Random Fandom Imagines 2

Bucky Barnes

This is dedicated to Kara_Song. I absolutely love her Henry Mills imagines book, and you should go check her out.

You don't dare close your eyes. Because the second that you do, you know what you'll see. You'll see the nightmares that are on a constant loop in your minds. The nightmares that aren't actually nightmares because they're your goddamn memories.
So you stare up at the ceiling. It's white. It's constant. It doesn't change. It doesn't mock you for being afraid of falling asleep. It doesn't tell you to go talk to someone. It doesn't tell you to go get help. You like the ceiling.
But you are still human. There is only so many hours that you can stay awake, without sleep, running on nothing but espresso shots and energy drinks (and sometimes, a combination of both).
You fall asleep that night. It's the first night in the past four that you actually drift off, losing consciousness and falling prey to the darkness that you succumb to, even though you try so hard to fight it.
It's peaceful and you actually get to rest— for about five minutes. Then it's back to the nightmares.
It's the same things, over and over again.
It's you getting trapped with no way out. Then it's you managing to escape, only to be caught right as you've stepped out of the building you'd been held in. Then it's you making it all the way out, only to be gunned down.
You jolt awake, gasping for breath. Your hand clutch at your sheets. You blink, hard, and— you're back in your nightmare.
This time— you're watching as your friends and family are on the ground, on their knees, in front of you. You want to move, to go to them and help, but you cannot because you can't move.
You watch as they get killed before your eyes and there is nothing you can do to stop any of it. You try to scream, try to move, try to do something—do anything—but it's all physically impossible. You can't move.
There's a weight on your shoulder, and you jolt away from it.
You try to turn, to look at whoever has you by the shoulder. But you can't turn your head. You're stuck.
You're trapped again. Back in that same chair. Wrists bound behind the chair. There's a bomb ticking in the corner. Your family and friends are in front of you— looking right at you with wide eyes and disappointed frowns.
Why aren't you trying harder to save us?
Why are you going to let them kill us?
Why why why
"Y/N!" someone screams, voice tinged with desperation, and you just want them to stop. You don't want to hear it anymore. You don't want to hear about how you're the reason people are dead, about how you're to blame for the destruction of lives.
Your hands go up to clutch at the side of your heads. "Wake up. Wake up. Wake up," you mutter to yourself over and over again.
Because you don't even know if you are awake, because this could damn well be something that they set up for you, and you could be wide awake.
But you need to wake up. Your fingers press into your temples, probably leaving marks, and you're tugging at your hair so hard that it actually hurts but that's okay because at least you know you can still feel pain and you'd be able to tell what's real and what's not.
"Y/N, please. Wake up. I'm not— no one's gonna hurt you. I promise. I promise. Wake up, Y/N. Come on."
A part of you registers the voice— tells you that you're okay and that all you have to do is to wake up. But then— you're looking at your friends and family being bound up with blood running down their faces whilst you sit in a chair with your hands tied up and a machine that runs electricity through your body. Not enough to kill, but enough for a hell of a lot of pain.
Your shoulders shake. But you're not doing that, not even unconsciously. Someone's touching you again.
Your eyes snap open (finally) and then with a single glance at a figure right by your side, you're leaping off the bed and with the gun that you never don't sleep without in hand, safety off, aimed right at whoever it is.
"Whoa, hey. It's only me. It's Bucky. It's Bucky."
You blink, letting your eyes adjust to the darkness, and when they do— you see Bucky with his hands in plain sight, and a concerned frown in his brows. You lower your gun, clicking the safety on, and you're suddenly breathing so deeply— trying to catch your breath.
"Sorry. Sorry. I'm— I'm good. I'm okay."
"You're not," Bucky tells you right after.
You clench your jaw, tilting your chin up almost defiantly over at him. "I am. Sorry for waking you." And then you cross your arms over your chest, looking over at your bedroom door pointedly.
"Y/N—" he starts. But then he cuts himself off as abruptly, before he's nodding, once, and then he's stalking out the door.
You don't sleep for the rest of the night. Or the next. Or the next.

