fic: right now (it's your tomorrow) (3/4)
Title: Right Now (It’s Your Tomorrow) [3/4] [chapter two here, one here]
Rating: PG-13 for now
Warnings: standard Winter Soldier trauma, not in any detail; in this chapter, allusions in a flashback to Bucky having taken money for sex, once, to help pay for Steve's meds
Word Count: 3,742
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
He does the dishes, after Steve departs.
They have a dishwasher, but he doesn’t bother. He uses it when Steve’s around, sometimes. Sometimes not.
The water’s hot and not frozen and that’s good. The air fills up with steam and soap and that’s good too. Pots and pans are solid graspable objects to his touch. They grow cleaner when he scrubs them. Finite chore with a visible tangible end.
Steve’s eyes had gotten sad the first time Bucky’d tried to explain. He’d tried a second time, worried and afraid he hadn’t said the words right. About something dirty getting scoured clean. Evidence of use wiped away, ready for the next task. Steve hadn’t looked much happier at that.
He’d given up, then. He knows Steve still doesn’t get it. He doesn’t have the vocabulary left to shape any more sense from the pieces. It’s about cleanliness, yeah. And about memory. Even if he washes the pot they’ve made spaghetti in, they’ll have the memory of tomato-slathered meatballs and garlic bread and Steve’s grin when Bucky got sauce on his nose. The rinsed shiny pot means that not all memories have to come with indelible scars.
His head hurts, but not much.
The breakfast pans and plates are dry and put away, and Steve hasn’t checked in, but it’s early to start fretting. It won’t be nothing, this mission-Bucky, in one of the world’s sickest cosmic ironies, is always right these days, and nobody’s laughing-but he hopes he’s caught it soon enough that whatever Hydra’s planning hasn’t kicked off just yet.
He wanders into the living room and then stops because he doesn’t know why he’s in the living room.
He glances around. The closed window-blinds and blank television screen and cozy sofa shrug back. No clue.
He stands in front of the sofa for a while. He’s good at standing in places. Not moving. Staying still until ordered.
The blanket from the previous night has remained on the sofa. It fluffs up in red-and-blue-and-white invitation. He knows it’ll feel warm.
Steve has said he used to like to read. Pulp magazines, comics, flying cars, anything with the word science in the title. You were, Steve’d said, smirking, pretty much a, I think these days you’d say geek, until me.
Nope, Bucky’d said right back, not me, Stevie, which one of us got kissed by Becky Connolly at the tender age of ten, again?
Steve had laughed, more out of relief and joy than because the recovered memory itself was hilarious. Bucky hadn’t had the heart to tell him that Steve himself’d mentioned that story, two weeks before.
He’s not sure he recalls how to read for pleasure. Delight in a scientific discovery. Pure indulging of curiosity. Steve had carefully showed him how to use the tablet-a StarkNet prototype-to pull up books and articles. Bucky’d said thank you, and once Steve’d left had promptly stared at the screen for an hour. Couldn’t think of anything he wanted to look up. Couldn’t imagine information without a tactical use. Not real.
The next time he looks at the clock he realizes that several hours’ve vanished.
He blinks. There’s a noise. Shrill.
The noise is not related to the blink, it turns out, because when he tests this theory-it’s not all that farfetched, considering the rest of him-it doesn’t correlate a second time. Huh.
At this point his phone rings. It’s the ringtone Steve put in for Sam. Marvin Gaye, crooning passionately away.
He picks it up. “What?”
“Do you ever say hello like a normal person,” Sam says, “sheesh, seriously, and thank God, okay, because I’ve been leaning on your doorbell and I was startin’ to think you’d checked out on me, and that is not okay, first because I like you and second because I like me, and man, Steve would kill me.”
“Oh.” He adds, “Sorry,” because that’s what people do. When he opens the door, Sam’s got folded arms and two Starbucks cups and an exaggerated glower. Bucky sighs. Pulls himself back together, as many pieces as he can grab. “Come in?”
“Damn right. Hazelnut macchiato?”
“Thank you?” He trails Sam back to the sofa. Sam sits down, because that’s what people do with furniture. Bucky suppresses another sigh and sits down too.
He likes Sam because Sam doesn’t need him to pretend. The problem is, of course, that Sam consequently knows how bad it is when he doesn’t.
He says, “Why do you even need me to say hello,” and takes a sip of his coffee. It murmurs heat and dark-roast nutty flavor over his taste-buds. “Unnecessary words. You called me. I picked up.”
“Unnecessary words my ass,” Sam says, and Bucky retorts, “Your ass is also unnecessary,” which makes Sam crack up. Bucky grins. Satisfactory result achieved. That…feels good.
“My ass,” Sam grumbles, assuming a thoroughly fake injured expression, “is entirely necessary. Learn to appreciate works of art, man.”
“I will when I see one.” He looks down at the featureless white lid. “I didn’t mean to. Scare you.”
“No, I know, no worries, we’re cool.” Sam waves a hand. “Are you? Cool?”
“I…” He stops.
He is. He’s not in pain. He’s not on his knees or screaming or too sick to focus. In fact, he suspects that he is what an ordinary person might call fine.
