ready to comply

[semi_stable]

[cw: descriptions of a panic attack, mentions of PTSD]


Things have been going very well for Bucky as of late, so it's no real surprise when he's suddenly knocked on his ass again. That's how it goes, after all. That's his story. That's how it always goes.

This time, all he's doing is walking down the street. He's smiling, almost even laughing, sipping at an iced coffee. He's talking with a friend, gesturing with his prosthetic hand, ungloved and visible to anyone who looks at him, and anyone who did wouldn't even be able to tell how broken he is.

Because he is broken. He always will be in some way or another. His brain was taken apart and put back together over and over again, scrambled and reformed, and he'll never be healed from that, not completely. Not to mention all the trauma and abuse, decades of it, and he can have a few good months but he'll never be totally free.

This is proven to him as he's walking past some sort of street fair out in front of his building. It's noisy, with people milling about and several different radios tuned to different stations drowning each other out. They suddenly all go quiet, music and talking replaced with an eerie, quiet static.

Longing.

The word makes Bucky go still, face draining of color. It's a low, commanding male voice speaking in Russian, and Bucky feels a little like he might throw up.

Rusted.

It's coming from every radio, even one from a car passing by, windows rolled down to take advantage of the nice day. It's coming from everywhere and Bucky's coffee falls from his hand, plastic cracking as it breaks against the pavement. "No."

Furnace.

"No, no, no, please," Bucky pleads in Russian, reaching up to put his hands over his ears. It's so unexpected to hear his trigger words that he forgets for a moment that he's supposed to have been cured of them, rewired during his time in Wakanda. But then he remembers, and it doesn't help. Whoever is behind this place has proven how powerful they are, and who's to say that they didn't undo that, too?

Daybreak.

It's getting louder now, more forceful, and Bucky lets out a panicked shout as he stumbles backwards, breathing heavily and shaking his head. He's flooded so suddenly with adrenaline, like ice water being dumped over his head, and he can hear his heart beating. Air gets stuck in his chest and he can't breathe, and while he recognizes the signs of a panic attack, he can't seem to make it stop. He's too terrified of what might be about to happen to do anything but panic.

Seventeen.

"No, no, not again," he chokes out, turning to run into the lobby of his building to try and get away from it, only to find that they're playing in there too, pumping tinnily out of a speaker in the corner. He chokes out a sob and sinks to the floor, pushing himself back into a corner and covering his ears. Someone follows after him and Bucky holds out his hand. "Stop! Stay back."

Benign.

There are four more. Only four more words until Bucky finds out of the switch in his brain will be flipped, if he'll climb to his feet and stand at attention. Four more words until this city finds out if the Winter Soldier is ready to comply.





[Help him. Have your pup be the person he was walking with and/or the one who finds him in the lobby. Despite his fears, the trigger words will not do anything because he's still cured, but he's still going through one hell of a PTSD episode.]

Comments

[semi_stable]

"Of course I ate all the food," Bucky replies with a scoff, as if offended that she even needed to ask the question. "We can have something delivered later."

At the end of the hallway is a small staircase to the door to the roof. There's a sign on the door saying that there is no roof access for residents but hey, he's broken far worse rules than that. At least it means that they'll have the place to themselves. Bucky has been up there a few times, and there isn't much to it aside from a barren concrete space in the corner of the roof, but at twelve stories high, it's a pretty good view.

"I can pick this pretty quick, but your way's probably quicker," Bucky admits with a smirk, gesturing to the locked door knob. He could also punch through it, but magic also means no property damage. "If you'd be so kind."

[the_variant]

"Using me for my magic now?" she asks, but she smiles as she wraps her hand around the doorknob. It doesn't take much effort for her to undo the mechanism, a faint wisp of green enveloping the knob as she works, then the door releases and Sylvie opens it to reveal the roof.

The roof itself isn't overly impressive, which she had expected. Most buildings in this city are the same, one or two with something set up for residents so they can enjoy the view, but more often than not, the doors are locked, like this one, for safety. It's the view she likes.

