multi-fandom oneshots

in bloom (bucky barnes)

summary: bucky spends the remaining hours of his birthday being interrogated and thinking about you.

pairing: bucky barnes x reader

word count: 2.3k

genre: fluff

warnings: mentions of child m*lesting, murder, bombing, racists, etc, but its all light hearted!! i mean as light hearted as they can be skdjskd

Let it be known that Bucky Barnes doesn't have a stark white ledger. It's dotted with red, blue, black. Some gold, maybe. Speckles of grey – and it used to bother him, until he realised that, well, nobody was truly clean. Steve and Sam had been war criminals. T'Challa had been exiled from his own kingdom at one point. Stark (rest his soul) had been a war profiteer for a time.

And while, yeah, it wasn't the same thing as being brainwashed for 70-odd years and forced to carry out assassinations and war crimes, the sentiment still stuck. It took a while – God, it took a while – but now Bucky Barnes can proudly announce that he is well aware that he is Not Trash. He's got his morals and his values and–

"Consorting with criminals, Barnes?!"

Thaddeus Ross is red-faced, a vein practically bulging from his forehead as he slaps a grainy CCTV still on the table in front of him. Once the Secretary is called in, you always know there's trouble, Bucky thinks dryly. I'm so scared.

The picture is almost laughably mundane; a greyscale image of a diner table, a man on one side and a woman on the other. The timestamp in the bottom left corner places it at three minutes past midday, five days ago. A Saturday. Bucky's face may be bent down towards his pancakes but there's no mistaking his side profile – the strong nose and jaw, the same haircut. And the woman is completely recognizable, too.

He almost laughs. You – a criminal.

(Well, technically...)

Okay, so maybe you're a criminal. An enhanced criminal, which was most likely why Secretary Ross was so interested. The media – for lack of creativity – simply called you Ivy. After Poison Ivy, of course, who was the only namesake their brains could think up when you first appeared on the news' radar a few years ago with your giant, sprawling vines and flowers. Capable of breaking concrete like it's thin glass, capable of lifting buses and whole houses from the ground, you were a force to be reckoned with. But you weren't evil.

There was that time you destroyed half the Pentagon and then that time where you stormed the biggest bank in New York... The bombing of another bank in Washington... The kidnapping in Austria, the murder of that one mob boss...

(Yep. Definitely a criminal.)

But she's not evil, Bucky interjects. She's not. So is it really consorting with a criminal?

Because there was the charity donations and the beating up of child molesters and Klan members – the children's home you regularly donated to, the sweet abandoned kitty you picked up from the rain, the way you referred to your plants as babies.

So you're not evil, Bucky's decided. You're just... amoral. You do what's fun instead of what's right, until you do. You're criminal in the sort of way that Steve was, kinda. You're more annoying than threatening, if he's being honest. You drink your tea without milk and you insist on shoving your cold little nose into the crook of his neck when you're sleeping, and sometimes you leave a trail of compost from the kitchen to the balcony when you're repotting plants. And you always get leaves in the joints of his metal arm. Always.