Oh My God This Is An Amazing Take 🥹

Oh my god this is an amazing take 🥹

okay but i was randomly thinking about stephen strange and bucky barnes. like i've never seen any fandom hypotheticals about them interacting, so i was pondering on it for a minute. and, well, i have nothing amazing fleshed out. but i thought of bucky (in an au where shuri doesn't help him with the hydra crap for whatever reason) showing up at the sanctum and asking for stephen's help. & stephen assumes that bucky needs magic help to fight someone so he gets ready to leave and tells bucky to tell him what's happening on the way. to which bucky says no, he heard that stephen's a doctor, that's why he came. so they sit down and bucky says that they have the files on what hydra did to him, but neuroscience is a highly specialized field and neither tony nor bruce are qualified and they don't have the background to really understand what hydra did to him. but bucky heard that stephen used to be a neurosurgeon, and figured that if anyone he knew could understand it, it would be stephen. so stephen agrees to try to help and asks for bucky to pass on the files for him to study. and while he can't use his hands to perform surgery or any other procedure bucky would need, he has the scientific knowledge to figure out what happened to his brain, or at least more so than the others bucky has gone to. so he pores over the documents until he has an understanding of what happened. he explained to bucky that the reason he doesn't practice surgery anymore is because of a hand injury, so he asks if he can bring a friend to help that's also a neurosurgeon but her hands can physically do what is needed. bucky agrees once he figures out that christine has known about stephen & sorcery for a while & isn't weird about enhanced people and can keep a secret. and eventually stephen & christine are able to figure everything out and help bucky be unaffected by the trigger words and aid him in memory recovery. & it's a big deal for stephen because while he can't perform surgery any more his knowledge from his years as a doctor still helped the patient with the most suffering, with the most complex problem he's ever aided. & it's huge for bucky bc he's finally free & now knows the extent of what hydra did to him and has doctors that can help him that also won't discriminate him due to being the winter soldier/being enhanced (& also dont report him if he's on the run at this time). so like he's learning how to build a relationship & trust, which we've seen was difficult for him post-tws (& who can blame him) especially during tfatws. he already knew steve from before so it was easier for him to rebuild that friendship. but with people that are new, that he didn't already have a past with, we've seen him struggle. & being stephen's patient helped him build a level of trust, and they end up seeing each other so often bc there's a lot to do & all that they start to become friends. it's huge for bucky. stephen is one of his first post-tws friends. like idk the two of them seem to have great potential as friends, i just have never seen it done.