fic: right now (it's your tomorrow) (2/4)
Title: Right Now (It’s Your Tomorrow) [2/4] [chapter one here]
Rating: PG-13 for now
Warnings: standard Winter Soldier trauma, not in any detail
Word Count: 3,564
Disclaimers: characters belong to Marvel, not me! Title from Van Halen’s “Right Now”, which I don’t hear enough these days.
Summary: Psychic-but-traumatized Bucky, SHIELD peacekeeper Steve, pumpkin-spice lattes, knitted Captain America blankets, a mysterious mission, and True Love.
now
Steve’s either contentedly asleep or faking so well that even Bucky can’t tell. Bucky lies beside him in the onyx-silver oil-painting night and memorizes the fall of shadows over Steve’s chest, not touching, only following with his gaze.
Steve’s smiling in his sleep. A hint of happiness settled down right there in his mouth. This, them sleeping beside each other, makes Steve happy, Bucky knows. His heart twinges, disobedient and wistful and feeling too much. Watching Steve sleep. Watching Steve smile.
His head hurts like multiple kinds of hell, but he’s not going to bother to get up. For one, that would awaken the super-soldier-sized softly-snoring lump in their bed. For another, he’s pretty much used to the hurt these days. Degrees of better or worse; never gone.
Right now it’s better. Not the best it’s ever been-not with the memory of earlier sharper agony scratching away around the edges-but better.
Steve will leave the painkillers on the kitchen counter the way he unerringly does before he himself leaves for a mission. Painkillers and fresh bright oranges and toffee or hazelnut or coconut syrup, whatever he’s brought home this time around for Bucky to pour recklessly into coffee, enough to drown utilitarian bitterness in the simple pleasure of too much flavor because he can.
Bucky will appreciate the love and the coconut syrup and the citrus thoughtfulness. He may or may not take the painkillers; depends how bad it gets, how weak he is without Steve around. This is his life now; he’s got to learn to deal.
He will not take-and Steve won’t leave out-the psychic suppressants. They’ve had one shouting match over this. Neither of them had exactly won.
The nighttime light, smoke and ghosts and compassion, highlights Steve’s muscles, the curve of his waist, the line of his hip beneath a snowdrift of sheet. The dimness turns dark gold hair to paler gilt, antique portrait-frames kissed by time.
Steve’s sleeping on his back, one arm thrown out for Bucky to cuddle into if he wants. He had. Still is, technically, caught between the solid furnace of Steve’s body and the firm commitment of the arm. It’s looped around his back, and his head’s on Steve’s shoulder.
He wants to move, and doesn’t want to move. Restlessness crawls beneath his skin, the skittering spider-legs of old memories and other hands. But this is Steve and he knows this is Steve. And his body feels warm.
The inertia and the warmth win out for the present. He doesn’t move. Lies there communing with the indigo shadows. They appreciate Steve together.
Steve brought him Starbucks. Because he asked. He licks his lips, tasting phantom pumpkin and cinnamon in the dark.
They’re not supposed to have the psychic suppressants at all. Those sorts of drugs’re highly regulated. Reserved for hospital use, for those patients who literally cannot cope, shrieking and smothered in visions and possible outcomes and the multiplicity of kaleidoscopic branching futures.
Three days after he’d found Steve’s apartment and Steve himself, found the only thing he knew for sure that he wanted in the snarled glittery web of his head, he’d hit the floor airless and too dizzy to even scream. A robot army, of all the stupid fuckin’ things. In Manhattan. Metal and bolts and sunlight and fists swung into civilian faces, fear and terror and death, and he’d felt Steve’s hands on his shoulders trying to hold him up, and he’d dribbled blood onto Steve’s kitchen tiles because he’d bitten his lip without noticing-
Steve, scared as hell-and oh Steve scared is the ugliest sight Bucky’s ever seen, Steve with his infinite heart and endless courage gone white-faced and visibly holding himself together-hadn’t known what to do. Steve’d never witnessed a vision hurt that bad. Didn’t know what Hydra’d done to the Winter Soldier. The pieces they’d tried to carve out, the conditioning. All visions must serve the plan. All else extraneous. If the Asset cannot focus sufficiently, he will be corrected.
Bucky’s not sure whether Steve asked or whether a friend-he’d guess Natasha, the Black Widow, with her eyes like the edge of a once-grasped memory-had brought over the tiny opaque illegal bottle unrequested. He’d been in no shape to argue.
That’d come after.
When he exhales, he imagines he can see his breath whisper over Steve’s bare skin. No marks, but he thinks there ought to be. Some sign of all the wounds he’s carved into Steve’s soul, inadvertently by his death and purposefully as the Winter Soldier and inadvertently a second time around by coming back wrong.