Even the headache from earlier’s departed.
He can feel his face go white. Huh. He’d never known that was so literal.
Sam sets down his cup. Leans in. “James? Bucky? Talk to me.”
“I’m…okay…”
“That’s good, right?”
“No-no, you don’t understand, nyet-” He’s on his feet. Shaking. “I have to-Steve-this is wrong, this is-Steve’s in trouble-”
“Wait, wait, slow down.” Sam doesn’t grab his arm because they both know that’s a terrible idea, but does step in front of him. “You Saw something? Just now?”
“No, I didn’t, but that’s why-” The room’s spinning. Steve’s in danger and somewhere Hydra’s gloating because the world’s going their way and there’s no threat, no need for the Winter Soldier to be Seeing anything that might suggest doubt on the eve of triumph or unsuccessful plans-
“Sit down,” Sam says, “before you fall over. Breathe. Slow. In. Out. That’s it. One more. You can do it. One more.”
“Steve,” Bucky whispers, breathing.
“Okay.” Sam’s kneeling in front of him, having eased him gently to the floor. “Steve. What about Steve? Actual vision?”
“No, I…the way it works, now…they’re happy about something, it’s going right…” He sees Sam figure it, then. Comprehension like a bullet. Like a heart-shot, straight and true.
“We have to go,” he says. “We have to-Steve.”
“We have to Steve,” Sam agrees, “right, okay. You sure you mean that we?”
“Please.” The Winter Soldier doesn’t beg. Bucky Barnes does if it’ll get him to Steve. Bucky Barnes will do anything, wade through blood and break bones and hollow out his own heart and sell his soul and perjure himself before witnesses and kneel on their plush dark-blue rug and plead without shame, if any of that’ll keep Steve safe one second longer.
He doesn’t get even that chance, though, because as he stumbles to his feet with Sam’s hand on his arm the universe implodes.
Metaphorical. But true nonetheless, as his senses turn into flame.
He hits the floor without the chance to scream. Images burn and scorch and race behind his eyelids, branded into his brain. Possible futures. Captain America in a bunker underground. Captain America throwing the shield, swinging-at what? Computer banks? Green-screened, green-skinned faces? A sizzle of blue energy-
Himself and Sam, magically there, fighting at Steve’s side-
Fire fire fire-
Bodies, impending bodies, a stomach-twisting overlay of potentialities. Dead Steve dead Bucky dead Sam. No. No no no. Dead Steve again. No. Steve safe. Yes. Steve and Sam safe. Yes, please yes, how can he make that one happen out of all the flickering windy glimpses-
Natalia-Natasha, these days, Natasha-and her partner running through a door-
Steve strapped down and hooked into a machine, with wires in his brain-
No.
Bucky with wires in his brain-
Okay, he’ll take that one. If Steve’s alive.
His mouth tastes like blood and vomit. Someone’s shouting. Far-off.
He keeps his eyes shut. Tries to focus. Narrowing down, following threads that cut into his mental fingertips as he tries to gather them. They slice his hands his brain his next breath to ribbons.
A crack of pain blooms across his cheek. External.
He gasps, chokes on saliva and whatever he’s been throwing up-he’s absolutely off macchiatos for a while-and opens his eyes.
Sam’s kneeling there with a hand raised, with that hand frozen in place because Bucky’s metal fingers’ve clamped around his wrist. They stare at each other for a minute.
“Oh,” Bucky says weakly. “Sorry.”
“Well, you didn’t break my arm, let’s call it a win.” Sam flexes his wrist. Winces. “Sit up for a minute? Look at me? Follow my finger?”
Left to right; Bucky sighs, flinches-there’s a lingering halo effect around every object, associated echoes of past and future positions in time and space-but manages to track enough to call himself functional.
“ ’m fine.”
“Nope. Here, I’m gonna get you water and clean you up-”
“No time.” He’s wrestling down the need to be sick again. But the rug’s self-cleaning-another minor StarkTech miracle-and he wobbles to his feet. “I know what Zola wants from Steve. And I feel fuckin’ awful when I think about us there too-”
“So we’re going. I got it.” Sam gets in under his arm, determined support. Bucky wants to protest. Can’t argue. Take the help when you need to, Steve had said, Sam had said. Not meant as an order, but it fits into his head better when he thinks of it that way. Something else Steve doesn’t quite understand but accepts.
Steve’s always accepted him. Steve’s been his strength all along. From Brooklyn to the lab to the fall to a bridge and a battle and a shocked look in blue eyes. No matter what. To the end of the line, and they’ve been past that line, over it, under it, dead and alive and brought back and brought back wrong, and he doesn’t even know what that phrase means anymore, what line or where, a metaphor or real battle-lines pulled up in formation.
It’s so stupid and all-encompassing that it can’t be anything other than true. Himself and Steve, to the end of the line. They’ll run headlong into it together.
He yanks off his shirt. Grabs another one and as many weapons as he can cram into various hiding places and holsters. Throws a few Sam’s way.
Sam catches knife and stun-gun and pistol easily. “Where’re we going?”
“Camp Lehigh.”
