Depth of a shade

Until.

Until, of course.

Until, she meets Bucky Barnes.

She thought she knew all the shades, but his eyes held a thousand she’d never seen before, hidden behind dark lashes she almost wanted to reach out and brush out of her way to better see the swathes of light hidden there.

The first time she saw Bucky Barnes, he was dirty, hair greasy. Delicate, almost fragile, in a way that was shocking for a man his size, for a man that could intimidate with one cutting glance. He’d hidden half behind Steve, hidden away from everyone for months, for nearly a year.

Shattered, broken, reformed.

Not quite whole.

Never from her though, he let her close, almost immediately. Bucky had never hidden from her.

The blue of his eyes were closer to gray in those days, reflective of the turmoil inside him, but turning almost flat wherever he was required to look anyone directly in the eyes, a curtain pulled shut to hide himself, the thoughts he harbored close to the chest, like darting fish in a pool.

She always saw them though, caught the fish that weren’t as fast as they thought they were.

When he looked up, the paleness of his eyes would mirror the color of the sky, baby pink, lavender, bright orange, and blues, so many blues, before his lids would flutter shut and hide away the world. The purple nightmare bruises under his eyes only highlighted the blue, though she wished she could reach out and swipe those shadows away with the pad of her thumb.

She adored his eyes, thought she had seen every shade in the world, knew every iteration of the color.

She didn’t, as it turned out, and Bucky had almost immediately noticed her watching him.

He had avoided her then, for a while, until she found him in the kitchen one morning, rifling through the cabinet above the fridge for a box of cereal.

“I think Steve ate the last of the cinnamon toast crunch if that’s what you’re after,” she had said, watching him startle a little at the sound of her voice. “And I wanted to let you know, I was looking at your eyes. That’s the reason I was staring. It was rude and I’m sorry.”

She had left the kitchen quickly, despite not getting her coffee, hadn’t wanted to make him more uncomfortable than she already had.

But it had only taken him a few hours to track her down, and tell her that if that was the reason she was staring, he didn’t mind.

Friendship had bloomed easy between them after that.

They had remained friends for years, through fighting and wars, through the snap and over to the other side of the blip, to Steve disappearing and the whole world as she knew it falling apart, to everyone being separated and gone and things being different.

Still, Bucky and his blue eyes found her, guided her back home, despite being lost.

They had only come together after everything fell apart, clinging to each other in a world that no longer made sense.

Nothing made sense but those eyes searching out hers, beckoning her closer, to find her way back to reality when nothing made sense.

Blue, she thought when Bucky finally kissed her, shouldn’t be a warm color.

But it is.

It's like being wrapped in a cloud, like staring out the window of a plane on a clear day. It's like freedom and hope.

Now, months after that first press of lips, that first taste of finding home again, she stares into that blue and thinks about what it means to her.

Friendship. Home. Safety. Probably love.

Maybe this was why she always felt an affinity with blue eyes.

Because a piece of her soul was to one day be stitched inside them.

She gets to gaze into them up close now, count his feathering lashes, pick the silvers out of the pigment, the flecks of green and gray and darker blue ringing the pupil.

She gets to gaze into them as Bucky strokes his hands up and down her back in soothing strokes. Her knees bracket his hips, fingers slipping through the newly short strands of his hair. His apartment was still empty, furniture sparse, walls blank.

Bucky was always frowning, a crease between his eyes that she made a point of smoothing her thumb over. He’s frowning at her now, but not quite so deeply as usual and so she knows he’s only thinking, not lost.

“Y’know,” he says suddenly, hands stilling on her hips, “sometimes I think you like my eyes more than me.”

She chuckles and pulls back, touching the dimple in his chin with one finger, “You are your eyes, Barnes. They hold no secrets.”

For a moment he doesn’t reply, running his fingers beneath the edge of his shirt, making her shiver.

“I thought I scared you, that first time I caught you staring. Thought I scared everyone.”

She doesn’t know why he’s thinking about that day, deciding whether she wants to press him. “Don’t give yourself so much credit,” she jokes instead, shifting to curl next to him on the couch, head against his shoulder, his arm curling protectively around her back. She moves her legs to rest over his lap and he automatically pats her thigh, fingers soft against her flesh.

“Maybe not to you,” he snarks. “You don’t have any sense of self preservation.”

Bucky still has a distant look in his eyes, like he’s peering into the past, like it's a movie playing in front of his eyes. The blue shifts to gray with the tide of ghosts pouring in, the fog of the past. “That was kinda a prerequisite to working with the Avengers.”

She mourns it, everytime, she mourns the loss of that blue - of the azure and sage, the warmth.

He snorts, “Yeah, it seemed that way.”

“Luckily I had a pretty protector come along.”

“Who?” He feigns confusion.

“You. Saved my life more times than I can count.”

