Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The day Bucky finds the black card is the day he slips the purple paper sleeve off his last strap of Hydra cash, fanning the stack of twenties out between his metal fingers. It’s enough to pay the rent on his glorified squat and keep him in food for two more months, but after that, he’s going to have to do something to get money, be it legal, illegal, or somewhere in between. He pulls five twenties off the top of the stack and then puts the rest back into the otherwise-empty safe that sits nestled under the corner of his bed.

It’s May 2nd, 2016, and Bucky has been living in New York City for almost two years.

After Insight Day had turned into a disaster and the Triskelion had fallen and the helicarriers had dropped in flaming pieces out of the sky and he had almost beat Captain America to death, he had wandered around DC for a while, living rough, sleeping in alleys and doorways. Two weeks of trying to survive, trying not to kill anyone, and trying to stay away from whatever remnants of Hydra might be out there looking for their lost Asset. He was a loose thread, now, just waiting to be raveled back onto the spool by the next person with a passing knowledge of the trigger words.

No habits, no patterns, the Soldier had said, that’s the way you keep them off your trail. But the exhibit at the Smithsonian was a spinning reel and there was a barbed hook sunk into the meat of his jaw, a line between them drawing him inescapably in. He couldn’t help himself; he had gone, in those two weeks, again and again and again, each time in a different disguise, different clothes and a different hat. Twice, he went in the middle of the night, slipping in through a basement window and knowing, somehow, how to move so that the cameras couldn’t see him. This was how the Soldier took care of him, even if he’d figured out early on that he and the Soldier were two separate creatures. That he wasn’t the Soldier, he was something else.

He went to the Smithsonian to look at the pictures of Captain America and the Howling Commandos and Bucky Barnes, but especially to look at the film clip of Captain America and Bucky Barnes—inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield—standing against a brick wall, easy smiles on both of their faces. We ARE friends, Bucky Barnes had said, the words clearly visible on his lips, and then they’d both laughed.

It fascinated him, this easy camaraderie, the blindingly obvious friendship and the subtler depth of feeling that could be teased out of the expressions on their faces. The clip was only five seconds long, playing over and over again in a loop, but he watched it hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in the two weeks that he haunted the museum like a particularly recalcitrant ghost.

At night, huddled against a brick wall under a women’s polyfill winter coat he’d lifted from the lost and found at the museum, he thought about the video clip, the contrast between the two friends and the memory that twined its insidious fingers around him, the memory that he had sunk his metal claws into and couldn’t let go of. He only had two weeks’ worth of memories, fourteen days’ worth, three hundred thirty-six hours’ worth, twenty thousand minutes’ worth; less if you discounted the time he spent asleep. Each memory was a flake of gold leaf which, melted all together in the crucible of his mind, might eventually be enough to mint the coin of a new self.

So as much as he hated it, he couldn’t bring himself to want to forget the memory of beating Captain America half to death on the shattered deck of the helicarrier, the crunch of the bone under his fist, the split in the soft, pink lip that dripped red blood, and the blue eye surrounded by a purpling bruise, almost swelled shut but still gazing at the Fist of Hydra and seeing someone else, instead.

You’re my mission.

Then finish it.

Two weeks after the Triskelion, he woke up early one morning before the sun had properly begun to rise and before the park he was sleeping in came awake in a glorious riot of birdsong, knowing, without knowing how he knew, that the time for thinking was over and that the time for doing was nigh. He couldn’t wait around any longer for them to come find him; he was going to find them first.

So began a month-long tour of destruction up and down the east coast of the United States, from DC to Atlanta to Charlotte to DC again, then up to Philadelphia, over to Pittsburgh, and finally, to New York, hitting dozens of out-of-the-way bases in between.

On his way out of DC, he stole a nondescript sedan from a parking garage, he stole a change of clothes from a thrift store, he stole a length of tubing from a hardware store and gas from the tank of another car in the parking lot. He stole whatever he needed, in fact, because he had no money, at least not until he took down the first base and cleaned out their safe, plus their weapons cache and their closet full of tactical gear, for good measure.

He wasn’t reckless about enacting his vengeance, exactly, but he no longer felt the compulsion, underscored by his programming, to keep his equipment in tip-top shape, either. Not only did he no longer have handlers to punish him for damaging equipment that belonged to Hydra, but he had to figure out for himself for the first time how to keep his equipment—body, his body, he had to remind himself constantly—in good condition. The first time he broke the fifth metacarpus of his right hand when a punch landed badly, he pushed the bone back into position until it no longer crunched and then went about his business for the next few days. He still knew how to cut the pain off so that it wouldn’t distract him from his mission, but eventually it occurred to him that if the bone set badly, he would have to rebreak it and then wait for it to heal properly before he could resume his tour of destruction.

He drove back into the city he’d just left, walked into the sketchiest looking club he could find, and slid a hundred-dollar bill across the wet bar top. The bartender pocketed the bill without even looking up, and when he asked for the name of a discreet doctor who accepted cash, a phone number jotted down on the back of a receipt was pushed back at him with no more fanfare than if he’d asked for a napkin.

He got his hand set properly, the serum did the rest, and in a few days, he was on the road again.

Food was a little more difficult. The equipment—the body—needed a constant supply of energy, which he already knew. Of course he knew—even when he was the Asset, he’d had to supply his body with all of that energy, himself, via his mouth. None of the technicians who did equipment maintenance were stupid enough to get that close to his teeth. But when it wasn’t handed to him ready-made in a tube, procuring the right things to provide energy in the right proportions to other macronutrients was a fucking nightmare. And when he started to regain his sense of taste, round about Atlanta? He almost wished for nutrient paste again. Almost.

He was constantly hungry, or at least what he thought he’d identified as hunger, a grinding, gnawing sensation in the pit of his stomach like his body was a millstone reducing his guts to dust. At first, he ate everything he could lay his hands on from the gas stations where he stopped to fill up the tank of the stolen sedan. Sleeves of dry crackers and packages of doughy chocolate chip cookies and Snickers, so many Snickers they glued his teeth together. Salt and vinegar chips that peeled the skin off the inside of his mouth. Beef jerky, like eating his own boots. Sometimes he threw it all back up in the gutter, but sometimes it stayed down long enough to be converted into energy, which filled him with an unfamiliar sense of buoyant satiety as alarming as it was desirable.

Once and only once, sometime after Atlanta, he picked up something called a hot pickle in a pouch. It was, confusingly, not hot. It was room temperature at best, even cold, having been sitting since the world was new in a bin in a gas station that was air-conditioned half to death even at the end of April. It bobbled sickeningly inside its plastic pouch, swimming in a pool of its own juices like the pallid green ghost of a monstrous, disembodied penis.

He managed to spill half of the sour-smelling juice on himself when he squeezed the pouch too hard in alarm, and then when he took the first bite, he immediately realized his mistake. This was not supposed to be a hot pickle. This was a spicy pickle, and the inside of his mouth was on fire.

He was the Soldier, though, right? He could just turn off the pain.

He could not, however, turn off the smell of the pickle juice, so while he normally would have slept in his car in some out-of-the-way turnabout off the main roads, he was forced to check into a motel with some of his Hydra cash and the ID of—he had to look at the name as he was handing it over because he hadn’t thought to do that first; jesus, was he getting sloppy, or was it the pickle juice fumes?—Kevin Bunsen, unfortunate Hydra IT guy. There was a creaky washer and dryer on the premises that operated on a steady stream of quarters, and he washed his pickle-y clothes along with everything else he’d been living in for weeks. At least Hydra wouldn’t smell him coming, now. The element of surprise was important.

Eventually, he had raided enough bases and destroyed enough equipment that he could breathe a little easier and could walk down the street without feeling the imagined prickling of eyes on the back of his neck. He felt like he could take a break. Whatever remnants of Hydra still existed surely had to know who was behind the sacking of all their East Coast bases, and the legitimate authorities were sure to notice if he kept it up any longer. It was time for a sabbatical, to take a little time off and think about what he was going to do next.

So he squatted in New York for a while, first in Manhattan and then in Queens, before he found a tiny little apartment on the top floor of a skinny little house on McDonald Avenue in Gravesend, sandwiched between a body shop and a shady medical supplies distributor that never seemed to be open. In his methodical, Soldier way, he broke into it one night, just to make sure that it wasn’t a front for something that was going to draw the attention of people who didn’t need to be reminded of his existence. But it looked like a legitimate medical-supply business, with stacks of boxes of rubber gloves and surgical masks. Probably not entirely legitimate, he figured, but whatever side business they had going on was something petty, like the way Anton, the guy who owned the body shop, paid most of his employees under the table. Small-time crime, nobody gets hurt, nobody’s interested in looking behind the curtain, nobody wants to ask the neighbors any questions.

The F train ran on its elevated tracks right in front of his living-room windows, but he was only a block and a half from the nearest stop, and it was easy enough to get used to the click clack screech of the subway passing by. The apartment was little more than a closet with a smaller closet where he slept, but there was enough space in the main room for the sofa left by the last tenant, and in the bedroom, a double bed pushed up against the one drafty window left enough room for one bedside table and a broken-down garment rack that he used as a closet. There was a matchbox-sized bathroom and a grimy kitchenette that had a two-burner stove, an oven barely big enough to roast a chicken, and a minifridge. It was small, drafty, noisy, freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer, but for the first time he could ever remember, he had something that might someday deserve the name ‘home.’

He bought a pillow, something called memory foam that felt like laying his head to sleep in the lap of god. He bought a frying pan and a spatula and then a knife, a kitchen knife. The distinction made the Soldier sneer in the back of his mind, but Bucky found that cutting meat with his fighting knives tended to make him think of other flesh he’d cut with the same knives, and that compromised his still-new ability to keep solid food down long enough for digestion to happen.

He found a book on a park bench, something called The Big Book of Science Fiction, and read it from cover to cover, staying up one entire night and half of the next to finish it. Then he found a bookcase in a dumpster that wouldn’t fall over if he kept one side of it propped up with a wedge of wood. He bought a pot of mint and kept it on the windowsill beside his bed, where he could reach over and brush his fingers against it, flooding the tiny bedroom with the smell of sweet green living things.

A few more bits and pieces of furniture and other home goods, and eventually he had something that looked like a home and felt like a home (and quacked like a home, some little faraway voice had peeped, nonsensically, in a remote corner of his mind). Finally, he could stop living as if he were five minutes from fleeing the country. He could stop weighing every action against its probable equal and opposite reaction, and he began to learn how to care for himself.

He graduated from gas station fare to bodegas to proper groceries; he tried yogurt and carrots and raisins for the first time. Every morning, he got up when his body told him to and jumped the first hurdle of the day, that thing called ‘breakfast.’ At first, he ate Cheerios because he found them in the grocery store under a sign marked ‘Breakfast Cereal.’ But Cheerios were dry and bland, and even when he poured milk over them like the picture on the front of the box, something told him he could be doing better. After a little bit of research, he moved on to oatmeal or toast with butter. Then, gradually, he began to incorporate honey and peanut butter, and then some diced fresh fruit, and then the supermarket bread was replaced by brioche from the good bakery, and sometimes croissants, or eggs and bacon, or an omelet loaded with vegetables.

After breakfast, he took a shower and did whatever the equipment—the body; he slipped up, sometimes, even months into this new, piecemeal personhood—needed in order to feel clean and good and taken care of. He washed his hair, trimmed his fingernails, shaved the stubble that invariably darkened his jaw again before the sun went down, and dressed in clean, soft underwear, worn-in thrift-store jeans, and some kind of natural-fiber shirt.

It’s not that the body itself demanded these items, but he remembered the Soldier’s tactical clothing, the straps that bit, the seams that chafed, and the mask that left him breathing his own stale, recycled air, hour after hour and chapped his lips until they cracked and bled, the mortification of the flesh. After almost three months away from Hydra, after one month of destroying everything that came within reach of the long metal arm of the Soldier, it might have seemed that in the grand scheme of things, the urge to take care of the body and feed it things that tasted good and dress it in soft clothes was an insignificant rebellion, the damp fizzle of an out-of-date firework. But he knew better.

As his flake-of-gold-leaf memories came back, memories from before, from when he was James Buchanan Barnes and he lived in Brooklyn with Steven Grant Rogers, he found out that he’d always been the kind of person who liked soft, nice things, and good, rich food, and a clean, sweet-smelling body. Maybe it was insignificant, but it had all the power of a thunderclap, his self returning to fill a vacuum that, for seventy years, he had not even known was there.

The memories were a problem, though. They trickled back one by one, sometimes in bits and pieces, prompted by a smell or a sound, sometimes appearing out of the blue in their entirety, like a reel of film thrust roughly into his unwilling arms.

Maybe it was a normal thing that happened to real people, to remember the time when they were thirteen and their best friend was so sick that his ma called the priest in because she thought he was going to die, and they thought they were going to die, too, they were so afraid. And then, when they remember it for the first time in seventy years, to feel that fear again so sharp and so painful, like a fist to the gut, that they have to run to the toilet and vomit until their stomach is empty.

It probably wasn’t normal, though, and it wasn’t conducive to the insignificant rebellion of making his body feel good, so he did what any real person would probably do and took every golden memory of Steve Rogers as it surfaced and folded it into quarters, and then folded that into quarters, and then folded that into quarters one last time, until it was smaller than a one-penny postage stamp. And then he stacked it neatly with the other golden memories in an imaginary snuffbox, like the one he’d seen once in an antique store, ornate, tarnished copper with a Chinese dragon embossed on the front. And when the snuffbox was full, he shut the lid and sealed it with a drip of solder and then dropped it into the fathomless black lagoon that lived at the very bottom of his heart.

Chapter Text

He folds the five twenties into his beat-up leather wallet and slips it into the back pocket of his jeans and then shrugs on the black leather moto jacket that hangs on the hook beside the door. Two knives go into sheaths strapped around his torso, and he slips one more into the stock of each of his tall combat boots. He picks up his phone and its loose SIM card from the bookshelf and drops them into the pocket of his jacket, and then unlocks the door and slips out.

There’s one more apartment on the second floor of this house, facing the back, but he hardly ever sees the occupant, a short, middle-aged woman with long dark hair always tied into a neat bun on the crown of her head. Her name is Inés Sanz Diosdado, 43 years old, naturalized United States citizen born in Lima. She works two jobs, evening shift as a clerk at a Duane Reade closer to the tonier parts of Brooklyn and morning shift as a nanny for a family of five on the Upper East Side. She sends money home to her mother in Lima every month like clockwork and receives letters from Lima in return. She likes to drink cheap lager and listen to 70s-era disco with the volume turned down low.

On the ground floor lives the son of the landlord, a reclusive man named Jason Mitchell Carr, 33 years old, high-school drop-out, no job. The only mail he receives are grocery store fliers, but he likes to play video games and draw. Mostly racing cars, sometimes purebred show dogs. Bucky had tailed him once when he had, uncharacteristically, left the house during the day, and he had gone down the street and around the corner to the pet store, where he stood in front of the window looking at the puppies for five minutes before he turned around and went back home again.

He knows these things because he ran a background check on both of the other tenants, read their mail, and broke into their apartments to scope things out all within the first week of moving in. He didn’t want to do these things, not really, but the vestiges of the Soldier’s programming wouldn’t let him rest until he verified all the tenants of his building, as well as the business activities of all the body shops, car glass repair places, medical suppliers, run-down diners, and warehouses within a two-block radius of his apartment.

He locks the door behind him and walks down the stairs. The building is silent; Inés is at work in Manhattan, and Jason is either playing video games with his headphones on or has gone out to visit the puppies again.

It’s a nice day, partly sunny, not exactly warm, but not cold, either. Typical May 2nd. He decides to walk to the coffee roaster in Carroll Gardens where he buys whole beans, freshly roasted, the newest addition to the regimen of making the body feel good. He takes his time walking up McDonald Avenue, the whole length of Brooklyn, until he gets to the corner of the cemetery, where he turns left to go towards Prospect Park.

As he’s standing at the light, waiting for the red person to turn green, he looks idly over at the telephone pole to his right. Stapled up amid the usual high-tide detritus of lost pet posters, multi-level marketing scams and for-rent ads is a black piece of cardstock with blocky capital letters in white ink:

FUNNEL NO. 9

DO YOU HAVE KNIFE SKILLS?

WE NEED YOU

And then below, there is a phone number. Nothing else. Bucky rips the whole piece of cardstock off of the telephone pole and then carefully picks the staples out as he crosses the street, dropping them into a waste bin on the other side. He slides the cardstock into his pocket and wanders around Park Slope some more, what looks like a random meander to an innocent observer but is actually a carefully calculated route designed to scrape any tails off the bottom of his bootheel. He doesn’t really think he has tails—hasn’t for ages, not since coming to Brooklyn—but it’s a comforting habit.

He ends up at a little nondescript café, soothing in its predictable 21st-century potpourri of artfully mismatched tables and blackboard with the menu written in chalk pens, not actual chalk. There’s coffee and pastries, but just the usual fist-sized brownies and lacquered croissants, nothing interesting. It’s called Bluebird Café or The Daily Grind or something equally forgettable.

Once he has his human hand curled around a cup of coffee and his back to the most easily defensible corner in the place, he pulls the piece of cardstock out of his pocket and looks at it again.

FUNNEL NO. 9

DO YOU HAVE KNIFE SKILLS?

WE NEED YOU

He has no idea what Funnel No. 9 could mean, but ‘knife skills’ is pretty self-explanatory. He definitely has knife skills, so it looks like Funnel No. 9 needs him, and he probably needs them, too.

He’s thought about it a lot in the last two years, about what he’s going to do when the money runs out. He’s thought about getting a job as a dishwasher or taking a night shift stocking shelves at a grocery store, something that doesn’t require interacting with the public. He could be a bike messenger; he’s fairly sure he knows how to ride a bike. He definitely knows how to ride a motorcycle, which can’t be that different, not to mention that he’s quick and fearless and has near-unlimited stamina and would almost certainly survive if he got hit by a car. He’d thought, briefly, about going back on the hunt for Hydra, raiding more bases, maybe moving out west and starting in on whatever West Coast operations still existed. But ultimately, he doesn’t want to leave New York. It was his home many decades ago and against all odds, it’s his home, again, and there’s something about the city that keeps him there like the magnet that sticks his shopping list to the front of his minifridge.

New York is where Steve lives. Of course he’s thought about showing himself, turning himself in, letting himself be known, going back to Steve. Steve has money; he knows, he’s checked his bank accounts. Steve lives all alone in a nice brownstone in Cobble Hill, where they grew up. Steve could feed him and clothe him and give him a roof to lay his head under. But he doesn’t want to go back to Steve. Not now. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket and takes the glove off of his human hand in order to extract the SIM card, wedged down into the deepest linty corner of his other pocket. He cracks the back of the phone and slots the SIM card in, powering the phone up and waiting for it to go through its happy-go-lucky beep-boop start-up cycle. He puts in the PIN and then checks his messages. Nothing. That’s good. He has never given anyone this phone number, although he has used the phone to make calls. Every six months he tosses it in the river and gets a new phone with a new number; it used to be three months, but after so much time with so little happening, he’s scaled his security practices down a bit.

He taps the number into the keypad that pops up on the screen and takes a slurp of his lukewarm coffee while it rings. After five of what passes for rings these days, a quiet little brrr like what might come out of a mechanical cat, the phone is picked up. There’s a noise of scuffling and someone laughing in the background before a man’s voice says, “Funnel number nine, yeah?”

“I’m calling about the ad,” he says, adding a little of the Soldier’s lack of inflection to his voice. Who knows what kind of people he’s going to have to impress?

“What ad? The fifty percent one? That was from last month,” the voice says.

Bucky frowns a little, narrowing his eyes. “The one about knife skills.”

“Oh fuck, yeah, that one, cool cool cool,” says the voice. “You got knife skills? When can you come in? For an interview or whatever. Like, today? Could you come today?”

“Yes,” Bucky says, thinking, shit, these people work fast. “When?”

“Well, where are you? We’re in Park Slope, so however long it’ll take you to get here.” He rattles off an address.

“I’ll be there in an hour,” Bucky says.

“An hour, cool cool cool,” the voice chirps. “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Jamie,” he says. “Jamie Ross.” It’s one of the names he gives out, especially for when he wants people to underestimate him. Nobody, not the cops, not the mafia, not Hydra, nobody expects some guy who calls himself Jamie to be capable of mass murder.

“Awesome, Jamie, see you in an hour,” the guy says, and Bucky hangs up without saying goodbye.

He finishes his coffee in one gulp and then takes his ceramic mug up to the counter. The girl at the register gives him a grateful grin, and he never can make his face smile at strangers, but he nods. Then he pushes by the tables and the strollers and the people milling around between them to the bathroom that’s at the back of the little café. The mirror is tarnished, lit by a bulb that manages to be both dim and harshly fluorescent at the same time, but it’s good enough to look himself over in the mirror. Long hair, clean and combed, but not fashionable or obviously flattering. He hadn’t shaved that morning, so his jaw is peppered with stubble. Black leather jacket, obviously well-worn and not fashionable, either. Black jeans, black boots, and the hidden knives scattered all around his person. He looks like he could be anything, within reason—most anything in the bottom strata of society. Need an errand boy? An assassin? A bouncer? A mechanic’s grunt assistant? That guy in the mirror is your man.

He looks at his hair again, not sure if he should tuck it behind his ears or let it hang in his face. Finally, he decides to put it up in a bun and combs it back from his face with his fingers, twisting it into a tail at the crown of his head and securing it in a roll with two black elastics that he pulls off his wrist. His ears are pierced, the left lobe and the right cartilage, and he likes the way his hair in a bun and the visible piercings make him look softer, automatically easier to underestimate. That guy in the mirror, it’s hard to tell whether he’s more inclined to slit your throat or to blow you in a back alley, and that’s just the way Bucky likes it.

He walks past the front of the building twice. It’s on a busy side street, lots of people in bright athletic wear pushing three-wheeled strollers, others with obvious bedhead carrying babies in complicated harnesses strapped to their chests. There are cyclists everywhere, and generic Brooklyn foot traffic. It’s the worst place that a business who needs a specialist in knife skills could possibly set up shop, but, he supposes, there is something to be said for hiding in plain sight.

The building itself is one of those four-story brick-fronted places with a rusty fire escape, classic New York, and the shopfront on the ground floor is painted a matte black, one large glass window in the front with a three-foot-high number 9 picked out on it in gold paint. The lighting inside is soft, clusters of Chinese paper lanterns from what he can see from across the street. There’s a single wooden table in the window. Sitting on the table is a timeless paper-pulp egg carton with one speckled brown egg, and placed upside down next to it, a stainless-steel kitchen funnel.

Bucky runs through the address again in his mind, for the fifth time in as many minutes. Yes, this is the place. If it’s a money-laundering front, it’s pretty clever; he’s never seen anything like it before.

He crosses the street, swerving around a taxi and a delivery truck and a skateboarder with a death wish. He pushes the door open and walks inside. There’s a man wielding an ostrich-feather duster in the back right corner of the shop who immediately rushes over, tucks the duster under his arm, and says, enthusiastically, “Hi!” He has sleek dark hair and a brilliantly white smile and a piercing in his nose like a tiny silver half-moon. “What can I do for you?”

“Uh,” Bucky says, giving the place a quick once-over. The walls are covered with floor-to-ceiling shelving, each individual shelf holding one box, one bowl, one cup, or one cooking utensil. There are whisks and spatulas displayed on wooden stands, and colorful tins and bottles that must hold spices. There’s one large wooden table in the center of the room with four tall stools around it and a door at the back left, and nothing else.

“I’m Jamie Ross,” Bucky says, looking back at the man again. He’s about as tall as Bucky is, but much slimmer, and he’s wearing a black apron over black jeans and a black, soft-looking button-up with the sleeves rolled halfway up his slender forearms. “I’m here for the interview.”

“Oh,” the man says. “Ohhhh, okay, okay.” He turns half around and shouts over his shoulder. “Flan!” he yells. “That’s guy’s here for you!”

Then he turns back to Bucky again and gives him a slow up-and-down. “I’d hire you on the spot if it was up to me,” he says. “You’ve got the look down pat.” Bucky narrows his eyes, not sure what to think, but right at that moment, another man bangs through the swinging door that must lead to the back of the shop. He’s short and skinny, big round-framed glasses pushed up his nose, hair buzzed short around the sides and combed down in a long fringe over his forehead and dyed, inexplicably, lime green. He holds his right hand out straight in front of him tensely, like a lance, and says, “Jamie, I’m Flannery, my parents named me after the author because I’m from Mississippi and they’re cuckoo bananas, but don’t expect me to be all Mississippi”—he puts the most outrageous Southern inflection on it that Bucky’s ever heard, but his accent is pure East Coast with a tinge of Brooklyn—“and don’t call me Flan, I hate it.”

“Flan’s all bark and no bite,” the other man puts in, and then shakes his head and tsks sadly. Flannery gives him the finger and a glare that pushes his glasses up further into his fringe. Bucky feels confused; he doesn’t remember the last time he was at such a loss, except for maybe the pickle incident, and that was two years ago. Who are these people? What is this place with its boxes and stools and countertops? Why would anybody name a child Flannery?

“Sorry,” Flannery is saying, “Diego thinks he’s funny. Diego, you’re fired. Jamie, let me show you around and then we can get started, yeah? Cool cool cool.” He turns around and breezes back through the door to the back of the shop, which swings shut behind him.

Bucky turns and looks at the man in the apron, who gives him another brilliant smile. “You get used to him,” he says.

When Bucky pushes open the door to the back of the shop, he’s momentarily startled by the contrast; the back room is tiled in bright white, with a big restaurant sink and a double-door refrigerator and six tables with stools. One wall is taken up with steel-pipe shelving stacked with translucent plastic boxes. Everything else is either chrome or stainless steel or slick, white subway tile. It looks like the kitchen of any reputable small restaurant in New York, but it could also do double duty as an abattoir, he thinks, the Soldier murmuring in approval.

Flannery is sitting at one of the tables with a stack of papers in front of him. To his left is a big wooden butcher-block cutting board, an array of kitchen knives, and—thank fuck—a pair of black nitrile gloves.

“Great great great, cool,” he says. “Sit down.” He gestures to the stool across from him. “Tell me a little about yourself, Jamie. Did you bring a resumé?” Bucky opens his mouth, but Flannery bowls right past him. “Of course you didn’t bring a resumé, it would have been the first thing you’d have shoved at me the moment you stepped in here, but that doesn’t matter because I’m looking for someone who’s got the skills, I don’t care if you’ve done an internship at El Bulli or just temped in food trucks. Anyway, like I said, tell me a little about yourself.”

Then he actually shuts his mouth and looks at Bucky expectantly from under his bright green fringe.

Bucky shifts uncomfortably on the cold stool. What the fuck have I gotten myself into? he thinks, wondering again if maybe it would just be easier to knock over a few more of Hydra’s little popsicle stands and be done with it. This is clearly not an organization looking for an enforcer, and definitely not an assassin. But as soon as he thinks it, his interior self shrugs and says, Ehh, why not.

“Um,” he hums, trying to buy a little more time. “I’m Jamie Ross, I’m thirty-one years old, I’ve lived in New York my whole life, worked a lot of odd jobs.” He can’t think of what else to say. Why the fuck didn’t he put together a quick cover on the way here? Normally he’s just Jamie Ross, New Yorker, and nobody asks him any further questions. But this guy wants to know more than that. Of course he does, it’s a fucking job interview. Shit.

“Okay Jamie, that’s cool, no worries, all I really need to know is that you have knife skills and you can teach other people your knife skills because we want to run classes here, did I already say that? I don’t think so. Anyway, and you need to have a bank account where I can set up a direct deposit.”

“Uh, yeah,” Bucky says. “Yeah, I do.” He has a dozen, under different names, although Jamie Ross isn’t one of them. He has bank accounts in offshore tax havens and in Canada and in Panama and in little New England credit unions. He has bank accounts coming out of his ears, although, at the moment, none of them have more than a hundred bucks in them. Which brings him back around to the reason why he’s here. “I have knife skills,” he says, sitting up straighter in his chair and smoothing a gloved hand over his hair. “But I’m not sure I have the kind of knife skills you’re looking for.”

“What kind of knife skills…” Flannery says, narrowing his eyes. Then he makes an obvious decision not to inquire any further. “Nevermind. I don’t care, as long as you can bone a fish and chop a carrot. Can you spatchcock a chicken?” he asks, almost suspiciously.

“Uh, yeah, yes,” Bucky says. He’s never spatchcocked a chicken before, but that doesn’t mean he’s never spatchcocked anything else. Surely the skills transfer.

And Bucky? Bucky has had a lot of free time on his hands in the last two years. And one of the things that he’s done with that free time is learn to cook. He’s mastered the basics and has pretty much maxed out the potential for his tiny two-burner kitchenette. So Bucky does happen to know his way around a knife, in the culinary sense.

“I can do all that. I can do anything you need, in the way of knives,” he says, trying to inject the right amount of confidence into his voice that will get him this job. “Do you need a demonstration?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s exactly what I was going to ask you to do next, we’ll start you with some veg and then you can move on to some meat. You didn’t bring your own knives, did you?” Flannery asks, leaning a little to glance around behind Bucky, looking for a bag he may not have noticed.

“Uh…” Bucky says, reaching with his gloved left hand automatically to the small of his back where his favorite knife sits snug in its sheath. Flannery narrows his eyes again and Bucky clears his throat, pulling his hand back around and clasping it together with the right on the polished metal tabletop. “No. I didn’t.”

“Hmm.” It’s the only thing Flannery says as he goes to the refrigerator, pulls open one side, and jerks open a gigantic crisper drawer. While his back is turned, Bucky hurriedly strips the glove off his left and hand pulls on one of the nitrile gloves. He flexes his fingers and makes a fist; they’re the good kind of gloves, thick enough that the gleam of metal doesn’t show through.

Flannery piles a few things into the crook of his arm and then comes back over to the table, lining up three carrots, an apple, and a tomato in front of him. Then he scoots the butcher block over in front of Bucky and pushes the knives into a clinking, clanking pile next to it.

Bucky grimaces, he can’t help himself. They may not be very good knives, but that’s no reason to treat them like a passel of pigs. He tries, as nonchalantly as possible, to separate them out on the tabletop so that none of their edges are touching. When he looks back up again, Flannery is watching him shrewdly, the beginnings of a smile in the faint crow’s feet around his eyes.

“Alright, Jaime,” he says, sitting up a little straighter, “first thing first, I want you to chop those carrots, small dice, julienne, and fine brunoise.” Then he clamps his mouth shut again. He’s obviously able to turn his volubility on and off at will, a skill that makes the ex-spy in Bucky a little jealous. What more perfect cover than an extrovert who can suddenly turn introverted?

Bucky looks down at the knives again and picks up a plain little utility knife. It has a wooden handle, well-worn, and a nice balance when he hefts it in his hand. He runs the edge of his right thumb down the blade; the point is chipped and there are burrs interrupting the file of its edge, but it’s sharp enough to do the job. Unable to resist, he spins it flat on his finger and then catches it again in the palm of his hand.

“Hmm,” is all that Flannery says, although the smile in his eyes has grown.

Bucky pulls the other glove on and picks up the first carrot and turns it over in his hand. It’s not peeled, and he knows he doesn’t actually need to peel carrots, but this small dice has to be perfect. So he sets the blade of the knife against the refrigerator-desiccated skin and proceeds to peel the whole thing in long, gauzy, golden-orange strips. Flannery has an eyebrow cocked now, looking impressed in spite of himself, and Bucky grins, just a little, on the inside. Maybe… maybe he can allow himself to have a little fun.

He cuts that carrot into perfect small dice, each tiny cube an exact replica of the others. The next gets julienned into identical matchsticks, and the third chopped into a uniform brunoise. The apple he peels from stem to blossom-end in one long, smooth, unbroken ribbon, and then cores and deseeds it, slicing it into crescents so thin they’re translucent. Then Flannery tells him to peel the tomato. He’s openly grinning now, enjoying the show that Bucky is putting on for him. Bucky has gotten into the swing of things and is punctuating his work with little knife flips and twirls, the tricks that he’d perfected during long stakeouts and then day after day of cooking dinner for himself, whistling along with the radio. He almost spins the knife on its point on the tip of his left forefinger but catches himself in time; there’s no way he’d be able to explain that away.

“Okay,” he says, picking up the tomato. “Do I get a water bath? A gas flame?”

“You could,” Flannery says, “but no.”

“Making me do it the hard way?” Bucky says, the grin in his interior showing through, just a little. He feels almost giddy at the unprecedented experience of smiling at a person that he wasn’t actually trying to scare shitless.

“Uh huh, absolutely, but from what I’ve seen I’m pretty sure that nothing is actually the hard way for you, not even giving you the worst of the worst, scrape-the-bottom-of-the-barrel, garbage knives to work with.” A little of the volubility is back.

Bucky frowns. “Don’t insult your knives like that. They’re the workhorses of your kitchen. They just need a little care. You have a whetstone? Or two or five?”

Flannery scoffs. “Of course we have whetstones, what kind of establishment do you take us for? And sure, you can sharpen my knives, but first you have to peel that tomato.”

Bucky picks up the sharpest knife in the bunch, a short, wickedly-curved little thing, and slowly peels the paper-thin skin off the tomato. It’s a little ragged and he’s taken a sliver of meat off in some places, but it’s the best he can possibly do without blanching.

“Perfect,” Flannery says, “Perfect, perfect, perfect. I think we can skip the rest. Cool cool cool. So, uh, do you have any teaching experience?”

“I—” The warmth in his chest turns icy cold. He sees, in his mind’s eye, a parade of little girls repeating the same jump over and over again, a faceless woman in a severe black dress with a riding crop tucked under her arm barking at them in Russian-accented French, himself called in to demonstrate the proper développé in a saut de chat. Later, he sees himself teaching the same group of little girls how to shoot through the excruciating pain of a broken trigger finger. Much later, there is another group, not Widows but Soldiers, and he—

He blinks, clearing his head, discarding those memories like he might discard yesterday’s newspaper in the waste bin, though the waste bin is more of a recycling center, shuffling the memories back into circulation no matter how hard he tries to suppress them. Flannery is still watching him, seeming not to notice that any time has passed.

“Yes, I have, actually. Ballet and self-defense, to children and adults.” It’s not a lie, exactly.

Flannery’s eyes widen fractionally, but he doesn’t say anything about Bucky’s unconventional job history. “How would you develop a lesson to teach a group of adults knife skills? Pretend I don’t know anything and I’m your first student.” He props his chin on his fists and bats his eyes like a technicolor cherub.

“Right. Um.” He can do this. He knows he can do this, he’s a fucking spy—or, rather, he was the fucking Soldier and one of his skill sets was spycraft, not that he ever got to use it much. And on top of that, he’s been living more-or-less undercover in New York for nearly two years, having conversations at the bodega and pretending to be a real person in public. Surely he can manage something.

“Right,” he says again, and then slips into a more friendly persona, as easily as changing one hat for another. “Hi, my name is Jamie, welcome to knife skills class.” He makes up a whole introduction on the fly, and then goes through the basics. He spreads the shitty test knives out on the table and names them: paring and utility knives, chef’s, fillet, serrated. He goes through each of their uses, and then the different cuts to make with each: julienne, bruinoise, chiffonade, slice, dice, chop. The ice in his chest has given way to warmth once again, and he’s having something adjacent to fun. Flannery makes all the appropriate noises, hamming it up, watching in wide-eyed wonder as if he’s never been so close to the business end of a knife before.

Finally, when Bucky is finished, Flannery claps his hands and says, “You’re hired.”

“But,” Bucky starts, aware again, all of a sudden, that this is a job interview and not just two friends messing around. Two acquaintances, he corrects himself. He’s the ex-Fist of Hydra; he doesn’t have friends.

“No, no, no,” Flannery says, waving him off dismissively. “Your job history is a little shady, but whatever, you know your stuff, you’re perfect, you’re hired, come up front with me and we can sign the paperwork and talk about your hours and what you’ll be doing in your classes and I’ll introduce you properly to Diego, although he’s an asshole, maybe you don’t want to be introduced to him, but too bad, you’re gonna have to be ‘cause if you’re working here you’re gonna be seeing him all the time.” All of this comes out in one breath, more or less, and by the time Bucky has gathered enough wits to respond, the door to the front of the shop is swinging back and forth on its hinges and he’s alone in the big, shiny white kitchen.

Chapter Text

Back at home in his tiny apartment later that evening, sprawled on the couch that takes up half of the living room and encroaches onto the tiled space that delineates the kitchenette, he looks at his contract again.

(“James Grant?” Flannery had said, looking up at him with his mouth pursed close in a frown when Bucky had admitted that his name wasn’t actually Jamie Ross. “Leave him alone,” Diego had said, bending down to lean his chin on Flannery’s shoulder and reading through the contract. “You expect someone who looks like that”—here he had given Bucky the up-and-down again—“not to have a dark past? Does he look like an angel to you?” He had batted his eyelashes and made kissy noises into Flannery’s ear until Flannery had shrugged him off with a huff and an ill-concealed grin. “Whatever,” he’d said, “just don’t bring anything you do out there”—he motioned to the big plate-glass window—“in here.” Bucky had nodded vigorously.)

“Two grand for doing almost nothing,” Bucky says to the empty room. Flannery had offered him the staggering sum of fifty bucks an hour—“You’re an expert in your field,” was all the explanation he’d given, and Bucky wasn’t stupid enough to try to deny it or argue him down to a more reasonable rate—and at ten hours of classes a week, that worked out to more or less two thousand dollars a month. Enough to pay his rent and his bills and maybe get Parmesan instead of Grana Padano or a single-origin coffee instead of the roaster’s Arabica blend.

Through the thin wall that separates his living room from Inés Sanz Diosdado’s, he can hear the quiet murmur of a police procedural on her TV. Downstairs is silent; Jason Mitchell Carr must have his headphones on. There’s only a little traffic on the street outside, muffled by the curtains, quiet even though he has the window over the couch cracked an inch. Right on time, the train rushes click clack screech past his building towards the Avenue U stop.

He had left Funnel No. 9 with the contract in hand and orders to come back after the weekend to learn the ins and outs of the shop. He had easily kept up the reticent, almost gruff demeanor that came so naturally to him, letting Flannery and Diego play off each other for his benefit. He was pretty sure they were a couple, but it was hard to tell; Diego seemed to be a handsy person in general, and if he had his hands all over Flannery, it could just be the intimacy of friends and business associates. He hadn’t dared to touch Bucky once, of course, not a quick shoulder grip, not a hand on his back to scoot him out of the way. But no one did; that was all part of Bucky’s charm.

When he left Funnel No. 9, he had sensed the Winter Soldier Lite façade slip a little. He felt strangely elated, as if he had just won a race or perfected a new skill that he’d been working on for a long time. A sense of accomplishment, of pride, almost. He hadn’t wanted to examine it in broad daylight in the middle of Park Slope, so he had tucked that strange half-giddiness away into his heart’s secret pocket for later and had walked with an imperceptible bounce in his step down to a really great Bangladeshi takeaway that he liked on Church Avenue.

Now he’s at home, stomach full (nutritional needs have been met, says the Soldier voice, his constant nagging companion), the sound of the F train fading into the distance. He takes the half-giddy feeling out of the secret pocket and turns it over and over in his mind. Why does he feel so good about this? It’s just a job, a way to make money, money that he needs. He could be siphoning cash from corrupt politicians’ offshore accounts or busting down the doors of more Hydra bases or kneecapping mafia goons in dark alleys, same difference.

But it’s not the same, something tells him. It’s a little, annoying voice that he, for some reason, associates with the ten-foot-high picture of Steve Rogers in the Smithsonian, the one where he’s looking off into the distance all noble and shit. The one where the cowl is squeezing his head like a half-unrolled condom so that his enormous nose looks even beakier than usual, the ridiculous chin strap making his lips look like a plump hot dog split down the middle. The one where he has an expression on his face like he’s just seen a seagull shit on another seagull mid flight over the Coney Island boardwalk and is having trouble processing it. That one.

Dum-Dum is on his left, looking like he’s just shotgunned a liter tankard of beer in newly-free Paris and is holding back a belch out of respect for freedom. Bucky is on Steve’s right, frowning, his brow furrowed slightly. He’s clearly remembering that one time he’d been jerking it to a dirty postcard, thinking that Steve was safely at work, but then Steve had burst through the door out of nowhere waving two tickets to the matinee of Snow White and hollering “Bucky! Bucky!” like he’d tripped over a goddamn gold bar in the street.

One of the nights that Bucky had broken into the museum after the Triskelion had fallen and he had still only found the barest traces of himself, he had been sitting in front of that display, staring at Steve’s noble-as-shit face. All of a sudden, he had been smacked, out of nowhere, with the overwhelming urge to draw a silly moustache on Steve’s foot-long upper lip. Preferably a thin one that curled up at both ends, a Salvador Dalí moustache, an old-timey villain moustache. He had giggled to himself for a good two minutes, alone in the middle of the Smithsonian at three o’clock in the morning, before his programming took back control and did the equivalent of putting him in a chokehold until he calmed down.

Anyway, he can admit it. It’s not the same.

Thinking about the Salvador Dalí moustache makes him grin, which makes him feel soft, which makes him think of Steve. He tries not to think of Steve too much or too softly, but he can’t really help himself. Steve is the itch that can’t be scratched, the prickle of a healing wound, the blank space left when a tooth falls out, his tongue completely incapable of leaving it unprobed. Steve is like the time he caught a bullet with his metal hand, just the wrong way. It left a burr at the edge of the plate that separated the base of his thumb from his palm, and he had spent a maddening week rubbing it compulsively with the thumb of his human hand until he’d finally found the right tools to file it down. Sometimes, if he clenches his metal fist just the right way, the place where the burr had been scrapes a little, just the minutest abrasion of metal on metal, but enough to make his hair stand on end. That’s Steve, too.

