pairings: bucky barnes x reader, steve rogers, natasha romanoff, avengers, oc
warnings: uhh idiots in love, mutual pining, and fake dating and i genuinely cannot tell if this is horrible so i hope it isn't lol
about: part two to ! where reader's nosy neighbor pushes reader to start a fake relationship with bucky barnes (can be read stand alone i think??)
a/n: finally!! here!! it only took me two months to finish writing and sooo much longer to squeeze into posts. it can be read as stand alone... just know it's fake dating.
[tagging everyone who was interested in a part two!! sorry if i miss anyone: @justmad s ]

"i'll see you tomorrow," bucky winks, caging you against your door before leaning in close, lips meeting in a soft kiss, pulling away after a few sweet seconds to nudge his nose against yours, a smile gracing his face.

"yeah," you agree breathlessly, the kiss having knocked you stupid even if it isn't the first one you've shared. "i love you," you let him know, casual in a way that makes the both of you ache—bucky for it to be real and you for him to know it is.

"i love you too," bucky responds too seriously, unable to help himself as he pulls you in for another kiss; unplanned, too caring, making the slippery slope of falling in love with bucky barnes all the more slippery.

his forehead knocks against yours, the both of you so wrapped up in each other you consider entering apartment to actually practice what you make your neighbor think you're doing inside when you're with bucky. "you gotta go," you remind halfheartedly, the locked arms around his waist contrasting your words.

"i don't wanna," bucky mumbles.

"i don't want you to." your eyes search bucky's, but you get too caught up in the beauty of the color, the sparkles swimming in their ocean to even remember what it is you're looking for.

you feel a vibration underneath your fingertips from bucky's phone, an unwelcome reminder of how true your words are, snapping you and bucky out of the moment. you inhale sharply, tearing your eyes away from bucky, loosening your arms around him.

"but you have to," you say with an embarrassed laugh. "so i'll see you soon." you pat his shoulder awkwardly as he kisses your cheek, catching the confused cock of his head when he notices. you send him a thumbs-up as he walks away that you immediately regret.

you make your way back into your apartment and shut the door, knocking your head against the door in disappointment at yourself.

"what is wrong with you?" you ask yourself, running a hand down your face. "who does that? he's your boyfriend, not your twelve-year-old cousin."

creaks from the apartment in front of you interrupt your pity party, and you force yourself to raise your chin so you can look into the peephole. your neighbor appears, wrapped in a robe with a phone pressed against her ear. you can faintly hear her side of the conversation while she converses with whoever is on the other line, her tone surprised as she looks down the hallway towards where bucky left.

"no, she actually has a boyfriend! i can't believe it either, but they see each other almost every day and kiss and do the whole lovesick thing!" did she not believe you? how lonely did she think you were?

"yes, he's very attractive! very, very. i am as surprised at this as you are. i think he would be such a good fit with my daisy, so i thought i would just wait until they were broken up, but i don't see anything like that happening!"

your neighbor sucks.

miss sellack tugs her robe closer to her body as she continues to chat, going back inside her apartment and shutting the door.

your phone vibrates, and you tug it out, glancing at your lock screen to see a message from bucky, whose contact you'd even changed to bucky <3 in commitment to the part—even if it was unlikely that sellack would ask for your phone for proof.

without your knowledge, bucky had changed yours too to pretty. the feeling he'd felt at seeing a stupid heart next to his contact name on your phone had given him too much of a high.

you okay? is bucky's message, to which you reply that you're fine, even if you are absolutely, horrendously are not fine, seeing as you are tremendously in love with him.

a few weeks—and no end even thought of—of being in a fake relationship with bucky barnes, and your love has become so casual in a way that toes scarily fast toward real; the crush you'd harbored on your friend had grown tenfold as you tricked your heart that he was yours.

it wasn't like it had been surprising or even slow. the thin line you were treading on was glassy and way too easy to slip on well before you had him quite literally in your hands, cradled like a precious jewel between your fingers because that's what he was—something gorgeous and important that deserved to be treated with the unfamiliar kindness you held him with.