Stepping out into the light wind, Sylvie walks toward the edge, the glittering lights of the city as bright as the stars above.

[semi_stable]

"Just being practical," he says with a smirk, watching as she unlocks the knob with, at least as it looks to him, a simple nudge from her mind. When Bucky thinks about all she could potentially do, it's terrifying. It would be entirely reasonable for him to be wary of her and want to stay clear, given all he's been through, but instead there is nowhere else he'd rather be.

He follows her out onto the roof and shuts the door behind them, heading toward the edge with her. Bucky can see why they don't want people up here, given the short ledge, but it's no concern to either of them. After setting down the champagne, he flicks out the blanket and lays it down flat. It won't be the most comfortable thing in the world, but they've both dealt with far worse.

Bucky sits down in the middle of the blanket, legs stretched out in front of him and elbows locked as he props himself up on his hands. He looks up at Sylvie, lit silver by the moon, statuesque profile silhouetted by the night sky, and he lets out a sigh that can only really be described as dreamy. "Hell of a view."

[the_variant]

"That's bloody cheesy," Sylvie answers, knowing Bucky isn't talking about the city spread out before her. A smile curves her lips, despite what she's just said, one that isn't her usual smug, confident smile, but something more genuine, something she spends too much time trying to hide.

After a moment, she looks back over her shoulder at Bucky on the blanket and says, "I like it."

Cheesy or not, there's a sense of romance in moments like these she's never experienced before. It still makes her uncomfortable some of the time, because allowing someone in like this, it makes her vulnerable, it opens her up to being hurt in ways she's avoided for so long.

She turns entirely from the edge of the building and walks back to where Bucky is on the blanket, settling herself on top of his thighs, her hands pressed against the blanket on either side of his body.

[semi_stable]

When he's called out, Bucky just grins at her, brows lifting in amusement when she says that she likes it. He's glad for that, because she deserves it.

"Hello," he says once she's in his lap, putting his hands on her hips and sliding them slowly up her sides as he leans in to press a kiss to her mouth. He shifts back and pops himself up on his metal elbow, moving his other hand to her cheek, up into her hair.

"I invited you up here for drinks, and look at you," he teases, nudging their noses together and pulling her upper lip between his. "Getting so fresh with me."

[the_variant]

"Terribly sorry. I wouldn't want to scandalize a gentleman such as yourself," Sylvie answers, pulling back from the kiss and sitting up straight atop his lap. "First I'll get you a little tipsy, so you won't be so shy."

In the wrong context and the wrong company, such a joke wouldn't go over well, but Sylvie doesn't think Bucky will take offence. It isn't as if she's really going to get him drunk and take advantage of him and despite her ability to enchant people, to get inside their minds, she wouldn't do it with him and she would never use it for something as easily gotten elsewhere as sex.

She retrieves the champagne from where Bucky has set it and unwraps the foil, then points the bottle away from them both. Honestly, she's rarely opened champagne and it could go very wrong, but she manages to pop the cork without any disasters.

[semi_stable]

"I actually can't really get drunk these days," Bucky says a bit regretfully. The serum sped up his metabolism in a way that just seems to immediately burn off the alcohol. He'll still drink it out of habit, or just because he wants to, even if it doesn't do much for him.

Sylvie takes the bottle and Bucky leans away, chuckling as she rips it open. He laughs when it pops, tipping his head back to watch as the cork goes flying to land somewhere on the roof, thankfully, and not onto the street below. The bottle overflows a little and Bucky gasps when cold, fizzy bubbles roll down his neck and into the hollow of his throat.

"But I'll still let you take advantage of me," he assures her in a low rumble, grinning seductively as he squeezes her hips. It's a joke just like hers, because that isn't what she's doing at all. "As many times as you'd like."

[the_variant]

"Can you really not?" she asks, tilting her head slightly. "Of all the things they've done to you, this is clearly by far the worst."

It clearly isn't, but she's smiling and there's still light in her eyes. Even now, she's aware of how tenuous things had felt for him not terribly long ago, less than thirty minutes ago really, and she wants to continue to distract him from it. She wants him to be here. With her.