Sometimes, when he really wants to make himself suffer, he deliberately thinks about Steve, lets his imagination run wild, thinks about his big, strong arms, his chest like the front grill of a Mack truck, his thighs like two juicy hams—no, like two whole pigs, just waiting for Bucky to pinch them so that they’ll squeal. He thinks about the way that Steve had descended on him in Kreischberg like the dove of the Holy Ghost descending on Mary as she prayed. But instead of telling Bucky that he was pregnant with God’s bastard child, he’d pulled him upright in his two arms like an affectionate boa constrictor and then loped happily away to fight a man who pulled his own face off while Bucky had trailed behind, sure he was still hallucinating. But it didn’t matter, he was Bucky fuckin’ Barnes, he’d follow Steve anywhere, at any size, in any state of corporeality.

Sometimes he thinks about Steve while he jerks off, sometimes he pretends it’s Steve’s thick fingers in his ass, sometimes he imagines it’s Steve’s mouth hot and wet around the head of his cock, when it’s really only his own hand after the lube warms up a bit. He thinks about the game they used to play when they were young, when Steve got in the mood to be bossy. It was a game they played even when Steve was nearly a foot shorter than Bucky and didn’t have the strength to throw him around like a sack of potatoes. When Steve got in that mood, he turned into a giant in Bucky’s mind, a towering inferno that pushed him around and smacked his ass and held him down and fucked him so hard he could feel it in the back of his throat and made his body burn and burn and burn. They called it a game just for the sake of giving it a name, but it was deadly serious for the both of them, and different, more profound in a way that sex wasn’t when Bucky was on top.

Sometimes, in his very, very darkest most desperate moments, he thinks about what it would be like to go back to Steve. Bucky keeps an eye on him, he’s not stupid, and he knows that Steve is still looking for him, still haring off around the country after false trails and dead ends and dragging that poor Falcon guy around with him. He had thought, once, that maybe Steve and the Falcon guy were a thing; you know, an item, a couple, maybe they were fucking. But long ago he’d realized that they were just friends, and the longer he keeps an eye on Steve, the more he realizes that Steve is actually just really, terribly lonely.

Going back to Steve would mean a good bed and a firm pillow and a hot body to warm his metal arm against at night. It would mean a kitchen with more than two burners and not having to listen to the guys at the body shop argue all day long through the single-pane window. It would mean the best food and never having to worry about money and it would mean having someone to laugh with and it would mean sex, lots and lots of sex, being fucked just the way he likes it for the first time in seventy years.

But he’s not sure he can do it. Steve is just so sad, from what he’s seen, and he’s not sure that he can fix all of that sadness, even if maybe Steve thinks he can. Even if maybe, very very deep down inside, Bucky would like to think that he can, too.

One time, once, a year ago in April, after he’d stopped his sightseeing tour of the East Coast’s finest Hydra bases and had found his little apartment and had settled down in New York for good, he had staked out Steve’s house for a day. Just to check in on him, just to make sure he was doing okay, all entirely selfless and detached reasons, of course.

Steve had left the house at the ungodly hour of five a.m., almost catching Bucky slipping down the alley around the corner with his bleary eyes and his surveillance equipment and his venti americano from Starbucks. Bucky had jumped into the shadows and almost spilled his coffee down the front of his coat, but Steve had just jogged on by, not looking at anything but the sidewalk in front of him, his face blank but determined. He had been wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt and a pair of black and neon pink running tights that left literally nothing to the imagination and which have featured in Bucky’s jerk-off fantasies ever since.

The rest of the day was uneventful, as he watched from the rooftop across the street. Steve—who never had an ounce of self-preservation in his entire fucking life and so of course didn’t close his curtains—talked on the phone, ran some errands, ate sad-looking sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, watched something on the TV that made him laugh, and then went to bed too early (to get up at five a.m. again, Bucky supposed).

Bucky, now tired and cramped and cranky and missing his couch, had watched him through the thin, half-closed curtains of his second-floor bedroom as he’d stripped off his jeans and pulled on pajama pants. Then he brushed his teeth and turned down the quilt. But he didn’t get in bed; he sat on the edge and opened the drawer of the bedside table and pulled something out, something small. Bucky had strained to get a better view through his scope; it was a tiny picture frame, about the size of a box of matches. He couldn’t see what was in the frame because Steve had it tilted towards his own face. But Bucky had watched through the scope in growing horror as Steve’s lip began to tremble, and then big fat tears were rolling down his cheeks, dripping off his chin as he made no move to wipe them away. He hunched over the little picture frame and rocked back and forth on his mattress while he cried, his big body all drawn into itself, looking smaller than Bucky had ever seen him this century.

Bucky was aware that he was gaping, his mouth hanging open like the unraveled net on a basketball hoop, but there was nothing he could do. Nothing he was going to do. Something was really upsetting Steve, but that wasn’t his problem; it’s not like he could just rush over and kick the door down. He focused through the scope again as Steve finally wiped his running nose on his sleeve (gross) and set the picture frame down on the table, face-up. Bucky managed to get a glimpse of the photograph before Steve reached over and turned out the lamp; it was a man, sepia-toned, in a uniform with a hat perched cockeyed on his head. There was a curious smile on his face, his face, it was Bucky’s face in the picture, the picture that had made Steve cry so much.

He felt like he had been pierced right through the heart with a knife, and his heart was still trying to beat around the blade; it hurt in a way that he never remembered it hurting before. Immediately, all in a haste, he packed up his scope and the remains of his own breakfast, lunch, and dinner sandwiches and the empty cup of coffee and scurried down the building’s fire escape, half-running once he reached the street. He’d attract too much attention this way, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. He felt like something was chasing him, but that something was inside his own chest, and it had already caught him and was taking great, juicy bites out of his heart. It hurt, he hurt, everything hurt and nothing hurt because there was no physical cause, and yet it was a physical pain, and he tried as best he could to outrun it, but he couldn’t. It followed him all the way back to his house, the way the moon follows someone out for a walk at night on a quiet country road, always there in the same place in the sky whenever they look back over their shoulder. But the moon was friendly and silvery and bright, and this was a thing that clawed at him and wailed.

He’s been back to Steve’s neighborhood since then, tailed him as he obliviously went through the motions of real life: exchanging some books at the library for others, stopping at the bodega for a gallon of milk and two of the sandwiches that he seemed, impossibly, to subsist on, waving to his neighbor, taking the long way home from the subway stop, cutting through the park and slowing down to a leisurely amble when he passed the dog park.

But he stopped spying on Steve through his too-thin curtains, half-afraid of what he would see, of his heart having to invent new and interesting ways to hurt. He felt a little queasy at the thought of seeing such a private moment, something that Steve had never intended for anyone to see, much less Bucky himself.

He had always been a big man, Steve, even when he was short enough to duck under Bucky’s outstretched arm without ruffling his hair, big in the way that great mountains are big, although they look small from a distance. The way the moon is big, although you could cover it up with a nickel held out at arm’s length against the speckled black of the dark night sky. The way a feeling is big, when he’s lying in bed at night and staring at the shifting patterns of the streetlights on the ceiling and thinking he’s about to be consumed by it like a scrap of paper held to a flame, although in the bright sunlight of the next morning, the feeling looks small again, unimpressive, weak and mild. Steve was big like that, brilliant with a radiant golden glow that sprang from some furious internal fire.

So, it had scared something in Bucky to see Steve pull into himself like he had when he’d cried over the picture. It scared the part of him that Hydra had thought they’d burned away with their chair and their beatings and their cryo and their abuse, but which had eventually come back in increments, like hearing returning after a too-close thunderclap. That was the part that had, eventually, remembered Steve, the Steve before the serum and the Steve afterwards, and Bucky’s pretty sure he’s remembered nearly everything there is to remember. But he doesn’t remember Steve crying.

Even at his mother’s funeral, when Bucky had begged him to move his one suitcase of clothes and armful of books into Bucky’s place, when he’d said but you don’t have to and ‘til the end of the line, even then, Steve had been stoic, or rueful, or distant, but he didn’t cry.

Bucky is thinking all this still lying on the couch, the contract discarded on the floor. The only light on in the apartment is the little 50-watt incandescent bulb in the extractor hood over the stove. There’s light coming in from the street, like always, but he’s rolled over on his side now with his knees bent and his hands tucked in between his thighs, looking at the half-hidden, warm golden glow. (That’s Steve, too.)

And then it occurs to him that he has seen Steve cry before. Once, a very long time ago. It’s just a split-second memory, one of the first he recovered. But he had long ago tucked it away in the linty, crumby bottom of his heart, and it has been a long time since he’s run back through it in his mind. The memory is this: Steve clinging to the side of a train, receding at a dizzying speed, cold, white snow blowing around his face in gusts as tears of anguish course down his face.

No matter, Bucky hasn’t spied on Steve at home again because he can’t. He can’t and he doesn’t want to and he won’t, so there. But it doesn’t really make a difference; just because he’s not watching Steve cry doesn’t mean that he doesn’t see the fatigue that dulls the shine of Steve’s face, like a silver dish unpolished or an old mirror tarnished with age. The way that he brightens when he sees a neighbor or the guy at the bodega who makes his sandwiches, but then the moment he turns his back, his face falls again into that unstudied blankness that makes Bucky want to put his fist through a brick wall.

Steve is fucking depressed.

At first, Bucky had been angry at Steve’s friend, the Falcon guy, the only person who ever comes to visit him in Brooklyn. He appears to be Steve’s only friend in the wild world of the 21st century, and he should know better, he should be taking care of him. But then one day, walking casually past where Steve and the Falcon guy were sitting at an outdoor café table, he’d heard the Falcon guy huff, “I’m just saying, you should consider it,” and Steve had folded his arms and looked off into the distance and said, “I told you, I’m fine. I don’t need therapy.” He’d had that infuriatingly righteous look on his face that gave Bucky the almost-overwhelming urge to put him in a headlock and give him a noogie until he screamed. So he didn’t blame Steve’s friend. He just blamed Steve for being so fucking Steve.

That’s why Bucky can’t watch him through his curtains anymore, and he’s gradually cut back on the time he spends tailing Steve around Brooklyn at street level. Now that he’s going to start a real job with actual responsibilities, he’s going to have even less time.

A little part of him starts to panic, thinks, ohmygod what if he gets in trouble when I’m not there, like Bucky is his Steven’s keeper or some bullshit. But he quashes that little voice into a tiny little cube that squeaks unintelligibly, and then he flicks the cube off his metal thumb with his metal middle finger straight into the glowing filaments of the incandescent bulb, where it spits and fizzles and disappears in a tiny puff of smoke. Steve is a big boy and can take care of himself, and it’s time for Bucky to get off the couch and go to bed.

Chapter Text

That Friday, his first day of real work—not counting the little bit of training that Flannery had subjected him to on Monday—he wakes up more nervous than he’s ever felt in his life, or at least that he can remember. He does remembers being nervous the day he had to kick big John Martin’s ass in order to save Steve from getting his teeth knocked out, nervous the first time he threw caution to the wind and kissed Steve hard on the mouth, nervous the first time he bent over the footboard of their little bed and felt Steve’s long-fingered hands spread his cheeks, nervous the day he shipped out, nervous when he was hauled out of his cell in Kreischberg, nervous when the train had rumbled through the pass and he’d gripped the zipline tight…

and…

jumped.

But that was all different, and the nervousness comes through the memories like the echo of an echo, a faint suggestion adrenaline, acrid on the back of his tongue. Now, he’s nervous because he’s going to have to stand up in front of a group of strangers and be nice and personable and smile with his whole mouth and say things like, “Great work, Janice, that looks perfect.”

Just do what the old Bucky did, he tells himself. Just be like the old Bucky. The old Bucky was charming and friendly and always had a smile or wink or a pat on the back for anybody who slipped into his orbit. He was sweet and funny, and all the girls loved him, threw themselves at him. He got the cream of the Brooklyn crop until he realized that what he actually wanted wasn’t soft, malleable skin and two handfuls of tit, but bony knees and sharp elbows and too many visible ribs to count on two hands. That’s when he’d thrown caution to the wind and kissed Steve, one dark midnight in the middle of August, when the heat never broke because the tarry asphalt saved the sun’s energy all day and then wafted it back skyward at night. They were sitting on the fire escape passing a bottle of beer back and forth, and Bucky, his insides a ball of wriggling nerves dancing on the end of a fishhook, had leaned over and kissed Steve, hard. Steve had gasped and then kissed him back, and then had bitten his bottom lip bloody in relief and anger and lust that could be, finally, pure and unbridled.

Of course, thinking about old Bucky just makes him think about Steve, like always. So he takes a page out of Steve’s book and pulls a pair of dusty beat-up Nikes out from under his bed and baggy basketball shorts from the milk carton at the bottom of the garment rack that serves as his dresser drawer and goes for a run.

The sun is already halfway above the horizon by the time he gets the mile and a half down to the boardwalk by Luna Park, sparkling silver and gold over the beaten-pewter surface of the ocean. It’s going to be a beautiful day, cloudless and warm, the kind of warm that makes it feel like summer is just around the corner. A day to lift his spirits, if I had spirits to be lifted, he thinks, grumbling a little at the nervous, giddy feeling that bubbles up against the inside of his rusty ribs like a school of little fishes.

When he gets back home, he takes a shower and then makes himself a cup of coffee with his fancy aeropress. Then, because he still has eight hours to kill, he pulls a pie crust out of the fridge and sets about making a blue cheese and caramelized onion quiche, eating handfuls of almonds as he goes to stave off his hunger. When it comes out of the oven, he eats half of it in one sitting and then puts a dishtowel over the rest for later. Then he cleans his apartment from top to bottom, running a rag around the baseboards, scrubbing the grout in the tiny shower stall that’s only three inches wider than he is, changing his one set of bedding and running a load of laundry through the little under-the-counter washing machine that he’d replaced the dishwasher with last year. He had also rigged a system in the bathroom with a rack and a pulley to hang the clothes up near the ceiling to dry. With all the windows open, he gets a cross-breeze that dries his sheets in no time, and back on the bed they go.

Finally, it’s late enough that he can in good conscience get ready to leave. He pulls on a clean pair of black jeans and a black Oxford cloth button-up with long sleeves to hide his arm. He’s embarrassed of the arm, but all it takes is one person to make the connection and he’d have to leave behind everything he’s nested around himself and disappear again.

He puts in all his piercings, including the septum, brushes his teeth, slicks a little leave-in conditioner between his palms and smooths his hair back, tying it up into a neat bun on the crown of his head. He looks at his face in the mirror, contemplating his stubbled jaw. He likes stubble and shaves every three days to keep it like that. It softens the lines of his face a little, makes his jaw look less pronounced, but it’s painfully rough on the sensitive skin of his human wrist. It’s like his name, soft little Jamie Ross with the manbun and the stubble, yet who scrapes like coarse-grit sandpaper against tender, unsuspecting fingertips.

Combat boots with the tall stocks for his knives, another knife at the small of his back, the beat-up leather jacket, and he’s good to go.

When he walks through the door of Funnel No. 9, Diego takes one look at him and slaps his hand over his heart, fluttering his eyelashes theatrically. “Lord god, Jamie,” he says, the twin of Flannery’s terrible Mississippi accent. “You better quit it with the piercings or you’re gonna give me a heart attack.”

“Diego,” Bucky says, nodding with a straight face. “Are you from Mississippi too?”

“Fuck no,” Diego says, straightening back up and looking affronted. “Cobble Hill, and don’t you forget it.”

“Hmm,” Bucky grunts, “me too.”

Diego’s face lights up. “No fucking way! What part? Maybe we knew some of the same people, you can’t be that much older than me.”

Oops. “Uh, I’m older than you think I am,” Bucky says. “Good genes.” Then he gives Diego a wink and a lazy salute to throw him off balance as he pushes through the door into the back. Flannery is inside setting things up at the chrome work tables around the room.

“Diego will flirt with anything with a pulse, don’t take it personally,” he says, smirking as he pulls a bag of vegetables out of the crisper. Two onions and two carrots for each workstation, to start with. “Okay, that’s most everything set up. Do you want to go over your lesson plan like we talked about on Monday? Or the checklist? Is there anything else you need? A pep talk, a shoulder to cry on? Otherwise, I’m gonna go back out front, I’ve got tons of orders I need to get caught up on.”

Bucky shoos him out the swinging door and finishes setting everything else up, instead, switching his leather gloves for the black nitrile ones and tying the strings of his official work-provided black apron with a big 9 stenciled on the front right as the door swings open and his first class files in. There are five of them, four women and one man. He looks them all over, his face impassive, most of his brain caught up in forming first impressions. There’s a tiny part of him, a dirty, unswept corner of his mind where a little goblin crouches on its heels, busy doing threat assessments. It’s scribbling away on a grubby piece of paper with a stubby pencil end all the while, but it’s easy to ignore; he’s been practicing ignoring it for the last two years.

He nods at the five students as they sort themselves out at the worktables, not quite a friendly nod, but at least an acknowledgement. He had finally concluded this morning, somewhere halfway to home on his way back from the ocean, that he didn’t need to be nervous about being the kind of person who smiled with his whole mouth and said things like, “Great work, Janice, that looks perfect.” Maybe he was soft, pretty Jaime Ross, maybe—especially when he glowered—he was tall, dark and brooding Jamie Ross, but people seemed to like both personas. His students could choose the one they liked the best, and if they didn’t like him at all, they had better put up with it if they wanted to leave Funnel No. 9 with knife skills.

All five of the students are looking at him now, shuffling back and forth on their feet nervously. The one on the far right of the back row, a woman with a dark buzzcut and a short-sleeved pink button-up shirt with pineapples on it, is looking back at him with friendly interest. The person to her right has long, dark hair and is wearing a slouchy black sweater and thick-framed black glasses, and she’s looking straight back at Bucky with the same impassivity that he knows is on his own face.

The other three students, the only man, in the back left, and the two identical-looking women in the front row, both with long blonde hair and fashionably wrinkled paper-bag dresses, are all looking at him with wide eyes and expressions he recognizes. Phone number chasers, he thinks. Goddamnit.

He clears his throat, picks up his chef’s knife in his left hand and tosses it up toward the ceiling so that it spins on its axis like a glittering fan blade, then catches it neatly again and uses it to motion to the group in front of him. “Alright, names please, we’ll start in the back row.”

The woman with the pineapple shirt is openly grinning, now, as she says, “I’m Mona.” The impassive woman next to her is Rani, and the man is Matt. The identical blonde women are Mariana and Helene. “And I’m Jamie,” Bucky says, pointing to himself with the tip of the knife. “Welcome to Knife Club.” A little patter of nervous laughter runs around the room, and his interior self pumps its fist in triumph.

It’s a line from a movie that he watched once in a motel outside of Harrisburg, Virginia, sitting open-mouthed on the edge of the bed in abject fascination. Only six weeks out of Hydra’s control, he was both desperately attracted to and utterly repelled by the movie, and it had engraved itself on his memory, scene by scene. A cultural staple, he’d read later, which seemed about right.

“The first rule of Knife Club is that you don’t talk about Knife Club.” There’s more laughter, now, and he catches a twitch in the corner of Rani’s mouth.

“The second rule of Knife Club is that you pay attention at all times. Mona, stop playing with the onions.” Mona jerks her hand away from her little pile of vegetables and bursts into a little bouquet of giggles. Bucky purses his lips and looks at her disapprovingly, but it just makes her giggle harder.

“As I was saying, the second rule of Knife Club is that you pay attention at all times. First, because you’re paying to be here, and you’d be wasting your money if you weren’t paying attention. And second, because these are very good knives, better than anything you have at home unless you’re married to a chef, in which case, why are you here.” The two women in the front row exchange glances and a small, private smile. They must be friends, he thinks. Possibly sisters.

“But to get back to my point, these are very good knives, and I sharpened them very well, and you could do all kinds of samurai tricks with them like slicing tomatoes in midair. Which means that they’re sharper than anything you’re used to and will slice your finger off if you are not paying attention.”

The man in the back row raises his hand timidly. He’s wearing a blue plaid flannel button-up and green skinny trousers and looks incredibly nervous as he says, “Um, so, what is the brand? If we wanted to buy a good knife?”

“Excellent question, Matt, and that brings us to the third rule of Knife Club. Once you leave here with your handy knife skills, you go and buy yourself a nice knife, a good one. I don’t care if it’s a chef’s knife or a utility knife or a paring knife or whatever. The one you always reach for in the kitchen whenever you have to do some basic chopping or slicing or mincing, that’s what I want you to buy. But a good one.” He picks up the wicked little paring knife from the table in front of him and spins it around his finger, a trick he picked up from Steve when they were kids. It had been one of Steve’s nervous habits, spinning his pencil unconsciously when he was drawing, and it drove Bucky nuts until he finally figured out how to do it himself.

“Now, when you leave, you can go out there and buy a really nice knife from Flannery and Diego, or you can look for one at another shop, I don’t care. But it has to be a good one and you have to hold it in your real, actual, human hand before you buy it”—he wiggles the fingers of his left hand, a private joke for himself—“because you need to test the balance, which I’ll show you how to do later.” He picks up the biggest knife on his table, a giant butcher’s cleaver, and finds its center of gravity with the tip of the forefinger of his left hand so that it balances lightly, perfectly, like a wicked silver daisy on a thin wooden stem.

“And the last rule of Knife Club, I suppose it’s rule three subsection A, and you probably all know it already because you look like very smart people, is that when you leave here with your handy knife skills and you go buy your very nice knife you never ever put it in the dishwasher. If I find out that you buy a very good knife, and then you run it through the dishwasher I’ll”—he narrows his eyes for effect, tries to look one-quarter as threatening as it’s possible for him to look, which is usually enough to make most people cry—“I’ll be so disappointed in you.” He pulls a sad clown face, mouth drawn down at the corners, eyes brimming with betrayal, and everybody laughs.

“Alright, good? Because we’re gonna start with the onions, so I hope you’re ready to cry.”

When the class is over, they all file out, filling the air with profuse thank-yous and you-were-greats and this-was-funs and waving at him happily. As the door swings shut behind Rani and her small, sincere smile, he can hear a burst of laughter and talking out in the front room.

A few minutes later, while Bucky is elbow-deep in a sink full of soapy water, washing the cutting boards and the knives, Flannery sticks his head through the swinging door and says, a mile-wide grin plastered on his face, “Boy, Jamie, you sure know how to leave an impression.” Bucky shrugs, barely smiling but feeling strangely pleased on the inside. Of course he left an impression, he’s the Winter fucking Soldier. Was the Winter fucking Soldier. All he knows how to do is leave impressions and assassinate people. That’s bullshit, says a little voice that sounds suspiciously like Steve. What the fuck is Steve doing in his head? His tiny smile turns to a tiny frown, but then Flannery says, “Almost ready for the next group? I’ll send them in in five.” And it starts all over again.

Bucky spends all the rest of the week either giving classes at Funnel No. 9 or preparing for his classes at Funnel No. 9 or thinking about his classes at Funnel No. 9. He is, quite frankly, exhausted. So it’s not until Sunday morning that he summons up the energy to pull on his Civilian Number Three disguise (ill-fitting khakis and a stiff-looking snapback and a pea green button-up shirt that bags around the waist) and go see what Steve is up to. When he gets to Steve’s house, the man in question is just coming back from his morning run, so Bucky loiters around the bodega on the corner until Steve comes out again, dressed in his own ill-fitting khakis and dark blue button-up. It’s straining at the seams where he’s got it rolled up over his massive forearms, and Bucky snorts derisively, all take a look at this guy to no one in particular. But the color makes his hair look like newly-threshed wheat, and his eyes look like two sand-softened shards of cobalt sea glass under his ridiculous eyelashes, and his skin is pink from the shower or from his run or just from being the pinnacle of truth and freedom and goodness and human perfection, and maybe Bucky’s ill-fitting khakis get a little tight as he watches Steve walk past him in the reflection in the bodega window.

But then he peels himself off the shopfront and trails along behind, and if Steve’s khakis manage to be ill-fitting and simultaneously cup his ass like peach fuzz cups a peach, well, Bucky’s in the spy zone and he doesn’t really notice.

Steve crosses the main thoroughfare and then cuts down a side street, walking at a leisurely pace with his hands shoved into the pockets of his trousers. From the back, he looks just like any other unusually big guy out for a stroll on a bright, late-spring Sunday morning, but whenever Bucky gets a glimpse of his reflection in a storefront or a car fender, there’s the same blank look on his face, like a drawing in washable marker that’s had a glass of water tipped over it. Or maybe like one of Picasso’s portraits; taken all together, his features make sense, but examined individually they turned out to be nothing more than basic shapes, crudely drawn, with nothing behind them, interesting only for their technical execution and not for any depth of feeling they might convey.

His face is flat, the bright three dimensionality that shines like the North Star in Bucky’s mind smoothed out by the steamroller of depression or ennui or exhaustion, or a combination of all three. It makes Bucky want to scream and tear something apart with his bare hands. It makes him want to sprint up behind Steve and tackle him, pin him to the ground with his thighs and his implacable metal arm and just drape himself over Steve like a weighted blanket until the blankness goes away and something, anything, shows underneath.

This is why he doesn’t tail Steve much, anymore. He just can’t take it.

Steve walks until he gets to a small restaurant with a big terrace, crowded with the usual gym-casual, baby-wearing, jogging-stroller Sunday brunch crowd. Falcon guy is already waiting for him at a table in the corner, and Bucky is gratified to see that there’s another terrace for another restaurant right next door; if he takes a table there, he’ll be able to eavesdrop perfectly without having to walk up and down the street. Bless you, Falcon guy, he thinks.

Steve gets himself situated in a chair that looks like a daddy long legs, its tiny seat the size of a dinner plate, its spindly legs looking like they wouldn’t support the weight of a five-year-old, much less a supersoldier. Bucky’s chair, on the other side of the bamboo fence that divides the terraces, isn’t much better, but it only creaks a little when he gingerly lowers his full weight onto it, submitting to the ordeal of holding up his 200 pounds without putting up a fight. The server comes over immediately and he points to something on the menu at random, not wanting to speak too much for fear that Steve might recognize his voice. When the server takes his menu away, he settles back into his chair to listen.

“Nah, man,” the Falcon guy is saying. “You know how she is, disappears for weeks at a time. Months, even. I can’t do that. I mean, I like her, and she likes me. But I can’t be with someone who can’t be there for me when I need her.”

“Has she ever talked about…” Steve’s voice is buttery rich in his ear, and the little hum he makes as he considers his words flows down Bucky’s spine like chocolate syrup. “…about getting out? I mean, you know her better than I do. Of course you do, you guys have been together for a while.”

Falcon guy starts to say something, but Steve must hold up his hand to cut him off, because then he continues, “Don’t start, Sam, you can’t convince me that it’s not at least halfway serious. And you’re clearly thinking about what it would be like to make it all the way serious.”

He hears Falcon guy heave an irritated sigh. “Yeah, okay, excellent powers of deduction you have there, Sherlock.” Steve laughs, just a little, but it’s genuine, and Bucky files the sound away in his secret heart pocket without even thinking about it. “I like her. A lot. Enough to maybe take the next step. And we’ve talked about it, about her getting out of the business. Or maybe switching to another… position… at the same company…” he says haltingly, clearly aware that they’re surrounded on all sides by open ears. “But I don’t know if I want to wait around forever for her to figure it out. I’m getting old, Steve.”

This time, Steve really does laugh, a big goofy guffaw that startles a pigeon scavenging on the sidewalk and makes Bucky’s mouth twitch in spite of himself. His server comes over and sets a cappuccino and a mimosa in a tall flute down in front of him as Steve says, “Fuck off, Sam. You’ll always be a baby to me.”

“Shut up and drink your fancy coffee,” Falcon guy says.

“You were the one who told me to meet you at a place where they serve fancy coffee,” Steve shoots back, and they bicker peaceably for a few more minutes. Eventually, Bucky’s breakfast comes out and it turns out to be a perfectly serviceable eggs benedict, although the hollandaise is a little too eggy and the English muffin was clearly not made in-house. It’s better than the soggy sandwiches and endless packets of peanut M&Ms that he usually has on stakeouts, though.

Steve and Falcon guy must have gotten their food, too, because they stop bickering and he can hear the clink of cutlery scraping against porcelain coming from their table. After a few minutes, Falcon guy says, lowering his voice a little, “What do you want to do about that lead out in Oregon? Do you think it’s worth looking into?”

There’s a silence, a long silence, in which Bucky can’t hear Steve doing anything, not eating, not drinking. Just sitting there. Finally, he swallows audibly and says, “It doesn’t matter if it’s worth looking into. I gotta go out there anyway and check it out. You know that.”

“Yeah,” Falcon guy says. “I know.” There’s another long silence, and then he says, “Steve…” his voice full of soft pity, the kind of thing that Steve hates. Bucky knows this like he knows the lines on the palm of his metal hand, and he expects Steve to snap at him, to be goaded into some kind of action, any kind of action at all, but instead Steve just heaves a sigh. “This is the third lead we’ve had on the West Coast in as many months. I’m thinking… I’m thinking…” There’s no little hum this time as he considers his words, and Bucky waits, his shoulders hunched, trying not to let the tension he feels radiate off him in visible lines.

After a minute Steve continues, “I’m thinking about leaving New York for a while.” Bucky almost shatters the mimosa glass in his hand, and is suddenly thankful, for the umpteenth time, for the near-complete control over his body that Hydra tortured into him. As it is, his metal hand under his thin leather glove had twitched around the fragile stem of the flute, and he has to take a moment to force his shoulders to relax by imperceptible degrees until he looks like any other guy with a belly full of eggs and orange juice.

“Leave New York? Really?” Falcon guy says, and he sounds as surprised and incredulous as Bucky feels, although there’s a note of approval in his voice that Bucky doesn’t like. Falcon guy is Steve’s friend and therefore has some responsibility over him, doesn’t he know he’s supposed to keep Steve from making stupid decisions like abandoning the only home he’s ever known?

“Yeah,” Steve says, and he sounds resigned, like he was strong-armed into doing something boring and now he can’t get out of it. He doesn’t sound like he’s talking about leaving everything he knows and disappearing… where? “Maybe go out west,” he continues. “I’m gonna keep looking. I’ll never stop looking. But maybe I need a change of pace, another base of operations. It’s so hard,” he starts, but cuts himself off abruptly, and Bucky knows without even having to look that he’s biting his lip, pulling his feelings back down into himself the way a snail pulls back into its shell when a shadow passes overhead. Steve clears his throat, and when he continues, his voice is flat and uninflected, at enormous odds with the words coming out of his mouth. “It’s hard living here, in our old neighborhood. Without him. Looking for him and never finding him. I see him on the street all the time, his face is there everywhere I turn, but in the end, it’s never actually him. I can’t take it anymore. I need a break.”

Bucky sits incredibly still, his body a statue carved out of four-billion-year-old granite. Steve is talking about him. Steve wants to leave the city because of him.

Vaguely, he hears Falcon guy say, “That’s understandable, man,” as he looks down at the table in front of him. Without even realizing it, the remains of his breakfast have been cleared away. The server sees him look around and comes over to ask if he needs anything, but Bucky just shoves a fifty-dollar bill at him and then weaves in between the rickety tables and out the terrace gate, speed walking down the street in the opposite direction as fast as he can, trying to run away from the clawing, wailing thing that has hunted him down once again.

He’s a block and a half away from the restaurant when he’s hit by the sudden realization that Steve never said when he was leaving. What if he’s leaving next week? What if he’s leaving tomorrow? Bucky is overcome with the wild desire to set eyes on Steve one last time, to see his wheaten hair and his sea glass eyes and his beautiful big, square face, just in case, so he crosses the street and walks back the way he came.

He slows down when he’s close to the restaurant. Steve won’t make him; he’s got his back to the sidewalk and is looking down at his empty plate, his big arms crossed over his chest. Falcon guy is saying something earnestly, but there’s too much noise for Bucky to make out more than a few unconnected words. Bucky stops and leans up against a tree, half-hidden by a double-parked delivery truck, and watches Steve’s reflection in the plate-glass window of the restaurant. Even from here, he can see that the blankness is back, the shuttered expression that makes Steve’s face look like a haunted house with no ghosts.

All of a sudden, Steve looks up at the window and meets Bucky’s eye. His eyes widen and his mouth drops open and he wheels around, but by then, Bucky has ducked all the way behind the delivery truck, his heart pounding in his ears, cursing himself for his carelessness and his stupid, reckless heart.

A crowd of people passes at that moment and he takes advantage of the cover to slip down the block and into an alley and disappear. But right before he goes, there’s a lull in the traffic, one of those propitious silences where it seems like time stops for a half second for everyone but him, and he hears Steve say, plain as day, “Nothing. I thought I saw… but it was nothing.”

Chapter Text

A few days later, he has a repeat in his Knife Skills class. It’s the guy named Matt, this time in a red flannel shirt and skinny khaki trousers, looking both embarrassed and eager to be there. He’s brought his own knife, the one he’d bought after the last class. It’s a nice, classic Wusthof chef’s knife that Bucky admires, wrapping the fingers of his right hand around the handle and turning the blade this way and that. “Nice choice,” he says with half a grin, and Matt flushes to his hairline and mumbles a flustered thanks under his breath, looking around the bright kitchen like he’s trying to find the escape hatch.

Goddamnit, Bucky thinks again. A tiny part of himself preens a little, but mostly he’s softly annoyed and grumpily resigned. It’s not that Matt isn’t cute; he is, with his short auburn hair and his big brown eyes and his skinny little hips in the staid khakis. It’s just that Bucky hasn’t been interested in anyone in the last seventy years, and he’s not about to start now.

Hydra had considered any sign of human emotion in their Asset, including lust, to be a glitch, and they debugged his system regularly with god knows what drugs, leaving him perpetually flaccid and uninterested in the nuances of human interaction. That’s not to say that no agent ever tried to take advantage of his supposed obedience, but all it took was a couple DIY castrations (and subsequent exsanguinations) for Hydra to write in the official Winter Soldier Handbook that any contact with the Asset besides that which was necessary for maintenance was strictly out of bounds, on pain of death (at the hands of the Asset himself, probably).

And then afterwards, after the Triskelion and the museum and the Tour of Vengeance up and down the East Coast, after he’d settled down in New York and the drugs had long been flushed out of his system and he’d finally started to feel like a real human being with a working cock, he realized that he wasn’t actually interested in anyone. In anyone else. In anyone who wasn’t Steve.

So nowadays he’s practically a monk, if you don’t count all the jerking off.

The week after Matt shows up again, Flannery corners him after the last class of the night and asks him if he’d be interested in teaching something else, either Advanced Knife Skills or something like Kitchen Basics, just the building blocks, how to make a roux and a mirepoix and stuff like that. How to properly caramelize onions, fold cheese into a soufflé batter, slice steak against the grain.

Bucky’s not sure how basic those basics really are—he remembers very well how long it took him to learn how to crack an egg as a newly-fledged person, post-Hydra. The memory of cracking an egg came back to him before he actually mastered it, and from one day to the next he suddenly knew how to do it without getting any bits of shell in the bowl. However, like usual, Flannery doesn’t give him a chance to object, just barrels on.

“You’re a fucking hit, man, we’ve had tons of people coming in and calling and emailing asking about what other courses we offer, and I have to tell them all that right now we only have Basic Knife Skills, but check back in June, because maybe then we’ll have begged and pleaded enough that you drop whatever your other job is and come work for us full time. Please?”

Bucky’s a little taken aback; he knew that he was good at what he did and that his students left satisfied and—importantly—better at dicing onions than they had been before, but he hadn’t realized that they actually wanted him to teach them something else. Sure, Matt had come back a second time, but he had obviously wanted to get into Bucky’s pants (or wanted Bucky to get into his), so he hadn’t thought any more of it.

At first glance, it’s a really entertaining prospect. He could work full time doing something he likes, something he’s good at, something that doesn’t involve slitting throats and sniping targets from half a kilometer away. But he says, “I like the idea, but I need a week to think about it,” ignoring the way that Flannery’s face falls a little under his perpetually cheerful smile.

He can’t say yes right away, not without giving it a lot of consideration, because… because he’s thinking about leaving New York, too.

Sure, when he came back to Brooklyn and finally found his shitty apartment and finally had his own bed and his own pillow and his own saucepans, he swore he would never leave again. But that was before he knew that Steve was thinking about it, before he overheard that conversation on the terrace in Cobble Hill.

He hates the thought that Steve is leaving New York because of him. He knows that he isn’t actually driving Steve away, that Steve wants to leave because he’s still looking for Bucky, doesn’t know that Bucky is actually in New York, too, in the same borough, that Bucky lays his head down every night on a pillow that’s only forty minutes away on the F train. That Bucky has been haunting the same streets he walks for nearly two years, now. Every day since Steve had said he was leaving, Bucky goes to Cobble Hill in the morning or the evening or whenever he has time, just to lay eyes on Steve, even for just a minute He can’t bear to let twenty-four hours pass without making sure that Steve hasn’t left yet. But there it is, all the same. Steve is leaving New York, and the catalyst is Bucky fuckin’ Barnes.

Part of him asks why he’s so upset about this. If Steve really means that much to you, that part says, then why don’t you go to him? Then he’ll never leave. Problem solved. But he can’t. He just can’t. Two years have passed since he’d broken his programming and gotten away from Hydra; a year and half has passed since he’d set himself up in a proper apartment with the vestiges of a proper life in Gravesend. A year and three months have passed since the morning he’d woken up in his own bed, wrapped in a hand-stitched patchwork quilt that he’d bought at a thrift store for a hundred bucks simply because it was pretty. That morning, he’d lain there, looking out the window at the crisp blue sky over the red brick parapet of the building next door, and thought to himself, I’m a person, now. And, to his immense surprise, he was.

As soon as he had determined that he was a person, then his next immediate thought was Steve and then the thought after that wasn’t a thought at all, but a pained noise. Eventually, he had just taken the thought of Steve and tossed it, not unkindly, into the bomb-proof safe of his mind and had shut the door, spinning the dial with a noisy whirr and then dropping the scrap of paper with the combination scribbled on it into the void of memory loss.

It didn’t work, though, not in the way that he could take the bad memories of torture and abuse and murder and shut them up and throw away the combination. Those stayed hidden, even if they weren’t actually gone, and he didn’t have to think about them when he didn’t want to. But Steve, or the memory of Steve, turned out to be an excellent safe cracker, or maybe the safe was actually made out of steel-colored tissue paper, or maybe it was just a figment of his imagination after all, because Steve kept coming back, over and over again.

He remembered everything, or nearly everything, from before the war. He remembered kissing Steve on the fire escape and the copper-penny taste of his own bloody bottom lip. He remembered howling with laughter until he gagged and the painful tenderness of tucking the blanket back around Steve in the morning to conserve the heat they’d built up over night. He remembered fucking and being fucked, and the taste of Steve’s come on his tongue like the bitter blossom end of a cucumber. He remembered the sunflower he used to buy at the florist’s on paydays, only one, because it was all they could afford, a soft, gilt halo to make Steve smile.

He remembered the way Steve’s hair turned from wheaten gold to the color of weathered barn siding when it was wet, fresh from the shower or sweaty from the heat, plastered to the back of his neck in perpetually overlong strands. Steve had always looked like he needed a haircut as soon as two whole minutes after Bucky had neatened him up with the scissors; the back of Steve’s neck had been a source of constant irritation and fascination to him. He remembered kissing it reverently, and then biting it ruthlessly as Steve squirmed underneath him. He remembered being able to span it with his broad hand, fingers curled around one side and his thumb around the other, like the dirty white collars of Steve’s work shirts. He remembered thinking that if only Steve’s neck had been a little smaller, or his hand a little bigger, he could have punched a hole in his forefinger and sewed a button on his thumb and Steve could have worn him out of the house like that, all nice and neat and buttoned up like a proper gentleman.

He remembered Steve in Kreischberg and Let’s hear it for Captain America!, Steve on the train, Steve on the helicarrier, Steve on the bank of the Potomac, barely alive, and he remembered the way that he’d left Steve there to die and had run away to be alone with his own broken self.

That’s why he can’t go back to Steve. It is the fist and the bruise and the split lip, the gunshot, the You’re my mission, the Then finish it. But it is also the way that Steve had cried over the picture of the old Bucky, cried like his heart was being torn open and rendered down into a great big vat of seawater tears. Bucky fuckin’ Barnes isn’t the old Bucky. He isn’t. He can’t be the person that Steve wants, can’t be the person that Steve is looking for. That’s why he can’t let himself be found. That’s why he is doomed, as far as he can see, to orbit Steve from afar, to follow him across the night sky the way the dog star follows Orion in endless loops around the firmament.

So what does he do, now? Well, he works and sleeps and sets his eyes on Steve once a day and stalks the streets of Brooklyn as his mind paces restlessly round and round in a tight circle inside of him, wearing a groove in the thin, dusty carpet of his soul.

Steve himself seems to work and sleep and stalk the streets of New York much the same as Bucky, at least as far as Bucky can tell. He doesn’t look like he’s getting ready to leave, like his suitcase is waiting beside the front door and he’s taking one last look around and writing a note for the neighbor about watering the plants. In fact, it looks like nothing changes at all, not even the look on his face.

Bucky eventually tells Flannery that he can take on more classes, but on a month-to-month basis. Flannery looks a little put out, but at that very moment two people come through the door and ask Diego if they can sign up for whatever classes Funnel No. 9 offers, and he finally says, “Okay, fine. I don’t like it, but if all we get out of you is a month, I guess that’s good enough, and we can always find someone else later, though I have absolutely no idea where we’d find someone who draws them in like you do. I swear you’re like fucking vinegar in the bottom of a wasp trap or something, I’ve got a page of people who left their emails asking to be contacted in case you do start teaching something else and it’s front and back, man,” he says huffily.

