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The Thunderbolts had their own floor in the Tower: six doors, six names—Yelena, Alexei, Ava, Bob, Bucky, John—and one kitchen that smelled of garlic at reasonable hours and of scorched heroics at unreasonable ones. It wasn’t perfect, but it was theirs: a mess of mismatched mugs, burnt pans, loud arguments that always ended with someone laughing, and a table big enough for all of them. Six people who should have never fit together, and yet—against every odd—they had become a team, a family in everything but name.
Sam’s Avengers lived one floor above—Sam carrying the shield, Joaquin still finding his rhythm with the wings, Thor treating the communal gym like it was Valhalla, Shang-Chi keeping sparring sessions honest, Hope sharp with her tech and sharper with her tongue, Carol blazing in like a comet when she wasn’t off-world, and Jen Walters balancing law briefs with deadlifts. Shuri dropped in from Wakanda when politics allowed, Scott Lang swung by when Cassie let him, Bruce visited between family dinners, and Wong only appeared to scold them when portal practice rattled the ceiling tiles.
There were unspoken elevator rules—no hammer-swinging near Pym canisters, no portal warmups while Hope was balancing takeout—and trivia nights still managed to spiral into diplomatic incidents.
-
John Walker cooked because it kept his hands busy and his mind out of ditches. He flipped pancakes like a man who owed the world breakfast. He’d done the paperwork—therapy twice a week, custody secured for his son, meds refilled—and the ritual of feeding people was the one thing that felt like it didn’t require permission.
Bucky stood in the kitchen doorway most mornings with a mug and a look that pretended to be casual. From a distance, you could say he was leaning. From up close, you could see he was braced—like the room might move and he meant to anchor it with his shoulder.
He loved John. It wasn’t subtle, the way a sunrise isn’t subtle. He loved how John always checked the exits first, then the faces—like safety was a duty carved into bone. Loved that John would throw himself into fire and then insist it was only the “reasonable thing to do.” Loved the easy, dangerous way John gave pieces of himself to everyone—team, neighbors, even Sam’s entire floor—and hated that John believed he deserved nothing back.
Once, in a war that felt like another lifetime, Bucky had loved Steve—but only as a brother, forged by loyalty and survival, nothing more. Sometimes, when he watched John, he saw flashes of those same principles: that stubborn refusal to quit, that bone-deep instinct to save others first, the grit to carry weight no one should. People joked about it, once—Sam even tossed it out half-serious, half-teasing—that maybe Bucky stuck close to John because he looked like a shadow of Steve. The press had speculated too, cruel in their certainty. But Bucky had set that straight. Sam didn’t joke about it anymore, not after Bucky explained how much it hurt John—and how untrue it was.
Because John wasn’t Steve. John was messy, flawed, human in ways that broke Bucky’s chest open. His strength wasn’t in shining ideals but in apologies he didn’t owe, in meals that steadied a team, in the stubborn tenderness of a man who believed he didn’t deserve love but gave it anyway.
And Bucky was lost to him. More every day. Not to the shadow of an old brother, not to the echo of values they’d both once fought beside, but to John himself—the man rebuilding piece by piece, trying, failing, trying again. The love of his life.
Their thing—if you asked Bucky—was a relationship with bad PR: a quiet, private, forever that would walk itself into the light when John was ready. If you asked John, it was sex plus penance—penance for the shield he’d carried, for the noise that had followed, for having wanted to be good and then being dragged like he had wanted the wrong thing.
They did not agree about definitions. They agreed about where to put the coffee.
On a Thursday night that should have been sleepy and stupid, they put the coffee in the wrong place. They kissed like they always did—fierce, grateful, a little desperate—as if every time might be the last. John pulled Bucky in like he was paying off a debt, and Bucky answered like he was being given a future.
But when it came to the end, when instinct usually had him pull away, Bucky didn’t move. He stayed inside, buried deep, clinging like if he let go the whole fragile thing would be taken away.