“What, Cap’s old training grounds?” Sam pauses to tap something into his wristwatch. It’s not only a watch, of course. “History not so much the in-the-past sort of history?”
Bucky doesn’t pause, doesn’t show the teetering anyplace physical. Sam’d known that. He hadn’t. Had needed the reminder. Holes in his memory. Wispy clouds. Gaps like the way Steve doesn’t answer when Bucky grabs the phone and calls.
Memories. They hurt. Everything hurts. Doesn’t matter.
Steve matters. That’s true.
then
It’s a sticky humid summer night, drowning in heat, drenched in sweat-trails and smothered breaths. Tendrils of creeping viscosity. Wavering lines practically visible in the air, like a bad cartoon.
Bucky’s been sitting on the floor by Steve’s bed for hours. Days, maybe. Listening to the rattle and rasp. Air sucked into Steve’s lungs. Cloying and thick.
Steve’s been sleeping fitfully, a little easier with the fall of night, though not much. The open windows try their best to help-they admire Steve’s scrappy heart just as much as Bucky does-but all they’ve got to offer’s more heat.
He thinks maybe Steve’s doing better than yesterday, and then he thinks maybe he’s imagining that, and he wants to cry but he’s done that already and his eyes and chest feel hollowed out and wrung dry.
He wants to apologize to Steve’s mother for everything. He’s done the best he can to take care of her son. Not that Steve’d ever love that phrasing, being taken care of.
He wonders whether she’ll forgive him, looking down from up in Heaven, surrounded by the angels all good and white and shining. Probably not. He wouldn’t. It’s a stupid damn simple summer cold. Settled into Steve’s chest. Making itself at home.
He’s not a nurse. He doesn’t have the money for a doctor. He doesn’t know what to do.
When he closes his eyes the Sight spurts and struggles and simmers, unreliable the way his gift’s forever been. Glimpses. Small stuff. He honestly can’t tell whether Steve’s going to live or die. And that’s a kick to the gut with a steel-toed boot, because he’s normally best at Steve, anything and everything to do with Steve, always.
He tries trickling water into Steve’s lax mouth. Steve wakes up enough to swallow, then coughs.
Bucky says, “Hey, pal, ’bout time you got up, I’m bored, you’re boring me here, Stevie, can I tell you about this new issue of Astounding I picked up, well, not new but they’re getting in the new ones tomorrow and Jimmy said I could take an old issue if I wanted, and there’s this story about time and a predestination paradox and-”
Steve, being the beautiful defiant lion’s-heart that Steve is, makes a fairly rude gesture his direction and croaks, “Predestination’s stupid.”
“Yeah, yeah, we make our own future and all the Seers out there’ll be out of business tomorrow. Stop tryin’ to talk.” Steve knows as well as he does that the Sight doesn’t work like that. It’s a multiplicity of futures, branching, some sharper than others, some closer, some clearly tied to the past, some cut loose. They’ve both heard radio serials, spent nickels and dimes on crackling films, watched heroes display thrilling insight to thwart evildoers in the nick of time.
Steve doesn’t know about him. Nothing to know. Nothing they can rely on. All he’s really got’s the present and he can’t stand a present in which Steve looks at him with disappointment; he can’t ever be one of those grand psychic superheroes, and maybe it makes him selfish, maybe it makes him a coward, but he’d rather live with the secret than watch excitement fade into disillusionment in Steve’s bright gaze.
Steve closes his eyes, drifting. Bucky’s heart clenches. The heat burns his skin, and prickles behind his eyes.
There are other things that Steve doesn’t know. That Steve will never, ever know.
Bucky’s been lying to himself for two days now. His Sight’s been quiet, ashamed the way he’s ashamed, except he’s not, not really. He made a choice. He did See two possible futures.
He’s not certain Steve’s going to live, no, but he’s pretty sure. He’d looked at two crooked knotted paths laid out for the stepping-onto, one on which he did earn the money for Steve’s medications and one on which he didn’t, and neither was a guarantee, he understood, but one had better odds than the other.
He’d been standing outside Jimmy’s newsstand shaking under the brilliant sunlight two days before, pulp magazine crushed in nerveless fingers. And the wide-shouldered dark-haired sharp-dressed man who’d shown up in dreams and looked him up and down then had stepped up beside him, casual as anything, and looked him up and down in real life too.
He’s not ashamed. He’s not anything. No room for that. He just wishes he knew it’d been for something. He just wishes he could be sure. He just needs Steve to live.
(Later, far later, they will kiss each other under gently falling snowflakes on an Alpine mountainside, and behind a tree with the bark rough on Bucky’s back, and in a narrow borrowed cot in a war-torn French village. Bucky will flinch for only a moment when Steve tells him he’s beautiful; Steve will think it’s because of more recent memories, Zola’s laboratories and pain, and will cup his face in both big kind hands and promise him it’s okay. And Bucky will nod, because this is Steve and Steve’s newly wide shoulders and Steve’s brave compassionate eyes, and so it is okay, they’re okay, and they make love like the first-ever sunrise of the universe.)
