Fic: "To Have and to Hold" ¤Captain America:TFA ¤Steve/Bucky ¤PG/PG-13 ¤Slice-of-life.Romance. Angst
Title: To Have and to Hold.
Author: Nemesi.
Fandom: Captain America: The First Avenger
Genre: Slice-of-life. Romance. Angst.
Word Count: A little under 5200.
Characters: Steve Rogers (pre and post serum), Bucky Barnes.
Pairings: Steve/Bucky.
Rating: mostly PG-13.
Disclaimer: Marvel owns my soul, and also all the characters and themes herein portrayed. I'm putting everything back inside Marvel's sandbox as soon as I'm done playing with their toys.
Warnings: Self-betaed. Slash. Character-death (canon events).
Continuity: Movieverse, definitely.
Summary: The little moments where one fell deeper in love with the other.
* * * * *
First Half ←
in sickness
It feels like he's burning.
A fiery, simmering heath, uncoiling from his abdomen and spreading out, waves thick like syrup, a sticky goo that he's sinking in, liquid fire that laps at his skin, wraps hungrily around his limbs, sinking needle-like teeth in his flesh and spreading green-tinted poison in his veins.
He's feverish. His stomach heaves, dry, and he's drenched in sweat. He hitches all over
(bugs crawling across his body, black things with round malignant eyes, trailing their feelers along his skin and leaving marks as dark as charcoal)
he can't draw breath
(his chest is open, and his heart is pulled out, a clockwork thing, rusty, turning and chinking softly like the wheel at Coney Island, a metal conch clamped stubbornly around a pearl of cool radiance, a picture inside a medallion, and that picture is---).
He squeezes his eyes shut, bites his lip bloody against a scream, and thinks of better things
(Steve)
better days
(Steve)
all that's bright and safe of his memories
(STEVE)
and the litany commences, his name, his rank, his name, his rank, because there's no way he's surrendering any of his secrets to this Nazi scum, the confidential intel and their base's location and the assault schedule and Steve's name.
The tide recedes, bit by bit, like it always does. It may take hours
(days)
but agony always tunes down into something more bearable as the drugs wear off.
He's barely coming to, still half-way between Hell and Italian ground, when something warm is pushed to his cheek, and it's odd - because it feels like coals on his skin, but it also feels like standing in the rain, the coolness soaking through him from under the pulse of brandishing heat.
It feels like lazy afternoons spent sprawled star-shaped on the floor, squinting in the sunlight slanting through the blinds and breathing hard in the dry Brooklyn heat, his nape wet with perspiration and his fingers brushing against Steve's, similarly sprawled in a patch of shadow, a sweating jug of lemonade sitting between them, glinting gold and spreading a thick, mouth-tingling scent in the air.
His eyes are open, they've been for a while.
But now they are also focusing, and they focus on the colour blue, cornflower blue, blue like Steve's eyes blue, and suddenly it is Steve's eyes, cornflower and stricken, staring down at him, and it's Steve's hand on his cheek, warm like a furnace and cool like a blessing, shaky and firm at the same time, and it doesn't even register at first that this Steve is twice his Steve, because he's delirious and perhaps this is life's last joke on James Buchanan Barnes's expense, letting him die with his eyes filled with Steve, but he doesn't really care, because he can recognize his Steve even when his shoulders get multiplied by four, and so he lets himself be pulled up and clings to him and then follows him to what could be either the afterlife or salvation, or even just a big headache and anything in-between, because it finally sinks in that, oh God, Steve's really managed to enlist for real and he's pulled a Steve and come to save Bucky, and Bucky will have to give him a piece of his mind as soon as the world stops spinning, and he'll have to try not to let through how damn proud he is of Steve, just how worried, especially after Steve does that comic-book jump and grasps onto Bucky and hoists him up as if he were a dame in a cheesy Hollywood flick, but Bucky's too delirious to protest and besides the prison is exploding around them and there's flames and debris and shrapnel and whatever all around them and damn; it suddenly occurs to him that he loves this foolish man like there's no tomorrow.
(but he rather hopes there is. A tomorrow, that is. And a few more days to spare, possibly.)
and in health
“Admiring yourself in the mirror, Mr. Rogers?”
In the weeks to come, Steve will adamantly deny any jumping of any sort, on the grounds that Captain American does not get caught off guard in his own tent, much less gets a fright out of it. Bucky will cheerfully disagree on both accounts, bragging on how he did catch The Cap off guard and scared him out his socks, to boot.
“I never pegged you for the vain type,” Bucky adds, eyebrow raised in pointed inquiry.
Steve shrugs half-heartedly, neither an answer nor the lack of one. Just a short, confused motion, before he goes back to watch his biceps flex in the shaving mirror.
Bucky takes a few steps inside the tent, plants his hip against the cot's frame.
“Talk to me, Steve-oh.”
His voice is coaxing, light as it is. Steve flexes his muscles once more, a nervous twitch.
“Doesn't it look... odd to you?”
“What does?”
“This.”
“In full sentences, Steve. So I can understand what you're talking about.”
“Everyone... everyone's making a fuss about me every since I was changed. They think this is so great but I, I can't even recognize myself, sometimes. I had to relearn everything about my own body, and there are times when I still think of this body as not being... right.” He trails off, tilts the mirror just in time to catch Bucky roll his eyes.
“Figures. Only Steve Rogers could find a fault in Captain America's body.”
Steve scowls. He has to tell himself he's not jealous of his own self; that he doesn't wish to go back to a time where Bucky had no need for Captain America, as long as he had Steve.
“That's the problem, Bucky. This isn't me. I've never been this--” he gestures to his naked chest, the tanned skin taut over rippling muscles, nipples hard and dark on the hairless canvas.