“Buck,” John panted, voice low, “you gotta pull out—”
Bucky only leaned down, kissing him harder, tongue sliding against his until John’s protest turned into a ragged sound in his throat. He swallowed every word and gave back the only one that mattered: me.
“Remember my name,” Bucky whispered between kisses, desperate and rough, “that’s all you need tonight.”
John tried to breathe an answer, but Bucky wouldn’t let him. He kept kissing, kept holding, kept pressing the dark, selfish wish deeper—mark him inside and out, tie him to me.
Even when John drifted into sleep, Bucky stayed, his cock still buried in him, refusing to give back the distance. He lay there with his arms locked around John, heartbeat pressed to heartbeat, as if tethering him by will alone.
And when sleep finally pulled him under, Bucky dreamed with the selfish knowledge that—for once—he had left part of himself behind, a prayer that John would never walk alone again.
He woke to a text from Sam: Gear up. Target: kid with a small wish-ability. Broker wants to ship him east. We get there first.
Bucky stared at the text, the shame of the wish still rattling around his ribs, and told himself that wanting family didn’t make him a monster. He did not entirely believe himself.
The kid—fourteen, maybe fifteen—had a too-big jacket and the kind of eyes people earned. The broker’s compound sat above a chain store that sold neon crop-tops; the elevators smelled like citrus cleaner and moral rot. Ava went ghost ahead. Yelena hummed like a knife on stone. Alexei provided the walking distraction of a large man trying to whisper.
John took point with Sam because when it came to children in trouble, John filed his body under shield even without the disc. He’d been at briefings, he’d been polite, he’d said “yes, sir” in all the right places, and he still bristled when anyone implied that he didn’t know how to keep a kid safe. He knew how. He’d kept himself alive in rooms like this. He’d kept the kid in his own life alive by showing up for school recitals and math homework and the boring Wednesday things that make a life.
They reached a stairwell where bad men made bad choices. Alexei made a louder one; concrete complained. A guard grabbed the kid; John stepped in fast—not with fists, but with voice. Calm, even, coaxing the way you would a deer off a highway.
“Hey. Breathe with me,” John said, hands open, weapon down. “In. Out. I’m John. We’re getting you out, okay? You don’t have to do anything else today. You already survived. That’s enough.”
The kid’s breathing matched his. His shoulders loosened. Bucky watched something move across the kid’s face—attention, recognition, the eerie stillness of power hearing its cue.
Bucky felt his throat close. John was…God. The world sharpened around him when he was kind.
And Bucky’s wish surged up raw and unholy: Tie him to me. He wanted John tied so tightly he couldn’t slip away, wanted everyone to see what Bucky already knew—that John was good, that he was a father who gave his heart without question. He wanted to be the one John leaned on, not out of choice but because there was nowhere else left to stand. He wanted John before the shield, before the weight, before Lemar’s death carved guilt into his bones. He wanted John to look only at him, to carry no burden but Bucky’s devotion. He wanted John like payment for his own endless sacrifices—proof that after everything, something belonged to him.
The thought was love. The thought was selfish. The thought was a prayer he hadn’t learned in any church.
The kid’s power pulsed in the air like a small held breath.
They got the kid out. That should have been the end of the story.
John took a hit to the ribs on the way down the stairs because stairwells are chaos and gravity holds grudges. He brushed it off, then calmed the kid a second time when the sirens outside triggered panic. He crouched so the kid wouldn’t have to look up to meet his eyes.
There you go, he said. You’re safe.
Bucky carried rage and tenderness in the same hand and almost crushed both. He walked behind them to the van, jaw tight. He did not say out loud tie him to me. He did not mean to say it in his head again. But the thought was there, small and ugly and full of what he believed was love.
The kid glanced back at him—just once, through messy hair—and Bucky felt like someone had opened a window.
The Tower did not do subtle.
The rescued mutant had stayed only a few days—long enough for John to feed him French toast, for Ava to guard his sleep without being seen, for Bob to leave knitted scarves like a nervous parent, and for Bucky to scowl at anyone who looked at the boy too long. Then Charles Xavier himself came to fetch the child, all quiet courtesy and steady assurances, and the Tower returned to its usual noise.