it was way too easy to be with him, to love him so effortlessly. it should have cost you more to convince sellack that you two were dating, it should've been harder for you to come up with the idea and for bucky to agree—for you to keep it up for so long. you should've kept to the script and stayed three feet apart in your apartment while you introduced bucky to pop culture, but you'd strayed from the topics discussed into the poem that was bucky.

it came so naturally between the two of you—the love. it spilled from you and stuck to him with tender touches while he poured his into the cups where he would drain the coconuts you liked so much.

with each new day of your lovely new week, you fell harder and harder, the border you'd drawn for yourself gone from your view with each kiss he pressed to your cheek, the warmth of the fingers laced with your own, squeezing one, two, three times to say i love you even though it's something the old lady living across from you probably wouldn't even notice.

but, you told yourself, what else would you expect from two spies if not attention to detail? the border between reality and imaginary blurred just as it had with other missions, yet it still felt so different, your soothed craving for your teammate something unexpected and cruel in the sweetest way.

your arguments against the hopes that maybe it was as real to bucky as it was to you were shut down by yourself, even if, unbeknownst to you, bucky had been wanting to hold your hand and kiss your lips far before your deal was brought up. when you told him of your predicament, recalling some of the things sellack had told you, bucky could've gotten on his knees to thank the woman.

at first, he really did try to hide his feelings, attempting to not make how enjoyable it was to pretend to be in a relationship with you so obvious. but he got so caught up in kissing the back of your hands and the heat of your cheeks underneath the pads of his fingers, the softness of your hair as he tucked it behind your ear—he got too caught up in you. all precautions were thrown out the window by the first week when he found himself stopping by your place every night, even if you'd agreed that three times per week was good enough.

"growth in a relationship is important to keeping it believable," he'd blurted when you questioned it lightly, not catching the lilt in your voice indicating hope that he would somehow sing the poetry that your mind wrote about him against your will. bucky wasn't sure if it was bullshit or not, but he assumed it wasn't after you simply nodded, mentally thanking steve for ranting to him about his failed relationships.

he'd grown accustomed to your apartment being called home from so many nights he'd stayed over and the multitude of times where he'd just hung out with you, so many of his things left around your place that he might as well live there. even the neighbors that weren't miss sellack knew him by name, greeting him with a smile when they spotted him making his way to your apartment. one of them had even gifted him a knitted sweater for the cat he wasn't aware they knew about. he'd put the sweater on alpine later that day and sent you a picture, telling you to show albert from next door.

alpine was walking around with that sweater now, crocheted letters reading baby l/n-barnes in white yarn. bucky had felt a ridiculous urge to take her with the sweater on with him the next time he visited your apartment, seeing that you barely came over to his room at the compound because there was no miss sellack there.

bucky thinks he should move.

he shakes it off, blinking himself back to reality when you call his name. when he looks down, his hands are deep in bubbles and warm water, the dirty plate he's washing in one hand. he can barely process the domesticity of it all, instead choosing to enjoy pretending to be your loving boyfriend who does your dishes. if pressed—which he wouldn't be—he could say it was for the risk of sellack listening into the walls. committing to the act. although he was committed long, long before the act even became tangible.

"what're you doing?" you ask when you come out of your bedroom, scanning his figure as he stands in your newly cleaned kitchen, "whoa."

the only thing not neat is the couch, where his blankets and pillows lie. it's a boundary he hasn't dared to cross yet. sleeping in the same bed with each other is too personal, too real. the rawness of seeing you at your most vulnerable is too authentic for this artificial relationship.

the morning he wakes up next to you is the morning where you're his and he's yours, truly.

"what d'you think?" he asks, looking back at you over his shoulder before turning back to the dishes. your eyes trail down the hard muscles of his back without your permission, suddenly perfectly awake as you spy the smooth expanse of his muscled back.

