Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

When Sam agreed to help Steve track Barnes down, he didn’t know even half of what was to come next.

He expected most of it, like actual legwork across continents, putting his ear to the ground for hearsay, and doing a lot of reading. Those seemed like givens for the kind of work cut out for him, and considering Steve and Natasha, the only ones that knew the Winter Soldier left the Potomac alive, were usually too busy being full-time Avengers on Hydra’s trail and tracking stragglers while, in the latter’s case, building new covers respectively, he expected fairly minimal help.

That had been alright with Sam. He’d done more with less in hopeless situations before, so he got to work. He’d started with Barnes’ history, his life before the army from Steve’s own recollection. Listened raptly for information, anything that could help, but also just to listen to Steve talk about a man he evidently thought the world of. In some ways, despite Steve’s youthful appearance and his tendency to drink Sam under the table, it reminded Sam of his grandaddy talking about the good old times.

“Bucky, well, he was sort of the life of the party,” Steve had said, grinning around the rim of his beer bottle, because Sam had insisted they couldn’t reminisce on the old days without breaking out some cold ones. “He’d always push me to go out with him, have fun, live life, but I was a bit of a boring guy, so I never really got around to that.”

“Seems like nothing much has changed,” Sam teased, smiling when Steve laughed and knocked his fist into his shoulder.

“Well, you might be right,” Steve said, “Bucky, he’d always try to get me to do new things, but he respected my decisions when I didn’t wanna. Some days, especially the days I was sick, he chose to stay at home with me, even when I wanted him to go out and enjoy himself,” he sighed, his eyes going glassy, “when I told him that, he’d always shake his head and tell me, I’m enjoyin’ myself now, Stevie.”

Sam had touched his shoulder then, patting him comfortingly as Steve fought back tears. It was a good incentive for Sam to reunite Steve with his long-lost best friend, or at least try his damndest; if it were Riley, Sam had thought, and god, if it were, it wouldn’t have even been a question. He’d have done it without a second thought, would’ve scoured the ends of the earth if he knew Riley was alive, even on hunches and hopes alone.

But Riley’s gone, never coming back. Instead of the ends of the earth, he’d scoured a canyon, looking for limbs and parts and tech that he wanted to set on fire, desperately searching for his dog tags or his rosary so he’d have something to give back to Riley’s mother. There was no getting him back, no sudden reappearances some seventy odd years down the line, but Steve could get his best friend back, was offered the opportunity by god or the universe or whatever, and Sam just knew he had to do this. He had to try.

With renewed resolve, Sam decided he’d get to work, opening files and reading them. It started with basic information; Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, male, Caucasian, American, born on March 10, 1917, the eldest of four, and best friend to Captain Rogers from childhood. Drafted into the 107th Infantry Regiment on June 14th, 1943, initially captured on October 7th of the same year and freed from captivity by Captain Rogers twenty-seven days later. Recaptured and declared KIA on February 1st, 1945. Escaped, Sam thinks to add to his mental list, January 12th, 2014. Nearly 70 years later. Nothing they didn’t already know.

It’s all information that Steve had told him, could’ve told him if he’d asked. Everything the public knows. Then, only a layer deeper, the nightmares began to unfurl as Sam worked his way through the files, and he realises, later, that they stopped referring to Barnes with his name.

Steve can’t remember the last time he’s had a good night’s sleep.

It’s difficult, what with how different the world is. It’s been three years since he first woke up, got defrosted, and was reintroduced into polite society like a time capsule, and it’s been a helluva ride so far. Aliens, super-secret spies, walking-talking scientific anomalies, egotistical billionaires with more money lining their wallets than Steve’s ever seen his whole life, and brain-washed best friends you thought were dead, and he’s only been around for about three years in this new future. What isn’t different, however, is the inability to sleep properly.

At first, he thought it was just his bed. His sheets are soft and silky, his mattress springs don’t dig into his back, and he has about three different pillows on his bed; facts of life that are all uncharted territory, growing up small enough to fit in a single bed with Bucky whenever his Ma worked late nights. It’s a big difference in terms of luxury from when he was twenty and sleeping wrapped up in Bucky’s arms on December nights in their apartment, the heater always either too broken or too expensive to use, or when he was twenty-five and he’d lie in an uncomfortable cot too small for his bigger, buffer frame while trying to sleep through Dum-Dum’s ship-horn snoring and Bucky’s near-silent pained whimpers. His bed felt too soft, too comfortable, too gentle, but Steve knows that it wasn’t the whole problem.

It was more than that, because he’d tried sleeping on his ratty couch and ended up with a sore back not even the serum could fix, and he’d tried sleeping on the floor but he’d dreamt that he was lying face-down on a battlefield again, dirt caking his skin and gunsmoke entering his lungs and shield missing in his hand. It was the fact that, in all of his time as Captain America during the War, his mind had forgotten what actual rest was like, and his body could no longer remember, seventy years later.

Tonight is no different, but he’s tired. Today’s just been an exhausting loop of absolutely nothing, the search for the Sceptre long and gruelling. Thor’s only started looking for it a few days back because time works differently for Asgardians, while Tony’s fucking with him about upgrades and the likes for his allegedly disgustingly outdated tech that he’d only received two months ago. Natasha and Barton haven’t checked back in for days now, and it occurs to Steve, too, that he doesn’t even know what Banner does with his time.

It’s been a bit of a bumpy ride, and Steve’s a super soldier that survived more life-threatening events than he thinks he should’ve, but he’s tired. He hasn’t even had the time to think about Bucky or the research or picking up a trail, busy even as the guilt of dumping all of this on Sam plagues him, but Hydra proves itself an irritatingly tough roach den to wipe out. Had it been up to Steve, he’d be working with Sam on the hunt for Bucky, but he’s wiped and exhausted to the bone, ready to just pass out the moment his body’s horizontal.

But the universe doesn’t like it very much when Steve’s idle, thinks he spent too long on pause as it is, so his phone starts ringing about fifteen minutes after he lays down on his bed and starts dozing off. To his credit, he’s not angry about it; he only feels resignation and a little defeat, and thinks solemnly, I’m never gonna get any sleep ever again. Then he realises that it’s Sam calling him, and it becomes a rush to sit up, fight the exhaustion off, and hope Sam isn’t calling in his metaphorical two-week notice.

“Sam? What’s up?” Steve asks when he answers, holding the phone to his ear and trying to keep the grogginess out of his voice. He sounds like how he feels, which is absolute shit, but he figures Sam would think it’s because he’s in pain rather than from being asleep.

He doesn’t, because Sam’s too observant and knowing for his own good sometimes. “Shit, um, sorry, did I wake you up?” Sam asks him quietly, sounding shaky and tinny from the crackling audio of his phone’s mic. He sounds nothing like the Sam that Steve’s used to, grinning and lighting up just about every room he walks into like the sun on a warm spring morning. It makes Steve worry, guilty for reasons he isn’t even aware of yet; that he’d been the one to drag Sam back into this and has yet to get him out, that he’s dumped all of the horrific required reading onto Sam.

Sam’s a grown man that can make his own decisions, he knows this, but Steve can recognise things that make him want to look away from Sam, afraid of the mirror image he sometimes is. Too brash for it, like it’s punishment and penance all at once. Sam doesn’t need penance, he thinks, and then the mirror image shatters, because Sam’s nothing like him— he’s better. “Yeah,” he says, sitting up, “but it’s fine, I wasn’t that tired anyway. You alright? You sound... upset.”

“I do, don’t I?” Sam laughs, but it doesn’t sound genuine. He sounds like he’s holding back tears, tight and choked. “Just, uh, couldn’t sleep. Well, I could for a bit, but then I had a nightmare, then I woke up and it was—” Sam sucks in a shuddering breath, releasing it shakily after a few seconds, and Steve’s heart breaks a little more. “Sorry. It’s nothing. I shouldn’t have called.”

“Hey, no, hey, wait,” Steve says, trying to be soothing in a way he hasn’t really been since 1943, “it’s fine, Sam, I’m glad you called me. Tell me about what’s bothering you.”

Sam doesn’t say anything for a while, just breathes harshly on the other end of the call. Steve lets him breathe, knows he gets moments where he just needs to gather his thoughts. He settles in with the intent of staying on the phone while Sam finds his sleep again, something that Natasha had told him was more common than he thought. She’d answered when he called her late at night after he woke up with cold sweat sticking to his skin after a nightmare, distant now, but memorably consisting of Bucky dying over and over while he sat there and watched like a stump. Sometimes, it’s enough to just sit and listen to someone else breathe, Natasha had said, distant yet personal, as always, to remember that you exist outside of the dreams your mind torments you with.

Sam sniffles, wet and warbly, then sighs to get his breathing under control, clearing his throat. She was right, as always.

After some time, quietly, Sam says, “it was about something in Barnes’ files.”

Steve’s gut twists with a stab of worry, dark and deep within. He tried to read some of the files they were able to scrounge up, had stomached about half of them before he couldn’t, wouldn’t anymore. He couldn’t imagine his best friend having all these things done to him, couldn’t imagine him doing all those things. He waits for Sam to continue, who sounds like he’s trying to keep his breathing controlled and measured.

Sam sniffles again, clearing his throat. “There was a part in his earlier files, where they put down... how they desensitised him,” he says, hoarse with grief. “They-they broke him, Steve. He acted out once, once, his whole time under their control, and they starved him then put him in a room with kids and told him to—” Sam heaves a sob, unable to keep going, and Steve shuts his eyes tightly, feeling bile rise in his throat. He’d read that file, too, skimmed the words until he couldn’t take it anymore. He’d been sick for days just thinking about it, about his best friend, his brother, going through things no one ever deserves to.

“How do you get back from something like that, Steve?” Sam whispers, “how does somebody heal from that? Is-is there even somebody still in there?”

Steve doesn’t have an answer for him, even after Sam ends up falling asleep after the call. For days after, he doesn’t have an answer.

The next time something like that happens, Sam is at Steve’s apartment.

He still has an apartment, thank you very much. Stark’s tower is wonderful with all the basic and luxurious amenities provided, and his room there basically spans a whole floor, but it’s often just too much. Steve grew up during the Depression, when money was scarce and pretty living spaces were even scarcer. He lived in this perpetually dusty and muggy apartment on 12th with Bucky and only barely managed to make rent every month, eating the blandest food and soldiering through the summer heat when it hit them, and before that, a tiny shoebox of an apartment with his Ma.

Both of those experiences compared to even a square foot of his floor in the tower makes him feel sickeningly lavish every time he stays in the Tower, like he’s been catapulted into the same bubble of wealth as bureaucrats and corporate shills. It doesn’t help when there’s an AI that listens constantly to his every word, or that he’s far too close to Tony and his face, a carbon copy of his father’s. Not when he had read that file.

For those reasons, it’s not his favourite thing to spend time there, so he still mostly lives in DC. Different apartment, since living in the same place where he’d seen a man bleed out and convincingly die on his living room floor isn’t exactly a preference of his, but he’s still somewhere in the same area. Sam sometimes drops by the Tower as his guest, but he mostly goes over to Steve’s apartment, similarly preferring Steve’s creaky couch and bachelor-stocked fridge to Tony’s thirty-thousand dollar stereo system and in-house movie theatre. Usually, they sit on his couch and talk, but right now, it seems like Sam’s more intent on reading than talking.

Or maybe he isn’t, on either account. Steve realises, after some time, that Sam’s not actually reading the file and is instead staring at a grainy black and white picture of Bucky curled up in a ball in the corner of an empty room, metal arm pulling his legs close to his naked body. The details are blurry, but Steve can make out the shape of him, shoulders hunched in what could be pain, fear, or both, the dark scar where his left arm meets his shoulder. Had it not been for his arm, Steve thinks achingly, he might not have recognised him.

The Asset in fetal position in corner A, after eight rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, the text below the picture reads, followed by artificial memory interposition via conditioning. It was not receptive to the administration of artificial memory until the seventh round. Eighth round was administered to test it’s obedience afterwards. Requesting an increase in voltage.

“It’s like they didn’t even see him as a person,” Sam says, low and monotone, when he realises Steve’s reading off his file. “Like he was just a tool. How many times do you think they tested his limits?”

“I don’t know, Sam,” Steve murmurs, chest tight and stomach swirling, “I don’t know.”

Sam looks at him then, a haunted, fearful expression on his face. Then and there, suspended in time, he looks about ten years younger than he actually is with his wet eyes and quivering lip, and Steve can’t help but think, I shouldn’t have asked you to help me do this. Why are you still here with me?

Looking back down at the file, Sam breathes out a shuddered breath. He puts on a smile but it’s too shaky to be anywhere close to genuine, like he’s only trying for Steve’s sake. “Well,” he says, “if I needed any more reason to look for him, I’ve got it right here.”

Right, Steve thinks, that’s why. Because you’re a good man—the best of us.

At Sam’s apartment, Natasha’s reading from a file on her tablet when she hears him sigh deeply.