But if the mutant had been a ripple, John’s son was a tidal wave.
It was John’s custody week, and the toddler was very much a resident of the Thunderbolts’ floor. Which meant the kitchen was suddenly stocked with juice boxes and chicken nuggets, the hallways echoed with high-pitched giggles, and every adult with a questionable moral record was now drafted into babysitting duty.
Yelena taught him Russian words that John immediately vetoed. Ava, at first stiff, let the boy hold her hand when he toddled down the hall—though she pretended not to notice. Alexei declared himself the “best playmate” and ended up crawling on the floor with toy trucks until his knees ached. Bob built entire blanket forts in the common room, then fell asleep inside them halfway through storytime.
And Bucky—Bucky never strayed far. He carried the boy on his shoulders, tied his shoelaces without being asked, and bristled if anyone else tried to pick him up. He treated John’s son like the most natural extension of John himself—protective, possessive, quietly smitten.
Upstairs, Sam’s Avengers got involved whether John liked it or not. Sam handled the logistics: childproof locks, car seat upgrades, even a pediatrician’s number slipped into John’s hand. Kamala offered to babysit, though she mostly just ended up on the floor stacking blocks and laughing harder than the toddler. Kate showed up with toy arrows and promptly got banned from playtime after the first near-disaster. Joaquin volunteered for “bird duty,” showing the boy how to flap his arms until he collapsed giggling. Carol dropped by once, scooped the boy up with a grin, and left him with a stuffed toy that hummed faintly with cosmic energy.
The Tower spun on like that—two teams, one building, and a toddler at the center of it all. Arguments about missions were interrupted by bedtime stories. Debriefings paused when small footsteps padded into the room with a blanket in tow. And through it all, John Walker cooked and fretted and tried not to show how much it meant to him that his son was not just tolerated, but welcomed—loved—in a way he’d never believed possible.
Then John started vomiting in the mornings.
At first, it was comedy. Yelena, braced on the counter watching raccoon videos, didn’t even look up before declaring, “You are glowing like overripe zucchini. Congratulations, papa. Boy or girl, we will throw you a party.” When John groaned, she added, “Twins, maybe. You have the aura.”
Alexei slapped him on the back like he could burp an exorcism out of him. Ava slid a glass of water through the counter and said nothing. Bob announced he had once vomited for six hours in Madripoor and found spiritual clarity in vegan cheese.
John scrubbed the sink and muttered, “I don’t even have the right organs,” like it was an oath and the tile was a confessional.
“Don’t worry,” Yelena chirped, zooming in on her raccoon video. “Science will find them. Probably in your kidneys.”
But when the color never came back to John’s face, when he kept swaying on his feet even as he insisted he was fine, worry moved in.
Yelena started a campaign to drag him to Medical. “You will go,” she declared, stabbing a flyer for routine checkups into his door with a knife. “You are stubborn like donkey. Donkeys are reliable, but even donkeys see vets.” Every morning she repeated it like a mantra just in different quotes.
Ava was subtler—hovering in doorways, watching him pale at the stove. She phased glasses of water into his hand before he even thought to ask. When he snapped once, saying, “I’m not going to faint in my own kitchen,” she only raised an eyebrow. “You’re not convincing,” was all she said.
Alexei kept pushing “remedies from the Motherland.” Pickled garlic. Beet juice. A broth so pungent John nearly gagged. “It will put fire back in your blood,” Alexei promised, pressing another steaming bowl at him. “You will thank me later.” John muttered that he wouldn’t, but drank it anyway just to shut him up.
And Bob…Bob knew something he couldn’t say. There’s something that hummed in him like radio static, just at the edge of hearing. He felt it in John’s sickness, in the way the world bent. He didn’t speak, because silence was sometimes the shape of love. But he slipped vitamins onto the counter, brewed teas meant for nausea, pushed them toward John without a word. At first John barked at him—“I don’t need this, I’m not fragile”—but Bob’s quiet persistence wore him down. “Family,” Bob said once, softly, and John didn’t know what to do with the word. He just drank the tea. And it helped.