Once, Bucky can’t find Steve for a whole weekend, and he stays camped out on the roof across the street with his scope trained on the front door, panic screaming shrilly in his ears while his heart thumps in great chiming booms like Big Ben. It’s totally irrational, he knows that. Steve works, he’s an Avenger, he has missions. And Bucky’s the Winter fuckin’ Soldier, he could track Steve with one eye covered and one hand tied behind his back and with half of his attention on the TV. He can find Steve in Oregon or the West Coast or the fucking moon.

But it doesn’t matter what he tells himself about being the Winter fuckin’ Soldier, he’s still scared shitless until late on Sunday night he wakes up with a start, cold and damp with the fallen dew on the rooftop, and sees a light on in Steve’s house, in his bedroom window, and the long, thick fingers of Steve’s unmistakable hand pulling the curtains closed. Bucky feels weak with relief, like he’s just staggered off a particularly vicious roller coaster. He packs up his detritus and goes home, exhausted, sparing only one more glance over his shoulder at the bedroom window. But he sees Steve sitting on the edge of the bed again, his head in his hands and his shoulders slumped like he’s carrying a weight that’s nearly too much to bear.

The next day, Monday, he’s exhausted, and it takes him far too long to get out of bed. By the time he does, the sun is already high overhead, shining between the slits in his heavy curtains and laying across the foot of the bed in a bright, fluorescent stripe. The sky is a hazy late-June blue, the color of an old shirt that’s been washed so often it’s translucent. It’s already too hot to go for a run.

The sheets seem to cling to him like wet newspaper; they look flimsy, but they wrap around his sweaty legs, trying to pull him back down into the depths of the bed. He finally gets himself disentangled and stumbles out into the kitchenette. He puts the kettle to boil on the stove and pulls his canister of coffee out of the cabinet to fill the aeropress, but when he flips open the lid, there’s only one meager pinch of grounds scattered over the bottom. “God fucking dammit,” he says out loud, and then, “motherfucker, son of a bitch,” to the empty house and the noise on the street and, belatedly, to the train that had just rumbled past.

Now that his schedule is a lot fuller, he only has Sundays off, and he usually takes advantage of them to buy the staples he can’t pick up at the neighborhood shops—like the coffee beans he gets from the specialty roaster—and do the once-a-week chores around the house, like grinding all the beans he’d already bought at the specialty roaster. But this Sunday, he’d been so caught up in watching Steve’s house that he had completely forgotten to do any shopping at all, and now he’s faced with nothing but bits and pieces of leftovers for breakfast and no coffee. “Goddammit,” he growls again, turning off the flame under the kettle. And then he thinks, a little plaintively, Steve Rogers is ruining my life.

He opens the little refrigerator that sits under the counter and looks sullenly inside. There’s nothing else to eat for breakfast but empanadas with beef and egg and olives that he’d made on Friday, not unless he wants to cook, and he can’t possibly cook without coffee. The universe must be conspiring against him, or maybe it’s just Steve Rogers. He pulls the container of empanadas out and slams the refrigerator door so hard that everything on the flimsy countertop rattles. The ceramic jar that he keeps his wooden spoons in falls over and tips all of his utensils into the sink, and he has to turn around and walk very slowly to the couch and sit down and count to a hundred like a giant hairy toddler before he calms down enough not to put his metal fist through something that would be a bitch to replace.

After he counts to a hundred and begins to feel like a kettle at a simmer rather than a pressure cooker at full boil, he shoves one of the cold empanadas in his mouth and goes to get dressed. He splashes some water on his face in the bathroom to keep the disgustingness at bay for a while longer, then pulls on whatever is crumpled on top of his laundry pile: black jeans, black, long-sleeved linen button-up, and the one thin leather glove he wears on his metal hand at all times. He twirls his hair up into a messy bun to keep it off the back of his neck, and he can feel the sweaty little curls start to dry on his nape. Even after washing his face, he still feels disgusting, but he needs a cup of coffee and some breakfast before his blood sugar drops so low that he actually kicks a hole in the wall.

Across the street from his house is a diner called The City Luncheonette, a little hole-in-the-wall place that looks like it hasn’t been renovated in a hundred years. It’s clean, though, and they make a passable cup of coffee and more-than-passable doughnuts, and Bucky stops by for breakfast or lunch at least once a week.

“Fucking hell, Jamie,” says the girl behind the counter, the ubiquitous diner bell tingling over the door when he walks in. “You look like shit.” Aoife Gleeson, 22 years old, tall with long coppery hair and a permanent scowl on her thin face. Her grandfather Declan owns the place, and she helps out sometimes.

There’s nobody else in the diner, though Bucky’s sure that Declan’s back in the kitchen, so he doesn’t try for polite. “Fuck off and gimme a cup of coffee, Aoife.”

At this, Aoife cracks a smile, big white teeth brilliant in her pale, freckled face. “That’s my boy,” she says, and Bucky mutters back, “Don’t act like my ma, I’m way older than you are.”

It’s the same patter they’ve had going for the last year, since Aoife dropped out of college to work in the diner and pursue her freelance art career. It’s familiar and comforting, though sometimes it reminds Bucky so much of the constant tit-for-tat between him and his sisters, now eighty years in the past, that he feels a little homesick with it. And there’s something about Aoife that reminds him of Steve, too, the thin, pointed face, the pale skin straight from cloudy Ireland, the sharp elbows, and the tendency to invite you out to the back alley for an ass-kicking at the drop of a hat.

Aoife sets a ceramic coffee cup down on the zinc-topped counter in front of him and tops it up with a splash of milk, just the way he likes it. He grumbles a lot, but he secretly loves the City Luncheonette. It’s so familiar, the countertop and the red leather barstools that swivel back and forth, the off-white ceramic coffee mug stained brown on the inside, its sides curved in a slight hourglass shape. The coffee, a little burnt and a little too strong, but mellowed with whole milk. And the doughnuts, made fresh every day. “Gimme a couple of the jelly-filled ones if they’re fresh,” he says, “and then a burger and fries, you know how I like it.”

Aoife glares at him, then half-turns her head and calls over her shoulder. “Hey Granda, Jamie from across the street wants two jelly-filled ones and a burger with fries and he wants to know if the doughnuts are fresh.” There’s a quiet commotion from the kitchen, and then a scratchy old-man voice with a thick accent calls back, “Tell him to go fuck himself and he’ll eat what he’s given.”

She turns back around with a grin and Bucky grins back, his day already a hundred times better now that he’s got some coffee in his belly. “You heard the man,” she says. “Now drink your coffee like a good boy.”

He feels a lot better by the time he crosses back under the elevated train tracks and jogs up the stairs to his front door. It’s almost noon, and he decides to take a shower and put on some clean clothes and go loiter around Steve’s neighborhood for a while, then pick up his coffee, just a few blocks away.

When he gets out of the shower, he pulls on a pair of navy shorts, slim-legged twill things that hit him mid-thigh, and a long-sleeved sage green button-up. Lately, he’s been trying out colorful clothes, because he has the money to buy new things, now, and because it’s just starting to feel right. It didn’t feel right before; when he was still in his Hydra-hunting phase, he wore all black all the time because it was necessary for all the spy shit, and he didn’t have room for work clothes and casual clothes because he lived out of a duffle bag. And then, once he’d settled down in New York again, he wore all black, black from head to toe, because he didn’t feel like he really deserved color. He felt dark on the inside, like a sticky, sucking tar pit, like he’d pull in any unsuspecting critter that happened to wander too close and suffocate it under the morass of his filthy soul. He couldn’t wear colorful clothes, it would be hypocritical, people wouldn’t be properly warned away, they’d get too close to him like a deep-sea shrimp sidling up to an anglerfish’s tempting light.

But then, the day after he got paid for legitimate work for the first time this century, he was walking from the subway station to Funnel No. 9 and he passed a little clothing boutique, very hipster, very Brooklyn, exactly the kind of place he’d never looked at twice before. But in the window, there was something that caught his eye: a display of socks half-rolled up with the foot part flattened out so that you could see the design. There were orange ones with watermelons, blue ones with pineapples, yellow ones with cherries, and purple ones with bananas. Some small, googly-eyed part of himself, just one of the many parts he dealt with every day like an exasperated zookeeper, told him to go in and buy them, and he did.

They were the most expensive socks he’d ever bought in his life. Hell, the four pairs together– and the pretty little box they came in– cost him almost as much as he would normally spend on a pair of jeans. But when he left the shop with the socks in the box and the box in a colorful paper bag, he felt something that it took him nearly an hour to realize was delight. And every time he left the house wearing his black-on-black-on-black outfit with a pair of purple banana socks hidden in his tall boots, he felt it: pure, unrepentant delight. That was the beginning, but slowly, surely, he let himself be coaxed into buying a plain green shirt, and then a navy shirt with a tiny, subtle pattern of orange and green carrots all over it, then a few pairs of shorts in muted colors, and finally, when he realized that his combat boots didn’t exactly match the shorts, a pair of checkered Vans.

He’d had to get used to the strangely naked feeling of leaving his legs exposed to all the grime and pollution of New York; his knees felt extra knobby, like two fistfuls of rock, his shins meatless under their thin layer of unprotective skin, and his ankles in the low shoes like two delicate machines, Swiss watches with the backs off, all the gears exposed and waiting to be sprung all over the place if he put his foot wrong.

He isn’t exactly fashionably dressed, but he has to admit that the clothes help him blend in better with the good people of Brooklyn in the summer than his goth outfits ever did. And besides, he likes it. Yeah! he says to himself, and his heart pumps its little fist inside his chest. I like it, and for some reason, that suddenly feels okay.

He takes the F train up to the Carroll St. stop and walks the couple of blocks over to the coffee roaster. He buys two pounds’ worth and then sits at the bar nursing a cup for a while, watching the people around him. The coffee roaster is a good one, an old business that’s been in the same family and the same neighborhood for a long time. It has obviously been updated for the new century and the new breed of coffee snobs that crawl all over Brooklyn now, the decorations on the authentically shabby side of shabby-chic and the menu full of things like flat whites and cold brews. It’s not that he looks down on coffee snobs, exactly, considering he’s one himself, with his fresh-roasted bags of beans and his hand-grinder and his aeropress. But he likes this place because he’s just as likely to meet a man with a beard and two full-sleeve tattoos and gauged ears coming through the door as somebody’s five-foot four-inch nonno in baggy polyester-blend trousers and a striped sport shirt.

After he watches people come and go for a while, he picks up his beans and slips out the door and walks up Court Street to Steve’s neighborhood. As he goes, he pulls on his Civilian Number One disguise, which is highly effective but consists of nothing but a pair of knock-off Wayfarers and a completely new body language. He slouches, hunching his shoulders and curving his spine at the top and tucking his chin in so that the annoying little pad of fat that forever sits under his chin pushes up, rounding out his face, making him look younger, softer, his neck shorter and thicker and his jawline less knife-like. His hips, the dot at the bottom of the question mark of his spine, he tucks in, too, leading with them a little more as he walks and changing his center of gravity. His feet, he shuffles, scuffing the bottoms of his shoes on the ball of his right foot and the heel of his left, whereas he normally walks heel-toe like a leopard stalking its prey.

His hair is already pulled up high and tight into a bun, he’s got in all his piercings, and his left hand with the glove is stuck in his pocket. He twists the cloth bag of beans back and forth so that it swings his arm back and forth like a pendulum, further pulling his center of gravity to the right and changing up his posture. And for the final touch, he whistles a little, whatever he heard last coming from the apartment next door, thin and reedy and terribly off-key.

Sometimes he thinks that he could probably walk right past Steve on the street, maybe even nod hello like a friendly neighbor, and Steve would never clock him. It’s not that Steve isn’t expecting him to be here, in New York, in Brooklyn, in Cobble Hill, of all places, not just that Steve thinks that he’s out in Oregon, still, or maybe Vancouver. It’s that the Civilian Number One disguise is very good, far better at dissimulating than any non-spy would ever expect, and Steve a non-spy if there ever was one.

Bucky can’t call him stupid, because he’s not, but there it is. He’s extremely intelligent, very good at calculating angles and velocities for when he throws his shield around, an excellent tactician who had a well-deserved reputation for brilliant moves in the war, and a cool, calm, collected head in the middle of battle. And he’s very clever with his hands, could paint Bucky from memory so that he looked like a goddamn photograph, could capture any number of small expressions and mannerisms that turned Bucky’s face from a study in charcoal to something more alive than the real thing, like he was about to burst out laughing and reach through the grubby sheet of newsprint to cuff you upside the head.

But Steve isn’t a spy, and he is a little daft, sometimes, and all Bucky has to do is slouch a bit and whistle off-key and Steve wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a line-up.

So, nice as you please, as if he were just out for a stroll through sunny, gentrified Brooklyn, he walks down Steve’s street and past his front door. The curtains on the ground floor are open and one of the windows is cracked. He can hear the sound of the radio playing from inside, or maybe Steve has a real record player, because it’s Billie Holiday singing Life can be so sweet, on the sunny side of the street, and he can hear the hiss and pop of the needle as it runs around the groove.

Steve’s home, then, that’s good. He should keep walking, get to work a little early unless he takes the long way, but there’s something about that song floating faintly through a window in the hot June afternoon that makes him turn around at the end of the street and walk back on the other side. Another blessed delivery van is parked almost exactly across from Steve’s door and he stops behind it, looking through the grimy passenger-side window and into Steve’s living room.

There’s a glare off the windows from the sun that’s past its zenith, going down behind him, and he can’t see much, but he doesn’t need to. Steve is standing in the middle of the big room on top of a tall ladder, reaching up to unscrew the nut on the bottom of the light fixture in the center of the ceiling. He’s whistling a little, Bucky can hear faintly from across the street, and he wiggles his hips when Billie sings, I’d be rich as Rockefeller.

You idiot, Bucky thinks, you’re going to bust your ass if you start dancing on that ladder.

Steve gets the nut all the way unscrewed and puts it carefully in his pocket, holding one hand under the light fixture so that it won’t fall. But when he pulls it all the way off the bolt, he must miscalculate and tip it over accidentally because a whole shower of dust and dead moths puffs straight into his face and he says “Eugh!” and coughs and sneezes and waves his hand like a big meat fan. And then, and then, to Bucky’s immense satisfaction, he climbs down the ladder, sets the fixture on a low table that Bucky can’t see, and peels his t-shirt off over his head.

Bucky can feel the breath catch in his own throat and he bites down on his bottom lip, stifling the whine that wants to come out. Steve is gorgeous, his chest is immense, all soft, pillowy tits, and his biceps look like they’re as big around as Bucky’s thighs. He looks like he should be getting packed up in loose straw in a wooden crate and sent back to Greece with the rest of the Elgin Marbles.

He watches as Steve wipes his face off with the t-shirt, and then tosses it aside. He runs a hand through his hair and then stretches, palming one of his pecs in a gesture that is so familiar, just so Steve, that Bucky feels a little pang of nostalgia and longing shoot through him. There’s a little pang of something else too, in his groin now, but thankfully Steve disappears into another part of the house that he can’t see from the window and he looks down at his watch, realizing with a start that he’s going to be late for work if he doesn’t hurry.

He gets to work a little early and gives Diego his usual lazy salute as he walks across the front room and through the swinging door at the back. Today he has Kitchen Basics (roux, mirepoix, etc.) first, and then Basic Knife Skills, his most popular class. Flannery is already getting everything set up for him, doling out vegetables for each table next to the cutting boards and the knives and the individual, one-ring gas burners. He gives Bucky a quick up-and-down and says, “You look spiffy, I like you in the black but there’s something about colors that makes you look a lot younger, with the piercings and your hair up like that you could be some senior at NYU, like maybe you’re studying engineering at the Brooklyn branch and your parents are rich assholes and you can afford to dress like you’re slumming it on five thousand dollars a month.”

Bucky looks down at himself and then back up at Flannery. “Do I look like a rich asshole to you?” he says, grinning sharply, mock-offended.

“No, well, only a little bit, you look like the son of a rich asshole, but anyway, you’re just more colorful than usual, that’s all.”

“You’re one to talk,” Bucky says, waving his elbow in Flannery’s direction as he ties his apron strings around his waist. “You look like you fell in the bubblegum bin at the candy store.” Flannery barks out a surprised laugh, but then he waggles his head back and forth, like he’s admitting that Bucky’s not far off. He’s got on sunny yellow alpargatas and blue shorts, like Bucky’s but much brighter, and a bright pink t-shirt with a unicorn on the front that clashes magnificently with his half grown-out green hair.

“Now this,” he says, gesturing to himself, “is real fashion, real taste. Real iconic. Why don’t I take you shopping sometime? I can show you where to get the good stuff, not that rich asshole crap.”

Bucky rolls his eyes, but he’s secretly pleased. A little voice that sounds awfully like his little sister Becca sing-songs, You made a friend! “Alright Flannery, whatever it takes to get you off my back, now shake a leg, I got a class to teach.”

The first class goes well, and there’s a half-hour break built in between it and Knife Skills, the last class of the night, in order to give Bucky time to wash the knives and cutting boards and load the industrial dishwasher. It’s a little stuffy in the back room, so he cracks the door to the alley a little, propping it open with the mop bucket, but after only a few minutes it starts to let the piss-and-garbage stink of the alley into the kitchen, so he shuts it again.

He hears the minute jingle of the bell over the door to the shop when there’s still fifteen minutes to go, and only listens with half an ear as Diego starts to gush over something, probably trying to sell someone a matcha whisk or whatever. He checks all the knives, sharpens a few that need a little extra attention, and sets all the vegetables out by their respective cutting boards. Then, five minutes before his class starts, he hears, close to the swinging door, a voice say, “Alright, thanks man, hold it for me and I’ll pick it up when the class is over.”

He recognizes the voice immediately, but it takes approximately half a second for his brain to flip through its rolodex and match the voice to a name and the name to a face, and by then the face is pushing through the swinging door, looking around expectantly and letting it swing shut behind him.

“Hi, I’m a little early, I hope—” says the Falcon guy, freezing in the doorway like he’s been caught with his pants down by the paparazzi. He has a handsome face, all sharp chin and neat beard and wide, polished-walnut eyes, all features that Bucky knows but has never actually looked directly at, before.

Bucky does nothing, stands tensed and waiting, all of the bubbling good-naturedness that he feels after teaching a good class subsumed in an instant under the hard, unyielding hand of his old training. He has a carrot in his metal hand and he knows, without even having to think it through, that he could take the Falcon guy down with just that one carrot and maybe his apron strings, not to mention the dozens of knives scattered around the kitchen and the especially lethal ones he has strapped under his clothes.

He isn’t worried about being hurt or captured, he knows that the Winter Soldier training will take care of him, but there’s a war raging on a lower level of his consciousness, acknowledged by the Soldier, who’s on high alert but not actually a part of the struggle. The part he’s fighting against is trying to get him to run, to fling open the back door and hightail it away from Funnel No. 9, not even stopping by his apartment for his things. Just run, run, run, leave, disappear, vanish without a trace as if he had never existed at all.

A half second passes, and he watches as a dozen emotions flit over the Falcon guy’s face, and then, astonishingly, he grins. “You,” he says, and it isn’t an accusation or a reproach, or even befuddlement. It’s relief and amusement and something bewilderingly close to happiness.

But then there’s a noise in the front room, the bell jingling as the door to the shop opens again and new voices spill through the crack around the swinging door. The Falcon guy’s face drops into something serious, and he says, low and urgent, “For the next two hours, I’m Sam and you’re whoever you are and nothing else, but will you give me a minute talk to you when we’re done?” Bucky just stares at him, and the Falcon guy’s eyes get impossibly bigger, pleading, imploring. “Please,” he says. “Just five minutes. Please.”

Bucky takes a deep breath, the air pushing his lungs into the forgotten corners of his rib cage, clearing out the dust and filling them up with good, clean air. Then he nods and turns around to put the carrot into the crisper drawer of the refrigerator right as the swinging door is pushed open and the other four students spill into the room, giving him the ten seconds that he needs to scream internally and box the Winter Soldier training back up and turn the key in the lock and then swallow the key and let the cacophony inside his brain quiet down. He can feel the adrenaline dissipate through his fingertips with one last tingle until finally, forcefully, he gets it together.

He turns around and looks at his students, who have arranged themselves already at the tables in front of him. He looks at each one of them in turn, memorizing their faces, not giving Falcon guy any more time than the rest of them. Then he picks up his chef’s knife in his left hand and tosses it up toward the ceiling so that it spins on its axis like a glittering fan blade, then catches it neatly again. “Welcome to Knife Club,” he says, and the class begins.

Chapter Text

After the class ends, Bucky waves three students out the door and humors the one who wants to ask him about whether it’s better to buy German or Japanese knives. Whenever there’s a finance-looking white guy with an unfortunate hairline in his class, seven times out of ten he’s going to want to argue about Bucky’s recommended knife list after the class is over. Bucky has gotten really good at listening in a way that makes them feel vindicated, while still getting them out the door in under two minutes.

While he’s talking, Falcon guy pretends to fiddle with something on his countertop, and then, when Bucky’s still caught up in the conversation, he gathers up the cutting boards and the food scraps and takes them over to the sink.

Bucky’s hackles rise when Falcon guy starts to go around each table and pick up the knives in one handful like a sharp and deadly bouquet, and he almost shoves the finance guy out the door before he whirls around and barks, “Drop ‘em!”

Falcon guy looks startled, but he just holds up his one free hand, palm forward in a gesture of peace, and slowly puts the knife bouquet down on the table next to him. “Sorry, man, didn’t mean to startle you, just trying to help,” he says, apologetically.

“You didn’t startle me,” Bucky almost growls. “But if you throw the knives together like that, you’ll ruin their edges and then it’ll take me hours to get the chips out.”

“Oh. Hmm,” Falcon guy says thoughtfully as Bucky turns his back, gathering the knives up carefully and taking them over to the sink to be washed. He doesn’t say anything else, but Bucky can feel the eyes on the back of his head, and it makes his shoulders hunch up around his ears involuntarily. He plugs the drain in the bottom of the sink and runs a little hot water in it, then gets the soap and the dishcloth and starts to wash the knives one by one, checking each one for scratches or burrs when it’s clean and then laying them out on a dry dishcloth beside the sink.

“What do you want, Falcon guy?” he says after a minute, his voice flat, not aggressive but not friendly by any stretch of the imagination.

Falcon guy actually laughs, sounding relaxed, as if he weren’t alone with the Winter Soldier and two dozen knives in a room that could become a makeshift abattoir in half a minute flat. “Sam,” he says. “My name’s Sam Wilson. I know we didn’t get off on the right foot the last time we met”—and here Bucky snorts, because the last time they’d met, he’d kicked Falcon guy off a helicarrier over the Potomac—“but I just want to talk to you. Friendly chat, that’s all. See how you’re doing. But I think I’m making you uncomfortable, so how about I wait out front with your boys ‘til you’re done?”

Bucky finishes washing the last knife and picks up another dishcloth, then starts to dry each one off carefully and slot it into its space in the special knife drawer. He still doesn’t look at Falcon guy, but he turns a little to the side so that he can see him out of the corner of his eye. His posture is open and friendly, his arms crossed over his chest, but with his hands visible on his biceps. He looks like a guy who just wants a friendly chat with a friend of a friend.

“You here to talk about Steve?” Bucky asks, without even thinking about it, raging inside at the words that just came out of his fucking mouth without his fucking permission.

Falcon guy doesn’t look surprised, though, doesn’t change his stance or look uncomfortable or defensive. He just says, “Only if you want to. I mean it, I’m just here to chat. Actually, I’m just here to learn how to chop an onion properly, but you already taught me that, so now I’m just here to chat.”

“Hmm,” Bucky grunts, noncommittal. And then, because he can always slip out the back door and disappear into the night if he decides that it’s not worth it, “Go wait with Flannery and Diego. I’ll be done in ten minutes.” Falcon guy just gives him a nod and walks out through the swinging door.

As soon as it closes behind him, Bucky’s training comes screaming back. Run, everything in him says, and the urge to just drop the knives and open the back door and climb up the fire escape and hightail it across the rooftops until he can lose himself safely in the crowded streets again is almost overwhelming. It’s instinctual, it’s something born of seventy-odd years of pain and training and pain and conditioning and pain and punishment, and even the two years that have passed since he broke Hydra’s grip on his mind can’t entirely dull the visceral need to disappear.

But he plants his feet, both his actual feet in their too-thin skate shoes in front of the sink and the feet of his soul inside his chest and says, No. Because the thing is, Bucky’s been hiding in plain sight for two years, and he hasn’t wanted Steve to find him, but he’s found Steve. He has an apartment and a routine and a favorite diner and a job that he’s really good at and purple socks with bananas on them, and he knows that all of those things are immaterial in the face of his continuing safety, survival, and freedom. But at the same time, they’re not, actually. They’re the things that make his continuing safety, survival, and freedom worth it. He’s done the nameless assassin thing, the Tour of Vengeance thing, the running and hiding and living out of a duffle bag in shitty motels thing, and it sucks, and it very much does not make life worth living, not if there’s another way to go about it, instead.

He finishes washing the things that have to be washed by hand and then loads the dishwasher. All of the food scraps get loaded into a bag, which he sticks out in the alley for Diego to take to the neighborhood compost heap later. Last chance, says the Soldier in his head as he lets the alley door swing shut, but he doesn’t even acknowledge that it’s there.

When he walks out into the front room, Diego is actually showing Falcon guy how to make a cup of matcha with the matcha whisk. “Oh, hey JR,” he says, “Just trying to sell your friend, here”—he puts a little flirtatious flip on friend, but then rolls his eyes when Bucky gives him a flat look—“on a brand new matcha whisk, very useful in the kitchen.”

Bucky doesn’t laugh, exactly, but makes an approximation through his nose. Flannery and Diego know their stuff and stock all kinds of gadgets and unusual toys, but they don’t exactly believe that most Brooklynites need a matcha whisk. It’s just that if they don’t stock them, someone will inevitably come in and ask for one.

“JR?” Falcon guy asks, cocking an eyebrow in Bucky’s direction.

“Jamie Ross, it’s my name,” Bucky says, challenging him to disagree.

“Ah yes, Jamie Ross,” Falcon guy repeats, and it sounds like a joke to Diego, who laughs, but Bucky knows it’s a question. He doesn’t answer it.

“So, Sam, right?” Flannery asks from the other side of the room, where he’s closing out the cash register. Falcon guy nods. “So, you’re friends with Jamie here, but are you actually friends or like friends”—he makes air quotes and gives Diego an ostentatious wink—“friends? How long have you known each other? What can you tell us about him? He’s incredibly mysterious, all I know is his first and last names and the bank where I send his paycheck, and absolutely nothing else, not where he lives or where he’s from—”

“Cobble Hill,” cuts in Diego, and Bucky can see Sam's eyes widen minutely in surprise.

“—or what he does outside of work,” continues Flannery without drawing a breath, “or what he doesn’t do outside of work or why he wears all black all the time like some kind of incredibly hot vampire, like, nothing, man.”

Falcon guy blinks for a moment, and then says, “He’s not wearing all black, now.”

“Oh no, apparently he’s been experimenting with colors now that it’s summer and nobody in their right mind wears black unless they’re like a ninja or something. Are you a ninja?” he asks Bucky, who can feel the corner of his mouth twitching up involuntarily.

“It’s already quarter past nine, I’m off duty, you’re not my boss anymore, I owe you nothing,” he says, mock-irritated, and then slings his bag of coffee beans over his shoulder and stalks toward the front door. “You coming?”

He doesn’t turn around, but Falcon guy scrambles anyway, picking up a gold-stamped Funnel No. 9 bag from the floor by his feet and saying, “Uh, yeah, yeah, thanks so much for everything, Diego, Flannery, I’m sure I’ll see you again, bye,” and then Bucky, already down the street and past the shopfront, hears the bells jingle again as the door swings closed.

“Wait up,” Falcon guy says and dodges a man in a suit talking on his phone before coming up level with Bucky’s left elbow. Either he’s forgotten about the metal arm or he doesn’t care that it’s the most lethal side of him, and they walk in silence for half a minute before Bucky says, “Where to?”

“You know that place at the corner of Court and Pacific?”

“With the pool table?”

“Yeah!” Falcon guy says, sounding a little surprised. “That’s the one. That okay with you?”

Bucky’s never actually been there, he’d just noticed the pool table through the window as he walked by because he notices everything and then remembers it because that’s his M.O. But he says, “Fine,” and then turns at the next corner to get them headed in the right direction.

“What do you want?” Falcon guy asks as they come in the door.

“Whatever you’re having,” Bucky says, so unwilling to give away any information that he’s even reluctant to show a drink preference.

While Falcon guy goes up to the bar, Bucky picks the most easily defensible table in the place, of course, and then puts his back to the wall, because if he is going to get cornered like this, the least Falcon guy could do is put his own back to the door.

It’s pretty late on a Monday night, so business is real slow, only a couple of regulars nursing drinks at the bar and a group of four middle-aged dads playing pool in the corner. None of them are threats, but he checks everyone out just to be sure. Nobody’s carrying, they don’t even look like they have knives, unless they’re very well-hidden (like his), and he relaxes incrementally against the hard wooden back of the booth.

A minute later, Falcon guy comes back over with two pints of something dark red like a low-lit ruby and slides one to Bucky across the scarred wooden tabletop. He looks at Bucky with his back to the wall and then to the empty bench across the booth, and then to the door, and cocks an eyebrow. Bucky just stares back at him flatly until he slides into the booth, and then waits for Falcon guy to take a sip off the foamy top of his pint before he suspiciously does the same. It’s good, tastes like a red ale, bitter, but not overly so. Nicely pulled with a good head, and it’s very cold. He nods his approval, but internally only; wouldn’t want Falcon guy to think he’s approved of in any way, shape, or form.

“So,” Falcon guy says after a minute, in which Bucky just stares at the wooden back of the booth behind his head. “Let’s start over. I’m Sam. Sam Wilson. And you’re…”

He holds out his hand, his right hand, and Bucky stares at it for a second before he holds out his own hand to shake. Falcon guy’s grip is strong, but he’s not trying to out-muscle Bucky. His hand is warm and dry, but Bucky knows that his own is cold and damp from being clutched around the condensation-beaded pint glass. Falcon guy doesn’t flinch, though, just squeezes his hand once and drops it. “Jamie,” Bucky says, finally.

“So, not…”

“What are we, friends? Only my friends call me anything else,” Bucky says flatly, tempted to snap, but not wanting to show that he’s irritated.

Falcon guy just laughs. “Okay man, sure, I get it. We’re not really friends, not yet.”

“Not really?” Bucky says, incredulous. “I tore off your wing and threw you off a helicarrier, Falcon guy.”

“C’mon! Saaaaaaam.” It’s a half-groan, half-laugh, drawn out for five full seconds. “For fuck’s sake, call me Sam. I’m off duty, I’m not the Falcon.” He takes a sip of his pint and licks the foam off his top lip. “And you also tore the steering wheel out of my car.”

Bucky grimaces, he can’t help himself. He’d forgotten about the steering wheel, had only been prepared to have the helicarrier thrown in his face.

“Sorry,” he says, and then, almost against his will, “Sam.”

“Now that’s more like it.” Sam sits back and crosses his arms over his chest but keeps his hands in view, just like back in the kitchen of Funnel No. 9. “So how’ve you been doing, Jamie? It’s been a long time since the last time we met.”

“Two years,” Bucky says, to buy himself some time. He doesn’t want to antagonize Falcon guy—Sam— he doesn’t want to antagonize Sam, but he also doesn’t want him to walk out of here thinking that he and Bucky are friends, or that they’re going to see each other again, or that there’s anything about this that should a) be repeated or b) mentioned to Steve. Just placate the guy a little, give him something to chew on, and then make sure he knows he’s never welcome to show back up at Bucky’s place of work again.

“Look,” Sam says, and leans forward to put his elbows on the tabletop. “I understand that you’re really uncomfortable doing this. And I want to say that I appreciate it a lot you taking the time to talk to me, even if I can tell you’re two seconds away from crashing right through that window and disappearing into the night.” Bucky forces himself to relax his posture a little just to spite him. “And I want you to know, ‘cause I suspect it’s a problem for you, that I will never tell Steve anything you tell me. I won’t even tell him I saw you, not unless you want me to.”

Bucky grits his teeth together so that they squeak like crickets inside his jaw. That is a problem. He knows what Steve will do if he gets word that Bucky’s in New York, that Bucky’s in the same borough, even; he’ll tear the whole place apart until he finds him. Steve never knew when to quit, not when he was five-foot-nothing in baggy pants, not when he was six-foot-two in a ragged leather jacket over a skin-tight leotard. Steve Rogers gets his teeth in something and you almost have to kill him to prise his jaws apart; he’s a blue-eyed, blond-haired bullfighting dog.

Bucky knows this, knows how tenacious he is, knows what kind of person Sam Wilson must be for Steve to hang around him so much, to trust him with his life. Knows he’s sticking his foot in it, knows he’s probably making a grave mistake, but his mouth opens without his permission and he says, entirely accidentally, “How is he?” Then he snaps it shut so hard that his teeth click; he’s already given away too much by asking.

Sam probably knows this, but he just takes another sip of his pint and looks out the window at the twilight foot traffic going up and down Pacific Avenue. “He’s good enough,” he says. “Keeps busy with work stuff, does a lot of volunteering, gets involved in these wild home-improvement projects that I have to go over and help him finish because he always gets himself in too deep.”

Bucky almost smiles, but then he remembers Steve’s face, the emptiness behind his eyes, the perfect, unblemished tabula rasa that Bucky could see covering up the yawning void like a thin sheet of vellum. “You’re lying,” he says, again without really thinking about it.

Sam looks back at him sharply, but he must see something in Bucky’s face because he slumps a little in his seat. All of a sudden, there are lines of exhaustion around his eyes that weren’t there before. He takes another sip of his beer and says, “You’re right.” Bucky waits, knowing that he’s not done. “He’s got PTSD and clinical depression and at least one anxiety disorder, and that’s just me doing an armchair diagnosis, it’s not like I’ve seen him professionally. No one’s seen him professionally.”

Bucky furrows his brow, and Sam says, “I’m not just the Falcon, you know, I’m also a counselor at the VA. I keep telling him that he needs to get help, but he won’t, and it’s eating him alive.” He looks down at his half-empty pint and heaves a sigh. “I didn’t want to dump all this on you, that’s not why I asked you to come get a drink with me tonight.”

He looks up at Bucky with his own brow furrowed—please believe me, it says—and after a moment, Bucky looks away. “I know,” he says. “I’ve seen him.”

“You’ve seen him?” Sam sounds incredulous, and then he obviously realizes that Bucky’s talking about spy shit. “Oh yeah, of course you’ve seen him. You’d keep tabs on him, that shouldn’t surprise me. How often? Just out of curiosity, I’m not trying to get a handle on your schedule.”

Bucky drinks half the rest of his beer in one draught, giving himself time to think. He shouldn’t say this, he shouldn’t be giving away all this information—for free!—to this guy he doesn’t know and can’t trust. But just like earlier, planting his feet in front of the sink in the empty kitchen and telling himself No, he feels it again, the bone-weariness, the absolute longing to stop running and maybe stop hiding, or at least to tell somebody, to get it out of his own chest, where it growls and whines day and night in the too-small the cage of his ribs.

“Used to be once or twice a week,” he says, low enough that Sam has to lean forward over the table in order to hear him a little better. “And then… and then it got too hard, so I cut back to just every once in a while. Just to check in.” He doesn’t specify why it got too hard, doesn’t even change the timbre of his voice, but Sam’s eyes get just a little bit softer in the dim light of the bar. “But then, last month, I learned that he was thinking about leaving New York, so I started to… to check in every day.”

Sam’s eyebrows climb up to his hairline. “Wait a second,” he says, “how did you know he was thinking about leaving?”

Bucky shrugs, the corner of his mouth quirking up just a little bit. “That’s for me to know and you to never find out.”

Sam shakes his head, a long-suffering smile on his own face. “Okay, okay, it doesn’t matter how you found out. But I can set you at ease, there. I finally talked him out of it. Or me and Clint talked him out of it, and Nat, that’s the Widow, I think she threatened to kill him, so he decided to put his West Coast plans on hold indefinitely and stay here.”

It feels, then, like something breaks inside Bucky, like he’s punctured the water balloon of his heart with a pencil and all the tension and fear that he had stored up there comes flooding out in one great gush. Still, he’s not the ex-Winter Soldier (ex-ish) for nothing, so he doesn’t show anything in his body language besides letting his shoulders ease down a fraction of an inch. “That’s… that’s good to hear,” he says. But his voice wavers pathetically, and he takes another gulp of his beer to cover it up. Body language, he’s got an iron grip on, but his voice is a fucking traitor and should be taken out back and shot.

“Yeah, it is,” Sam says, and downs the rest of his own pint.

Bucky gets up then because it’s his round, and although it surprises him and he’s reluctant to admit it to himself, he… doesn’t really want to go home. You made a friend, that little-sister voice sing-songs in his head, for the second time that day. He’s standing at the bar, looking at the dusty shelf of liquor bottles behind where the bartender is pulling their pints, when he gets an itch in his nose, just a little tickle like he’s going to have to sneeze in a minute. But he doesn’t sneeze, and when he surreptitiously thumbs his nose to relieve the tickle, it turns out that he doesn’t have to sneeze at all; he’s actually on the verge of tearing up.

It’s a discovery so shocking that it dries the tears right up in their ducts, and he stays frozen like that, lightly pinching the tip of his nose between the thumb and forefinger of his human hand and his mouth hanging open, just a little bit. He can’t shake himself out of it until the bartender comes back with two more pints and sets them down in front of him, slopping the foam onto the bar and soaking a little dime-sized patch in the elbow of Bucky’s shirt where he’s got it resting on the edge.

He shakes himself invisibly and pays the man, then takes the pints back over to the table. When he slides back into his side of the booth, he looks down at his hands curled around the glass, one in its ever-present leather glove, and then he looks up at Sam, who is gazing out the window, giving him some space.

It’s dark outside now, not the best time to be sitting so exposed in the big picture window of a bar within walking distance of Steve’s house, but he doesn’t want to leave yet. The feeling is stronger now, and he recognizes it for what it is. It disgusts him, on some level, but another, more clinical part of him says, You need this. You’ve been too many years without the kind of basic human interaction that’s necessary for mental and emotional well-being. Another part of him scoffs, like what mental and emotional well-being?, but it’s just the monkeys squabbling in their cage again, easy to ignore.

He takes a deep breath and Sam turns his head away from the window, his face open and sincere, a hint of a smile playing about his lips. “So…” Bucky says, and trails off. Sam just waits. After a minute, Bucky clears his throat and tries again. “So… Sam Wilson. Tell me about yourself.”

As they’re leaving, Sam swears on his wings that Steve will never learn about this. “I’m a counselor, man,” he says, as they’re pushing through the grubby glass door. “I know how to take things to the grave.” The air outside is cool, now that the sun has gone down, and a little humid. He might walk all the way home, he thinks. It’s the perfect night for it, and it’s only seven miles; he can do it in no time.

“Thanks,” Bucky says, and he means it. They stand in front of the bar, a little awkwardly. Sam has his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his shorts, and Bucky is swinging the bag of coffee beans back and forth.

“Can I, uh, get your number?” Sam says. He actually looks embarrassed, so Bucky cracks his biggest grin of the evening, showing a little line of white teeth in the corner of his mouth, and says, “What’s the matter, Sam Wilson? Don’t be shy, you trying to get in my pants? All you gotta do is ask.”

Sam pulls a revolted face and says, “Fuck off, here I am trying to be all friendly and you have to come on to me like that.” He shakes his head and tuts reproachfully. “My momma always said I was too pretty for my own good.”

Bucky actually laughs, just the barest sliver of a chuckle, but there it is. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll call you,” he says, and then turns on his heel and walks down the street.

“You don’t have my number!” Sam calls after him, and Bucky turns around and, walking backwards, says, “Are you sure about that?”

He doesn’t, actually, but it shouldn’t be that hard to get.

Chapter Text

As it turns out, he doesn’t even need to go looking for Sam’s number, because he sees him not five days later coming out of Steve’s house on Saturday afternoon.

Bucky had spent the entire seven miles of his walk back home with his mind whirling, a blender spinning all of the chatter in his head and his insuppressible thoughts into some kind of gibberish milkshake. There are two threads that stand out though. There’s Bucky, and there’s the Soldier.

It’s disgusting, the Soldier says, and Bucky counters, But it felt so good to be friendly with somebody.

He’s not your friend, he’s the enemy, it’s a security risk, he’ll put you in a cell as soon as he can, why do you think he’s trying to help Steve find you? It’s disgusting to feel so pathetically grateful for the chance to put your freedom on the line like this.

He knows he’s breathing too roughly, walking too fast. But there aren’t many people on the street, and if anybody glances up at him, their eyes slide away as soon as they see him having some kind of emotion; that’s New York for you.

You’ve always been alone, you don’t need anyone, this goes against protocol, this is such a sorry-ass way to feel, I’m disappointed in you goes the voice of the Soldier, a harsh litany echoing round and round his head, until all of a sudden, he realizes that there are actually two voices. The Soldier (this goes against protocol) is concerned for his safety, but it’s the other, nameless voice that’s telling him he’s disgusting and pathetic.

After that, it’s easy to separate the two out and take the nameless voice, which now sounds awfully squeaky, a rat that’s been caught trying to flee down a too-small mouse hole, and squeeze it in the palm of his hands like a ball of putty until it’s the size of a marble, and then roll it through that same mouse hole and behind the baseboard and then walk out the door and press the detonator so that the whole building blows up behind him in a spectacular, cinematic ball of fire.

And now it’s just him and the Soldier, and they can talk in peace.

I know it’s a safety risk, he thinks. But there are some things that are more important than safety. And one of those things is quality of life. And yeah, okay, I have an apartment and a job and I like the clothes I wear and I eat good food and I guess my quality of life is pretty high. But human companionship is also essential for quality of life, and I’m almost as human as anybody else.