Because she loves him. A shocking revelation, even to her.

[semi_stable]

Bucky laughs at that and reaches up to wipe the champagne from his neck with his palm, tipping his head back and then breathing out as he lifts it to look at her again. She's so beautiful under the silvery light of the moon, stars twinkling above her head.

"Loki found some Asgardian ale somewhere," he remembers, chuckling a little and sliding his good hand up the back of her shirt to touch her warm skin. "Tasted like paint thinner but it did give me a little buzz. So, I guess I could drink that."

He lifts the bottle with his other hand and takes a sip, feeling the bubbles fizz on his tongue before rolling down his throat, and then hands it over to her. "It'd just be hard to let myself, you know?"

Bucky knows that she will. Better than anyone else, she understands the danger of letting your guard down, if even for a little while.

[the_variant]

"Oh god, that's hardly worth it," she answers, wrinkling her nose. Sylvie was a child the last time she had Asgardian ale, but even still, she remembers it being rather disgusting. Maybe it had just been that she was so young, not interested in drinking, but she prefers to believe her tastes were always just much too refined.

Hardly true of a woman as rough as she can be.

"Mm," she hums softly as he hands her the bottle. Rather than answer, she takes a sip, then sets the bottle aside. "Yes, I know what you mean. The first night Loki and I were on the run together, I was trying to lay low and that idiot got drunk with the very people we were hiding from. Got us kicked off the train. Quite literally, he went out the bloody window."

[semi_stable]

"It really does taste awful," he admits with a soft smile, but he does still appreciate the gift. Loki had gone out of his way to try and do something nice, something personal, and Bucky doesn't imagine that happens very often. So yeah, even though it tastes like gasoline, he'll cherish that damn bottle.

While Sylvie sits aside his lap and talks about Loki, Bucky again waits to see if he'll feel anything akin to jealousy, but he doesn't. Instead he just feels warmth and affection for both of them, laughing at Loki's antics and shaking his head with wry amusement.

"I have not been fortunate enough to see Loki that drunk," he says with a warm chuckle, because while they'd gotten buzzed on sips of that ale, it wasn't anything like what Sylvie is describing. "Maybe one night we can all plug our noses and have a few drinks, see what happens."

[the_variant]

"Only if you want to be roped into a rousing night of karaoke," she answers in a dry tone, then puts both her hands on Bucky's chest and pushes him back down onto the blanket. "And I don't want to be thinking about karaoke right now, do you?"

She has something much more interesting right here, after all, this man with whom she's developed a connection against all odds. Sylvie hadn't thought it possible for her to love one person, never mind two.

She leans in to kiss Bucky, her lips against his, the kiss almost chaste at first. Right now, she knows she's a distraction, but she hopes in a way she's a comfort, too.

[semi_stable]

"It'd just be yet another thing I've never done before you two," Bucky admits with a laugh. That particular list is a long one, and he blushes a little when he realizes that most of the things on that list are sexual. Not all, but a decent chunk. And then she pushes him back and Bucky lets himself go easily, willingly giving himself over to the warm, all-encompassing distraction that is her body.

She kisses him more softly than he expects, and Bucky smiles into it as he lifts his good hand to the side of her face, fingers sliding into her hair to push it back as he returns the kiss, pressing his mouth to hers a little more firmly because being here with her is so much better than thinking about what just happened. It doesn't deserve his attention, really. If anything, he supposes that he should be a little grateful. Now he knows for sure that the deprogramming has held up. He isn't going to revert back to being so helpless.

"I do wonder what song I'd pick," he says as he suddenly pulls away from the kiss, as if that's what he's been thinking about the whole time, and then gives her a teasing grin.

[the_variant]

"Some old song no one else knows," she answers, smirking down at him. "Something that makes everyone in the room realize you're a very old man."

She crosses her arms over his chest, rests her chin on her forearms, and looks at him with slightly narrowed eyes, considering, as if she actually knows any of the music from his time. She doesn't, she'd never spent any time on Midgard in the forties, and what she does know has been gleaned almost entirely from Bucky himself.