One hour later, two hours, three, Steve’s fever breaks. Steve opens confused blue eyes and focuses right on him, and Bucky says, voice cracking, “Steve-” and leans forward and kisses him.
It’s all wrong and it’s all right. He’s never Seen this moment, much as he’s imagined it. He’s not thinking anything. Only feeling. Steve’s alive and looking at him and Bucky’s drowning in the need to kiss him.
He’s not the brave one. Steve is. This isn’t brave. This is like breathing. He’ll die otherwise.
Steve’s lips are dry and startled and then less startled and surprisingly enthusiastic if unpracticed and then also wet and kind of salty, because Bucky’s crying.
Steve twines a weak hand into his hair. Bucky swipes a hand across his eyes. Doesn’t apologize.
“So,” Steve husks out, voice a worn scrape from abused lungs, “ ’m I dead?”
“Hell no,” Bucky says, other hand resting on Steve’s left wrist, where he’d just leaned in to check that pulse a minute before. His own is skyrocketing.
“Huh,” Steve says, way too smug for someone flat on his back and barely breathing. “Pretty sure I just kissed an angel.”
Bucky gets out something like, “-Goddamn terrible line, punk-” before Steve’s kissing him again.
(Even later, the first time they kiss-the second first time, the first time that Bucky can recall with any solidity though the rest’ve continued coming back in slow-sidling shreds-it’s once again Bucky who moves first. Steve can’t or won’t, too generous to push, making no demands of the man who’s stumbled clumsily out of nowhere good and into his home and his life. Bucky makes sunny-side-up eggs for breakfast because he vaguely remembers doing that and climbs into Steve’s bed because that feels right, and Steve’s eyes say they want to cry but he’s holding it all inside.
On the first evening of the second week, Steve’s looking at him the way Steve can’t seem to help looking at him, a mix of awe and adoration and wistfulness and determination and grief and hope, and that little muscle along Steve’s jaw ticks the way it does when the emotions’re too deep to show. So Bucky sighs and gets up from the bed and comes over to the bathroom doorway and asks, because asking’s important, “Can I kiss you?”
Steve’s mouth falls open. Bucky says, “That a yes? ’Cause I’m thinkin’ I want to try,” and Steve nods, wordless and flushed.
Steve tastes like toothpaste and astonishment and familiar heat, and that’s the first time Bucky thinks the word home.)
In that first glorious moment, in their sunbaked creaking Brooklyn world for two, Steve kissing him is everything Bucky’s ever wanted. More than. He’d only begged the universe to let Steve stay alive. And the dwindling aches in the newly strange spaces of his own body don’t matter, not important, not in the grand epic scheme of everything; even that can be sweet if he thinks about it, because he made the right choice, he picked the right path to set his feet on, he did this for Steve.
He did this right, Saw a future and made it happen. And somehow he’s getting rewarded. He’s not going to argue. Just going to hold on with both hands while the gift’s being offered. As long as he can.
now
He’s finished strapping grenades into the appropriate places. He looks over at Sam. Who says, “I’m not gonna ask you again if you’re sure, but I am gonna ask you about the advisability of calling for backup.”
“Fury doesn’t trust me.”
Sam cocks an eyebrow.
“He doesn’t trust my Eyes,” Bucky amends, picking up a machine gun, deciding against the weight. The autumn sun burns low and merciless through the window. He likes the sensation of the rays on his cheek. “He thinks Hydra fucked too much with my brain to ever be sure it’s not some sort of trap.”
“He right about that?”
“Yes. Got us a ride?”
“I called Stark. Figured you didn’t want to go official. He’s sending a jet. He’s busy. On the moon.”
The moonbase is very much a work in progress. Tony Stark, from what Bucky’s heard from Steve, treats it like a personal engineering-project playground. Nick Fury’s apparently convinced that someday Stark’s going to blow them all up with a badly-aimed laser. Steve’s opinion on this had been, “well, he’s probably not wrong.”
“Two minutes,” Sam adds, checking his watch. “Any idea what we might expect?”
“Some sort of trap.”
“Okay, thanks for that.”
“No, I mean…” Bucky yanks his hair back into a loose bun. He can’t bring himself to cut it any shorter-one of those oddly-shaped triggering annoyances, reminders of the insidiously mundane nature of control-but he can get it out of his face. “I don’t know. Electronics. An old computer system. Wanting-input, I think. Zola. But he’s dead.”
“A dead guy plus computers. So we’re talking, what, cyborg zombies?”
“I don’t know!” He glares at the rug. It’s busy cleaning itself. Tidying up after his weakness. “I’m not as good in the field as I was. The more we tip probabilities in our favor…the more I try to fuck up whatever Hydra’s got planned…”
“So you can puke on people,” Sam observes. “Deadly weapon.”
Bucky scowls. The Winter Soldier part of his head points out that it’s not not true, as a last resort. “I can still shoot. I can still shoot you. We need to move now.”
“About a minute. We should get up to your roof. Something new?”
“I’m feeling better.”
“Shit.”
Bucky doesn’t say the my sentiments exactly. Unnecessary words again. Anyway, his expression’ll shout it.
