Chapter Text
“I need somebody who speaks French, looks good in a tux and can punch through a cement wall,” Natasha announces, entering the Rogers-Barnes apartment via the fire escape window.
The Rogers-Barnes contingent, currently in some kind of… hug situation… on the couch, both look at her expectantly. “Fluent French,” she adds.
They keep looking at her.
“What, both of you?”
“Take your pick,” Barnes says. “I’m fluent in eight dialects, but you have to kickstart it and sometimes my brain damage likes to play language roulette. This one - “ he jerks a thumb at Steve “ - can speak on command, but only Parisian French from the forties.”
“Both of us can do the wall-punching,” Steve says.
“And it’s lady’s choice as to who looks better in a tux.”
(10 Things I Hate About You AU)
“Sup, bro,” Rumlow says.
Bucky stares at him. “Bro,” he returns cautiously.
“I need you to take out Wilson.” Rumlow says. “The white one, not the black one.”
“I am not doing anything illegal,” Bucky says immediately.
“Yeah, man, parole sucks,” Rumlow says, nodding understandingly. Bucky, whose entire experience with the criminal element begins and ends with accidentally walking out of Build-A-Bear with an unpaid teddy when he was five, stares at him.
Then again, Bucky’s henley was from Goodwill even before he got machine oil and fertilizer on it, and even if the neckline wasn’t distorted enough to show a good bit of his chest and shoulder it’s not like the scarring on his throat and jaw is easy to miss. He’s also the most built guy in the room-- pretty much any room-- because PT had been good for him and he sort of just hadn’t stopped, after. And he’s been told his resting face makes people wonder just how fast they would have to run to get away from him if he suddenly snapped and started disemboweling people with a Number 2 pencil. (Thanks, Tony.)
So Bucky can see, sort of, maybe, how somebody who didn’t know him at all would sort of. Assume things.
“Look,” Rumlow says. “You don’t have to fuck him or anything. Just take him out, dinner at McDonald’s or something. He’s gay as fuck, it’s not a problem-- listen, you gotta do this for me, man, nobody else would survive that crazy shrimp motherfucker and I need it to happen.”
“What the fuck,” Bucky says.
“Two hundred bucks,” says Rumlow.
Bucky immediately gets a hi-def crystal-clear mental snapshot of his bank account, followed rapidly by his monthly budgeting spreadsheets, utility bills, grant stipend and a mental post-it reminding him that the twins’ birthday is two weeks away and that he can’t get away with just cooking a nice birthday dinner when the birthday belongs to two fifteen year old girls.
God, what do fifteen year olds even want? He and Becca hadn’t ever actually been fifteen, had they? Their mom liked to joke that the two of them had been born thirty, but he hand to god cannot even remember neither him nor Becca actually being teenagers. Not like, teenage teenagers. Bucky had spent the first half of high school in science fairs and the second half in the hospital, and Becca had basically conned everybody in CNN’s local office into adopting her three weeks into freshman year. He’s pretty sure neither of them had any friends their own age from fifth grade until actual college.
No, really, what do fifteen year olds like? Is it-- Instagram? That’s-- a thing, right? A cool thing? Can Bucky get them two Instagrams? Maybe one? Can they share? How much would that even cost?
“Two fifty,” Rumlow says, completely misinterpreting the glazed bafflement in Bucky’s eyes, and Bucky’s almost tempted to stay quiet and see if he ups it some more before his anxiety kicks in and blurts “Done,” out of his mouth.
“Cool, bruh,” Rumlow says, starting to stand. “I knew you were cool--”
“Up front,” Bucky says, and it’s honestly pure coincidence that his shoulder chooses to twinge at that exact moment in a way that makes him roll it, recalibrating the tensor cables in his arm with that creepy clicking noise he and Tony haven’t quite managed to get rid of yet.
Rumlow freezes and sits back down. “Sure, man, let me just get my wallet,” he says, and he doesn’t move until Bucky nods.
Huh. Maybe he’ll keep the clicking. Once he establishes what’s fucking causing it, anyway.
“I’m looking for, uh, Wilson?” Bucky says.
The girl snaps her gum. “The white one?”
“Uh… sure,” Bucky says. “The… white one.”
“Uh-huh,” the girl says disinterestedly, already turning to bellow, “HEY STEVE!”
Then Wilson turns around, and Bucky trips, stumbles and crashes into a stack of easels. There’s a complicated moment where he thinks he’s saved himself by grabbing onto a big metal rack thing filled with drying paintbrushes, but it only ends up tipping over onto him. The whole mess goes down to the floor with an unholy clatter.
“Hey, man, you okay?”
Bucky gapes up at a very familiar pale face, minus the usual bruises and plus a half dozen piercings and a few streaks of violently pink hair. “Steve?”
Steve’s eyes go huge with shock. “Bucky?”
“Yeah!” Bucky struggles to get up, batting away a paintbrush that’s threatening to go up his nose. With Steve’s help they manage to get him sitting upright, at least, and staring at each other. “Steve!”
“Holy shit. Buck.”