Steve says it’s not like that. Steve says that those crimes are Hydra’s, not Bucky’s own. Steve says that the world got colored in again the second he knew Bucky was alive. Steve thinks that the rest is just details, not unimportant but less important than the fact of a heartbeat.
On good days Bucky believes him.
The suppressants turn him into a vacant useless collection of bones and meat on Steve’s sofa. Left to his own devices, he might not even care, at least not if that was what Steve saw fit to do with him. Steve knows right and wrong better than he does, forever has-but he can’t.
He’s always Seen Steve better than anyone else. On suppressants he might not See a single crucial final could-be-fatal moment. Simple. No amount of discussion’s budging that rock.
Steve had looked at his eyes, had visibly wanted to beg and plead and take the pain away and carry it for him because that’s what Steve does. But this is Bucky’s pain, and Bucky’s choice. And Steve had in the end swallowed hard and said, “Okay, it’s your head, it’s your decision,” because Steve loves him.
At least he’d made it to the bathroom earlier before throwing up everything in the universe. He doesn’t always.
At least he’d been able to let Steve touch him. He can’t always.
Steve’s other hand, the one not resting on Bucky’s waist, is lying flung out across the mattress. Paradoxical fingers, artist’s brilliance and soldier’s calluses; or maybe not a paradox at all. Steve is good at making things happen in so many ways. Creation. Action. Fighting for a kinder world.
Bucky ends up smiling a bit wryly at the night. Steve Rogers. The hands to his eyes, the Shield for his Sight, his other half. Or they would’ve been, could’ve been. Except the timing’s never been right, he’s never been right, and their whole partnership’s a messy patched-together limping affair.
Steve’s had that lion’s heart inside his body from the start, even when that body couldn’t throw a punch without gasping for air. Bucky’d pulled him off the ground in a dingy alleyway and known the way he’d never known anything else, one of those shocks of clairvoyant crystalline surety he’d heard about but never had, not until right that second, the second their hands met. Sparks in his head, under his skin: every last drop of psychic ability and intuition and physical attraction on top of that, all standing up and shouting pay attention to this, this is your life, right here!
There’d never seemed to be much point to telling Steve. Not as if Bucky’s Sight was ever any kind of reliable; no reason to think this one was different, even though he knew it was. No way to explain.
After Zola, in the war, he’d finally been useful, but that hadn’t been right either. Unnatural the other direction. Floodgates kicked open. Men following him on missions because he knew where to go, and glancing at him with apprehension back in camp. I’m not reading your minds, Bucky’d wanted to say, I don’t have that kind of control. He never said it. He wouldn’t’ve trusted him either.
Steve’d gotten into a bar fight once in Paris because of glances like that. Bucky’d dragged him out and sworn up and down he’d punch Steve in the face himself if anything like that happened again. Steve had given him a wounded-puppy stare: Buck, I did it for you, you can’t tell me that’s right, what they’re sayin’-
Steve, if awake, would probably tell him that being patched up means they’re still standing. He guesses maybe they are.
On good days.
Steve had joined Director Fury’s peacekeeping corps in this brave new world because it’d been the right thing to do. Steve is missing one crucial detail about the entire cop-and-psychic-partner dynamic, however, namely the fact that his own Seer’s too fucked-up to be of any consistent use. Back to familiar unreliability, though in a different way, and these days that comes with bonus puking his guts out in Steve’s toilet.
Steve, who is awake, says without opening his eyes, “I can hear you thinking, Buck.”
“Sorry, Stevie, my passionate contemplation of pumpkins keeping you up?”
“That’s disgusting. We’re never buying anything in the gourd family ever again. Vicodin, or should I just remind you that I have a mission, one you sent me on, I’m going in the morning, so we’re working together just fine?”
“I meant pie,” Bucky says, “I like pumpkin pie, c’mon, Steve, I’ll never be able to look gourds in the face now, I don’t even want to know what you’re comin’ up with. Captain America, wholesome as ever. We’re okay.” He even means it.
Steve wriggles a little closer, surprisingly plaintive for such impressive bulk. Nudges a nose into Bucky’s hair. “You inspire me. Camp Lehigh, you said. And computers.”
“Don’t need me for that. Yeah…something soon…not yet, but soon. At least one explosion. Probably.”
“I can handle explosions.”
“Take Sam,” Bucky says, listening to Steve’s heartbeat.
“Um,” Steve says rather guiltily.
“You called and asked him to check in on me, didn’t you?”
“…maybe?”
“Don’t go alone.” He moves his metal arm-the flesh-and-blood one’s trapped between them and slowly falling asleep-and lets fingertip sensors absorb Steve’s pulse, the steady thumping of blood, the temperature of sleep-flushed skin. “I’ll be good for a couple days without you, you know that, we’ve done it before. I feel less sick when I think about you being there without backup, so take Sam.” This is true. In the thorny thicket of what Hydra’s left of his Sight, black is white and good is bad and anything that might get Captain America killed is encouraged.