She looks over, curious. He’s looking down at a physical file, the paper worn from age and minimally preserved. The storm on his expression is something Natasha’s seen before a handful times, like when she’d been shot by the Soldier (again) after the tussle on the highway and he was demanding she receive medical attention. A righteous kind of fury that she’s only seen on the best of people or the most misguided of them all, and while Natasha knows Steve trusts him, she’s still not sure which category to put Sam in.

Beautifully stupid, she’d thought as Sam sat across from her, reading files upon files in companionable silence, not grilling her on where she’s been for the last few weeks or what she’s been doing like Steve does. Trusting, she added, as he carried himself around her with an ease Natasha’s not sure she’d done anything to deserve yet, smiling at her like her ledger isn’t redder than a rose and eating the fried calamari she ordered like she couldn’t kill him in a hundred different ways. There’d been a glint in his eyes when he looked at Steve as he left them to handle something else that clued her in. Trusting of Steve, she amended, and it all circled back to beautifully stupid.

His face is a dark cloud now, lost in his thoughts. “See something you don’t like, Wilson?” she asks steadily, aiming for lightheartedness. For people who’ve only known each other for a little over two months, he picks up on her teasing and sarcasm well enough, bantering back and forth with her in a way Steve wouldn’t or couldn’t.

Sam doesn’t quip back, though. In fact, she’d almost think he hadn’t heard her if it weren’t for the way his fingers flex a little to grip the folder tighter. She waits patiently for him to say something, taps mindlessly away on her tablet.

Right when the silence goes on for long enough that she thinks he won’t say anything, Sam mutters quietly, “I’m gonna fucking kill them.”

Natasha nods, understanding the sentiment even without context. Scooting over from her side of the couch, she peers over to look at what Sam’s been staring at, before realising he’d just been looking at Barnes. It’s a picture of him on the operating table, half of his metal arm missing and sporting a multitude of scratches and wounds. There’s a circular saw positioned above his metal shoulder, and judging from the wide-eyed and fearful expression on Barnes’ face, gagged and bound like an animal, he felt all of it.

She recalls something she’d read from another file, dated 1976. The neural network interfacing between the Asset’s mind and arm was a success. It is now only able to feel 5% of the pain administered to it’s arm rather than the previous 45%. Note: the Asset will still experience excruciating pain if the arm is completely removed. Not recommended, as it may go into cardiac arrest.

She looks at the top of the file for the date. 05.04.1957. Nearly twenty years before the operation.

“I’m gonna fucking kill them,” Sam repeats darkly, plainly. Natasha nods, quiet and neutral, and plucks a piece of fried calamari from the cooling pile.

They get a lead on Bucky’s location about five weeks into the search.

Natasha’s the one to see it, pinpointing the strange activity in Ukraine. They’ve been monitoring known Hydra bases all over the globe, hitting them as a small group of just Steve, Natasha, Clint, and occasionally Tony when one day, a base in Kropyvnytskyi just suddenly goes dark. Small, basically an outpost, but dark all the same, the proverbial light-switch flicked off as Steve and Natasha survey the live map.

“Do you think they just left?” Steve asks, standing in front of their screen-wide map. He’s been getting better at understanding just how complex this tech is, and he knows enough about Tony’s tech that a cyberattack is nigh impossible unless it’s his own tech being used against him. 

Natasha shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so. Hydra bases don’t just drop off without a trace like that, and there’s no way they could’ve known how to get past JARVIS and his defences,” she points out, pursing her lips. “I think this might’ve been Barnes.”

Before, Steve might’ve regarded her with suspicion at her conviction, a scathing how do you know this? on the tip of his tongue. Times have changed though, and Steve trusts Natasha more than he thinks he likely ever would’ve. “You really think so?” he asks, crossing his arms as he tries to keep the eagerness out of his tone.

Natasha hums noncommittally, but Steve can see from the subtle change in her posture that she’s as suspicious of this as he is. “We wouldn’t have seen it if he didn’t want us to, so he must have his reasons; for assistance, maybe,” she says, sounding uncertain, before saying, “think about it. You’d want revenge too, if they did to you what they did to him.”

Steve thinks about the file on his desk at home, the one he’d left only half-read, how he couldn’t read any further than sexual conditioning of the Asset before he put the file down and felt like his lunch was about to come back up and all over his desk. He thinks, with a tight fist, about Sam reading through all of the files Steve couldn’t bring himself to finish reading, how he’d started sleeping over at Steve’s place more often than he didn’t, and how he’d shakily told Steve once, while he’d been reading a file annotated in Russian, that the limit had been ten shocks.

“Yeah,” he says after a while, the silence between them heavy, “I would.”

Natasha shoots him a glance before looking back at the screen, face carefully impassive. “Better let Wilson know,” she says, “he’ll want to work his way from Kiev, and that’ll take a while. Trail might go cold soon.”

Steve already has his phone in his hand. He thinks about Sam’s smile again, how long it’s been since he last saw it. “On it.”

Four months after Sam starts looking for Bucky, trailing after the crumbs he left since Kropyvnytskyi, he finally meets him face-to-face.

At first, it was definitely the king of all goose chases. He’d started in Kiev, which had been a twelve hour flight from DC, the trail cold long before Sam could even make it halfway through the flight. He’d decided earlier on that the only way he was gonna be able to track Barnes would be if he waited for his next hit on a base, undoubtedly not too far from where he’d started, so Sam bided his time and waited for the crumbs to drop.

The next alert had been pinged from Shepetivka four days later, then Tynne, then Dubrovytsya, and right when Sam had thought that Bucky was on his way to Belarus, he’d switched gears and resurfaced in eastern Ivano-Frankivsk, heading south from Dzembronya to the Romanian countryside, where Sam didn’t even know Hydra bases were in. Then, months of just trailing after Barnes like a lost dog; from Năsăud to Bistrița, a stopover in Zalău, then giving Cluj-Napoca a wide berth for reasons unknown to Sam, like he’s subverting expectation.

Unexpectedly, it’s not him who finds Bucky; rather, it’s Bucky who finds him in Tirana, a stop-over from Niskic on his way to Kichevo. Sam had paid for a night in the cheapest hotel he could find, exhausted from the ride, ready to just collapse into a hopefully-soft bed so he could get up early the next day and update Steve with the same old nothing yet. Travel bag slung over his shoulder when he arrives at his room, he’s not displeased; it’s a simple, sparsely decorated room with a comfortable-looking bed and a nice view of the city. There’s a desk by the window, so he goes over there, puts his bag down on the floor, and takes out the manila folder of recent files concerning Barnes.

He spends about fifteen minutes, hazy and loopy, looking over the debrief, how Bucky appeared on the radar for a moment in Tirana about five hours ago and disappeared right after. He doesn’t have high hopes, can’t when you’re hunting a ghost, but he still hopes for—well, something. Shutting the file, he sighs, takes off his reading glasses, puts them on the desk, and gets dressed for bed. The shower’s tempting, but he’s a little groggy and a lot drained, so he’s out like a light the moment he hits the mattress.

He wakes up three hours later when he hears a quiet clunk, ears registering the sound before his brain does. Blinking his eyes open to adjust to the darkness, he sits up, rubbing his eyes and decidedly not yelping when he sees a figure sitting in the chair by the desk. Hurriedly flicking on the lamp next to him, he realises that it’s Barnes.

“Uh,” Sam says, swallowing dryly, “hi.” Nice. Great work, Wilson.

Bucky regards him with a sharp stare, dark-eyed and tight-lipped, as if he’s taking Sam apart one by one and trying to figure him out. It’s disconcerting and uncomfortable, but Sam doesn’t do anything, doesn’t make any sudden movements. He’s not sure if sitting up any further than how he’s positioned is gonna end with a knife in his skull, and while, sure, Sam’s a bit of a terminal risk-taker, he still has the self-preservation skills to know if it’s too dangerous.

“Do you know me?” Sam asks when Bucky says nothing, because he has to. I know you, he doesn’t add, a little nervous, I know too fucking much about you. I know what they did to you, how they made you. That’s why I’m here. Steve didn’t even have to ask twice.

Bucky lets the silence drag on, then he glances at the files on Sam’s desk, and Sam realises that they’ve all been laid out, rifled through with careful hands. Bucky looks back at him, sees him following his gaze, and it hits Sam that the only reason why he’d woken up is because Bucky wanted him to. “I do,” Bucky rasps after a while, his voice like churning gravel to Sam’s ears, “you’re Steve’s friend. I... tried to kill you, twice.”

I’ve learned to separate you from the Winter Soldier, he thinks he wants to say, chooses not to. Too much for a first meeting. “Okay. Do you know why I’m looking for you?”

Somehow, Bucky’s frown gets deeper. “Yeah. Because of Steve. He wants me to be someone I used to be, wants his friend back.”

Sam swallows dryly again. “And are you? His friend?”

“I’m not his enemy,” Bucky answers, and that’s as close as Sam can probably get to a clear answer. Bucky fishes something out of his pocket, tosses it at Sam. It lands on his blanket—a USB drive. “Intel, on Hydra bases the Avengers haven’t discovered yet. Most of them are Soviet-era, so they’re not as technologically advanced as the others, but they’re still operational in many other ways. A lot of Hydra’s people escaped to these, when the files were first released.”

“Basically untraceable,” Sam says, and Bucky nods, like that wasn’t just the most words Sam’s ever heard from him. Then, “how’d you know which bases the Avengers haven’t found yet?”

Bucky levels a look at him that feels vaguely like do you even need to ask? “This is all I can give you,” he says after a short, uncomfortable silence, “do with it what you will. Show it to them, burn it, whatever. I’ll get to them myself if they don’t.”

He gets up from the chair, and Sam sits up and says, “wait, what do I tell Steve?”

Sam’s still a little floored every time he sees Bucky look directly at him, the memory of his cold, fearful blue eyes in those pictures still fresh on Sam’s mind. “Don’t tell him I found you. I don’t want him knowing where I am. Not yet,” Bucky says, his face an imperceptible mask. “I’ll show myself when I’m ready.”

Before Sam can say anything else, Bucky opens the window and climbs out, leaving him alone. He wonders if this is the last time, or just one of many times to come.

It’s the latter.

Sam’s not sure how it becomes a thing, but it does. The visits in the night only actually pick up in Belgrade, a full month after their first meeting in Tirana, and Bucky gives him another drive. Updated, he’d said, and it sure was; Hydra’s losing bases to the Avengers’ and Bucky’s combined yet separate efforts, and they’ve been clambering over each other to swim to the top, politicians and corporations without an inkling of loyalty to the cause turning on each other.

“It’s a far cry from their Red Skull days,” Bucky had told him simply, as casually as talking about the weather with his ass planted on the armchair in the corner of Sam’s room, and if Sam had to guess when it became a thing, it was then.

A week after Belgrade, Bucky sneaks into his room in Brașov with a bag of branzoaice in hand and a hesitant offer to share. A week after that, he sneaks into his room in Iași with a box of Rom chocolate and a discussion about new, weird social expectations. A week after that, he sneaks into his room in Chișinău with cheese pie and a story about him and Steve shooting the shit back in ‘35. A week after that, Sam rents a hotel room not far from the Muzeul de Istorie si Etnografie in Balti and leaves the door unlocked, and does it for all the times they meet after.

“Why do you visit me in every hotel I stay at?” Sam finds himself asking one day, while he and Bucky are eating cream puffs. Sam had passed by a bakery that day, bought a dozen with the intention to share, and was pleased when Bucky came that night, silently sneaking in from the window like scaling walls is nothing out of the norm for him. Likely isn’t.

“You want me to go?” he asks back, but they both know he doesn’t mean it. Sam wouldn’t want that either; it seems that Bucky’s fine company when he isn’t trying to kill him. “You’re... uncomplicated.”

“Uh-huh,” Sam says, expectant, not really sure what that’s supposed to mean. He’s a simple guy, but not that simple.

“I don’t have any existing emotional baggage with you,” Bucky explains through a mouthful of cream. “Our history’s very recent. Uncomplicated.”

“You stole my steering wheel, grounded me, and kicked me off a helicarrier,” Sam notes blandly, and if this had been the first, second, or even third time he’s ever mentioned this, Bucky would’ve frozen up, gotten flighty, and tried to figure out how to say sorry for all of those things at once or just ran away. But it isn’t.

Instead, Bucky shrugs and says, “less complicated than being somebody’s dead best friend.”

The weeks after that are pretty docile. Sam follows leads that follow him into his hotel room and eat whatever pastries and desserts he buys. He calls Steve once a week, feeds him a lie he doesn’t feel very guilty about telling, all the while sitting in bed and watching whatever local show is playing while Bucky sneaks into his room and tries macarons and franzbrötchens and Pop Rocks.

It’s strangely domestic. He’s comfortable with Bucky in a way that he feels like he shouldn’t be, and Bucky’s comfortable with him in a way they both don’t actually understand, naturally gravitating to each other. Bucky reasons with the same thing—uncomplicated—every time Sam asks, and eventually, he stops asking, just makes space for Bucky in this new transitory life.