“Holy shit Steve.” Bucky pretty sure his mouth is still hanging open. “Why’s your last name Wilson?”
Steve grins. “Got adopted.”
“Shit, that’s awesome! That’s awesome, right?”
Steve’s grin gets bigger. “Yeah, it’s awesome. They’re good people-- my brother goes here, actually-- you do too? Do you go here?”
“Yeah! Yeah, engineering, I’m doing my master’s in bioengineering,” Bucky babbles. “What do you-- art? You do art? Still do art, right?”
“That is why I’m in the art building,” Steve says, but he’s laughing, he looks happy.
Bucky wordlessly turns his head to the side and lifts his hair up to show the thick surgical scarring on the base of his skull. “Brain surgery,” he says, then amends, “well, first car crash, then brain surgery. Neural implants. It’s how I can move this.” He wiggles his metal fingers. “It’s also why I’m in the labs all the time. I’m head guinea pig and second engineer on a next-gen prosthetics project and I’m basically doing my thesis on my own arm.”
“Did my bachelor’s in MechE.”
Fury stares at him for a long, long time. “What the fuck happened to you, son?”
Bucky smiles beatifically. “Love, sir.”
It starts with Bucky being an idiot of unprecedented magnitudes. He’d been bored, and bored of being bored, so he started cleaning up their little two-story brownstone, then changing things around, then finally renovating the top floor except “renovating the top floor” turned into “building a third story”. It’s fine. It’s great. He learns a lot about lumber grades and load-bearing structures and city permits and their enclosed rooftop gazebo thing is gonna be beautiful, okay, and it doesn’t matter how many times he hits his thumb with his hammer because it’s metal and just bounces off anyway.
And everything's going great - or at least with all catastrophes relatively minimal - when Bucky trips headfirst into sexual awakening at the age of probably-thirty-nine via renovation hardware malfunction.
It’s a Tuesday morning. He’s using the nailgun and he’s having fun with it. It requires a long-ass extension cord, so Bucky’s trailing bright orange wiring as he goes. The enclosed gazebo situation he's building may have been originally designed to be a shady-bower type thing meant to be placed in the middle of a field, but he’d liked the design so much he went through the hell of modifications anyway. The point is, there are eight columns around the central space, which currently sports a hole serving as Bucky’s trapdoor back into their actual house.
Bucky has nobody to blame but himself where he gets so absorbed in using the nailgun that he doesn’t realize his extension cord is now tangled around more than three columns.
“Why in god’s name do I have a stiffy,” Bucky says aloud.
Bucky buys the rope, because Steve has some kind of condition that prevents him from accessing common sense whenever he has to buy something. The shop is in Park Slope, and the tattooed salesgirl assures him it’s 100% vegan and organic and paraben gluten carcinogen free, which, okay, but Bucky would’ve been happy with “won’t give you a rash, probably”. It’s also dyed a soft petal pink. The salesgirl offered him black and red, too, which was probably a reasonable enough guess given his boots and motorcycle jacket, but there’s something about the pink that makes him go a kind of warm inside, just looking at it.
He takes it home and throws it in the washing machine with the rest of the colors, and that’s enough to make him forget about it until Steve pulls it out from their pile of clean underpants.
Bucky loved being tied up, back before the war. Steve would trap his wrists with a belt or a tie, anchor him to the bed or keep him still at the table, and sometimes if Bucky was very good and got very lucky Steve would loop a belt around his neck and leave it there. He could be still on his own, sure-- he’d made his damn army career on it-- but for some reason there was something about having no choice about it that bypassed most of his defenses and went straight to the spine.
Bucky shivers. He doesn’t spend too long in front of the mirror these days, not longer than it takes to shave, really, but he-- remembers being vain, being careful, knowing he was handsome and taking his time to make himself even more so.
Bucky looks in the mirror now. He doesn’t really look the same as before, and not even in a way that can be excused by age. He stands differently, his face moves differently, and all of that is without the hair and the bulk and oh, right, yeah, the metal fucking arm.
Bucky runs his flesh hand up his stomach and chest, scratching automatically at the chest hair before letting his palm rest at the base of his throat. Bucky at twenty had been sleek and lean, well groomed and cocky and proud of it; a collar had suited him, even when it had been cheap black belt leather. He’d felt favored, loved-- spoiled, even, and he’d looked it, too, he knew, sprawled on their cheap bed with its cheap sheets and rich with all of Steve’s attention on him. He’d looked good. He’d felt better.
Bucky at ninety-nine is now nearly three hundred pounds of mad science and muscle. He doesn’t really relax much and he knows he still moves like a carnivorous bulldozer whenever he stops paying attention. Collaring that-- well, let’s just say putting a collar on a nice purebred house dog goes a little differently from putting one on a Rottweiler that’s just barely stopped foaming.
Bucky squeezes at his throat, just a little, then lets his hand drop.