It takes Bucky three strides to reach his side. He touches him on the shoulder, warm and brief (and really, what does it say about Bucky that the touch feels like a brand on Steve's skin, that it pulls at his heart as if they were connected by an invisible string?). Steve doesn't dare turn, but their eyes do meet, through the mirror. Bucky looks earnest, worried in a way that makes guilt pool inside Steve's gut.
“This what, Steve?”
Attractive, Steve thinks. Likeable. Swarmed by people who suddenly need a me that isn't me at all.
“Perfect,” he says instead, frowning a bit when Bucky's troubled expressions clears suddenly, his face splitting into a sunny grin.
“Look buddy, I hate to break it to you, but - the serum didn't make you perfect. It just made the outside catch up with the inside. That's all. This is you, Steve. There's just a little bit more of you,” he squeezes Steve's shoulder, leans in to share a grin, breathing hot and moist against Steve's cheek. “Okay, a whole lot more of you, perhaps. But this is still the little Steve I rescued from bullies and took on every ride at Coney Island.”
“I paid for most of those rides,” Steve manages around the thumping of his heart. When Erskin said that everything inside him would be magnified by the serum, Steve hadn't thought he might mean his feelings. But now he was to wonder; because if he loved Bucky before, this that he feels now... it goes beyond love. He thinks he might live another seventy years, and still wake up in the morning with Bucky's image in his mind and his name on his lips.
Bucky flashes him a grin, angled and roughish.
“Well then, next time I take you to the fair, everything will be on me, promise.”
“Like a date?”
“Like a date where I pay for everything, don't forget that.”
“Trying to buy my favours now, Buck? You know I'm not that kind of gal.”
His attempt at humour is feeble at best, if not downright disastrous; but Bucky is chuckling at it, his body shaking with quiet laughter. He presses his face into Steve's shoulder to hide the sound, and curls his fingers around Steve's own. It's an old habit - Steve remembers Bucky doing the same when they were eleven, and thirteen, and sporadically when they were seventeen, as long as they were tucked away somewhere no one could see them.
Usually, the feeling it brings Steve is only half-comforting; while the other half is comprised by this blooming, constricting feeling in his chest; heat that spreads down his neck and pools at his groin; and a sense of rightness he knows he can't let himself sink into.
Today, though - today it's his new, perfect and not-right body, and Bucky's treating it the same as the old, imperfect fit, and Steve can't reciprocate the way he always does - tucking his head under Bucky's chin and slipping his hand at the small of Bucky's back, breathing quietly against his heart - but he makes up for it by pushing his cheek to Bucky's own, and closing his hand on Bucky's hips and pulling them flush against each other, cheek-to-cheek, heart-to-heart, knee-to-knee, and this is the only thing about his new body he can agree on being perfect.
It still fits around Bucky's own; like two pieces of a puzzle.
“Thanks, Bucky. For... for everything.”
He feels the grin stretching against his cheek, feels the amused puff of breath waft against his ear. The hand around his own moves, slithers, until their fingers are curled together in a tight knot.
“My pleasure, buddy.”
until
The shield feels heavy, and how can Steve carry it so effortlessly is beyond him. He barely registers the strain, though, because Steve is down, and that armed monstrosity is advancing on him, opening fire--
--and it should feel odd to watch Bucky handle the shield, Bucky stepping in the line of danger to save Steve, like it always was a lifetime before, but it feels right even as it feels awing - the shield glinting in the pale winter sun, flecks of snow melting on Bucky's dark hair, the sweat on his cheek, darkening his collar a darker blue - even as it feels worrying, the panic rearing up inside Steve, the urgency, the--
--but Bucky'll be dead before he lets this scum lay a hand on Steve--
--and Bucky'll be dead if Steve doesn't drown the ringing in his ears, if he doesn't get on his feet and goes to him, goes to him now---
death
---the sound of rapid-fire, sharp and so eerily familiar it's almost a task to get worried, to think anything other than protect Steve, and he fires back, driven and a little drunk of his worry, even as he's forced back by the explosions, forced back and out and--
--and Steve only needs to stretch, only a little bit, and he's perfect, this body is perfect, Captain America is perfect, so he surely can do that, can stretch the remaining inch and grasp onto Bucky's straining hand, hold onto it and pull him up, up and into Steve's chest, dammit, because it can't end like this, it can't, it can't--
do us
--Steve's name is ripped from him in a sharp, hollow cry, but he keeps reaching up, even as he falls and falls and falls, even as water opens up underneath him, and ice envelopes him in a shroud of coldness and--
--and the plane crashes, exploding on impact, snow rushes at him, sprays up like a giant wave, the coldness spreading, enveloping him in a coffin of ice, and he thinks, selfishly:
I'm sorry Peggy.
I'll miss you, Peggy.
I love you, Peggy.
And deeper down, where regret mingles with relief and smiles with tears:
I love you, Bucky.
I miss you, Bucky.
I'm coming home, Bucky.
part.
He wakes up.
Wakes up to the sound of birds, like never before in Brooklyn.
To curtains waving gently in the breeze, washed-white and almost luminous, so unlike the flapping, shredded canvas tent from the army.
He wakes up to a radio droning on about a football game; and to memories like the smell of green grass and sunshine in the field, the taste of hot dogs and euphoria; the press of bodies moving in waves around him like a single entity, and the touch of Bucky's hand on his knee, the glint in his ice-green (blue, gold, silver, he never got the colour right on canvas) eyes, the curled edge of his smirk, warm and teasing and full of affection.
He wakes up, seventy years later, with Bucky's image in his mind and his name on his tongue, tasting like pouring rain and blood shining on pink lips and spun sugar and Christmas sweets and ocean's breeze and lemonade and gunpowder and sweat and all that's bright and dark of Steve's memories.
Just like he'd known he would.