Sometimes they go out. Rather, sometimes Sam goes out, sees the rest of the world in the form of museums, libraries, cathedrals, cafés, and parks, and Bucky shadows him like the ghost story he used to be. One day, he visits the Galleria Borghese while he’s in Rome, looks at the statues as if he actually gives a shit about art. He comes across one with a man and a woman turning into a tree posed together.

“Apollo and Daphne,” he reads out loud, looking at the plaque, “by a guy named Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Sounds conceited.”

“They say the best angle to look at it is from the right,” Bucky says, obscure and out of plain sight but standing close enough to Sam that he can feel his presence. “Is it?”

Sam looks at it for a while, looks at the expressions immortalised on the marble. Daphne is in a perpetual scream, fear evident on her face as her hands become tree branches, feet blending into earth and roots. Apollo is in a similar state of disarray, looking distraught as he watches her, expressions captured in almost grotesque and voyeuristic detail.

“Do you know about the myth behind this?” Bucky asks him. Sam shakes his head, still looking at the statue. “Well, I don’t know all that much about it,” he says, “but if I remember it right, it’s a story about a chase.”

“A chase?” Sam asks quietly, hand on the strap of his bag. Of all the statues to pick. “Who’s chasing who?”

“Apollo chasing Daphne. He pissed off Eros, the god of love, and he shot Apollo with an arrow of love and Daphne with an arrow of hate,” Bucky explains, his voice a low, cool baritone, “so Apollo chases after Daphne, tells her to come to him and love him, but she doesn’t; she can’t. She asks her father, Peneus, to help her escape Apollo, so he turns her into a tree to protect her.”

“Is that so,” Sam murmurs, almost too quiet to be heard; Bucky hears him clearly. It’s all that matters in this limbo of a moment.

“Yeah,” he replies, “eventually, Apollo finds her just as she turns into a tree and vows to honour her forever, and leaves her alone.” Sam hears him sigh. “I think I get it.”

When Sam turns around, he isn’t there.

Bucky comes back.

He’s there when Sam’s in Florence, sitting in his hotel room and eating chocolate mousse, and Sam stops questioning everything. He wonders if Bucky ever stops and thinks about what they’re doing, when it went from Sam chasing Bucky to Bucky following Sam. He wonders if Bucky ever thinks about those Hydra bases that he dumped into the Avengers’ hands, if he ever felt like taking care of them himself. He wonders if Bucky feels the electricity between them, if he notices how Sam’s eyes linger and how close they sit when he reaches over to pluck a piece of chocolate out of the pile Bucky’s accumulated.

Bucky looks at him through his lashes when Sam leans a little too far into Bucky’s space when he tells a joke, something about Sam’s chosen moniker, and he thinks, oh. Bucky listens raptly when Sam talks about his family, smiling softly when Sam talks about his mother, and he thinks, oh. Bucky offers him a candied cherry with his left hand and leaves it resting palm up when Sam takes it, and he thinks, oh, I could love him, maybe.

He could. He might. He takes a bite out of the cherry, the flavour bursting in his mouth. Bucky watches him with half-lidded sky blue eyes. He could. He might.

In Milan, Steve calls while Bucky’s there.

It slipped Sam’s mind that Tuesdays on whichever time zone he finds himself in are the unofficial check-in times with Steve. He’d been careful in feeding Steve small white lies, finding it hard to feel guilty when he knows it’s for Bucky’s own good. Steve’s his friend, and he loves Steve, trusts him more than he thought he would’ve, but Sam knows how Steve can get. Bucky needs the time and space away to be his own person.

Sam laughs at himself, privately, for acting like that was the only reason, that he’s doing this solely for Bucky’s benefit. He allows himself the indulgence of Bucky’s company, of talking to someone who listens, of being around someone that looks at him the way Bucky does. Of being around Bucky, who purses his lips when he smiles and tucks his hair behind his ear when he’s thinking, who says Riley’s name gently like he knew him, who says nothing when Sam tears up at pet documentaries.

They’re doing something similar to that, watching an exposition on Nile alligators on Sam’s hotel room bed while eating custard and chocolate bomboloni, when his phone starts ringing. Sam picks up the phone as Bucky’s eyes stay on the screen, acting enraptured by the closeup shot of the alligator’s sand-white scales, despite the guarded line of his shoulders and the stiff movement of his hand reaching into the box of bomboloni.

Sam answers the call and puts it to his ear, knowing immediately who it is the moment the phone rang. “Hey Steve,” he says into the receiver, seeing Bucky from the corner of his eye tense up and nearly crush the bombolone in his hand. He’s stock still like Steve’s somehow watching from the call, so Sam presses his knee a little further out, knocking it against Bucky’s thigh.

“Hi Sam,” Steve’s tinny voice comes in, and Sam knows he doesn’t need to put him on speaker for Bucky to hear what he says, “how are things? You still in Rome?”

“I’m doing alright, and no, I’ve been in Milan for a few days now, why?” Sam asks, glancing at Bucky. He’s looking at the pastry in his hand like it offended him, tongue darting out to lick at the powdered sugar on his lip. “Are you guys alright? Did something happen?”

“Well, no, it’s just—” Steve sighs, sounding tired. “We received, uh, a package recently. Addressed from Rome, but when we traced the place, it was from an apartment complex in a street that doesn’t actually exist. We made sure it wasn’t hosting any dangerous material, and when we opened it, all the package had was a USB drive.”

Bucky actually looks at him then, brow raised in question as he finally returns to himself, taking a bite out of his bombolone. Sam blinks at him innocently, deliberately, his eyes alternating between Bucky’s eyes, the soft pastry between his titanium fingers, and his sugar-flecked mouth. “What’s in the drive? Have you checked yet?” Sam asks, swallowing after he does. The room feels like it’s upped in temperature.

“Yeah, we did, after JARVIS did a clean sweep to make sure it wasn’t dangerous,” Steve says, sounding a little shaky. “All of the files there were about Hydra bases, Sam—bases we weren’t even aware existed. There had to be more than fifty bases detailed in those files. Fifty.” Steve laughs derisively. “It’s like they kept multiplying and never figured out when to stop. Those bases, though, we never would’ve found ‘em on our own. No one had that kinda intel, not even Natasha, so it had to come from inside.”

“Do you mean to say...” Sam trails off, maintaining eye contact with Bucky through low lashes, admiring the way the black of his pupils expand to overtake the cool blue of his irises. Sam feels overwhelmed by the weight of his gaze, the way his eyes track Sam’s face like he’s committing everything to detailed memory.

“Yeah. I think-I think it might’ve been Bucky,” Steve says, but Sam can barely hear him through the pounding of his heart, “I think he put all of this together and sent it to us. I think he wants us to focus on Hydra instead of him.”

“Maybe he does,” Sam replies as neutrally as he can, glancing down at Bucky’s mouth when he reaches up to take a bite of his bombolone, and finds that he wants to taste the sweetness of the chocolate cream on his tongue. “Are we calling the search off, then?”

“Well, I mean, the Avengers will be the ones to deal with the new bases,” Steve replies, sounding sheepish, “so, if you’re still up to the task...”

“Yeah, of course I am,” Sam says, watching the sugar flake onto Bucky’s dark stubble, “I told you I’d see this through, didn’t I? I’m too invested now to just drop it.”

He sees the look on Bucky’s face, the way his brow raises in an expression of are you? He nods, and something clears in Bucky’s expression. “Thank you, Sam, really. You don’t know how much this means to me.” There’s some rustling and beeping in the background, then someone muffled talking to Steve. “Yeah, okay. Hey, look, Sam, I’m sorry but I gotta get going. We found a good place to start with the bases.”

“Yeah, no problem. Call me if anything changes,” Sam says distractedly, letting Steve end the call before he tosses his phone aside, just as Bucky pounces and basically smashes their faces together, kissing Sam with a hurriedness and desperation that he feels both blindsided by and burning from anticipation with.

Bucky kisses like he fights, Sam realises. Like it’s his last chance every time, like he’s a cornered animal trying desperately to find an out. Sam slows them down, gets Bucky to roll over so Sam’s on top, turns their kisses from heated and rushed to slow and savouring. He feels more than sees Bucky relax, the way he sighs through his nose and the way his eyes flutter shut, hands coming up to rest on Sam’s waist and sliding up and down his hips and thighs. The plates of his arm snag on Sam’s jeans and Bucky wrings a hiss out of Sam when his teeth nip at his lip, and it’s perfect in all of its imperfection.

They don’t get any further than that, and Sam’s glad for it. He doesn’t know what it is they’re doing, doesn’t know if Bucky’s even ready for that conversation, so he just holds Bucky in his arms like he’s smaller than he actually is when they finally part. Sam feels the outline of Bucky’s ribs under his faded henley, the small width of his waist, and realises why he loves the pastries so much.

It’s been months since Hydra had him, he thinks, but they never taught him how to eat. The bombolone Bucky had been holding lays on the floor within Sam’s vision, flattened like the cream had been sucked out.

“Can we just,” Bucky starts, doesn’t finish. Sam gets it. He pulls Bucky closer, nestles his face against warm brown hair, traces the lines of his body with ease. Sam says nothing in response, simply holding Bucky because they’ve got nowhere else they need to be.

He strokes Bucky’s side, feels him relax further into his arms. He doesn’t know what they’re doing, but he’s glad they came across this.

(Later, he’ll wonder why this is what set them off. He’ll ask Bucky, tasting of grocery store rosé and of each other, and Bucky will tell him with a smile on his face, well, Milan’s romantic, isn’t it?)

He hasn’t had a nightmare in days.

It’s strange, though his nightmares come in waves rather than regular occurrences, usually more around the fall season. Riley’s still fresh in his mind four years later, still makes an appearance in his dreams every now and then, and he figures that he’ll never really move past that. Most of the time, it’s about the fall, an RPG knocking Riley clean out of the sky, wing pack busted and dropping hundreds of feet while Sam watched and watched and watched. It wouldn’t have mattered if the wing pack had stayed intact; the explosion would’ve killed him immediately, cooked him alive even though it had only hit his wings. His subconscious either doesn’t know this or doesn’t acknowledge it; Riley still screams when he falls.

Sometimes, in those dreams, Riley would survive. He’d survive the explosion, the fall, the two days it took for them to finally find the canyon he ended up in. He’d survive and he’d loom over Sam’s face, shake him into wakefulness, and demand why didn’t you save me, you were right there, you should’ve done more, you should’ve cared. He’d wrap his fingers around Sam’s throat, bony and colder than they always were, and he’d squeeze until Sam woke up.

After he started reading Bucky’s files, it had been like his mind found fresh nightmare fodder. He’d dream about Riley being shot out of the sky, the darkness making it difficult to see who’d taken him out, but sometimes he would see a flash of metal and the silhouette of a man propping up a launcher. He’d dream about the Soldier coming into his barracks at night, Riley sleeping on the bed across from him, and he’d try to stand up, scream, do something as the Soldier reached for a knife and positioned it right on Riley’s neck. He’d dream about Riley taking the Soldier’s place, tortured for weeks and months and years all while Sam watched like some kind of voyeur, crying and sobbing behind a wall of glass, the Asset will experience excruciating pain if the arm, the leg, the large intestine is removed, but the Asset is Riley and Bucky and neither all at once.

After one such night in a hotel room in Ville Haute, Sam had woken up, shivering and shaking and fighting the urge to puke, clutching at his head like he could rip it off and stop his racing heart. He’d forgotten that he no longer slept alone, that he changed hotel rooms by the city like clothes but slept next to the same man nearly every night, a man that would leave before he did so he could pretend to pick up the trail. He’d forgotten that a mismatch of arms, one made of blood and bone and the other of metal and circuits, could provide comfort to him like he’d never known before.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Bucky had whispered to him, eyes clear and blue and bright and alive, so alive, more than he could say of Riley or the Soldier’s deadeye stare. Sam had shaken his head no, because the nightmare was already slipping away from him and he’d wanted nothing more than to forget. In turn, Bucky held him throughout the night, holding him close with his right arm and stroking his chest with his left, using something meant for destruction for comfort, speaking softly to Sam about nothing.

That had been the last nightmare he’d had of Bucky, who he’d fall asleep and wake up next to on most days, who he knew was alive and made of sturdier stock than anyone else he’d seen. From Trier to Koblenz to Frankfurt, he’d followed Bucky, went to see places like the Palmengarten while Bucky spoke softly about a memory involving a neighbour in Antwerp and her sweet maudlin, all the while eating schokokuss and fresh-baked buchtel in sparsely decorated hotel rooms.

He only realises his nightmares about Bucky have gone away while they’re in Munich, lounging in soft sheets and sipping unbelievably expensive apricot wine, tucked against each other and laughing quietly about everything and nothing. Like they’re different men living different lives; weak, fleeting shots at normalcy that last no longer than the time they have together.

“Would be nice to do this all the time,” Sam sighs, during a lull in conversation. Bucky hums in his arms, head pillowed on his shoulder. “Just sitting here, doing this,” sleeping and waking up the next day without dreaming of you living through a hundred deaths, “it seems nice to have every day.”