The Soldier says nothing, but Bucky can feel the deep disapproval.

And the other thing that’s more important than safety is Steve, and Sam Wilson is Steve’s best friend because that’s a role I can’t fill, and I have to make sure that he is as good a friend for Steve as he needs to be. The spy shit works, don’t get me wrong, but it’s much easier and more efficient and a better use of resources if I actually interact with Sam Wilson instead of having to tail him and Steve around Brooklyn.

He waits for a moment for the objection; he’s crossing Avenue P, now, and he’s almost home. But his feet go heel-toe, heel-toe silently on the sidewalk and the cooling breeze pushing up the avenue from the ocean ruffles the hair that curls humidly at the nape of his neck and he crosses Quentin Road and still there’s no objection. The Winter Soldier is gone.

Or not gone, he’ll never be gone. He’ll always be there, forever, in some dark corner of Bucky’s mind because he is Bucky, he’s something that Bucky will never be rid of until he shuffles off this mortal coil and is finally rid of his whole, entire self. But for right now he’s silent, and Bucky takes that as exactly what it is: tacit agreement, a sign that he’s right.

So, for the moment, he does nothing. He thinks about Steve—of course he does—but now that he knows that Steve’s not leaving, he feels like he doesn’t need to lay eyes on him every day, anymore. So, on Tuesday, he gets up early and walks down to the hardware store on Avenue U and buys everything he needs to make himself a bookshelf with a long, foot-wide piece of old spruce he’d found languishing in a dumpster a month back. He stops in the City Luncheonette for a bag of doughnuts on the way back and spends the rest of the time before he has to go to work finishing the bookshelf to hang over the head of his bed, making sure that it takes him all fucking day so that he doesn’t get antsy and do something he regrets.

On Wednesday morning he wakes up early and decides that one day off is enough, so he pulls on his Civilian Number 3 outfit and tucks his hair up under a navy ball cap with a pharma logo on the front and takes the subway up to Steve’s neighborhood. He’s loitering around the bodega at the end of the block again when Steve and Sam walk past on the other side of the street, their shirts soaked with sweat, though only Sam is breathing heavily. Sam is wearing a loose white shirt and running shorts, but Steve’s shirt is so tight he looks like he’s been dipped in cotton-flocked latex and Bucky has to resist the urge to turn around and get a proper gander at his damp tits. As they pass by, in the direction of Steve’s house, Bucky hears Sam say faintly, “I swear to god Steve, ‘on your left’ wasn’t cute the first time you said it, and it wasn’t cute the hundredth time you said it and if you don’t cut it out I’m gonna…” But then a pick-up with a load of something metallic in the bed hits a pothole in the middle of the street, and everything else is drowned out in the resulting jangle.

In the reflection in the bodega window, Bucky can see Steve’s door, but not the street. The door opens and Steve stands on the threshold for a moment, then smiles and waves and retreats inside, closing it behind him. Bucky waits for another moment until he’s sure that Sam has continued walking down the street and hasn’t turned back toward Bucky before he tosses the newspaper he’s been reading as a cover onto the ledge under the bodega window and walks off in the same direction.

Sam doesn’t even get to the end of the block before Bucky catches up to him, but he lets them both get out of sight of Steve’s house before he walks up like he’s going to pass Sam and says, “On your left.”

Sam startles like Bucky had let off a string of firecrackers in his ear, and his head snaps around painfully on his neck. “What the fuck?” he says and almost trips over a protruding root in the sidewalk. Then he looks a little bit closer and says, again, heartfelt, “What the fuck. Jamie?”

“The same,” Bucky says, and then takes his cap off, shaking his hair out. It’s sweaty and a little tangled from having been stuffed up under the cap, which he sticks under his arm while he pulls his hair into a messy bun with his fingers and an elastic that he pulled from his pocket. The cap he abandons on the lid of a garbage bin as they walk past.

Sam is slowing down, now, staring at him with utter incredulity, as if Bucky had pulled off his cap to reveal a writhing mass of snakes. He almost trips over another root, and that seems to pull him out of his reverie.

“Man,” he says, “what the fuck are you wearing?”

Bucky almost laughs and has to bite the inside of his lip to keep from smiling. “Oh, this?” He gestures to himself with his gloved left hand. “This is spy shit, Sam Wilson, I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

Sam huffs through his nose, offended. “You look like you’re about to go play golf with my Great-Uncle Bert. I’m embarrassed to be seen with you.”

Something inside Bucky cackles with glee. When was the last time I could be a real asshole to someone? he thinks. Probably not since the last time he interrogated a Hydra agent, which would be, now, almost two years ago, give or take a few weeks. And that wasn’t really fun, per se, although he was most definitely an asshole. In a manner of speaking.

“Oh yeah? You’re wheezing so loud, I’m surprised no one’s called the ambulance yet. You’re a terrible spy, you’re going to blow my cover if I stick around you any longer.”

They stop for a red light at the crosswalk. Sam scoffs. “I’m not a spy, I do loop-the-loops on rocket-powered wings in a red and silver circus suit, do I look like a goddamn spy to you?”

They’re crossing the street, now, and Bucky slows down on the other side, gives Sam an openly derisive once-over and says, “Nope.”

“Asshole,” Sam says, and huffs through his nose again, but there’s a laugh in it. “What are you doing here anyway? Are you stalking me?”

“No,” Bucky says, as if he were talking to a small child. “I’m stalking Steve.”

“Oh, right. You know, he’s an asshole, too. You two were made for each other.”

All of a sudden, the fun is gone. It’s not that the bright light of the sunny June morning dims, or that the breeze off the ocean picks up and pushes a chill into his bones, but something goes missing all of a sudden, and Bucky can feel the smile drop off his face, a smile that he hadn’t even known was there until it was gone.

“Oh fuck, I’m sorry,” Sam says, and he sounds painfully sincere. He must have noticed the change in Bucky’s demeanor, and some little voice inside him says, Who’s the shit spy now, huh?

He schools his face, makes it relax back into the characteristic Civilian Number 3 vacuity, and starts to say, “Well, you know…” but Sam cuts him off. “Don’t try to pull one over on me, Jamie, I have an incredibly finetuned bullshit detector. You forget I’m a trained counselor.”

“Ooh,” Bucky says, and rolls his eyes. “A trained counselor, you got me quaking in my boots.”

“Damn straight,” Sam says with satisfaction, “I’ve got skills and I know how to use them.” And they seem to be back on the path again, just like that. Bucky wonders if he’s just been manipulated; maybe Sam isn’t so bad at this spy shit after all.

They walk for another half a block in companionable silence, until they’re almost at the subway stop and Sam says, “Look, I’ve got a lot of stuff to do this morning, so as much as I’d love to have a drink and catch up on the wife and kids and baseball and whatever normal people talk about, I gotta get the train here back to Manhattan.”

“Cool,” Bucky says, and starts to turn away, but Sam holds his hand out, not touching Bucky, just keeping him in place. “Wait a sec. You never called me, that’s cool though, I know how you spies are.” A tiny bit of bitterness creeps into his voice, and Bucky files that information away for later; it’s probably important. “But I meant it when I said I wanted to keep in touch. So I’m not leaving ‘til you give me your number.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket and unlocks it, then looks at Bucky expectantly.

Bucky gives him a minute’s worth of flat stare, but Sam doesn’t budge, just raises his eyebrows a little higher. Finally, Bucky heaves a sigh and says, “Wait here.”

“Where are you going? If you run away on me now, I’m gonna be pissed.”

“I’m going to the Duane Reade.” He points down the block to the big glass-walled drug store “Can you stay out of trouble ‘til I get back?”

Sam gives him his own flat look in return and says, “If you’re not back in five minutes I’m coming to your work tonight.”

“Ooh, still quaking in my boots.”

Three minutes later he’s back with a brand-new SIM card. He pulls it out of its plastic packaging, digs his own phone out of his pocket, and swaps the new SIM for the old one, all right in front of Sam, who watches him with a sort of resigned incredulity. Once the phone recognizes the new SIM, he says, “Okay, sure, you can have my number,” and rattles the digits off so fast that Sam has to scramble to get them keyed in properly in his own address book.

“Wait a second, lemme make sure you’re not pulling my leg,” he says, and types out a message. Half a second later, Bucky’s phone buzzes:

[unknown number]: I hate u

He rolls his eyes and tries to look as put-upon as possible. “Yeah, whatever, have fun with your busy day mister counselor,” and then spins around on the ball of his foot and slouches off in the opposite direction.

Half a block later his phone buzzes again.

[unknown number]: I would hate to have another drink with u sometime. It would be terrible. Don’t let’s set a time and a place bc then I’d have to show up

Bucky almost laughs out loud, his heart beating a funny little tattoo in his chest, his step so light that it’s difficult to keep the Civilian Number 3 lethargic slouch believable. You made a friend, you made a friend, the Becca-voice singsongs again, and he actually starts to believe it.

[Sam]: I’m going to Steve’s for dinner on Saturday
[Jamie]: ?
[Sam]: I’m just saying, I might stop at the bar with the pool table for a relaxing drink
[Sam]: Since Steve doesn’t drink and he definitely doesn’t cook
[Sam]: So I probably need an aperitif to help digest the bodega heros or whatever he’s going to serve me
[Jamie]: I get off work at 9
[Sam]: And??
[Sam]: I guess that’s as much of a confirmation as I’m gonna get
[Sam]: Fuckin spies man, ur all the same

Bucky walks into the bar at a quarter past nine. It’s significantly more crowded than it had been on Monday, and the crowd is totally different. Younger Brooklynites, lots of cuffed jeans and thick plastic-framed glasses and the kind of haircut that Steve used to have, but ironic. It raises his hackles a little bit, but he isn’t exactly worried about Hydra catching up to him here. The people who tend to fall in line enthusiastically with Hydra are usually more earnest, less into the nuances of fashion, more pasty white across the board. No, he’s nervous because it’s a lot of people and he doesn’t like crowds, that’s all.

Sam is already at the bar, leaning with his back to the wall and his right elbow on the bar top, scanning the room and drinking a beer. The only booth left is the one right next to the door, and Bucky realizes that Sam must have discarded it immediately because he knew that Bucky would have refused to sit there. He pushes through the door and nods when Sam immediately catches his eye and raises his bottle of beer in a silent question. By the time he gets to the end of the bar, Sam has already moved over to leave him the space in the corner by the wall, and there is a freshly sweating brown bottle sitting on the bar top, just for him.

He smiles on the inside, though not the outside; it wouldn’t do for Sam to get the idea that Bucky approved of him.

“Wilson,” he says, once he feels the cool plaster of the wall under his shoulder blades, relaxing a little now that he can keep an eye on everybody at once.

Sam opens his mouth and then closes it, narrowing his eyes and looking thoughtfully at Bucky. “Jamie. I almost called you the other name. It’s a little difficult when you go by one thing but Steve’s always going on and on about this other guy whose name starts with a B.”

Bucky feels a little like there’s an ant crawling up the small of his back, tickly and uncomfortable. He shoves the feeling away and points to Sam’s beer with the neck of his own bottle. “That’s a digestif.”

Sam looks down at the beer in his hand, confused, and then looks up again, confusion turning after a minute to incredulity and then, like a summer sunrise, to a sort of incandescent disgust. “Did you really come here to meet me for a drink just to correct my gastronomic French?”

Bucky does a bastardized version of the Gallic shrug and Sam rolls his eyes so hard his head lolls back on his neck. “Okay, look, man, I’m just going to say this once, but why don’t you write it down on a little card and keep in it your pocket so that you can pull it out and look at it every three minutes:”—he mimes writing on a little card with a golf pencil—“fuck you.”

Bucky feels his lips twitch and he takes another swig from the bottle to cover it up while Sam scrubs a hand up and down over his face. “Okay,” Sam says eventually. “Let’s start over.” He visibly rearranges his face into something resembling a stock photo of a Business Lunch Meeting. “So, Jamie, it’s nice to see you, bet you’ve had a long week, how’s everything?”

“Good,” Bucky says, his eyes flicking from Sam around the bar and back again. Sam just looks at him expectantly, and some blessed little voice in his head says, Ask him about his own week, idiot. “Ah, so, uh, what about you?”

Sam looks like the Business Lunch Meeting just closed the deal. “Great, thanks for asking! I didn’t have to do any of my ‘second job’ stuff,”—the wink wink is audible—“just my regular hours at the VA.”

“That’s… that’s good.” Bucky wants to strangle himself. Is this small talk? Is that what regular people do? He has a newfound appreciation for Flannery and the way he fills up whatever space he’s in with a wall of sound. You can just lie down in front of it and bask, there aren’t any gaps to be stopped up. He heaves a sigh. “This sucks. I hate small talk.”

He expects Sam to be a little offended, at the very least, but he just snorts into his own beer and says, “Okay then, so what do you want to talk about?”

“Why do you sound so bitter when you talk about spies?” He doesn’t think before he asks the question, and he assumes the answer is going to be something like, “You’re all sneaky bastards” or “You like pranks too much,” but he doesn’t expect Sam’s eyes to widen in shock. He gets ahold of himself quickly, and maybe anyone else wouldn’t have noticed, but Bucky isn’t anyone else.

“Jesus,” Sam says, and it’s clear from the tone of his voice that he knows that Bucky knows that he’s hit a nerve. “For stuff like that, obviously. Can’t a guy repress something? Do y'all have to know everything?”

Bucky looks at him shrewdly. Sam looks ruffled, but not angry. So he says, “When you talk about Steve you say ‘Steve’ with an audible eye roll, but it’s affectionate. But when you say ‘spies,’ it sounds like the profession as a whole insulted your mother, and James Bond himself stood you up on a date just last weekend.”

Sam just stares at him incredulously again for a full minute before shaking his head and draining the dregs from his bottle. Bucky has waved for two new ones from the bartender before he even sets it back down on the bar top again. “You know, I can’t believe I’m about to do this, but something tells me that telling you a secret would be like writing it on a stone and dropping it into a deep, dark well.”

Bucky mimes zipping his mouth shut and then throwing the key over his shoulder and Sam laughs. “Okay, I got it. I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t even know you, hardly. But I guess I trust you because you showed up today, and because Steve trusts you, that godforsaken idiot.”

Bucky almost frowns—Steve TRUSTS me?—but he squirrels it away to puzzle over later and contents himself with nodding in agreement at ‘that godforsaken idiot.’

The bartender brings over two fresh bottles and clears the empties with a clink. The bar is a little more crowded than it was before, the quiet toc-toc of the billiard balls almost drowned out by the noise of conversation and laughter and music playing on the stereo overhead. It makes the little space that they’ve carved out between them at the end of the bar feel more intimate than even a high-backed booth would; it’s a space for confidences, for letting your guard down, just that tiny little bit. Sam’s got his back almost pressed up against the person standing sideways to the bar behind him, but he only lowers his voice a little before he says, “So I’m seeing this woman. I’ve been seeing this woman, for a while now. And I like her, and she likes me, and things are good.”

He’s peeling the label off his bottle now, and doesn’t look up at Bucky when Bucky says, “So… what’s the problem, then?”

“The problem is that she’s a spy, man, and sometimes she up and disappears for weeks at a time and doesn’t give me any warning or tell me where she’s going.” He gesticulates a little wildly with his bottle. “Which, I totally get because she’s a spy, obviously she can’t give me up-to-the-minute reports. But still.”

“Is it the Widow?” Bucky asks, and Sam’s head snaps back up, that earlier incredulity and shock dialed up to eleven. Bucky holds up a placating hand. “Don’t ask me to explain, I have my little ways. But also, it’s pretty obvious, it’s not like you’re meeting lady spies at the VA.”

“I might,” Sam says, affronted and embarrassed in equal measure. “You never know.”

“Tell me about her,” Bucky says, and to his everlasting amazement, Sam does.

Three beers later, Sam is a little tipsier than he thinks he is, and Bucky is stone-cold sober. They push through the grubby glass door of the bar and into the humid, lamp-lit street, and Sam says, “Why the fuck are you not even a little buzzed?”

“I’ve got the serum, same as Steve does,” Bucky says, and grabs Sam by the shoulder to steer him around a rowdy group of teenagers and down a quieter side street. “Can’t get drunk.”

“Oh yeah,” Sam says, “I remember now. Fuck, that sucks.” He sounds really sorry about it. “Sometimes I wish I could get Steve real stinkin’ drunk, just once, just so he’d let go a little, you know?” Bucky pushes him a little so that he sits down on a stone window ledge and then leans up against the brick wall next to him. “He’s just so buttoned up, like his buttons have buttons. He represses so much, and I can’t get him to go to therapy. It’s killing him,” he finishes morosely.

“Yeah, I know,” Bucky says softly, and Sam’s head snaps up again, the fog clearing a little from his big brown eyes. “Oh shit, sorry Jamie, I know you don’t want to talk about him.”

“No, no,” Bucky says, and then, as the Soldier frowns at him like a towering thundercloud inside of his own head, “I want to talk about him. I want to know about him. I worry about him a lot.”

“Then,” Sam says, and stands up, swaying a little and poking Bucky in the chest with one forefinger. Maybe he’s drunker than Bucky had originally thought because he says, “Then why don’t you let him find you? Go back to him, Jamie.”

Bucky looks away, across the dark, tree-lined street. Steve only lives half a mile from here; he’s at home, where Sam left him, maybe watching TV. But it’s late enough that he might already be in bed, or maybe sitting on the edge of the bed again, looking at that picture of the sepia-toned man in the flat cap.

“I wish I could,” Bucky says, and takes Sam by the arm again, half-supporting, half-dragging him back out to the main thoroughfare, where it’ll be easier to hail a cab. “I’m only telling you this because you won’t remember it in the morning. But I wish I could, Sam. I wish I could.”

[Sam]: Sorry I got a lil wasted last night
[Sam]: I guess I got carried away talking about my “””friend”””
[Sam]: But I had a lot of fun
[Sam]: Let’s do it again some time
[Sam]: Also, I wasn’t blackout drunk, I remember everything we talked about
[Sam]: You know if you want to talk about it…
[Sam]: You don’t, but that’s okay, I gotta offer, just lemme do my thing
[Sam]: Next Monday, same time same place??
[Jamie]: k

Chapter Text

They don’t talk about it, not the next time, or the next, or the next. Somehow, without Bucky realizing what’s happening, they do actually become friends. They have a standing date, Mondays after Bucky gets off work because that’s when Sam’s less likely to be busy, and they go to the same bar so often that the bartender knows them by name. Bucky feels a little like a frog that’s being boiled in water, and every week his hard skin softens a little until by the end of the summer he’s unrecognizable even to himself.

He smiles, he laughs, he becomes the type of person who says, “Hey, Diego told me a good joke, what do you call people who go to Asgard on vacation?” He reluctantly becomes the type of person who has text etiquette; he doesn’t leave Sam on read unless it’s funny, and he texts if he’s going to be late. Slowly but surely, he becomes the kind of person that someone else thinks of as a friend.

He listens when Sam talks about the Widow and when Sam gives him updates on Steve. He doesn’t ask for updates on Steve, not since that first time, but Sam gives him a little rundown every time they meet, whether he likes it or not. Steve embarrassing himself when a socialite hits on him at one of Pepper’s charity things, Steve falling off a ladder and breaking his sofa, Steve balking at the prices when Sam takes him to Restoration Hardware for a replacement and insisting they go to Ikea instead, Steve getting knifed on a mission and being all stoic about it like usual. Steve isn’t getting worse, Sam says, but he’s not getting better, and that’s not very good at all.

Finally, at the end of August, Sam comes right out and asks him, point-blank. They’re at the bar in their favorite booth, each of them nursing some kind of IPA that the bar has new on tap this week. It’s okay, but too bitter-tart for Bucky’s taste, like the spongy white pith of a fresh lemon.

The first thing Sam does is put his hands flat on the table, one on each side of his sweating pint glass. “Okay,” he says, and then just looks at Bucky.

“What.”

“We’ve known each other for going on three months now, right?”

“Riiiiight?” Bucky draws the word out, not sure where this is going, but totally sure he’s not going to like it. “Are you about to ask me for a favor? Do you need someone assassinated?”

Sam pulls a face. “No, that’s what I have Nat for. Now shut up and let me talk.” Bucky just raises an eyebrow and Sam goes on, “So we’ve been friends for going on three months…”

“Only two, really, and maybe a week,” Bucky interrupts primly.

Sam’s hands clench into fists and he pounds on the table, but lightly. “Shut up, asshole. I hate you.”

Bucky just grins into his beer.

“Anyway, I was saying, we’re friends of some standing, and I think that I feel comfortable enough to ask you about something I’ve been meaning to ask for… for two months now. You don’t have to answer, and it’s kind of not my business, but I really am curious.”

“It’s alright Sam, my nipples are not pierced,” Bucky says seriously. “I know you were wondering.”

Sam narrows his eyes and his face scrunches up in a combination of disgust and irritation bordering on rage before he visibly smooths the expression away and says, “Okay Jamie, okay. That was not what I wanted to know, but I’m glad you told me. Thank you for sharing with the class.”

Bucky curls forward in a little mock-bow and flourishes his gloved hand in the air.

“My real question,” Sam says quickly so that Bucky can’t get a word in edgewise, “is, why don’t you want to have anything to do with Steve?”

Oh.

Bucky looks down at his pint on the wet wooden tabletop, turns it a few degrees between his fingers, and thinks about slithering out of the question like a sneaky snake. He hates the question, he can feel the knot of nerves that form in the bottom of his stomach just from thinking about it, but there’s something else in him that wants to answer it. It’s the same part of him that made him go with Sam for that first drink, that wouldn’t let him flee through the alley door of Funnel No. 9 and disappear into the night, that gave Sam his phone number and kept saying see you on Monday, again and again and again.

So he says, “Okay,” and then holds up a hand when Sam looks surprised. “But you gotta let me speak, and don’t interrupt me.”

He looks down at his pint again, waiting for the inevitable interruption, but it doesn’t come. When he looks back up, there’s something subtly different about Sam’s face. It’s not that he looks any different than normal, but his face is a little more open, a little more thoughtful. It’s his counselor face, Bucky realizes, ready to listen, patient, uncovered.

“Okay,” Bucky says again. “You gotta realize, it’s not that I don’t want anything to do with Steve. It’s that I hurt him very badly, and every time I see him some little part of me remembers crushing his face with my fist”—he curls his left hand in its glove unconsciously until the leather creaks—“and then leaving him to die on the riverbank. He’s, you know, the peak of human goodness and kindness and generosity and I’m… I’m me.”

Sam furrows his brows at this, but he doesn’t try to talk, so Bucky plunges on. “And, and, I know that he wants to find me, he wants me back, as a friend or, or a lover, or anything, or, I don’t know. But it really doesn’t matter because what Steve wants is 1938 Bucky and his jokes and his joie de vivre and his charisma, and I’m not that person anymore. That’s an ideal that I can never live up to. I’ll never be that person again. No matter what Steve thinks he wants, he’d be disappointed if he ever found out what the real deal is really like, and I can’t face that.”

He slumps over, then, clutching his pint with his right hand, his left hidden in his lap. He feels drained, like someone has pulled the hidden plug in the heel of his right shoe and all the stale air has hissed out of him until nothing is left but his deflated carcass. It’s not even like he’s said that much, he hasn’t talked about how he longs for Steve, how every time he sees him from afar, he aches to reach out and touch him, how watching the sweep of his eyelashes across his pale apricot cheek through the scope causes him a physical pain in his chest like his heart’s being stomped on. How sometimes, lying alone in his bed at night, he thinks that a life without Steve in it isn’t a life that he wants to hang on to, tooth and nail, for another eighty or a hundred or a hundred and fifty years.

He hasn’t even said that much, but it’s too much, and he can’t bear to look up and see it all confirmed by the look on Sam’s face. Which makes it all the more shocking when Sam says, after a minute of silence, “That’s bullshit. No, that’s fucking bullshit.”

Bucky snaps his head up, and he straightens his spine so fast that his metal hand clonks against the underside of the table, sloshing the beer in their pint glasses. “The fuck?” he says, appalled, outraged, and wounded.

But Sam’s counselor face is gone, and he looks very sick-of-your-bullshit and I-don’t-get-paid-enough-for-this. “Look,” he says, pointing an accusing finger at the center of Bucky’s chest. “I’ve said it once or twice or five times and I’ll say it again. You and Steve are made for each other. No, you deserve each other. Because you’re both self-martyring emotionally-constipated incommunicative bastards!” He’s almost yelling now, and Bucky glances quickly around the bar, but none of the other solitary drinkers are paying them any attention. The perks of meeting for drinks at 9 p.m. on a Monday.

He looks back at Sam, who has got his arms crossed over his chest, his chin tucked down and his jaw clenched. He’s looking straight at Bucky, meeting his eye, and Bucky can see that this isn’t a show, Sam isn’t trying to tease him; he really is irritated beyond bearing.

So instead of throwing the rest of his drink in Sam’s face and flouncing out of the bar in a huff, he grits his own teeth and says, “Okay. Okay. Care to explain?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, quick off the starting block. “You know what Steve says to me? All the goddamn time?” He puts on a face that screams ‘self-martyring bastard’ and lowers his voice half an octave. “He says, ‘I gotta find him, Sam, it was my fault he fell off the train, Sam, I didn’t look for him afterwards because I was too sad, Sam, and then I couldn’t save him from Hydra until two years after I woke up in the future, Sam, and then I almost killed him on the helicarrier, Sam, and then I let him leave without making sure he was okay, Sam.’”

Bucky chokes out a guttural “HA!” and then, “He was unconscious! How was he going to make sure I was okay before I left? Just to pick out one thing wrong with all… with all that.”

Sam gives an exaggerated shrug. “Don’t fucking ask me, man, I’m not his therapist and I refuse to be and he refuses to see anyone else, so the mind of Steven G. Rogers remains a mystery to me.”

“That’s just so, it’s so…” Bucky trails off, unable to put the indignation he feels into words.

“I’m not even done, there’s also the whole”—here he puts on his Steve voice again—“’I can’t stop thinking about his face on the helicarrier, Sam, he was so confused, I should have tried harder, Sam, maybe it’s because I was too different than what he remembered from before the war, Sam, I hate this stupid body, Bucky would have recognized me earlier if I were still small, Sam.’”

Bucky looks out the window, breathing through his nose. His left hand is clenching and unclenching spasmodically, the grating of his teeth loud in his own ears. “I wish he was here, I’d really love to fucking punch him in the nose for being such an idiot.”

“Well,” says Sam, spreading his arms wide, his smile furious. “There’s a really easy solution to that problem.”

Bucky doesn’t look away from the window, but he forces his hand to unclench, spreading the fingers flat against the tabletop. He takes a deep breath, in through his nose, his chest expanding and expanding until he can feel the buttons on his shirt straining against the pressure, and then lets it out again slowly.

“As much as it kills me to say this,” he says, and he can see out of the corner of his eye how another smile, a real one, spreads slowly from one side of Sam’s face to the other, “you may have a point.”

Sam’s grinning now, brilliant white teeth on full display. “I need some more time, though,” Bucky says, finally looking him in the eye.

Sam spreads his arms again, this time magnanimous, and says, “That’s all I ask, Jamie. That’s all I ask.”

He does need more time, but he’s not sure why. Maybe he needs time to get used to the idea, and he definitely needs to be able to sit down and think about it properly without the notion skittering away out of his reach like a beach-dwelling sand crab. He goes about his life with the same dogged determination and surly cheer that he’s always had, but now he’s accompanied everywhere by a maddening chorus of Steve. Steve? Steve. Steve? Steve, up-down up-down like a fucking seesaw in his brain.

He almost completely stops going to check in on Steve because of the sudden, nearly overwhelming compulsion that has developed to just step into Steve’s path and say, “Hey pal, long time no see,” and he is definitely not ready for that yet. No, sir. Uh uh.

He continues to meet Sam, and Sam continues to talk off-handedly about Steve, and so Bucky knows that he’s okay, even if it’s not the same as actually setting eyes on the bright day star that masquerades as Steve’s face. But he has to think, goddammit, and it’s impossible to think about Steve when all he can think about is Steve. It doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way it is.

He’s also supremely grateful to Sam for taking him at his word when he said he needed more time. Sam acts as if that conversation at the end of August never actually happened, and as August turns into September and summer fades into the warm-cool days of early autumn, he continues not to ask, not to push, not to do anything but be there. He even comes back to take another class from Bucky, this one about improvisational cooking because, as he says, you stay out in the field for too long and you’d better learn to cook leaves and berries or you’re going to be mighty constipated when you get back to base.

Not that he’s actually ever had to eat leaves and berries. And not that he stays out in the field that much, at least as far as Bucky can tell. Obviously, the ex-Fist of Hydra doesn’t have the privilege of a security clearance that lets him in on Avengers business, but sometimes Sam has to reschedule or, once, cancel entirely.

That’s a hard week, actually, and Bucky feels irritable and listless for a few days, chalking it up to the change of the seasons and the shorter days before he realizes that he’s just been thrown for a loop by not having his usual meeting with Sam. He goes to the City Luncheonette the next morning, thinking maybe he just needs some witty banter, but he’s so petulant and morose that Aoife finally just dumps his plate of doughnuts in a paper bag and tells him to take them home and come back another day when he’s looking a little more human.

He kicks an empty soda can clear across the street as he crosses back under the bridge and then spends the rest of the morning on his hands and knees scrubbing furiously at his battered wooden floors with a scrub brush—like Cinderella, if she were a large and deadly thundercloud—until the mood passes, just in time to get ready for work.

And all the while, there’s that Steve. Steve? Steve. Steve? Steve driving him bonkers.

Finally, one day, he gets sick of not knowing what to do or what to think, so he sits down on his broken-down sofa and pulls a battered old notebook off of his bookshelf and flips to the first empty page he can find. He sharpens a pencil with a knife and makes a list of the pros and cons of showing up on Steve’s doorstep like a wee orphan babe, if wee orphan babes were six feet tall with a glare that could murder a man at ten paces.

PROS

- Steve and Sam and I could hang out together

He absentmindedly flips the pencil around his thumb while he thinks. Is that the only pro he can come up with? With a shrug, he leaves a half-page space underneath, just to be fair, and then writes:

CONS

- loss of freedom

- unsafe (Steve would never turn me in, probably, but he’s a terrible liar, someone could get it out of him real easy)

- would have to put up with Steve’s big sad eyes

He thinks for a minute more, then goes back up and adds that to the pros.

- Steve will stop being sad (maybe)

He knows he’s not responsible for Steve’s depression, he knows this because Sam has told him so, not to mention that it’s just common sense. But christ, it’s a big temptation to highlight it in phosphorescent yellow and underline it twice and then throw the whole list away because if it’s true, what more does he need?

He goes back to the cons, instead.

- maybe it won’t work out because we’ve changed too much

That, that’s a big one. He knows what Sam said, what Sam continues to say all the time by actually wanting to hang around with Bucky, by seeming to look forward to seeing him every Monday night: he’s friend material. But what if Bucky’s just too different, and what if Steve is just too different, and what if they don’t come together like two halves of an orange in the same peel, anymore? What if they’re like… like two of those sea urchins with the foot-long spikes who can be in the vicinity of each other, but not together? That’s worse than the status quo. He’d rather orbit Steve from afar for the rest of his life than find out that they’ve turned into prickly, incompatible echinoderms.

The F train rushes by in the Avenue U direction and the friendly, comforting clickity-clack relaxes him a little. He slouches back into the sofa cushions and twirls his pencil around his thumb again. After a moment he writes, under the pros:

- shared life experience

Because hanging out with Sam is all well and good, and he likes Diego and Flannery just fine, but they’re all so young, practically babies, and even Sam’s combat experience doesn’t hardly match anything that Bucky’s gone through. He’s from another century, another era completely, and although he’s adjusted pretty well to this one, if he does say so himself, Steve is the only other person in the entire world who was born in the nineteen-teens but is still in his twenties. That part is important. Bucky could raid a nursing home for friends who’re his age, but then they’d all have actually lived every second of it, not like him. And not like Steve.

Another minute’s contemplation and under the cons he writes:

- maybe Steve will be mad I made him wait so long

But then he thinks about it a little, thinks about what Steve had said to Sam that day on the terrace and the look on his face when he thought he had seen Bucky in the restaurant window, and he goes back and scribbles through it until the words underneath are illegible. Then he writes under pros:

- less alone

He surprises himself a little with that one. It seems to come out the end of his pencil without him really thinking about it. He doesn’t feel alone, does he? Obviously, he is, he has no social contact outside of work and meeting Sam once a week, but he was also the Winter fucking Soldier, he’s been far more alone than this, for many, many years, in all the ways that really count. Even when he was surrounded by STRIKE teams or medical staff, he was alone, alone in his own body because the comforting bolster of his personality had been burnt clean away by the chair and the brainwashing and the conditioning. Nowadays, he’s got so much personality that his head’s practically a tenement, the kind he and Steve used to live in before the war, full of loud voices and conflict and laughter and humanity. It’s irritating, but he loves it. He’s not alone, not like before.

And yet, sometimes it still feels like he is.

He flips the pencil around and around as he thinks until it finally goes flying across the small space that separates the sofa from the kitchenette, rebounding off the yellowing cabinet doors. The space is so small he doesn’t have to get up, just leans forward and snags the pencil between his metal fingers.

That’s another pro, he thinks. Steve has a big house. But he doesn’t write it down. It seems too frivolous, not something he should be taking into consideration when he’s thinking about upending his whole goddamn life. Maybe Steve wouldn’t want to live with him, anyway. Maybe he wouldn’t want to live with Steve. Maybe he’s putting the cart before the horse. So he slumps back again and stares at the dull stainless hood over the two-burner stove without really seeing it, just letting the thoughts percolate in his head until, unexpectedly, one pops up fully formed like Athena, the terrifying root of Zeus’s little headache.

- I love him

He writes it down with a shaking hand and then slaps the notebook closed and flings it away from him, where it hits the front door with a thump and falls to the floor. I love him?? his own mind shrieks at itself, while another part is bent double with laughter, slapping its knee and coughing and wheezing and cackling like a whole murder of crows. He feels like he’s stuck his head inside a big cathedral bell right as the rector yanked on the bell pull. It’s like the good part of the 1812 Overture up there between his ears, all crash and boom and smash and a screaming brass section.

How could he not have known? How could something so obvious, something that now feels as subtle a half-naked model on a backlit billboard in the middle of Times Square, how could it have never occurred to him before? Now all the pieces are falling into place, now he can see that he’s been playing three-dimensional chess all along, and the king that he thought he held in check holds him in check, instead.

Well, that clinches it, doesn’t it? If he loves Steve, why wouldn’t he want to be with him? Sam has already pretty thoroughly disabused him of the notion that he’s bad for Steve, or dangerous, or that he should stay away from him precisely because he cares for him. So what is he waiting for, part of him is asking, his heart in his chest straining toward the door like an impatient puppy. He could go now, he could put on his running shoes and just sprint all the way there, he could be at Steve’s house in no time at all, knock on the door, fall over the threshold and into his arms.

But the rest of him knows that he’s still not ready. Needs to sit with it for a while longer, get used to the idea. Figure out how to actually do it. He still needs some time.

He thinks for a couple of weeks about how to tell Sam, how to enlist Sam’s help or get Sam’s advice without making it seem like it’s a big deal.

How should he do it? Should he just drop in on Steve one day? Ask Steve to come to his house? Meet at a Starbucks like they’ve both swiped right on Tinder? He’s standing in front of the stove while he’s thinking about this, stirring a skillet full of pumpkin risotto, and he pauses for a second to look around at the ratty, broken-down couch, the bed with the visible valley in the middle where his scavenged bedframe sags, the off-white cabinets that always look grimy, no matter how often he cleans them. If it were anyone else from upscale Brooklyn, he would never let them see the way he lives, never let them set foot inside this shithole that he has the balls to call home, knowing that they’d be judging him all the while.

But Steve is Steve, he’s not actually from upscale Brooklyn, and this place is leagues better than the shoebox they shared before Bucky shipped off to Europe. Not to mention that he kind of wants Steve to see how he lives, the life that he’s made for himself, the way he picked the pieces of himself up and put them back together again all on his own with duct tape and superglue until they became less a collection of things and more one whole, actual person.

But before he can come to a decision, real life intervenes, because he gets stabbed on the first Thursday in October while buying milk at the bodega around the corner from his house.

Chapter Text

It’s one of those crisp, clear fall days, brilliantly sunny, the golden hour twice as long as usual. The kind of day that cleans your lungs out with a boar-bristle scrub brush when you take the first deep breath outdoors, the shock of the cold air and the bright sunshine pushing out on the next exhale all the grime that had accumulated in the corners through the long, hot, sticky summer.

He takes the subway home after work, like usual, but gets out a stop early so that he can walk a little, glorying in the nip in the air and the leaves that crunch underfoot and the calm that descends on the streets when it’s too cold to be outside just for the sake of being outside. When he passes the bodega, it’s still open, so he decides on a whim to go in for milk because he only has enough for coffee tomorrow morning, and with a fresh carton he can make proper French toast with the stale butt end of a brioche loaf that’s wrapped up in a dishcloth on his counter.

He pushes the door open, the little electronic doorbell above his head making its quiet dee-doo, and nods to the kid on duty behind the counter. He knows the owner, a man with a big laugh who always waves at Bucky’s septum piercing and says, “You look like a bull” in a thick accent of indeterminate origin. The first time he said it, Bucky just gave him the Winter Soldier face, but that didn’t seem to put the man off any. He said it again, the next time Bucky came by with the piercing in, so he decided to just play along, sticking his index fingers up on either side of his temples. “Moo,” he’d said with the flattest, deadest affect he could muster, and the man burst out laughing and they’d been friendly from there on out.

He only works in the morning, though, and whenever Bucky stops by after work, there’s a rotating cast of kids in their late teens manning the register. This kid barely looks up from whatever he’s doing on his phone. There’s only one other guy in the store, short and stocky with a watch cap pulled down over his ears, rummaging through the bags of chips near the front. Bucky walks past him through to the back where the cold cases are and looks at the milk for a moment, trying to decide whether to get one quart or two. He doesn’t really have room for two more quarts in his tiny dorm-room fridge, but brioche soaks up a lot of milk. Actually, if he makes bread pudding instead of French toast, he can assemble it all tonight and just leave it on the counter to soak, and then pop it into the oven as soon as he rolls out of bed in the morning. Yeah, that’s definitely the better idea.

He tucks two quarts into the crook of his metal arm and is looking around, wondering lazily if there’s anything else he should get while he’s here, when he hears the kid at the front say, “I don’t have the key to the safe, man, and anyway, Amir clears it out every night, there ain’t gonna be nothing in there. Just take what’s in the register and go, fuck!” He bites out the last word bitterly, and as Bucky turns smoothly around and stalks on silent feet between the shelves he almost has to laugh; that kid’s got some brass balls, and it’s a good thing Bucky’s here because otherwise it might go all the worse for him.

He passes the man by the chips, who is now standing stock still and pretending he doesn’t exist. Bucky doesn’t blame him, he knows he’s only going to foil this robbery because he can, because he’s the ex-Winter fucking Soldier (ex-ish) and he could do it with one leg hobbled and his metal arm tied behind his back and a blindfold on. So he slides silently up beside the guy at the counter, a tall man in a black Yankees cap and a red bandanna cinched over the lower half of his face like he’s a fucking cowboy on the lonesome trail. Bucky almost has to laugh again at the way the guy startles when he registers that Bucky is there, looking like his skeleton is trying to take the short route out of his body, and brings his gun to bear on Bucky’s face with a shaking hand.

Bucky nonchalantly pulls the cartons of milk out of the crook of his metal arm, sets them on the counter, and then as the kid watches him in open-mouthed disbelief, he moves with superhuman speed—but just a bit; plausible deniability—to disarm the guy and then clock him under the chin. He does it gently enough that he doesn’t kill him, but hard enough that his head snaps back and he falls with a thump to the grimy bodega floor, unconscious.

Bucky turns back around to the kid, who has still got his mouth hanging wide open. “Call the cops and then ring me up that milk, would ya?” he says with a grin. He hears the other guy come up behind him, but doesn’t think anything of it until, in one moment that seems to last near forever, the kid’s eyes flick over his shoulder and widen and Bucky feels a blow at his back that knocks him forward, almost sprawls him out face-down on the counter. Time speeds back up and he spins on his heel, ducking to the right and clocking the guy on the hinge of his jaw with his metal fist. He doesn’t pull his punch enough and he feels the joint give as the guy’s head whips around and he crashes to the ground, his skull bouncing sickeningly on the linoleum.

“Fuck,” Bucky says, flexing his metal fingers. He watches the guy for a moment to make sure he’s still breathing. Then he turns back around to the kid, still standing in the same position with his mouth hanging open, his face ashen. “Thank fuck I didn’t kill him,” he says. “Call the cops, will ya?”

“Uh,” the kid says, still staring at him like he’s just appeared through a portal from the underworld. “Shouldn’t I call you an ambulance? You’ve… uh…” He gestures weakly to Bucky’s chest and Bucky looks down to see nothing but his leather jacket over the black button-up he wore to work. But bending his head down pulls taut the tendons at the back of his neck and the tendons pull on his trapezius and oh. Then he feels it, the wave of pain that grows to a crescendo like a struck gong that just goes on ringing and ringing until it finally coalesces into a sharp point of pain right under the lip of his metal shoulder cuff. He reaches around behind him with his right arm until he feels it, a short and slender knife stuck up to the hilt in the meat of his shoulder, almost on the seam where the metal cuff meets the scar tissue. He takes a split second to contemplate whether or not to pull it out; if he leaves it in, he can control his blood loss better until he gets to a safe place, until he gets back home. But if he leaves it in, he’s going to attract the attention of anyone he might pass on the street, walking around with a knife sticking out of his back.

So finally, he grits his teeth and twists his right arm back a little further until he can grip the blade right under the guard with his first and middle fingers, and then pulls the knife out.

