fic: the tones that tremble down your spine [4/4]
Look, it's actually the chapter count I said it'd be! Time for comfort and hope and bubble baths!
Title: The Tones That Tremble Down Your Spine [4/4]
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: in this chapter: Lots of consent issues and mention of past abuse, not too specific here. Hope, instead!
Word Count: 3376 for this chapter
Disclaimers: characters belong to Marvel, not me; no harm intended. Title from Of Monsters and Men’s “Crystals,” which in my head is a Bucky song.
Summary: Tony tells him they’re planning a party for Steve’s birthday. He knows how parties are supposed to go.
Notes: written for feanorinleatherpants, for this seriously NSFW Hydra Trash Party fan art. Poor Bucky. Poor boys. Time for comfort!
He runs, and it is not a tactically considered retreat, not a cool calculated winter-etched strategy; it is hot and panicked and powered by short breaths and a pulse drumming in his ears. He plunges through doors and down temperature-regulated Tower hallways, and finally throws himself out a window three floors up because he can’t stay inside those walls any longer-
He lands on both feet, instinctively catching balance. The impact rings up through his boots; he blinks. His vision’s wrong, a cloud of sparkles and multicolored light across dark shapes, where’s that coming from, is his programming collapsing at last-
Oh. Fireworks. Fourth of July.
He puts a hand out. Touches the sleek grey wall of the Tower, where he’s standing beside it with both boots on the ground. Breathes.
Fireworks. Steve’s birthday.
He’s still here next to the Tower and he asked Steve not to look for him but he doesn’t know-
He doesn’t know whether Steve will want him back, enough to look-
He doesn’t know whether he wants Steve to look for him-
His eyes burn. Odd. Dry and hot, like fire licking behind his lids when he closes them.
He vanishes away into the shapes and shadows of the dark. Not far. A couple of alleys over. Lots of alleys in New York City. Always have been.
This alley’s relatively tidy, for a given metropolis-value of tidy. Two dumpsters. Winding metal fire-escapes like decorative art. The sky above like a narrow strip of smoky blue velvet, punctuated by scattershot Independence Day flame. He flattens his back against helpful dusty brick, and then thinks dimly that he’s wearing a clean white t-shirt-Steve’s shirt, oh hell-and that’s not going to be white and clean for long.
He’s not. Clean.
The fireworks burst above like cannon-fire and death in ecstatic colors.
He needs-
He wants-
Does he? Want?
The thick black anal plug he’s wearing stirs wetly, having a will of its own, rubbing inside his body. The body. With the plug.
The urge to vomit swells. He battles it down. He is good at battles. He is-
Good?
He breathes, hearing how much he sounds like a wounded animal; he puts hands on knees, and bends over and pants for air under the delirious crash-and-crackle of the firework finale.
When he lifts his head he spots the corner of an ATM at the other end of the alley. He has a bank account of his own-Tony Stark had set that up, and Pepper Potts had said something about prisoners of war and decades of earned back-pay-but he can’t use that. Steve might be watching. Someone might be watching.
Maybe. If they care to.
It’s the work of a moment to ascertain that, while both Hydra remnants and SHIELD agents have been exquisitely thorough, one or two old accounts remain. Small ones, the type made available to him on missions if supplies were required, for instance a purchase of innocuous deadly deceitful household items that’d appear nothing like an assassination at all. These accounts are miniscule enough to’ve been missed. He empties both. Cash.
He has a great deal of money, now.
He genuinely does not know whether Steve will come looking.
He turns his back on the Tower. It worries after him, but he ignores this and picks out the most luxurious hotel in the city, the fanciest glitziest shiniest hotel, adjective piled upon adjective. The sort of place Bucky Barnes could never’ve afforded; the sort of place the Winter Soldier would’ve never understood. Strategic, he tells himself.
He spots a lightweight sports jacket left on a balcony-someone who’d come out to see fireworks, maybe, and forgotten it-and hops up to grab it because he’s wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt (that no longer smells like Steve, and he’s not thinking about that) and the arm’s a bit conspicuous.
He can’t do much about the hair. It gets in his mouth at one point. Hydra had wanted it long: a disguise, a means of control and obedience to their orders about hair-cutting or not, a test of his skill. He swipes it out of his face, registers mild annoyance, stops mid-step because: mild everyday human annoyance.
When he strolls into his chosen opulent hotel-between two faux-Roman marble-and-gold pillars that’re trying way too hard- the napping late-night desk clerk jolts awake and gives him a fascinated once-over. Expensive distressed jeans, borrowed coat, dark hair in his face, hand jammed into his pocket. He tilts his head, chin lifted, eyes dismissive. Tries to pull off eccentric billionaire, cranky about melodramatic holiday kerfluffle, seeking peace and quiet.