Bucky was hands and breath and presence. Every time John bent over the sink, Bucky was behind him, a steady palm on his back, murmuring low reassurances. He was the glass of water already waiting on the counter, the hand brushing damp hair off John’s forehead, the thumb ghosting along his cheek as he wiped his mouth with a towel. He touched John constantly, like contact alone could anchor him in place.
Bucky wanted to throw him over a shoulder and march him straight to Medical, demand an answer, demand a cure. Instead he bit it down, carrying the word mine in his chest like a coal he could never set down. He poured it into every quiet gesture, every time he refused to let John be alone with his sickness.
And John, pale and tired, kept scrubbing the counters, cooking meals, pretending his body was still his own. His therapist had told him to name what he controlled. He wrote: Chili. Timing. The decision to be kind.
He did not write: Whatever this is inside me.
The mission should have been routine. A drop, a grab, an exit. John made it three corridors before the floor rolled like bad ocean. He muttered, “I’m good,” to nobody in particular, and then his knees buckled.
“Walker!” Sam’s shout cracked over comms, sharp with alarm.
Bucky caught him before gravity could finish the job, arms locking around him in a grip that refused to let go.
“He’s down!” Ava’s voice was clipped as she cut through the corridor, already clearing their path.
“I told him!” Yelena’s voice snapped over the channel. “I told him to go to Medical—donkey man never listens!”
“Quinjet, now,” Sam ordered, voice taut. “We’re pulling out.”
Alexei cursed under his breath, half prayer, half frustration, while Bob hovered close, wide-eyed, whispering fragments only he understood.
Bucky didn’t answer. He carried John all the way to the extraction point, through the noise, through the blur of evac. He did not put him down until the med team forced him to.
The wait in Medical was a storm. Yelena paced tight circles, knives flashing in her restless hands. “See? I was right. Stubborn. He thinks he is unbreakable. Look at him now.” Ava leaned against the wall, arms crossed, her silence sharper than words. Alexei muttered about iron constitutions and how even steel bends. Bob kept whispering the word family under his breath like it was a spell. Sam stood by the door, jaw tight, keeping everyone steady by sheer force of will.
And then John stirred. A groan, a muttered curse, eyes blinking against the light.
Bucky was there instantly, hand wrapping around his wrist, thumb brushing against the pulse like he could anchor him back. “Easy,” he murmured. “You’re safe.”
Hours pass and then the doctor came out, tablet in hand, face cautious like a man about to step onto a minefield.
"Mr. Walker," said a doctor with the cautious voice of a man about to tell a supersoldier something inadvisable. "We've got your labs."
"Great," John rasped, trying to sit. "Tell me it's a stomach bug. Or a curse. I'll take a curse."
The doctor coughed. "You're—ah-twelve weeks pregnant."
Silence went long and taut. It broke on Sam's wheeze. "I'm sorry, what?"
John stared at the ceiling. He laughed. It came out like a bark. "Nope."
"Mr. Walker—"
"I don't have the right organs," John said, pitching his voice to the doctor and the air and the two-way mirror and God. "I am missing the standard issue equipment."
The doctor held up a scan like a shield. "Nonetheless."
"Nonetheless what?" John demanded. "Nonetheless I'm...nesting? Nonetheless I'm going to start crying at commercials? Nonetheless—where is the child supposed to come out, my—anus?" The word rang out like an accusation.
Yelena clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes crescenting; Bob made a noise like he'd been emotionally stabbed. Alexei blinked like he'd just realized he was in a medical facility.
Bucky didn’t laugh. His hand closed firmly around John’s wrist, grounding him. He leaned in, voice low and steady, meant only for John. “Easy. Don’t waste your breath yelling. I’ve got you.”