"oh, just that you would be the perfect husband," you grin cheekily, luckily used to the sight now that he's practically moved in. "and are the best fake boyfriend—god, i think the nicest thing any of my real boyfriends have ever done for me was hand me a mop."

bucky shakes his head, "those days are over." for now, a little voice in your mind reminds. until this is over.

"what do you want for breakfast?" you ask, catching bucky's annoyance at the strands of hair that fall over his eyes. tugging the hairband that you keep on your wrist off, you walk over to him, giving him a sweet smile before gently pulling his hair back and tying it into a neat little bun at his neck. "better?" you ask, eyeing him carefully before tucking a particularly stubborn lock behind his ear.

bucky hums, happily engulfed in the touch of your fingertips. "thanks, honey," bucky replies, the nickname slipping off his tongue smoothly, the use of it heavy between his lips.

"f'course." you wave him off, the term never failing to leave behind a sticky sweet mess at the bottom of your heart, but not catching you off guard. the fact that you're alone, with no audience to act for, barely passes through your mind. maybe you don't care.

"can you make those pancakes again?" bucky requests. "i'll go get the mop in the meantime."

you groan. "how many times do i need to tell you that you don't need to mop?"

"now that i know where it is, there's no stopping me, doll."

-

the building bucky had known near nothing about is a place he can now navigate with his eyes closed. he knows the creaky steps when he goes down the stairs, and can now anticipate the stall the elevator experiences when it's passing past the third floor. he knows the short way to the washing machines, and that machine number five is the best one of them all. he now brings extra quarters in the case it isn't available, because the second-best is number seven, although it eats coins sometimes.

bucky's hair is in that strawberry scrunchie thing you'd given to him a few days ago, humming your favorite song with your laundry basket underneath his arm. he waves to some of the neighbors and leans down to pet one of the cats that lingers around sometimes. he can smell alpine on him now that he's finally brought her over to your apartment—it's only for the day, to show albert how much alpine appreciates the sweater.

you'd sent him down to get your laundry before he left to go to the compound, although it was really him insisting he could while you insisted you needed to send him off with some leftovers for all that he was doing for you.

on his way down, bucky bumps into one of your neighbors: an old, stern man who bucky could swear he knew when he was younger, lenny.

"how's your girl?"

"'doing okay," his response is automatic now, he notices. the moment he'd usually need to process the fact that you're his girl now is gone. the fact is accepted.

lenny grunts in response, eyeing the laundry basket bucky is holding. nodding, lenny claps bucky's back. "'better be, kid." as grumpy as the guy is, he cares about you.

down in your apartment's laundry room, drowning in the smell of your detergent, bucky can feel the comfort in the lilac scent that trails after him now. he's been so wrapped in the plastic of it all that it's his reality, and he's not against it.

-

the thread holding the difference between the role you were playing and who you really were was beginning to fray, and the avengers were beginning to notice.

inadvertently, the distracted smiles and brief conversations—the brewing feelings—turned into inside jokes and intertwined pinkies and shared histories, crushes blurring into something you couldn't quite figure out with the more you knew about the other. it was all butterflies and heated cheeks when you were together, seats on the quinjet quickly switching from beside steve and and natasha to right next to each other.

movie nights were glittered with laughter under blankets when you would point something out on the screen, whispering into the shell of bucky's ear, warmed with the heat of bucky's shoulder underneath your cheek when you fall asleep, softened with the fabric of bucky's shirt crumpled in your fingers when you watched a scary movie, pulling him closer without notice when you got caught up in the movie.

as slow as you thought it to be, the change was clear and harder to patch with how familiar you'd become with each other. not only were your teammates trained spies, but it was fairly obvious with the way bucky would look at you as you walked out of a room, exchanging silent glances when bucky knew your order from your favorite restaurant by heart and shrugging nonchalantly when questioned about it.

for experienced assassins and avengers, it was all too obvious—from you dropping by occasionally to return things he forgot at your place to bucky walking past with your hair ties holding his hair away from his face; especially when you would sink into the couch of the common room with a shirt that was clearly not yours and bucky wouldn't even bat an eye— seemingly too abrupt with the unseen change. your friends would raise their eyebrows, but only exchange looks in exchange of a discussion.

they do so now, as you greet bucky with a kiss on the cheek after giving a smile to steve. you pull away with a short inhale as if you had made a mistake, leaving bucky's cheeks rosy and pulled with a smile. his vibranium palm settles on your waist, but you lean into it before remembering you aren't supposed to, moving toward natasha as sam eyes bucky with curiosity.

his eyes follow your figure as she leads you into the kitchen, sending you a smile when he catches your eyes. sam scrutinizes bucky until he notices, furrowing his brows as he stares back.

