100 Marvel One Shots✔️

The Tests of Time >> Bucky Barnes (Winter Soldier) X Reader

Title: The Tests of Time

Paring: Bucky Barnes X Reader

Warnings: PTSD Bucky Barnes

Spoilers: for Captain America: The Winter Soldier  and Captain America: Civil War. 'Nuff said.

Author's Note: We all know I like writing, but somehow this got to be almost 4,000 words and well it's Buck and I love Buck, and that's that. Also, 88K reads? WTH (how did we get here? i still remember it when this book had like, three reads?!) but also thanks, guys! 

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You were a second-generation immigrant, but that didn't stop those cruel words. Even if you were American, there was just something about you - perhaps it was the appearance, or that name of yours, or even what you brought to eat for lunch in your Tupperware - which made those nasty comments and grubby handed people treat you like you were a second-class citizen. Just because you spoke another language at home behind the closed doors of the apartment. Just because your blood came from the cold and the snow and had a deep history of being wrapped in things greater than itself.

There was a sort of story, a folk tale that your grandmother had told your mother, and a story that your mother had, and she'd told you both accounts as a child. It was fantastical, phantasmagorical for bloodlines to have a story that was passed on, and this one was no different.

There was the narrative of Grandmother Svetlana, who on the way to return from town selling coal in the colds of the Polish winter, had been lost in a snow drift too far from the house for a search party to have found her.

She would have died there, but her stories told of a man, with wild eyes, the only words she had shared were her thanks, and his curt Russian accent calling her a  'zgubione kaczątko' . Lost duckling. He had been walking by, wearing one of the military coats she had seen on Russian soldiers by the boarder, and had shed it to share once he had taken her from the snow.

That coat was the only reminder of that day - a remnant of a sort of fairy-tale. Grandmother Svetlana's story was of a man who had saved her life; she would always talk of him as if he was an angry angel, who had delivered her to her doorstep from the grasps of the old Gods, who had disappeared before her father had answered the door. The memory of the angry angelic man stayed with her, even when she began to lose her mind following the death of your dear Grandfather.

Your mother's story was different. She was not being protected by someone in her account, but rather, protecting.

She'd just uprooted her mother and father from living in Pennsylvania, to move to a little place in the East of Minnesota, in a more manageable property for her ageing parents, and, to find a place where she could raise the child she was carrying with a stable living. Not a soul knew of the father, of who he was and did and did to her, and she kept it that way. It was a long drive over, and wanting to take it in two days, Marcia _______ had stopped at a cheap motel overnight, had settled in her ageing parents to sleep, and took a little walk through a corn field.

Not in her greatest imagination had she thought to come across a wounded man. Eyes marked with bruises and black dust, they were staring deep into her soul, the shade of blood mottling his paling skin, a silver space-age hand, dark blood soaking the black clothes he wore.

Your mother said of him uttering in a mixture of Russian, French, Czech, Polish - and only because of your mother's heritage, she knew what he was speaking of, what he needed. Luckily again, your mother was a nurse, and before too long, he was cleaned up.