Fuck. That hurts.

He’s the Winter fucking Soldier, he can handle a little stab wound. His breathing is fine, a little labored because of the pain, but the knife doesn’t seem to have hit anything vital, not a lung or a rib, just the meat of his shoulder next to the metal cuff. But then he pulls the knife around in his right hand and looks at it, the wet red of his blood glowing dark and rich-looking under the bodega’s fluorescent lights. The point of the knife is missing, a good centimeter of it, and the break is new, clean and sharp. It must have hit the metal cuff from the inside and broken off.

“Fuck,” he says, emphatically. He transfers the knife into his metal hand and turns it around so that the blade lays flat against the cuff of his leather jacket, invisible to any casual passersby. Then he scoops up the two quarts of milk in his right arm and says to the kid, who is still standing behind the counter with his mouth open, not on the phone to 911 like he fucking should be, “Hey, I’ll take care of myself, you call the cops before one of those guys wakes up. Sorry about not paying for the milk, but you can tell the boss he owes me anyway.” Then he walks out of the shop, teeth clenched around the bolus of pain that sits on the back of his tongue, letting his training take over, just a little bit, so that he can get himself home.

When he finally gets into his house and locks the door behind him, dumping his milk on the counter along with the knife, he strips out of his leather jacket and his shirt, wincing as the movement pulls on the muscles in his shoulder despite how careful he is. He goes into the bathroom and looks over his shoulder in the mirror. There’s less blood than he thought there might be, although it’s still oozing out of the wound and dripping down his back in a bright red streak. The skin around the slit is purpling and swelling.

He has to get the shard out; it can’t stay in there. The serum is going to try to push it out, but it’s got the metal cuff in the way, and it might get pushed in the wrong direction, into his lung. He only contemplates for a moment before he pulls his phone out of his back pocket and opens the case one-handed. He pulls the newest SIM card out of the crumbs of lint in his front pocket and slots it into place, not even bothering to put the back on again before he turns it around and types in the PIN. There’s only one number saved in his phone, and that’s the one he calls.

“Uh? Hello? Hey, hey, uh… man. Hey, man. What’s up?” Sam sounds confused, as well he should be. Bucky has never actually called him before, and it’s almost half past ten on a Thursday night. They just don’t have the kind of relationship where this is normal. Sam also very deliberately didn’t use his name; he’s probably with other people, then, and Bucky can hear some noise in the background that might be talking, or might just be the TV.

He doesn’t have time to think about it, though. The longer he waits, the harder this is going to be. “Sam, I need your help. It’s kind of an emergency. Can you come to my house? And bring a first aid kid, make sure it has those extra-long tweezers.”

“Uh, yeah, hold on,” Sam says, sounding evasive. He evidently goes into another room, because the voices disappear and there’s the sound of a door clicking shut. “Are you hurt? What do you need? Where do you live? I’m at Steve’s, if you’re in Brooklyn, I can get a cab and be there asap. It’s pretty late, there won’t be traffic.”

Bucky feels an enormous surge of gratitude to Sam for not even stopping to question him, for being ready to help at the drop of a hat. “Yeah, I live in Gravesend. I’m okay for now but I need some help. The sooner the better before the serum helps the wrong way.”

“Yeah, okay, Gravesend, that’s maybe twenty-five minutes. Text me your address and I’ll be on my way.” There’s a half-second pause, and then Sam says, “I don’t have my first aid kit, though, ‘cause I’m not at home. I could stop at Duane Reed on the way over but that’ll mean more time. Or I could take Steve’s, I know he has one. I’ll probably have to tell him why I need it, though.”

Bucky feels, all of a sudden, achingly, meltingly tired and simultaneously full of a kind of helium-gas relief, like he’s dissolving into thin air. That’s it, then. This is it. He doesn’t have to think about how to do it, how to give himself up to Steve. It’s all over, it’s out of his hands, and now all he has to do is wait for twenty-five minutes.

“Yeah,” he says, swallowing thickly, and only in part because of the pain. “Yeah, that’s fine. Whatever you think is best. And he can come too, if he wants.”

Ten minutes later, he’s sitting on the couch with his eyes closed, a towel around his shoulders to soak up any blood that might still be leaking out, when the door buzzer surprises him out of his reverie. He stands up, his hips creaking and his back stiff now that the adrenaline is gone and the serum is starting to do its work. “Yeah?” he says into the intercom.

“It’s us.” Sam’s voice is tinny and faraway. Bucky presses the button that opens the door downstairs and then stands by his own door, listening to the two sets of feet clumping up the creaky stairs. Sam is muttering, “You best get a handle on yourself, do not spook him or I will throw you out on your ass and then help him disappear again myself.” There’s an indeterminate noise, Bucky guesses of assent, and then he throws the bolt and opens the door and there they are.

Sam has a motorcycle helmet under one arm and a canvas bag in the other hand. “Jamie, start talking,” he says as Bucky moves to the side to let him in. He opens his mouth but doesn’t start talking because there’s Steve, in the glorious flesh, simultaneously looming in the empty doorway and looking like he’s trying to make himself as small as possible. He has a look on his face that Bucky can only halfway parse. He looks stricken and scared and jubilant and relieved and a lot of other things that don’t usually go together, his features all sliding around like shifting sands, like he’s about to laugh and cry and scream and doesn’t know what to do first. His eyes are two dark notches under his straight brows, full of naked feeling, and they roam all over Bucky’s face, flicking down to his bare chest and then back up again. He doesn’t give the metal arm a second glance, which some small part of Bucky notices and files away in his secret heart pocket to think about later.

“Steve,” Bucky says, and nods.

“Buck,” Steve croaks out, and swallows audibly. Then he very visibly gets ahold of himself and says, “Can I come in?”

Bucky just nods again and Steve slips past him, not close but not far enough that Bucky can’t smell him. He gets one big whiff of his detergent and his deodorant and something floral, maybe his shampoo, and his shoulder hurts like a bitch and he knows he’s working against the clock, but for a second all he really wants to do is just faceplant into Steve’s armpit and stay there for a little while. But he closes the door instead and turns around.

There’s nowhere for them all to sit, he realizes immediately, not that it matters. This ain’t a tea party. It’s almost comical the amount of space they take up, three huge guys in the tiny apartment. It looks like a dollhouse all of a sudden, and Bucky thinks about the three of them sitting down for an actual tea party, about what a delicate china cup would look like in Steve’s huge hand, and feels a giggle bubble up inside his chest. But he knows it’s just a little bit of shock; this isn’t the first time he’s been stabbed. Probably not the hundredth time, either.

He slumps back down on the couch again and then turns sideways, pulling the towel off as Sam sits down next to him and leans in to take a look. Steve looks around awkwardly, his arms hanging limply from his shoulders like two big cured hams. Then he clasps his hands behind his back and leans back against the door, very obviously trying to look like he’s not about to vibrate right out of his skin.

When Sam gets a good look at Bucky’s shoulder, he whistles, low and appraising, and Bucky says, “Got stabbed stopping a robbery at my bodega.” He sees Steve, out of the corner of his eye, mouth the words my bodega, but he doesn’t actually say anything, just continues to look stunned. “It was a little skinny knife, it’s over there on the counter.” Sam starts to get up, but Steve anticipates him, steps forward to pick up the knife and hand it over. “Wouldn’t be much to worry about except that I think it hit the inside of my metal shoulder and the point broke off.”

Sam looks the knife over and nods, handing it back to Steve, who lays it back down on the counter. There’s a streak of Bucky’s blood on his hand now, but he doesn’t seem to notice, just clasps it in his other hand behind his back again.

“So, you want me to, what, dig it out?” Sam says, repulsed and skeptical and hiding his worry pretty well, though not well enough. “I’m a counselor, haven’t you heard? My paramedic training is way out of date.”

“Sure, just give it your spiel about internalized homophobia, maybe it’ll come out on its own,” Bucky says flatly, and Sam bursts out into a great, surprised barking laugh that fills up the whole tiny house. He can see Steve start, and then gape, and then shut his mouth with a snap that’s audible even over Sam’s laughter.

“Fuck, man,” Sam says, wiping his eyes. “Are you always like this after you’ve been stabbed? Is this you going into shock?”

“Nah. It could hardly be called a stabbing, anyway,” Bucky says, flicking his eyes up to Steve’s face. Steve is staring at him, incredulous, and Bucky keeps his eyes on his face as he says, “It was more like a tickle,” so that he doesn’t miss the way the corner of Steve’s mouth twitches, just a little bit.

“You know who you sound like?” Sam says, as he pulls the first aid kit out of the bag and sets it on his knees.

Steve comes alive, then, pushing off the door with his shoulders and holding the bloody hand out toward Sam, forefinger first. “Don’t say it,” he warns, and Sam snickers as he rips open a packet of disinfectant wipes.

Bucky peers over his right shoulder. “I don’t need that, I’ve got the serum, nothing can infect me.”

“Hold up,” Sam snaps. “You call me in basically the middle of the night and make me pause the movie we were watching and then tear all down the whole length of Brooklyn hell-for-leather on the back of Steve’s bike, you’re gonna let me do it the right way.”

Oh, Bucky thinks. That’s how they got here so fast.

But he doesn’t have a retort, then, because Sam swabs a fresh wipe around the wound and it stings, so unexpectedly that Bucky flinches and hisses through his teeth.

“You big baby,” Sam mutters. “I know you’ve had worse.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bucky says, but he’s watching Steve again. Steve looks like he’s torn between wanting to help and wanting to jump out the window; he looks helpless and scared, and Bucky suddenly feels like he’s the one in the enviable position, here.

“Okay, I’m ready,” Sam says. “This is gonna hurt. You want to bite down on something, hold onto something before I start fishing around in there?”

Bucky looks around the apartment, trying to think of something he can squeeze without turning it into a fistful of dust, but then Steve steps forward and sinks to the floor in front of the couch and holds his hands out, both of them, in the air between his chest and Bucky’s knees. There’s still blood on his left hand, drying now and flaking off, except for the in lines of his palm where it lies in threads of red-black.

“If you want,” he says, and he sounds different, confident now that he has something to do. He’s staring at his own hands, his head bowed a little, and he looks, in the white-gold incandescent light shining softly through the cheap paper lantern over the couch, like he’s offering a sacrifice in a temple somewhere. Or maybe he is the sacrifice, the lamb waiting patiently for the knife to fall and spill its consecrated blood on the holy ground, supremely confident in its worthiness.

Unexpectedly, Bucky feels that tickle in his nose again, and now that he knows what it is, what it means, it takes on a whole other dimension. “Thanks,” he says softly, and crosses Steve’s huge palms with his own, curling his flesh and metal fingers around the edge of Steve’s hands and squeezing tight. Steve closes his own fingers like the covers of a book where Bucky’s own hands are the pages and squeezes back, his skin paper-dry and blood-hot against Bucky’s own. He can feel Steve’s pulse, slow and steady, and barely suppresses a shiver when Steve moves his thumb, hardly more than an involuntary twitch, down the delicate metatarsals that stand out like bas-relief on the back of Bucky’s right hand.

He doesn’t look up and Steve doesn’t either, both of them staring at their hands clasped together on Bucky’s knees. The pain throbbing through his shoulder fades into the background and he feels the whole of his being pivot until it is aimed like a shining arrow at the two sun-bright points of contact between them.

“Okay,” he says, clearing his throat when Sam shifts impatiently behind him. Deep breath, in, out. “I’m ready.”

When it’s all over and Sam has matched the bloody knife point to the bloody knife and has sewn him up with neat little stitches and the sweat that had stood out all over his body is starting to dry, Steve squeezes Bucky’s hands again, and then slowly uncurls his fingers where they’re still clamped over Bucky’s like two bear traps dusted with golden hair.

Bucky pulls his own hands away and watches as Steve starts to rub the blood back into flesh turned dead white by the strength of Bucky’s grip. He hisses softly through his teeth and then Bucky can see him grimace out of the corner of his eye.

“Sorry,” Bucky says, and feeling—for what he thinks is the first time in his life—shy, he looks up to meet Steve’s eye. Steve is staring at him again with an intensity that makes Bucky’s soul shrink back a little in his chest, and a tiny voice inside him whispers maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

But something must show on his face; Steve must be able to see the uncertainty, the curtains being pulled closed behind his eyes, because he looks scared for a moment and then smiles, rueful and small, and creaks from his knees to a squat and then up to his feet. Bucky doesn’t breathe a sigh of relief, but it’s a near thing. He closes his eyes for a moment and a wave of exhaustion sweeps over him like a heavy blanket pulled all the way up over his face; all he wants to do is lean back into the sagging couch cushions and go to sleep. Sam and Steve can turn the lights off on the way out.

Sam finishes washing his hands at the sink and dries them on the dishtowel that Bucky has hanging off the oven door. It’s white with little black sloths printed on it, and Bucky sees Sam crack a grin when he folds it back up to hang on the oven again. But then the smile disappears, and he turns around and folds his arms across his chest and says, “So, what now?”

He wants to get up and stretch and yawn in Sam’s face and say, “Well I dunno about you guys but I’m going to bed ’cause the serum’s about to lay me out flat for the next twelve hours.” At least, that’s what he imagines himself doing, but then there’s a twinge in his shoulder that spikes above the humming baseline of pain that’s throbbing in time with his heartbeat, and he winces, feeling the way his heavy eyelids close and then don’t open again.

There’s silence and then some rustling, and he realizes that Steve and Sam must be communicating by hand signals, talking about him right in front of his face. “I can hear you signing,” he says, “and since my eyelids each weigh about twenty pounds, I can’t really get them open to look at what you’re saying, so I’d appreciate it if you could just use your words instead.”

Sam snorts. “Okay then, Jamie. We’ll go and let you rest. You better call me first thing in the morning, otherwise I’m showing back up here and banging on your door until you let me in.”

“Mmhmm, sure,” Bucky mumbles. “I’ll remember.”

There’s another rustle and then Sam says, “I’m gonna go wait downstairs, I’ll give you two a minute.”

The door closes behind him with a click and Bucky says to the silent room, “Well, you found me.”

Steve laughs, a little wetly, and says, “In Gravesend, of all places.”

“Wanted to be within walking distance of Luna Park.”

Steve laughs again and Bucky can hear him shifting back and forth on his feet. “What was wrong with Cobble Hill, huh?”

Bucky tuts disdainfully. “Too expensive these days, do I look like I’m made out of money?”

And then Steve says, “You look like a million bucks to me.”

Bucky cracks one eye and turns his head and frowns at Steve, who is scarlet from his collar all the way up to the tips of his ears, holding himself tall and stiff like an empty suit of armor. Bucky just laughs, low in his throat without opening his mouth, and then closes his eyes again.

“Sit down, you look like you’ve about to have a stroke.”

Steve hesitates for a moment, but then steps across the tiny living room floor and sits gingerly on the edge of the couch, thinking, perhaps correctly, that it won’t hold both of their full weights at the same time.

“I live in Cobble Hill, you know. Went back home,” he says, blatantly trying to change the subject.

“I know.”

“You do?” Steve sounds surprised, but there’s more curiosity than shock in it.

“Steve.” One slow breath, in and out. “I’ve set eyes on you nearly every day for the last year and a half.” He’s so tired, bone-tired, he’s weary, he’s worn thin in all the important places.

“What?” Steve says, and it’s barely a whisper, it’s a breath escaping from the back of his throat. “You… you’ve been… tailing me? Watching me?”

“Look. I’m sorry I didn’t let you find me sooner, but I couldn’t. I… I can’t explain it right now, I’m too tired, the serum’s taking it all out of me trying to heal up this fucking shoulder. You know how it is.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, and his voice is thick and syrupy with something, with the tears or the anger or the desolation or whatever it is that he’s trying to hold back.

“But you found me, now. Ask Sam about it if you want, he knows a little bit.”

Steve doesn’t say anything, but he’s breathing slowly and deliberately, in and out through his nose, and Bucky doesn’t even need to look at him to know that he’s trying to calm himself down.

“And he’s waiting for you downstairs,” Bucky prompts, not necessarily trying to get Steve to leave, but trying to get him to do something, anything.

“Buck…” Steve’s voice goes tight now; it sounds like he’s starting to panic. “I, please, I…”

It feels like lifting a sledgehammer, but Bucky manages to scoot his right arm far enough along the couch cushions that he can smack his fingers weakly into the side of Steve’s thigh, huffing a laugh through his nose when Steve jumps in place like he’s been snakebit. “Calm down, for fuck sake,” he says. “Sam has my number. You get it from him, and then send me a message. I promise you’ll see me again.”

“You promise?” Steve says, and his voice sounds so raw, like it’s been dragged the wrong way over sandpaper, that Bucky makes the herculean effort to open his eyes. Steve is looking at him like he’s a life buoy, that little red-and-white striped doughnut that would save him from drowning if he ever fell into the middle of the ocean. Maybe he is in the middle of the ocean, maybe he is drowning, maybe he does think that Bucky is the miracle that’s going to save him.

Bucky can feel it again, his soul shrinking back in his chest a little bit, trying to put some space between itself and Steve’s huge, all-consuming, burning bush of a presence, but he makes sure that nothing shows on his face. “I promise,” he says.

Steve heaves a huge sigh, his lungs expanding and contracting like the bellows of a great cathedral organ, and scrubs his hands over his face. After a moment he pushes himself to his feet, broadcasting reluctance with every movement of every muscle. “Is there anything you need before I go?”

“You can put the milk in the fridge,” Bucky says, and closes his eyes again. He’s about three minutes away from falling asleep whether Steve is still here or not.

“Sam already did that.” And, oh, Bucky didn’t even notice. Oops.

Then he hears Steve step closer and there’s a shadow over his face, blocking out the light from the paper lantern over the couch. Soft and warm and barely-there like the brush of an owl’s feather, he feels the palm of Steve’s hand cup his jaw for half a second before it disappears, and it pulls as it goes a sense memory from the recesses of his mind, a place in his memory palace that he hasn’t visited in months and months, of Steve in Kreischberg when he pulled Bucky off the table, cupping his face in the palm of his hand in mingled terror and relief because it was the only tender touch they’d had the time for.

His gasps, quietly, belatedly because Steve is already opening the door and stepping through into the hallway. He flicks off the light switch beside the door and says, his voice low and gentle, “Night, Buck,” before pulling the door to with a click.

Bucky’s last thought before he falls asleep is, Oh fuck, the bread pudding.

Chapter Text

The next day there are four new messages on his phone.

[Sam]: Steve told me ur gonna sleep for at least 12 hrs and I shouldn’t expect u to call me at 8 am
[Sam]: but if u don’t call me by noon I’m still coming over
[Sam]: this is a threat
[Sam]: I know where u live now

Once he gets up and stretches and looks at the clock—it’s 11:05 am, right on time—and hobbles over to the kitchenette to put the kettle on for his coffee, he gets the milk out of the fridge and whisks it together with an egg and some nutmeg and ground star anise in a shallow bowl and then slices up the leftover brioche and makes French toast. Bread pudding would have been better, but some days you get stabbed and are immediately thereafter reunited with your long-lost lover that you almost killed twice when you were brainwashed, and you just don’t have the time.

While the French toast is sizzling in the pan, he picks his phone up off the table and calls Sam, who answers on the first ring.

“Hey! How are you doing? How’s the shoulder?”

Bucky wiggles it a little, and there’s nothing but a tiny twinge deep under the cuff. “Just peachy, a little stiff and a little sore, but that’ll be gone by work tonight.”

“Don’t tell me you’re actually going to work,” Sam says flatly.

“’Course I am, I’m fine, or I’ll be fine, why would I call off?” He flips the piece of bread over in the pan and then pulls a plate off of the dish rack.

“I, uh, I don’t know how to tell you this, Jamie. I’m sorry to have to be the bearer of bad news. But you… you got stabbed last night. In the back. Literally.”

“Hmm, I don’t know,” Bucky says. “Sounds farfetched.”

Sam laughs. “Right, right. Okay. I guess you’re back in fighting fit.”

“Yep.” The first piece of French toast is done, and he slides it onto the plate and plops another piece into the pan.

“Well,” Sam says. “That’s good. Um.”

He’s working up to something, it’s obvious, and it’s clearly about Steve, so Bucky just says, “Spit it out.”

“Okay. So, I gotta ask, because he’s my friend and I’m your friend, what are your intentions concerning Steve?”

Bucky can picture Sam’s face, his serious eyebrows drawn down over those big dark eyes, his lips pursed in a frown, and he cracks up, throwing his head back and laughing until his shoulder twinges again. “What are you, Papa Rogers? Standing on the front porch with a shotgun? Afraid I’m gonna get him in the family way in the back of my ’69 Camero?”

“You think whoever stabbed you could have done us all a favor and got you right in the sense of humor,” Sam says sourly.

“He tried, but alas, he missed.” Bucky pulls a jar of fig jam out of the fridge and spreads a thick smear of it on the French toast.

“Seriously, though, Jamie. You don’t have to tell me anything, I’m just wondering, but…” He trails off.

“I know,” Bucky says, turning back to the stove and flipping the second piece of toast. “You care.”

“Yeah, of course I do. And Steve’s the kind of oblivious bastard who makes you feel like his feelings are little baby birds and you’re responsible for making sure they don’t fall out of the nest.”

Bucky remembers that time he heard Steve tell Sam that he didn’t need therapy, he was fine, and he sighs. “I’m not gonna hurt him on purpose, Sam. That’s all I can guarantee.”

“Well, that’s all I can ask, I guess.”

At 11:30, as he’s swiping the last of his French toast through the last dollop of jam on his plate, his phone buzzes three more times.

[unknown number]: Hi, it’s Steve. I hope you’re feeling better this morning, I know the serum will put you to rights but if you really did sleep on the couch you might be stiff
[unknown number]: After I left I thought I should have helped you get to your bed, I’m sorry I didn’t
[unknown number]: Please let me know how you’re doing when you wake up

It’s a little stilted, but he knows that Steve’s trying not to spook him, like Sam said. It’s considerate, actually, to let Bucky set the tone. It’s sweet.

[Bucky]: Yeah, I’m stiff, but it’s fine.
[Bucky]: The shoulder’s a little sore, but it should go away before I have to go to work tonight
[unknown number]: Where do you work?
[Bucky]: Sam not tell you?
[Bucky]: It’s how we met
[Bucky]: I teach classes at a cooking supply store in Carroll Gardens.
[unknown number]: Wait, Funnel number 9?
[unknown number]: Sam told me he was going there for a knife skills class but then never mentioned it again.
[unknown number]: That was you??
[Bucky]: yep

The three little dots show that Steve is typing, and then they disappear. After a minute, they bubble across the dialogue box again and disappear.

Bucky washes his plate and fork and the frying pan and then drinks the rest of his coffee while he watches the dots appear and disappear a few more times. Finally, he just types:

[Bucky]: We could meet for a drink tonight after work if you want

And then he locks his phone and goes into the bathroom to take a shower.

Work is fine, his shoulder is fine, but he’s antsy even after he’s done his tried-and-true trick of rolling the silver lightning threads of his nerves up onto a big wooden spindle, like the kind that electrical wires come on, and then tying them off at the end and chaining the spindle to a few cinder blocks and pushing it into the Gowanus, where it sinks through the sludge at the bottom and is never seen again.

They do come back again, though, the ghost of electrical installations past, and flutter loose-endedly in the pit of his stomach while he’s trying to teach five eager Brooklynites how to do small dice without losing a finger in the process.

When he’s finished with his last class, he cleans up as quickly as possible, grabs his backpack, and walks through the swinging door straight into Diego’s back. Diego stumbles forward and almost crashes into the big wooden table that takes up the center of the front room, but Bucky catches him by the shoulders and sets him gently back on his feet.

“Jesus, you’re strong,” Diego says breathlessly, and tentatively reaches out a finger to poke Bucky in the metal bicep. Bucky watches him with narrowed eyes, but he knows that Diego won’t actually come to the right conclusion. “Fuck, your arm feels like it’s made out of granite, how much time you spend at the gym?” he says, and then fondles his own bicep for comparison.

Bucky steps lightly out of the way before Diego can start asking to see his metal bicep up close, and is almost at the door when Flannery looks up from the accounts he’s going over and says, “You usually take longer to get cleaned up, where are you going in such a rush, do you have a date, are you dating someone?” He widens his eyes, looking innocent and sweetly concerned, while Diego says, “Ooooh, Jamie’s got a date,” in a sing-song playground voice.

Bucky whirls around on the ball of his foot and gives them both the Winter Soldier stare, which makes Flannery crack up over his excel files and Diego fan himself dramatically with his hand. “I do not have a date. I am meeting a friend for drinks and I don’t want to be late.”

“Who’s the friend?” Diego says, and immediately afterwards Flannery says, “And when did you meet them?”

Bucky takes in a deep breath and huffs it out through his nose, trying to look like he’s irritated, but he’s mostly just amused. “His name is…”—he hesitates dramatically, then arches his eyebrows and widens his eyes, very we all know this is a lie—“Steve, and I met him…” Now he actually pauses to think. “In 1924” was just about to trip right off the end of his treacherous tongue, and he knows that Flannery and Diego, blithely oblivious, would have just laughed it off, but he doesn’t even want to joke about it, not when it could be remembered at a later date. So he just says the other truth, the other half-truth: “I met him yesterday.”

“Oh jesus,” Diego says, fanning himself again. “He didn’t even wait the mandatory three days to text you again? He’s in love with you, Jamie, mark my words.” Flannery nods archly in agreement, and Bucky feels something bubble underneath his skin like the soft carbonation in a glass of fresh champagne. It’s itchy, but a good itchy, like the feeling he gets when he’s been sitting down too long and he needs to get up and stretch, touch his toes, feel each muscle group pull and tighten until the too-big, too-small, too-there feeling is gone.

He makes a big show of rolling his eyes. “Yeah, whatever. See you guys tomorrow.” Then he does his lazy salute and pushes through the door into the cold, crisp October night.

Steve is already at the bar; of course he is. It’s Friday, so the place is more crowded than usual, Sam and Bucky’s booth taken up by a group of women in their twenties, but Steve has secured two stools at the end of the bar by the wall and is sitting on one of them, drinking out of a short, stout bottle, looking around with a carefully belied nervousness.

He has a snapback pulled down low over his eyes and a dark blue sweater with a cowl neck that looks like it’s intended to soften his jawline. He’s hunched a little in a way that makes him look exactly like a tall man trying to hide his height, and Bucky heaves a sigh on the inside. Steve in stealth mode is like capsaicin in peppers; it’s meant to be a deterrent, but it ends up being the main attraction, instead.

He spots Bucky as soon as he pushes through the door and relaxes visibly, giving him a silly little wave that he immediately looks like he regrets. Bucky manages not to roll his eyes as he pushes between the crowded tables and slides onto the stool with his back to the wall.

There’s another bottle on the bar top, hidden behind Steve’s elbow, and he pushes it over nervously, eyes flicking back and forth between the bottle and Bucky’s face.

“Sam, uh, he told me to get you whatever I was having.”

“Sam tell you to let me sit with my back to the wall?” Bucky asks, and drinks half of the still-cold bottle in one go before he looks at the label. It’s Red Stripe, he likes Red Stripe.

“Yeah, uh yeah,” Steve stammers, “is that okay?”

Christ, he looks so nervous. Bucky doesn’t remember the last time he saw Steve this nervous, not counting yesterday, which was a fluke. Maybe never? Steve has always been fierce and bold, it’s a constant, like the value of pi: you can calculate the circumference of a circle with Steve’s chutzpah. It’s unsettling to see him wrongfooted, and some little part of Bucky socks its fist into the palm of its other hand and says, I’m gonna fix this, by golly.

So he smiles his widest, truest smile, the one that hikes the right corner of his mouth up and presses the dimples into his cheeks and folds the skin around his eyes into soft wrinkles. “It’s good to see you, Steve,” he says, and puts most of his feeling into it. It wouldn’t do to put all of his feeling into it; that would be overcompensation.

He can see Steve relax like room-temperature butter, his shoulders melting back into his torso and a light coming on behind his eyes. “Better than yesterday,” he says, and it’s easy for Bucky to smile this time; he doesn’t even have to think about how to do it.

“Yeah, well, yesterday was a little rough.” He holds up his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart.

“Are you okay, now? I know you’re not totally healed, you can’t fool me like you can fool Sam.”

“I don’t think I can fool Sam, either, he just knows not to press his luck.” Bucky brings the bottle to his mouth and drains the rest of it. He’s on high alert; he doesn’t miss the way Steve watches his throat as he swallows and then glances away.

“How’d he ever get stuck with the two of us as friends?” Steve says.

“Must’ve pressed his luck too hard and it broke.” He sets his bottle back down on the bar with a dull clink.

Steve laughs, soft and genuine, and looks at Bucky, just looks at him. The tangle of nerves in Bucky’s stomach comes back, and he leans over the bar to signal for another round, trying to break the tension, torn between wanting to bask in the true blue glory of that gaze and wanting to crawl under his bar stool and hide until Steve looks away. It’s strange to both want something inordinately and still feel repelled by it when you get it, but that’s where he is. Steve is just so much, so much of everything, all wrapped up in the body of one big, golden demigod with Paul Newman’s smile and a gaze like solar radiation unfiltered by the atmosphere. Bucky’s back feels cold against the wall of the bar in comparison to his front, which is practically burnt to a crisp.

“So tell me about yourself,” he says, and then winces. What’s there to know about Steve that he doesn’t know already? Plenty, but it sounds like a question you ask of a stranger, and Steve might think that Bucky doesn’t remember the fire escape and the iron-framed bed and the haircuts and the little apartment that was just big enough for the two of them. But it’s not like he can come right out and say, “Hey, don’t worry, I still remember that time you fucked me so hard I fell out of bed and sprained my wrist and had to miss work for two days.” Well, he could, but it’s not really appropriate for whatever tentative little dance they’re doing now.

But while this is all unrolling at the speed of light across the stock ticker of his mind, Steve is just smiling shyly, looking down at his fresh bottle of beer and working his thumbnail under one corner of the label. “There isn’t much to tell,” he says. “I do work stuff, I hang out with Sam. Sometimes I hang out with Nat or Clint, but we’re not as close.” Then he looks up at Bucky, “They’re, uh…”

“I know, you don’t have to explain,” Bucky interrupts.

Steve nods, looking relieved. “And… and for a long time I was looking for you. Spent a lot of time on that, actually. It was really important to me.” Bucky feels that hot-cold pull-push feeling again. “But now I found you,” Steve says, and beams.

What can Bucky do but beam right back? There’s no other choice, if his face had done anything else, he’d have smashed himself over the head with his own beer bottle as punishment. They must look like two shadeless light bulbs sitting in the corner there, beaming at each other by turns. Nobody’s squinting, though, so they’re probably still incognito.

In an effort to turn the wattage down a little, Bucky scoffs and says, “I let you find me, actually.”

Steve, the asshole, just shrugs unconcernedly and says, “Eh, I would have tracked you down eventually. It was more important to me than anything else in my life, seeing you again.”

All of a sudden Bucky has had it with sitting on a bar stool playing at being a lamp. He needs cold air, an empty sky above his head, hard concrete underfoot and the darkness of poorly lit side streets to hide his face in.

He pulls out his wallet and counts out enough money to cover both rounds, plus a tip, throwing it down on the bar before he stands up and hikes his backpack over his shoulder. Steve is looking at him now half curiously and half panic-stricken. Bucky rolls his eyes again. “I just need some fresh air. Come on.” He grabs the sleeve of Steve’s sweater between two fingers and pulls him unresisting out of the bar.

“I didn’t even finish my beer,” Steve complains once they’re out on the street, walking at a brisk clip in the direction of Steve’s house.

“What are you whining about,” Bucky says, “You don’t even drink, normally.”

“Jesus christ, how do you know so much about what I do and don’t do?” Steve sounds a little indignant, actually, and Bucky hastens to say, “Sam told me, calm your tits.”

Steve snorts through his nose like a Looney Tunes bull. “You and Sam been doing a lot of talking about me behind my back?”

“Would you rather I know all this stuff about you because I’ve been peeping through your curtains?”

“Have… have you?” He sounds unsure, now, and Bucky realizes all of a sudden that Steve has lost the knack of telling when he’s joking. Or maybe it’s Bucky who’s lost the knack of joking. Maybe that’s part of why Steve seems so nervous; he can’t read Bucky like he used to be able to. It used to be that he would pick up on changes in Bucky’s mood before Bucky himself even knew something was wrong, asking him what was the matter when Bucky himself felt fine, only to be irritated into an angry outburst by something exceedingly minor five minutes later.

So he says, “Okay. Lemme lay my cards out on the table.” And then, after a moment’s thought, “Half of my cards. I gotta retain some of my feminine mystique.”

Steve laughs, put at ease again. “Okay?”

“So, I tail you, not every day. But, let’s say, five times a week, sometimes more, sometimes less.”

“You tail me? Present tense?”

Bucky’s caught off guard and he trips over a broken piece of sidewalk in the split-second that he’s not paying attention to where he’s putting his boots. You’re a shit spy, Barnes, the disapproving Soldier voice says, at the same time that he feels Steve’s big, warm hand close around his metal elbow. The servos in the elbow hum in appreciation and his forearm twitches, but he’s careful not to do anything that would look like jerking away or throwing Steve off.

He looks over at Steve, who’s looking over at him, his brow furrowed with some small emotion. He lets go of Bucky’s elbow, and Bucky makes a show of dusting off the front of his jacket to give them both a moment’s-worth of space.

“No,” he says finally, “past tense. Why would I need to tail you if I’ve got your phone number? I can just hack into your GPS and do it that way while I’m sitting at home in my underwear. Or there’s always trackers. I could have half a dozen on you already and you’d never know it.”

He darts a glance over at Steve again, and he’s gone back to grinning in the sulfur-yellow pool of streetlight they’re just passing through. Even in the worst possible lighting conditions, he still looks like he was sculpted from buttery marble by Pygmalion himself, the bastard. It’s very inconsiderate, ruining all of Bucky’s plans for walking around in the dark and not looking at each other.

“But, to answer your other other question, I have looked through your windows sometimes, from across the street.” He doesn’t mention that sometimes he was at street level and sometimes he was on the roof with a scope.

But Steve just says, easily, “I guess that’s what I get for not keeping my curtains closed in the living room.”

“Yes, of course it’s what you get!” Bucky is suddenly indignant. “You idiot, how could you not have more sense? You’re lucky it was just me watching you dump dead moths all over your face and not some right-wing nutjob with a semi-automatic and a grudge.”

“Wait a second,” Steve says, and stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk. An indignant lady in high heels sniffs at their rudeness and click-clacks around them and away. “You saw that? When I was changing the light fixture?”

“Sure did,” Bucky says, and it’s his turn to grab Steve by the elbow, pulling him down a side street that cuts over toward his house. “It was hilarious.”

“I… okay, wait, fuck you.” Bucky laughs, his grin so wide it’s about to split on both ends. “You could have seen me any number of times watching TV or, or, or lifting weights, but no, it has the be the dead moth thing.”

“I could have seen you lifting weights, too, how do you know I didn’t?” Bucky shrugs, nonchalant, but he’s actually kicking himself inside. He would have done less tailing and more stakeouts if he’d know he could have caught Steve lifting weights in his living room.

“So why didn’t you ever…” Steve starts, but Bucky’s luck runs true once again, and he stops on the sidewalk and interrupts, “We’re here.”

Steve looks around slack-jawed like he’s just stepped off the bus from Boringville, West Dakota. “Wait, this is my house.”

Bucky lays his right hand over his heart and lets his eyes bug out. “Lord have mercy, is it really? What a coincidence!”

Steve laughs, but it peters out nervously at the end. “You, um, I mean, do you want to come in?”

“Didn’t I tell you I wanted to keep some of my feminine mystique?” Bucky gives him a look like I would, but I’ve got a reputation to preserve.

Steve just rubs the back of his neck and kicks the concrete where the sidewalk plate tectonics have pushed it up into a little Himalaya. “Oh, okay.” He looks disappointed, but also like he’d expected it. Then he says, “Thanks, uh, thanks for meeting me, I really appreciate it. It means so much to me,” and it’s so painfully shy and earnest that Bucky’s hard and crusty heart melts like chocolate in a bain marie.

He takes a deep breath and then lets it out slowly, giving himself time to back out before he actually comes out and says it. No? Nobody? Okay then. “You’re not pulling teeth, here, Steve. Actually… a few weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to let you find me. I was tired of hiding. But I just didn’t know how to do it, not until last night when Sam said he was at your house, and I thought, okay, why not, I’m sick of running. I just want to see Steve again.”

He’s been looking everywhere but Steve, at their shoes, at Steve’s front steps and the painted iron handrail, at the car parked in front of his house, a beat-up old Golf Cabriolet. But now he glances up at Steve’s face and is shocked, and then not so shocked, to see that his eyes are damp with tears. He’s not actually crying, not yet, but he’s looking at Bucky like he’s the last good thing left in a cruel, hard world. “So, uh, there’s another card for you,” Bucky finishes weakly.

Steve looks at him for one long moment more and then sniffs once and heaves a sigh. “Okay. You won’t come in, that’s fine, I understand. But, um, when can I see you again?”

Bucky thinks, I feel like I’m being courted, and then, maybe that was Steve’s plan all along? Step one: find Bucky; Step 2: Woo Bucky; Step 3: ????; Step 4: Profit. Well, fuck it. He’s going to let himself be wooed if that’s what Steve wants to do. It’d be nice to be pursued by Steve in the broad light of day, for a change.

It’s strange to think that they have to do this dance again, but then he realizes that they never actually did this dance in the first place. It was always Steve and Bucky, best friends forever, until that night on the fire escape when Bucky looked over and Steve was sitting there in the speckled half-light in one of Bucky’s old undershirts, leaning back on his elbows and looking at the leafed-out oak tree that made a dark curtain between them and the building across the street. The neck of the undershirt was so stretched-out that it sagged halfway down Steve’s narrow chest, and where it was tented up over his heart, Bucky could see one small nipple, rosy pink against Steve’s pale, milky skin.

Then he had ignored the nerves in his stomach and leaned over into Steve’s space until Steve had looked up at him, eyebrows knit together in a soft question, Yeah?

He had kissed Steve and Steve hadn’t even hesitated, had just kissed him back like he’d been expecting Bucky to do it, had been waiting, actually, for years for Bucky to grow the balls to do it. It was hot and smoldering, an August 15th kind of kiss, and his lips burned with it, but when he finally opened his mouth, expecting Steve to part his lips and let Bucky’s tongue inside, he had bitten Bucky instead, hard and sharp on the bottom lip, and then while Bucky wiped the blood off, had said, “About fucking time, Barnes. Now get inside and take your pants off.”

So no, there was no dance, there was no courtship, there was only before, when they were best friends, and after, when they were still best friends, but now they were fucking.

All of a sudden, he realizes that Steve’s nervous fidgeting is ratcheting up and up, winding tighter and tighter, and he knows that he’s been silent for a little too long. “Uh, sorry, I was just thinking,” he says flimsily, the excuse but a kleenex covering the massive emotional hard-on his brain has popped in its pants.

“Dangerous pastime,” Steve says, sounding slightly more at ease.

“So, you want to hang out again? How about Sunday?”

“Yeah, hang out. Sunday’s fine. Yeah.” Steve manages to sound both relieved and disappointed at same time, and Bucky thinks I was right, he is trying to do this proper and I sound like I’m giving him the “just friends” talk. That’s not what he wants, but it’s not what he doesn’t want, either, and he’s not trying to tease Steve or string him along, but he has to get this right so that Steve doesn’t get the wrong idea, but also doesn’t jump to conclusions and fireman-carry Bucky to the county clerk’s office for a marriage license.

So he steps forward, not exactly in Steve’s space but close enough that he can hear Steve’s heartbeat pick up. “Well, I made the plans this time, so I think it’s your turn to pick. Where d’you wanna take me?”

A smile breaks out suddenly over Steve’s face like a wave crashing against a seawall. His teeth are bright white, glowing softly in the light from the streetlamp down the sidewalk, and his grin is so loud that Bucky can almost hear it. It sounds like a golden bell ringing sweetly in the night.

“Lemme think about it, okay? Gotta make it good.”

“I’m pretty easy to impress, Rogers, don’t strain yourself.”

Steve’s smile tones down a little bit, but it’s not like it disappears, it just turns its back a little, considerately hiding its brilliance for a minute so that Bucky doesn’t burn his retinas. “I’ll do what I want,” he says softly, and oh. That’s Steve.

Bucky wants to kiss him all of a sudden, desperately wants to bite Steve’s bottom lip bloody and win the century-long, one-sided grudge-holding contest, but he thinks, Later, don’t get ahead of yourself. But…

“Okay, send me a text and tell me where to meet you. And give me a hug before I go?”

Steve’s eyes widen for a split-second and then he almost trips forward into Bucky’s arms, grabbing him around the shoulders and squeezing him so hard that the servos whine as they recalibrate to deal with the sudden pressure. Bucky brings his own arms up and around Steve’s freakishly tiny waist, hardly bigger than it was when he was a skinny little stick of dynamite, spitting and hissing in Bucky’s embrace.

After a second, he says, against his will, “Fuck, you smell so good,” and then pushes away before his traitorous body thinks that maybe it’s got carte blanche. Steve is looking like a cherry bonbon in the sun, all gooey and warm, with an actually quite stupid smile on his face.

“Whelp,” Bucky says. “It’s late, I gotta go.”

“Okay,” Steve says, “see you on Sunday.”

Another moment passes.

“Whelp,” Bucky says again. “It’s late, I gotta go.”

Steve laughs, soft and low and says, “Night, Buck,” sticking his hands in the pockets of his jeans and rummaging around for his keys. When he gets to the top of his stairs, Bucky finally finds the wherewithal to spin around on the ball of his foot and march off toward the subway, whistling through his teeth as he goes.