"what?"

sam shrugs, eyebrows going up, "nothin'."

bucky isn't convinced, narrowing his eyes at the man for a moment more before he hesitantly moves toward the living room, leaving sam and steve alone in the room.

"huh," sam hums after they're alone, sharing a look with steve before deciding to follow bucky into the living room, only poking their heads out the door in a poor attempt to be inconspicuous.

you come up to him with a bowl of popcorn, offering it to him. he takes it, fingers covering yours for longer than necessary, but you barely seem to notice, only replacing the loss of his fingers with the warmth of his shoulder as you talk to him about something. you laugh when he says something, leaning into him while he smiles dopily at having made you laugh.

"wow," sam mumbles. "you said he had game?"

steve shrugs, "it looks like whatever it is he's doing is working."

bucky moves a piece of hair away from your face, his fingers lingering on your cheek.

"woo, that's intimate," sam whistles lowly, watching as you look down at the floor, seemingly snapping out of whatever trance you were in.

you tell him something that makes his arm fall back to his side, lips pressed into a thin smile as he nods. you look disappointed, too, but you don't notice the same feeling painted on bucky.

"stupid," sam whispers, shaking his head. "i have no idea what's going on, but it's stupid."

"it usually is with bucky," steve agrees tiredly, "but he's too stubborn to listen. to anything. ever."

"i know he likes her," sam starts, "it's painfully obvious. and i'm very sure she likes him—it's also, painfully obvious—so i don't know where... the trouble would be."

"you'd think, huh?" steve affirms, going to join the rest of the team in the common room. bucky is sitting in his usual place, but you're not next to him like you frequently are, instead moving to sit next to nat. ever the wingman, however, steve decides he wants to sit next to her for the day, plopping down on her couch before you can. "sorry," he lies, cracking a smile when you say it's fine and head in bucky's direction again.

natasha stares at him, "i can't believe either of you did anything ever."

"fair," steve shrugs, sitting straighter at the sight of you next to bucky again, a grin adorning your features already.

-

the movie night goes like the rest of them usually do, with bucky and you too close for anyone to believe you're just friends, and the both of you forgetting that you're supposed to be. you're yawning by the end of the movie, clinging to bucky's shirt as you already drift off to sleep. bucky's clearly tired, too, drunk on how warm he is with you next to him.

"time to get up, sleeping beauties," tony announces with a yawn, "it's a bad look for the avengers to be draped over my couches instead of their rooms. be responsible."

groaning, the team begins to get up, including you. "oh, i gotta drive home," you say softly, stretching.

bucky shakes his head as he sits up, blinking himself awake. "can't you just stay here? it's late."

"it's fine." you wave him off. "i think it'll be worse to drive home in the morning than right now."

"okay," bucky gives in, following you as you head to the door. most of the avengers go off to their rooms, the only ones remaining being sam, steve, and nat, who only quietly trail after you to say half-hearted goodbyes even if you'll come back the next day.

"i'll see you guys tomorrow," you tell them, blowing a kiss at natasha. "i'll see you soon, okay?" you say to bucky, pulling him into a kiss that he melts into instantly, awakening the rest of the avengers. you and bucky don't register the action that has become a habit until a few seconds pass by and you remember you're not at your apartment and there is no one to fool. you freeze and pull away, staring at bucky with wide eyes.

"i knew it!" sam cheers.

"i told you he had game. i knew he'd tell her sooner or later," steve remarks.

