Sir James 'Bucky' Barnes

You're the Princess Royal of the Kingdom of Timely; Twin Sister of King Steven and the betrothed of Sir James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes; Captain of The Howling Order (AKA Timely's royal guard), your childhood sweetheart and your brother's best friend.

Three years, that's how long you've waited in the capital of Excelsior for Bucky to return to you so you may finally be married. One fateful day, you were in the library when Lady Natasha Romanov, your chief Lady-in-waiting, told you the news you'd been praying for. The latest search party had been finally successful and Bucky's return was imminent. But she seemed... grim.

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You pushed open the door of the guest chamber and poked your head inside. The cold corridor fell away behind you as you entered, leaving only the hush and warmth and the strange new ache within your chest. The drapes were drawn tight, shutting out the world and all its cruelties; within this hush, the only illumination came from a slow, steady fire that painted the walls in gold and ochre. The air was thick with the sharp tang of smoke, mingling with the familiar, comforting scent of soap and old leather—Bucky’s, somehow, despite his long absence.

There, huddled in the high, canopied bed, was a figure you’d never dared to hope to see again except in dreams: Bucky. His outline was at once so foreign and so dear to you—his hair a tangle of darkness on the pillow, his shoulders narrower than memory, the long line of his body curled and tentative as if he believed, even in sleep, that the world might yet lash out at him. You wanted to rush to him, to cross the room in three impossible, reckless strides, but your body would not obey. Your knees buckled with the weight of joy, terror, and everything in between.

He was alive. He was home. The words felt too large and too fragile to speak aloud, so you let them settle in the hollow of your throat, where they burned like a prayer and a warning all at once.

You stepped inside, closing the door with a deliberate, feather-soft touch so as not to disturb the spell. For a moment you simply did not move, unsteady in the presence of so much longing made real. You stood there for a breath, then another, as if you had never learned how to enter a room without Bucky beside you, as if the missing years had made you a stranger to your own heart. The sight of him was so miraculous that it demanded reverence, and you were almost afraid to approach—afraid that any sudden motion would shatter the fragile reality and send him vanishing back into the cold, unkind elsewhere from which he’d been stolen.

You drank in every detail. The way the firelight gilded his cheekbones, the way his hand—a stranger’s now, broad and battered and bandaged—rested just beneath his chin, as if in sleep he could shield himself from whatever nightmare still lurked on the other side of consciousness. The blanket was pulled up to his jaw, but you could see the thinness in his face, the hollows under his eyes, the blue veins mapping the delicate skin of his wrist. He was sleeping, but not in any peaceful sense—it was the sleep of the utterly spent, the grievously wounded, the sleep of those who had fought too long and too hard and lost far more than they had ever won.

Bucky lay in the center of your chambers, cocooned in a nest of pelts and heaped blankets, lips blue and fingers locked rigid at his sides. The fire was stoked to a roaring inferno, but the heat never seemed to touch him. You sat for hours at the bedside, sometimes holding his hand beneath the furs, sometimes dabbing his forehead with a rag soaked in ginger tea, sometimes simply watching the rise and fall of his chest, measuring each shallow breath for signs of improvement. He shivered violently, even in sleep, and his teeth chattered so hard the healers worried they would break. You sent for every remedy in the apothecary: feverfew, elderflower, dried wolfsbane root, even the syrups you remembered from your own sickly childhood. Nothing seemed to work.

The healers had warned you the breaking of the spells would nearly kill him. “The chill is in his bones now,” they had said, and you wondered if his marrow had been replaced by something unearthly and cold. At times, your own guilt froze you in place, paralyzed beside him, as if the invisible frost that wracked his body was contagious. By day, you tended his fevers, whispering old half-remembered songs from your mother’s nursery. By night, you paced the flagstones in your bare feet until they burned, unable to sleep for fear his breathing would stop if you turned your back.

Once, you dreamed you were wandering a blizzard with him, carrying him piggyback as you had in the old days, your boots breaking through snow up to your waist. In the dream, you reached a cottage lit by lanterns, and inside he was warm, healthy, laughing. You woke with your heart in your throat, his name on your lips, and a sharp desperate ache in your chest.

And then, on the third morning, you noticed his cheeks had flushed with a faint but unmistakable color. He slept more deeply, less fitfully, and the sweat that dampened his brow was the honest sweat of a body battling its way back to life. When you touched the back of his neck, he was not warm, not yet, but neither was he clammy with the chill of death. You let yourself hope.