“I’m yelling,” John snapped, eyes wet, chest heaving. “I don’t need defending. I need a diagram. And a priest, a freaking exorcist. And a—Sam, stop smiling!”
“I’m not smiling,” Sam said, smiling with his voice only. “I’m…managing my face.”
They paged for Wong. They paged for science. They paged Prof. Xavier. They paged for anyone who could square a circle and give a soldier control over the one thing he thought belonged wholly to him.
The answer, when it came, was smaller and worse: There was a wish. The kid makes wishes happen. Not big magic. Not clean. The kind that attaches itself to feelings like a barnacle and then grows into a ship.
The Tower became a sitcom with too many protective aunts and uncles. Sam printed a color-coded schedule for “non-invasive check-ins.” Kamala made a banner that said HAPPY ??? Kate made a playlist called “Not A Parasite, Probably.”
Alexei cried in the kitchen and blamed the onions. Wong brought a safety charm and quietly stuck it under John’s pillow. Joaquin taught breathing techniques he swore worked on both falcons and nervous humans. Carol stopped in, carefully patted John on the shoulder like she was afraid he’d break, and left a teddy bear that could probably survive entry into the sun.
Yelena and Ava teased him mercilessly until anyone else did it; then they were knives and frost. Alexei stood between John and loud noises as if his body had been designed to be a boulder. Bob started knitting smaller things and announced he was “manifesting onesies.”
John tried to breathe. He tried to be gracious. He tried not to throw a plate when three separate people reminded him to drink water in one hour. He loved them. He wanted to hide in a vent.
Bucky stepped up like a husband in a 1940s training film, which was fine until it wasn’t. He was at John’s elbow in doorways. He slept in a chair outside John’s room “just in case.” He said “I’ve got it” whenever a task appeared and meant I’ve got you whenever John existed.
John, who had carved survival out of proving he was not weak, felt the bars of it gilded around him. He hated that he needed the cage. He hated that he didn’t hate it.
Sam watched all of it and knew he had helped build this mess. He made tea for John and listened when John did not talk.
Bucky saw John laugh easier with Yelena than with him. Saw John say thank you to Alexei without flinching and say I can do it to Bucky through teeth. It hurt. It was fair. He had been part of the mockery that made John small; love did not erase that ledger. He meant to balance it the only way he knew how: by being relentless.
Everything waited until it didn’t.
John’s water broke on a Tuesday while he was arranging carrots by color. He looked down, looked up, and said to the room at large, “Biology and I need to have a discussion about exits.”
The body, it turned out, adapts like a miracle and a horror story both. Wong explained it like he was explaining a clever card trick: temporary structures, magically induced pathways, no permanent changes if you don’t want them, congrats, modernity.
John stared at him and said, “I’m a man. I’m not using—whatever that is. Cut me open.”
They scheduled the C-section. Bucky held John’s hand in pre-op without theatrics. He didn’t say ours. He didn’t say mine. He didn’t say forever. He said, “I’m here,” because that didn’t ask anything back.
John joked that the only thing he would miss by not having a “natural” birth was the chance to crush Bucky’s metal arm. He threw out baby names, deadpan—“Nope,” “Still Nope,” “Absolutely Not.” He laughed at his own joke until it blurred into something thinner, closer to crying. The anesthesiologist murmured something practiced and kind. The curtain went up. The world narrowed to pressure and sound and the ordinary holy.
A baby cried—a new, furious sound—and the room found its center.
Someone said, “He’s perfect.” Someone else whispered, “Healthy, strong.” The words blurred together like background static.
John’s heart did the impossible. It broke and healed at once.He let the world be small enough for one breath, one cry, one impossible weight in his arms.
After, the Tower turned romcom again. Balloons appeared. A casserole threatened structural integrity.
Yelena’s card read CONGRATS ON THE PARACLE, because she couldn’t decide between parasite and miracle and refused to apologize. Ava stood guard by the window and smiled with her eyes. Bob cried openly; Alexei cried loudly.
John nodded, smiled, nodded, smiled—the practiced art of gratitude smudging the edges of his exhaustion.