Bucky hums again, turning his head slightly to press a kiss against Sam’s neck, soft and tender. “It does,” he says, “but I know you, Sam, and I—well, I don’t know me, not fully, but enough.” He reaches down to take Sam’s hand, the one not holding a wine glass, and lifts it up to press a kiss against the back of it. “You’re not done with all of this yet, and neither am I.”

Sam chuckles, but he’s right. We’ll fight until we drop.

One night, Bucky has a nightmare.

They’re in Málaga when it happens, sleeping in a hotel room with a sprawling view of the Castillo de Gibralfaro in the distance. Before they’d gone to bed, Sam had talked about how spoiled he’s becoming, practically cradled in Bucky’s arms while eating chocolate from his fingers and letting the dramatic murmurs of Spanish telenovelas fill the quiet. You’re turning me into a kept man, Barnes, he’d told Bucky, to which he grinned from ear to ear and smothered Sam in kisses. Hopelessly hopeful, hopelessly intrigued, hopelessly mundane.

He’d gone to bed with Bucky wrapping him in his arms, almost possessive in the way he holds him, the plates of his metal arm slowly warming from where it’s trapped between Sam’s body and the mattress and leaving marks on his skin. Sam had drifted off to the solid press of Bucky’s chest to his back, lips gently pressed against his neck and stubble tickling the skin there. Then, what could be hours or minutes later, Sam startles awake with the feeling of Bucky’s arms tightening and tightening around him.

“Bucky,” he whispers, the mechanical whirrs of the metal arm adding to his growing anxiety, “Buck, hey,” he tries again, louder this time, and his arms grow tighter until Sam’s sure he’s going to bruise, “Bucky—shit, Bucky!”

Bucky gasps awake, wrenching away from Sam so fast that he ends up on the floor in a blur of movement, panting and gasping for air like he’d been choked. Sam winces as the cool air rushes his warm, pressed skin, sitting up from the bed and looking at Bucky. He runs his fingers through his hair and hides behind it as Sam rubs his arms, hovers close by. “Baby?” he calls out worriedly.

“I—” Bucky starts and stops just as abruptly, shaking as he pulls his legs closer to his face, burying his head to his knees. “I-I don’t—” Unbelievably small, rocking back and forth on the heels of his feet, the Asset in fetal position in corner A, a prisoner to his own mind.

“Hey, hey, hey, it’s okay,” Sam says, moving closer to the edge of the bed but maintaining some distance so Bucky doesn’t feel crowded, “you’re okay, just-just breathe, Bucky,” he coos, speaking as softly as he can as he reaches out with his hand, palm faced upwards as an offering. Bucky cowers away from it, shaking so violently Sam almost feels it, so he slows down, letting his hand fall flat right where Bucky can see it. “I’m not gonna hurt you, Bucky, I won’t,” he says, likely can’t, he thinks, “you can’t hurt me either, I know it, so focus on my breathing, okay? Try to match it.”

Sam takes controlled breaths, breathing in for three seconds, holding for three, and exhaling for six, repeating the process over and over again until he sees Bucky’s shoulders begin to slump, the tension coiled there releasing with every inhale-exhale. Sam keeps his palm exposed, the pain in his arms slowly fading as he says, “you wanna come back up here, sweetheart?”

Bucky’s still controlling his breathing, no longer shaking as much, but when he looks up at Sam, he can see the glassiness of his eyes and his lashes wet with tears even in the dark, and it’s such a heart-wrenching sight that Sam can’t help but extend his hand a little further. “Come on, it’s okay,” Sam croons, and eventually Bucky gets to his feet and takes Sam’s hand, letting himself be pulled back into bed.

It doesn’t take much to maneuver Bucky into his arms, hugging him close like he’s done for Sam multiple times before. He’s never known Bucky to have nightmares, or at least nightmares so startling that he’d launched himself off the bed, so he doesn’t prod, doesn’t pry. He lets Bucky settle into his arms, hands stroking his sides gently while avoiding the puckered skin where his metal arm joins into his shoulder.

Once he feels Bucky calm down a little more, he asks quietly, “do you want to talk about it?”

Bucky considers his words, swallowing dryly as he tucks himself impossibly closer into Sam’s chest. “No,” he replies after some time, the word rough on his tongue. Then, he reaches up to lightly touch Sam’s arm, where the skin there will likely darken and bruise. “I’m sorry for hurting you,” Bucky tells him, keeping his touch fleeting.

Sam presses a kiss to the top of Bucky’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” he says, “go back to sleep. I’ll be right here.”

“You’re not worried?” Bucky asks, unbelievably small and wrecked. “That I might... hurt you again?”

Sam shakes his head, a small movement in order to not jostle Bucky. He tucks his face into his neck, ignoring the tips of Bucky’s hair tickling his brow. “Not one bit.”

Steve asks Sam to be an Avenger, and the first thing he says is thanks, but no thanks.

It’s right after the mess in Sokovia, a year into his ‘search’ of Bucky, when Steve asks him to become an Avenger. The Avengers have been through the wringer in the span of that few weeks; rogue AIs quoting Stark one-liners, international catastrophes, the devastation of entire cities. It’s a lot in a short amount of time, and Sam can’t help but be glad that he’d turned down Steve’s offer of staying a little longer for the afterparty when he’d visited the night Ultron attacked.

Steve hadn’t asked him if he wanted to be an Avenger, then, at least not directly. Steve had looked at him when Sam asked about the fight after they finally retrieved the Sceptre, eyes bright with the same glint that had him looking over Sam’s file and his various qualifications a little too closely when he first joined up. It made him a little more cautious about his words, careful to not imply anything more than what he wanted to say. He knew a headhunter when he saw one.

The thought follows him all the way to Lisbon, from the airport to the taxi to the Lisboa Pessoa, looking at the view of the five o’clock sunset from the balcony. He’s sitting on one of the wooden chairs, basking in the sinking sun while Bucky sits on the chair beside him, only separated by a small table. He’s looking at the sunset too, comfortable silence between them as they let their presences speak for themselves.

“He asked me to be an Avenger,” Sam says after a while, glancing at Bucky. There’s a drink in his hand, dark red like wine but sweeter than, from the sip Bucky offered earlier. It’s cranberry, sweet and sour all at once, but the sourness comes as an aftertaste. It makes his tongue feel dry with the residue.

“Okay,” Bucky says, taking another sip. He looks at Sam, dark lashes glowing caramel and ice blue eyes hidden behind half-lidded eyelids. His cheeks are dusted pink from the warmth, throat working to swallow the mouthful of his drink, day old stubble roughing up his otherwise soft look. He’s wearing Sam’s shirt. “I imagine you had something to say to that.”

Sam hardly realises that he hadn’t followed that up with anything else, so he blushes and looks back out at the distance. Can’t feed Bucky’s ego too much by letting slip that he’d forgotten to continue the moment his eyes landed on him. He sighs, setting a little into his chair. “I said no.”

A moment passes, and Bucky says, curtly, “what?” Then another moment passes, long enough for Sam to steal his drink from his hand and take a sip, then Bucky asks, not without feeling, “why? Don’t you want to be an Avenger?”

Sam thinks about it a little more. Being an Avenger means tiring missions, trying to do the right thing, soaring in the air with wings of a technologically advanced make. It means fighting alongside Earth’s mightiest defenders, being around Steve and Nat, officially going back into that kind of life. It means leaving Bucky and their little slices of normalcy in hotel rooms and cafés behind, seeing him less and less, being around Steve’s earnest, weepy eyes and Natasha’s sharp, knowing gaze.

“I don’t know,” he says honestly, after a short silence, “I prefer this ghost story over fighting aliens and robots, but.” But what?

Bucky smiles at him, but Sam can tell there’s something else hidden underneath it. He lays his right palm out onto the table, looks at Bucky meaningfully, and smiles when Bucky places his metal hand in his. He touches Bucky’s wrist, the rigid plates and humming metal there, slides his fingers up to the hem of his long sleeve. “What’s wrong?”

Bucky doesn’t say anything immediately. He looks out at the distance, where the sun is setting in the horizon, bathing the sky in swathes of tangerine and honey. Sam watches and admires Bucky, the way his hair goes golden where the sunlight hits the thinnest strands and the way his nose scrunches when the wind tickles him there.

He’s enamouring, Sam thinks, and figures he might be enamoured in turn.

“I feel like you should be with them,” Bucky answers him, still not looking at Sam, “you belong to that life. Doing good and saving lives. Not sitting here and...” He doesn’t finish.

Sam lets his palm graze over Bucky’s, the pressure finally getting him to look at him. His eyes are earnest, as honest as the sunset. “Do you want me to go?”

“No,” Bucky says immediately, without hesitation. Then, with a small smile, he adds, “that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.”

“I see,” Sam says quietly. He doesn’t want to go either, but he can’t deny the truth; Steve needs him. Needs a team, but specifically one with Sam in it. The Avengers are important enough to him to put a hold on their search for Bucky. “Okay. I’ll go.”

“I knew you would,” Bucky tells him, smiling in a way that doesn’t reach his eyes. Sam understands, feels that undercurrent of bittersweetness. “You gonna leave tonight?”

I should, Sam thinks, I should call Steve and tell him I’ll go, and he’ll send me a jet so I can go home.

“Tomorrow,” he answers, standing up from his seat and pulling Bucky along with him into the bedroom, “I’ll go tomorrow.”

Bucky’s smile looks more sincere then, and he follows Sam.

Sam travels when there isn’t a mission on his schedule.

He’s officially an Avenger now, and it’s everything Steve said it would be and more. They fight bad guys, they do good things, their tech is always the most advanced, and Sam’s back in the air. The wind is wonderful against his skin, along with the adrenaline that rushes through him and seizes his lungs in the best way possible. He feels free in a way only the wings can provide, like Icarus burning into nothing for his love of the sun.

But when there’s nothing to do, in the weeks or months that span between missions where Sam flies Falcon, he flies commercial. His first chance off of training and their first mission as a group, he does it in the hopes that Bucky would find him, sitting in a Café Méricourt in a little corner in Paris. He orders a café noisette and two plates of madeleines, eating off of one and leaving the other on the opposite side of the table. It isn’t very busy that day, the early wisps of a gloomy Tuesday morning, so much so that no one bats an eye at the conspicuously dressed American sipping coffee and obviously waiting for someone to join him.

He doesn’t have to wait very long, in the end. Bucky slides into the seat in front of him, like he’d only excused himself to the bathroom before and was simply coming back to retake his seat. Natural, carefully so, from the way he takes a bite out of one of the madeleines precariously stacked on the plate in front of him. Sam doesn’t say anything, just lets the illusion of no time passed settle between them like a warm, familiar fleece. Bucky reaches over and takes his coffee, sipping it before wincing at the bitterness.

“Should’ve ordered your own,” Sam tells him with a smile, the first words between them in over two months. Bucky quirks his lips up, not exactly a smile—couldn’t, Bucky told him once, not when there are other people to see—and looks at him with unmistakably tender eyes. Doesn’t say anything, not until they both finish eating and Sam gets up, walks back to his hotel room alone. Leaves the door unlocked.

Bucky comes in not long after, shutting the door behind him and clicking the lock closed. Sam stays seated in an armchair in the corner of the room, lets Bucky do a full sweep to make sure they aren’t bugged, lets him do it twice, stays silent the whole time even as Bucky wordlessly asks him to move away from the armchair. The room is safe, private in all the ways that matter. Just like that, Sam stands, meets Bucky halfway, and takes his face in his hands and kisses him.

“I missed you, sweetheart,” Bucky murmurs against his lips, greedy for more. Sam kisses him again, lets the press of his lips and the insistence of his tongue immortalise I missed you too onto Bucky’s skin. Falls into the bed together, touching and feeling and exploring in the most intimate ways. They’ve never quite done this before, more used to kissing and not getting any further than that, but this-this feels right.

“Let me,” Bucky asks him reverentially, shaking with it, “let me take care of you,” and Sam does, Christ. Sam would let him, always.

He lets him take the lead, lets Bucky lower him onto the bed and take him apart to put him back together again, lets him kiss and strip and lick and suck like there’s nothing else he wants, needs more than this. Bucky peels off clothes and layers until it’s just them, skin pressing against skin, Sam’s head thrown back against the soft pillows and mouth parted in reverie as Bucky explores every inch of him like Sam is some kind of gospel theology, worshipping this holy ground. Bucky wants to give him everything, and Sam wants to take all of it, and that’s just the way of things between them.

I love you, Sam thinks, doesn’t say, because he doesn’t need to, not with the way Bucky touches him, the way he feels on him, the way he loves on him without words. He loses himself to the sensations, says his prayers and praises, puts in as much as Bucky lets him. Everything in Sam’s world boils down to this one moment, suspended from reality, zeroing in on him and Bucky and Bucky and him.

“I don’t know,” Bucky says, much later, “if I can do... this all the time.”

