pov- imagines

THE WAY HE LOVES- B. BARNES

pairings: bucky barnes x widow!reader
warnings: mentions of red room, but mostly fluff and cuteness
about: the five ways buck shows he loves you and the first time he actually tells you. for heavenlybarnes' love in verse challenge
a/n: literally hate this but i am drop dead tired rn

you had told bucky barnes you loved him long after you knew you did—long after you'd felt the sweet butterflies that sprouted each time you talked to him or caught his eyes on you. only after the knowledge had enveloped you whole, wrapped you in its unyielding embrace until you were teeming with it, brimming, spilling over with your love for bucky did you tell him, lying under the covers and in his arms, pressed against his chest—with his eyes glimmering even prettier than the stars in the sky, you told him you loved him, feeling the gentle weight of his eyelashes on your cheeks when he smiled.

he could feel it too, embedded so he could never forget—would never want to because you were ingrained, your gentle reassurances threaded in him and your patience bleeding into his edges.

he loved you beyond words, but the poems of love he was feeling were lodged in his throat, and he wasn't able to get them out.

you had smiled at him in that soft way that was so you, an index finger light on his cheek while your thumb pressed into the cleft of his chin. you kissed his forehead then, followed by his nose and both of his cheekbones until you landed on his lips.

"you don't have to say anything," you promised quietly, graceful words falling on the guilt on his tongue, soothing it away like water on fire. "i just couldn't hold it in anymore."

he kissed you again, murmuring a thank you with the circles his fingers rub on your waist, his lips dragging his love on your jaw.

he still couldn't speak it, not yet, but even if he didn't recognize it, he let you know it was there.

-

the first time bucky met you, little bears were huddled in your hand as you offered them to him a few days after he'd arrived at the tower, nodding kindly when he declined with a silent answer. every other time he came out of his room and spotted you, you were holding some type of candy, always enough to extend some of it toward him. it only took endless patience on your part and a variety of sweets until he accepted, and suddenly you were buying two bags of candy instead of one and leaving them outside of his room when he didn't feel like coming out.

candy became something... yours. which meant that bucky began paying attention to it, especially when your apartment became littered with it—particularly when he realized that the gummies you'd leave behind always seemed to be the same ones.

the lack of red and blue—and sometimes a very specific shade of green—gummies wasn't something sudden or new, but it did bring him memories of the yellow gummies he'd find himself eating frequently.

bucky didn't really even think about the color, eating whatever you would give him, which meant that yellow and orange gummies were always left behind until he ate them, clearly not carrying the same hatred for them that you did.

(which was lucky, because bags of gummies would always be left nearly half-empty, almost entirely consisting of the colors you avoided, but a few of the others left because you knew bucky liked them too.)

bucky never said anything, just held back a little smile when he saw you squinting to see if it was a pink or orange lifesaver while bucky popped whichever his fingers found in his mouth, unsurprised when it was usually orange.

then, a couple of months into your relationship, you found a bag of gummies you'd bought a while ago pulled open after coming back from a mission, half of the candy gone. a few days later, it was still there, untouched even after another bag had been opened.