yesterday, today
Title: Yesterday, Today
Rating: PG-13 for references to Winter-Soldier-related torture and brainwashing, and also first kisses
Word Count: 3,801
Disclaimers: characters belong to Marvel, not me! Title from My Chemical Romance’s “The Kids From Yesterday,” which is too perfect for them.
Summary: The Winter Soldier did not lean comfortably against Steve’s cracked countertops, because the Winter Soldier did not lean comfortably against things, but the gesture hovered in that voice. Skirting around the idea of familiar, trying it on for size. Or: first kisses, recovery, sunshine, and Steve’s hand in Bucky’s hair.
The first time Steve Rogers kissed Bucky Barnes, the world ended.
The second time it began again. But Steve didn’t know that, not the first time, didn’t know there’d be a second time, and so: end of the world, boom, all heroes down.
Not literally, of course. But it felt that way.
Seven days and two lifetimes and one kiss. The duration of existence. Exploded into cold component atoms, just like that.
Bucky’d shown up on his doorstep seven days previously. Steve had been not-exactly-hiding-out in a Brooklyn apartment, not too far from their old neighborhood-some sort of cosmic irony, not that he was laughing, not that he remembered how to laugh at anything that wasn’t black-lined and full of despair-and lying low, getting texts from Natasha as she mowed through old HYDRA contacts with unstoppable deadly grace and learning nothing reliable about the whereabouts of one Winter Soldier, previously James Buchanan Barnes.
Steve was poised, had been poised, to jump into action, to run and swing and bash heads together and scream Bucky’s name until someone gave up something. Some data, some trail, some thread that he could pull to find his heart on the other end.
There was no thread. Everything he tugged came crashing into brutal but too-old ruins. Medical reports. Mission parameters. Visuals of a chair and harsh evil straps and glinting needle-points. The Winter Soldier’s HYDRA file, or maybe a third of it: too much redacted, too much red, too many operations left unrecorded by history, kept shadowed and black as dried blood.
Nothing about where he might’ve gone.
Nothing about what he might do, having saved Steve’s life, having no orders and no one to give them.
Steve was poised for action and there was no action, there was nothing, and he didn’t know how to have nothing because he’d always had Bucky and when he hadn’t had Bucky he’d had the ice.
Sam had looked at him with concern professional and personal, and then had gone to see Tony Stark about speeding up repairs to those wings, as if that would help, as if they knew where to begin any kind of search or quest or flight.
Steve, standing in his kitchen, staring at the ancient refrigerator-and ancient these days meant nineteen-seventies, and wasn’t that a laugh, the peeling linoleum flooring muttered darkly up at him-had found his hand closing around the handle so tightly it snapped.
He hadn’t been hungry. He had been, suddenly, bleeding, though it slowed and stopped as he watched. Didn’t recapture the drops already on the floor. Already fallen. Unrecoverable.
He’d turned, and his front door’d been open, the hinge that always creaked not creaking; and there’d been Bucky Barnes standing in his doorway, long hair and crooked baseball cap and tattered hoodie and smudges under pale eyes; there’d been Bucky Barnes in his doorway, and Steve had remembered, absurdly, the first breath he’d ever taken after the serum’d hit his veins: like the whole world flowing in, like the flavors of gilt-edged dust-specks and crisp laboratory air and pure oxygen, like inhaling all the colors he’d never known existed because he hadn’t been able to see them, and now he could, he could see.
“Hey, punk,” Bucky’d said, half-grinning, half-wary, “mind if I come in?” and Steve had taken a step forward, bare toes in his own blood on the yellow linoleum, and scratched out, “…Bucky?” through his sandpaper throat.
“Sure,” Bucky’d said again, and if there’d been an infinitesimal pause before that reply Steve couldn’t hear it because every pulse-beat in his ears was busy telling him that this was Bucky, this was Bucky’s smile, Bucky’s voice, and how and why were important but they could wait, because Bucky.
Bucky’d sighed, glancing at Steve’s floor, “so it’s still my job cleanin’ up after you, huh?” and Steve had started crying, unashamed, because fuck the world, Captain America could cry when Bucky Barnes walked out of death into his terrible hole-in-the-wall brown-and-yellow wallpapered hideout apartment.
Bucky had moved differently, spoken less, slept less, watched Steve more. Talked, when he did talk, when he wasn’t silent in the wrong places, about wanting revenge, about wanting answers, about knowing there weren’t answers; and that was true, they both know it was, there’d never be a completed puzzle.
Steve could believe all that, the silences and the differences and the helpless rage; Steve wouldn’t’ve believed a Bucky who hadn’t changed, who’d been perfectly and flawlessly himself again. The cracks were real, and so: Steve had believed.
Steve had believed until right now, this second. Seven days to not see it. Ten seconds for his heart to split in two.
He’d left Bucky carefully alone-not alone, not out of sight, but not pushing, not trying to touch-for the first two days. Bucky seemed to appreciate this, accepting without argument tentative offerings of bland chicken, soup, ginger ale. Steve hadn’t been sure about likes and dislikes; hadn’t been sure what if anything he’d been eating. If Bucky had preferences, he made no comment.