"All I really know are Asgardian songs," she says. "I never spent much time listening to music after that."

[semi_stable]

Her teasing makes him laugh out loud, even though what she says is entirely true. He is an old man, and that comes out in very stereotypical ways sometimes, like him finding most modern music to be just noise. But he does like music, his music, the kind that makes him think of home. He likes the kind of music that he used to dance to back when he was young and the world was small, and all he had to worry about is if he'd get a kiss at the end of the night.

"Hmm, let's see," he breathes out, sliding his hands up her sides. Maybe he can share that music with her. A song comes to mind, one that's been recorded over and over again since he was young, and he clears his throat.

"Stars shining bright above you, night breezes seem to whisper I love you," Bucky sings in a low voice, smiling as he gently thumbs at Sylvie's temple, brushing her hair back behind her ear. "Birds singing in the sycamore tree, dream a little dream of me."

He stops after that, chuckling a little self-consciously and putting his hand on the side of her face. "I always liked that one."

[the_variant]

"And of course you sing well, too," she says to cover the pink stain of her cheeks. The words are sweet, the melody, too, and Sylvie never knows what to do in order to deal with or accept the way her chest and stomach threaten to do gymnastics whenever Bucky or Loki are sweet with her.

"How unfair to the rest of the men in this city that you look like you do and can sing," she says as she leans into the hand he has on his face. "No wonder your only competition for me is a god."

She grins finally and leans in to kiss him again.

[semi_stable]

Bucky knew that he could carry a tune, but he never would have said that he could sing well. He wonders if maybe she's letting her feelings for him affect her opinion, which would be very sweet. Wisely, he doesn't point that out. He's too busy being enamored with the blush on her cheeks, a rare sight.

He laughs at her words and grips her chin playfully between his thumb and forefinger as she leans in to kiss him, returning it for a few moments before pulling back a little.

"Are we in competition?" He asks in a teasing voice, nudging his nose against hers and then touching his tongue to her bottom lip. "I wasn't aware. Does serenading you win me points?"

[the_variant]

"Constant competition, I expect you both to spend all your time trying to outdo the other," she answers, though that clearly isn't true. Sylvie isn't an especially demanding person, she doesn't have overly high expectations or want anything more from people than they're able to give.

Nor are they in competition. They simply both are.

What they are, she's never entirely sure, but they are anyway. They're hers and she's theirs and she can't fathom how it happened. How much her life has changed.

"The serenade gets you exactly six points," she says, then nips his lower lip. "But I can't tell you who is ahead."

[semi_stable]

"Ah, I see," Bucky muses, laughing a little as she bites at him. He knows that it isn't true. If it was a competition, Bucky would have already bowed out gracefully. Because if it were, he knows that he wouldn't win. He's just glad that they've all made spacefor each other, made room for all the feelings that Bucky always thought that he would only ever have for one person.

"Mm, intriguing," he breathes out, sliding his hands up under Sylvie's shirt, fingers drifting over her ribs and then up under the back of her bra, thumbing at the clasp without making a move to unhook it just yet. Instead he kisses her, lifting his head to deepen it. He licks into her mouth, sucking at her tongue and dragging his front teeth over the inside of her bottom lip. It's slow and lazy, languid, and Bucky hums as he thumbs open one of the two hooks. "How many points do orgasms get me?"

[the_variant]

"Eleven if it's just an average orgasm," she murmurs against his mouth. "Twenty-seven if it's spectacular."

With both Bucky and Loki, it's all been spectacular. She might not be verbally encouraging or overly effusive, she may not always have the right words to say to either of them, but she hopes, in her way, she's been able to show them both.

Both her hands go to either side of Bucky's neck as she kisses him deeper. She moves in his lap, her hips rolling lazily. The weather is warm enough, the blanket beneath them soft enough, and Bucky is calm beneath her hands, happier than he had been earlier.