They almost never left John alone with the baby. It was love. It was also possession.
Especially when Bucky’s hands hovered at the bassinet, metal and flesh steady on either side, as if anyone might try to steal what was his.
Because in his chest there was no question. This wasn’t just John’s child. This was their child. He and John—partners, whether John admitted it out loud or not. The baby was the proof of it, the binding of it, the family Bucky had wished for and now would protect with teeth.
He never said my son. He didn’t need to. It sat in the room like a storm front, carried in every breath he took, in the way his gaze stayed locked on the small rise and fall of the baby’s chest.
Then came the thing John had not prepared for: milk. His body had opinions. He hated having a body that had opinions. He tried bottles. The baby tried bottles and cried like a disappointed executive. John said, “No,” to the room, to himself, to a standard he’d never had to argue. He was a man. He had decided, early, firm, that there were limits to what he would allow this wish to take.
But the baby would not latch to anything but him. It was a problem and an answer and something else—something like relief—when feeding worked. John seated himself, jaw clenched, eyes on a fixed point on the wall until something loosened and he looked down and saw a small life thriving because of him and he was…happy.
He despised himself for being happy. He was happy anyway.
Bucky moved like a man who had been given the moon and asked not to stare. He cried exactly once, into his fist, when no one else was in the room. John pretended not to see. He saw everything. He was tired enough to be honest.
“Don’t,” John said.
“Don’t…what?” Bucky asked, rough.
“Don’t make a face like I’m a miracle,” John said, calmer than he felt. “I’m a man feeding a baby. This is weird. It’s fine.”
“It’s beautiful,” Bucky said, because he never learned when not to tell the truth.
“Stop it,” John said, cheeks hot, skin too thin. He didn’t mean stop. He meant I don’t know how to be loved while I’m like this and I’m afraid I’ll want it forever.
Bucky proposed ten days later, because he had slept four hours in three and the world felt made of glass. He was earnest, soft-eyed, voice shaking.
“Marry me,” he said in the kitchen while John measured out cumin for chili. His words came slow, deliberate, like each one had to be pried loose from his chest. “I want this to be more than borrowed time. I want you, and I want him to grow up with two parents who chose each other. Paper, a name, a home that no one can take away. I want it real, John. I want us real.”
John did not turn. He stirred, wooden spoon clicking against the pot. He tried to keep his breath even. The smell of chili rose warm and sharp, grounding him in the ordinary. He said, finally, in a voice he didn’t recognize, “I’m too tired to decide my own lunch, Bucky. I’ll think about it.”
Bucky’s jaw worked like he wanted to argue, but he swallowed it. He took the answer, nodded once, and bent to kiss John’s hair, lingering there as if the gesture could buy him time. Then he rolled up his sleeves and started washing dishes he had already washed, hands moving too hard, water running louder than it needed to.
Yelena walked in, saw his face, and made a noise like you make when the knife slips—sharp, low, involuntary. Ava put a hand through the counter as if threatening the universe itself. Alexei came home with a wedding magazine and pretended it was for research on “modern rituals.” Sam said nothing, but he kept looking at John a little longer each time they crossed paths, as though weighing a ledger he had no right to balance.
The Tower Med did an in-house follow-up because nobody wanted paparazzi ranking the ethics of miracles. A nurse scanned, a doctor hummed, a tech said “huh.”
“Huh?” John said, instantly suspicious.
“Two things,” the doctor said, eyes on the screen. “One: the residual magical signature around the pregnancy reads like a structured wish. We knew that, but this confirms specificity.” She angled the monitor. “There’s an imprint—like a…call it an initiator’s fingerprint.”
“Two?” Bucky asked, too fast.
“Paternity,” the doctor said, and the word made John’s tongue go numb. “DNA confirmation. The baby’s father is—” She stopped, looked up, as if realizing the room had turned to stone. “—James Barnes.”
Silence with edges. Somewhere, a machine beeped because machines do not care about narrative.