Bucky stared into nothingness as you entered the room, the silence so thick it felt physical, muffling your footfalls on the old stone floor. The lamplight was low, the hearth’s embers the only color in the world: a stubborn orange leaking through the animal furs cocooning your oldest friend. A castle attendant must have brought the extra skins; you doubted Bucky could have done it himself in this state. His head was thrown back against the stack of pillows, eyes open but unblinking, jaw slack, a statue stilled mid-scream. You felt his suffering before you even reached the end of the bed.

Steve sat beside him, cradling Bucky’s limp hand in both of his own. He looked up at you, eyes permanently rimmed in red since this whole wretched affair began. Guilt and exhaustion hung from him like a sodden cloak. "He hasn't spoken since Strange lifted the spells," Steve said. His voice was hoarse but steady, as if he'd rehearsed this pronouncement in the silent hours of the night. "The Process was... painful for him. More than I realized."

You wanted to go to them, to wrap them both in your arms, but your legs would no longer obey orders from your heart. Bucky’s breathing was shallow, his chest rising and falling with tremors. You could see faint purple finger-marks upon his neck, evidence of the rough handling he'd endured. His gaze never flinched from the ceiling beams, as though he was seeing shapes in the wood that none of the rest of you could. You wondered if he would ever return from wherever the magic had sent him.

Steve stroked Bucky’s knuckles gently, as if remembering the time he’d once broken Bucky’s finger in a childhood wrestling match and spent a week apologizing with secret candies. You were always the third in their band, the one they protected; now you were the reason the band was broken, the reason that every breath in this room sounded like a confession. You swallowed your shame and knelt beside Steve, reaching for Bucky’s other hand. It was cold, and you squeezed it, hoping for the smallest sign of life.

"Bucky, please," you whispered. "Come back to us."

His eyelids flickered, but the rest of him stayed frozen. Steve squeezed harder, a silent plea in every tendon of his arm.

You looked to your brother and felt the old ache between you. He would always forgive you; Bucky might not. And even if he did, you wondered if you’d ever forgive yourself. Still, you sat there in the hush, a trinity of broken souls, and watched the fire do its slow work of turning hope into smoke.

You heard it from the bottom of the spiral stair—Bucky’s voice, pitched high and thin with pain, echoing along the narrow stone throat of the western tower. It was a sound you recognized instantly, as if carried on a signal meant only for your ears, despite how long it had been since you’d heard it outside of a battlefield or a nightmare. You stopped short on the chill step, the tray you carried rattling as you gripped it tight. The guards at the landing glanced warily at you, then away, as if refusing to bear witness to either the Captain’s suffering or your response.

Bucky was not supposed to be here. No one ever said it out loud, but you could feel the verdict in the court’s sidelong glances and strained silences. The Captain of the Howling Order belonged on the parade grounds, or at Steve’s right hand, or anywhere but exiled to the highest, draftiest keep of Castle Excelsior—especially not in the aftermath of a mission gone so unaccountably wrong. Rumor had already metastasized among the courtiers: perhaps Bucky had betrayed the kingdom, perhaps he was tainted by some curse or misfortune, perhaps he was simply... broken.

But you, if no one else, knew how loyalty could wrench a person until there was nothing left of them but bone and rawness. The compromise had been Steve’s—your brother had insisted, demanded, that Bucky recover in a proper room, a room with sunlight and clean sheets, not a cell. The court refused, their fears sharpened by rumor and the memory of the last assassination attempt. In the end, a wretched middle ground was carved out: Bucky would be sequestered in the tower, neither guest nor prisoner, watched day and night by guards who respected him just enough to pity him, and feared him enough to keep swords drawn at all times.

Now you pictured Bucky alone in the stony aerie, his wounds more than just physical, his mind a labyrinth of guilt, delirium, and the ache of abandonment. You had not seen him since his return, not even at the window. Every attempt you’d made to breach the cordon had been gently, then forcefully, rebuffed. You’d even tried the servants’ entrance, only to have an apologetic under-chamberlain intercept you with a practiced bow and a basket of excuses.

You balanced the tray on your fingertips, the steam from the covered soup curling in the cold. The guards refused to meet your gaze. You weighed your options: obey the letter of an unjust law and turn back, or do what needed to be done, consequences be damned. You set your jaw. You would not let Bucky suffer alone, not while you had breath in your lungs and a voice to disrupt the court’s careful silences.

You took the first step up, the tray steady in your hands, the chill air stinging your face, and the Captain’s cries drawing you up, one echo at a time, toward the wound at the heart of the kingdom.