The clerk visibly waffles, contemplates, buys the act. More so when cash appears. He keeps the arm hidden. Tony Stark does not like to be handed things. He can be equally fanciful. The clerk slides the key across the counter, after a second.
He picks his way around ornamental ferns and questionably dressed statuary. He takes the stairs even though it’s thirty floors up. Not a hardship. And he’s faster than an elevator.
The room’s sumptuous and florid and gaudy, but not in a bad way. Brown-and-topaz striped silk on walls and counterpanes. Draperies falling over tall windows, thick and serene. Mirrors with overwrought massive gilt frames, and a mini-bar that won’t do him any good, and above all a kind of hushed meaningful breath-holding: the room and the universe waiting to see where they collectively go from here.
He kicks off his boots. They land with twin thuds. Black smudges on plush cream carpet.
He looks at the black huddled shapes, and his hand-his flesh-and-blood hand-starts to shake, and then he’s shaking. Everywhere. Under Steve’s clothes. Wearing his ludicrous party accessories, the ones that Steve doesn’t want, the body that Steve doesn’t-
He tears it all off. Leaves useless clothing crumpled in rent-asunder pieces on the floor. Jerks open the cock-ring and throws that into the heap too. Grabs the base of the plug inside him and yanks. Gasps at roughness; drops object atop fabric-shreds; stares morbidly while it glistens, black and slick and without function now. He can feel the slick between his legs, and his stomach twists.
He stumbles into the bathroom. He cannot look at himself, so he looks at the gilt-edged tile of the shower, the decadent whirlpool tub, the jets, the complimentary bottle of purple-and-gold bath salts. The floor is chilly under his toes, because it is marble, and marble is cold. The tub is nearly large enough to swim in, to share, to drown inside.
He has had an aversion to tubs-to water in general: blunt forceful showers, baths, immersion, submersion-throughout the months he’s been living with Steve. Steve has never commented on the rapid-fire in-and-out of Bucky’s showers. Steve only smiles like he can’t believe Bucky’s here to be showering.
He flips on the tap. As hot as it’ll go. Skin-scalding. He watches it fill. Lapping higher. Creeping up. As he stands naked and shivering on marble.
When the tub is full, he shuts off the tap, and takes a deep breath, and steps in.
The water’s too hot. The water’s too hot but it feels good. Scorching. Cleansing. Annealing. It embraces him without making demands. It is clear and untroubled. It does not hurt.
He sits down. Water caresses his limbs, his stomach, his chest.
He tilts his head back and lets ripples play with his hair. There’s an ache in his ass, but it’s far-off and knitting itself back into nonexistence. He does not ignore it, but permits it to go.
He tests whether he can reach the jet controls with his toes. He can.
Those are his toes. Pink and callused and kind of skinny, like baby creatures peeking up from a newly bubble-strewn lake. He wiggles them.
The arm’s fine in water. He’s never told Steve as much, though Steve must’ve guessed. Designed to function in rain, or fully submerged, or under sea-pressure. He uses it now to dip into frothy bathwater, breaking surface tension, and to flick tiny droplets at the closest gilty tile. The drops gleam as they land, happy to comply. The air’s steam-soaked and water-saturated. He can feel the heat in his lungs.
His cock bobs, half-visible under bubbles. It’s soft now. Not hard. A hanging long weight between his thighs: innocuous, not painful, present and registering a flutter of sensation when he cups it and then lets go. That’s him. Like the toes.
He experiments with the tiny bottle of bath salts. He can’t place the scent-obviously not a memory worth leaving in his head-but it’s straightforward and light and vaguely herbal and a little sweet, though not too much.
He closes his eyes, letting his knees float. The tub’s too big for only him. Steve would like it, he thinks. Steve would like to draw it: the vine-and-grapes mock-Italian fresco at the back, the curving statue arms of placid-eyed nymphs pressed into service as towel-racks, the whole over-eager clumsily sincere affair. Steve would see both: the trying too hard, and the trying.
He splashes a foot just because he can. No one here to tell him no. And he’s warm.
Want, he thinks. Want, and Steve. Want, and Steve, and choices. Steve’s choices. His own.
After a while, after the water’s gone cold, he gets up and showers properly, scrubbing every inch of himself until he’s pink and breathless and tender and almost whole; and then he hauls himself out of the bathroom, and, dripping and bundled into a robe worth more than his and Stevie’s old apartment, eyes the torn sticky disaster he’s left on the bedroom floor.
He makes a call. The sleepy desk clerk becomes wide-awake at the promise of more cash. Hotel-branded gift-shop clothing appears at his door within ten minutes. As instructed, the boy simply knocks, takes the pile of money, leaves the bags, and is not there to spy a fluffy-robe-clad supersoldier snaking an arm out to pick them up.