Chapter Text

Just his luck, Steve gets called away the next week on a mission, and Sam too, and Bucky has to spend seven long days with nothing but his own damn self to keep him company. There’s work to distract him, of course, and Flannery and Diego, and Aoife one morning when he goes to the Luncheonette to get doughnuts because he’s feeling too sorry for himself to make breakfast. But when you let yourself look forward to something and then you don’t get it, well, it makes a body feel something that could be adjacent to sadness.

He’s bereft, actually, when Steve texts him on Saturday morning, though it takes him a long time to admit it.

[Steve]: There’s been an emergency
[Steve]: With work
[Steve]: I won’t be able to make it tomorrow!!
[Steve]: I’m really sorry
[Steve]: I was really looking forward to it :(((((((((((((((
[Bucky]: Don’t worry about it
[Bucky]: Me too
[Bucky]: Text me when you get back please
[Steve]: Of course!!!
[Steve]: Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone
[Bucky]: How could I, you’re taking all the stupid with you

Steve replies with an incomprehensible string of emojis, but Bucky interprets them as something like this: I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU REMEMBER THAT!!

So, on Sunday, Bucky cleans his house within an inch of its life, puts on his beat-up sneakers and runs down to Luna Park just to look at it and overlay the agony of the present with the glow of memory. It looks nothing like it used to—the old park burned down and wasn’t rebuilt until just a few years ago, and not even in the same place. The paint is brighter, the Ferris wheel is taller, and everything has an air of 21st-century robustness about it that is hilariously absent in the tooth-rattling thrill of his memory. If he squints, though, he can still see Steve losing his lunch down the side of the car at the top of the Trip to the Moon’s highest hill.

He laughs to himself, but the mirth dissipates quickly. For a short, awful second, he feels a painful squeeze of longing for Steve from before the war: the way he fit under Bucky’s arm, the hollow-boned grace of his limbs, the lovely litheness of his slender body. He misses the faint whistle in Steve’s chest at night, his near-sighted squint, the sharp knobs of his crooked spine. He even misses the way that love and warfare went hand in hand for Steve, who was always striving to prove that, between the two of them, he was the dirtier fighter, the quicker wit, the stronger will, the better fuck.

There’s a glimpse of the old Steve in the new one, but it’s there and gone like a mote of dust floating through a sunbeam. Fuck you, Steve had said the other night, and I’ll do what I want, so Bucky knows that all the old vinegar must still be there, somewhere. His fingers itch to reach into Steve’s marrow and root around for it, pull it out from under whatever dusty pile of duty or fear it’s hiding under. For another long, painful second, he wants to see Steve so bad that tears spring to his eyes, but then someone bumps into him on the sidewalk, and he remembers why he’s here. Steve is on a mission and Bucky is trying to run himself into a state of blithe uncaring, again.

The sidewalk feels too crowded all of a sudden; it’s too warm an October Sunday for him to get any peace and quiet at Coney Island. He turns his back on the park and the ocean and puts his head down and starts to run.

On Monday, he leaves the house right after lunch because he’s still antsy and irritable and he knows he needs to walk around a bit and work the kinks out of his soul before he goes into work. He takes the subway up to the Prospect Park station and then walks the rest of the way, cutting down side streets to hit the maximum amount of crunchy leaf piles and avoid the most people. Closer to Funnel No. 9, he passes the little shop where he’d bought his socks and sweeps right through the door on a whim, not even bothering to look at what’s on display in the window.

When he comes back out again, half an hour later, he’s several hundred dollars poorer, but all the richer for a teal cashmere V-neck sweater that looks like a peacock’s tail feather and is so soft that the sensors in his metal arm struggle to perceive it. His plan is to wear it when Steve finally gets back from wherever just to enjoy the way his eyes pop out of his head.

He leaves the shop and starts walking in the direction of Funnel No. 9, thinking about the sweater and the way it felt on his skin and the way the V is deep enough to see the shadow that lies between his pecs—the merest suggestion of tits, but all the more provocative for being so subtle. He’s thinking about the way the shop assistant had whistled in genuine admiration when he’d stepped out of the narrow changing room, and he gloats a little, thinking Steve’s gonna shit himself.

But then some other part of him smacks him on the back of the neck and he puts his hand up to rub at the phantom sting. What do you think you’re playing at? he asks himself. Is this a game?

No, of course it’s not, he’s got the notebook with the list of pros and cons at home to prove it. But it sobers him, and his good mood evaporates in a second. He kicks viciously at a leaf pile and scatters it into the street, and then swears at himself for destroying the perfect pleasure of wading ankle-deep through dead leaves in the middle of October. There are too few perfect pleasures in life, and they shouldn’t be wasted on a temper tantrum.

He can feel his interior self frowning at him in disapprobation, and he realizes it’s pulling his face down into a hair-raising scowl because a dog drags its owner across the street to avoid him. Okay, he thinks. Let’s talk about this.

It’s impossible to find a sidewalk bench in New York because no one is allowed to be comfortable without spending money for the privilege, so he finds a nice, low window ledge to plant his butt on and sits there for a minute, thinking hard.

It feels, on the one hand, that this is the most important thing he’s ever done in his life, whatever it is that he’s actually doing right now. Getting to know Steve? No, that’s not right. He’s known Steve for almost a century, he can read Steve like a book, mostly. He thinks. So maybe Steve has changed a little bit, maybe Bucky has changed a little bit, too. Maybe they’ve both changed, but in opposite directions so that there’s more than just a little bit of difference between them. But now that he’s spent a couple of hours around Steve, he knows that it’s not an insurmountable distance, it’s not something that’s going to need crampons and ice axes to overcome.

It feels… maybe it feels important because it’s a negotiation, a sort of happy haggling over the terms and conditions of Bucky’s reinsertion into society, or at least the final leg of it. He’s got a job and an apartment and a teal blue cashmere sweater and he can take care of himself; he’s pretty well reinserted, already.

But not all the way.

He hasn’t really turned the key of himself in the lock of his life, not yet, and maybe that’s what this is. If he and Steve can… if Steve likes him the way he is now, if things work out, if they can be friends (or… or?? a little voice shrieks inside), that’s when the last tumbler will submit to the teeth of the key, when the lock will click, when the door will swing open, and when Bucky’s real life will be waiting for him on the other side.

Maybe I’m putting too much pressure on myself, here, he thinks, but just then, someone bangs on the glass behind him and yells, “You’re blocking my light!” and he jumps up and waves an apology and slinks away, leaving his thoughts buzzing behind him like a cloud of gnats.

Four days later, on Friday afternoon as he’s washing up the lunch dishes (one dish, one fork), his phone buzzes from where it’s sitting on his overstuffed bookshelf. He dries his hands eagerly and snatches it up.

[Steve]: We’re back!!
[Steve]: Finally
[Steve]: Everything’s fine
[Steve]: Could we meet Sunday? Like we were planning to last week?

Bucky can feel the grin that spreads itself all over his face like butter on hot toast. It’s stupid, it’s mortifying, but there’s no one to see him but the broken spines of his second-hand books, so he just lets his mouth do its thing.

[Bucky]: Sure, when/where?

Then he locks the phone and walks the two steps back to the kitchen to dry the plate and fork.

Half a minute later the phone buzzes again, but it’s not Steve.

[Sam]: Heads up u might get a visit from the Widow
[Sam]: Steve was texting u and she asked why he was smiling like a ding dong and he spilled the beans
[Sam]: Worst spy ever i swear to god

Bucky frowns, the hair on the back of his neck prickling as if she were already there, standing in the two feet of space between his back and the kitchen sink.

[Jamie]: Shit
[Jamie]: You mean a bad visit or a good visit

He doesn’t have to wait but ten seconds for Sam to write back.

[Sam]: Neither?
[Sam]: I think she just wants to make sure ur on the level
[Sam]: Don’t fight her, her intention isn’t to fight u
[Sam]: And it would cause more problems than it would solve
[Sam]: She really cares about Steve

Bucky’s lip curls a little without him even realizing it. She really cares about Steve? If she really cared about Steve, she’d be helping him, he thinks, the same thing he thought about Sam all those months ago when he was first sizing him up, territorial and secretive. But Steve is difficult to help, always has been, so how would he know? Maybe she is helping him. Maybe he should give her the benefit of the doubt. There’s a lot about Steve’s friends that he doesn’t know, and just like Sam surprised him into an unlikely friendship, maybe there’s something more to the Widow than prickly claws and red hair from a bottle.

Then the phone buzzes again.

[Steve:] What would you say to ice cream on a cold day
[Bucky]: I would not say no
[Steve]: :)))))))))))
[Steve]: Okay well there’s a really good place in Rockaway that I really like
[Bucky]: Okay well Rockaway is on the dark side of the moon
[Bucky]: It’ll take forever to get there
[Steve]: Not if we take the bike ;)

And, sure, Steve’s way of mixing typographical smiley faces and emojis is kind of weird and kind of silly, but it’s so Steve it makes his teeth hurt. Also…

[Bucky]: Wait a sec where do you park the bike
[Bucky]: I’ve never seen it at your house
[Steve]: Yeah I usually keep it at the Tower bc I don’t have anywhere to park it at my house
[Steve]: I hardly ever use it cause it’s kind of a pain
[Steve]: But this is a special occasion ;)

There goes that twinge in his teeth again, like biting down into an ice-cold cherry popsicle. He clenches his jaw just to feel it ache a little. Steve is just so… goofy. Sincere, but with a knock-on effect that makes you feel you should smile at babies instead of just making blankly menacing eye contact, or tip your hat to passing pigeons, or some other Mary Poppins shit.

[Bucky]: That’s fine, you gonna pick me up?
[Steve]: Yep, you want to have lunch out too? I could come get you at 11?
[Bucky]: Perfect, see you then

Another incomprehensible string of emojis, and Bucky catches himself grinning down at his phone, looking mighty goofy, himself. He scowls, just for the practice, and then locks his phone and goes into the bedroom to change for work.

The Widow shows up in the City Luncheonette the next morning, eating a doughnut, one of Aoife’s cigarettes tucked behind her ear. She’s laughing about something under her breath but turns to look at the door when the bell tinkles and Aoife says, “Oh, hey, Jamie, you look half-decent today. Coffee and two of the regular?”

Bucky stands there for a second and takes in the tableau, Aoife and the Widow, same red hair, same milky-pale skin, sharp little chins, the both of them. They could be a big sister and a little sister, except for the fact that Aoife’s eyes are as pale blue as a starflower and she’s got at least eight inches on the Widow.

“Hmm,” he grunts. “Make it four.” Then as Aoife turns her back to grab the coffee pot, he slides onto the stool next to the Widow and says, “I guess I should thank you for not showing up in my house.”

“I was told that probably wouldn’t go over very well.”

“God bless Sam,” Bucky says, and maybe God doesn’t exist and blessings definitely don’t, but he means it from the bottom of his heart, anyway.

“And Barton. He wanted to come instead, thought you might react better. But I can’t trust second-hand information.”

“Good praxis,” is all Bucky says before Aoife’s sliding his chipped mug of coffee across the counter. She’s looking back and forth between them curiously as she pulls his doughnuts out of the case and puts them on a plate, and Bucky can see the question ready to trip off the end of her sharp tongue.

“Do you know each other?” she asks, gesturing with her forefinger between the two of them.

“No,” says Bucky, at the same time that the Widow says, “Yes.”

Aoife furrows her brow, then looks at Bucky with a frown as she sets the plate down in front of him. “Bad luck running into your ex at a diner, man,” she says, and then it’s Bucky’s turn to furrow his brow while the Widow, to his everlasting surprise, snorts gracelessly into her own half-empty cup of coffee. Aoife just looks amused, and smugly arch, proud of herself for having ferreted out what she thinks is one of Bucky’s little secrets.

“She’s not my ex,” he says petulantly, half because he wants to explain himself and half because he wants to wipe that smug smile off her face.

“No, I’m friends with his ex,” the Widow says, and Bucky whips around to give her a scalding look, How dare you.

“No honor among thieves?” he says, and is surprised for the second time in half a minute when she grimaces and mutters, “Sorry.” Then, a little louder, to Aoife, “Sorry, that’s all the secrets you’ll be getting out of me about this asshole. My lips are sealed.”

Aoife pouts, disappointed. “So are his. He’s been coming here for a year and I don’t know anything about him but the fact that he likes crullers and coffee with a drop of milk and he understands Gaelic, even if he doesn’t speak it. I don’t even know how old he is or what he does.” She swivels so that she’s facing Bucky head-on, one fist tucked into her apron at the curve of her waist and the other elbow propped on it. She waves at Bucky with that hand, and then tucks it under her chin like Rodin’s thinker. “But now that I’ve got someone here who can confirm or deny, I guess I should try out a theory or two. Let’s see… you’re twenty-eight and you’re a waiter at some macrobiotic place in Manhattan, but you cam on the side to make ends meet.”

Bucky can see the Widow smiling faintly out of the corner of his eye, and he gives neither of them the satisfaction of a proper response. “Nope,” he says.

“Okay…” Aoife says, narrowing her eyes, “then you’re a shop assistant in one of those places that has only two sneakers and a pair of jeans on display, and you moonlight as a dancer in a high-dollar strip club.”

Hmm, slightly closer, Bucky thinks. “Nope.”

“Oh, come on,” Aoife huffs. “Look at those legs.” She leans over the bar top and gives Bucky a slow up-and-down, or as much of him as she can see. “They’re like five miles long. Don’t tell me you’re letting them go to waste.”

Bucky is nonplussed, but he keeps his face flat and irritated. It’s not that hard; he can see the Widow grinning openly out of the corner of his eye. “Aoife, stop hitting on me. I’m too old for you by an order of magnitude.”

“I’m not hitting on you,” Aoife says disgustedly. “I’m a lesbian.”

And then, the very last straw on the top of a whole hayloft full of straw that brings the whole barn down with a resounding crash, she flicks her eyes subtly over to the Widow. But not subtly enough to escape Bucky’s attention. He drains the rest of his coffee in one swallow and motions to his plate. “Good for you, I’m gay. Now put these in a bag, please. And give me another dozen in a separate bag.”

“In a hurry?” the Widow asks, as Aoife rolls her eyes and huffs in irritation, but does as he asks.

“Yep,” he says, pulling a bill out of his wallet and throwing it down on the zinc countertop. He takes the two bags from Aoife and says, “See you later,” then walks out through the door without a backwards glance. He knows that she’ll be coming after him, though, so he just walks one door down and waits in front of the computer repair place, leaning up against the brick wall and looking at his own house across the street, bisected by the elevated subway tracks.

Sure enough, a minute later, the door to the Luncheonette opens and the Widow walks out, throwing a sweet smile over her shoulder before letting the door swing shut behind her. The smile disappears, all traces of its existence erased, as she saunters over to where Bucky is leaning against the building.

“Gaelic?” She leans up against the building next to him, close enough to give some semblance of privacy, but not so close that he could get the jump on her.

“Picked it up at Steve’s house when we were kids and never forgot it. Well, I guess I did forget it, but then it came back like everything else.”

“You know why I’m here.”

“Of course. You don’t think Steve can handle making his own choices like a big boy, so you gotta come make sure I’m good enough for him.”

She doesn’t say anything for almost a full minute, and he’s not sure whether she’s angry or amused; the sliver of her profile that he can see out of the corner of his eye gives nothing away. But he’s not at all prepared to hear actual hurt in her voice when she finally says, “You’re wrong. You’ve got it all wrong.”

“Oh, really?” Everything about this has thrown him for a loop, from the fact that she showed up in his neighborhood diner to the fact that she’s not trying to hide what she’s feeling from him, the Winter fucking Soldier, at the very least a rival and at the very worst a deadly enemy. So, because he doesn’t know where he stands, he lashes out, the instinct of every animal caught in a cage since the dawn of time. “So why you gotta come find me, then, and behind Steve’s back, too?”

“Because I care.”

Bucky snorts. “Yeah. Okay. Sam, maybe I can believe it of Sam. But I’ve been tailing him for a year and a half and I’ve never seen you at his house. You’ve never taken him out for coffee or gone on a run with him. Do you even know what he looks like when he thinks nobody is watching? Have you noticed that he’s just… gone?”

He can see the little muscle in the corner of her jaw jumping, just a little flicker under the skin, but enough to betray a strong emotion. She’s one of the best spies in the world, he knows that for a fact, and he’s not at all sure what to think when she lets him see that his needling is working.

“Do I have to be his best friend to care about him?” she says, and Bucky, needled himself, now, barks out, “You could never take my place.”

Oh fuck, you fucking idiot. God, he is the worst spy of all time. At this moment, even Steve is better than him. Aoife is better than him. Even a stone is better than him; you can squeeze blood from of a stone, but you can never make it tell its secrets ‘cause it doesn’t have a big fucking mouth.

He starts to push himself off the wall, almost whirls around on his heel and takes off down the street, but that would just be a confirmation, another show of vulnerability. And he doesn’t doubt that she could keep up with him, anyway. It would be useless.

A quick glance shows that the corner of her mouth is quirked up, but it’s not derision that he sees there. It’s something softer, maybe a little rueful.

“I told you. You’ve got it all wrong. I care about Steve and I don’t want him to get hurt. But I don’t think he’s a baby who can’t take care of himself. I’m not here to give you an ultimatum, or make you pass some kind of test.”

“Okay, so what, then. You come all the way to Gravesend for the doughnuts?”

“No, I came to make sure that you were okay.”

“I… what?”

Then she turns to look at him, stares at the side of his head until he turns and looks at her. “I was Red Room, too, you know.” And he does know, but somehow, he seems to have forgotten. “I’ve been out for far, far longer than you have. But I also have a support system, a network. I have friends.”

“I have friends,” he says, needled again in spite of himself.

“I’m not saying you don’t. But Sam and Steve, they don’t know what it’s like.”

He doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing at all.

“I really did come out here to make sure that you were okay.”

“I believe you,” he says, and surprisingly, he does.

“And now that I’ve seen that you’re doing pretty well for yourself…” she says, pushing up from her deceptive slouch against the wall and pulling a slim black wallet out of the pocket of her moto jacket. She extracts a matte black business card with a telephone number in white, New York area code.

“Text this number with your name, whatever name you’re using now, and within ten minutes you’ll get a reply with another number where you can contact me if you ever need anything.”

Bucky reaches out and takes the card between the gloved fingers of his left hand. He still doesn’t say anything, just looks at the card and then looks back up at the Widow.

“And I mean anything,” she says. “Even if you just want to talk about it. Maybe this is the last time you’ll ever see me. Maybe not. But now you know you’re not alone.” And with that, she turns to walk off, but Bucky says, “Wait.” He holds out the bag with the dozen crullers. “These were for you.”

She looks at the bag, looks up at him, looks back down at the bag again before reaching out to take it from his human hand. “Thanks,” she says, and gives him a smile that he knows to be genuine because it echoes right down to the marrow of his bones. And then she disappears, blending in, somehow, with the sparse crowds on McDonald Avenue at this time of day, and he heaves a sigh of relief and gratitude and something akin to wonder.

Chapter Text

At 10:55 a.m. on Sunday, his phone buzzes.

[Steve]: Downstairs

He looks in the mirror for the fifth time in as many minutes, smooths a rebellious wisp of hair back up into his bun again, grabs his jacket from the hook by the door, and hops down the stairs like a goth Easter bunny. When he comes out the front door, Steve is parked in the mouth of the alley that runs past Bucky’s building, straddling his motorcycle and frowning down at the phone in his hand. There’s a sleek black helmet sitting on his lap and another one tucked under his arm.

Bucky immediately realizes two things. One: Holy shit, this was a miscalculation. If he gets on the back of that bike with Steve in front of him, Steve between his legs, he’s going to come in his pants and then he’ll have to sit around in a sticky puddle all afternoon. And two: He’d spent all that time putting his hair up and getting it to look nice, and it never occurred to him even once that he was going to have to wear a goddamn motorcycle helmet. Fuck’s sake.

Steve looks up at that moment and catches sight of him, the smile on his face enough to make Bucky’s head spin. “Heya, Buck, you look great,” he says, and gives Bucky a little up-and-down that manages to be so sweet and not at all salacious. It makes Bucky want to put some extra-threatening apex predator into his strut so that Steve will stop looking so perfect and start looking a little more human.

Anyway, he scowls, not wanting to give Steve the benefit of anything, and says, “I know, I look amazing, but I forgot I’d have to take my hair down to put the helmet on.”

The look on Steve’s face doesn’t change, but something in him perks up its ears, Bucky can sense it. Interesting, he thinks, or the seedy part of him that wants to drive Steve wild. But he just reaches up and pulls the elastic out of his hair and then shakes it down around his shoulders, combing it with his fingers into a side part so that it’ll lie down flat. Steve watches him and Bucky watches Steve watch him, and there’s something in his expression that he can’t catch. It’s not lust, it’s not hunger, it runs deeper than that, it’s more desperate, and all of a sudden Bucky feels like he’s seen too much. It’s one thing to want to tease Steve a little, to want to feel the warm glow of being wanted himself, but it’s another entirely to see the place where the want comes from, the bottomless pit, the light-bending gravity well that Steve is slowly, inexorably pulling Bucky back into orbit around.

He shivers involuntarily, and Steve’s face suddenly switches to soft concern. “Are you cold? Do you need to put on a heavier jacket?” It’s a beautiful, sunny late-October day, warm enough that he doesn’t actually need a heavier jacket, but he grasps at the excuse to run back upstairs and compose himself a little. “Yeah, that’s a good idea, I’ll be right back,” he says, and dashes back up the porch stairs and through the door before Steve can say anything else.

It only takes him a second to breathe through the overwhelming feeling that he can’t actually name, something akin to panic but not actually panic at all. It’s the same feeling as at the bar, last week, of wanting something so much you can’t survive without it, and then not being able to get away from it fast enough once it comes within reach. He scowls at himself again as he unlocks his door, and yanks his only other, heavier jacket off the garment rack in his bedroom. It’s not until he’s back at the bottom of the stairs again that he thinks he should have probably rubbed a quick one out in the bathroom, just to restart the day all over again and on the right foot, this time.

Bucky’s driven motorcycles before, back when he was the Fist of Hydra and, more recently, when he was the fist of Hydra’s destruction and he appropriated some agent’s crotch rocket from a safehouse garage in Charlotte and then drove it through a poorly secured chain-link gate at a base in Philadelphia. But it’s something else, indeed, to be the passenger, to ride down the parkway at top speed pressed crotch-to-collarbone up against Steve’s giant windscreen of a back. There’s something soothing about it, actually, the way he can’t do anything to control the situation, can’t do anything but let Steve drive and let himself be lulled into a sort of trance by the rumble of the engine and the rush of the wind as it parts around Steve’s big frame, leaving him in a little pocket of stiller air, his own personal slipstream.

When they finally get to Rockaway, he finds himself a little unsteady on his feet, embarrassingly, and Steve looks at him with that same soft concern until Bucky shakes his head roughly and says, “Alright, what’s the plan?”

“Well, there’s that ice cream place I was telling you about, but that’s for after lunch, so we should find some place to eat, and then we can get dessert and maybe take it to the beach?” It starts out as a statement of fact and turns into a tentative little question at the end, and Bucky feels that same sort of strange disconnect as before, looking at big, fierce Steve Rogers and seeing this other version of him, shy and hesitant, laid over top like a piece of tracing paper.

He himself doesn’t know how to act, he knows he’s giving mixed signals, but he desperately wants to recapture the feeling of total surety and confidence bordering on cockiness of those two kids who’d kissed on the fire escape. He thinks back to the other night on the sidewalk in front of Steve’s house and realizes that maybe what Steve needs is something to push against, a solid, familiar ground on which he can plant his feet.

Okay, he thinks perversely, I can be the ground. The beloved thorn in Steve’s side, a role that used to be so ordinary and comfortable that it settles the little wibbly part inside of him that feels like a weak-hearted rabbit when Steve comes around. So he sets his fists on his hips, arms akimbo, and says, “Christ, Steve, I thought you had a plan, here, do I have to do all the logistical work again?”

Steve’s grin is sudden and bright, a little wicked like he’s thinking about taking a bite out of Bucky, and he says, “I didn’t know how picky you were nowadays, Buck. You work in a high-class kitchen store and you made me meet you at a fancy bar, what am I supposed to think?”

Bucky doesn’t even have to pretend, now. His jaw drops and he says, “A fancy bar? A fancy bar? That place? Pal, your standards have gone to shit since the last time I went drinking with you, which if memory don’t deceive me is when the Commandos found that barrel of flat beer in that bombed-out pub in London in 1944, not that it did the two of us any good.”

A little flicker of something passes over Steve’s face, a tiny hurt that’s there and gone in a moment, but before Bucky has time to worry about it, Steve says, “Not all of us are hipsters, Buck. Some of us are old classics.”

Bucky really is happily incensed, now. He gets up in Steve’s face and waggles his finger right in front of that cocky grin, so familiar he could draw it in his sleep. “Look here, asshole, I don’t even know how you know what a hipster is, but if you think I’m a hipster you… you got another think coming.” It doesn’t sound nearly as menacing as he means it to sound, and Steve rightly laughs in his face and then snaps his teeth at Bucky’s finger so that he yanks it back with a glare.

“Okay, burgers or ramen?” Steve says, waving his hand toward their general vicinity. “There are both within a couple blocks of here.”

Bucky turns in a circle like he can actually see the two restaurants and hums, considering. “I like ramen better,” he says, “but I’ll only go if you swear to me you know how to use chopsticks and aren’t gonna embarrass me by asking for a fork.”

Steve bursts out laughing, an artless peal like the ringing of a rope-handled dinner bell. “Picky picky,” he teases, while Bucky frowns. “Burgers it is, then.”

Later, they get ice cream cones, mango (Steve) and pistachio (Bucky), and walk the two blocks down to the boardwalk, where Steve finds an empty bench and sits down, one long arm stretched over the back. He looks oceanward with beatific innocence, but also like he’s just waiting for Bucky to sit down so that he can curl it around his shoulder and pull him closer, into the lee of his big body.

It’s a nice thought, but Bucky says, “Nuh uh, you brought me to the beach, we’re going to go to the beach, come on.” And without waiting for Steve to answer, he spins on his heel and marches down the three wooden stairs to the sand, where he stoops down and starts to awkwardly unlace his boots. Steve’s right beside him in a flash, taking his cone out of his hand and saying, “Lemme hold that, then you can hold mine.”

They walk barefoot across the chilly sand like two ding-dongs from Hot Town, Florida who don’t know how cold it actually is in New York in October, but there’s no one to feel embarrassed in front of apart from a few runners plodding along over the firm sand at the high-tide line. Eventually, Bucky finds some place that looks just as good as any other place and he plops down on the sand, tossing his boots to the side and patting the ground next to him just in case Steve isn’t sure what they’re doing there.

His ice cream is halfway gone, already. “You wanna trade?” he asks, and Steve hands his over without even hesitating. There’s a smear of yellow on the corner of his mouth, and Bucky watches, mortified beyond belief, as his own treacherous hand reaches up and swipes it off with the pad of his thumb. And, even worse, when Steve looks at him, startled and delighted like the guest of honor at a surprise birthday party, he completes his transformation into a disgusting cliché by blushing and then looking quickly away.

Laughter rings through his head, his own laughter, he’s laughing at himself, hee hee hoo hoo like a cartoon ghoul. He’s thinking about how easy it would be to just tip over and bury his head in the sand when he feels Steve scoot over closer to him and press up against his shoulder, the radiant heat of him like a smelting furnace glowing red and orange even behind his closed eyelids.

“This okay?” he asks, and it’s so like Steve to ask, to make sure even as he’s taking outrageous liberties, that Bucky feels better all of a sudden.

“Yep,” he says simply, and takes a bite of the mango ice cream just to make Steve wince, ignoring the way his teeth scream shrilly in his mouth.

All in all, it’s a perfect afternoon, a good day, and when Bucky gets off the back of the motorcycle, he almost almost fucks it all up by leaning in for a kiss. But he doesn’t, mostly because Steve is looking at him like he wants to fuck it all up by leaning in for a kiss, and that triggers Bucky’s by-now-familiar reaction of this is too good get me away from here. So, he settles for reaching up and squeezing Steve right at the crook of his neck, the meat of his shoulder and the delicate clavicle so familiar under his fingers and yet so, so different.

Steve just looks at him, the naked longing back on his face, the well of want uncovered. But Bucky thinks, now that he sees it again, that maybe it’s more complicated than he thought it was that morning. Steve remembers how they used to be, the things they used to do to each other, the way they used to make each other feel. Of course he does. But that’s not it, not entirely. There’s a whole other picture hidden behind the plaincloth desire. It’s the way he cried over the old photo of Bucky, it’s the blankness of his face when he thought no one was looking, it’s the loneliness that rang out in him like a gong, so loud that Bucky was astonished when it seemed like no one else could hear it.

Bucky’s not sure he can give Steve everything he wants. He’s not even sure that he can give Steve what he needs, which is, in the end, a much simpler thing: a friend, a companion, perhaps. But he’s going to try so fucking hard it might kill him, so he squeezes Steve’s shoulder tight, again and says, as honestly as he can, “I had a great time. Thank you for taking me out. If you’re free, we could see each other again this week.”

The plain relief and gratitude and joy on Steve’s face are painful to behold, and it takes all of Bucky’s willpower not to turn his own face away. “Not tomorrow, though,” he adds. “Tomorrow’s when I meet Sam.”

“Alright, alright, I guess I can let Sam monopolize you for one day,” Steve says, sounding put-upon, but Bucky’s nerves thrill all the way down to his toes at the casual possessiveness. And then, “Tuesday I have a charity thing that I’ll be getting ready for all day. What about Wednesday? When do you have work?”

“I start at six, but I’m free the whole morning.”

“Can I take you out for breakfast?” Steve looks so sweetly hopeful, Bucky doesn’t have the heart to tell him he hates getting up early with a fiery passion.

“Wellllllll,” he says, drawing it out, trying to think. “Since you took me out today, I think it’s my turn, don’t you?”

Steve looks sheepish, rubs the back of his neck with his big, rawboned hand. “I guess. If you insist.”

“I insist.” An idea occurs to him. Maybe it’s the worst idea he’s ever had. But maybe it’s not? “Although, I hate going out early, so how about I make you breakfast. A late breakfast. You can come over whenever you want, but not before ten, because I won’t answer the door.”

Steve looks at Bucky then at the rundown building behind him, and then back at Bucky again. At first, he seems incredulous, but it morphs into a kind of delight, wide-eyed and anticipatory.

“I thought you wanted to maintain your feminine mystique,” he says unexpectedly. Bucky had expected him to stumble through his acceptance with a shyly grateful elation, but maybe he’s starting to get the hang of this. Maybe he’s starting to think that Bucky won’t necessarily run away screaming if he’s anything less than soft and deferential.

Maybe he’s realized that his feet are on solid ground again, that he can get away with reverting back to his true self, a little punk-ass shit from the bad side of Brooklyn.

That’s hot as fuck, Bucky whimpers internally, while externally, he claps Steve on the side of the neck again and gives him an ostentatious wink and a sloppy salute. The naked longing comes screaming back into Steve’s face, but he returns the salute and starts the motorcycle engine as Bucky turns away and fishes his key out of his pocket.

Don’t matter if it’s hot as fuck. One thing at a time.

“Oooooooh,” Sam sing-songs as soon as Bucky slides into the booth. There’s already a pint of something waiting for him. “I heard you had a date.”

Bucky’s still shrugging out of his coat, but he pauses for a second to give Sam an arch look. “It wasn’t a date.”

Sam snorts. “Right. That’s exactly what Steve said, but then his face was telling a whole different story.” He scrunches his own face up, eyebrows pulled down low over the bridge of his nose, and pitches his voice down an octave. “It wasn’t a date, Sam,” he says, and then his face transforms into something resembling a particularly good-natured baby being handed a fistful of daisies, his smile so wide that Bucky can see his back teeth.

Bucky laughs and lays his coat on the bench beside him. “Poor Steve,” he says, and picks up his own pint. “He’s the smartest man I know, but there’s something about his face that’s just so… so…” He trails off, gesturing at his own face with his hand, unable to think of the right word.

“Unsophisticated?” Sam supplies.

“That’s a nice way of putting it,” Bucky says, and Sam snorts into his glass.

“We shouldn’t talk about him behind his back,” Sam says, trying to pull a straight face, but his lips keep twitching.

“I mean, that’s what we’ve been doing every day since you found me, but okay, you have principles now, I guess.” Bucky takes the first pull from his pint, and it’s cold and rich, and a chill spreads through his belly with fingers of ice and it’s perfect.

“Shut up,” Sam says through his teeth.

“So… I saw the Widow.”

“Already? Shit.” Sam’s surprised, even though he’d told Bucky to expect it, even though their meeting clearly hadn’t gone off the rails. Bucky realizes that Sam had been a lot more nervous than he’d let on in their text exchange.

He looks out the window, tapping his metal fingers on his glass, the clink clink clink muffled by his thin leather glove. A teenager passes by with a Saint Bernard twice as big as he is straining at its leash. “It was… it was okay.”

“So, what happened?”

Bucky tells him about walking into the diner, about Aoife, about how the Widow had actually apologized to him for giving away one of his secrets.

“Hmm.” Sam doesn’t look surprised, this time. “She’s not an asshole. She’s just… a spy.”

“Yeah, but I shot her. Twice.” It still baffles him that he could attempt to kill someone and that they would turn around and forgive him. Him, the ex-Winter fucking Soldier. Ex nothing, as if he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger, kicked Sam off the helicarrier, shattered Steve’s cheekbone. He hasn’t even forgiven himself, yet.

As if he can read Bucky’s mind, Sam says, “And? So? You pulled my wing off and threw me off a helicarrier, and look at us now. Bee eff effs.”

Bucky chokes a little on his beer. “What?”

Sam pauses for a second and then says, “Forgot you’re like a hundred years old. It means best friends forever. Or best fucking friends, depending on who you ask.”

Bucky grins, showing all his teeth. “I’m sorry to have to break it to you, Sam, but you are I are never gonna fuck.”

Sam drops his head into his hands and massages his temples theatrically with his fingertips. “Shut up, Jamie. Just shut up.” He straightens back up and looks at Bucky, pulling a disgusted face. “I’m not into the whole BDSM greaser look anyway, you’re safe.”

Bucky bursts out laughing. “I hate you, you asshole.”

Sam just grins and tips his half-empty pint glass in Bucky’s direction. “I hate you, too.”

They’re silent for another moment before Bucky says, “Anyway. The Widow. She gave me her phone number.”

Sam gapes. “What? What the fuck, it took me months to get her phone number! She’d stayed at my house! I helped her when she was a fugitive from justice! And she just gave you her phone number just like that?” He actually looks angry, and Bucky’s taken aback. But he knows Sam is a little sensitive about his relationship—or whatever it is—with the Widow, and he doesn’t want any misunderstandings.

“Listen, Sam, she gave me her phone number in case I wanted to talk about stuff that happened to me with”—he lowers his voice, perpetually paranoid—“with Hydra. That’s why she came to see me. It wasn’t because she wanted to make sure I wasn’t just biding my time and waiting to kill Steve. She said she wanted to make sure that I was okay. And that she knew what it was like, because she was Red Room, too.”

“Fuck,” Sam says quietly, on a breath. “I had no idea. I… I thought she was just worried about Steve. I didn’t realize she might be worried about you, too.”

Bucky shrugs. “Yeah, me neither.”

“I… I got a little mad about it the other day, when I texted you about it. I probably owe her an apology.” He glances at his phone, which is sitting facedown on the table beside his elbow, but he doesn’t move to pick it up.

Bucky shrugs again. “Probably.”

“Fucking spies, man,” Sam grumps after a minute. “Full of surprises, every time I turn around you pop out with a new one like a fucking jack-in-the-box.”

Bucky tries not to grin at him, but it’s hard. “So, anyway,” he says after a moment. “You want to meet up with me and Steve sometime?”

Sam raises both hands in front of his face and waves them vigorously, almost knocking over his empty glass in the process. “No way. Whatever there is between you, you gotta figure it out yourself. I’m not your damn chaperone.”

“But what if we—“ Bucky starts, but Sam interrupts him.

“Nope, don’t care what you’re about to say. You couldn’t pay me enough to sit around and watch you make goo-goo eyes at each other.”

“I don’t make goo-goo eyes,” Bucky says, affronted.

“Well, Steve’s goo-goo eyes are enough for the both of you,” Sam says.

Bucky takes a deep breath and lets it puff out through his lips in bone-weary agreement. “They certainly are.”

Steve shows up at 10:05 on Wednesday morning, exactly as Bucky had expected him to, so he’s showered and dressed, and the oven is already preheated. He’d thrown together a bread pudding, all casual-like, with the remains of the loaf he’d made on Monday morning and some wildly out-of-season strawberries and raspberries he’d bought for an arm and a leg at a fancy grocery store near work the previous afternoon.

He slides the bread pudding into the oven right before he opens the door. Steve is standing there with a grin on his face like his birthday has come around, again, for the second time in the last two weeks. “Heya, Buck,” he says, stepping through the door as Bucky closes it behind him. He holds up a plastic bag in one hand, and in the other, a single bright sunflower, the end of its thick stem wrapped in damp newspaper.

“You brought me a flower?” Bucky says, nonplussed and, simultaneously, incredibly touched.

“Yeah, just one to brighten up your house a little. I…” He pauses, looking down at their feet. Bucky looks down too and realizes that he’s wearing the purple banana socks. Steve doesn’t comment, though, just continues, “I thought that maybe if I brought a whole bouquet, you’d think… I mean, you’d think...”

Bucky finishes the sentence for him. “That you were trying to get into my pants?”

“No! I mean… I mean, shit. I mean…” He’s the color of smoked salmon, a lovely bright pink that clashes violently with his wheaten hair.

Bucky laughs. “You walked right into that, pal. But thank you, I love sunflowers.”

“I know,” Steve says softly. “I remember.” And then they both stand there, looking down at the sunflower with its pollen-yellow petals and its dark, velvety center. After a moment, Steve clears his throat a little and says, “Do you have something to put it in?”

Bucky looks around the kitchenette, with its two cabinets and three square feet of counter space. “I’m not sure I do, actually. I don’t have a pitcher, and none of my drinking glasses are big enough…” He trails off, thinking that maybe the stockpot is the only thing that won’t tip over, and he’ll have to leave it sitting on the back burner of his little stove.

“Well,” Steve says, holding the bag up. “There’s also this, we could use it up and then you could put the sunflower in it.”

Bucky takes the bag from Steve, a little electric shock zipping up his metal arm as their fingers brush. He’s not sure if it was actually a static discharge or whether it was just his imagination, but it sets his heart to beating double-time for a few seconds before the rhythm smooths back out again. He looks inside; there’s a bottle of orange juice and a bottle of champagne. “Really, Steve?” he says. “Mimosas on a Wednesday morning? Are you trying to get me wasted before work?”

Steve rolls his eyes. “You know you can’t get drunk, same as me. It just felt like a special occasion, so I wanted to do something special.”

Bucky thinks about needling him a little, Why’s it a special occasion, huh? Wink wink nudge nudge, but he doesn’t. It’s such a sweet gesture, such a sweet thing to say, and he doesn’t feel like ruining it, not right now. Not yet.

He pulls the bottles out of the bag and sets them on the counter and then gets two highball glasses from the drainboard.

“Can you get ice out of the fridge?” he asks Steve, who’s just standing in front of the door like the world’s most awkward bouncer, trying to look like he’s not intensely curious about Bucky’s living space, now that he can see it in the light of day.

The mini-fridge has a tiny little freezer, barely big enough for two ice cube trays, but they don’t actually need any more for the moment. Steve crouches down and Bucky watches out of the corner of his eye as Steve’s jeans strain around his massive thighs. Is the stitching reinforced? It has to be, there’s no way he’s not popping out of his jeans every time he flexes, those things are like fucking tree trunks… redwoods… you could probably drive a car right through them…

Steve is clearing his throat, and Bucky slams back through the plate-glass window of reality with a start. “Uh, thanks,” he says, and takes the trays, replacing them with the champagne bottle. “Open this, and don’t do any property damage.” There’s a muted pop behind him as he cracks ice into the glasses and pours orange juice over them, and then Steve steps up to the counter and tops up the glasses with the foaming, sparkling champagne.

They each pick up a glass, and Bucky turns to face Steve, who is facing him, his hip cocked against the corner of the counter, his legs crossed at the ankle. All of a sudden, he seems strangely, effortlessly at home, as if he’s been in Bucky’s minuscule kitchen a hundred times already. It makes something that looks like the warm, dry glow of a well-laid fire start up in the middle of his stomach, and he puts the glass to his lips to hide his simmering consternation. But Steve says, “Wait wait, we have to toast first. It’s bad luck if you drink before you toast.”

“Says who?” Bucky asks petulantly, which in the end is just as good at covering up his consternation as shotgunning a mimosa.

“Well, my ma always said it,” Steve says hesitatingly, a little sheepish now that he has to explain himself.

“Oh, well if Sarah said it, I guess it’s the word of God.” Bucky flattens the hand not holding his glass over his heart.

“That’s right, so we have to toast.” Steve pauses, and Bucky waits, but the pause just goes on and on, and finally Bucky looks up from the mesmerizing line of bubbles that stream up the side of the glass. What was he expecting? Exactly what he sees, the naked longing back again, and he just knows that if he leaves Steve to his own devices, he’s going to come out with 'Here’s to us,' or 'To finding each other again,' or something else that’s just as likely to give Bucky the nose-tingles as it is to give him the screaming meemies. So he says, instead, “Here’s to getting stabbed at my bodega,” and Steve’s face immediately crumples into a wide-open grin, his eyes almost disappearing in the crinkles pushed up by his pink cheeks.

“Here’s to getting stabbed at your bodega,” he says, and tips their glasses together with a clink.