On the second morning he’d had to ask, turning as Bucky trailed him voicelessly into the only bedroom. The night before, Bucky’d looked at him and said, “still sharing a bed, Steve, I thought we could afford multiple mattresses now,” and Steve had nearly started crying again but said, “whatever you want, Buck, I’ll sleep on the sofa if you say” even though the sofa had springs poking out in two places and a broken arm. Bucky’d raised an eyebrow and pointedly gotten in the bed on the other side.
Steve had lain awake all night, petrified, heart slamming itself against his breastbone. He didn’t know whether Bucky’d slept. He could hear slow measured breathing, but that didn’t mean anything, didn’t mean sleep, not with the Winter Soldier’s capabilities regarding espionage and infiltration.
Bucky, at his back. Bucky in his bed. Bucky close enough to turn over and touch and-to touch the way Steve never had, and never expected to ever have-
His entire body’d ached with impossible love and desire and confusion. He’d never known love could hurt so much; he’d thought he’d known, after a train, once. But he had Bucky beside him and a lifetime away and he felt so damn lonely and so damn good because Bucky was beside him, and that was more than he’d ever imagined he’d get to have, one last time.
He hadn’t seen the truth. Not then.
He’d asked the next morning, when he’d sat up to find Bucky already awake and watching him, always watching, metal arm carelessly caressed by the sun. He’d asked, “what made you come back?” and the words were all wrong and nothing Sam would counsel him to say and shoved up and out of his mouth by heartache.
Bucky’d gazed at him for a minute, strands of dark hair swinging forward to echo the line of his jaw, and Steve’s fingers had yearned to reach out. “Tell me,” Bucky’d said, “about me,” and Steve had breathed in a great shuddering breath and had.
He’d told Bucky everything, everything he could think of, big and small. You were always wading into fights because of me. You never started the fights, not until you met me, not until you got pissed at guys makin’ fun of me. You were everyone’s favorite, polite to little old ladies and babies in strollers, golden boy in school, good at every damn sport, steady hands and quick reflexes. You liked banana-flavored gum and pulp serials about spacemen when you were ten, and you still liked them when you were fifteen, and you weren’t ashamed of that, either. You got good grades and still the jocks liked you, you could throw a football like nobody else and all the scrawny geek kids liked you, all the girls wanted you to ask ’em out and then they wanted you to ask ’em out again. And you wanted to be friends with a skinny punk kid who used to ditch class to stand out in front of women’s rights centers and free health clinics and get into fistfights with every heckler who showed up.
You brought me home every time and cleaned me up and taught me how to throw a punch better, not good but better. You could whistle Chopin and Bach and Beethoven, though you’d laugh if I asked you if you knew any jazz tunes, and you said you didn’t remember how to play the piano, which wasn’t an answer.
You pawned your dad’s pocket-watch the spring I needed asthma medicine and we couldn’t pay. You swore up and down you got it back, but I never saw it again.
You joined the army because I wouldn’t stop trying and you knew that.
You were the best sniper anyone’d seen. A natural, Sergeant Barnes. Your men would follow you anywhere and they told me later you hardly smiled and you could whistle, they all knew you could whistle, code-signals and bird-songs, but never a tune.
I got you to smile once, after we got back, after I found you and you wouldn’t leave without me, after Zola-
And he stopped talking, because Bucky’d gone very still and self-contained, sitting across from him at the only table in the apartment, metal fingers scraping over wood.
I’m sorry.
Bucky’d shaken his head.
And Steve had talked until his voice was hoarse and his head was aching, from dawn until dusk. And Bucky’d smiled, just a sliver.
And Steve had woken up the following morning, really woken up, all those old aches and longings stirred to the surface and fiercely craving, with Bucky here and second chances here.
Even then he’d held out. Self-discipline. Not pushing. Captain America.
But Bucky’d turned, this morning, a week in, looking up at him; just an ordinary moment, an ordinary stupid moment, Bucky lifting orange juice from the fridge with precise fingers and glancing Steve’s direction.
But Bucky’d turned, bringing it to the table, and there’d been sunlight in his hair and he’d said, “You drew an orange-juice ad once, sent in a sketch and they bought it, to pay rent on that apartment, even crappier than this one-” and Steve had taken a step forward and kissed him.
Steve kissed him. And Bucky kissed back. Steve knew he did.
For a split second the world sparkled. Coruscated. Effervesced.
Bucky pulled away, eyes wide, lips wet and shining. “That wasn’t in the files-”
And Steve’s heart imploded.
“…the files.”
“The-” Bucky seemed to realize what he’d said, what he’d revealed, what he’d broken, then; and stopped trying to say anything at all.
“How much,” Steve said, very slowly because that was all he could manage, deliberately because he thought he might be dying, “do you remember.”
“Nothing,” the Winter Soldier said, and the ground crumpled out of existence beneath Steve’s feet, and the sky caved in, and maybe that was a metaphor but it felt true, it felt as true as that nothing.