He catches a glimpse of himself in the baroque mirror as he’s getting dressed. He pauses, wandering closer. Eyes like ghost-blue, like haunting, like bruises. Dark hair, drying in tangles because he hasn’t brushed it. Glinting deadly silver and taut muscle. Plus a hotel-branded grey hoodie and navy-blue sweatpants with a logo on his ass. Hmm.
The sweatpants’re soft inside. Fuzzy. His skin…might like soft and fuzzy.
He runs fingers through his hair, doing the best he can.
He tries out the ocean of bed in the main room. It attempts to swallow him whole in memory-foam and pillow-topped plushness. He panics briefly, punches a sausage-shaped pillow-monstrosity with tassels on the ends, falls out of the clutches of lavishness onto the floor, glares. Then gets up and dives right back in, because the bed’s not going to win.
He ends up curled into the pillows in the center of the bed-ocean, hugging the stupid tassel-beast, feeling emptied-out and tired and scared as hell but also lighter and more reckless and more real, feeling the fuzzy tangibility of sweatpants over bath-heated skin, catching a hint of herbal-sugar scent when he breathes.
He falls asleep there, which he does not mean to do. But when he awakens from a dream he cannot remember, early fingers of dawn tugging shyly at his window-curtains, he simply yawns and burrows further into silk sheets and pillowcases and goes back to sleep, because he’s comfortable and disinclined to move.
He wakes up again about two hours after that, and bolts upright, heart pounding. He can feel his pupils get wider. Steve. Oh hell. He left Steve, he didn’t come home, he told Steve not to look-
Some part of his brain kicks him and says: you woke up thinking about him, not your nightmares. Yeah, he grumbles back, got that, thanks; and flips himself out of the wonderful bed with newfound purpose.
He checks out via the ostentatiously large television-the future’s grand-so he doesn’t have to speak to anyone, and he goes out a back-door mostly-unused exit just out of habit. He tosses a certain towel-wrapped bundle into a dumpster a block away. The mid-morning post-holiday air’s bright and cloudless and clean, the sort of brilliant sharp clarity that throws cliff-faces and choices into stark relief.
He’d dismembered the belt before wrapping it up, peeling off a strip of thin leather and twisting it enough to make it pliable. The leather’s holding up his hair in a messy attempt at a bun: maybe he can’t bring himself to cut it yet, but it’s out of his face, or it would be if he were better at making a bun.
He passes shops, a bakery, a fashion boutique, a hobbyist arts-and-crafts place. He passes apartments and a tiny curly-haired girl drawing flowers on the pavement with pink-and-yellow chalk.
He pauses. Retraces his steps.
Ten minutes and one intimidated hobby-shop clerk later, he has a small bag in one hand and somewhat less cash in his right boot.
He maybe runs a little. Thinking about Steve.
When he gets back to the Tower he can’t spot anyone immediately, no signs of life, but the Winter Soldier’s at least a match for Tony Stark’s security system, plus Jarvis actually has some kind of soft spot for Bucky Barnes and more broadly for guys with trauma-skewed reactions, so Jarvis listens when Bucky says very quietly, “Hey, sit on the alarm for a sec, okay?”
He says, “Thank you,” after, and settles for patting the wall of the stairwell in lieu of clapping an honorary fellow Commando on the shoulder, and then swings himself into the air-ducts and heads off to find Steve.
Steve’s not in fact hard to find. Steve’s standing in the living room of his-of his and Bucky’s-quarters, fretting. Tension and unhappiness and heroic stubborn determination radiate off him like sunshine. Bucky, in the vent above his head, can’t not smile.
“-look,” Sam’s saying, hand clasping Steve’s arm, low and intense, “I know, man. I get it. I know. But he asked you to not look. He asked you for privacy. He asked you for something.”
Steve’s shoulders droop. “I can’t just-it’s been all night, and no one’s heard-he’s alone out there and he’s-you heard him, before he left, and the, the, everything I found in the bedroom, I can’t-what if he’s not okay, shouldn’t I-”
“He’s not okay,” Sam agrees. “Neither are you. And he’s not irrational or stupid, right? He’s pretty damn capable.”
“He’s not-”
“He thought he knew what we were doing. He was acting completely rationally, y’know, given his prior experience and understanding. Not sayin’ it’s healthy, and he’s gonna have a whole bucketload of trauma to work through, but he did think he understood, he was making choices, he was thinking. You heard him. He knows you’re not Hydra, Steve. He was doing it for you this time.”