He opens his mouth to contradict her before he seems to think better of it and shakes his head, “Quit distracting me. I’m trying to tell you something.”

Blue eyes meet hers, looking down at her with a softness that wrecks her heart. She reaches up to touch the edge of his mouth, the corner of his jaw. A man made of edges, but with eyes that betrayed every soft part of him that the sharpness protected.

Bucky made truth of the sentiment the eyes are the window to the soul.

No wonder, she thinks, that they had forced him into a mask, occasionally into those goggles. He felt too much, too deeply, laid it all too bare.

“Okay,” she murmurs. “Tell me.”

He nods, looking away from her again, speaking into the distance rather than at her. “Steve said it was because I was so stoic. That I had a habit of just…zoning out and-,”

Bucky stops and shakes his head, looking down, watching the tip of his finger as he drags it over the crown of her knee. “Doesn’t matter. I have a resting killer face is what it came down to. Thought it best if I didn’t hang around much. I didn’t want to put Steve in an awkward position by disrupting the team’s dynamic.”

He flattens his hand against her leg, palm smoothing down her calf before his hand curls around her ankle.

She watches his eyes closely, watches the sadness of the blue swim in again, like something emerging from the great deep of the ocean, a sorrow as old as the universe itself.

“And you…you made a point to apologize to me. Looking at my eyes, you said.”

“Prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen,” she chirps, watching as pink tinges the crest of his cheeks.

“Sure. I thought you were making shit up. But I started hanging around, because it sounded like you meant it when you said you were sorry.”

“I did.”

He squeezes her side, tipping his head to the side to nudge her head with his nose. “I know. Realized it pretty quick that you really were just looking at my eyes. Couldn’t understand why.”

“Because-,”

“I realized too,” he soldiers on, cutting her off. “That I loved that about you. You read me so easily. I didn’t want anyone to know me then, but after that, I wanted you to know everything.”

She grips his chin in her hand, pulling back from his shoulder so she can see those eyes that held the whole wide world and a century of history in them. And she tells him, for the first time, how she feels about blue eyes, about the constellations and universes she saw in them. About him.

“So maybe I liked your eyes more than you when I first met you, because I thought I’d seen every shade, knew every single hue. But clearly I hadn’t and I was obsessed, and I found you in them. Maybe you have a resting murder face but your eyes are so expressive. You can’t hide anything.”

He licks his lips and presses his forehead to hers, closing his eyes to her. “You still haven’t let me tell you what I’m trying to.”

Sometimes talking with Bucky was like dancing, push and pull, hook and sinker, shifting ever slowly closer to the thing he really was trying to communicate.

“‘Kay, sorry, I’m listening.” She taps the flat of her palm very gently against his cheek. Bucky opens his eyes immediately, knowing she wants to see the shifting clouds, the brewing storm, the sunny skies and turbulent waters.

“I’ve been in love with you since that day. I fell in love with you. I love you. I’ve loved you for a very long time. ‘S okay that you only recently felt this way, about y’know, me and you, but I want you to know.”

“Bucky-,”

The blue is bright, feverish, intense. “Doll, I know you have some weird thing with my eyes-,” she huffs out an annoyed breath at hearing it described that way, “-but honey, your eyes saved me.”

She goes still, listening. “Kind and bright and attentive. You paid attention. You didn’t expect anything. You didn’t want anything. And you looked anyway.” He breathes out, nervous. “Eyes so steady and warm. Like caramel, like honey. Like earth.”

Bucky falters, some of the confidence in his voice draining away, irises leeching away color. Like he’s said too much.

She didn’t know he could be so poetic, thought her musings were one sided all these years.

“Thought you should know,” he finishes awkwardly, his hand releasing her ankle, eyes sliding away from hers. “I loved you all that time.”

She traces the curve of his ear, the edge of his jaw.

“I love you now, for what it's worth. I loved you in a different way before. But it's always been there.” She peers into his eyes again, a well memorized landscape to her now. “Were you waiting all this time?”

He nods.

“Didn’t think to say anything?” She teases. “Little depressing that we only got together after the literal end of the world, after everything changed.”

“Think it's a habit. Steve waited too.”

“That’s stupid,” she says.

Bucky kisses her abruptly, his mouth so soft she would willingly melt into him if it meant the feeling never went away. “Doesn’t matter now. Just know, I would have rather kept letting you parse out the color of my eyes than ever lose you. So I kept my trap shut and let you love my eyes.”

“How tragic and chivalrous of you.”

That finally gets her a smile. “That’s my brand.”

“Certainly seems that way.” She taps his lips with the tips of her fingers, kissing his eyelids when they flutter shut, delicately, one at a time. “Don’t hold on out me anymore. I expect you to tell me everything you find in my eyes.”

Bucky kisses her forehead. “Easy. It was like coming home.”