“Nothing…”
“It’s what I’m good at. Infiltration. Being whomever I need to be,” the Winter Soldier told him, looking at him, only looking but the look felt like ice, and Steve never could use the word ice lightly but this was heavy, heavy as lead and drowning, “and you needed me to be him. I learned.”
“Bucky-” No. Not Bucky. No air. “Do you-I don’t even know what to call you!”
The Winter Soldier put his head on one side. The motion wasn’t what Steve remembered. Wasn’t implacable ruthless efficiency; wasn’t Bucky Barnes’ loose-limbed tactile affection. “I was always the asset, on missions.”
“I’m still your mission.”
“Of course.”
“So you’re going to try to kill me.” Why now? Why not any of the nights or days so far? Why come to Steve’s door a week ago at all, instead of pulling out a sniper rifle from a hundred yards away, instead of putting a knife through the kitchen window while Steve washed dishes? Why anything, why everything, why?
This got a smile, and the smile balanced on the edge of recognizability but missed it by a bullet’s-width. “Never said the mission was to kill you.”
“Sorry,” Steve said, shield under the table, shield within foot’s-flip, “if I have some trouble believing that.”
“Haven’t killed you yet.” The Winter Soldier did not lean comfortably against Steve’s cracked countertops, because the Winter Soldier did not lean comfortably against things, but the gesture hovered in that voice. Like the smile: skirting around the idea of familiar, trying it on for size. “So yes. Believe it.”
“What…is your mission, then?” And the words tasted like salt and snowfall from a mountain cliff and train-soot and tears.
“Bucky Barnes would have saved you.” The haunting haunted eyes of that ghost’s face watched his reaction. Steve didn’t even try to hide the gut-punch of the words. “I saved you. In the water. I don’t know why. I wanted to. Know why.”
“So your mission…”
The smile surfaced again, evanescent and humorless. “The asset needs a mission. And I couldn’t go back. Safety protocols. If someone betrays you, lies to you, keeps intel from you, don’t trust them. Of course Pierce never meant to include himself in that category. But until they take it from me, I remember. They lied to me about knowing you. You didn’t.”
“You trust me,” Steve said, and wanted to say more: that’s not an until, that’s a never, they’ll never take anything more from you, never again, I’ll die before I let them touch you, I will forever love James Buchanan Barnes and I think I love you, you who saved a man you can’t remember and showed up at my door made of knives and broken-glass edges and trust.
“I trust you more than I trust anyone else at the moment,” the Winter Soldier said, “and I still want to know why,” and Steve’s chest creaked, expanding and contracting, burning and screaming with despair and fragile half-smothered hope.
He murmured, not really knowing why, “I used to draw you…”
“You used to draw Bucky Barnes. In sunlight. In your apartment, or at the park, or on a rusted fire escape that should’ve collapsed, except you didn’t weigh enough for a cat, so we were always okay.”
“You remember-”
“Nothing. I told you. They had that sketch in the exhibit. My face. His face.” The Winter Soldier looked at metal fingers, flexed them, curled them in and out. “They looked like a mask. The shadows on his face.”
“I’m sorry,” someone said, and someone kept talking, and Steve realized the someone was himself, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I should’ve known, I should’ve gone after you, I should’ve jumped off the damn train myself and found you, you would’ve found me, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry-”
“No.” One step across the kitchen. Two. And a hand on Steve’s shoulder. Both hands. Flesh and metal. Steve didn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t tell whether this was just a deeper fall into the abyss or a stumble that might lead out of it. “I’m not him, but you said he was smarter than you, and I’m guessin’ I might be too.” The hint of Brooklyn flared and subsided so fast Steve nearly missed it, and then wondered whether it’d been unconscious or purposeful, a means to put him at ease, and if so what that meant, what thoughts had moved behind steel gates.
“Strategically,” the Winter Soldier added, “you have nothing to apologize for, you had no way of knowing what Zola had done to him because he never told you, you could never have expected him to survive, and you had a mission, and he knew that too,” and Steve shook his head because he knew, he knew then, and knowing made no difference to the pain.
“If you’d saved him then,” the Winter Soldier said, hands on Steve’s shoulders, those cat-pale eyes-Bucky’s eyes, and not Bucky’s eyes, and not an assassin’s eyes, not exactly, not now-intent and blunt and unfiltered, “he’d’ve grown old and died in the past and I wouldn’t be here to save you now. When you stupidly drop your best weapon mid-combat. Did no one ever teach you about tactics?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said, “I think it worked out pretty well, all things considered,” and he meant, you’re here, you’re here, you’re here and telling me I’m stupid, and thank you, thank you.
“You never kissed him,” the Winter Soldier said, and Steve was confused enough at the topic-jumping to only blink and say, “Um,” which was not one of his better comebacks on record.
“You kissed me. I thought it was because I was being him, but you never kissed him.”