“That’s worse,” Steve protests. “He said-Sam, he said he loves me. And I didn’t even say it back. I didn’t-”
“He knows, Steve.”
“No, he can’t, he said I loved him-Bucky-fuck-he thinks I don’t know who he is. I know who he is. He brought me goddamn blueberries in bed and he makes me smile and I didn’t say it back and I need to find him, Sam, I need to tell him-”
Bucky kicks open the air-vent, drops down to the living-room floor in front of Steve, curses his inability to keep his own hair out of his face, and says, “Tell me now.”
“Well,” Sam says. “Don’t you have suspiciously flawless timing.”
Steve’s lips say Bucky, oh God, Bucky.
“Hi,” Bucky says. “I’m. Y’know. Sorry. About leaving.”
“You,” Steve starts, Steve stops. The muscle in his jaw does a heartbreaking giveaway twitch. “If you needed…if you need to.”
“I hurt you.”
“I, um, kinda heal…?” Please don’t hate yourself for this, Steve’s eyes beg him.
“I…guess maybe I do. That. Too. I got you something.”
“Bucky,” Steve breathes. The windows are open, floor to ceiling, letting morning light pour in. Steve must’ve opened them. Hoping.
Steve’s eyes are so blue, and his freckles stand out over shocked-fair cheekbones, and Bucky Barnes loves him so goddamned much.
“You didn’t think I meant forever,” he says, “when I said I was gonna leave, I just needed a night, I just needed,” and then he says, “Steve, Stevie, it’s okay,” because Steve’s falling apart in front of him, tears like fear and sorrow and the knife-point of a wish on the brink of coming true.
“Bucky,” Steve says again, tremulous and shaken and trying hard, “or, um, not-if you don’t want to be called-I’ll stop if you want, whatever you want, I know you’re you, that came out wrong, I’m so sorry, I do know who you are and I love you, I love you-”
“I know.” He steps closer. Close enough for a kiss under the sunlight. “You love me. And I love you. I was always coming back, you think I’d leave your ass to get trampled by tanks without me?”
Steve gulps back another sob. Swallows down agony like the noble idiot he is. “You said you know. That I love you.”
“I do. Here.”
“You…oh, Buck-shit, sorry-oh, wow.” Steve takes out the set of colored pencils, drawing-pencils, an infinity of iridescent color and potential. The best set he could acquire on that momentary whim. “These…where did you…why did you…”
“Happy birthday,” Bucky tells him. “You can use the name. It’s part of me. The part that remembers putting ice on your big dumb hand in nineteen-thirty-eight, that time you tried to punch a wall because you broke your one good blue and we couldn’t afford a new one.”
“I absolutely believe that story,” Sam says. They both ignore him. For now.
Bucky says, “When I said I wouldn’t mind a party with you if it was the real me and you. I don’t want anyone else. I want you.”
Steve opens his mouth, holding rainbows in one hand while the bag flutters to the floor.
“No, listen,” Bucky says, hopefully before Steve can get lost in martyrdom tendencies and overactive protect-at-all-costs care. “I’m not okay. I might not be for-a while. But I know about wanting something. Someone. For me. I want you. And maybe bath salts. But mostly you. Us, Steve.”
And Steve hears him, really hears him. Looks into his face: searching, questioning, finding. Bucky nods, just a fraction. Steve’s lips quirk: almost a smile. Bucky has to smile back.
Steve holds out the hand not occupied with art supplies. Bucky takes it. Sam, with superhuman tact, disappears from view.
“I like your outfit,” Steve says. “I mean, if you don’t mind being a walking advertisement. That’s a terrible logo, too.”
“Yeah? Bet you could do better.”
“You sayin’ you want me to draw on you?” Steve tugs at his hand: not insistent, only asking. Bucky goes willingly. They end up chest to chest, hip to hip, heartbeat to heartbeat. “All over you? Everywhere.”
“Kinky, Steve.” His pulse’s beating wildly: elation like hummingbird’s-wings, like dust-motes dancing in sunshine, like the anticipation of joy. “ ’m in.”
“Speaking of…” Steve bites his lip, looks like he’s maybe thinking better of the comment, says it anyway. “That stuff…everything you bought…”
“I don’t know how to use most of it. I mean, I know which ones…felt good. Which ones we could throw out. Which ones might feel good if it’s you doin’ it. I know what a lot of it does. Not how to do it. Kinda figured you would, really.” He hopes he’s reading Steve correctly. He thinks he is. He thinks that if this is hope he might like the way it feels.
“Oh,” Steve says, happy and apprehensive and above all Steve: picking up the challenge and the dare and running with it, running with it with Bucky’s hand in his, “you thought so, huh? And some of it felt good…you thought about me doing it…?”