John watched his own face do a thing he didn’t feel yet. He said, “Right.” He said, “Okay.” He said, to the doctor, very politely, “Could you please leave us for a second so I don’t commit a felony in front of witnesses.”
The room emptied with the vacuum pop of an airlock.
Bucky did not reach for him. He had finally learned that when John’s face went that carefully blank, touch was a match near a gas leak. “I didn’t know,” Bucky said, and the words were honest enough to be useless. “I wished something else.”
“What did you wish,” John asked, voice smooth as a blade. His hands were steady. His heartbeat was a hammer.
“I wanted a family with you,” Bucky said. His voice cracked and steadied in the same breath. “Don’t you see? It’s a miracle, John. A child with both our DNA. Proof that we’re meant to be.”
John blinked. A laugh climbed up his throat, tripped, fell, bruised its knees, kept going. “That’s worse,” he said conversationally. “That’s so much worse.” He stopped laughing. “You wished for a cage.”
Bucky flinched. “I wished for you to be safe.”
“Safe like a wife in the forties with a husband who signs her name for her?” John asked. He was very calm. It was the kind of calm that made Sam take a step back when he saw it across rooms. “You wished for the shape of a life and the world filled it with a baby. And you didn’t tell me you had wished anything at all.”
“I was afraid,” Bucky said. “If I said it out loud, it would make it…more true. And this—this isn’t what I meant. I swear.”
John stared at him until the edges of Bucky blurred. He felt the Tower become a set he hadn’t built: laugh track upstairs, casseroles cooling, people popping in with jokes to hide concern. To everyone else, this was a romcom. To him, it was a horror where his body had become a public park. He had doors he couldn’t lock. He had choices that had to be cleared with a committee of love.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
Bucky’s voice was raw, stripped down to its last wire. “Let’s not fight tonight. You’re exhausted.”
They left Med together, silent. The elevator’s mirrored walls reflected two men who looked like strangers to themselves.
On their floor, John turned toward his own room out of instinct. Bucky’s hand came down on his arm, not forceful but firm, steering him gently the other way. “Why would you go there?” he murmured. “Everything’s already in our room.”
Our. The word hung in the air heavier than steel.
Too tired to argue, too tired to do anything but move his feet, John let himself be led.
Inside, the baby fussed, sharp and immediate. John stripped down stiffly, awkward as hell, and brought the child to his chest. The latch hurt at first; he hissed, cursing under his breath, but the baby quieted instantly. The rhythm took over: suckle, breathe, swallow. John’s body ached at the betrayal, at the intimacy, at the strange warmth of being needed this way.
Bucky lowered himself onto the couch beside him, thigh pressed into John’s, one hand braced against the cushions. He didn’t say a word, didn’t move except to stay close. He watched John and the baby like it was the most sacred thing he’d ever seen.
John felt hemmed in: the baby on one side, clinging and hungry; Bucky on the other, steady and immovable. From outside the door, it would have looked like a family portrait. From inside his own skin, John felt caged, the two weights pinning him into a frame he hadn’t chosen.
When the baby finally drifted into sleep, Bucky rose, scooped him up gently, and carried him to the crib. He tucked the blanket close, dimmed the light, and returned to John.
He offered a hand. John stared at it for a beat too long, then gave in because resistance required more energy than he had left.
They lay down together. Bucky’s arm came around him, heavy and sure, a tether and a wall. Exhaustion dragged at John’s bones until he almost gave up thinking altogether.
And then he felt it: cool metal slipping over his finger. A ring, precise, undeniable.
Bucky didn’t ask. He didn’t demand. He only pressed his forehead to John’s temple and whispered, so soft it could have been a dream, “Let’s not fight tonight.”
John didn’t take the ring off. He didn’t say yes. He just lay there, Bucky on one side, the baby breathing in the next room, the Tower humming overhead like a sitcom set with perfect timing.
From the outside, it looked like a romcom ending: domestic, gentle, happily ever after.
From where John lay, it felt like a telenovela—velvet walls, no doors, love and tragedy written in the same hand.