Chapter Text

They start to see each other a lot after that, twice a week, and then three times a week, and then almost every day. Sometimes it’s just Bucky getting off the subway two stops too early and dropping by Steve’s house for five minutes on his way to work. Sometimes it’s the whole day, a picnic lunch in the park, two matinees back-to-back, and then a late dinner. And once, it’s a late-night excursion to the Bowman Observatory in Greenwich, to look at the moon through a telescope.

Then Steve starts coming to pick Bucky up at Funnel No. 9 when they meet for drinks after work. The first time, Bucky comes out of the kitchen and almost runs into Flannery and Diego, who are standing right in front of the swinging door with their heads close together, looking at something through the plate glass window.

When Bucky slips through the door behind them, Flannery turns around and waggles his eyebrows. “Don’t look now, but there’s a guy loitering on the sidewalk outside who looks exactly like Captain America.”

Bucky nudges Flannery out of the way to get a better look, but of course, he finds exactly what he thinks he’s going to find. There’s Steve, standing half-in, half-out of the pool of light spilling out of the shopfront, leaning up against a tree wearing his snapback and looking down at the sidewalk, trying as earnestly as possible to be cool, be casual. Worst spy ever, he hears Sam say.

“Don’t let him hear you say that, he hates it,” Bucky says nonchalantly. “He thinks Captain America is a total asshole.”

Flannery and Diego both swivel toward him like they have laser-guided targeting systems instead of eyes. “Hold the fuck up,” Diego says, his palm hovering in the air in front of Bucky’s chest like he could actually stop him from going anywhere. “You know that guy?”

Bucky tries to hold back his irresistible smug grin by biting savagely on his bottom lip, but it only half works. “You remember my friend Steve from last month?”

Diego gasps and Flannery says, “Wait, his name is Steve, too?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, looking out the window again. He can tell that Steve is desperately trying not to look through the window to see if he’s there. “Pretty unfortunate all around.”

Flannery makes a noise of blatant incredulity while Diego grabs his right arm and shakes it, saying, “For the love of god, Jamie, ask him to come in, please.”

But right at that moment, Steve’s patience runs out and he looks up from under the brim of his snapback. He sees their little group, all watching him with unabashed interest, and narrows his eyes for a moment before he picks Bucky out of the lineup. Then his face does the sunrise thing again, a streetlamp unto itself, outshining all the other lights in the brightly lit New York night. He raises his hand and gives Bucky a little wave.

“Wow,” Flannery says, impressed, and Diego just squeaks.

“Sorry, that’s my cue, I gotta go, see you guys tomorrow,” Bucky says, pushing between them and stalking out the door before they can get a word out. Steve’s face gets, if anything, even brighter as he says, “Hey, Buck,” and Bucky says, “Hey, Steve.” He knows Flannery and Diego are watching as they walk away in the direction of their bar, and he knows he’s going to get the third degree tomorrow, but he doesn’t even care.

A month after Bucky gets stabbed, after he lets Steve look through the tiny crack in the door into the panic room of his life and they start this quasi-relationship, this little dance that is threatening to sweep Bucky up into a far grander waltz than he’d bargained for, Steve gets a call as they’re walking through Prospect Park and has to leave, immediately, for parts unknown.

Someone chatters into his ear while he frowns into the distance, making masculine noises of affirmation—“mmhmm, uh huh, yeah”—and Bucky looks around without looking around, going through the soothing motions of doing threat assessments on everyone in sight while he waits. After a minute, Steve stabs irritably at the phone to hang up and then turns to Bucky, looking bereft.

“I gotta go,” he says, his voice sticky with regret. “It’s an emergency, it’s a bad one. I’m sorry.” He moves his hand a little, an abortive attempt at something, though whether he was trying to take Bucky’s hand or just gesture vaguely in anguish isn’t clear.

“Oh,” Bucky says, feeling strangely bereft, himself. They’d been talking about going to the zoo, killing some time before Bucky had to get to work, but now that he’s faced with the prospect of having to kill his own time without an accomplice, all the fun has suddenly rushed out of the afternoon.

“I… um, Nat’s coming to pick me up at the 9th Street exit, would you walk down there with me?” Steve has got his eyebrows drawn up in the middle, looking hesitant again and, somehow, so small, but it’s not like other times. It’s not the time for needling, for sass. He doesn’t need that solid ground to push off of right now; what he needs is a hand to hold.

So Bucky says, “Yeah, of course,” and slips his right hand through Steve’s left, as easy as you please, as if this is something that they do every day, have been doing every day for years and years. Steve doesn’t say anything, just starts off in the direction of the exit, but Bucky can hear the click of his throat as he swallows, and he squeezes Bucky’s hand tight and doesn’t let up.

When they get close to the exit, Bucky relaxes his grip and tugs a little, giving Steve an out if he doesn’t want the Widow to see them holding hands, but Steve doesn’t let go. In fact, he murmurs, “Don’t you dare,” and tugs their clasped hands flush against his hip so that Bucky’s pulled closer to him. Close enough to smell the old leather of his jacket and the woody jasmine of his cologne.

There’s an ostentatious black Corvette idling at the curb, an unusual glare on the window that hides whoever’s inside, but already he knows who it is. Steve stops before the path meets the sidewalk, but behind the big granite slab of the Lafeyette memorial so that they’re invisible to the driver of the Corvette, for which Bucky is thankful.

Steve doesn’t let go of his hand. He makes a half-turn so that he’s facing Bucky, and then goes through the usual paces of standing there like a statue at the Parthenon and just looking. Bucky feels like he’s mostly used to it by now, or at least he doesn’t have that near-overwhelming feeling of RUN AWAY! anymore. That doesn’t mean that it’s comfortable to be looked at like he’s the bright sun at the center of Steve’s solar system, or maybe like he’s the cool green Earth and Steve hasn’t heard about heliocentrism yet.

“I…” Steve says, but the I just peters out to a little speck of a pronoun, so Bucky takes pity on him. He raises the hand not trapped in the constricting embrace of Steve’s big paw and squeezes his bicep. “If you can, text me while you’re gone so that I know you’re okay, but I understand that you might not be able to. Call me as soon as you get back. And take care of yourself, okay? Please.”

“Yeah, Buck, of course I will,” Steve says, all in a rush. Then he draws himself up a little and something of Captain America creeps in, into the set of his shoulders and the cant of his chin. “I gotta go. I’ll let you know what I can, when I can.”

“Of course.”

He gives Bucky’s hand one last quick squeeze and then lets it go, where it feels like it’s been turned to metal, too, cold and lifeless, dangling alone at his side.

“See ya, Buck.”

“Bye, Steve.” And then he’s gone, disappeared around the corner of the monument. Fifteen seconds later Bucky, hears the oversexed tiger roar of the Corvette as it peels itself off the curb, but he’s already walking back into the park and doesn’t turn around to watch it leave.

An hour later, as he’s sitting in a nondescript café in Park Slope people-watching, his phone buzzes five times in quick succession.

[Steve]: Leaving now, going to be gone at least a week, probably more
[Steve]: Can’t tell you anything else, sorry
[Steve]: Sam says to tell you “samesies”

There follows a string of shrug emojis and rolling eyes emojis. At least he hasn’t gone full Cap yet, Bucky thinks.

[Steve]: I’ll call you as soon as I get back
[Steve]: Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone

Bucky can hardly type out his reply fast enough.

[Bucky]: How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you

But all he gets back is the little red exclamation mark and Not Delivered, an impersonal cuff to the tenderest part of his heart.

The next week is terrible, and the week after that is a hundred times worse. Bucky’s worried, of course, but more than that, he’s beside himself with rage, at himself, for not being able to hold it the fuck together. He’s the ex-Winter fucking Soldier (ex-ish), goddammit. You can be the most feared assassin in the world, a ghost story with a kill count that you can unroll on a scroll of parchment like Santa’s naughty list, but it’s all for naught. One day you find yourself with a few casual friendships, and then you hold hands with a guy twice, and all of a sudden you turn into a sailor’s melancholy wife, haunting the widow’s walk built around your cold and lonely garret.

Two weeks and a day after Steve leaves, Bucky walks out of work like usual and wrestles his phone out of his back pocket, where it had been on silent since he’d come in three hours before. Normally, there’s nothing, but today he has three missed calls and two texts.

[Steve]: Sorry to disturb you, I forgot you were at work
[Steve]: I’m at home now, everything’s fine

Bucky doesn’t even hesitate.

[Bucky]: I’ll be there in 20

And then he locks his phone and shoves it into his backpack and starts walking as fast as he can.

When he gets to Steve’s house, he dashes up the stairs and goes to knock on the door—Steve has a doorbell, but ringing doorbells is for sadists—but Steve pulls the door open before he can even get his knuckles on the immaculate paintwork. He looks terrible; he’s standing on his own two feet and his hair is damp, obviously fresh from the shower, but he looks like he hasn’t slept a wink since he got into that Corvette two weeks ago. And, now that Bucky has stepped over the threshold and can get a better look at him under the dim hall light, he’s trembling.

“Fuck, Steve,” Bucky says, at a loss. “You look like shit.” He kicks the door shut behind him and drops his backpack on the floor in the entryway. Steve doesn’t say anything; he just stands there. After a moment he reaches his hand out, halfway between them, but immediately pulls it back. He looks hesitant, like he’s conscious of not wanting to cross a line, but more than that, he looks desperate, desperate for something that Bucky doesn’t know how to give.

He knows how to hug, though, so that’s what he does. He steps forward and holds his arms out and, when Steve doesn’t move, slides them around his shoulders and tightens his grip until he can feel Steve’s shivers run through his own body like ripples through a pond. “Come on, pal, you need to go sit down.” He loosens his grip and goes to step back, but Steve’s hand comes up like a whip cracking to clutch at the back of his coat.

“I’m not going anywhere, I’m just trying to get you over to the couch where you’ll be more comfortable.” Steve doesn’t let go, but he allows Bucky to maneuver him out of the hallway and through the door to his living room and over to the sectional couch that takes up the whole corner under the big bay window.

He manages to push Steve down onto the couch, but almost tumbles right on top of him because Steve still won’t let him go. Bucky’s thirsty, and Steve should probably drink a glass of water, too, maybe eat something, but it can wait for a while. He sits down next to Steve, in the corner, and then shrugs off his coat, which Steve immediately lets go of now that it’s not part of Bucky anymore.

He just sits there, rigid and trembling, hands lying on his thighs like two dead leaves. Bucky scoots over so that their shoulders are pressed together, but it doesn’t seem to help much. He thinks for a moment about what to do, should he call someone? He doesn’t want to bother Sam; if this is what Steve’s like, Sam’s not going to be in great shape, either. What if he texts the Widow? He never contacted her after that time at the City Luncheonette, but he’d saved the number in his phone. Just in case.

Or maybe he should try to get Steve to eat something, or to go upstairs to bed? But finally, he says the only thing he can think of that might make this a little bit better: “Can I hold you?”

Steve immediately turns toward him, grabs the sleeve of his shirt in one hand, and pulls his legs up onto the couch, tucking his knees underneath his chin. It’s awkward, Bucky can’t get his arms around Steve, but sitting there with one hand slung over the back of the couch and lightly gripping his shoulder like they’re two nervous teenagers at a movie isn’t going to cut it, either. So finally, he pulls at Steve’s other arm and pushes at his legs until he’s straddling Bucky’s lap, his knees bent, his arms around Bucky’s neck, and his face buried between his nape and the back of the couch.

God, how often has he fantasized about being in this exact position? About Steve holding onto the back of the couch for dear life while Bucky fucks up into him, hands spreading the globes of his cheeks, teeth clamped around one pink nipple. He feels nothing, though, when he thinks about that now, no lust, no heat, no tingle in his belly. Steve has got a grip on him like a kraken on a rowboat, and all Bucky can do is tip his head onto the back of the couch to give his neck a rest and run his hands up and down Steve’s back, over and over, soothing, calming, willing his anguish to disappear like so much smoke in the wind.

Some time later, he wakes up with a start. Steve is shifting in his lap, hissing through his teeth as he tries to unbend his legs from where they’ve been bent at the knee for… how long? Bucky glances out the window, but it was dark when he got here, and it’s still dark now. His phone is in his bag, which is sitting over by the door, but even though his inner taskmaster is barking about schedules and minute hands and the necessity of knowing what time it is all the time, he’s not going to get up to get it.

Finally, Steve pushes himself up, hands on the back of the couch in a tame parody of Bucky’s beloved fantasy, and falls over to the side, where he can sit down properly and stretch his legs out with a groan, his joints cracking like a panful of popcorn. They sit there in silence for a minute, maybe five minutes—Bucky’s concept of the passage of time is still knocked a little cockeyed from the unexpected nap. Steve is slouched down and canted over a little so that his temple rests against Bucky’s coldest, most unforgiving shoulder. It should be uncomfortable, but he doesn’t do anything, doesn’t shift to a better position. His long runner’s legs are stretched out on the coffee table, and his big hands are lying like dead leaves in his lap again, loosely curled, waiting for the winter wind to come and blow them away.

Finally, Bucky starts to get antsy, wanting to break the silence, wanting to get up and run a lap around the house to work out the kinks and sparks cramping up his own skeleton. “Was it bad?” he asks, soft and low, barely breaking the silence at all.

He’s not sure what to expect, whether Steve is going to burst into tears or unspool a story the likes of which could make the Winter Soldier’s hair stand on end. But whatever he was unconsciously steeling himself for, he never expected Steve to shrug dispassionately and say, “Just a little worse than normal.”

All of a sudden, Bucky can feel the flare of anger light up inside him, sparking and hissing as all of his constituent parts screech in unison, What?? “Just a little worse than normal?” he says. Screeches, actually, unable to keep the inside thoughts inside for the moment. “You mean it’s like this all the time??”

Steve shrugs again, his head jiggling against Bucky’s shoulder. “Sometimes better, sometimes worse.”

“Fucking hell, Steve, what happens when it’s really bad, huh?” He sits up straight, leans forward to rub at his eyes with the heel of his right hand, jostling Steve’s head so that it flops back against the couch. He turns his head to catch Steve’s eye, but Steve isn’t looking at him. He’s staring straight ahead, the eerie blankness back in his face, terrifying now that Bucky can see it up close, terrifying because he’d thought that he was the reason for the blankness and that he’d fixed it by letting Steve find him. It comes as a shock to see that that’s not the whole truth.

He’s scared, and he’s more worried now that he’d been in the last two weeks, so he lashes out, unable to keep his claws from springing out, snick snick. “What do you do when it’s really bad?” he repeats, bitter as a strip of willow bark. “You couldn’t go to the bridge, we both know from experience that that wouldn’t be enough. You stand on the subway platform and watch the trains go by, wondering if that would do the trick? You sit here in the dark with a loaded gun and think about it? Huh?”

Steve comes alive, then, and Bucky feels a perverse satisfaction at watching his face transform into something real, something vivid, something beautifully and wonderfully angry.

“No!” he almost yells. And then, softer, “No. Fuck, I’ve never done that. I’ve never wanted to do that.”

Bucky jerks out a laugh, “Ha!” and feels it echo down the empty corridors of his mind. “You drove the plane into the ice, didn’t you?”

Steve’s face transforms again, the anger melting away like a dusting of snow, leaving uncovered the hurt and the pain and the sorrow that he’s been steeping in silently since… since he came out of the ice, probably. “That was different,” he says quietly. His voice is steady, under control, and Bucky has no idea how he does it, because he himself feels like he’s about to come apart under the strain of feeling so many different things at once.

He doesn’t believe Steve, but all of a sudden, he’s reached his limit. He can’t talk about this anymore; he’s not Sam, though he wouldn’t wish this on Sam, anyway. It feels like he’s stepped in a whole nest of fire ants, his legs itchy, his nerves firing at random. He jumps off the couch and stretches, going up onto his tiptoes to get the blood moving everywhere.

“I have no idea what time it is, but you need to eat something. Come on.” He holds out his right hand and Steve looks at it for a moment as if he’s not entirely sure that it won’t bite him, but then he takes it hesitantly and allows Bucky to pull him to his feet.

Bucky leads him into the kitchen, where there’s nothing in Steve’s fridge but a carton of two-week-old eggs and two pots of mustard. The crisper drawer is full of sprouting onions.

He tries not to be judgmental, tries not to make Steve feel bad about not taking care of himself, but he has to clench his jaw around the words that want to spill out like bricks from a wheelbarrow: How can you live like this?

He pushes Steve down into a chair at the kitchen table and then slices onions and caramelizes them in olive oil—it’s not even extra virgin, he bitches to himself. Butter would have been better, but there’s no butter to be had at Steve’s house. No herbs, not even a pot on the windowsill. He has a backyard, Bucky knows from looking at satellite photos, but he’s never seen it himself, and he’d be shocked beyond belief if there was anything back there but a jungle of weeds, or, even worse, a dismal grey expanse of broken concrete.

Okay, so Steve travels a lot—herbs in pots would have died of thirst round about the middle of the first week—but he doesn’t actually travel that much. There aren’t even any pots with dead herbs in them, just like there are no zucchinis or bell peppers spoiling in the crisper drawer, no mysterious month-old leftovers in unmarked tupperware in the back of the fridge, none of the detritus of life. There’s nothing but a carton of eggs and two kinds of mustard and some old onions.

Steve sits silently at the little kitchen table, gazing out the window over the sink where the mysterious backyard is still shrouded in darkness. Bucky cracks eight of the eggs into a bowl he finds in a cabinet and whisks them with a fork from the sparsely populated silverware drawer. A little more searching, Steve sitting silently, miles away at the table all the while, turns up a bag of salt and some pre-ground pepper dust, which he adds liberally to the eggs.

Finally, after another few minutes, he slides an omelet onto a plate and sets the plate in front of Steve with a clean fork. “Eat. No backtalk.”

Steve looks up at him through his long mink lashes and says, “I wasn’t gonna backtalk.” The ghost of a smile that died from disuse plays around his mouth.

Bucky slides into the chair across from him. Steve looks more alive; gone is the thousand-yard stare, the blankness, and the empty house of his face has lights on in the windows. He starts cutting small bites off of the omelet with his fork and eating them, not with any sort of relish, but Bucky doesn’t blame him; old eggs, old onions, pepper dust. There wasn’t much to work with.

It doesn’t take him long to finish the omelet, and he sets the fork down on his empty plate with a clink. He doesn’t look at Bucky when he says, “Thanks for taking care of me, Buck,” but whether it’s from embarrassment or shame or those lingering traces of soul-deadening apathy, Bucky’s not sure.

“I will take care of you any time,” Bucky says, and he means it, every part of him means it. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t a conditional statement, though. “But you need to take care of yourself, too.”

“I take care of myself!” The little burst of defensive anger is like a balm to Bucky’s weary soul. That’s Steve, he thinks, and almost smiles.

“I know you’ve been gone for two weeks, but there was nothing in your fridge but eggs, onions, and mustard.”

“How do you know I didn’t throw away some stuff before I left, huh?” Steve says snidely, not meeting his eye, pushing the fork around the plate with his forefinger.

“Because you were with me when you got called up, in the park. Are you telling me the Widow picked you up and then brought you back here so you could clean out your fridge? In that case, she could have given me a ride to work.” Steve snorts, though whether its derision or embarrassment or if he’s, maybe, actually amused, Bucky can’t tell. “Anyway, did you throw away your hot sauce? Your mayonnaise? Your ketchup, your jam, your curry paste, your bread-and-butter pickles?”

“You don’t have curry paste in your fridge,” Steve snarks, and Bucky can see him starting to warm up again. It’s so familiar, so Steve, that Bucky feels his heart overflow with all kinds of things, good things, the bad feelings from the last few hours pushed over to the side to make room.

“That’s because I’m an insufferable snob and I make my own from scratch when I need it,” he says archly. Then he puts his palms flat on the table. “Listen. I mean it, Steve. I’m here, and I’m not leaving.” Steve looks up at him quickly, confusion all over his face, but something hidden behind it like the rising sun of hope. It makes Bucky feel like he’s sticking a knife between Steve’s ribs when he says, “I mean, I do have to go home sometime.”

Contrary to expectations, however, the light of hope in his eyes doesn’t disappear; in fact, it gets incrementally brighter when Bucky continues, “But I’m not going to leave you. I’ll be here for you when you need me.” Steve looks, all of a sudden, so happy that Bucky thinks, How many times do I have to say it? It’s a tangent, but: “Do you really not believe me? When I say that I’m here to stay, that I won’t disappear again?”

Steve shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know. It’s not like I think you’re lying. It’s just that each time you say it, it gets more and more real.”

Bucky stretches his right hand across the table and grasps the fingers of Steve’s left. “I’m here. I’m staying. I’m not leaving. You’re never getting rid of me again, not as long as you live.” It’s not meant to be a vow, but it sure as fuck feels like one. Steve’s looking at him again like that, like he’s water in the desert, or a green smudge on the horizon after months and months at sea, and Bucky simultaneously warms and quails under his gaze.

“But what I want to say is that I can’t help you alone. You need help from someone else, for all of the trauma you’ve got from work and… and everything. A therapist or a psychiatrist”—Steve has gone back to frowning a little—“and don’t give me that look, you know I’m right, you know Sam’s right.” Steve doesn’t say anything, but he heaves a huge sigh, and it sounds like irritation, but it also sounds like capitulation, and Bucky’s heart thrills to hear it.

“And you need help from yourself. You need to do things you enjoy. You need to do something besides just exist in the spaces of time between missions and when you see me and Sam. You need to live a real life like a real person.”

“I know,” Steve says, small and quiet. He squeezes Bucky’s fingers so hard that Bucky momentarily wishes he’d reached out with his left hand, instead.

And you need to retire, Bucky thinks, all of a sudden, but it’s not time for that, not yet. It might not be time for that for years. But the time for that will come, someday, he’s sure of it.

They talk a little bit more; Steve tells him a little about the mission in the vaguest terms, and Bucky tells him about how he’d amused himself for those two long weeks, and then all of a sudden, there’s a light in the kitchen that wasn’t there before. A golden ray slips between two buildings on the other side of Steve’s backyard and hits the neck of the faucet over the sink, scattering glittering chips of sunlight around the kitchen.

It’s morning.

“Oh,” Bucky says, taken aback. They’d slept for far longer than he thought they had. “The sun’s up.”

Steve smiles, tired but authentic. “It’s been a long night. I’m sorry I made you stay over, I—” Bucky cuts him off with a wave of his hand.

“You didn’t make me do anything, Steve. I was happy to be here. Happy to help you. I’ll do it again tonight if you need it. But I do need to go home now, though.”

He pushes his chair back and stands up. Steve stands up, too, and moves toward the hall, but Bucky says, “Wait a second. Before I go…” and trails off. He walks over to the sink and looks out the window. The backyard still exists in a kind of hazy limbo between the night and the day, but he can see that it’s mostly the green-brown color of end-of-the-year vegetation, a neat brick walkway bisecting the miniscule square. A few tall stalks of grass are sending up last-chance seeds, but it’s been cut since the end of the summer, and there are two well-used lawn chairs and a bright red charcoal barbeque sitting next to the stairs that lead out from the back door. He almost rocks back on his heels as a tidal wave of some sort of weird relief washes over him, and he thinks, inexplicably, Look at that. It has potential.

Chapter Text

Thanksgiving is the next week, and Bucky, who has somehow come unmoored from time, forgets all about it until Flannery tells him that they’re closing the shop from Wednesday to Sunday because he’s travelling back to Mississippi to spend the holiday with his family.

“You just wait,” Diego says with a grin from where he’s dusting the shelves as Flannery cashes out and Bucky stands with his hand on the doorknob, ready to leave. “Every time he goes to Mississippi he comes back with the cutest little accent, dropping ‘ya’lls’ and ‘ain’ts’ left and right. It’s adorable.”

Flannery makes a face and flips him the bird. “As if you don’t drop that New York squawk like a hot potato the minute the wheels touch down in Atlanta.”

“Self-preservation,” is all Diego says, archly, and flutters his feather duster ostentatiously over the pristine wooden shelves.

It’s the perfect opportunity, and Bucky pounces on it like an overactive kitten. “You guys are together, right?” he asks, waggling a finger back and forth between them.

Diego looks at Flannery and Flannery looks at Diego. “Yep, going on ten years,” Diego says, the expression on his face turning soft in a way that Bucky has never seen before. Usually, he oscillates wildly between faux-disdain and fervent enthusiasm; Bucky has never seen this sort of quiet, easy regard before.

“We met in college,” Flannery continues. “I came to New York to get away from Mississippi because I couldn’t exactly be myself there, and there are a billion mosquitoes and it never snows.”

“So…” Bucky’s not really sure how to ask the question. He doesn’t want to pry, but he’s genuinely interested in Flannery’s backstory. “Can you be yourself there, now? With Diego?”

Diego and Flannery exchange another look, this time a little more guarded, but eventually Diego shrugs and Flannery gives a minute nod. “Yeah, it’s fine. The Mississippi that I grew up in is a lot different from the Mississippi of today. But the problem wasn’t that I was gay, the problem was that everyone thought I was a girl.”

“Ahhh, gotcha,” Bucky says, and all of a sudden, he does. “That’s cool, I’m glad you guys found each other. You seem to have a real good thing going on.”

“Yep,” Flannery says, looking at Diego again, and it’s a yep with an audible decade behind it. “What about you, Jamie? You scurrying off to meet your boytoy Steve? You never know, you could be saying the same thing about him to someone else in ten years.”

Fuck.

Flannery has no idea, no idea how right he is, how Bucky could just come out and say, right now, “Actually, we’ve been together for almost eighty years.” But that presupposes that they’re together, still together, and if they’re still together, then what the fuck is Bucky doing, playing the fool in Gravesend?

So, instead, he just says, “You never know,” gives them both his usual salute, and disappears through the door.

On the way to the subway stop, he texts Steve.

[Bucky]: Did you know it’s almost Thanksgiving??
[Bucky]: The shop is closed Wed-Sun

He checks his phone again when he gets home, and there’s a whole string of messages from both Steve and Sam.

[Steve]: Ahhhh you’re right, I completely forgot
[Steve]: Hold on a minute
[Steve]: Okay, I usually go with Sam to his mom’s house but he says this year they’re going on a cruise and he forgot to tell me
[Steve]: I’d be mad, but maybe that way you could spend Thanksgiving with me?
[Steve]: If you don’t have other plans

Bucky barks an undignified laugh at his phone. He’s getting undressed now, hanging up his still-clean shirt back on the garment rack, and he pauses for a minute to type out his reply.

[Bucky]: Who the fuck would I have plans with
[Bucky]: Sam? Oh right, he’s going on a cruise, that bastard
[Bucky]: Of course we can do Thanksgiving together
[Bucky]: It’ll be just like old times

Immediately the reply comes through, Steve’s signature bouquet of incomprehensible emojis, an exuberant keysmash that brings another smile to Bucky’s face. When did he get so fucking fond of Steve and all his idiosyncrasies? There is, of course, that notebook still shoved in the back of his bookshelf and the list with the bullet point that says I love him, but there’s a huge difference between love and fondness. You can love someone even as the sight of them makes you break out in hives.

But most of the time, Steve just gives him this squishy-squishy feeling inside, like he wants to take Steve’s face in his hands and squeeze the living daylights out of him, mash his cheeks together until his eyes disappear in the wrinkles. He wants to hug him so hard he pops. It’s not a sex thing, somehow. It’s just fondness, plain and simple.

The messages from Sam are a little more subdued.

[Sam]: JAMIE I forgot to tell u I can’t meet on Monday bc I’m going on a cruise w my ma and my sister and my aunt and my cousin
[Sam]: Sorry not sorry
[Sam]: Have fun eating dry turkey at Steve’s
[Sam]: I’m gonna be lying beside a pool in the middle of the ocean

Bucky snorts. He’s in his pajamas now, and he goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth while he types with the other hand.

[Jamie]: How dare you suggest that my turkey will be dry
[Jamie]: Or did you think I was gonna let Steve be in charge of the turkey?
[Jamie]: LMFAO no
[Jamie]: Have fun, text me when you’re back

He locks his phone and sets it on silent, then finishes rinsing his mouth and walks the two steps back into his bedroom, where he curls up under his patchwork quilt and, instead of counting sheep, begins to plan an elaborate, 21st-century Thanksgiving dinner.

Thanksgiving turns out really well, actually, and the string of minor disasters that threaten to mar the day are converted into hilarious mishaps, with five minutes’ perspective.

Bucky gets to Steve’s house early on Thursday morning with a bag on one arm filled with shallots, a bottle of red wine vinegar, spices, roasted chestnuts, good bread from the good bakery, five different kinds of cheese, dried figs, plus a log each of salame al finochietta, bresaola, cured chorizo, and pepper-rubbed salchichon. On the other arm is another bag with a roasting pan, a good stew pot, three of his best knives, and the pumpkin pie that he’d made the night before. In his backpack is his cast-iron pan and two bottles of a very good Rioja wrapped in dish towels, because even if neither of them can get drunk, he’s not drinking tap water with the first Thanksgiving dinner he’s had in seventy-one years.

When he gets through Steve’s door, he drops everything on the floor. The cast-iron pan clangs and the wine bottles clink, and he grimaces as he straightens back up, rubbing his shoulders. “Ow, jesus, that was heavy.”

“You could have given me a longer list, you know,” Steve says, reaching over with a tentative hand and lightly massaging his aching shoulder. His touch is far too light to make any sort of difference to the pain, which is fast disappearing, anyway.

“No way, the list I gave you was already five feet long. And you’ll never use a cast-iron pan again, so it doesn’t make sense for you to buy one of your own.” He bends down to pick up his bags, but Steve shoos him out of the way and picks them up himself, as easily as if he were picking up a penny on the sidewalk. His ham-hock biceps under his tight navy t-shirt don’t even bulge.

In the kitchen, Bucky is confronted with the first minor disaster of the day, a bag of waxy red potatoes. “What are these,” he asks flatly.

“Potatoes?” Steve says innocently. “Taters? Spuds? Patatas? Pommes de terre?”

“Hush,” Bucky commands, with an imperious wave of his metal hand. “I meant, these are red fingerlings which do not make good mashed potatoes, and I specifically said—”

But Steve interrupts. “You specifically said nothing, you specifically said potatoes and that was all. Are these not the right kind of potatoes, your majesty?” He does a little flourish with his hand like a court page in velveteen pantaloons, and Bucky bites down on his lip so as not to give Steve the satisfaction of a smile.

And then…

“Cranberry sauce in a can. Cranberry sauce. In a can?? What kind of two-bit, gingham-apron circa-1953 Thanksgiving dinner do you think I’m putting on here?” Steve looks like he can’t decide whether to take offence or give in to his amusement.

Bucky closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, pinching the bridge of his nose between his cool metal fingers.

“Okay,” Steve says, and Bucky, with his eyes closed, can hear that his voice is full of laughter. “In my defense, I don’t know what a cranberry looks like except that it’s probably red, so I asked a very nice lady at the grocery store where the cranberries were, and she said, ‘For Thanksgiving?’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and she stuck this in my hand.”

Bucky open his eyes. Steve is chewing his lips desperately, trying not to break out into his rising-sun grin, amused, as always, at Bucky’s nitpicky temperamental snit fits. Sic semper Steve Rogers.

Everything else is, thankfully, fine. Bucky puts Steve to work peeling shallots and chopping the roasted chestnuts while he dry-brines the turkey that Steve had bought and cubes the bread for the stuffing. They work well together in Steve’s big, empty kitchen, falling back into the rhythm of “hand me this” and “pass me that” and “move your ass” after only a few minutes. Bucky marvels a little at how well his body remembers how to move around Steve’s, even if his mind has forgotten.

Steve follows Bucky’s orders with a kind of bubbling cheer, laughing and poking fun at him while Bucky slips easily into his role of good-natured grump like pulling on a stretched-out sweater from childhood, found in the back of the closet.

While the turkey is cooking, Bucky gives Steve a sharp knife and the bresaola and tells him to slice it thinly, and then immediately demands the knife back so that he can show Steve how to slice it thinly. “Like this, curl your fingers in and rest the flat of the blade against your knuckles,” he says, shaving off a slice so thin that it looks like red stained glass when Steve holds it up to the light.

“Jesus christ,” Steve says. “You have some impressive knife skills.”

“I literally teach a class called Knife Skills,” Bucky says, swirling his wine around in the glass. They’re more than halfway through the first bottle; at this rate, they will be drinking tap water with the turkey. “Also, I’m the Winter fucking Soldier.”

Steve glances up at him, his knife stilled where he’s trying to imitate Bucky’s thin, clean slicing technique. “Not anymore,” he says, but it’s not a statement of fact, it’s a hesitation, a question.

“Hmm…” Bucky wobbles his hand in the air, comme ci, comme ça. “It’s not exactly like I’m the Winter Soldier. But he’s still in there somewhere. He comes out when I need him, like when I got stabbed at the bodega. But mostly he just makes snide remarks about how I’m getting soft.”

Steve smiles faintly and looks back down at the bresaola again. His knife makes a soft tock on the cutting board, and he holds up the slice; it’s much better than his first one, though he’s still shy of Bucky at his worst.

But who cares? “Great job,” Bucky says, and lets a little of the squishy-squishy fondness out in his voice. Steve looks like a kindergartener with a gold star on his first drawing as he pops the bresaola into his mouth. “How about you slice more than you eat, though,” Bucky says, “and I’ll do the cheese and then we can watch TV or something while we wait for the turkey.” He hip-checks Steve, but gently, and then stands sturdy and still while Steve presses back into his side like a grateful golden retriever, vibrating with the effort of keeping a lid on the pressure cooker of his happiness.

They watch Back to the Future, which Steve chooses randomly from Netflix because neither of them have seen it, and then they make the sides. The potatoes get roasted and smashed and then roasted again, and in the end, they’re even better than mashed potatoes would have been. The turkey and the stuffing and the caramelized shallots are polished off between the two of them, and as they’re leaning back at the table contemplating the poor bird’s carcass, Bucky says, “I forgot how much we can eat. I should have made another one.”

“Ehh,” Steve says, full and complacent, “there’s always next year.”

Later, as they’re cleaning up the kitchen, Steve stops where he’s wrapping up the last bits of the cheese in plastic and says, “Wait, on Thanksgiving you gotta say what you’re thankful for, we forgot about that part.”

Bucky grimaces, his face turned away to the sink where Steve can’t see him. He knows what’s coming. “You first,” he says, ripping the band-aid right off.

“Okay,” Steve says, the cheerful bastard, “I’m thankful for Nat and Clint, and Tony, sometimes, and Sam, all the time. And you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” He sounds like he’s discovering a hidden treasure, a secret room behind the bookshelf, like he didn’t already know, like Bucky didn’t already know. “And the fact that you’re the best thing that ever happened to me twice just blows my mind every goddamn day.”

Bucky is rinsing the plates off before he puts them in the dishwasher, but at that he stops, head bent over the sink, hands clutching at the cold metal lip. Okay, what does he say to that? Steve, will you marry me? might be appropriate, but anything else is going to sound like a hollow mockery of such a sincere, unintentional declaration of love. His mind screams in twenty registers like a pipe organ with all the stops out, and he can hear, faintly, the voice of the Soldier saying, Shoulda run when I told you to.

Steve notices that he’s frozen in place. “Buck…” he starts, but Bucky interrupts.

“I… I need some fresh air. I’m gonna go sit out on your stoop for a minute.” He straightens up, but doesn’t turn around, buying time by drying his hands thoroughly on the dishtowel.

“Did I do something? Is everything okay?” Steve sounds worried, and not exactly scared, but not far from it, either.

You ruiner. You ruin everything, Bucky thinks savagely at himself. He could say no, could say how he just needs to expose the top of his head to the sky for a little so that his thoughts can escape harmlessly into the open air like a gas leak, rather than explode in the close air of the kitchen. But you know what? He’s not going to lie to Steve. So he just grits his teeth against the battery-acid discomfort and says, “Steve, sometimes you’re a lot,” and turns as if to walk out into the hall. You ruiner. You asshole.

Steve wilts like a freshly picked daisy in the middle of August. “Fuck. I know, I’m sorry. I’m trying not to get ahead of myself. I’m trying so hard not to scare you off.” He sounds so scared himself that Bucky stops in his tracks and spins around, grabs Steve by the elbow and turns him around so that they’re facing each other. “Hey, hey, none of that. It’s okay. I’m sorry I snapped. It’s not a you problem. It’s a me problem, and I’m working on it.”

Steve is shaking his head, obviously unwilling to let Bucky take even half an ounce of the blame, but Bucky squeezes his elbow a little tighter and gives it a shake. “No, you listen to me. Don’t ever apologize for having too much love to give.” Steve startles at the L-word, but fuck it, why not just come out and say it? Then it’s out in the open and they’re not dancing around it anymore. “It was never a problem before, and you’re not the one who changed. Well, okay, you did change, you’re a lot nicer than you were before, but I’m the one who changed in the other direction. Just let me get used to it a little. It’s like… like turning the light on in the middle of the night. You’re so bright sometimes I can’t look directly at you until my eyes adjust. Okay?”

“You… you know I love you?” His face is a study in wonder and hope intermingled with fear.

“The fuck kind of a question is that?” Bucky lets go of his elbow to smack him on the arm with the back of his hand “Is the Pope Catholic? Steve, I never doubted you loved me, not once, not a single second since I kissed you on the fire escape on the 15th of August 1936, not even on the helicarrier. It’s like a flag, if you’re not waving it over your head in a parade, you’re wearing it on a pin on your lapel, but it’s there and it’s visible and you’re proud as fuck of it and you couldn’t hide it if you tried.”

“Oh,” Steve says, stunned, like Bucky’d just clotheslined him with a lead pipe. “I… I didn’t know it was so obvious.”

“That’s ‘cause you’re an idiot,” Bucky says flatly. He laces his fingers through Steve’s and can feel the way his hand is trembling. “Come sit outside on the stoop with me so I can let my head cool off a little bit. I promise, everything is okay.”

Steve lifts his other hand slowly, giving Bucky the chance to shy away, and when he doesn’t, he cups his hand lightly around Bucky’s jaw, an echo of that first touch the night Bucky got stabbed, which itself was an echo of Kreischberg. His hand is warm, his fingers so long they almost curl around under Bucky’s ear, and he’s doing that thing with his face again, that looking thing. It’s Bucky’s turn to tremble, just a little bit, and he turns away, his jaw rasping against Steve’s palm as he goes, and says, “Come on. Five minutes, and then we can come back in for pie.”

The first week of December, Steve calls him right as he gets home from work. He’s locking the door behind him and slipping out of his coat when the phone rings. It takes him a moment to find it on his person and another to get his gloves off so that he can answer it.

Steve says, with no preamble whatsoever, “I got an appointment with a therapist!”

“Aww, fuck, Steve, I’m so proud of you!” Bucky’s grinning wildly, alone in his apartment, his boots half-unlaced, his hair a staticky mess from his wool beanie. He leans over the back of the couch and twitches the curtains closed so that his only neighbor, the blank, windowless wall of the building across the alley, can’t see him smiling.

“It’s all thanks to you,” Steve says, his voice like cotton wool, and Bucky is the precious and fragile thing he’s wrapping up.

“It’s all thanks to Sam.” Bucky thinks back for the umpteenth time to the conversation on the terrace, to Sam trying again and again and again to get Steve to get help. Neither one of them deserve a friend like Sam; he’s too good for this world.

“Sure, of course, I would be so much worse if I didn’t have Sam to kick my ass up and down the block a couple times a week,” Steve says with an audible shrug. “But it’s you that’s really made the difference. Before, I didn’t care about feeling better, about getting better, because there was nothing to get better for. I was just going through the motions, and that was fine. But then I found you.”

“I let you find me,” Bucky says, more to interrupt the honey-sweet drizzle of Steve’s voice than from any sort of petulance.

Steve laughs, a low, intimate thing that vibrates down the line. “Fine, whatever, you let me find you, and then I suddenly wanted to be better because I wanted to be there for you when you needed me.” Bucky can hear the swish of fabric on fabric, but whether Steve is getting undressed or just shifting around on the couch, he doesn’t know. “But I guess it turned out that maybe you were there when I needed you, first.”

“Hmm,” Bucky says, trying to buy some time to think of what to say. “I’m sure you’ll be able to return the favor someday.” He tilts his head, holding the phone between his shoulder and his ear so that he can use both hands to unbutton his shirt. He shrugs it off his shoulders and tosses it in the laundry pile, and then unzips his jeans, shimmying a little to get them down over his hips.

Steve has to be able to hear him, but he doesn’t say anything, just does something that sounds like a happy little sigh and says, “Probably. But for now, I’m gonna start going to a therapist and I’m thinking about looking around for something to do.”

Bucky finally gets the sausage casings of his jeans off his legs and pulls on the sweats he wears to bed. “What, like a hobby?” That’s not what he’s thinking though, that’s not the question just waiting to trip off the edge of his tongue. What he doesn’t say is, Like a different job?

“Yeah!” Steve sounds enthusiastic, as if he’s never had a hobby before. And maybe, now that Bucky thinks about it, maybe he hasn’t? “What if… what if I came and took one of your classes?”

“Absolutely not.”

Steve laughs again, but this time it booms deep through the phone, through Bucky’s ear, following the carotid artery as it loops dizzily through his brain and then plunging back down to his heart. “Okay, okay,” Steve says after a minute. “I thought you were going to say that. I’ll find something else. Woodworking, maybe. Or bookbinding, so I can make my own sketchbooks.”

Bucky is in the bathroom, squeezing the last pea of toothpaste out of a very flat tube, but he stops dead. “Are you still drawing?” How, how could he have forgotten about that?

“I…” Steve sounds hesitant, like he’s telling an embarrassing secret. “I just started again, actually. I hadn’t done anything, not really, since I came out of the ice.“

He doesn’t need to elaborate; Bucky knows the whole story already, extrapolated with ease from that one throwaway clause, since I came out of the ice. “I’m so proud of you, Steve,” he says. There are big feelings in his chest, glowing white like molten silver, and he imagines them falling off his lips and flowing across the airwaves, drip-dropping out the receiver on Steve’s end.