Steve sighs. Loudly.
“You know I’m right.”
“Sam’s not you.”
“No one else is me, dumbass. Take Sam.”
“I’ll think about it.”
That’s as much of a concession as he’s going to get at the moment. Bucky closes his eyes. Allows the thump of Steve’s pulse to overtake the thunder in his temples. Sam’s not him, but Sam does possess a touch of empathic gift, the same gift that’d previously made him outstanding at locating men in need of rescue and makes him such a good counselor for veterans now. Sam will pick up strong emotions, if not detailed scenarios.
Steve and Sam together will most likely come back okay. And Bucky…
…will wait at home.
Steve’s home.
Where he showed up one dreary graveyard-sky afternoon because he couldn’t stay away.
He knows he loves Steve. He knows Steve loves him. With every atom of his broken heart, he knows.
He just doesn’t know why.
Steve’s hand kneads his back affectionately, soothing tense knots. “Cold?”
then
He’s lying on his back. Everything hurts and nothing hurts. All kind of distant. Far-off. Like twinkling stars: scorching up close, of course, but pretty from a distance.
He knows he’s lying in snow because for a while he’d felt wet and cold, but he’s not so much noticing now.
He thinks he might be missing most of an arm. He hasn’t looked, but something feels different on that side. Weight distribution. Uneven. He’d’ve thought that at least might hurt, not that he particularly wants it to.
He can see Steve’s face when he closes his eyes.
I’m sorry, he wants to say. I know I didn’t tell you. I did tell you. Even before I completely knew, when all the images showed up and smacked me over the head and laughed, I told you I hate trains and I knew you wouldn’t know what I meant but I was saying I’m sorry. I was saying I’m choosing this with you instead of anything else without you. I love you.
Should’ve told you that.
Should’ve looked you in the eyes and said it, straight up: Steve Rogers, I love you.
You’d’ve known if I had that something was wrong.
He knows Steve will be grieving. He doesn’t know whether Steve will realize what Bucky had known. He hopes not. The weight’ll go right to Steve’s too-generous heart and crush it.
He doesn’t know whether he’s going to die. He assumes so. In all the missions, all the visions, he’s never Seen anything for himself past this point. Only the train and the fall and the black.
He’s Seen Steve once or twice, in the blurrily indistinct way that means those possible shapes haven’t settled into any degree of probability. Steve alive and jogging in some sort of near-future sunlit city, maybe D.C. from the glimpse of the White House, not that Bucky’s ever been. Steve in battle with a reptilian alien, which, maybe his brain’s finally imploded under the cacophony of unregulated revelations. Steve still and pale and ice-cold and unmoving.
He’d tried to give the warning. Don’t get on any planes. Please. Not that Steve was ever any kind of good at staying safe.
(Later he’ll hear a story about a training camp and a fake-live grenade and he’ll turn to look at Steve very very slowly and Steve will say, yeah, but-I couldn’t do anything else, could I. And Bucky will love him, helplessly and angrily, more than ever.)
He hopes Steve is succeeding at the mission. Hopes someone else, maybe Dum Dum or pretty Peggy, can step in and guard his back and hold him up through the inevitable collapse when the adrenaline wears off and the loss sets in.
He is, selfishly, a little glad he never told Steve, because he might’ve never been able to go through with this with Steve begging him to stay off the train.
He pretends, because there’s no harm in that-ha, no harm, no arm, and now his mind’s losing rationality in what’s not even a very good joke-that he gets to see Steve one more time, that Steve’s come to find him and knelt down and taken his good hand in both of those large ones. He pretends that he gets to tell big blue eyes “I love you,” the first and last time those words’ve hit the air, and he thinks that Steve says it back, love for love.
Steve says something else. Something Bucky doesn’t understand. Russian? Steve doesn’t speak Russian. French, yeah, a bit of German, sure. Russian, no.
He shoves his eyes into focusing. Steve’s skinny beloved shape flickers and fades. The voices don’t. Only get more excited, carrying over snow.
Dark dots. The dark dots are people. They come closer and put hands on him. One of them smiles. Another one speaks into a communicator of some kind. Bucky, like Steve, does not speak Russian.
(Later he will know Russian. He will know too many languages he can’t remember learning.)
He catches a name. Zola.
Oh, he thinks, I am going to die, just not the way I thought; and then the hands lift him and maneuver him and the numbness erupts into stabbing unendurable pain, and then he thinks nothing more.
now
Steve’s rubbing his back and kissing his hair and asking whether he’s cold. This is not a question with a graspable answer, so Bucky just nods and permits Steve to bundle him up in fierce arms and thick woolen blankets. The arms feel awfully nice. So do the blankets. So does Steve.
Eventually, to the cadence of Steve’s breathing, he sleeps.