“I wanted to,” Steve got out. “I wanted-so bad-I never knew how to-it was the forties, it was-guys couldn’t just say-and you were, he was, everything, the other half of my fuckin’ soul, and I couldn’t lose you. And then I lost you. And I should’ve kissed you every damn day. Every night. And-”
He stopped. Bucky-the Winter Soldier-was smiling again, albeit sadly. “Do you want me to be him? So you can?”
“No,” Steve said, and reached for him in turn, gradual enough to not trigger crackling instincts, hand resting gently over one pale cheek, over the faintly stubbled sharp line of his jaw. “No. I’m sorry. Nothing you don’t want. I promise, Buck-I just promise.”
He hurt everywhere, inside and out. Exhaustion laced through every single one of his super-soldier bones. No. He didn’t want to kiss the Winter Soldier pretending to be Bucky Barnes because he thought that was what Steve wanted. Steve wanted to kiss the man who was standing in front of him, telling him not to carry that guilt any longer, trying. Steve wanted that man to want to kiss him back.
“What if,” the Winter Soldier offered, half hesitation and half curiosity, trained strategist considering possible options given available information, “I liked it? Not being him. Kissing you.”
“You…what?”
A one-shouldered shrug, eloquent as rain. “It felt good. I don’t remember having done it before, but. I liked the way it made me feel.”
“You…did?”
“I did. I want to kill a lot of HYDRA bastards and I want to kiss you again. This is complicated. Having emotions. How do you do it?”
“Well,” Steve said, wanting to laugh, wanting to cry, wanting to save the universe and leap tall buildings in a single bound and grab ink and paper and capture the light in winter-sky eyes right at that perfect imperfect second; wanting to hold on and never let go, because they were alive and it hurt and he and Bucky could take all the hurt head-on, together, and walk out the other side, “I hear the kissing can help.”
“Shut up and get on that, then, punk,” Bucky said, and Steve froze and said, “…Bucky?” because that joke hadn’t been in any of the exhibits or files, not that he’d ever seen.
“I don’t know,” Bucky said, absolutely wide-eyed, as close to spooked as Steve’d ever seen the Winter Soldier, “it just felt right, it just came out, I don’t remember-should I not say-”
“Don’t have existential angst while I’m trying to kiss you,” Steve said, “jerk,” and Bucky blinked and said, “Wait, that sounds-did I-I’m not ever going to be him but that sounds-”
“Right,” Steve said, “that sounds right, and I don’t care who you are or aren’t, you’re you, and you’re still saving me, you always save me, can I kiss you now.”
Bucky didn’t laugh-maybe the Winter Soldier didn’t remember how-but his eyes danced, under a stray strand of dark hair. “Steve.”
“Yeah?”
“You can call me Bucky. He was a good man. I don’t mind carrying the name. And…”
“…yeah?”
“You might need somethin’ to scream in bed, later.”
Steve stared at him. Steve’s entire body stared at him. At attention.
Bucky nibbled a lower lip. “I mean…if that was okay. The line. Back to sounding right. But…”
“But,” Steve said.
“I don’t think I’m a virgin.” Bucky worried at the lip again. Steve leaned in, and they were breathing the same air, the two of them standing in each other’s arms in the beat-up old-fashioned sympathy of the kitchen, the orange juice content to be abandoned on the table. “I have some…flashes. Of missions. Data. But it’s not like memory. I don’t remember how to do this. I can say the lines, I know I want you, I just. Tell me how to do this.”
“Tell you…”
“I did say I trust you,” Bucky said, “so make me feel good, again, like you did already, unless that was it, Captain America,” and Steve started laughing, or maybe crying at last, and whispered, “I can do that, Buck, I can make you feel good, I promise, I promise always, okay, and no that was not fuckin’ it, come here-” and brought their lips together.
He meant to be gentle. He wanted to be gentle. This Bucky was-not innocent, no, no one would ever in sincerity apply that word to the Winter Soldier, but new to this, new to everything, in his arms. Steve wouldn’t make demands. Wouldn’t ask for anything more than what Bucky wanted.
This Bucky tasted like black bitter coffee and smiled while being kissed. This Bucky took everything Steve was doing-tender little licks and caresses, tentative flicks of tongue over skin-and learned it instantly and gave it right back, unafraid and confident, no doubt in part because he could plunge one of his multiple knives into Steve’s kidneys at any second that seemed to call for such, but mostly, Steve thought, because this was the man he was: in any lifetime, the bravest and best man Steve had ever known.
Bucky pulled back just a little; Steve did too, heart pounding like earthquakes, just from one kiss, just from the kiss, and rested their foreheads together. “Was that-”
“Good,” Bucky said, and smiled, and the sun came out from clouds and spilled honeyed light across his shoulder, catching fire from metal, tangling playfully in his hair. “That was…good. I don’t know if I-this is okay for today. Maybe we can try the screaming in bed thing, y’know, later-”
“Yeah, yes, God yes, yes-I mean if you want, Bucky, yes-”
“-but can we do this part again? Now?”
“Good,” Steve agreed, because it was, because yes, and put a hand into his hair to share the sunshine, and they did it again.
