CHOSEN - Bucky barnes x Oc

Some people carry their past like a shadow, always behind them, silent but heavy. Others carry nothing, because life has never offered them the chance to hold on to anything. They met somewhere in between the lines of hatred-between memory and survival, between silence and the desperate sound of a heartbeat that still hadn't learned how to hope.

Bucky barnes was a man learning to be whole again, piece by piece, scar by scar. His past wasn't something he could forget; it clung to him in the way he spoke, the way he looked over his shoulder when the world got too quiet. But he was trying-trying to be something more than the weapon he once was.

Athena wasn't broken. She wasn't healing. She simply was. A still point in a world that never stopped spinning. Existing wasn't a luxury; it was her rebellion. Every breath she took was a defiance of everything that tried to erase her.

They didn't find love. It found them-in the quiet moments between prolonged therapy sessions, in the glances that said more than words could. In the way he never asked her to change, and the way she never flinched at the things he couldn't say.

They weren't perfect. They weren't whole. But they were real. And sometimes, in a world that has taken too much from too many, real is the bravest thing two people can be.