"no, no, y/n probably told him first, he could barely talk to her until a few months ago," natasha argues.

"what?" bucky and you ask at the same time, turning to each other for a second.

"you guys finally got together," sam clarifies, "it took you long enough. i'm just thankful the two of you finally confessed. the whole silent pining lovesick thing was getting gross."

"oh," you whisper, nodding disorientedly. "yeah, the silent pining lovesick thing we have going on," you repeat. "what?"

-

it's oddly quiet in the car as bucky drives you home.

it's been a long time since uncomfortable silence existed between the two of you, always replaced by teasing and laughter you find yourself missing, no matter how blinding it might be or how many lines it blurs.

the taste of any words feels wrong in the situation, and so you stew, running over possible quips like dialogue scripts.

it's awkward enough for you to pick the first words you pluck from your mind in an effort to break the soundlessness. "so, about what just happened—" you start, cutting yourself off when you realize bucky is speaking too.

"what did nat mean by—"

you clear your throat, anticipating the end of his question.

"i had this huge crush on you," you finally admit, only wanting to get it over with before you have to hear the suspicion out of bucky's mouth.

"really?" bucky blurts, turning to look at you in shock before remembering he was driving, clearing his throat as he returns his attention to the road. "uh—had?"

"you did too!" you point out accusingly, remembering steve's words. "they said they knew you would tell me at some point. and sam said that thing about pining."

"what he said requires two people," bucky argues, trying to drive the focus back to you.

"not—not necessarily," you sputter hopelessly.

"y/n," bucky insists seriously, sparing you a glance as he drives, your apartment building close by in the distance.

you tense at the mention of your name, beginning to play with your nails.

"i did," you force out. "i do like you. and it sounds stupid and i know that means it was wrong of me to start this thing with my feelings about you," you begin to ramble, not daring to look up from your lap stubbornly and missing the glance bucky sends your way. "but i genuinely didn't mean for it to last this long. or for us to get so close or anything but i can't say i'm upset about it."

you're pushed lightly from the seat with the impact of bucky stopping so suddenly, making you realize you're finally home.

with tears beginning to burn with their prospect, you begin to say your goodbyes, tangled with apologies and guilt.

"stop it," bucky interrupts, an arm reaching for you to get you to stay still and look at him.

"i'm not upset about it either. i'm actually really glad about it because i..." bucky cringes. "you're right this does sound stupid—i really like you too."

your eyebrows furrow in your disbelief at him. "what?"

"i mean that i want be with you not just to fool your neighbor. i mean that i want you for real."

your face softens as you absorb his words, eyes locked with his, your fingers falling from the door so you can unlock your seatbelt. the click is loud in the silence, his features pulled in nervous anticipation until you suddenly kiss him in the privacy of the car.

"i want you for real too," you confess breathlessly when you pull away, a grin stuck on your face as bucky's hands cup your head, pulling you into kisses repeatedly—for real this time.

-

you don't want to let go of bucky's hand when you get to your door, feeling light and bubbly and like you don't want to let go of him for a while.

you lead him inside and have to fight the giddy smile when you don't let go of his hand, only feeling him squeeze your knuckles as if reminding you that there's no reason to anymore.

"do you want to stay?" you offer. "it's late," you point out lamely.

bucky laughs, pulling you closer to peck your nose. "yeah," he nods, "let me just go get the stuff—"

you stop him when he begins to pull away and head to the closet where he put away what he used for sleeping over on the couch. "wait."

bucky looks back at you in confusion.

"you can stay with me," you propose, catching the look of hesitance on his face when you say it. "we don't have to do anything, just... it's the one thing we never did because it was fake and now it's not."

bucky softens then, moving back towards you, "yeah. yeah, why not?"

-

bucky can't help the awe when his eyes flutter open in the morning, warmed by your laying on his chest. your eyelashes are settled lightly on your cheeks, your hair messy, and face completely relaxed in an unshielded way. trusting.

he revels in the rawness of your soft smile when you wake up, delighted with the genuine way you tell him you love him.