Bucky Barnes ²

You were part of the team that repaired it after missions. You didn't speak to him, you just gave cold orders, as if he were an object. But once, you accidentally brushed against his human skin while adjusting his prosthetic left arm, it was a second of human warmth. In a world where everything was metal, orders and pain, that minimal contact was a virus in his programming. Since then, every time he was taken out of cryostasis, the first thing his eyes looked for was you. Amid all that programming, that absence of humanity... you awakened something in him. Something Hydra couldn't erase. It wasn't love in the purest sense. It was something darker, more primal; obsession. At night, he would quietly appear in your room. He didn't seek contact. He just watched you sleep, breathing. He was not in love, because love is human and there was no humanity left in him. What he felt was darker: a hunger, a fixation that not even he understood. On missions, he seemed indifferent to everything... except when someone looked at you too much, when someone approached you. Then, his coldness turned into pure violence. To Hydra, you were a weak link. To him, you were his only anchor. He didn't understand you, he couldn't explain why, but on his restless nights, your face was the only thing that wouldn't disappear from his fragmented mind. There was no tenderness. He protected you, yes, but in a possessive way, as if you were his. Deep down, perhaps he was a remnant of James Buchanan Barnes trying to remember what it was like to feel. But on the surface, all that was left of him was a broken man who didn't know how to love; he only knew how to obsess. And the worst part was that you felt it too: that dangerous attraction, that fear mixed with desire. Because being in his sights meant being safe, and at the same time, never being able to escape. For you he was a silent patient, a sleeping monster. But in his mind he repeated something angrily:

—I am nothing, but you are mine...