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It begins in the most unremarkable way possible—which is exactly why it startles them both.
A pulse runs through the Tower, soft enough that no alarms trigger but strange enough that the lights flicker with the faintest tremor, like the building exhaled too sharply. Sam curses from the hallway, something about Proteus’s containment vault and “why is it always my floor,” and John is halfway through deciding whether he should investigate when he feels it: a subtle tightening near his finger, a pressure too delicate to be a restraint and too precise to be coincidence.
He looks down.
A thread—thin, bright, impossibly red—stretches from his finger toward the other side of the room.
Toward Bucky.
For a long moment, neither of them moves. The thread hangs suspended in the narrow space between them, trembling faintly with the lingering echo of whatever anomaly passed through the building. It’s not attached by force; John can feel no pull, no drag, nothing guiding his hand except the growing weight of his own heartbeat.
Bucky’s eyes track the line with a slow, cautious focus, as if determining whether he should disarm it or study it. The light catches on the thread, bright enough to make the air shimmer. Behind them, Yelena murmurs something in Russian that sounds dangerously close to “I knew it,” but neither man looks away long enough to confirm.
Sam leans in, eyebrows high. “Well. Damn. Y’all are—uh. Connected.”
John doesn’t answer. His throat has gone tight with a sense of exposure he can’t name. It’s one thing to feel drawn to someone; it’s another to have the universe—or Proteus’s vault—turn that feeling into something visible, something everyone in the room can see reflected back at them.
Bucky shifts first, moving toward him with a careful deliberation that anchors the space between them. The thread moves with him, weightless but obedient. When he stops within arm’s reach, the thread settles into a gentle arc, suspended between their wrists like a question neither of them asked out loud.
“You good?” Bucky asks, voice soft enough that it doesn’t break whatever delicate thing hangs in the air.
“I—yeah,” John says, though the word lands unevenly. He watches the red line pulse faintly with the rise of their combined breathing. “Just… surprised.”
Bucky’s gaze stays steady on him, not on the thread. “You think it means something.”
John swallows, the motion small but betraying. “I don’t know. I just—if this is some destiny thing, or some soulmate thing, I don’t want it to feel like we didn’t choose this.”
Bucky’s expression shifts, subtle but unmistakably tender. “John,” he says, quiet but certain, “we’ve been choosing this long before a piece of glowing string decided to show up.”
The words settle somewhere under John’s ribs, warm and grounding. Still, the uncertainty lingers—thin as the thread, but real.
Later, after the others drift away with varying degrees of teasing and curiosity, they find themselves at the small kitchen table beneath the calm wash of warm light. The thread remains. It loops gently around their hands now, a soft coil resting against his wrist like a breath made visible.
And it is there, in the quiet that follows surprise, that John begins to think.
—
The red thread doesn’t belong in the world as he understands it—not the way myth claims it does, not the way stories paint it as a force capable of dragging two people across continents and lifetimes just to meet.
John never believed in that kind of inevitability. He never thought he’d be someone fate would choose for anything. But he felt something like it before tonight, in moments so small they were easy to miss unless he paid attention.
The brush of Bucky’s fingers against his own while passing a mug. The warm weight of Bucky’s palm at the back of his spine in crowded rooms. The quiet, unconscious way Bucky reached for him in sleep, as if even in dreams he refused to let John drift too far.
If fate had a color, John thinks, maybe it lived in those details long before this thread made itself known.
But tonight, there is proof. Physical. Visible. Undeniable.
A thread, thin and soft, wrapped loosely around their intertwined hands like something fragile made visible just for them. Red. Bright. Quiet.
A metaphor rendered literal in a way that stirs something inside him he is not used to facing.
Bucky runs his thumb over John’s knuckles with a touch that feels both grounding and unbearably gentle. The light catches the red line between them, throwing a small reflection across the table. He studies the thread with a kind of careful consideration that suggests he is not afraid of it—only curious.
“You believe in this?” Bucky asks, voice low, carrying none of the judgment John expected to hear. “Soulmates. Threads. All that.”
John looks down at their hands, then up at the man sitting across from him. Beneath Bucky’s steady gaze, something unspools quietly in his chest.
He could deflect. He could joke. He could pretend none of this unsettles him. But the question deserves something real.
“I don’t know if I believe in destiny,” John says slowly, his fingers curling around Bucky’s because that part he knows to be true. “But I believe in… us. In choosing you. Every day.”
Bucky’s eyes soften—not with surprise, but with a relief that tells John maybe he wasn’t the only one wrestling with questions he didn’t know how to ask.
“Even when it’s not easy?” Bucky asks.
“Especially then.”
A small shift moves through Bucky’s breath, a loosening around the shoulders, the kind that happens when someone finally hears what they’ve been waiting to hear without knowing it. He turns their hands, letting the red thread lie more deliberately across his palm, as if examining not the string itself but the meaning someone else would attach to it.
John watches him, voice quieting. “What about you? You believe in any of this?”
Bucky doesn’t answer immediately. His eyes trace the thread, but his expression stays anchored in something more introspective. When he finally speaks, his voice is steady.
“I don’t think fate brought me to you,” he says. “I think I walked toward you. Even when I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. Even when I thought I was walking away from everything.”
The words move through John like warmth easing into places that have been cold for too long. Suddenly the thread feels less like a verdict and more like a reflection—something external catching up to something internal.
“If there’s a string,” Bucky continues, lifting their joined hands as though making a quiet oath, “it’s the one we tied ourselves. Not destiny. Not luck. Just… us. Holding on.”
John looks at the way the thread crosses their skin—bright against flesh and vibranium, delicate but real, like a truth that has finally allowed itself to be seen.
He thinks about the moments that shaped them: the first mission they clashed on, stubborn and sharp; the late-night arguments that turned into confessions; the first time Bucky fell asleep with his forehead pressed to John’s shoulder as if anchoring himself without permission.
None of it felt like destiny. It felt like choice. Small ones. Daily ones. Brave ones. Frustrating ones. Two people stepping toward each other even when the world insisted they should turn the other way.
John shifts closer, knees brushing Bucky’s under the table. Bucky’s breath touches his lips when he speaks.
“Can I tell you something?”
“Always.”
“I would’ve found you,” John whispers. “Even without the string. Even without anything pulling us. I would’ve kept looking.”
Bucky’s inhale is quiet, but the emotion behind it is not. “Yeah,” he says softly, voice roughened by belief. “I know. I would’ve found you too.”
John lets the silence that follows settle warm and deep in his chest. The thread glows faintly where their hands rest together.
Then Bucky lifts their joined hands to his mouth. He presses a slow kiss to the back of John’s knuckles, lips brushing the red thread like a promise.
“This isn’t what makes us soulmates,” he says. “We make us soulmates.”
The words land with the weight of something he will carry for the rest of his life.
John squeezes his hand, slow and deliberate. “Then let’s keep choosing it.”
“Every day,” Bucky answers.
And as the red string lies between them—visible, real, but no longer frightening—John understands that nothing about this thread changes who they are.
It only reveals what was already there.
Two hands. One choice. A connection shaped long before fate ever decided to show its face.
—