Hand in hand, toward the future. “Bet we could figure it out,” Bucky says, “Together.”
Title: The Tones That Tremble Down Your Spine [4/4]
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: in this chapter: Lots of consent issues and mention of past abuse, not too specific here. Hope, instead!
Word Count: 3376 for this chapter
Disclaimers: characters belong to Marvel, not me; no harm intended. Title from Of Monsters and Men’s “Crystals,” which in my head is a Bucky song.
Summary: Tony tells him they’re planning a party for Steve’s birthday. He knows how parties are supposed to go.
Notes: written for feanorinleatherpants, for this seriously NSFW Hydra Trash Party fan art. Poor Bucky. Poor boys. Time for comfort!
He runs, and it is not a tactically considered retreat, not a cool calculated winter-etched strategy; it is hot and panicked and powered by short breaths and a pulse drumming in his ears. He plunges through doors and down temperature-regulated Tower hallways, and finally throws himself out a window three floors up because he can’t stay inside those walls any longer-
He lands on both feet, instinctively catching balance. The impact rings up through his boots; he blinks. His vision’s wrong, a cloud of sparkles and multicolored light across dark shapes, where’s that coming from, is his programming collapsing at last-
Oh. Fireworks. Fourth of July.
He puts a hand out. Touches the sleek grey wall of the Tower, where he’s standing beside it with both boots on the ground. Breathes.
Fireworks. Steve’s birthday.
He’s still here next to the Tower and he asked Steve not to look for him but he doesn’t know-
He doesn’t know whether Steve will want him back, enough to look-
He doesn’t know whether he wants Steve to look for him-
His eyes burn. Odd. Dry and hot, like fire licking behind his lids when he closes them.
He vanishes away into the shapes and shadows of the dark. Not far. A couple of alleys over. Lots of alleys in New York City. Always have been.
This alley’s relatively tidy, for a given metropolis-value of tidy. Two dumpsters. Winding metal fire-escapes like decorative art. The sky above like a narrow strip of smoky blue velvet, punctuated by scattershot Independence Day flame. He flattens his back against helpful dusty brick, and then thinks dimly that he’s wearing a clean white t-shirt-Steve’s shirt, oh hell-and that’s not going to be white and clean for long.
He’s not. Clean.
The fireworks burst above like cannon-fire and death in ecstatic colors.
He needs-
He wants-
Does he? Want?
The thick black anal plug he’s wearing stirs wetly, having a will of its own, rubbing inside his body. The body. With the plug.
The urge to vomit swells. He battles it down. He is good at battles. He is-
Good?
He breathes, hearing how much he sounds like a wounded animal; he puts hands on knees, and bends over and pants for air under the delirious crash-and-crackle of the firework finale.
When he lifts his head he spots the corner of an ATM at the other end of the alley. He has a bank account of his own-Tony Stark had set that up, and Pepper Potts had said something about prisoners of war and decades of earned back-pay-but he can’t use that. Steve might be watching. Someone might be watching.
Maybe. If they care to.
It’s the work of a moment to ascertain that, while both Hydra remnants and SHIELD agents have been exquisitely thorough, one or two old accounts remain. Small ones, the type made available to him on missions if supplies were required, for instance a purchase of innocuous deadly deceitful household items that’d appear nothing like an assassination at all. These accounts are miniscule enough to’ve been missed. He empties both. Cash.
He has a great deal of money, now.
He genuinely does not know whether Steve will come looking.
He turns his back on the Tower. It worries after him, but he ignores this and picks out the most luxurious hotel in the city, the fanciest glitziest shiniest hotel, adjective piled upon adjective. The sort of place Bucky Barnes could never’ve afforded; the sort of place the Winter Soldier would’ve never understood. Strategic, he tells himself.
He spots a lightweight sports jacket left on a balcony-someone who’d come out to see fireworks, maybe, and forgotten it-and hops up to grab it because he’s wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt (that no longer smells like Steve, and he’s not thinking about that) and the arm’s a bit conspicuous.
He can’t do much about the hair. It gets in his mouth at one point. Hydra had wanted it long: a disguise, a means of control and obedience to their orders about hair-cutting or not, a test of his skill. He swipes it out of his face, registers mild annoyance, stops mid-step because: mild everyday human annoyance.
When he strolls into his chosen opulent hotel-between two faux-Roman marble-and-gold pillars that’re trying way too hard- the napping late-night desk clerk jolts awake and gives him a fascinated once-over. Expensive distressed jeans, borrowed coat, dark hair in his face, hand jammed into his pocket. He tilts his head, chin lifted, eyes dismissive. Tries to pull off eccentric billionaire, cranky about melodramatic holiday kerfluffle, seeking peace and quiet.