Rating: PG-13 for references to Winter-Soldier-related torture and brainwashing, and also first kisses
Word Count: 3,801
Disclaimers: characters belong to Marvel, not me! Title from My Chemical Romance’s “The Kids From Yesterday,” which is too perfect for them.
Summary: The Winter Soldier did not lean comfortably against Steve’s cracked countertops, because the Winter Soldier did not lean comfortably against things, but the gesture hovered in that voice. Skirting around the idea of familiar, trying it on for size. Or: first kisses, recovery, sunshine, and Steve’s hand in Bucky’s hair.
The first time Steve Rogers kissed Bucky Barnes, the world ended.
The second time it began again. But Steve didn’t know that, not the first time, didn’t know there’d be a second time, and so: end of the world, boom, all heroes down.
Not literally, of course. But it felt that way.
Seven days and two lifetimes and one kiss. The duration of existence. Exploded into cold component atoms, just like that.
Bucky’d shown up on his doorstep seven days previously. Steve had been not-exactly-hiding-out in a Brooklyn apartment, not too far from their old neighborhood-some sort of cosmic irony, not that he was laughing, not that he remembered how to laugh at anything that wasn’t black-lined and full of despair-and lying low, getting texts from Natasha as she mowed through old HYDRA contacts with unstoppable deadly grace and learning nothing reliable about the whereabouts of one Winter Soldier, previously James Buchanan Barnes.
Steve was poised, had been poised, to jump into action, to run and swing and bash heads together and scream Bucky’s name until someone gave up something. Some data, some trail, some thread that he could pull to find his heart on the other end.
There was no thread. Everything he tugged came crashing into brutal but too-old ruins. Medical reports. Mission parameters. Visuals of a chair and harsh evil straps and glinting needle-points. The Winter Soldier’s HYDRA file, or maybe a third of it: too much redacted, too much red, too many operations left unrecorded by history, kept shadowed and black as dried blood.
Nothing about where he might’ve gone.
Nothing about what he might do, having saved Steve’s life, having no orders and no one to give them.
Steve was poised for action and there was no action, there was nothing, and he didn’t know how to have nothing because he’d always had Bucky and when he hadn’t had Bucky he’d had the ice.
Sam had looked at him with concern professional and personal, and then had gone to see Tony Stark about speeding up repairs to those wings, as if that would help, as if they knew where to begin any kind of search or quest or flight.
Steve, standing in his kitchen, staring at the ancient refrigerator-and ancient these days meant nineteen-seventies, and wasn’t that a laugh, the peeling linoleum flooring muttered darkly up at him-had found his hand closing around the handle so tightly it snapped.
He hadn’t been hungry. He had been, suddenly, bleeding, though it slowed and stopped as he watched. Didn’t recapture the drops already on the floor. Already fallen. Unrecoverable.
He’d turned, and his front door’d been open, the hinge that always creaked not creaking; and there’d been Bucky Barnes standing in his doorway, long hair and crooked baseball cap and tattered hoodie and smudges under pale eyes; there’d been Bucky Barnes in his doorway, and Steve had remembered, absurdly, the first breath he’d ever taken after the serum’d hit his veins: like the whole world flowing in, like the flavors of gilt-edged dust-specks and crisp laboratory air and pure oxygen, like inhaling all the colors he’d never known existed because he hadn’t been able to see them, and now he could, he could see.
“Hey, punk,” Bucky’d said, half-grinning, half-wary, “mind if I come in?” and Steve had taken a step forward, bare toes in his own blood on the yellow linoleum, and scratched out, “…Bucky?” through his sandpaper throat.
“Sure,” Bucky’d said again, and if there’d been an infinitesimal pause before that reply Steve couldn’t hear it because every pulse-beat in his ears was busy telling him that this was Bucky, this was Bucky’s smile, Bucky’s voice, and how and why were important but they could wait, because Bucky.
Bucky’d sighed, glancing at Steve’s floor, “so it’s still my job cleanin’ up after you, huh?” and Steve had started crying, unashamed, because fuck the world, Captain America could cry when Bucky Barnes walked out of death into his terrible hole-in-the-wall brown-and-yellow wallpapered hideout apartment.
Bucky had moved differently, spoken less, slept less, watched Steve more. Talked, when he did talk, when he wasn’t silent in the wrong places, about wanting revenge, about wanting answers, about knowing there weren’t answers; and that was true, they both know it was, there’d never be a completed puzzle.
Steve could believe all that, the silences and the differences and the helpless rage; Steve wouldn’t’ve believed a Bucky who hadn’t changed, who’d been perfectly and flawlessly himself again. The cracks were real, and so: Steve had believed.
Steve had believed until right now, this second. Seven days to not see it. Ten seconds for his heart to split in two.
He’d left Bucky carefully alone-not alone, not out of sight, but not pushing, not trying to touch-for the first two days. Bucky seemed to appreciate this, accepting without argument tentative offerings of bland chicken, soup, ginger ale. Steve hadn’t been sure about likes and dislikes; hadn’t been sure what if anything he’d been eating. If Bucky had preferences, he made no comment.