In the morning he gets up and makes eggs and bacon and pancakes, apple-cinnamon-walnut with butter and syrup. He’s not any kind of gourmet cook, but he has stray recollections of having to learn on days when Steve’d been too sick to get out of bed, when someone had to try. Half-burned soups gradually becoming less so. Stale bread turned into pudding. The art of thinning milk out with water. Most of that’s less relevant in a world where Captain America’s got money and the Winter Soldier’d kept backup caches stashed away, but the skills’re transferable and the habit’s apparently permanent: himself cooking for Steve.
Steve, half in uniform, gets lured out of the bedroom by the scent of breakfast, and devours fluffy cakes by the dozens. “Love you.”
“Love you,” Bucky says back, and draws a happy face in syrup on the last one and drops it onto Steve’s plate. He doesn’t care one way or another about the process of cooking as such; doesn’t hate it, doesn’t find it fascinating. But Steve’s smile, Steve being well-fed, Steve being happy before missions-
Those things he does care about. And that is a fact: Bucky Barnes will do whatever he can, anything he can, to take care of Steve. Including pancakes.
Not banana bread, though. Today’s bananas are blasphemous. A travesty.
Steve studies the pancake. “Are you?”
“Are…you…befriending the breakfast food?”
“You know what I mean. I called Sam, too.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re a terrible liar,” Bucky muses to his coffee. Raspberry mocha, this morning. Whipped cream and chilly autumn sunshine peeping through the kitchen window. “And yeah. Wouldn’t say it if I weren’t.”
“You didn’t say it,” Steve says. “You drew it on a pancake. I’m just not good at lying to you, and that wasn’t lying. Misdirection. At best.”
“Don’t try to misdirect your Eyes, then. Even if I am fifty kinds of fucked-over, I can still See you when you think I think you’re in the shower. You called Sam and told him to check on me anyway, because you’d rather him watch me than be your backup, which is really fuckin’ stupid, Steve.” He adds, well aware that he’s got whipped cream on his nose and no doubt looks ludicrous arguing, “And that was me sayin’ it. Thought you were the artist; you’d figure it out.”
“You have whipped cream on your nose.” Steve grins, astonishing and bright. “Leave it. Can I touch you?”
“Ah…yes?”
Steve gets up, comes around the table, puts both hands on Bucky’s face, leans in-and licks the tip of his nose. Bucky sits there blinking and confused and incredibly turned on, which is not the appropriate reaction to Captain America licking his face, unless it maybe is.
Steve cares. That’s what it is.
“Better,” Steve concludes, voice all smug and self-satisfied, and Bucky wants to kiss him because Steve looking so proud of himself is too damn adorable.
He grumbles, “Could’ve just kissed me,” and Steve’s grin grows. Huh. Wouldn’t’ve thought that was possible, but there it is, giddy as the sunbeams. “Want me to?”
“Yes, dammit!”
“Such a mouth on you,” Steve murmurs, “I don’t know, Buck, think we might need to find better ways for you to express yourself,” and that frankly ridiculous line shouldn’t be as hot as it is, but then Steve’s mouth lands on his, syrup-sticky and sweet, and Bucky forgets how to talk for several blissful minutes.
Steve pulls away with reluctance. “I should get dressed…”
“You could get undressed,” Bucky tempts. There’s whipped cream in Steve’s hair now too. And their breakfast table really isn’t made to support two super-soldier bodies.
“You said it wasn’t soon, but it was important.”
“Yeah…I know…all right, go on.” He unwraps legs from Steve’s waist. “Sending Sam after you the second he shows up here.”
“He won’t listen. About the shower, Buck, you’re always invited. And…”
“I know.” Sometimes, once in a while, he can accept. Sometimes the memories sear and sizzle like the morning’s bacon. The spray of indifferent icy water. Being hosed down. Standing naked when told. His body following someone else’s orders. “And?”
“And.” Steve touches his face, his cheek. The day’s crisp and full of dawn around them, and Bucky doesn’t for once feel like shivering. “What you said. Your Eyes, you said. To me. Mine.”
“Oh-fuck, Steve, no, I just-I meant-I was just talking-”
“I know. But you said it. You didn’t think about it.” Steve kisses him once more, grabs the happy-faced pancake, and through a bite finishes, “Me, too. Yours.”
“No manners at all,” Bucky says, and plucks the last strip of bacon off the plate before Steve can eat that too. Steve regards this theft with some dismay, but mostly joy. “I’ll call if I pick up anything else. Or if I feel worse, Steve, I know.”
“Good,” Steve mutters, and goes off to pour himself into the Captain America uniform once more. When he comes back there’s a pile of more bacon, and Bucky watches him grin at that.
“Steve.”
“Yeah, Buck?”
“I know you are. And I am. Yours.”
“Yeah,” Steve agrees, “you are,” and swings himself onto his motorbike with his shield on his back, shining in red and blue earnestness under the open sky, and Bucky props a shoulder in the doorway and watches him leave.