Sam looks up at him, letting the hairs of his goatee rub against Bucky’s chest, sending a shiver down the man’s spine. It endears Sam, how sensitive and reactionary Bucky is, like every touch is the first one he’s ever felt. He wants to give Bucky more of those firsts.

“Making love?” Sam asks softly, letting his breath warm Bucky’s skin even more than it already is. There’s a flash of recognition in Bucky’s eyes, deeply blue and sincere, like he’s connected dots Sam doesn’t see. Bucky looks at him for a long time, enough that it should be uncomfortable. It isn’t.

“Yes,” Bucky says after a while, belated, “making love.”

Sam smiles, breaks eye contact so he can pillow his head on Bucky’s chest. A part of him is relieved, knowing they’re both right where they want to be. The rest of him is content. “That’s fine,” Sam tells him, his lips grazing Bucky’s skin, “I don’t need it as much, either.”

Bucky doesn’t respond, but his hand, warm and firm, strokes his side and speaks for itself. 

One day, when Sam least expects it, Bucky says, “I’m ready to talk to Steve.”

Sam looks at him, hand in his hair stilling for a moment before continuing to stroke it, fingers running through strands like sand. They’re naked from the waist up, both covered in kisses and bite marks, but they don’t get any further than just a little fooling around. Sam understands, knows that Bucky’s been through too much in virtually so little time, knows he’s afraid of something. Sam doesn’t mind; he’s always been a little different like that, finding more satisfaction and enjoyment in holding someone in his arms and being held than in sex.

“I’m glad,” Sam says, because he is, but he can sense an undercurrent of anxiety in Bucky, so he waits for him to continue.

The silence stretches, long enough that Sam figures Bucky doesn’t have anything else to say. Then, he says, “I remember the first time I asked about him, too long ago, when I was still...” he trails off, but Sam knows what he means. Knows all too well.

Subject #56898 was taken out of cryostasis on this day, 16.04.1946, Sam remembers reading, translated directly from Russian by Natasha, it lashed out and demanded information regarding Steven Rogers, the fallen Captain. It is proof that method A1 is not effective after short-term cryostasis. We must move on to method A2.

“I killed one of their doctors,” Bucky continues, keeping his breathing careful and controlled with his prickly cheek pillowed on Sam’s chest, “made them tell me where Steve was. They told me he was dead, and I didn’t believe them,” he laughs without humour, a soft rumble against Sam, “then they strapped me down and started shocking me. They thought they shocked the memory out of me.” He presses his cheek a little more firmly against Sam’s shoulder. “He was all I could see every time they did it. I wanted to forget him.”

“But you didn’t,” Sam says before he really thinks about it, and Bucky freezes up.

“You’ve read my files,” he says flatly, so tense in Sam’s arms that it’s like holding a statue. Sam nods, doesn’t deny it; he can’t, not after what they’ve been through. “So why are you here?”

“I didn’t mean to be,” Sam tells him honestly, the hand not in Bucky’s hair stroking him from the nape of his neck to the small of his back. “I started looking for you because I was obsessed with achieving some form of justice,” he continues, even as Bucky somehow freezes even more, “it changed, somewhere along the way. It’s not like that for me anymore.”

“And do you think,” Bucky says thickly, “that because I’m lounging with you in bed, he isn’t just waiting for a moment to strike? That I’m not that person anymore?”

“You never were,” Sam tells him with conviction. Bucky turns enough to look him in the eyes.

He trails his metal fingertips up Sam’s side, in a way that could’ve been ticklish if Sam were. “I could crush your ribs with just this hand. I could kill you in ways you won’t have even heard about.”

Sam looks back at him, eyes hard and challenging. “So do it.” He takes Bucky’s metal hand, ignores the way he flinches, and presses it to his throat. Lets him slide his titanium fingers around the bump of his throat. “Prove it. Kill me.”

Bucky breathes hard—probably doesn’t even realise it, if Sam knows him. He hears the gears and mechanics shift and recalibrate in Bucky’s arm, knows that Bucky could tighten his grip without breaking a sweat. He recalls Sarah’s last words to him when he’d been running away from everything, many years ago; you’re so fucking addicted to danger, Sam, she’d said, chasing after it like a high. She’d been right then, and she’s right now.

With Bucky’s hand still on his neck, he removes his hand from Bucky’s hair and cups his cheek. Anyone looking at them would’ve been lost at the sight; Bucky’s hand clamped around Sam’s throat, titanium thumb pressing into his pulse point, and Sam’s palm pressed against Bucky’s cheek, tender and gentle like a breeze.

They both lean in at the same time, chasing after the taste of each other. Addicted to danger.

Organising the conversation with Steve is easier than he thought it would be.

Sam initiates the meetup in Copenhagen, tells him about a strong lead. It’s technically the truth, but the moment Steve touches down and hugs him, Sam decides that he needs to know from Sam himself, sooner rather than later. Any later, he thinks.

“Steve,” he says, stopping Steve in his tracks when he hears Sam’s tone. They’re standing in a sparsely populated part of the airport, and Steve’s likely experiencing some jetlag, but this can’t wait. “You gotta know something, man.”

Steve’s face twists up into concern. Earnest, too earnest for his own good. “What is it?”

I found your boy, Sam thinks, or, no, he found me, kept seeking me out even when he didn’t need to, like he was interested right from the get-go, like he was lonely and needed to talk to somebody who understood, like he needed to talk to someone like you that wasn’t you. I’ve called you countless times with him in the room. We eat pastries and desserts and snacks together, drink coffee together, talk to each other about anything that comes to mind. I fell in love with him, and he fell in love with me, and I found your boy but he’s been with me for the better part of one and a half years. I found your boy and the nightmares about him stopped, Steve.

“I may not have told you everything about Barnes,” he begins, and tells Steve everything.

Steve’s quiet by the end of it, expression twisted into a cold mask. Sam hates it, can’t place that look on his face right, like it doesn’t belong on Steve. It doesn’t, not around him, but he knows he deserves it. “If he didn’t ask,” Steve says slowly, carefully, “would you have never told me?”

“Yes,” Sam says without hesitation, looking him in the eye. The bustle of the airport doesn’t distract him from this sole purpose of telling the truth. “If he kept asking me not to. I wouldn’t have.”

Steve’s jaw tightens, looking at Sam like he’s stripping him to bone. Sam sighs, looking down; he knows this play, knows how to make himself smaller in the moment to placate people like Steve. He lessens the tension in his shoulders, flicks his eyes down to Steve’s chest and shoulders, draws himself in a little lower. Part of him registers what he does and hates, hates that it’s to Steve.

Steve takes a long breath, controlled, and closes his eyes. In, then out, then his eyes open, some of the hardness gone. “Where is he now?” he asks flatly, shifting his hand from the handle of his bag enough that Sam can see where the rubber grip sports dents.

It’s not for him, Sam knows, because he knows Steve’s intensity, knows he has to take it out on this before he takes it out on someone else. “In my hotel room,” Sam replies, looking at his watch, “left him there about an hour ago. I told him I’d go pick something up,” he looks at Steve, carefully keeping his eyes on the space between Steve’s eyes, “if you don’t mind me passing by the bakery near here?” He chuckles a little, the sound only barely convincing to his own ears. “He’s got a bit of a sweet-tooth.”

Then and there, Steve’s eyes soften, expression relaxing slightly as he smiles a little at the fact. Part of Sam is relieved when he does, knows that while he might not be completely out of the woods, he won’t be subject to that simmering, angry Steve Rogers smoulder on the way back to the hotel. “I guess that’s never changed, huh?” he says, his smile going soft. “No, not at all. Lead the way.”

They walk to Andersen Bakery, keeping light conversation as Sam purchases whatever pastries and sweets look new to him. He finds out that Steve’s technically still on call, that he can’t afford to be away too long—like you, Sam doesn’t hear but feels all the same—but that he’d made time for Sam’s request. They spend the rest of the walk back to the hotel in silence, the anticipation building as they ride the elevator to Sam’s floor and end up in front of the door of his room.

He swipes the keycard, opens the door, and steps in, closing it behind Steve when he enters and meeting his gaze when he looks for it. He doesn’t think he’s in the wrong for keeping Bucky’s secret, a fact Steve’s just gonna have to grapple with on his own. For now, Sam watches the moment it dawns on Steve that they’re not the only people in the room.

“Buck,” Steve says faintly, no longer looking at Sam. He’s shocked, like the idea of Bucky being here hadn’t settled in until he saw him. It makes Sam smile a little; see-it-and-believe-it Rogers. “You’re here.”

Bucky stares at him for a long moment, before standing up from the armchair he’d been sitting in. Sam can see the moment Steve thinks Bucky might be coming towards him, watching Bucky with teary and hopeful eyes, until Bucky asks Sam, “what did you get?”

Steve looks at him in confusion, and Sam takes that as his cue to shake the paperbag in his hands, the sound of crumbs rattling in them. He steps closer to the table in the middle of the room, takes the wrapped romkugler, direktørsnegl, and hindbærsnitter out of the bag, and sets them on the table. “These seemed like the sweetest options. That one,” he points to the romkugler, “contains rum essence, but I figure you’re not too bothered by that.”

Bucky very nearly beams at him, says, “no, I’m not,” until he remembers that Steve is here, Steve, his best friend, just watching him and Sam with an even more shocked expression. “Hi, Steve,” Bucky says neutrally, and Sam knows this look; like he feels awkward, but he doesn’t know what exactly to do, so he comes across as cold and unfeeling.

“You and Sam,” Steve starts, doesn’t know how to finish. Sam looks at him expectantly, watches the series of complicated expressions on his face. Eventually, he decides on, “there’s something going on here, huh?”

“Is that really what you wanna start on?” Sam asks, looking at Steve seriously. Bucky sits on a chair by the table, looking at the pastries with interest before picking up a hindbærsnitte, halving it and giving the other half to Sam. He takes it, still looking at Steve who watches the exchange with something like green envy. Sam wonders if it’s because Bucky seems to trust Sam more than him, or if it’s because they have something he never did.

Steve swallows, looks at Bucky with an unreadable expression, tinged in grief and betrayal. Dramatic, Sam thinks. “I guess not,” he says, walking over to the seat in front of Bucky. He tenses up, eyes darting to Sam, and Sam figures that Bucky’s confidence in this conversation hinges on him being there. “You wanted to talk, Buck?” Steve asks him, looking every bit like the kicked puppy he is.

Sam turns towards the bedroom, dusting flakes of pastry off his hands, until he feels Bucky hook a finger in his jeans, stopping him in his tracks. When he looks at Bucky, he says, quietly, “don’t go.”

“I’ll only be in the other room,” Sam tells him just as softly, though for what reason, he’s not sure. He can feel the sharpness of Steve’s gaze, hear the turning of gears as he tries to reconcile his Bucky, loud and excitable, to this Bucky, reserved and looking at Sam like he’s—

“Okay,” Bucky relents, letting go of Sam’s hip with a pat to the dip of his back. Easy touches, comfortable and natural to them; whereas Bucky is touch-starved, bereft of soft holding and kind hands, Sam feeds off of touch, radiating comfort with his hands and body pressed up against Bucky’s. They fit in a strange and wonderful way, and if Sam craves touch that Bucky’s willing to give too, that’s between the two of them.

Sam spares Steve a glance, who briefly looks at him with a softened expression, before he goes to the bedroom and closes the door behind him, turning the TV on to block out the sounds of their talking. He lets it play on an episode of New Scandinavian Cooking and settles into the bed.

He’s lightly dozing when the door opens and Bucky slinks inside, silent as a mouse even though he undoubtedly heard Sam stir. He shuts the door and immediately crawls into bed with Sam, and Sam lets himself be maneuvered into being the little spoon, humming contentedly.

“Where’s Steve?” Sam asks him, tugging Bucky’s arms closer around his chest. Did it go well, he doesn’t ask, leaning down to press a kiss to a metal finger. It twitches at him, and he smiles sleepily from it.

“He’s in the living room,” Bucky murmurs, it went fine, he doesn’t say. “I let him have the couch,” he adds, sounding drowsy now, like the conversation sapped him, and they both fall asleep like that.

The next day, Sam wakes up first, putting a pot of coffee on. He can see the outline of Steve on the couch, smaller than he is, and can see the stillness of his body, his controlled breaths.

“We might as well talk,” Sam says, taking pity on Steve, knowing he’s coming up with ways to start a conversation. Steve blinks his eyes open and glances up, looking sheepish for a few moments before he’s getting up and walking over to Sam, sitting a little awkwardly on a stool by the island counter.

They don’t talk for a bit, just sit there by each other in silence. Then the coffee machine dings, and Sam takes two mugs and pours, adding a dash of cream to his and a teaspoon of sugar to Steve’s, passing the mug to him. “Thanks,” Steve murmurs, taking the mug and stirring. Sam sits in front of him, lets the silence drag on until Steve makes up his mind about what he wants to talk about.

“Bucky told me, about you two,” Steve starts, and adds, “only a little bit,” when Sam raises his brow in disbelief. “I gotta say, when I first asked you to help me look for him, this isn’t really the result I was expecting.”