On the second morning he’d had to ask, turning as Bucky trailed him voicelessly into the only bedroom. The night before, Bucky’d looked at him and said, “still sharing a bed, Steve, I thought we could afford multiple mattresses now,” and Steve had nearly started crying again but said, “whatever you want, Buck, I’ll sleep on the sofa if you say” even though the sofa had springs poking out in two places and a broken arm. Bucky’d raised an eyebrow and pointedly gotten in the bed on the other side.
Steve had lain awake all night, petrified, heart slamming itself against his breastbone. He didn’t know whether Bucky’d slept. He could hear slow measured breathing, but that didn’t mean anything, didn’t mean sleep, not with the Winter Soldier’s capabilities regarding espionage and infiltration.
Bucky, at his back. Bucky in his bed. Bucky close enough to turn over and touch and-to touch the way Steve never had, and never expected to ever have-
His entire body’d ached with impossible love and desire and confusion. He’d never known love could hurt so much; he’d thought he’d known, after a train, once. But he had Bucky beside him and a lifetime away and he felt so damn lonely and so damn good because Bucky was beside him, and that was more than he’d ever imagined he’d get to have, one last time.
He hadn’t seen the truth. Not then.
He’d asked the next morning, when he’d sat up to find Bucky already awake and watching him, always watching, metal arm carelessly caressed by the sun. He’d asked, “what made you come back?” and the words were all wrong and nothing Sam would counsel him to say and shoved up and out of his mouth by heartache.
Bucky’d gazed at him for a minute, strands of dark hair swinging forward to echo the line of his jaw, and Steve’s fingers had yearned to reach out. “Tell me,” Bucky’d said, “about me,” and Steve had breathed in a great shuddering breath and had.
He’d told Bucky everything, everything he could think of, big and small. You were always wading into fights because of me. You never started the fights, not until you met me, not until you got pissed at guys makin’ fun of me. You were everyone’s favorite, polite to little old ladies and babies in strollers, golden boy in school, good at every damn sport, steady hands and quick reflexes. You liked banana-flavored gum and pulp serials about spacemen when you were ten, and you still liked them when you were fifteen, and you weren’t ashamed of that, either. You got good grades and still the jocks liked you, you could throw a football like nobody else and all the scrawny geek kids liked you, all the girls wanted you to ask ’em out and then they wanted you to ask ’em out again. And you wanted to be friends with a skinny punk kid who used to ditch class to stand out in front of women’s rights centers and free health clinics and get into fistfights with every heckler who showed up.
You brought me home every time and cleaned me up and taught me how to throw a punch better, not good but better. You could whistle Chopin and Bach and Beethoven, though you’d laugh if I asked you if you knew any jazz tunes, and you said you didn’t remember how to play the piano, which wasn’t an answer.
You pawned your dad’s pocket-watch the spring I needed asthma medicine and we couldn’t pay. You swore up and down you got it back, but I never saw it again.
You joined the army because I wouldn’t stop trying and you knew that.
You were the best sniper anyone’d seen. A natural, Sergeant Barnes. Your men would follow you anywhere and they told me later you hardly smiled and you could whistle, they all knew you could whistle, code-signals and bird-songs, but never a tune.
I got you to smile once, after we got back, after I found you and you wouldn’t leave without me, after Zola-
And he stopped talking, because Bucky’d gone very still and self-contained, sitting across from him at the only table in the apartment, metal fingers scraping over wood.
I’m sorry.
Bucky’d shaken his head.
And Steve had talked until his voice was hoarse and his head was aching, from dawn until dusk. And Bucky’d smiled, just a sliver.
And Steve had woken up the following morning, really woken up, all those old aches and longings stirred to the surface and fiercely craving, with Bucky here and second chances here.
Even then he’d held out. Self-discipline. Not pushing. Captain America.
But Bucky’d turned, this morning, a week in, looking up at him; just an ordinary moment, an ordinary stupid moment, Bucky lifting orange juice from the fridge with precise fingers and glancing Steve’s direction.
But Bucky’d turned, bringing it to the table, and there’d been sunlight in his hair and he’d said, “You drew an orange-juice ad once, sent in a sketch and they bought it, to pay rent on that apartment, even crappier than this one-” and Steve had taken a step forward and kissed him.
Steve kissed him. And Bucky kissed back. Steve knew he did.
For a split second the world sparkled. Coruscated. Effervesced.
Bucky pulled away, eyes wide, lips wet and shining. “That wasn’t in the files-”
And Steve’s heart imploded.
“…the files.”
“The-” Bucky seemed to realize what he’d said, what he’d revealed, what he’d broken, then; and stopped trying to say anything at all.
“How much,” Steve said, very slowly because that was all he could manage, deliberately because he thought he might be dying, “do you remember.”
“Nothing,” the Winter Soldier said, and the ground crumpled out of existence beneath Steve’s feet, and the sky caved in, and maybe that was a metaphor but it felt true, it felt as true as that nothing.