The nightmares never stop. Sometimes they're worse than others. Sometimes you go through the goddamn sleep paralysis again— where you wake up over and over again, but you never actually do wake up. You're just dreaming about waking up. And you don't know if you're awake or not— you never do.
Bucky comes to your bedside again, after a particularly bad one. It's the same situations. The same people. The same pain.
You tell him again. You tell him you're okay, that you're sorry for waking him, but you're fine.
But Bucky takes one look at you, and he shakes his head again. "You're not," he says, just like before, so softly but it echoes in the silence.
And while you'd normally get annoyed because who is he to know that you're not okay? You can't, because if anyone can understand— it's him. Sure, the other Avengers have different degrees of PTSD, too, but— Bucky understands.
Bucky's just like you. He never talks about what he's going through. He's stubborn. He pretends everything is sunshine and rainbows when he's going through hell in his mind. He gets it.
"... I'm not," you sigh quietly, shaking your head— finally, finally admitting to it.
"That's okay," he says, shrugging a shoulder, and then he's stuffing his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, nodding over at your bedroom door. "Wanna go shoot some stuff?"
You end up in the gym until sunrise, shooting bullet after bullet— always hitting the bullseye. Bucky shoots, too, but mostly: he watches. Until it's just before sunrise and he gets this mischievous grin on his face and he takes Barton's bow and starts to shoot with that.
Barton comes down about five minutes later in pyjamas, already yelling about Bucky using his bow the moment he steps through the doors. That bow is meant for someone with grace and poise, the greatest sharpshooter known to man, Barton sniffs, snatching the bow away from Bucky. Then he trips over his own feet, about 0.2 seconds afterwards.
You laugh so hard that you barely even remember the nightmare.

You should be used to this. This being the sounds of cars, even at midnight, and sometimes— cars backfiring.
But you're not. Because one car backfires and suddenly you're cowering and you're back at the one place you know you've already escaped from.
One sound and you're moving without conscious effort, clawing and punching and fighting nothing— but you don't stop, because if you do, they'll get you again. They'll make everything hurt even more than before.
There are arms around you. You fight them. You won't let them take you. Not again. Never again. The arms tighten. You think you yell out a no, get away from me, NO, but the arms are still around your upper body, trapping your own arms to the side of your body.
They'll take you. They're going to torture you. They're going to—
"— tomatoes. Gotta have 'em raw, because the ones from the can, even now, taste like shit, really. It's just not nice, is it? Anyway—"
They're going to hook you up to the machine again. The current. The pain. You need to get out. You can't go through that again. You won't go through that again. You can't break free. You can't—
"— let it sit for, like, five to ten minutes. Check on the bread while you wait, or clean, if you'd rather, but let's be real— who'd want to clean up when you've got garlic bread to check on? And—"
Your mind finally registers the words being spoken. Garlic bread? What?
"— drain the pasta. Then pour that motherfucking sauce all over it. Take out the bread. And—"
You blink, hard. Your mind registers your surroundings. You're not back there. You're in the living room. On the floor. In the dark. One of the arms around you is cold. When you look down at it, it's metal.
"Bucky?" You croak out, craning your neck up slightly.
Bucky looks back at you, from where he'd been looking forward, at nothing in particular. His lips split into a smirk. "And that's how you make the only thing I know how to cook, but am a fucking pro at."
You exhale slowly, slumping in his hold. Then before you can stop yourself, you let your head tilt back, into his chest. You feel him tense behind you, but he's relaxing as quickly as he'd tensed.
"Thank you," you mutter into the darkness, eyes shut, because you don't want to look at him.
"Hey," he calls softly, tapping you cheek lightly with a finger.
You peek your eyes open, despite really not wanting to. And he peers back at you. It's almost like he's looking straight through you. But you're not unsettled. If anything, you're calmed by the way he looks at you.
He bends his head down slightly, knocking his forehead lightly onto yours before bringing his head back up. "You don't gotta go through this alone."
You're silent for a while, just looking at him. Then you look away, in favour of knocking your forehead lightly onto his cheek. "I know that now," you say so quietly that you think he might've missed it.
But then Bucky's arms are squeezing you a little tighter, and there's the feel of lips pressing against your head and an equally soft, "Good."
You don't know how long you stay like that. On the floor, with your back pressed against his chest, the both of you in half upright positions with your legs stretched out. But you do know that it's the first night that you've not gotten a nightmare, and it's the best damn sleep you think you've had in years.