Rating: PG-13 for now
Warnings: standard Winter Soldier trauma, not in any detail
Word Count: 3,564
Disclaimers: characters belong to Marvel, not me! Title from Van Halen’s “Right Now”, which I don’t hear enough these days.
Summary: Psychic-but-traumatized Bucky, SHIELD peacekeeper Steve, pumpkin-spice lattes, knitted Captain America blankets, a mysterious mission, and True Love.
now
Steve’s either contentedly asleep or faking so well that even Bucky can’t tell. Bucky lies beside him in the onyx-silver oil-painting night and memorizes the fall of shadows over Steve’s chest, not touching, only following with his gaze.
Steve’s smiling in his sleep. A hint of happiness settled down right there in his mouth. This, them sleeping beside each other, makes Steve happy, Bucky knows. His heart twinges, disobedient and wistful and feeling too much. Watching Steve sleep. Watching Steve smile.
His head hurts like multiple kinds of hell, but he’s not going to bother to get up. For one, that would awaken the super-soldier-sized softly-snoring lump in their bed. For another, he’s pretty much used to the hurt these days. Degrees of better or worse; never gone.
Right now it’s better. Not the best it’s ever been-not with the memory of earlier sharper agony scratching away around the edges-but better.
Steve will leave the painkillers on the kitchen counter the way he unerringly does before he himself leaves for a mission. Painkillers and fresh bright oranges and toffee or hazelnut or coconut syrup, whatever he’s brought home this time around for Bucky to pour recklessly into coffee, enough to drown utilitarian bitterness in the simple pleasure of too much flavor because he can.
Bucky will appreciate the love and the coconut syrup and the citrus thoughtfulness. He may or may not take the painkillers; depends how bad it gets, how weak he is without Steve around. This is his life now; he’s got to learn to deal.
He will not take-and Steve won’t leave out-the psychic suppressants. They’ve had one shouting match over this. Neither of them had exactly won.
The nighttime light, smoke and ghosts and compassion, highlights Steve’s muscles, the curve of his waist, the line of his hip beneath a snowdrift of sheet. The dimness turns dark gold hair to paler gilt, antique portrait-frames kissed by time.
Steve’s sleeping on his back, one arm thrown out for Bucky to cuddle into if he wants. He had. Still is, technically, caught between the solid furnace of Steve’s body and the firm commitment of the arm. It’s looped around his back, and his head’s on Steve’s shoulder.
He wants to move, and doesn’t want to move. Restlessness crawls beneath his skin, the skittering spider-legs of old memories and other hands. But this is Steve and he knows this is Steve. And his body feels warm.
The inertia and the warmth win out for the present. He doesn’t move. Lies there communing with the indigo shadows. They appreciate Steve together.
Steve brought him Starbucks. Because he asked. He licks his lips, tasting phantom pumpkin and cinnamon in the dark.
They’re not supposed to have the psychic suppressants at all. Those sorts of drugs’re highly regulated. Reserved for hospital use, for those patients who literally cannot cope, shrieking and smothered in visions and possible outcomes and the multiplicity of kaleidoscopic branching futures.
Three days after he’d found Steve’s apartment and Steve himself, found the only thing he knew for sure that he wanted in the snarled glittery web of his head, he’d hit the floor airless and too dizzy to even scream. A robot army, of all the stupid fuckin’ things. In Manhattan. Metal and bolts and sunlight and fists swung into civilian faces, fear and terror and death, and he’d felt Steve’s hands on his shoulders trying to hold him up, and he’d dribbled blood onto Steve’s kitchen tiles because he’d bitten his lip without noticing-
Steve, scared as hell-and oh Steve scared is the ugliest sight Bucky’s ever seen, Steve with his infinite heart and endless courage gone white-faced and visibly holding himself together-hadn’t known what to do. Steve’d never witnessed a vision hurt that bad. Didn’t know what Hydra’d done to the Winter Soldier. The pieces they’d tried to carve out, the conditioning. All visions must serve the plan. All else extraneous. If the Asset cannot focus sufficiently, he will be corrected.
Bucky’s not sure whether Steve asked or whether a friend-he’d guess Natasha, the Black Widow, with her eyes like the edge of a once-grasped memory-had brought over the tiny opaque illegal bottle unrequested. He’d been in no shape to argue.
That’d come after.
When he exhales, he imagines he can see his breath whisper over Steve’s bare skin. No marks, but he thinks there ought to be. Some sign of all the wounds he’s carved into Steve’s soul, inadvertently by his death and purposefully as the Winter Soldier and inadvertently a second time around by coming back wrong.
Steve says it’s not like that. Steve says that those crimes are Hydra’s, not Bucky’s own. Steve says that the world got colored in again the second he knew Bucky was alive. Steve thinks that the rest is just details, not unimportant but less important than the fact of a heartbeat.