“Nothing…”
“It’s what I’m good at. Infiltration. Being whomever I need to be,” the Winter Soldier told him, looking at him, only looking but the look felt like ice, and Steve never could use the word ice lightly but this was heavy, heavy as lead and drowning, “and you needed me to be him. I learned.”
“Bucky-” No. Not Bucky. No air. “Do you-I don’t even know what to call you!”
The Winter Soldier put his head on one side. The motion wasn’t what Steve remembered. Wasn’t implacable ruthless efficiency; wasn’t Bucky Barnes’ loose-limbed tactile affection. “I was always the asset, on missions.”
“I’m still your mission.”
“Of course.”
“So you’re going to try to kill me.” Why now? Why not any of the nights or days so far? Why come to Steve’s door a week ago at all, instead of pulling out a sniper rifle from a hundred yards away, instead of putting a knife through the kitchen window while Steve washed dishes? Why anything, why everything, why?
This got a smile, and the smile balanced on the edge of recognizability but missed it by a bullet’s-width. “Never said the mission was to kill you.”
“Sorry,” Steve said, shield under the table, shield within foot’s-flip, “if I have some trouble believing that.”
“Haven’t killed you yet.” The Winter Soldier did not lean comfortably against Steve’s cracked countertops, because the Winter Soldier did not lean comfortably against things, but the gesture hovered in that voice. Like the smile: skirting around the idea of familiar, trying it on for size. “So yes. Believe it.”
“What…is your mission, then?” And the words tasted like salt and snowfall from a mountain cliff and train-soot and tears.
“Bucky Barnes would have saved you.” The haunting haunted eyes of that ghost’s face watched his reaction. Steve didn’t even try to hide the gut-punch of the words. “I saved you. In the water. I don’t know why. I wanted to. Know why.”
“So your mission…”
The smile surfaced again, evanescent and humorless. “The asset needs a mission. And I couldn’t go back. Safety protocols. If someone betrays you, lies to you, keeps intel from you, don’t trust them. Of course Pierce never meant to include himself in that category. But until they take it from me, I remember. They lied to me about knowing you. You didn’t.”
“You trust me,” Steve said, and wanted to say more: that’s not an until, that’s a never, they’ll never take anything more from you, never again, I’ll die before I let them touch you, I will forever love James Buchanan Barnes and I think I love you, you who saved a man you can’t remember and showed up at my door made of knives and broken-glass edges and trust.
“I trust you more than I trust anyone else at the moment,” the Winter Soldier said, “and I still want to know why,” and Steve’s chest creaked, expanding and contracting, burning and screaming with despair and fragile half-smothered hope.
He murmured, not really knowing why, “I used to draw you…”
“You used to draw Bucky Barnes. In sunlight. In your apartment, or at the park, or on a rusted fire escape that should’ve collapsed, except you didn’t weigh enough for a cat, so we were always okay.”
“You remember-”
“Nothing. I told you. They had that sketch in the exhibit. My face. His face.” The Winter Soldier looked at metal fingers, flexed them, curled them in and out. “They looked like a mask. The shadows on his face.”
“I’m sorry,” someone said, and someone kept talking, and Steve realized the someone was himself, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I should’ve known, I should’ve gone after you, I should’ve jumped off the damn train myself and found you, you would’ve found me, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry-”
“No.” One step across the kitchen. Two. And a hand on Steve’s shoulder. Both hands. Flesh and metal. Steve didn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t tell whether this was just a deeper fall into the abyss or a stumble that might lead out of it. “I’m not him, but you said he was smarter than you, and I’m guessin’ I might be too.” The hint of Brooklyn flared and subsided so fast Steve nearly missed it, and then wondered whether it’d been unconscious or purposeful, a means to put him at ease, and if so what that meant, what thoughts had moved behind steel gates.
“Strategically,” the Winter Soldier added, “you have nothing to apologize for, you had no way of knowing what Zola had done to him because he never told you, you could never have expected him to survive, and you had a mission, and he knew that too,” and Steve shook his head because he knew, he knew then, and knowing made no difference to the pain.
“If you’d saved him then,” the Winter Soldier said, hands on Steve’s shoulders, those cat-pale eyes-Bucky’s eyes, and not Bucky’s eyes, and not an assassin’s eyes, not exactly, not now-intent and blunt and unfiltered, “he’d’ve grown old and died in the past and I wouldn’t be here to save you now. When you stupidly drop your best weapon mid-combat. Did no one ever teach you about tactics?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said, “I think it worked out pretty well, all things considered,” and he meant, you’re here, you’re here, you’re here and telling me I’m stupid, and thank you, thank you.
“You never kissed him,” the Winter Soldier said, and Steve was confused enough at the topic-jumping to only blink and say, “Um,” which was not one of his better comebacks on record.
“You kissed me. I thought it was because I was being him, but you never kissed him.”