He slams one extra throwing knife into an arm holster, and they run out the door and up the stairs and to the hovering transport that’ll carry them to Steve.
Rating: PG-13 for now
Warnings: standard Winter Soldier trauma, not in any detail; in this chapter, allusions in a flashback to Bucky having taken money for sex, once, to help pay for Steve's meds
Word Count: 3,742
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
He does the dishes, after Steve departs.
They have a dishwasher, but he doesn’t bother. He uses it when Steve’s around, sometimes. Sometimes not.
The water’s hot and not frozen and that’s good. The air fills up with steam and soap and that’s good too. Pots and pans are solid graspable objects to his touch. They grow cleaner when he scrubs them. Finite chore with a visible tangible end.
Steve’s eyes had gotten sad the first time Bucky’d tried to explain. He’d tried a second time, worried and afraid he hadn’t said the words right. About something dirty getting scoured clean. Evidence of use wiped away, ready for the next task. Steve hadn’t looked much happier at that.
He’d given up, then. He knows Steve still doesn’t get it. He doesn’t have the vocabulary left to shape any more sense from the pieces. It’s about cleanliness, yeah. And about memory. Even if he washes the pot they’ve made spaghetti in, they’ll have the memory of tomato-slathered meatballs and garlic bread and Steve’s grin when Bucky got sauce on his nose. The rinsed shiny pot means that not all memories have to come with indelible scars.
His head hurts, but not much.
The breakfast pans and plates are dry and put away, and Steve hasn’t checked in, but it’s early to start fretting. It won’t be nothing, this mission-Bucky, in one of the world’s sickest cosmic ironies, is always right these days, and nobody’s laughing-but he hopes he’s caught it soon enough that whatever Hydra’s planning hasn’t kicked off just yet.
He wanders into the living room and then stops because he doesn’t know why he’s in the living room.
He glances around. The closed window-blinds and blank television screen and cozy sofa shrug back. No clue.
He stands in front of the sofa for a while. He’s good at standing in places. Not moving. Staying still until ordered.
The blanket from the previous night has remained on the sofa. It fluffs up in red-and-blue-and-white invitation. He knows it’ll feel warm.
Steve has said he used to like to read. Pulp magazines, comics, flying cars, anything with the word science in the title. You were, Steve’d said, smirking, pretty much a, I think these days you’d say geek, until me.
Nope, Bucky’d said right back, not me, Stevie, which one of us got kissed by Becky Connolly at the tender age of ten, again?
Steve had laughed, more out of relief and joy than because the recovered memory itself was hilarious. Bucky hadn’t had the heart to tell him that Steve himself’d mentioned that story, two weeks before.
He’s not sure he recalls how to read for pleasure. Delight in a scientific discovery. Pure indulging of curiosity. Steve had carefully showed him how to use the tablet-a StarkNet prototype-to pull up books and articles. Bucky’d said thank you, and once Steve’d left had promptly stared at the screen for an hour. Couldn’t think of anything he wanted to look up. Couldn’t imagine information without a tactical use. Not real.
The next time he looks at the clock he realizes that several hours’ve vanished.
He blinks. There’s a noise. Shrill.
The noise is not related to the blink, it turns out, because when he tests this theory-it’s not all that farfetched, considering the rest of him-it doesn’t correlate a second time. Huh.
At this point his phone rings. It’s the ringtone Steve put in for Sam. Marvin Gaye, crooning passionately away.
He picks it up. “What?”
“Do you ever say hello like a normal person,” Sam says, “sheesh, seriously, and thank God, okay, because I’ve been leaning on your doorbell and I was startin’ to think you’d checked out on me, and that is not okay, first because I like you and second because I like me, and man, Steve would kill me.”
“Oh.” He adds, “Sorry,” because that’s what people do. When he opens the door, Sam’s got folded arms and two Starbucks cups and an exaggerated glower. Bucky sighs. Pulls himself back together, as many pieces as he can grab. “Come in?”
“Damn right. Hazelnut macchiato?”
“Thank you?” He trails Sam back to the sofa. Sam sits down, because that’s what people do with furniture. Bucky suppresses another sigh and sits down too.
He likes Sam because Sam doesn’t need him to pretend. The problem is, of course, that Sam consequently knows how bad it is when he doesn’t.
He says, “Why do you even need me to say hello,” and takes a sip of his coffee. It murmurs heat and dark-roast nutty flavor over his taste-buds. “Unnecessary words. You called me. I picked up.”
“Unnecessary words my ass,” Sam says, and Bucky retorts, “Your ass is also unnecessary,” which makes Sam crack up. Bucky grins. Satisfactory result achieved. That…feels good.
“My ass,” Sam grumbles, assuming a thoroughly fake injured expression, “is entirely necessary. Learn to appreciate works of art, man.”
“I will when I see one.” He looks down at the featureless white lid. “I didn’t mean to. Scare you.”
“No, I know, no worries, we’re cool.” Sam waves a hand. “Are you? Cool?”
“I…” He stops.
He is. He’s not in pain. He’s not on his knees or screaming or too sick to focus. In fact, he suspects that he is what an ordinary person might call fine.
Even the headache from earlier’s departed.