On good days Bucky believes him.
The suppressants turn him into a vacant useless collection of bones and meat on Steve’s sofa. Left to his own devices, he might not even care, at least not if that was what Steve saw fit to do with him. Steve knows right and wrong better than he does, forever has-but he can’t.
He’s always Seen Steve better than anyone else. On suppressants he might not See a single crucial final could-be-fatal moment. Simple. No amount of discussion’s budging that rock.
Steve had looked at his eyes, had visibly wanted to beg and plead and take the pain away and carry it for him because that’s what Steve does. But this is Bucky’s pain, and Bucky’s choice. And Steve had in the end swallowed hard and said, “Okay, it’s your head, it’s your decision,” because Steve loves him.
At least he’d made it to the bathroom earlier before throwing up everything in the universe. He doesn’t always.
At least he’d been able to let Steve touch him. He can’t always.
Steve’s other hand, the one not resting on Bucky’s waist, is lying flung out across the mattress. Paradoxical fingers, artist’s brilliance and soldier’s calluses; or maybe not a paradox at all. Steve is good at making things happen in so many ways. Creation. Action. Fighting for a kinder world.
Bucky ends up smiling a bit wryly at the night. Steve Rogers. The hands to his eyes, the Shield for his Sight, his other half. Or they would’ve been, could’ve been. Except the timing’s never been right, he’s never been right, and their whole partnership’s a messy patched-together limping affair.
Steve’s had that lion’s heart inside his body from the start, even when that body couldn’t throw a punch without gasping for air. Bucky’d pulled him off the ground in a dingy alleyway and known the way he’d never known anything else, one of those shocks of clairvoyant crystalline surety he’d heard about but never had, not until right that second, the second their hands met. Sparks in his head, under his skin: every last drop of psychic ability and intuition and physical attraction on top of that, all standing up and shouting pay attention to this, this is your life, right here!
There’d never seemed to be much point to telling Steve. Not as if Bucky’s Sight was ever any kind of reliable; no reason to think this one was different, even though he knew it was. No way to explain.
After Zola, in the war, he’d finally been useful, but that hadn’t been right either. Unnatural the other direction. Floodgates kicked open. Men following him on missions because he knew where to go, and glancing at him with apprehension back in camp. I’m not reading your minds, Bucky’d wanted to say, I don’t have that kind of control. He never said it. He wouldn’t’ve trusted him either.
Steve’d gotten into a bar fight once in Paris because of glances like that. Bucky’d dragged him out and sworn up and down he’d punch Steve in the face himself if anything like that happened again. Steve had given him a wounded-puppy stare: Buck, I did it for you, you can’t tell me that’s right, what they’re sayin’-
Steve, if awake, would probably tell him that being patched up means they’re still standing. He guesses maybe they are.
On good days.
Steve had joined Director Fury’s peacekeeping corps in this brave new world because it’d been the right thing to do. Steve is missing one crucial detail about the entire cop-and-psychic-partner dynamic, however, namely the fact that his own Seer’s too fucked-up to be of any consistent use. Back to familiar unreliability, though in a different way, and these days that comes with bonus puking his guts out in Steve’s toilet.
Steve, who is awake, says without opening his eyes, “I can hear you thinking, Buck.”
“Sorry, Stevie, my passionate contemplation of pumpkins keeping you up?”
“That’s disgusting. We’re never buying anything in the gourd family ever again. Vicodin, or should I just remind you that I have a mission, one you sent me on, I’m going in the morning, so we’re working together just fine?”
“I meant pie,” Bucky says, “I like pumpkin pie, c’mon, Steve, I’ll never be able to look gourds in the face now, I don’t even want to know what you’re comin’ up with. Captain America, wholesome as ever. We’re okay.” He even means it.
Steve wriggles a little closer, surprisingly plaintive for such impressive bulk. Nudges a nose into Bucky’s hair. “You inspire me. Camp Lehigh, you said. And computers.”
“Don’t need me for that. Yeah…something soon…not yet, but soon. At least one explosion. Probably.”
“I can handle explosions.”
“Take Sam,” Bucky says, listening to Steve’s heartbeat.
“Um,” Steve says rather guiltily.
“You called and asked him to check in on me, didn’t you?”
“…maybe?”
“Don’t go alone.” He moves his metal arm-the flesh-and-blood one’s trapped between them and slowly falling asleep-and lets fingertip sensors absorb Steve’s pulse, the steady thumping of blood, the temperature of sleep-flushed skin. “I’ll be good for a couple days without you, you know that, we’ve done it before. I feel less sick when I think about you being there without backup, so take Sam.” This is true. In the thorny thicket of what Hydra’s left of his Sight, black is white and good is bad and anything that might get Captain America killed is encouraged.
Steve sighs. Loudly.
“You know I’m right.”