The clerk visibly waffles, contemplates, buys the act. More so when cash appears. He keeps the arm hidden. Tony Stark does not like to be handed things. He can be equally fanciful. The clerk slides the key across the counter, after a second.
He picks his way around ornamental ferns and questionably dressed statuary. He takes the stairs even though it’s thirty floors up. Not a hardship. And he’s faster than an elevator.
The room’s sumptuous and florid and gaudy, but not in a bad way. Brown-and-topaz striped silk on walls and counterpanes. Draperies falling over tall windows, thick and serene. Mirrors with overwrought massive gilt frames, and a mini-bar that won’t do him any good, and above all a kind of hushed meaningful breath-holding: the room and the universe waiting to see where they collectively go from here.
He kicks off his boots. They land with twin thuds. Black smudges on plush cream carpet.
He looks at the black huddled shapes, and his hand-his flesh-and-blood hand-starts to shake, and then he’s shaking. Everywhere. Under Steve’s clothes. Wearing his ludicrous party accessories, the ones that Steve doesn’t want, the body that Steve doesn’t-
He tears it all off. Leaves useless clothing crumpled in rent-asunder pieces on the floor. Jerks open the cock-ring and throws that into the heap too. Grabs the base of the plug inside him and yanks. Gasps at roughness; drops object atop fabric-shreds; stares morbidly while it glistens, black and slick and without function now. He can feel the slick between his legs, and his stomach twists.
He stumbles into the bathroom. He cannot look at himself, so he looks at the gilt-edged tile of the shower, the decadent whirlpool tub, the jets, the complimentary bottle of purple-and-gold bath salts. The floor is chilly under his toes, because it is marble, and marble is cold. The tub is nearly large enough to swim in, to share, to drown inside.
He has had an aversion to tubs-to water in general: blunt forceful showers, baths, immersion, submersion-throughout the months he’s been living with Steve. Steve has never commented on the rapid-fire in-and-out of Bucky’s showers. Steve only smiles like he can’t believe Bucky’s here to be showering.
He flips on the tap. As hot as it’ll go. Skin-scalding. He watches it fill. Lapping higher. Creeping up. As he stands naked and shivering on marble.
When the tub is full, he shuts off the tap, and takes a deep breath, and steps in.
The water’s too hot. The water’s too hot but it feels good. Scorching. Cleansing. Annealing. It embraces him without making demands. It is clear and untroubled. It does not hurt.
He sits down. Water caresses his limbs, his stomach, his chest.
He tilts his head back and lets ripples play with his hair. There’s an ache in his ass, but it’s far-off and knitting itself back into nonexistence. He does not ignore it, but permits it to go.
He tests whether he can reach the jet controls with his toes. He can.
Those are his toes. Pink and callused and kind of skinny, like baby creatures peeking up from a newly bubble-strewn lake. He wiggles them.
The arm’s fine in water. He’s never told Steve as much, though Steve must’ve guessed. Designed to function in rain, or fully submerged, or under sea-pressure. He uses it now to dip into frothy bathwater, breaking surface tension, and to flick tiny droplets at the closest gilty tile. The drops gleam as they land, happy to comply. The air’s steam-soaked and water-saturated. He can feel the heat in his lungs.
His cock bobs, half-visible under bubbles. It’s soft now. Not hard. A hanging long weight between his thighs: innocuous, not painful, present and registering a flutter of sensation when he cups it and then lets go. That’s him. Like the toes.
He experiments with the tiny bottle of bath salts. He can’t place the scent-obviously not a memory worth leaving in his head-but it’s straightforward and light and vaguely herbal and a little sweet, though not too much.
He closes his eyes, letting his knees float. The tub’s too big for only him. Steve would like it, he thinks. Steve would like to draw it: the vine-and-grapes mock-Italian fresco at the back, the curving statue arms of placid-eyed nymphs pressed into service as towel-racks, the whole over-eager clumsily sincere affair. Steve would see both: the trying too hard, and the trying.
He splashes a foot just because he can. No one here to tell him no. And he’s warm.
Want, he thinks. Want, and Steve. Want, and Steve, and choices. Steve’s choices. His own.
After a while, after the water’s gone cold, he gets up and showers properly, scrubbing every inch of himself until he’s pink and breathless and tender and almost whole; and then he hauls himself out of the bathroom, and, dripping and bundled into a robe worth more than his and Stevie’s old apartment, eyes the torn sticky disaster he’s left on the bedroom floor.
He makes a call. The sleepy desk clerk becomes wide-awake at the promise of more cash. Hotel-branded gift-shop clothing appears at his door within ten minutes. As instructed, the boy simply knocks, takes the pile of money, leaves the bags, and is not there to spy a fluffy-robe-clad supersoldier snaking an arm out to pick them up.