“I wanted to,” Steve got out. “I wanted-so bad-I never knew how to-it was the forties, it was-guys couldn’t just say-and you were, he was, everything, the other half of my fuckin’ soul, and I couldn’t lose you. And then I lost you. And I should’ve kissed you every damn day. Every night. And-”
He stopped. Bucky-the Winter Soldier-was smiling again, albeit sadly. “Do you want me to be him? So you can?”
“No,” Steve said, and reached for him in turn, gradual enough to not trigger crackling instincts, hand resting gently over one pale cheek, over the faintly stubbled sharp line of his jaw. “No. I’m sorry. Nothing you don’t want. I promise, Buck-I just promise.”
He hurt everywhere, inside and out. Exhaustion laced through every single one of his super-soldier bones. No. He didn’t want to kiss the Winter Soldier pretending to be Bucky Barnes because he thought that was what Steve wanted. Steve wanted to kiss the man who was standing in front of him, telling him not to carry that guilt any longer, trying. Steve wanted that man to want to kiss him back.
“What if,” the Winter Soldier offered, half hesitation and half curiosity, trained strategist considering possible options given available information, “I liked it? Not being him. Kissing you.”
“You…what?”
A one-shouldered shrug, eloquent as rain. “It felt good. I don’t remember having done it before, but. I liked the way it made me feel.”
“You…did?”
“I did. I want to kill a lot of HYDRA bastards and I want to kiss you again. This is complicated. Having emotions. How do you do it?”
“Well,” Steve said, wanting to laugh, wanting to cry, wanting to save the universe and leap tall buildings in a single bound and grab ink and paper and capture the light in winter-sky eyes right at that perfect imperfect second; wanting to hold on and never let go, because they were alive and it hurt and he and Bucky could take all the hurt head-on, together, and walk out the other side, “I hear the kissing can help.”
“Shut up and get on that, then, punk,” Bucky said, and Steve froze and said, “…Bucky?” because that joke hadn’t been in any of the exhibits or files, not that he’d ever seen.
“I don’t know,” Bucky said, absolutely wide-eyed, as close to spooked as Steve’d ever seen the Winter Soldier, “it just felt right, it just came out, I don’t remember-should I not say-”
“Don’t have existential angst while I’m trying to kiss you,” Steve said, “jerk,” and Bucky blinked and said, “Wait, that sounds-did I-I’m not ever going to be him but that sounds-”
“Right,” Steve said, “that sounds right, and I don’t care who you are or aren’t, you’re you, and you’re still saving me, you always save me, can I kiss you now.”
Bucky didn’t laugh-maybe the Winter Soldier didn’t remember how-but his eyes danced, under a stray strand of dark hair. “Steve.”
“Yeah?”
“You can call me Bucky. He was a good man. I don’t mind carrying the name. And…”
“…yeah?”
“You might need somethin’ to scream in bed, later.”
Steve stared at him. Steve’s entire body stared at him. At attention.
Bucky nibbled a lower lip. “I mean…if that was okay. The line. Back to sounding right. But…”
“But,” Steve said.
“I don’t think I’m a virgin.” Bucky worried at the lip again. Steve leaned in, and they were breathing the same air, the two of them standing in each other’s arms in the beat-up old-fashioned sympathy of the kitchen, the orange juice content to be abandoned on the table. “I have some…flashes. Of missions. Data. But it’s not like memory. I don’t remember how to do this. I can say the lines, I know I want you, I just. Tell me how to do this.”
“Tell you…”
“I did say I trust you,” Bucky said, “so make me feel good, again, like you did already, unless that was it, Captain America,” and Steve started laughing, or maybe crying at last, and whispered, “I can do that, Buck, I can make you feel good, I promise, I promise always, okay, and no that was not fuckin’ it, come here-” and brought their lips together.
He meant to be gentle. He wanted to be gentle. This Bucky was-not innocent, no, no one would ever in sincerity apply that word to the Winter Soldier, but new to this, new to everything, in his arms. Steve wouldn’t make demands. Wouldn’t ask for anything more than what Bucky wanted.
This Bucky tasted like black bitter coffee and smiled while being kissed. This Bucky took everything Steve was doing-tender little licks and caresses, tentative flicks of tongue over skin-and learned it instantly and gave it right back, unafraid and confident, no doubt in part because he could plunge one of his multiple knives into Steve’s kidneys at any second that seemed to call for such, but mostly, Steve thought, because this was the man he was: in any lifetime, the bravest and best man Steve had ever known.
Bucky pulled back just a little; Steve did too, heart pounding like earthquakes, just from one kiss, just from the kiss, and rested their foreheads together. “Was that-”
“Good,” Bucky said, and smiled, and the sun came out from clouds and spilled honeyed light across his shoulder, catching fire from metal, tangling playfully in his hair. “That was…good. I don’t know if I-this is okay for today. Maybe we can try the screaming in bed thing, y’know, later-”
“Yeah, yes, God yes, yes-I mean if you want, Bucky, yes-”
“-but can we do this part again? Now?”
“Good,” Steve agreed, because it was, because yes, and put a hand into his hair to share the sunshine, and they did it again.