He can feel his face go white. Huh. He’d never known that was so literal.
Sam sets down his cup. Leans in. “James? Bucky? Talk to me.”
“I’m…okay…”
“That’s good, right?”
“No-no, you don’t understand, nyet-” He’s on his feet. Shaking. “I have to-Steve-this is wrong, this is-Steve’s in trouble-”
“Wait, wait, slow down.” Sam doesn’t grab his arm because they both know that’s a terrible idea, but does step in front of him. “You Saw something? Just now?”
“No, I didn’t, but that’s why-” The room’s spinning. Steve’s in danger and somewhere Hydra’s gloating because the world’s going their way and there’s no threat, no need for the Winter Soldier to be Seeing anything that might suggest doubt on the eve of triumph or unsuccessful plans-
“Sit down,” Sam says, “before you fall over. Breathe. Slow. In. Out. That’s it. One more. You can do it. One more.”
“Steve,” Bucky whispers, breathing.
“Okay.” Sam’s kneeling in front of him, having eased him gently to the floor. “Steve. What about Steve? Actual vision?”
“No, I…the way it works, now…they’re happy about something, it’s going right…” He sees Sam figure it, then. Comprehension like a bullet. Like a heart-shot, straight and true.
“We have to go,” he says. “We have to-Steve.”
“We have to Steve,” Sam agrees, “right, okay. You sure you mean that we?”
“Please.” The Winter Soldier doesn’t beg. Bucky Barnes does if it’ll get him to Steve. Bucky Barnes will do anything, wade through blood and break bones and hollow out his own heart and sell his soul and perjure himself before witnesses and kneel on their plush dark-blue rug and plead without shame, if any of that’ll keep Steve safe one second longer.
He doesn’t get even that chance, though, because as he stumbles to his feet with Sam’s hand on his arm the universe implodes.
Metaphorical. But true nonetheless, as his senses turn into flame.
He hits the floor without the chance to scream. Images burn and scorch and race behind his eyelids, branded into his brain. Possible futures. Captain America in a bunker underground. Captain America throwing the shield, swinging-at what? Computer banks? Green-screened, green-skinned faces? A sizzle of blue energy-
Himself and Sam, magically there, fighting at Steve’s side-
Fire fire fire-
Bodies, impending bodies, a stomach-twisting overlay of potentialities. Dead Steve dead Bucky dead Sam. No. No no no. Dead Steve again. No. Steve safe. Yes. Steve and Sam safe. Yes, please yes, how can he make that one happen out of all the flickering windy glimpses-
Natalia-Natasha, these days, Natasha-and her partner running through a door-
Steve strapped down and hooked into a machine, with wires in his brain-
No.
Bucky with wires in his brain-
Okay, he’ll take that one. If Steve’s alive.
His mouth tastes like blood and vomit. Someone’s shouting. Far-off.
He keeps his eyes shut. Tries to focus. Narrowing down, following threads that cut into his mental fingertips as he tries to gather them. They slice his hands his brain his next breath to ribbons.
A crack of pain blooms across his cheek. External.
He gasps, chokes on saliva and whatever he’s been throwing up-he’s absolutely off macchiatos for a while-and opens his eyes.
Sam’s kneeling there with a hand raised, with that hand frozen in place because Bucky’s metal fingers’ve clamped around his wrist. They stare at each other for a minute.
“Oh,” Bucky says weakly. “Sorry.”
“Well, you didn’t break my arm, let’s call it a win.” Sam flexes his wrist. Winces. “Sit up for a minute? Look at me? Follow my finger?”
Left to right; Bucky sighs, flinches-there’s a lingering halo effect around every object, associated echoes of past and future positions in time and space-but manages to track enough to call himself functional.
“ ’m fine.”
“Nope. Here, I’m gonna get you water and clean you up-”
“No time.” He’s wrestling down the need to be sick again. But the rug’s self-cleaning-another minor StarkTech miracle-and he wobbles to his feet. “I know what Zola wants from Steve. And I feel fuckin’ awful when I think about us there too-”
“So we’re going. I got it.” Sam gets in under his arm, determined support. Bucky wants to protest. Can’t argue. Take the help when you need to, Steve had said, Sam had said. Not meant as an order, but it fits into his head better when he thinks of it that way. Something else Steve doesn’t quite understand but accepts.
Steve’s always accepted him. Steve’s been his strength all along. From Brooklyn to the lab to the fall to a bridge and a battle and a shocked look in blue eyes. No matter what. To the end of the line, and they’ve been past that line, over it, under it, dead and alive and brought back and brought back wrong, and he doesn’t even know what that phrase means anymore, what line or where, a metaphor or real battle-lines pulled up in formation.
It’s so stupid and all-encompassing that it can’t be anything other than true. Himself and Steve, to the end of the line. They’ll run headlong into it together.
He yanks off his shirt. Grabs another one and as many weapons as he can cram into various hiding places and holsters. Throws a few Sam’s way.
Sam catches knife and stun-gun and pistol easily. “Where’re we going?”
“Camp Lehigh.”