He catches a glimpse of himself in the baroque mirror as he’s getting dressed. He pauses, wandering closer. Eyes like ghost-blue, like haunting, like bruises. Dark hair, drying in tangles because he hasn’t brushed it. Glinting deadly silver and taut muscle. Plus a hotel-branded grey hoodie and navy-blue sweatpants with a logo on his ass. Hmm.
The sweatpants’re soft inside. Fuzzy. His skin…might like soft and fuzzy.
He runs fingers through his hair, doing the best he can.
He tries out the ocean of bed in the main room. It attempts to swallow him whole in memory-foam and pillow-topped plushness. He panics briefly, punches a sausage-shaped pillow-monstrosity with tassels on the ends, falls out of the clutches of lavishness onto the floor, glares. Then gets up and dives right back in, because the bed’s not going to win.
He ends up curled into the pillows in the center of the bed-ocean, hugging the stupid tassel-beast, feeling emptied-out and tired and scared as hell but also lighter and more reckless and more real, feeling the fuzzy tangibility of sweatpants over bath-heated skin, catching a hint of herbal-sugar scent when he breathes.
He falls asleep there, which he does not mean to do. But when he awakens from a dream he cannot remember, early fingers of dawn tugging shyly at his window-curtains, he simply yawns and burrows further into silk sheets and pillowcases and goes back to sleep, because he’s comfortable and disinclined to move.
He wakes up again about two hours after that, and bolts upright, heart pounding. He can feel his pupils get wider. Steve. Oh hell. He left Steve, he didn’t come home, he told Steve not to look-
Some part of his brain kicks him and says: you woke up thinking about him, not your nightmares. Yeah, he grumbles back, got that, thanks; and flips himself out of the wonderful bed with newfound purpose.
He checks out via the ostentatiously large television-the future’s grand-so he doesn’t have to speak to anyone, and he goes out a back-door mostly-unused exit just out of habit. He tosses a certain towel-wrapped bundle into a dumpster a block away. The mid-morning post-holiday air’s bright and cloudless and clean, the sort of brilliant sharp clarity that throws cliff-faces and choices into stark relief.
He’d dismembered the belt before wrapping it up, peeling off a strip of thin leather and twisting it enough to make it pliable. The leather’s holding up his hair in a messy attempt at a bun: maybe he can’t bring himself to cut it yet, but it’s out of his face, or it would be if he were better at making a bun.
He passes shops, a bakery, a fashion boutique, a hobbyist arts-and-crafts place. He passes apartments and a tiny curly-haired girl drawing flowers on the pavement with pink-and-yellow chalk.
He pauses. Retraces his steps.
Ten minutes and one intimidated hobby-shop clerk later, he has a small bag in one hand and somewhat less cash in his right boot.
He maybe runs a little. Thinking about Steve.
When he gets back to the Tower he can’t spot anyone immediately, no signs of life, but the Winter Soldier’s at least a match for Tony Stark’s security system, plus Jarvis actually has some kind of soft spot for Bucky Barnes and more broadly for guys with trauma-skewed reactions, so Jarvis listens when Bucky says very quietly, “Hey, sit on the alarm for a sec, okay?”
He says, “Thank you,” after, and settles for patting the wall of the stairwell in lieu of clapping an honorary fellow Commando on the shoulder, and then swings himself into the air-ducts and heads off to find Steve.
Steve’s not in fact hard to find. Steve’s standing in the living room of his-of his and Bucky’s-quarters, fretting. Tension and unhappiness and heroic stubborn determination radiate off him like sunshine. Bucky, in the vent above his head, can’t not smile.
“-look,” Sam’s saying, hand clasping Steve’s arm, low and intense, “I know, man. I get it. I know. But he asked you to not look. He asked you for privacy. He asked you for something.”
Steve’s shoulders droop. “I can’t just-it’s been all night, and no one’s heard-he’s alone out there and he’s-you heard him, before he left, and the, the, everything I found in the bedroom, I can’t-what if he’s not okay, shouldn’t I-”
“He’s not okay,” Sam agrees. “Neither are you. And he’s not irrational or stupid, right? He’s pretty damn capable.”
“He’s not-”
“He thought he knew what we were doing. He was acting completely rationally, y’know, given his prior experience and understanding. Not sayin’ it’s healthy, and he’s gonna have a whole bucketload of trauma to work through, but he did think he understood, he was making choices, he was thinking. You heard him. He knows you’re not Hydra, Steve. He was doing it for you this time.”
“That’s worse,” Steve protests. “He said-Sam, he said he loves me. And I didn’t even say it back. I didn’t-”
“He knows, Steve.”
