MCU (Avengers) Imagines Part Two

Steve Rogers X Barnes!Reader - Stressed Out

A/N - This chapter was inspired by the song 'Stressed Out' by Twenty One Pilots. Reader is Bucky's younger sister, and she grew up with him and Steve. 

You had never intended to fall in love with your brother's best friend. God, when you had been a kid, growing up in Brooklyn, you never would have imagined that the guy who used to turn up around your dinner table and talk sweet with your mom, and who could barely say a word to you without going a little red in the cheeks, would be the same guy you ended up hopelessly in love with. But unexpected things tended to happen when you put people under unusual circumstances. 

When you had woken up in a version of New York that had made no sense, with very little understanding of how you'd ended up there, beyond your memories of Steve having to set the plane down in the middle of the ocean, you had been terrified. You'd blinked and the world had turned on its head. Brooklyn was no longer the comforting place you remembered it as. The people were different. The buildings were different. Hell, it even smelt different. 

The only thing that had remained the same was Steve. Sure, he wasn't the skinny kid that looked like he could be knocked over by a slight breeze anymore, but it was still him. 

That first night, you'd been restless. You'd been tossing and turning for what seemed like hours, and still, you'd yet to get even a moment of sleep. You could hear the sounds of the city through the thick windows of the apartment the S.H.I.E.L.D agent had set the two of you up in, and with each echoing sound, you felt your body tense further. It hadn't taken you long to give up on sleeping altogether, padding out into the living room in the hopes of calming your racing nerves. 

It really was a gorgeous apartment, top floor of some highrise that hadn't existed when you'd gone under the ice, with a picture window looking out over the entirety of Manhattan. Perhaps, if you could recognise any of the landmarks, you would have thought it was pretty, but all you could see was a god awful mismatch of buildings in varying styles, none of which seemed right to you. 

"What are you doing up?" Steve's voice was thick with sleep as it broke the not-quite-silence, causing you to jump as you span to face him, your heart beating a mile a minute as you stared at him in disbelief. 

"Are you trying to kill me?" you yelped, placing a hand over your heart. "Christ, Stevie-"

"What are you doing out here?" he pressed on, ignoring your attempt to avoid the question as he moved to stand beside you, staring out over the landscape with the same frown that you'd been wearing. 

You shrugged slightly. "Couldn't sleep," you hummed, your eyes fixed on him as he continued to stare out of the window. "Thought that maybe if I got up and moved around a little bit I might suddenly feel tired enough to go back to bed-"

The corner of Steve's lip twitched up at your confession. "Is it working?"

"Does it look like it's working?" 

He chuckled, his eyes finally flickering over to your face. "Either it isn't or you're a really high functioning sleepwalker," he teased, watching you smile for the first time since you'd come out of the ice. 

You snorted at his comment, shaking your head slightly. "Every time I get even close to falling asleep there's some wayward noise that wakes me straight back up." You shrugged slightly. "I don't know about you, but when I pictured the future when I was a kid, I never imagined it would be so loud."

"Oh, I never thought about the noise. Always thought it would be flying cars and bright lights."

"Well, at least you got the bright lights right-" you murmured, letting your words trail off.

Steve lifted his hand, hesitating for just a second before resting it on your shoulder, giving it a light squeeze. "Give it time; we'll get used to it." 

"I don't think I'll ever get used to the smell," you told him. "I can't quite put my finger on it, but something smells wrong-"

"It's the cigarette smoke," he interrupted, causing your brows to furrow. "In the 40s, practically everyone smoked, you couldn't walk down the streets without meeting up with a cloud of the stuff, but now-" he paused shrugging. "I guess the habit kinda died down and the smell went with it."

You hesitated for a moment, brows still furrowed in concentration. "Shit," you murmured, your tongue darting out to wet your bottom lip. "How didn't I realise that?"

Steve nudged your shoulder with his, causing you to look up at him with a small frown still painting your features. "You've been pretty busy," he told you, offering up a soft smile. "You had bigger fish to fry than figuring out why the city smells different to when we were kids."

"But you figured it out," you uttered, allowing a smile of your own to pull at your lips. 

"I have a better sense of smell than you-"

"Hey," you interrupted, shoving his chest slightly. "My sense of smell is plenty good enough."

A soft chuckle slipped out of Steve and he rolled his eyes at your defensive chatter. "It's a serum thing, Bonehead. All of my senses are better than they used to be-" He shook his head slightly. "I swear, all you Barnes' kids are the exact same; always jumping down my throat before I can finish a sentence."

Your laughter drifted off into silence as your eyes wandered back to the landscape on the other side of the window, your smile fading as you stared out at the city that you didn't recognise. 

"You should go back to bed," you told him, attempting and failing to keep your voice light. 

"I'll keep you company," he hummed, slumping himself down onto the couch behind you and offering up a sweet smile. 

"There's no benefit in us both feeling like crap in the morning-"

"Y/N," he interrupted, his voice a little firmer than you were used to. "I'm going to sleep like crap knowing you're out here on your own, anyway. I'd rather just be out here with you."

You nodded, moving to sit beside him on the sofa. "Fine," you agreed softly. "But, you can't be all mopey when you're completely exhausted in the morning."

"I promise to keep my tired thoughts to myself."

"Good, because I'm not going to have any sympathy for you when it's all self-inflicted," you murmured, shuffling slightly on the sofa in an attempt to make yourself comfortable.

"I won't say a word," he told you, lifting an arm in your direction until you caved and leant into his side, settling down immediately. 

You glanced up at him, brows furrowed. "You'd better not. I'm going to be too tired to put up with-" your words trailed off, interrupted by your own yawn. "To put up with your whining," you pressed on, your eyes drifting closed as you absorbed the warmth ebbing off of Steve. 

He hummed slightly. "Whatever you say, Sweetheart," he uttered, brushing your hair away from your face and smiling when you let out a soft content sigh, already drifting off to sleep.

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