A lot of you have been surprised by the twist I threw in there and some of you are mad at me. And I get it. I advertised the story as something that it didn’t end up being. But I’ve removed the Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers tag from AO3 so that new readers don’t pick up a tin of tuna only to find out it’s beans. For those of you that are already in deep (I mean, god, I’ve already written 80,000 words, I would understand if you didn’t want to give up now—I hope you don’t!), I promise you, all the rest of the tags that have been there since the beginning are true. There will still be a Happy Ending. I’m not interested in telling stories that don’t have a happy ending.

Now, you might be wondering, why the sudden change? Why introduce Bucky being the Winter Soldier when the whole story hasn’t been about that? Have I been planning this twist since the beginning? A question to which my response is just a very long laugh. You guys know I’m a pantser through and through. This is why I love writing fanfic and why my original work tends to be short-form poetry, emphasis on short. With someone else’s words, I can wing it, see how the story organically develops and always have canon to fall back on (or, more often, viciously rip apart).

So, no, I didn’t know that I was going to bring all the superhero stuff into it from the beginning. But you guys know I love angst (in my stories at least—in my real life … well, that’s a post for another day. Actually that’s a post for never and probably something I should talk about with a licensed professional instead) and I thought it might be interesting if we—and Steve—learned that Bucky had this big secret the whole time. Should he be pissed? Should he be relieved that he finally has an answer for why Bucky sometimes gets cagey and withdrawn? Does he choose to stay with him even after his understanding of his partner and, frankly, his entire perception of the world has completely shifted? Does he just accept the fact that Bucky has a whole network of former assassins and superpowered people in his life? Because I think it would be reasonable if he totally freaked out. I think it would be reasonable if he got mad and wanted to break things off because he’d just had his world thrown totally upside down and feels like he doesn’t even know the person that he’s been falling in love with. That’s going to rattle anyone!!