“No, he can’t, he said I loved him-Bucky-fuck-he thinks I don’t know who he is. I know who he is. He brought me goddamn blueberries in bed and he makes me smile and I didn’t say it back and I need to find him, Sam, I need to tell him-”
Bucky kicks open the air-vent, drops down to the living-room floor in front of Steve, curses his inability to keep his own hair out of his face, and says, “Tell me now.”
“Well,” Sam says. “Don’t you have suspiciously flawless timing.”
Steve’s lips say Bucky, oh God, Bucky.
“Hi,” Bucky says. “I’m. Y’know. Sorry. About leaving.”
“You,” Steve starts, Steve stops. The muscle in his jaw does a heartbreaking giveaway twitch. “If you needed…if you need to.”
“I hurt you.”
“I, um, kinda heal…?” Please don’t hate yourself for this, Steve’s eyes beg him.
“I…guess maybe I do. That. Too. I got you something.”
“Bucky,” Steve breathes. The windows are open, floor to ceiling, letting morning light pour in. Steve must’ve opened them. Hoping.
Steve’s eyes are so blue, and his freckles stand out over shocked-fair cheekbones, and Bucky Barnes loves him so goddamned much.
“You didn’t think I meant forever,” he says, “when I said I was gonna leave, I just needed a night, I just needed,” and then he says, “Steve, Stevie, it’s okay,” because Steve’s falling apart in front of him, tears like fear and sorrow and the knife-point of a wish on the brink of coming true.
“Bucky,” Steve says again, tremulous and shaken and trying hard, “or, um, not-if you don’t want to be called-I’ll stop if you want, whatever you want, I know you’re you, that came out wrong, I’m so sorry, I do know who you are and I love you, I love you-”
“I know.” He steps closer. Close enough for a kiss under the sunlight. “You love me. And I love you. I was always coming back, you think I’d leave your ass to get trampled by tanks without me?”
Steve gulps back another sob. Swallows down agony like the noble idiot he is. “You said you know. That I love you.”
“I do. Here.”
“You…oh, Buck-shit, sorry-oh, wow.” Steve takes out the set of colored pencils, drawing-pencils, an infinity of iridescent color and potential. The best set he could acquire on that momentary whim. “These…where did you…why did you…”
“Happy birthday,” Bucky tells him. “You can use the name. It’s part of me. The part that remembers putting ice on your big dumb hand in nineteen-thirty-eight, that time you tried to punch a wall because you broke your one good blue and we couldn’t afford a new one.”
“I absolutely believe that story,” Sam says. They both ignore him. For now.
Bucky says, “When I said I wouldn’t mind a party with you if it was the real me and you. I don’t want anyone else. I want you.”
Steve opens his mouth, holding rainbows in one hand while the bag flutters to the floor.
“No, listen,” Bucky says, hopefully before Steve can get lost in martyrdom tendencies and overactive protect-at-all-costs care. “I’m not okay. I might not be for-a while. But I know about wanting something. Someone. For me. I want you. And maybe bath salts. But mostly you. Us, Steve.”
And Steve hears him, really hears him. Looks into his face: searching, questioning, finding. Bucky nods, just a fraction. Steve’s lips quirk: almost a smile. Bucky has to smile back.
Steve holds out the hand not occupied with art supplies. Bucky takes it. Sam, with superhuman tact, disappears from view.
“I like your outfit,” Steve says. “I mean, if you don’t mind being a walking advertisement. That’s a terrible logo, too.”
“Yeah? Bet you could do better.”
“You sayin’ you want me to draw on you?” Steve tugs at his hand: not insistent, only asking. Bucky goes willingly. They end up chest to chest, hip to hip, heartbeat to heartbeat. “All over you? Everywhere.”
“Kinky, Steve.” His pulse’s beating wildly: elation like hummingbird’s-wings, like dust-motes dancing in sunshine, like the anticipation of joy. “ ’m in.”
“Speaking of…” Steve bites his lip, looks like he’s maybe thinking better of the comment, says it anyway. “That stuff…everything you bought…”
“I don’t know how to use most of it. I mean, I know which ones…felt good. Which ones we could throw out. Which ones might feel good if it’s you doin’ it. I know what a lot of it does. Not how to do it. Kinda figured you would, really.” He hopes he’s reading Steve correctly. He thinks he is. He thinks that if this is hope he might like the way it feels.
“Oh,” Steve says, happy and apprehensive and above all Steve: picking up the challenge and the dare and running with it, running with it with Bucky’s hand in his, “you thought so, huh? And some of it felt good…you thought about me doing it…?”
Hand in hand, toward the future. “Bet we could figure it out,” Bucky says, “Together.”