[semi_stable]

"I guess I better make it spectacular, then," Bucky teases, grinning into the kiss. "See how many points I can wring out of you."

She kisses him hard and Bucky gives himself over to it, letting himself be distracted from what he'd just gone through by her attention, because those words aren't his life anymore. His life is here in this strange place, with these unlikely people, and he's glad for it. He's happier here than he's been in decades.

Bucky's hands curl in the hem of Sylvie's shirt to drag it over her head, tossing it aside and then grabbing her hips as he rocks up against her, groaning as he grabs her face to tug her into another urgent kiss, licking into her mouth with an eager hum.

[the_variant]

She pulls back long enough to let Bucky tug her shirt up and off, shaking her hair out when he does, then she’s back, kissing him again, her breasts pressed against him through her thin bra. Bucky is eager, he’s always eager, and she loves that about him. In so many aspects of her life, most people have been closed off. She’s been closed off. Bucky isn’t always an open book, but in moments like this, when they’re alone together, she can see him.

She can see all of him.

“Here,” she murmurs against Bucky’s mouth, pushing her hands up under his shirt to get it off. She wants to feel his skin on hers.

[semi_stable]

Sylvie's hands slide up over his stomach and his abs flex as he lifts his shoulders, letting her pull his shirt off and toss it aside. The air is balmy, just a little bit cool in a way that feels good against his flushed skin. Her body pressed against him feels better, and he kisses her again, one hand on the back of her head as the other unhooks her bra, spreading his warm hand against the middle of her back.

He urges her to sit up a little, pressing his metal elbow into the blanket to prop himself up, pressing kisses along her jaw and down the side of her neck, tugging her bra away to let her breasts spill free. Cupping one in his hand, he curls himself over to drag his mouth down her chest, over the curve of her other breast until he can pull her nipple eagerly into his mouth, sucking hard and looking up at her face as he takes the tight nub between his teeth, baring them as he gives it a playful tug.

"You're fucking spectacular," he breathes out, biting at the side of her breast before lifting his head to kiss her again, sliding his hand down between her legs, gripping at her cunt through buttery denim, grinding his palm against her as he licks into her mouth. "You drive me wild."

[the_variant]

There are times when the man she had first met and the man she's with now don't entirely line up. It isn't that Bucky ever appeared to be a prude, at least in part because she hadn't much thought of it, but he'd seemed buttoned up in a lot of ways. Closed off.

Sylvie had understood that. She'd responded to it.

Now they're here together, they've said things to one another she never imagined they would, and the way he touches her, the way he looks at her, it's as if she's unlocked something in him. She knows he's unlocked something in her.

She arches into his touch, her hips rolling, grinding against him. With one hand, she holds onto his thigh behind her body, supporting her weight where he's told her to sit up, and the other she buries in his hair as they kiss again. His hand is so hot between them and she moans, pressing herself into his palm.

[semi_stable]

In some ways, Sylvie literally brought a part of him back to life. It was a part of him that he had thought was gone forever. He wasn't sure that he'd ever feel passion again, or the hungry desire to feel another body against his own. He thought that his ability for intimacy was gone.

But then he danced with Sylvie one night, and she revived him, breathed life back into him. She made him feel more human again, and since that night, his connection to her has only grown. He knows what it feels like to be passionate again, and he credits that, at least in part, to her.

In one easy move, Bucky rolls them under so that Sylvie is the one on her back, so she gets to see the sea of stars splayed out overhead, and Bucky kisses her mouth again, her neck, her shoulder, and then between her breasts. He bites gently at the side of one and then takes her nipple between his teeth as he pulls open her jeans, sucking hard as he shoves her pants and underwear down over her hips.

After one more noisy suck, he lets her breast fall from his mouth and mouths his way down her stomach as he tugs off her boots, and then her socks, grunting impatiently before finally getting her jeans off and tugging her legs open so he can fit between them.

"Enjoy the view," Bucky says with a flirty grin, winking at her while pointing up at the sky, and then he ducks his head to press his mouth between her legs, dragging his tongue eagerly up through the core of her.