The now-iconic footage of Iron Man firing his repulsors at Captain America’s shield and using it as a redirect to take out six Chitauri in a moment of perfect teamwork and flawless cohesion is playing again. It looks great on TV and the clip has over nine million hits on YouTube, but what actually happened is that Tony swung around, turned his fire on Steve, Steve raised his shield to cover himself - the cameras entirely failed to capture him bellowing “STARK WHAT THE FUCK” as he tilted the shield to turn the reflected beam away from Iron Man - and it just happened to knock over as many aliens as it did without cooking one or both of them in their suits.
After Bucky watched all the available Battle of Manhattan footage, he’d rested his forehead on the kitchen table for a long five minutes. “It honestly wasn’t that bad,” Steve tried to tell him.
“Shut the fuck up, Steve,” Bucky said.
“No, honestly, after Tony flew the nuke through the wormhole - ”
“Do you even hear what’s coming out of your mouth?” Bucky demanded, sitting up, eyes wild. “How the fuck are you doing it? Where do you keep finding people crazier than you?”
“Are you including yourself in this category?”
“The world may be ready for a queer Captain America,” Bucky says wearily, “but it is not ready for Captain America’s extremely fucked-up homicidal ‘boyfriend’.And the boyfriend,” Bucky continues threateningly when Steve opens his mouth, “Is not fucking ready for the fucking security nightmare that is stepping out to the closet or whatever they call it in the twenty-first fucking century.”
Steve shuts his mouth, looks incredibly mulish for a second, then deflates all at once, curling his arm around his knees. He thunks his forehead against the side of the tub. “Sorry.”
Bucky lifts his pruny flesh hand out of the water and puts it in Steve’s hair, watching the suds drip down his collar as he takes another drag on the cigarette. “What’s that they say,” Bucky says, blowing the smoke out the window. “You gotta do you. Something like that. And I gotta do me.”
”Thought that was my job,” Steve halfheartedly tells his own knees, and Bucky rubs absently at Steve’s nape but neither of them bother to move.
“You really are sorry,” Bucky muses a few minutes later. “You’d have suggested we fuck in the tub by now with your butter-wouldn’t-melt face on otherwise.”
Steve doesn’t lift his head but Bucky can hear his grin. “Why, you wanna?”
“You feel like flooding the downstairs neighbors, Rogers?”
“They’ll survive.”
Bucky squeezes Steve’s nape and shakes him a little. “What day is it, Rogers?”
Steve groans. “Thursday.”
“That’s right. That means my week of nice boring vanilla sex isn’t over yet, and that means until midnight on Sunday you’re going to keep your trap shut about whatever the fuck the internet’s told you to try with your dick next–”
“Fuck you, you loved the thing with the belt - ”
“I’m going to desecrate his grave,” Barnes said calmly. “Ideally I would have liked to piss on his corpse, but not even that is worth digging up the carcass. Also, does anybody know where Arnim Zola is buried?”
“Under forty yards of munitions bunker rubble,” Steve said.
Barnes thought about it. “Acceptable. Pierce?”
Natasha grimaced. “They wanted to put him in Arlington–”
“–but given the fact that he’s the biggest fucking traitor to his country since Benedict fucking Arnold–” Steve interjected.
“– they buried him in his family plot instead. Glenwood Cemetery.”
Sam turned his phone to them. “About an hour from here, if google’s right about traffic.”
It took more like ninety minutes, but that was because, as flying Sam most eloquently described it, DC traffic was its own super special individual circle of hell.
Pierce’s grave was large and tastefully elaborate, the final resting place of a successful politician. The headstone was grey marble slab, Alexander Michael Pierce written across it in engraved gold script. 1948-2014. There were no flowers.
“Want me to draw a dick on it?” Steve offered.
Barnes looked at the Sharpie in his hand, then at the gravestone, then at his metal arm, then back at the gravestone. He threw the Sharpie over his shoulder and crouched down, bracing his flesh hand on the head of the tombstone.
“What are you– wow,” Steve said, as the shriek of Barnes’ metal finger carving into the marble split the air. “That’s… wow.”
“Marker washes off,” Barnes grunted, carving in another letter. “Adamantium is forever.”
“I don’t know whether to be impressed or… no, I’m definitely impressed,” Sam said. “A little scared, not gonna lie, but definitely impressed.”
Barnes sat back. “There,” he said, wiping rock dust off his finger. “Now it’s accurate.”
Alexander Michael Pierce, the gravestone now read, with NAZI TRAITOR ASSHOLE spelled out below in huge, mathematically perfect capitals right below. Barnes blew some more rock dust out of the letters and nodded in satisfaction.
“That’s about right,” Steve said critically, regarding it with hands on his hips. “You sure you don’t want me to add a dick on there? Because I could absolutely–”
“Steve,” Bucky said, standing up, “shut up for a second,” and then he grabbed Steve by the neck, kissed him on the mouth and dipped him backwards like that one picture of the sailor he’d seen from VE day.
“Bucky!” Steve exclaimed, wrenching his mouth away. “Not in a cemetery, oh my gmmmphhh–”
“Really?” Sam said behind them. “Are you for god damn serious right now?”
“Bucky,” Steve gasped, when Bucky came up for air. “Bucky, we are literally over Pierce’s dead rotting body.”