“Thanks, Buck,” Steve says, and Bucky knows he can feel them, the drip-drops of molten silver. “It… it really means a lot to hear you say that. But, uh,”—there’s the sound of wood knocking on a plaster wall, is he in bed?—“you should really hold off on the praise until you see what I’ve been drawing, though. It’s terrible.”

Bucky holds the phone against his chest for a moment so that Steve doesn’t have to hear him rinsing his mouth and spitting in the sink. “Liar.”

“Am not!” Steve says, and there’s another low laugh. “I’m severely out of practice.”

“You just need to warm up a little. Find something good to draw.”

“Would you sit for me?” He’s tentative, but so warm, his whole soul like an electric blanket that Bucky can pull right up over his ears. He’s in bed now, the wind whistling through the cracks around his shitty window frame, but he burrows under his quilt and listens to Steve’s soft, shy voice in his ear and feels like he’s curled around a brass brazier full of live coals.

“Of course,” he murmurs. And then, “But fully clothed, it’s December.”

“I have a fireplace, you know.” Steve sounds distracted, but maybe that’s a tactic, maybe he’s on the offensive now.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“It gets real hot in the living room if I throw a few logs on the fire.” There’s a sigh on the other end of the line and… Is he… Bucky thinks, is this turning into phone sex? Is he touching himself? But no, Steve wouldn’t; he’d ask first, always.

Then, all of a sudden, there’s the sound of running water and the clink of a dish set down in the sink. “Are you washing the dishes?” Bucky asks, only a little incredulous because five seconds ago he’d been picturing Steve in his bed with his hand down his pants.

“Yeah, uh, I made fried egg sandwiches for dinner. With bacon and avocado.”

“Holy shit,” Bucky says, and almost sits up in surprise, remembering at the last minute that he’s trying to conserve heat in his little patchwork ice cave.

“I know!” Steve sounds so proud of himself. “It’s not much, but…”

“I’ve seen your fridge, you don’t need to explain.”

“It’s not a sandwich from the bodega,” Steve says.

“No, it sure isn’t.”

Now, neither one of them speaks; there’s just the soft, domestic sounds of Steve washing up the scant dinner dishes. Bucky closes his eyes and imagines himself at Steve’s kitchen table, watching the muscles in his broad back move with the motions of cleaning and swiping and rinsing and drying. He’s probably wearing a button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, massive forearms covered in fine, blond down, wet on his wrists from the dishwater like the fluff on a brand-new chick. Bucky imagines himself writing, making a grocery list, maybe, on the back of a receipt. Or maybe he’s reading a book that he pulled off of Steve’s shelf. His belly is full of bacon, egg, and avocado sandwiches, and he’s just biding time, waiting for Steve to finish so that they can go upstairs to bed.

It’s so sweet, so lovely and domestic and warm that he tears up, pinching the bridge of his nose with his human hand to drive away the tingles. He waits for another minute to be sure that his voice is steady, and then says, “Steve, I need to go to sleep.”

“Oh yeah, sure, of course.” He can hear the phone being switched to Steve’s other ear, and then the flick of a light switch. “Sorry for keeping you, I just… I like…”

“I know,” Bucky says. Squishy-squishy. “Me too.”

There’s the distant plod-plod-creak of Steve climbing his stairs, and then he says hesitantly, “You don’t work tomorrow, you want to… you want to come over?”

“Sure,” Bucky says, while his interior voices all scream, Yes, YES, of course, OF COURSE. “Any specific reason?”

“No. Just to see you. That’s all.”

Sometimes—and lately, it’s been happening more and more often—Steve says something that makes Bucky’s heart feel like it’s breaking. It’s a physical hurt, but he knows what it is. It’s like when a bone heals crooked and has to be rebroken and set properly so that it will heal good and strong and straight again, except that it’s his heart. Steve is smoothing out the kinks and the cramps, turning it into something good and strong and worthy of his own self even as he’s unaware of what he’s doing.

“Of course,” Bucky says, after he takes a minute to breathe through the pain. “Around lunchtime? I’ll send you a text when I’m on my way.”

“Sure, thanks.” Water runs in the background; Steve must be brushing his own teeth, now. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Me too.” Bucky rolls over and switches off the bedside light. In the dark, with Steve’s voice soft in his ear, it almost feels like they’re in the same room. “Goodnight, Steve.”

“Night, Buck.”

He climbs the stairs slowly, one foot at time, savoring the anticipation he feels coursing through his veins. It’s sharp and bright like a young wine, heady, bubbling up through his legs to collect in the pit of his stomach where it flutters, light and eager.

On the second floor, the staircase keeps climbing, curving around to the left so that he can’t see past the first landing, but it doesn’t matter; he’s not going higher, not right now, not today. There is a short hallway in front of him and three doors, one on the right, one in the middle, and one on the left. His feet make no sound as they leave the last step; he looks down; the floor is covered with a thick, scarlet carpet, the color of a blowsy rose, and his bare toes almost disappear in the deep, plush pile.

Everything is silent, but with a kind of visceral expectancy that he can feel gathering around him like a magic cloak. He passes the first door, ignores the second, and opens the third.

There, on a bed with white sheets and big wooden posts, is Steve, delightful and shocking in his obscenity. His face is turned away from the door, mashed into the rucked-up bedsheet, but his back is bowed and his round, perfect peach of an ass is stuck high in the air, facing Bucky, who is standing motionless in the doorway. He’s reached around behind himself, three of his own fingers sunk up to the last knuckle in his wet, twitching hole.

When he hears the door open, he moans brokenly, and then whispers, “I’ve been waiting.” He’s across the room, but it sounds like he’s whispering directly into the shell of Bucky’s ear, and a delicious shiver runs through him, even as he’s undoing his belt and pushing his pants down around his thighs.

Steve is loose, he’s obviously been working on himself for quite some time, and there’s an impressive wet spot on the bed where his cock is steadily dripping great viscous drops of precome. But it doesn’t matter how loose and open he is, Bucky almost chokes on his own tongue when he takes the hard wings of Steve’s narrow pelvis in his two hands and pushes his cockhead through the tight ring of muscle; it’s so tight, it’s the tightest thing he’s ever felt, he has no idea how he’s actually going to be able to push in all the way.

But he does, he bottoms out, and Steve moans again like he’s dying, but dying of pleasure, like he’d sold his soul to the devil for this orgasm. Bucky still can’t see his face, it’s hidden by his massive shoulder and the messy nest of his overlong hair, but Steve is saying, “Bucky, Bucky, Bucky,” in time with his thrusts, in a ragged voice that sounds like it’s been dragged over hot coals.

And then he comes, he comes so hard his vision blacks out and he wakes up, a second later, alone in his own bed, gasping for air like his head’s been held underwater. It takes him only half a second to figure out where he is, and then he throws the quilt off, anxious to keep it clean. There’s a massive amount of come cooling in the valley where his thigh meets his groin, running in sticky rivulets down into the seat of his sweatpants.

“Fuck,” he says out loud. How much noise was he making? What if the neighbor heard him? How embarrassing.

He gets up and strips his clothes off, stepping into the kitchen to shove them directly into the washing machine. In the bathroom he wipes himself down with a wet cloth. Come has trickled all the way down to the back of his knee; he can’t remember the last time he came so hard, or so much.

Okay, he thinks, maybe that will get it out of my system. A little voice somewhere in the back of his head says yeah, right..

But really, it would be helpful if he could just wet dream his way out of this… this whole… this everything. He wants Steve so bad he can taste it, he can feel the desire thick and chewy between his back teeth when they’re together, like he’s perpetually five seconds and a semi-secluded back alley away from ripping Steve’s clothes off and having him right then and there.

But then Steve always says something or does something sweet and hesitant, his poise faltering in the face of Bucky’s continued existence, and it makes Bucky feel like he’s licking a battery, instead. Then his automatic flight-or-flight response kicks in and he has to dig his heels in and find some way to needle Steve so that he stops being so lovely and shy and starts being the sassy little shit he remembers from before.

Is that it? Does he feel this way because New Steve, tentative Steve, is so far removed from fierce, half-feral Steve, with his sharp canines and wicked eyes and the chip on his shoulder the size of Volkswagen, who would just as soon smack Bucky’s ass the color of a ripe strawberry as say that he loved him? It’s the superimposition, again, a soft and hesitant Steve overlaid on top of the wily, foxy Steve that he knew and loved so well.

Knows and loves so well.

Lying in bed, wondering why he’s half-hard again when he should be soft and sleepy, he thinks that maybe Steve will keep on like this forever unless he, Bucky, does the thing, makes the move, strips his pants off in Steve’s kitchen and bends over with his hands around his ankles.

He’s so afraid, a little voice whispers. It’s not the Soldier, it’s another voice he’s never heard before, a little Tinkerbell of a voice high and soft in his ear. He’s fucking terrified. He thinks that if he doesn’t tread carefully enough, he’s going to ruin the delicate balance and lose you, and if he loses you, he’s going to lose the last unbroken thread in the warp of his self.

Bucky absentmindedly palms his cock through his only other pair of clean sweats and feels the desire mount a little higher, the clockworks wind a little tighter. Okay, he thinks. Fine. He feels determined and a little scared, himself, like he’s in the first car on a rollercoaster, and he’s just cresting the top of the first hill.

I can be the strong one. Strong enough to ruin it.

Chapter Text

He gets to Steve’s house the next day right before lunch, like he’d said, thinking that they’d go out or order pizza or something, but when Steve opens the door with a dishtowel slung over one shoulder and a tentative, happy smile on his face, Bucky feels a little thrill of amazement and delight run right down to his toes.

“Wait a minute, Steve,” he says as he toes his shoes off in the hall. The house is warm and the air smells like something good and filling, tomatoes and garlic and butter. “Did you cook?”

Steve grins hugely, so proud of himself and so adorable that Bucky has to pinch himself surreptitiously on the tenderest part of his right arm as he’s taking his jacket off so that he doesn’t start screaming about it. “Yeah,” Steve says, looking down and scuffing his toes on the worn floorboards of the hallway, and Bucky almost flies to pieces right then and there. “Sam told me I couldn’t fuck up pasta sauce, and he even gave me his ma’s secret recipe because he said it was a special occasion.”

“Jesus,” Bucky says reverently, just as his stomach growls like an eggbeater spinning in a bowl of marshmallow fluff.

Steve grins even wider, and Bucky can almost see the pearlescent white of his back teeth from where he’s standing. “Well, come on,” Steve says, gesturing with one arm toward the kitchen like Bucky’s the belle he’s about to escort into the ball. “Everything’s ready. I was just waiting for you.”

It’s good, it’s actually really good, so good that Bucky thinks about asking Sam’s mom for the recipe. He’d have to do it directly, of course; not only was Steve sworn to secrecy, but it’d be an insult to the chef to get it thirdhand.

Afterwards, they go into the living room and Steve pulls his laptop down off the shelf while Bucky slouches down into the corner of the couch. While Steve searches through Netflix for something to watch, he keeps up a low-grade patter of complaints about Bucky stealing the best spot, that’s his spot, goddammit, you can sink down into it and the right angle of the cushions keeps your head upright without any effort on your part whatsoever, and blah blah blah. Bucky stops paying attention. He’s tired, last night’s dream or escapade or whatever it was having kept him up thinking until the wee hours of the morning.

Not to mention that Steve is just too beautiful for words, gesturing with one big hand while the other holds the laptop balanced on his knee, his hair in disarray and a hastily wiped-off splotch of tomato sauce running down the middle of his shirt. His color is high, his brows pulled down over his nose as he gestures towards Bucky’s puddle of a body in mock-approbation. He’s not being careful, he’s not handling Bucky with kid gloves; he seems, either because of the calories or the exposure therapy, easily, thoughtlessly comfortable. Bucky can see, for the first time this century, the small, wiry body that used to dominate him joyfully transposed over the big, solid frame like the afterimage left on his retina when he looks at a bright light for too long.

It’s like the dry, oniony outer layers of Steve’s personality have peeled back, and Bucky can see the sharp white flesh exposed underneath, fresh and waiting for him with a nasty, lovely bite. He can feel his heartbeat kick up a notch in anticipation.

“Steve,” he says. Steve stops immediately, but to Bucky’s immense gratification, he doesn’t look any less annoyed. He just fixes Bucky with a wolfish glare and Bucky shivers deliciously from his heart right down through his guts.

“Look…” He can’t look at Steve while he’s doing this, so he just slouches further down and tents his fingers over his stomach, staring at the ceiling. “I can’t do this little dance or whatever it is we’ve been doing anymore. It makes my skin itch, your great big smile and your selflessness and your love and you never asking anything in return.” He reaches up and presses the tips of his fingers into his eyes until fizzling sparks burst into life behind his eyelids. “It’s too much, you’re too holy, and since I’m the ruiner, I’ve got to ruin it somehow before I go stark raving from all the sweetness and light. I need to make it bad.”

It comes out all in a rush and he feels a little better for having said it, but finally, when he risks a look, Steve is just staring at him, his mouth hanging open, his face transformed into something incredulous and hurt and terrified all at once.

Of fucking course.

Bucky grabs two handfuls of hair at his temples and tugs his head this way and that, grinding his teeth. As usual, nothing comes out of his mouth the right way.

“Okay,” he says, smoothing his hair down behind his ears again and closing his eyes tight. “Wipe that look off your face because there’s nothing to be hurt over or scared about. I’m not leaving, I’m not telling you I don’t want to see you. I’m just telling you I’ve figured out a solution that’ll make us both happy.”

“What’s that?” The fear is gone, but the tentativeness remains.

“I want to fuck you.” How you like them apples, Steve?

He cracks one eye and Steve is gaping again, but for other reasons, now.

“Or you can fuck me, I don’t care, really Steve, please, I just…” He sits up now, feeling desperate for Steve to understand him, really understand him. He puts his metal hand on Steve’s knee and squeezes hard and doesn’t let up. “I want to be with you. Really be with you. But you gotta stop handling me like I’m made of spun glass. I don’t know how to put it any plainer than that.” Steve looks like he’s been run down by a whole herd of wooly mammoths. “Plus, do you know how long it has been since I had sex?”

Steve slowly shakes his head.

“Well, you were the last, so seventy-one years. And do you know how long I’ve been dreaming about your dick?” He gestures with his other hand at Steve’s crotch and Steve glances down like he’d forgotten what was there. “Since I broke my programming and remembered what you could do with it, basically.”

Steve looks like a baby seeing a dog for the first time. He gapes, he flounders, he visibly processes the last minute’s-worth of conversation, the little wheels and cogs turning in his head. But then his face settles into something determined and a little wicked, and Bucky thinks, That’s Steve. That’s my Steve.

“Is that right?” Steve says. “You’ve been dreaming about my dick?” He sets the laptop gingerly on the coffee table and then crosses his massive forearms over his massive chest, his face bunched up in a frown like Bucky’s just told him he’d taken the motorcycle for a joyride without his permission.

“Damn straight,” Bucky says, his own grin taking over his face now, his whole body thrilling in anticipation. It worked, it’s working, he was strong and he did the thing and his hunch paid off and it worked. He’s about to get dicked down for the first time this century, and he’s gonna get dicked down good.

Steve stares at him for another very long minute, considering, plotting, maybe. Then he says, “Bucky. Go get me a glass of water.”

It’s a test, and Bucky knows it, and Steve knows that Bucky knows it, and he almost laughs out loud in sheer, giddy glee. He can do this, this is what he’s good at. Leaving impressions, assassinating people, sharpening knives and… and whatever this game is. The game. Their game. He never took the time to sit down and think about it when they were both young and reckless and Steve got in the mood to order him around, and he’s not going to start thinking about it now, either.

But he knows that this is Steve’s way of saying, How much do you remember? and Is this okay?

And boy, is it ever okay. So okay that Bucky trips over his own feet in his haste to jump off the couch and comply with orders. He hears Steve laugh behind him, low and lush like the damp heat of a tropical glasshouse. He speedwalks into the kitchen and starts throwing cabinets open at random. His mind seems to have turned into a wheel of swiss cheese; he can’t remember where the glasses are, and he feels a delicious urgency that won’t let him stop to think about it.

All of a sudden, he hears the quiet swish of bare feet behind him, and he spins around, his heart beating double time, the adrenaline shooting deliciously up his spine and all his animal instincts screaming predator!

Steve stalks across the kitchen toward him, the denim between his thighs making a menacing hiss. Bucky’s fingers start to itch, he’s forgotten all about the glass of water, he’s almost beside himself with desire, half-wild with the need to grab Steve by the hip bones and pull their bodies together with a crash.

Steve reaches him and leans forward, but checks his momentum by planting one hand on the cabinet beside Bucky’s head, boxing him in, very high-school locker vibes. He looks at Bucky’s mouth, which must be flushed from the way he’s been biting his lips frantically for the last thirty seconds, and then up to meet Bucky’s eyes. His own eyes are the hot blue blaze of a cloudless sky in the middle of August, interminable, inescapable. “Can I kiss you?” he whispers. Even though Bucky passed the test with flying colors, Steve gives him one last chance to say no, this is too much, to back out, to return to the status quo.

So Bucky loses control. “Fuck, yes, of course, anything you want, just like we used to, please,” he babbles, and grabs Steve by the neck of his shirt, pulling him in so that Bucky can reach his mouth and kissing him for all he’s worth.

Steve leans into the kiss with a groan that comes up from the depths of his belly, and even though he’s not that much taller than Bucky, it feels like he’s towering over him, like Bucky has shrunk half a foot, like Steve has descended from Mt. Olympus for the express purpose of turning Bucky into a bowlful of trembling jelly.

Steve is pressing him down, now, the lip of the counter digging painfully into the backs of his thighs, and grinding his own thigh slowly up against Bucky’s stiffening cock. The metal of his zipper digs into the sensitive skin through his underwear, and he draws in a hissing breath around Steve’s tongue in his mouth. Then, hardly thinking about it before he does it, he pulls away a little and bites Steve on the lip, hard.

Steve starts back with a gasp, a bright red bead of blood welling up on the plump pillow of his raw-looking bottom lip. He looks startled, but only momentarily, until Bucky says, “That’s for biting me in 1936,” and then his mouth splits in a slow grin and he licks up the drop of blood with the tip of his pink tongue.

Then before Bucky can say anything else, dig himself even further into the hole of trouble in which he’s already happily neck-deep, Steve bends his knees a little and wraps his forearms under the meat of Bucky’s ass and heaves him up over his shoulder. Bucky screeches, startled and dizzy with lust, his cock digging even more painfully, now, into Steve’s sharp collarbone, all the blood rushing to his head, which is dangling level with the small of Steve’s back.

He feels like he’s drunk, swaying back and forth as Steve carries him out of the kitchen and up the stairs. He tries to grab at Steve’s ass, tantalizingly close to his face, but his arms just bobble around like a marionette’s.

Then Steve kicks the door of his bedroom open with a bang, strides across the floor, and dumps Bucky unceremoniously onto the bed. Bucky grabs at the duvet—blue, not white, a steadily-diminishing part of him notes dispassionately—to steady himself as the world rocks around him like a stormy sea.

Steve is staring at him intensely from where he stands at the foot of the bed, the colossus of Rhodes, his fists planted on his hips and his face possessive and clouded with lust. “Take your clothes off, Buck,” he says, his voice like sandpaper, and Bucky obeys, pulling his sweater off together with his t-shirt in one swift movement. Then he tries to get the button on his jeans undone, but his fingers are trembling, his human palm sweaty all of a sudden, and he fumbles the button again and again before Steve is right there, brushing his hands away. “Let me do it,” he says.

Bucky whines like a dog under the exquisite torture of Steve’s thick fingers slowly, carefully popping the button out of its buttonhole and then drawing his zipper down tooth by tooth. The backs of Steve’s fingers brush over the thin black cotton of Bucky’s briefs as he grasps the waistband of his jeans on either side of his fly and works it down over his hips. His knuckles skim over the thin, sensitive skin on the inside of his hip bones, so close to his straining, aching cock that Bucky whines again and tosses his head from side to side. “Seventy-one years, Steve,” he says, his voice cracking on the last word, but Steve just grins.

He straightens back up, then, and grabs the cuffs of Bucky’s jeans and, with one mighty pull, whips them down and off his legs. Bucky slides halfway down the bed with a squeak, his briefs around his ankles, and Steve pulls them off with one hand like an afterthought and tosses them over his shoulder.

Then he stands there and looks. If Bucky had thought that Steve’s looks before were uncomfortable, they didn’t hold a candle to this one. Steve is looking at him with a greed that sets a nervous little metronome tick-ticking in his heart, and he can feel his breathing pick up, his belly hollowing out in the cradle between his hips and his rib cage with each overwrought breath. A little drop of precome beads on the end of his cock as it bobs up and down over the soft, dark hair that trails down from his navel.

Steve breaks character then, just for a moment. His face softens, his plush mouth falls open on an exhale, and his eyes gleam wetly in the bright afternoon sunlight shining through the thin white curtains that cover the window.

“Steve, don’t, not right now,” Bucky whispers, because if Steve can’t keep it together, how’s Bucky gonna keep it together? There’s a time for crying and there’s a time for getting fucked within an inch of your life, and you could definitely combine the two, but that would require some negotiation beforehand. The drop has already turned into a little puddle of precome cooling on his belly, and he doesn’t have time for this, not right now.

Steve’s eyes flick up to meet his, and he swallows heavily. “Alright,” he says softly, before his voice hardens up again, an iron command wrapped in velvet. “Turn over.”

Bucky obeys, rolling over onto his stomach and burying his face in the thick, plush duvet. He bucks his hips, ruts up against the mattress a few times without even thinking about it, and it feels so good, his cock so desperate for that little bit of friction that he moans softly into the bed. His moans are cut off quickly, however, turned into a squeal by the sharp sting of a slap to his right ass cheek.

“Stop it,” Steve says, and Bucky can feel his face flush, the sting already faded into the comfortably warm pain of a sunburn, but the humiliation is still sharp and hot. Hotter, even, when Steve grabs his thighs right above the backs of his knees and forces him to bend his legs up until his ass is in the air. Now his face feels like a burning brand, about to set the bedclothes on fire.

“Mmm,” Steve rumbles under his breath, appreciating, considering. Bucky’s mind is already half-gone, he’s back in his dream from yesterday, but this time it’s Steve who’s standing in the doorway looking at him while he’s knuckle-deep in his own hole.

“Steve,” he says again, half-whine, half-plea, and then everything in his belly clenches up when he feels the pad of Steve’s thumb ghost softly over his hole, smooth and rough at the same time. “Steve,” he whines again, more insistently, this time, though he’s not even sure what he’s asking for.

Crack! Another open-palmed slap, on the other cheek. “Hush,” Steve says over Bucky’s moans, and then the bastard leaves him there, open and exposed, face half-buried in the duvet and hidden under the dark tangle of his own hair. There are soft sounds behind him that he only half-catches, so caught up is he in thinking about what he must look like, how exposed he is, how vulnerable, how tender. Cloth rustling, the soft pop pop pop of a button fly, a drawer opening and closing, the click of a bottle cap.

And then he clenches automatically, unwillingly, around the cold, hard-soft intrusion of Steve’s lubed-up finger breaching his hole, pushing in slowly as Bucky tries to make his body relax, his thighs all a-tremble. “Steve,” he says again, a sigh and a whine, “I… I don’t know, it’s been so long, it’s, Steve, I…” Nothing’s coming out but a jumbled-up mess of words, unintelligible, anyway, with his face smashed into the duvet, the ends of his hair in his mouth. But Steve just says, “Shhh,” then smooths his dry hand down Bucky’s back, pushing him into a deeper arch, before drawing it back and smacking him again with a sharp crack. Bucky’s moan goes high and wobbly and then the tenor changes, somehow, and Bucky feels himself relax, open up, and lets Steve slide in easily to the last knuckle.

Oh, it feels so good, it feels so right, and when Steve murmurs, “That’s right, good job,” he feels his whole body flush hot at the praise. Another finger joins the first, and it’s easy this time to let him pump his fingers in and out, to relax under the slow glide, to let the pleasure wash over him in wave after wave, and when Steve crooks his fingers just right—of course he remembers how Bucky likes it—to make sounds that he hasn’t made in seventy-one years, to moan and sigh and gasp, and to let some rediscovered part of him take the reins of his mouth.

“Oh Steve, fuck, so thick, god, your fingers, please, I’m ready, gimmie, fuck me, please, fuck me,” he babbles into the duvet, but Steve must hear him because he pulls his fingers out, and Bucky hears the click of the cap again. Then Steve’s huge hand is reaching between his legs and wrapping around his cock, giving it a few slick tugs while Bucky whimpers and squirms, the hot coal of pleasure that sits in the bottom of his belly burning brighter and brighter and brighter.

“Steve, stop, not yet, I wanna, I wanna,” he pants incoherently, but Steve hears him, Steve understands him.

His hand disappears, and he squeezes Bucky’s hip. “Turn over,” he says again, the velvet command again, and fuck. Bucky wobbles over onto his back and Steve looms over him again, crawling up the bed on his knees so that he’s kneeling between Bucky’s spread thighs. He’s looking at Bucky impassively, the way he’d look at an objet d’art, something expensive but not otherwise noteworthy. Bucky feels like he can’t breathe; he feels like he’s in a glass case, spread out for viewing, and Steve is looking at him from outside, this thing that he owns, that’s only valuable because it’s his.

But then Steve breaks the illusion by running his hand up Bucky’s waist and cupping his chest, thumbing over a nipple so that Bucky gasps quietly. “I’ve never forgotten how beautiful you are like this,” he says, like he can’t help but make it tender. Bucky screws his eyes closed and turns his face away. He can’t look at Steve, it’s too much, it’s all too much.

“Please, just fuck me, please,” he pleads, and a whimper breaks free from his loose mouth when Steve pushes his knees up to his chest and holds them both there with the massive spread of his right hand, while with his left he lines his cock up and then pushes in in one long, slow, easy glide.

Bucky can feel his eyes roll back in his head and his mouth fall open all the way. He arches his back off the bed as much as he can and makes a sound that would be humiliating in its wantonness if he had any brain to spare for thinking about it.

Steve starts slow, pulling out with a maddening drag and then pushing back in again, just as slow, but pretty soon he’s set up a rhythm, pounding into Bucky, gasping and grunting in time with the slap of his belly against the meat of Bucky’s thighs. Any lingering fear that Steve might have taken ‘I want to fuck you’ as an invitation to make love, instead, evaporates into thin air as Steve keeps going, harder and faster, no delicacy or tenderness left now in his face. He’s looking down at Bucky through half-closed lashes with the detachment of a man looking at a high-performance race car.

Bucky doesn’t think it can get any more perfect, but then Steve pushes his legs even closer to his chest, and Bucky feels his rib cage constrict and he can’t catch a breath. With the dizzy breathlessness and the change in the angle of Steve’s thrusts, pretty soon he finds himself right on the edge, his balls drawn up tight, the burning coal in his belly growing brighter and brighter.

“Steve, Steve, Steve,” he pants, “I’m gonna, I’m gonna…” and Steve lets go of his legs so that they fall open on either side of his waist, then wraps his sticky fingers around the head of Bucky’s cock, jerking him shortly off in time with his thrusts.

“Oh… oh…” is all Bucky says before he comes, harder than he can ever remember coming before, shooting up so far that he can feel the burning drops of come landing on his neck. The world whites out, and the sun coming through the curtains pales in comparison to the brightness of his orgasm as it lights up every last nerve in his body. He comes back to his senses right as Steve moans his name brokenly and thrusts up into him one last time, pushing him up the bed so hard he can feel it in the back of his throat.

He watches Steve from between his knees as he kneels there, eyes closed, mouth slack, sweat standing out all over him, and flushed a beautiful pink. His breathing is harsh and ragged, but it starts to slow down even as he gives a few last, abortive thrusts, milking the last of his orgasm. A minute passes and he cracks one eye, looking down at Bucky watching him. A slow, filthy smile spreads across his face and he runs his fingers through the come that’s pooling in the hollow where Bucky’s collarbones meet at the base of his neck, dragging his wet fingers down Bucky’s sternum like he’s anointing him, a debauched sacrament.

“Was that bad enough for you?” he says, finally.

“It was horrible,” Bucky says, and grins back up at him, soft and sated and consecrated, supremely confident in his worthiness.

After it’s all over and Steve wipes him up with a succession of warm washcloths and then falls back into bed, pulling the covers up over them both, he rolls over and throws a leg over Bucky’s hips, pulling him close in a cephalopod embrace. “What are we, now? Are we back together? Is this a thing?”

Bucky snuggles into his pillowy chest, trying to get as close as he possibly can without actually climbing inside. “Jesus, Rogers, you fuck a guy once and all of a sudden you want to have The Talk?”

“Once?” Steve sounds affronted. “What do you mean, once? We’ve done this hundreds of times. Thousands, maybe.”

“Okay, well if you want to nitpick, what do you mean, back together?” Bucky pulls his head back on the pillow so that he can look Steve straight in the eye. “I don’t ever remember us splitting up.”

Steve's face looks like the culmination of a century’s worth of sunrises, all superimposed, whiting out the image with an unbelievable brilliance. “Well, alright then,” he says. His voice is full of wonder, but his smile is all confidence and cocky joy. “When are you moving in?”

“Joke’s on you, I already live here,” Bucky says, and turns around so that he can nestle into the cradle of Steve’s arms, the little spoon, the treasure. “Just got to go pick up some stuff from my old place. And replace all your pots and pans and knives.”

Steve snickers into the back of his neck.

“Anyway, shut up and let me sleep. I want to take a nap. This bed is amazing. I should have done this months ago.”

“’Night, Buck,” Steve says, nosing softly through his hair.

“’Night, Steve.”

There’s a moment of comfortable silence where he feels himself drifting, a coracle on the calm of an inland sea, before Steve murmurs, “I love you, Buck.”

A yawn and a sigh, and then everything in him comes together to say, “I love you too, Steve,” and he shuts his eyes and falls softly, quietly asleep.

Chapter Text

Six months later

He’s not late for work, but only because he finally gets a foot behind him and pushes off the wall where Steve has him pinned, using the momentum to carry them both backwards in a Fred-and-Ginger move across the hall until Steve trips on the rug and sits down heavily on the bottom of the staircase.

Bucky falls on top of him, of course; Steve still has his limpet hands stuck to Bucky’s back, but he manages to peel them off and stick them to the banister, instead. “Stay there. Don’t move,” he orders, and Steve does, hanging off the railing with his face flushed and his hair sticking up all over his head, looking like some half-ravished silent movie heroine clinging to the last of her dignity.

“Don’t leave me, Bucky, I’m dyin’,” he whines.

“You can take care of it while I’m gone. You do know how to jerk off, don’t you?”

“No, I forgot,” Steve says petulantly, and Bucky slips his shoes on as he looks down into Steve’s face, glorious and perfect even from this angle. His mouth, pursed close in a pout, looks like a wet, red cherry, and he almost dives back down for another kiss. But Steve’s an incorrigible bastard, a troublemaker who loves nothing better than to make trouble for Bucky. In the form, for example, of making Bucky sprint all the way to work because he’d followed him into the hall on the pretense of giving him a goodbye kiss and then had pushed him up against the wall, grinding one of his massive thighs up between Bucky’s legs.

“It goes like this,” Bucky says sourly, making a jerk-off motion with his hand. “Look it up on the internet if you can’t figure it out.”

Steve just pouts some more, but then as Bucky scoops up his backpack with one hand and flips the lock on the front door with the other, he says, “I’ll pick you up at the usual time, okay?”

Bucky pauses for a second on the threshold. “Okay. Love you.”

“Love you too, sweetheart,” Steve says, and Bucky shuts the front door behind him with a smile on his face, his steps light and easy even if he has to walk with his backpack slung around over his front to hide his raging hard-on.

They’d fallen back into their old ways almost immediately after Bucky had said “I need to make it bad” and Steve had finally believed that he’d meant it. It was like almost no time had passed—and for Steve, it hadn’t, not really. Two and a half years between the last time he’d seen Bucky, standing in the pass in the mountains and waiting for the rumble of the oncoming train to reach their ears, two and a half years and then he’d been standing on the threshold of Bucky’s apartment in Gravesend, asking to come in.

Bucky had taken the longer way around, of course. But even if he remembered it, all of it, he’d had enough practice at remembering and forgetting that he could slice along the seams—one seam in 1945 and the other in 2014—and then stitch the two ends together, a wormhole of the mind bridging opposite ends of the galaxy.

He’d woken up later that afternoon feeling like a shiny new coin straight from the U.S. mint, except for the fact that his ass was sore. Steve was still asleep, the covers pushed down so that the dip and curve of his downy lower back was just coming into view, and Bucky wanted so badly to faceplant onto that wide, warm expanse of skin and sizzle like butter. He was itchy, though, an under-the-skin itch to get up and do and go and make something, anything. Maybe it was time to start thinking about dinner.

He pulled on Steve’s jeans and his t-shirt just because he could and went downstairs barefoot, walking soft-soled into the kitchen and standing in front of the fridge with a little shiver of trepidation in his heart. There’s always takeout, he said to himself, and then pulled the door open with a jerk.

Well, it wasn’t the walk-in deep freeze at El Bulli, but he found himself pleasantly surprised, moving things around with his metal hand, the bare skin of his arms pebbling in the cold air that wafted out. Steve had bought ketchup and mayonnaise, and there were three jars of pickles, as well as bags of shredded cheese and sliced cheese and a couple big blocks of what looked like pepper jack. There was half a zucchini with the end wrapped in plastic and two red peppers and a lemon. There was even—Bucky picked the tube up and gazed at it wonderingly—tomato paste, probably bought specially for Mrs. Wilson’s pasta sauce.

When Steve came down half an hour later, the sun was already gone, the early-December night rippling across the sky like a wave leaving a speckling of stars in its wake. Bucky had Steve’s one good pan heating on the stove, a chunk of butter melting in the center, and he was spreading mustard on thick slices of bread, setting them greasy-side up on the plates he had lined up on the counter.

He had been thinking about going back to his own apartment, the cold silence broken only by the screeching of the F-train, the bed with the valley in the middle and only his own body heat to warm it up. Steve’s house was cozy, no drafts at all to be felt through the double-glazed kitchen windows over the sink. There was a fireplace in the living room, too, and that big, soft bed with the cloud-like duvet and Steve’s furnace of a body to wrap himself in.

He tried not to tense up when he heard the bed creak upstairs and managed to force his shoulders down from around his ears when he heard Steve’s feet in the hall. He didn’t turn around when he heard Steve moving their coats around in the entryway and the jingle of his keys, or when he heard his feet padding into the kitchen. Then a big warm hand was smoothed down his back and a kiss was pressed to the side of his neck just below his ear, and Steve was saying, “I love it when you make yourself at home in my kitchen. What’s for dinner?”

It was the perfect opening, so Bucky pounced on it, putting the butter knife down and turning around into Steve’s space, Steve’s hands moving around until he was holding Bucky on either side of his waist. “Grilled cheese with sautéed peppers and pickle relish. Also, we should probably talk about that.”

To his credit and Bucky’s relief, Steve only cocked an eyebrow, the smooth planes of his face unmarred by a frown. “I assume it’s not the grilled cheese you want to talk about?”

“Yeah. Right. So…” Bucky found that he couldn’t make eye contact. He was about to ask for something big, something that was so big that it actually felt small, like the full moon at its zenith in the night sky. “So when I said, ‘joke’s on you, I already live here—’” he started, but Steve cut him off.

“It’s fine if it was just a joke,” he said softly, and then, in a move that made Bucky’s heart thunder in his throat, he took Bucky’s chin in one of his big hands and tilted it up, forcing him to look Steve in the eye.

“It wasn’t,” Bucky whispered, when he had finally found his voice.

Steve let go of his chin, then, and grabbed his hand, the human hand, and with the rising-sun smile breaking out all over his face, he pressed something small and cold into the center of Bucky’s palm. He looked down at his hand in Steve’s, and there in the cradle of his fingers was a key.

“I didn’t think so,” Steve said, pressing into Bucky’s space to kiss him while the butter sizzled cheerfully on the stove and the wind outside thrashed the trees in a fit of mad jealousy, unable to get in. “Welcome home.”

The next day, Bucky had gone back to his old apartment for his quilt and his clothes and his books and his kitchen supplies, but he’d never slept there again.

Some small part of him had worried that he’d have to get used to living with Steve again, used to sharing space with another body, another person’s noise and smell and clutter, but it was like someone had done up the shirt of time wrong, the button of 1936 slipped comfortably into the buttonhole of 2016, and neither of them had noticed.

Christmas came and went and they hardly noticed that, either, and then it was January, 2017, a year that looked so futuristic when it sprang out of the end of Bucky’s pen that he had to say it over and over to himself to try and wrap his mind around it. He spent two weeks with Flannery in the back room at Funnel No. 9 working on the next year’s class schedule, developing a slew of new multi-week courses and a lecture series. He enrolled in a course, himself, in indigenous food systems at CUNY and spent a long spring semester leaving the house way too early every morning to catch the train.

Steve, usually with Sam in tow, tried out woodworking and urban gardening and creative writing before he’d finally enrolled in a ceramics class and had found his other calling.

They had a shed in the backyard, now, with a wheel and bags of clay and a table covered with jars of mysterious powdery substances that Steve worked chemistry magic on to turn into rich glazes. The spare bedroom was given over to a small kiln and shelves for curing green pottery and holding the fired pieces that were waiting to be glazed. Everyone they knew had a vase or two and six or seven coffee cups. They’d gotten rid of all of Steve’s old plates and replaced it with stoneware in all the colors of the rainbow, the results of Steve’s glaze experiments. Flannery and Diego even started to sell some of his pieces in the shop under a sign that said, ‘Handmade in Brooklyn,’ though the name of the potter remained a closely guarded secret.

Diego smiles at him when he walks through the front door of Funnel No. 9, but then his eyes zing to the side of Bucky’s neck and he says, “Jesus, you get mauled by a vampire or what?”

Bucky slaps his hand to the spot and, sure enough, feels the tell-tale sting of a fresh bruise, the skin slightly too warm against the tips of his human fingers. “That fucking bastard,” he growls under his breath, while Diego laughs and does suggestive things with his eyebrows.

“Who’s a fucking bastard?” Flannery asks as he pushes through the swinging door from the kitchen.

“Steeeeeve,” Diego sing-songs, while Bucky glowers.

Flannery peers at his neck and sniffs. “That’s not very professional. Not that I want to infringe on your aesthetic, but a bright purple hickey doesn’t go very well with your, you know.” He waves his hand at Bucky. “Your vibe.” Bucky looks down at himself, trying to see himself from the outside for a moment and get a handle on what kind of a vibe he has, exactly. He’s wearing a butter-yellow button up with a pattern of tiny pink dinosaurs in sunglasses all over it and his old navy shorts and last year’s checkered Vans.

“Colorwise, I think it matches perfectly,” he says, and Flannery makes a disgusted noise from the corner where he’s rooting around in his tote bag.

He pulls out a classic red cowboy handkerchief and tosses it to Bucky, who catches it with one hand. “Tie that around your neck, otherwise someone’s gonna get distracted and chop a finger off and I’m not sure the insurance is gonna cover a workplace accident caused by you being a slut for your boyfriend.”

“Hey, it was Steve’s fault, I didn’t even notice,” Bucky grumbles, but he ties the handkerchief around his neck all the same. The bruise will fade within the hour, anyway, and he can take it off after his first class leaves.

“Is Steve coming to pick you up later? I’ll make sure to speak to him about it,” Flannery says primly, pushing his big round glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“Yeah, and he’ll probably come by early, you know how he likes to hang out.” When he’s not out on a mission, Steve usually comes to pick him up after work so that they can walk home together holding hands like they’ve been married for a hundred years. He usually arrives early, though, partly because he likes the company and partly because Flannery likes to use him as a human forklift, shifting shelves around and fetching boxes and, once, moving the heavy oak display table out of the window and replacing it with a 600-pound millstone.

Somewhere along the way, Bucky thinks, Flannery and Diego must have figured out that Steve-that-guy-Bucky-lives-with actually is Steve-that-guy-who’s-Captain-America, but they’ve never mentioned it. It’s just that Flannery kept giving Steve bigger and bigger things to move and lift, until he was picking up millstones and antique apothecary cabinets and crates of marble mortars and pestles without batting an eyelash. Every once in a while, Bucky will catch Flannery looking back and forth between them with something shrewd and knowing in his face, but he never asks, never drops any hints, never appears to think of Steve as anything but Bucky’s boyfriend, or Bucky as anything but a guy who’s good with knives. Sometimes he’s so grateful he can barely keep from bursting into tears.

The handkerchief is making his neck sweat, and he knows the bruise is going to start itching any minute now as the capillaries knit back together. “Please do give him a piece of your mind,” Bucky says with a grin. “Like I said—"

But the front door opens right at that moment and lets in one of his students, then another and another until they’ve all been ushered into the kitchen by Flannery and are waiting for him to start. He adjusts the handkerchief around his neck and gives Diego a sloppy salute and walks through the swinging door into the back room.

Standing in front of the high steel table that serves as his podium, he looks around at the class, the same kind of group he usually gets. They are mostly youngish, well-to-do professional-looking types, but there’s a wide-eyed teenager standing next to an older woman who must be her mother. The woman has her hands clasped on the gleaming work surface in front of her, looking around with good-natured expectation, but the girl is serious-faced, her lips pursed to keep hidden the nervousness that Bucky can see radiating out of her eyes.

He picks up his chef’s knife in his left hand and tosses it up toward the ceiling so that it spins on its axis like a glittering fan blade, then catches it neatly again. “Wow,” the girl whispers, and then her face breaks into a wide, crooked grin.

Bucky grins back at her when she catches his eye. “Welcome to Knife Skills,” he says, and the class begins.