From anybody else, Sam would’ve frowned, would’ve looked into the implications. If only he hadn’t been the one to introduce Grindr to Steve, which had been as awkward as it sounds. “I’m guessing you expected him to want to come with you?” he asks, watches for Steve’s expression, the way his jaw tightens slightly and his eyes avert to his steaming mug.

“Yes,” Steve replies simply, then sighs, “no, I don’t know. I hoped—he’d want to see me, I don’t know, a little sooner than this. I didn’t-I tried not to have expectations,” he amends, “but I just see his face, and I-I’ve dreamt about him, this, for ages, and now that he’s here it’s like—” he doesn’t want to see me, Steve doesn’t say, but Sam hears it well enough.

“He wouldn’t have asked to meet you if he didn’t want to,” Sam says matter-of-factly, levelling a steady gaze at Steve. “Like I said, if he never wanted to see you, I wouldn’t have told you about him. It was his choice, and I don’t think he regrets it.” Sam drinks from his mug, the liquid still too hot for anything more than a small sip. “You shouldn’t regret it either. It took him a while before he told me he wanted to see you.”

Steve nods, wisely says nothing else, and sips his coffee. There’s a lull in the conversation for a while, quiet as the morning light filters into the room through the glass balcony door. Sam glances at the door of the bedroom, slightly ajar with only the view of rumpled, draped sheets on the edge of the bed, where Bucky’s still sleeping. It fills him with a sort of domestic tenderness, knowing his man is sleeping in there, probably face first in fluffy hotel pillows and digging long, rigid marks into his skin from sleeping on top of his metal arm.

Steve catches the smile on his face and smiles in turn. “So, you and Bucky, huh?” he says, voice turning upwards in a teasing lilt as he leans more relaxedly against the counter.

Sam chuckles softly, looking away from the cracked bedroom door and at Steve. “Yeah,” he says fondly, “me and him.”

“It’s nice,” Steve tells him, warming his already warm hands against his mug. After a short silence, he says, “I remember the first time he told me he liked men as much as he liked women, back in ‘32,” he says, grinning, “he was in hysterics, thought that I was gonna hate him or whatever for it. That jerk, he knew I always had his back.”

“Had his back in more ways than one, so it seems,” Sam teases, earning himself a laugh and a light pinch to the arm. “I’m sure that wasn’t a big deal for you,” he says with a fond smile. Steve shakes his head.

“Nah. Told him, well, jeez, Buck, I was gearin’ up to tell you the same thing,” he quotes in perfect Brooklyn twang, to which Sam laughs, laughs until his cheeks hurt, and Steve smiles at him. It’s a soft smile, a common fixture between them when one or both of them do or say something stupid. It’s the fondness of a friendship built out of a strong bond on and off the field, with Sam seeing more than just the shield and the moniker and Steve seeing more than just the big smile and helpful hands.

It reminds him of before, when it’d just been the two of them trying their best to read up on everything Bucky’s been up to since DC. Long nights over at each others’ places, eating straight out of the fridge or ordering in, that time Steve misplaced a file and they had to overturn every piece of big furniture in Steve’s apartment until they found it in Sam’s; it made Sam feel the most at home as he possibly could for the first time since he got home four years ago by then.

Sam looks at the door again, coffee cup to his lips. The sheets poking out move slightly, shifting for a few moments before stilling again. Right. He has a different home now.

Two days after seeing Steve, on his last day in Copenhagen before he moves on to Gothenburg, Sam wakes up to the loud alarm of his phone and Bucky’s groggy groan of turn that off, Wilson, before I crush it. When he smacks his hand against the nightstand enough times and picks up his phone, he sets it to mute before taking the time to read the alert.

04/28/2016: EX-HYDRA on radar, mercenary activity in Nigeria. All skeleton personnel report to base, ASAP.

Sam never knew her, but he figures that Peggy was a good woman.

Decorated, definitely. A powerful, smart woman that didn’t let the world stop her in achieving a great many things. Headstrong, tactical, a beloved daughter, sister, mother, and grandmother. A great-aunt to Sharon Carter, which came as a surprise to both him and Steve. She’d always fought for what was right, one of the truly incorruptible people; even when things seemed dire for her, Margaret Carter did her utmost to uphold her belief in goodness and justice. She’d lived a long life and retired comfortably because of it.

He figures, even without knowing all of these, that she was a good woman, but he knows: to Steve, she’d been the best.

So he leaves Steve alone, lets him stay in the church for a little while longer and hangs back outside. He knows what it’s like to mourn all too well—for his dad, his mom after, then Riley only six years ago. He sits on a bench and looks up at the drowsy London sky, drab and dreary like all the life has been sucked out of it. Sleepy, even as the streets and buildings bustle with life. He’s seen more of Europe in the last two years than he has his entire life, and he figures, if he wanted to ever retire abroad, he wouldn’t mind it being there; far from the itchy heat of the Registan desert, farther still from the people and the memories he’d left behind.

“They say brooding is best left for birds,” he hears, and when Sam turns his head to look, Natasha is standing there, wavy fiery red hair styled perfectly on her shoulders, dressed in a business suit. Her smile is genuine, and Sam’s still a little floored by it sometimes, how easy her smiles come nowadays. He used to take it as a personal victory every time he got Nat to smile, even when it was to smirk at something he’d said. Now, two years later, she smiles like she knows Sam wants to see it, does it for his benefit, and maybe for herself too. “Is he in there?” She nods towards the church.

“Yeah,” Sam says, looking back out at the distance and watching the rest of the world carry on with life. He expects her to head on inside, give it another shot with Steve, but he knows Nat’s not stupid. She’s here to ask him the same thing she asked back at the compound, in more direct words now that no one’s listening, and Sam goes where Steve goes, sure, but he’s not mindless. He’s got his own reasons not to sign; reasons that are good enough that he knows it’s closer to Steve following him than it is the other way around.

Natasha sighs, then places a gentle hand on his shoulder, catching his attention. “It’s not too late to come with me,” Nat says, soft-spoken and careful. Sam loves her, loves her, he can’t not, because under all the layers of assassin and agent and spy, Nat is a good person, a good person Sam respects. Sam sees through her and sees that all of her covers are dripping with the desire to do good, to be good, from the day she and Steve showed up at his home until now. He loves her because she’s family, like Steve and Rhodey and Wanda and the others.

He loves her and he knows she loves him, which is why she’s asking. It softens and hurts his heart all at once.

“It is for me,” Sam tells her, looking at her now. He can see the nearly imperceptible crumble of her expression, before it smooths back up into a mask of her own making. He sighs, tired, and tries to smile at her. She deserves as much, stilted as it is. “It’s alright, Nat. You can tell them you tried to get through to me.” He tilts his head a little, aiming for relaxed and probably missing by a few miles. “I’ll even cite you as very convincing.”

Nat smiles, but there’s a note of disappointment to it. Sam feels the same way— effectively, he’s saying he’d rather be free than be with family. Shame that those are different things, now. “I’ll see you around, Wilson,” she says, patting his shoulder with her hand before she moves away, heels clicking against the cobblestone as she enters the church. Sam closes his eyes, opens them again moments later to look at the sky again. Thinks about better things.

“You really gotta go?” Bucky murmurs, still loose and sweet with sleep, his mop of hair covering most of his face. Sam pauses from his packing, smiles at him, and walks over.

“Yeah, I do,” Sam says, gently brushing away the hair from Bucky’s face so he could cup his cheek. Bucky exhales slowly, relaxing into Sam’s touch in a way that has yet to lose its novelty. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

“You better,” Bucky tells him, angling up to steal a kiss from Sam, “a guy gets used to this kind of spoiling, he can’t get enough of it.”

That was a week ago, right after they’d been alerted to Rumlow’s presence. He’s not sure where Bucky is now, since they’ve always worked on the assumption that he’ll find Sam in whatever European city he finds himself in, chipping away at Steve’s Avenger salary by trying the sweetest, flakiest pastries money could buy. He smiles to himself when he thinks about honey-sticky fingers and bright eyes and the press of metal against his waist.

“Good thoughts?” he hears, and he opens his eyes to see Steve standing there, looking a little weary. Sam nods, gestures for Steve to sit.

“Thinking about Bucky, is all,” Sam responds, crossing his legs and splaying his arm across the backrest. “Feels like there’s nothing on my mind but him anymore. Like some lovesick teenager.” He chuckles softly.

Steve laughs at that, leaning a little into Sam’s space and knocking his shoulder against his. “If he’s anything like himself, he’s the same way,” he says. “So, in between missions to save the world and all that, you and Bucky have just been expending team resources, jumping from hotel to hotel?”

“More or less,” Sam chuckles back, “not like Tony’s missing that money, anyway.” He sighs, pulling his lip between his teeth then back out again. The truth hurts, but the truth is the truth. “I guess that’s it for us, huh.”

Steve sighs next to him, a deep, tired sound. “I guess it is. Some part of me thinks... I don’t know. What do I gotta do just to stay in the fight, keep doing some good, you know?”

“I don’t know,” Sam replies honestly, “but if you figure that out, be sure to tell me. All I know is, I’m not gonna sit around and wait for a board of people to decide which fight I should stick my nose in or stay out of.” He scoffs, looking down at his slacks. “They think they can send troops into Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and think that they’ll come right out of it believing in the governments of the world to know what fight’s worth it and what isn’t.”

Steve doesn’t reply, just nods solemnly. Then, he dusts off his lap, looks at Sam for a long moment like he might want to say something meaningful, maybe a Steve-patented we do what we have to speech, before deciding against it. Instead, he holds a hand out and says, “wanna go get some lunch?”

Wherever it was that Sam expected to meet Bucky again, an abandoned garage wasn’t on his list of options.

The news broke while Steve was escorting Sharon to her hotel. Sam had seen glimpses of it on the TV, unable to believe the events of the day while they had lunch, and he’d asked Sharon if they could watch the news, see what’s going on. She’d let them up to her room, and there, he was faced with the fact of the matter: Bucky was being framed as the terrorist that bombed the UN.

Sam looked at the blurry shot of his face over and over, half-hidden behind a mask that exposed only his eyes and nose. It looked—wrong, and it didn’t make sense for any of this to happen, because Sam knew, saw for himself—Bucky had been himself for the better part of two years without a single hitch or stumble, the most of his past catching up to him being whenever he had a nightmare. Reconciling that Bucky, terrified of being the Soldier again, with the one being shown on the news, the alleged Winter Soldier making his comeback, seemed too far-fetched.

“That can’t be Bucky,” Sam had said firmly, shaking his head. He ignored Sharon’s inquisitive look and went straight for the rational. “He’s not stupid. If he was the Winter Soldier, if somebody did get to him, he’d wear something to conceal all of his face, or he wouldn’t let himself get caught on camera, or—”

“Sam,” Steve cut in gently, “it’s right there. I-I don’t know, maybe someone got to him, or... maybe something changed, while we were gone—”

“No,” Sam told him emphatically, “no, how-how could you say that, Steve? I know Bucky, he wouldn’t just—what, fucking turn evil because we left, because I left.”

“I know—”

“No, Steve, I know,” Sam interrupted with irritation lacing his words, “I know he isn’t like that anymore. I spent a year and a half with this new Bucky,” he said, ignoring Sharon’s incredulous expression, “and he may not be the best friend you once had, but he’s still a good man. He would never, even without me.”

Steve had lowered his shoulders and murmured an apology, guilted, and that was that. Then they were on a flight to Vienna to survey the damage done to the UN, aside from the casualties recorded on the news, and not long after, a flight to Bucharest. But because nothing could ever go so easily, Bucky starts running and before long, they’re on a van to Berlin, cuffed and awaiting a verdict on their hand in aiding and abetting a global fugitive, however innocent, in his escape.

To make matters worse, their gear gets confiscated and they’re effectively benched while the UN dealt with the Accords, all for none of it to mean anything because for some fucking reason, no one did a background check on the doctor they sent in to psychoanalyse Bucky. After a power surge that shuts down the entire facility, no one can get to Bucky until after the quack psychologist gets to him first and sets him loose on them.

“Bucky,” Sam gasps out, choking for air as Bucky grips him by the jaw and squeezes, “Bucky, you know me,” he wheezes, the blankness of Bucky’s face harrowing, then Bucky tosses him aside like he weighs nothing, like the last time they saw each other didn’t end in tender kisses and a promise to come back. No, Sam thinks blearily as the Soldier engages Steve, trying to pick himself back up, I made that promise to my Bucky. This isn’t him.

Hardly twenty minutes pass by before Sam, separated from Steve when he’d tried to catch up to the psychologist, finally finds them again, an unconscious Bucky slung over Steve’s shoulder. There’s a helicopter wing protruding from the lake they’d evidently crawled out of, but Sam sees the pained expression on Steve’s face, sees Bucky, unmoving, hauled like a sack of rice, and thinks, there’ll be time for that, later.