“Sam’s not you.”
“No one else is me, dumbass. Take Sam.”
“I’ll think about it.”
That’s as much of a concession as he’s going to get at the moment. Bucky closes his eyes. Allows the thump of Steve’s pulse to overtake the thunder in his temples. Sam’s not him, but Sam does possess a touch of empathic gift, the same gift that’d previously made him outstanding at locating men in need of rescue and makes him such a good counselor for veterans now. Sam will pick up strong emotions, if not detailed scenarios.
Steve and Sam together will most likely come back okay. And Bucky…
…will wait at home.
Steve’s home.
Where he showed up one dreary graveyard-sky afternoon because he couldn’t stay away.
He knows he loves Steve. He knows Steve loves him. With every atom of his broken heart, he knows.
He just doesn’t know why.
Steve’s hand kneads his back affectionately, soothing tense knots. “Cold?”
then
He’s lying on his back. Everything hurts and nothing hurts. All kind of distant. Far-off. Like twinkling stars: scorching up close, of course, but pretty from a distance.
He knows he’s lying in snow because for a while he’d felt wet and cold, but he’s not so much noticing now.
He thinks he might be missing most of an arm. He hasn’t looked, but something feels different on that side. Weight distribution. Uneven. He’d’ve thought that at least might hurt, not that he particularly wants it to.
He can see Steve’s face when he closes his eyes.
I’m sorry, he wants to say. I know I didn’t tell you. I did tell you. Even before I completely knew, when all the images showed up and smacked me over the head and laughed, I told you I hate trains and I knew you wouldn’t know what I meant but I was saying I’m sorry. I was saying I’m choosing this with you instead of anything else without you. I love you.
Should’ve told you that.
Should’ve looked you in the eyes and said it, straight up: Steve Rogers, I love you.
You’d’ve known if I had that something was wrong.
He knows Steve will be grieving. He doesn’t know whether Steve will realize what Bucky had known. He hopes not. The weight’ll go right to Steve’s too-generous heart and crush it.
He doesn’t know whether he’s going to die. He assumes so. In all the missions, all the visions, he’s never Seen anything for himself past this point. Only the train and the fall and the black.
He’s Seen Steve once or twice, in the blurrily indistinct way that means those possible shapes haven’t settled into any degree of probability. Steve alive and jogging in some sort of near-future sunlit city, maybe D.C. from the glimpse of the White House, not that Bucky’s ever been. Steve in battle with a reptilian alien, which, maybe his brain’s finally imploded under the cacophony of unregulated revelations. Steve still and pale and ice-cold and unmoving.
He’d tried to give the warning. Don’t get on any planes. Please. Not that Steve was ever any kind of good at staying safe.
(Later he’ll hear a story about a training camp and a fake-live grenade and he’ll turn to look at Steve very very slowly and Steve will say, yeah, but-I couldn’t do anything else, could I. And Bucky will love him, helplessly and angrily, more than ever.)
He hopes Steve is succeeding at the mission. Hopes someone else, maybe Dum Dum or pretty Peggy, can step in and guard his back and hold him up through the inevitable collapse when the adrenaline wears off and the loss sets in.
He is, selfishly, a little glad he never told Steve, because he might’ve never been able to go through with this with Steve begging him to stay off the train.
He pretends, because there’s no harm in that-ha, no harm, no arm, and now his mind’s losing rationality in what’s not even a very good joke-that he gets to see Steve one more time, that Steve’s come to find him and knelt down and taken his good hand in both of those large ones. He pretends that he gets to tell big blue eyes “I love you,” the first and last time those words’ve hit the air, and he thinks that Steve says it back, love for love.
Steve says something else. Something Bucky doesn’t understand. Russian? Steve doesn’t speak Russian. French, yeah, a bit of German, sure. Russian, no.
He shoves his eyes into focusing. Steve’s skinny beloved shape flickers and fades. The voices don’t. Only get more excited, carrying over snow.
Dark dots. The dark dots are people. They come closer and put hands on him. One of them smiles. Another one speaks into a communicator of some kind. Bucky, like Steve, does not speak Russian.
(Later he will know Russian. He will know too many languages he can’t remember learning.)
He catches a name. Zola.
Oh, he thinks, I am going to die, just not the way I thought; and then the hands lift him and maneuver him and the numbness erupts into stabbing unendurable pain, and then he thinks nothing more.
now
Steve’s rubbing his back and kissing his hair and asking whether he’s cold. This is not a question with a graspable answer, so Bucky just nods and permits Steve to bundle him up in fierce arms and thick woolen blankets. The arms feel awfully nice. So do the blankets. So does Steve.
Eventually, to the cadence of Steve’s breathing, he sleeps.
