The Blackbird (Bucky Barnes X OC)
Their instincts have always been to run. He knows how to retreat behind silence and the old instinct to keep his hands off anything good. She knows how to keep moving before attachment turns into captivity.
In the wreckage left by HYDRA and TALIC, with old files exposed, public perception twisted into something hungry, and gods dropping from the sky with impossible warnings, they find themselves facing a stranger kind of battle.
For once, the danger isn't asking them to disappear.
It's asking them to stay.
Bucky is learning how to exist in a life no one ordered him to live, where protecting someone means knowing when to reach for them and when to let them choose the fall. She has nowhere left to chase him, no mission left to make of bringing him home, and far too much practice insisting she's fine when there is always something else to fix first.
Old nightmares surface in places they don't belong. The Crow has become public property in everything but name. Thor keeps telling stories she has no interest in believing. And somewhere beneath missions, therapy, old ghosts, new enemies, and the dangerous comfort of ordinary things, the lines they thought they understood begin to blur.
Between weapon and person. Protection and control. And being needed versus being chosen.
They survived the people who decided what they were.
Now they have to live long enough to find out what remains when no one else gets to decide.