Back in the present, in a dreary, dusty garage tucked away about fifty miles from the JCT, Sam calls Steve over as Bucky begins to wake up, masking the thundering of his heart with a neutral expression and fooling no one, not even himself.

He swallows dryly, crossing his arms even as his back twinges in pain and his jaw aches. As it is now, his mind is a confusing place; two different versions of Bucky warring together, one being the man held close in his arms, languidly petting his chest and tasting of sweet tangerine, and the other being the man he’d just seen, crushing his jaw with a metal fist and throwing him across the room. That wasn’t him, his mind reminds himself, your Bucky is the one that you love, but it’s harder to believe it, to see past the bruises on his jaw and ribs, to see past his deadeye stare and the way his metal arm whirred and twisted to hurt Sam.

“Steve,” Bucky groans, looking up. Then he sees Sam, and there’s this split-second moment where Sam wonders will he recognise me until he sits up straighter, says faintly, breathlessly, “Sam.”

“Which Bucky are we talking to right now?” Steve asks, keeping his tone carefully expressionless, betraying nothing even as he glances at Sam. It’s moments like these that remind Sam that Steve had picked up acting at one point or another during his time as a bonds-seller.

Bucky’s head lolls to the side a little, flexing his shoulder from where it’s likely aching. He looks at Sam with a small frown, so devastatingly sincere. “You told me you’d be back before I knew it.”

Sam’s unable to stop the small chuckle that comes out of him at that. “You didn’t exactly give yourself the time to know.” He breathes in deeply, then out. “Probably should’ve stayed in bed, huh?”

Bucky’s expression shutters then, regretful over something he doesn't even know about. “What did I do?”

“Enough,” Steve replies, crossing his arms and looking between Sam and Bucky as if he still hasn’t really grappled with the idea that there’s something between them. Enough, Sam thinks with a derisive internal laugh, understatement of the century.

“God, I knew this would happen,” Bucky whispers softly, eyes scrunched in remorse, “everything Hydra put in me is still in there, and all he had to do was say the goddamn words.”

Steve’sexpression looks like a cross between a deeply harrowed frown and a distressed grimace. “Do you know what he wanted? Why he wanted to get to you so badly?”

Bucky visibly swallows, licking his chapped lips in thought. “He wanted to know about Siberia, where I was kept,” he says after some time, “he wanted to know exactly where.”

“Is there anywhere you wouldn’t follow me?” Sam had asked Bucky one night, gently petting his hair and separating the tangles, six months before the present day. His fingers still held the scent of pomegranate curd tart, palms warmed from holding Bucky.

“Siberia,” Bucky answered immediately, then thought about it a little more. “Genoa. DC. Indiana.” He turned his head, enough so he could press a kiss against Sam’s wrist. “Wouldn’t mind a date to the Smithsonian, though,” and he’d smiled when Sam laughed.

“Why, what’s in Siberia?” Sam questions, stepping closer. Bucky looks at him with an expression of raw compunction.

“Other Winter Soldiers.”

When Sam first started reading about what they did to Bucky, he’d thought, no fucking wonder they didn’t make any more of him.

The things they’d done to him to get him to submit and be the willing soldier they’d made him, they needed a level of inhumanity that simply felt unfeasible. The torture, the shocks, the starvation, the abuse—they were more than what a small group of specialists could handle. Sam had mourned a man he never met and been thankful, in some twisted way, that he was the only one to have ever experienced that.

Finding out that others were subjected to the same pain as Bucky had shocked him, but what surprised him most was that they’d been uncontrollable. Filled with rage, boiling blood, and a terrifying need to kill. Where Bucky had been docile, they’d been violent and ruthless, maiming and killing for the fun of it.

“Why do you think they turned out like that?” Steve asks, arms crossed and back hunched in thought. Sam understands—it’s terrifying to imagine what they would unleash on the world if freed.

Bucky shrugs, a strange movement from where his arm is still restricted. “They wanted to be more powerful. There was a will to be more, to be-to be worse,” he huffs derisively, “they didn’t realise that the reason why it worked so well on me was ‘cause I didn’t want anything to do with their plans. They had to beat the obedience into me. Giving the death squad the serum, that- that was like taking a leash off a pack of rabid dogs.”

Jesus. “So, taking the leash off of you is like setting a puppy loose,” Sam says, eyeing Bucky’s reaction. Something sickening curls in the pit of his stomach.

He feels himself relax a little as Bucky chuckles quietly, hoarse and rough-sounding. “If the puppy’s got a vault of red in his ledger and scrambled eggs in place of a brain, yeah, sure.”

Sam lets himself smile, and he sees Bucky look up and follow the line of his mouth, and he thinks, my Bucky’s not a danger to me. He reaches behind the vice keeping Bucky bound up, unscrewing the grip and loosening it enough that Bucky can free his arm. He keeps it there, though. “Are you sure? I mean, I don’t-I don’t know if he’s gone.”

“I’m sure,” Sam replies easily, taking Bucky’s metal wrist and pulling it out of the grip. Bucky rolls his shoulder, looking grateful, but mostly, looking miserable. “Bet this wasn’t how you thought we’d see each other again, huh?”

“I’d ask if you wanted to go to the Ritz-Carlton if I wasn’t worried we’d be arrested as soon as we showed our faces,” Bucky says softly, laying his metal hand out and palm-up for Sam; an admission of trust. “Sorry I couldn’t sit tight, sweetheart,” he murmurs as Sam intertwines their fingers together.

“Not your fault,” Sam tells him, meaning every word of it. He hears footsteps receding, belatedly remembering that Steve was still in the room, but his world zeroes in on the way Bucky leans his head so it’s resting against Sam’s arm. He sits down, letting Bucky slump against him, and repeats, “not your fault.”

Bucky relaxes minutely, slumping further like the weight of the world rested on his shoulders. “When this is over,” he says quietly, “in the future, I wanna go back to Milan with you.”

God. “I’ll let you take me anywhere, Bucky.” He pulls him closer to his arm, cheeks warm and heart steadying. “Anywhere.”

The nightmares on the Raft are bad.

In the mornings (or his approximation of them, based on the mealtimes) he thinks about everything that’s gotten him to this point. How an early morning jog had changed the course of his life, how he’d been settling down for the long road of recovery until Steve Rogers barrelled his way into his life, how so little of the life he led affected that chance meeting. He thinks about the split second between keeping his calm life and helping Captain America kidnap a SHIELD agent, the demonstration of his aerial capabilities, encountering a ghost on the highway. Encountering that ghost again, being kicked off a helicarrier and sent plummeting down, down, down until his chute deployed.

Encountering that ghost another time, in the form of papers and files and nightmares. Reading about what had been done to that ghost, the abuse and torture and experimentation he’d undergone until he was just a shell wearing the face of James Buchanan Barnes, Steve’s best friend. Pictures of long needles, circular saws, leather straps. Pictures of the Soldier, sadistically shot and voyeuristic.

Meeting him, the real him, for the first time. Distrust at first, then tentative acquaintanceship, then Venice, Milan, Paris. Vanilla hearts and red bordeaux and hollyhocks, blackout curtains and satin duvets and berry-flavoured kisses. A gift, an exchange, a beginning of the end, a calm amidst the storm. A realisation of all there is and all there could be.

Falling in love with that ghost. Missing him every day.

When Steve breaks them out of the Raft, one of his first questions is, where’s Bucky?

“About that,” Steve murmurs, looking mournful, but not as much as Sam would imagine he’d look if Bucky were dead, so he stomps that fear down and waits for more. “Siberia didn’t go very well, with Tony in the mix.”

You have to go as a friend, he’d told Tony, bruised and battered in that floating prison. Sam sighs, a furrow in his brow. “What did he do?”

“Zemo wanted all of us there, to tear the Avengers apart,” Steve explains, earning a raised brow from Sam, “he showed Tony what happened to his parents, what the Soldier did.” He gestures to the still-healing cut on his cheek, doesn’t gesture to his arm, naked and stripped of the shield. “Didn’t end well.”

Sam remembers reading the files at first, then hearing about it nearly a year before everything that’s happened, from Bucky’s own account. How he remembers every victim of the Soldier, present in spirit but broken in mind, how the names of each and every one of his targets stay in his head like a language of death. Among them had been Tony’s parents, Howard and Maria Stark, assassinated and made to look like an accident. He’d been unable to really look Tony in the eye for months after he found out, and couldn't stomach that guilt after.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says sympathetically, meaning it. His ribs are still bruised and he still dreams about Tony aiming for his face, but he knows how much Steve cared for Tony, precarious as their relationship was.

Steve nods. “Thanks. But, uh, after the fight, we got banged up pretty badly, then King T’Challa offered us help and refuge as an apology for trying to kill Bucky,” and the rest of us for associating with him, “so I left him in Wakanda while I got you guys out and tied up some loose ends.”

Steve picks up on the meaning behind his wide eyes and parted lips, throat swallowing around nothing, so he says, “it was his choice, Sam,” and places a comforting hand on his shoulder. “He wanted to go back into the ice, just until they figured out how to get the programming out of his mind.”

He smiles a little, a little quirk of his lips that don’t quite reach his eyes. “He told me to give you this,” he says, retrieving a DVD copy of Casablanca from his bag and handing it to Sam, “not sure why, but I didn’t exactly have time to ask questions.”

Sam takes the DVD, looks at it for a good long moment in confusion. They’ve never watched this movie together, of all of the things they’ve watched on various hotel TVs, and he’s fairly sure they’ve never even talked about it before. He’s also never seen this in Bucky’s possession before, and he tries to figure out what it means, why Bucky thought to give him this rather than—

It dawns on him slowly, and for the first time in what feels like forever, Sam feels tears well up in his eyes as he chuckles wetly, putting the DVD down on his lap. He laughs then, tears beginning to stream down his face as Steve looks at him concernedly, not sure what to do now that Sam’s crying, but he thankfully remains silent.

“That dumbass,” Sam says, laughing as he wipes the tears from his face. He hears Steve’s question before he even says anything, so he shakes his head, looks at the DVD again. It’s a private moment meant to be shared between them, a joke that would’ve been funnier if Bucky had told him himself. Instead, Sam’s alone and he feels like crying a little more.

Steve leaves him alone not long after that, patting him on the shoulder before going. Sam smiles down at the DVD, the ache in his bones making him cave. We’ll always have Paris.

A month after his escape, on the run with Nat and Steve, his nightmares get worse.

Riley returns, clawing and grasping and screaming in ways Sam had never seen him do when he’d been alive, but this time, he has Bucky with him, dragging him down as they plummet to unfathomable depths that Sam can’t follow. Running, always running, running for hours or years, chasing after Bucky’s fading face, so close yet so far, their fingertips nearly touching yet somehow miles apart. Begging him to come back, to grab his hand, to go to him, only for it to fall on dead and unhearing ears.

He wakes up feeling like he’s choking, heaving and panting like he’d run a marathon. He reaches out for someone that isn’t there, his fingers grasping cold sheets rather than a warm chest, mind searching for long and soft hair to card his fingers through and metal plates to trace with a fingertip. He’s filled with a sense of longing, of deep yearning, something he doesn’t remember ever feeling so strongly before.

It becomes obvious that he hasn’t been sleeping well, after a while. Steve throws him concerned glances when Sam slinks out of his room in the morning, eager to go on a run and get away from his thoughts and his lonely bedroom. Nat’s more subtle, lingering touches and softer words than usual, like she knows how it feels to miss someone who might never come back.

He doesn’t cry, doesn’t sob, doesn’t make any indication of sadness. He goes about life how he always does; going on runs, catching up on some reading, basking in the sun, going on missions and ops, flying whenever he can. He pretends like things are normal, pretends like Steve and Nat aren’t waiting for him to just snap, pretends like he doesn’t miss—

He knows Steve gets updates about Bucky. He knows that Steve has a whole separate phone for those updates, Wakandan technology with the best encryption on the planet, untraceable on any lines and completely anonymous. Steve’s a bit of an old soul, to put it lightly, so his ringer is always on and every time it pings a melodic twinkling sound, Sam knows he has to leave the room. Not because Steve asks him to or because he wants to, but because he doesn’t want to know.

He wonders if he’s being too dramatic. Bucky’s still alive, that’s the bottom line, right? He’s alive, he’s getting better, he’s making rapid progress, he’s not in Sam’s bed at night, hasn’t been for months, and soon, for a year. Things could be worse, he reminds himself, he could be dead or Bucky could be dead or unable to remember him, but then he thinks about tumbling around in warm sheets, sharing honeyed kisses, tracing lines of hard muscle and soft fat, and he thinks, things could be worse, but god, I miss him.

He has another nightmare, and he wakes up screaming. There’s a hand on his shoulder that he wants to reach out for, to lace his fingers with, until he realises it’s a left hand made of skin and bone, and he aches. “Sam? Sam, are you okay?”

He swallows tightly, trying to catch his breath. He blinks his eyes open, catching Steve’s concerned expression, dimly lit by the nightlight in the corner of the room. “You okay?” Steve repeats, unaware of how much Sam wishes it wasn’t him saying those words.