In the morning he gets up and makes eggs and bacon and pancakes, apple-cinnamon-walnut with butter and syrup. He’s not any kind of gourmet cook, but he has stray recollections of having to learn on days when Steve’d been too sick to get out of bed, when someone had to try. Half-burned soups gradually becoming less so. Stale bread turned into pudding. The art of thinning milk out with water. Most of that’s less relevant in a world where Captain America’s got money and the Winter Soldier’d kept backup caches stashed away, but the skills’re transferable and the habit’s apparently permanent: himself cooking for Steve.
Steve, half in uniform, gets lured out of the bedroom by the scent of breakfast, and devours fluffy cakes by the dozens. “Love you.”
“Love you,” Bucky says back, and draws a happy face in syrup on the last one and drops it onto Steve’s plate. He doesn’t care one way or another about the process of cooking as such; doesn’t hate it, doesn’t find it fascinating. But Steve’s smile, Steve being well-fed, Steve being happy before missions-
Those things he does care about. And that is a fact: Bucky Barnes will do whatever he can, anything he can, to take care of Steve. Including pancakes.
Not banana bread, though. Today’s bananas are blasphemous. A travesty.
Steve studies the pancake. “Are you?”
“Are…you…befriending the breakfast food?”
“You know what I mean. I called Sam, too.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re a terrible liar,” Bucky muses to his coffee. Raspberry mocha, this morning. Whipped cream and chilly autumn sunshine peeping through the kitchen window. “And yeah. Wouldn’t say it if I weren’t.”
“You didn’t say it,” Steve says. “You drew it on a pancake. I’m just not good at lying to you, and that wasn’t lying. Misdirection. At best.”
“Don’t try to misdirect your Eyes, then. Even if I am fifty kinds of fucked-over, I can still See you when you think I think you’re in the shower. You called Sam and told him to check on me anyway, because you’d rather him watch me than be your backup, which is really fuckin’ stupid, Steve.” He adds, well aware that he’s got whipped cream on his nose and no doubt looks ludicrous arguing, “And that was me sayin’ it. Thought you were the artist; you’d figure it out.”
“You have whipped cream on your nose.” Steve grins, astonishing and bright. “Leave it. Can I touch you?”
“Ah…yes?”
Steve gets up, comes around the table, puts both hands on Bucky’s face, leans in-and licks the tip of his nose. Bucky sits there blinking and confused and incredibly turned on, which is not the appropriate reaction to Captain America licking his face, unless it maybe is.
Steve cares. That’s what it is.
“Better,” Steve concludes, voice all smug and self-satisfied, and Bucky wants to kiss him because Steve looking so proud of himself is too damn adorable.
He grumbles, “Could’ve just kissed me,” and Steve’s grin grows. Huh. Wouldn’t’ve thought that was possible, but there it is, giddy as the sunbeams. “Want me to?”
“Yes, dammit!”
“Such a mouth on you,” Steve murmurs, “I don’t know, Buck, think we might need to find better ways for you to express yourself,” and that frankly ridiculous line shouldn’t be as hot as it is, but then Steve’s mouth lands on his, syrup-sticky and sweet, and Bucky forgets how to talk for several blissful minutes.
Steve pulls away with reluctance. “I should get dressed…”
“You could get undressed,” Bucky tempts. There’s whipped cream in Steve’s hair now too. And their breakfast table really isn’t made to support two super-soldier bodies.
“You said it wasn’t soon, but it was important.”
“Yeah…I know…all right, go on.” He unwraps legs from Steve’s waist. “Sending Sam after you the second he shows up here.”
“He won’t listen. About the shower, Buck, you’re always invited. And…”
“I know.” Sometimes, once in a while, he can accept. Sometimes the memories sear and sizzle like the morning’s bacon. The spray of indifferent icy water. Being hosed down. Standing naked when told. His body following someone else’s orders. “And?”
“And.” Steve touches his face, his cheek. The day’s crisp and full of dawn around them, and Bucky doesn’t for once feel like shivering. “What you said. Your Eyes, you said. To me. Mine.”
“Oh-fuck, Steve, no, I just-I meant-I was just talking-”
“I know. But you said it. You didn’t think about it.” Steve kisses him once more, grabs the happy-faced pancake, and through a bite finishes, “Me, too. Yours.”
“No manners at all,” Bucky says, and plucks the last strip of bacon off the plate before Steve can eat that too. Steve regards this theft with some dismay, but mostly joy. “I’ll call if I pick up anything else. Or if I feel worse, Steve, I know.”
“Good,” Steve mutters, and goes off to pour himself into the Captain America uniform once more. When he comes back there’s a pile of more bacon, and Bucky watches him grin at that.
“Steve.”
“Yeah, Buck?”
“I know you are. And I am. Yours.”
“Yeah,” Steve agrees, “you are,” and swings himself onto his motorbike with his shield on his back, shining in red and blue earnestness under the open sky, and Bucky props a shoulder in the doorway and watches him leave.