“What, Cap’s old training grounds?” Sam pauses to tap something into his wristwatch. It’s not only a watch, of course. “History not so much the in-the-past sort of history?”
Bucky doesn’t pause, doesn’t show the teetering anyplace physical. Sam’d known that. He hadn’t. Had needed the reminder. Holes in his memory. Wispy clouds. Gaps like the way Steve doesn’t answer when Bucky grabs the phone and calls.
Memories. They hurt. Everything hurts. Doesn’t matter.
Steve matters. That’s true.
then
It’s a sticky humid summer night, drowning in heat, drenched in sweat-trails and smothered breaths. Tendrils of creeping viscosity. Wavering lines practically visible in the air, like a bad cartoon.
Bucky’s been sitting on the floor by Steve’s bed for hours. Days, maybe. Listening to the rattle and rasp. Air sucked into Steve’s lungs. Cloying and thick.
Steve’s been sleeping fitfully, a little easier with the fall of night, though not much. The open windows try their best to help-they admire Steve’s scrappy heart just as much as Bucky does-but all they’ve got to offer’s more heat.
He thinks maybe Steve’s doing better than yesterday, and then he thinks maybe he’s imagining that, and he wants to cry but he’s done that already and his eyes and chest feel hollowed out and wrung dry.
He wants to apologize to Steve’s mother for everything. He’s done the best he can to take care of her son. Not that Steve’d ever love that phrasing, being taken care of.
He wonders whether she’ll forgive him, looking down from up in Heaven, surrounded by the angels all good and white and shining. Probably not. He wouldn’t. It’s a stupid damn simple summer cold. Settled into Steve’s chest. Making itself at home.
He’s not a nurse. He doesn’t have the money for a doctor. He doesn’t know what to do.
When he closes his eyes the Sight spurts and struggles and simmers, unreliable the way his gift’s forever been. Glimpses. Small stuff. He honestly can’t tell whether Steve’s going to live or die. And that’s a kick to the gut with a steel-toed boot, because he’s normally best at Steve, anything and everything to do with Steve, always.
He tries trickling water into Steve’s lax mouth. Steve wakes up enough to swallow, then coughs.
Bucky says, “Hey, pal, ’bout time you got up, I’m bored, you’re boring me here, Stevie, can I tell you about this new issue of Astounding I picked up, well, not new but they’re getting in the new ones tomorrow and Jimmy said I could take an old issue if I wanted, and there’s this story about time and a predestination paradox and-”
Steve, being the beautiful defiant lion’s-heart that Steve is, makes a fairly rude gesture his direction and croaks, “Predestination’s stupid.”
“Yeah, yeah, we make our own future and all the Seers out there’ll be out of business tomorrow. Stop tryin’ to talk.” Steve knows as well as he does that the Sight doesn’t work like that. It’s a multiplicity of futures, branching, some sharper than others, some closer, some clearly tied to the past, some cut loose. They’ve both heard radio serials, spent nickels and dimes on crackling films, watched heroes display thrilling insight to thwart evildoers in the nick of time.
Steve doesn’t know about him. Nothing to know. Nothing they can rely on. All he’s really got’s the present and he can’t stand a present in which Steve looks at him with disappointment; he can’t ever be one of those grand psychic superheroes, and maybe it makes him selfish, maybe it makes him a coward, but he’d rather live with the secret than watch excitement fade into disillusionment in Steve’s bright gaze.
Steve closes his eyes, drifting. Bucky’s heart clenches. The heat burns his skin, and prickles behind his eyes.
There are other things that Steve doesn’t know. That Steve will never, ever know.
Bucky’s been lying to himself for two days now. His Sight’s been quiet, ashamed the way he’s ashamed, except he’s not, not really. He made a choice. He did See two possible futures.
He’s not certain Steve’s going to live, no, but he’s pretty sure. He’d looked at two crooked knotted paths laid out for the stepping-onto, one on which he did earn the money for Steve’s medications and one on which he didn’t, and neither was a guarantee, he understood, but one had better odds than the other.
He’d been standing outside Jimmy’s newsstand shaking under the brilliant sunlight two days before, pulp magazine crushed in nerveless fingers. And the wide-shouldered dark-haired sharp-dressed man who’d shown up in dreams and looked him up and down then had stepped up beside him, casual as anything, and looked him up and down in real life too.
He’s not ashamed. He’s not anything. No room for that. He just wishes he knew it’d been for something. He just wishes he could be sure. He just needs Steve to live.
(Later, far later, they will kiss each other under gently falling snowflakes on an Alpine mountainside, and behind a tree with the bark rough on Bucky’s back, and in a narrow borrowed cot in a war-torn French village. Bucky will flinch for only a moment when Steve tells him he’s beautiful; Steve will think it’s because of more recent memories, Zola’s laboratories and pain, and will cup his face in both big kind hands and promise him it’s okay. And Bucky will nod, because this is Steve and Steve’s newly wide shoulders and Steve’s brave compassionate eyes, and so it is okay, they’re okay, and they make love like the first-ever sunrise of the universe.)
One hour later, two hours, three, Steve’s fever breaks. Steve opens confused blue eyes and focuses right on him, and Bucky says, voice cracking, “Steve-” and leans forward and kisses him.
It’s all wrong and it’s all right. He’s never Seen this moment, much as he’s imagined it. He’s not thinking anything. Only feeling. Steve’s alive and looking at him and Bucky’s drowning in the need to kiss him.
He’s not the brave one. Steve is. This isn’t brave. This is like breathing. He’ll die otherwise.
Steve’s lips are dry and startled and then less startled and surprisingly enthusiastic if unpracticed and then also wet and kind of salty, because Bucky’s crying.
Steve twines a weak hand into his hair. Bucky swipes a hand across his eyes. Doesn’t apologize.
“So,” Steve husks out, voice a worn scrape from abused lungs, “ ’m I dead?”
“Hell no,” Bucky says, other hand resting on Steve’s left wrist, where he’d just leaned in to check that pulse a minute before. His own is skyrocketing.
“Huh,” Steve says, way too smug for someone flat on his back and barely breathing. “Pretty sure I just kissed an angel.”
Bucky gets out something like, “-Goddamn terrible line, punk-” before Steve’s kissing him again.
(Even later, the first time they kiss-the second first time, the first time that Bucky can recall with any solidity though the rest’ve continued coming back in slow-sidling shreds-it’s once again Bucky who moves first. Steve can’t or won’t, too generous to push, making no demands of the man who’s stumbled clumsily out of nowhere good and into his home and his life. Bucky makes sunny-side-up eggs for breakfast because he vaguely remembers doing that and climbs into Steve’s bed because that feels right, and Steve’s eyes say they want to cry but he’s holding it all inside.
On the first evening of the second week, Steve’s looking at him the way Steve can’t seem to help looking at him, a mix of awe and adoration and wistfulness and determination and grief and hope, and that little muscle along Steve’s jaw ticks the way it does when the emotions’re too deep to show. So Bucky sighs and gets up from the bed and comes over to the bathroom doorway and asks, because asking’s important, “Can I kiss you?”
Steve’s mouth falls open. Bucky says, “That a yes? ’Cause I’m thinkin’ I want to try,” and Steve nods, wordless and flushed.
Steve tastes like toothpaste and astonishment and familiar heat, and that’s the first time Bucky thinks the word home.)
In that first glorious moment, in their sunbaked creaking Brooklyn world for two, Steve kissing him is everything Bucky’s ever wanted. More than. He’d only begged the universe to let Steve stay alive. And the dwindling aches in the newly strange spaces of his own body don’t matter, not important, not in the grand epic scheme of everything; even that can be sweet if he thinks about it, because he made the right choice, he picked the right path to set his feet on, he did this for Steve.
He did this right, Saw a future and made it happen. And somehow he’s getting rewarded. He’s not going to argue. Just going to hold on with both hands while the gift’s being offered. As long as he can.
now
He’s finished strapping grenades into the appropriate places. He looks over at Sam. Who says, “I’m not gonna ask you again if you’re sure, but I am gonna ask you about the advisability of calling for backup.”
“Fury doesn’t trust me.”
Sam cocks an eyebrow.
“He doesn’t trust my Eyes,” Bucky amends, picking up a machine gun, deciding against the weight. The autumn sun burns low and merciless through the window. He likes the sensation of the rays on his cheek. “He thinks Hydra fucked too much with my brain to ever be sure it’s not some sort of trap.”
“He right about that?”
“Yes. Got us a ride?”
“I called Stark. Figured you didn’t want to go official. He’s sending a jet. He’s busy. On the moon.”
The moonbase is very much a work in progress. Tony Stark, from what Bucky’s heard from Steve, treats it like a personal engineering-project playground. Nick Fury’s apparently convinced that someday Stark’s going to blow them all up with a badly-aimed laser. Steve’s opinion on this had been, “well, he’s probably not wrong.”
“Two minutes,” Sam adds, checking his watch. “Any idea what we might expect?”
“Some sort of trap.”
“Okay, thanks for that.”
“No, I mean…” Bucky yanks his hair back into a loose bun. He can’t bring himself to cut it any shorter-one of those oddly-shaped triggering annoyances, reminders of the insidiously mundane nature of control-but he can get it out of his face. “I don’t know. Electronics. An old computer system. Wanting-input, I think. Zola. But he’s dead.”
“A dead guy plus computers. So we’re talking, what, cyborg zombies?”
“I don’t know!” He glares at the rug. It’s busy cleaning itself. Tidying up after his weakness. “I’m not as good in the field as I was. The more we tip probabilities in our favor…the more I try to fuck up whatever Hydra’s got planned…”
“So you can puke on people,” Sam observes. “Deadly weapon.”
Bucky scowls. The Winter Soldier part of his head points out that it’s not not true, as a last resort. “I can still shoot. I can still shoot you. We need to move now.”
“About a minute. We should get up to your roof. Something new?”
“I’m feeling better.”
“Shit.”
Bucky doesn’t say the my sentiments exactly. Unnecessary words again. Anyway, his expression’ll shout it.
He slams one extra throwing knife into an arm holster, and they run out the door and up the stairs and to the hovering transport that’ll carry them to Steve.