Sam nods, breathing in for three seconds and exhaling for six. He thinks about how much he prefers the sharp coldness of metallic fingers rather than Steve’s warm, rough palm.

Eventually, he begins to get better.

The days still feel empty without Bucky in them, but less so than when he’d first found out that Bucky went back into cryo. Even a year later, he still wakes up feeling like his bed’s too big for one person, and he still can’t really bring himself to go to the bakery he passes by on his runs no matter how wonderful it smells, but the nightmares have lessened over time and he feels like a person when he wakes up, so there are those little mercies.

Life goes on, despite being fugitives from the only home they have. He manages to call Sarah every month, more than when he was still living in the States, and misses out on more than a few important events, like his first nephew, AJ’s, third birthday, and the birth of his second nephew, Cassidy. Sarah tells him about Delacroix, what’s been going on, Cass’ first word being mama, AJ’s sudden eloquence in demanding they get a dog, how America’s still in shambles over the fact that their Captain America, Black Widow, and Falcon are fugitives.

“You ever gonna come home, Sam?” Sarah asks one time, over the secure line that the Wakandans generously offered them. “It’s not just America that wants you all to come home. Christmas without you just isn’t the same, and Andy doesn’t want Cass to grow used to not having an uncle. Neither do I.”

Sam sighs, leaning his head against the wall. “You know I want to, Sar, but it ain’t that simple,” he says mournfully, “the only way I’m stepping foot on US soil is if I turn myself in so I can get sentenced to some max-security prison, or if I give up Steve or Nat or Barnes, and I can’t do that.” I could never.

Sarah sighs too, regretful. “Yeah. I know. Just miss you here, is all.”

Sam gets it. He misses his family, his friends, his job at the VA, morning runs around Lincoln Memorial, coffee with Rhodey and Steve in the kitchen, waking up in his own bed instead of whatever motel mattress or overnight cot in whichever location they’ve found themselves in. Moving day by day rather than fight by fight, their only respite being the safehouses in between.

He also misses the feeling of prickly stubble against his palm, long hair tickling his fingers, warm and soft lips pressing against his own, insistent hands roaming his body, quiet giggles and soft sighs, the solidness of Bucky’s body against his. He misses him— god, he misses him.

He misses all of it.

The first time they see each other again, two years have gone by, the world is going to shit, and Bucky is different.

They’re both different. Bucky’s lighter, a little more carefree with his emotions, animated when he talks to Steve and happy to see him. Sam is... the years haven’t been the kindest, beating him up from every angle and every direction, but when he sees Bucky, sees him for the first time in so long, sees the wideness of his eyes and the way his lip quivers, Sam can’t take it. It’s like something slots back in place, like putting on a warm sweater; familiar and so desperately something he missed.

“Sam,” Bucky breathes out, just in time for Sam to near him, and there’s a moment of surrealism that they’re both here, both existing in the same space, both conscious for it, and Sam just takes him into his arms and viciously tells himself, don’t cry around all these people. “Sam,” Bucky repeats, reverential and soft. A tone reserved only for each other, his voice going shaky around the syllable like he’s telling himself the same thing.

“Missed me, old man?” Sam asks wetly, burying his face into the seam of Bucky’s collar; surreally, he still smells of something warm and woodsmoke. Bucky just laughs against him, so free and expressive, and Sam can’t find himself caring about Steve or Nat’s knowing smiles or anyone else’s confusion—this, having Bucky in his arms and being held by Bucky, finally, is all that matters.

“You know I did,” Bucky replies, pulling away after what could be ten straight minutes of just holding each other, but everyone hasn’t moved on yet, so Sam figures it hasn’t been very long. “Why is it we’re always meeting like this nowadays?” Bucky asks with a million-watt smile that could kill thousands, “first I tried to kill you, then I tried to kill you again, and now the end times are upon us. What happened to Rome, or Frankfurt, or Bucharest?”

Sam rolls his eyes as they walk side by side, just barely stopping himself from lacing his fingers with Bucky’s. But because he subverts all of Sam’s expectations, he intertwines their fingers together like they’re going for a leisurely stroll rather than preventing the end of the world. “You know goddamn well what happened in Bucharest last time we were there, sweetheart,” Sam says, trying to ignore the heat in his cheeks and only stumbling slightly.

Bucky grins with tinted pink cheeks before it softens into a sweeter smile, private between them. His eyes, bluer than the prettiest oceans, look at him in a way Sam’s not sure he’ll ever want to live without ever again. “Missed hearing you call me that,” Bucky hums.

Sam’s about to respond before Nat is amusedly chiming in with, “hurry up unless you wanna get left out of the debriefing, lovebirds!”

They’re off to save the world, to hold their ground on their turf. Then, a flash of bright light, and he’s turning to dust.

One moment he’s in Wakanda, pushing himself up from where he’d been knocked down, and the next, he’s in a bed.

He doesn’t know where he is. It looks like a hotel room, nondescript and impersonal as it is, with miscellaneous decor and flower vases and unlabelled, stacked books on the console table by the door. The lights are dimmed and set to the lowest option, and he’s lying on his back and looking at the ceiling, cream and blank like the walls. He’s warm, at least, and he’s drowsy.

When he turns, he startles at the sight of someone else in his bed, all long lines and thick muscle and messy, dark hair.

“Sam?” he hears from the man, a warm and familiar rasp, and when his eyes adjust, he makes out sharp blue eyes, soft and pink lips, and a metal arm. “What’s wrong? Nightmare?”

“I—no,” Sam replies, trying to remember his dream. Had he been dreaming? “No, I don’t think so,” he says, thinking. Grass, trees, a field, a fight maybe, but-but he’s here, not wherever that is, he’s in bed with Bucky and it’s early morning and he’s fine, they’re both fine, so why did he wake up?

“Come back to sleep, my love,” Bucky tells him, pulling him back into warm and cold arms, tucking him neatly against his chest. Strangely, he feels like he’s missed this, but-but he’s been here all along, so why would he? There’s something missing, and he doesn’t know what, but something in him is saying that this is wrong.

For some reason, as he shuts his eyes and sinks back into Bucky’s warmth, he wonders, am I dead?

When he next wakes up, he’s on hard ground in the forest, and he feels severely disoriented.

“Oh, Jesus,” he groans as he gets up off the floor, only barely stopping himself from vomiting out his breakfast on the roots of a tree. He feels like he just rode past a hundred-fifty G’s from how dizzy and disoriented he feels, but then he’s still looking for Rhodey—at least, that was what he was doing, right?

“Sam!” He hears Bucky shouting for him, and he’s hit with a strange feeling of déjà vu, like he’d heard that before but in different contexts. “Sam!” He hears again, and he realises that he’s probably looking for him, so he hauls himself up and supports himself on the tree before yelling back, “over here!”

Bucky jogs over, looking about as confused as Sam feels. “You okay?” he asks, helping Sam up with effort. Something went wrong, or something went right, because Wakanda looks different, a little aged, and Steve is nowhere in sight, neither is anyone that he last remembers seeing, and he’s in— “Sam?”

Sam looks at Bucky, brows furrowed in concern and wide-eyed from confusion, and it just hits him that they could’ve—might’ve—died and Sam would never have known any better, so he flings himself onto Bucky and locks him in a tight embrace, heart picking up at Bucky’s surprised grunt and subsequent return of his hug. Sam buries his head into Bucky’s shoulder and shudders, a river of need coursing through him, like his body is only now registering that something horribly wrong had happened.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Bucky croons, tilting his head so his hair is pressing into Sam’s cheek, and Sam’s told him before that he hates it, the way his scraggly hair rubs against the little coils of his facial hair, but right now there’s nothing more grounding than the feeling. “It’s okay,” Bucky repeats, hand rubbing his back and the other wrapped around his waist.

Sam removes himself from the hug after a short amount of time, taking the sides of Bucky’s face in his hands as he holds Sam’s waist. Unable to fight the desire, he meets Bucky halfway and kisses him, raw and pure relief hitting him at the feeling of Bucky’s lips on his, reciprocating with the same desperation, the same respite.

“I’m glad we’re okay,” Sam tells him quietly afterwards, eyes looking over Bucky’s own glassy ones, his pink cheeks, the red tint of his lips. Alive, Sam’s mind assures him, alive and here with you. “What the hell happened? Where’s Steve?”

“This is my first time seeing aliens, Sam,” Bucky says, a small, anxious smile on his face, “anything that happened today, I wouldn’t be able to explain any of it.”

Sam laughs, heart doing stupid little flips over something as simple as Bucky joking. Part of him had forgotten whether or not Bucky had seen or heard of the aliens of New York, or the incident in Nevada. “Good point. Were they anything like you expected?”

Bucky shakes his head, says, “I expected more big green heads than—” before he’s cut off by an unfamiliar voice speaking somewhere close to them, saying, “Mr. Wilson, Mr. Barnes.”

They turn and see a man in a red cape and weird clothing, looking like something straight out of a cosplay convention, but Sam’s seen weirder fashion choices than that in recent time, so he focuses on the man’s magic hands and the fact he’s coming through in a portal. “Are you ready to save the world again, for real this time?”

Sam looks at Bucky, still holding each other, and they smile. “Not really,” Sam says, looking back at the wizard and smirking at his raised brow, “but are we ready to save Steve’s ass again? Sure.”

Just as quickly as they had fallen into this one, they fall into another fight, and come out better and worse for it.

Tony Stark dies, and everyone mourns. Strangely, guiltily, selfishly, all Sam could think about is the phantom pain in his chest.

After everything that happens, Bucky is different.

When they first came back from not-death, the Blip as the survivors called it, Bucky had kissed him, held him like it was the first and last time, desperate and confused and loved. Then they’d fought in a war of universes, shooting and flying side by side until Tony’s sacrifice, and after that, they’d checked in on each other. He seemed fine then, well even, and Sam had no cause to worry.

Then Steve said he’d be putting the stones back, in a tone of voice Sam didn’t recognise from him, and Bucky had drawn his conclusions. He clammed up, became curt and quiet, more than he already was, and Sam was at a loss. He’ll just be gone for a few seconds, Sam had reasoned with Bucky, and it was like it had fallen on dead ears. Like Bucky didn’t want to hear him.

When Steve came back, old and carrying a shield to give to Sam, he understood Bucky’s plight.

Then Bucky began withdrawing from him. He stopped touching Sam unnecessarily, his touches turning chaste and utilitarian, like a pass of his hand over Sam’s body could kill him. It’s not fear or disgust, neither regret nor anxiety, and somehow, it’s worse. To know that Bucky’s holding back and away from him for reasons he can’t figure out, to know that there’s a different meaning to Bucky’s longing looks and his tightened fists.

He calls him Sam, but it’s not the same. He hasn’t called him sweetheart in what feels like forever, weeks at most, and yet the longest they’ve gone without that casual intimacy. Sam tries to initiate, wrap his arms around Bucky’s shoulders like he’s done hundreds of times before, and Bucky freezes up like he’s been hit and Sam can’t take that guilt, can’t shuck it off like a shawl, so he retreats and gives Bucky the space he needs. He doesn’t want to be the one to trip Bucky like that, so he doesn’t, but god, he misses it.

It ends the opposite way as it started, Sam will realise later on, with Bucky running to rather than away from Steve, and with Sam finding him rather than the other way around. Instead of the closed quarters of a hotel room in Tirana, it’s a private slice of land close to a lake in Indiana, quiet and desolate like the both of them by the end of things. Instead of a beginning, it’s an end— the devastation of them both.

Steve Rogers dies of old age, and no one knows but them. The world will guess and theorise on what happened, but the truth of the matter is that Steve, his best friend and the man that believed in him more than he thought should be possible, was lowered into the ground in a simple casket, then buried next to a grave Sam knows was once Bucky’s.

“They buried me in Indiana,” Bucky had told him once, his hands caressing Sam’s sides, “well, they couldn’t find anything of me, of course, but they buried an empty casket and put a tombstone there with my name on it.” He smiled, gently and tentative, like he’d been speaking of an old friend rather than himself. “I visited, while you were out avenging. My parents and my sisters are buried there, too, right next to me.” Sam kissed the top of his head, gentle. “My parents’ names were George and Winnifred, and my sisters’ Rebecca, Cassandra, and Loretta.”

“If you could choose,” Sam found himself asking, swallowing dryly, “if you could choose where to be buried, where would you want to go?”

Sam had expected a soft laugh, or a joke along the lines of you getting ready to bury me, Wilson? until Bucky pressed a kiss against the firm swell of his chest, light and promising. Until he’d grasped the outstretched hand Sam had offered to him, had taken that gift of knowing Sam and his fears of dying in an unmarked grave, and had given back.

“Wherever you wanna go, sweetheart,” Bucky had told him, “ain’t nowhere or no one I’d go home to but you.”

It ends, Sam will suppose later, when he stands next to Bucky after the service, looking at the simple grave—simple, because everything and nothing had been simple with Steve.

“He asked to be buried here,” Bucky says, his voice carefully controlled and quiet. It’s just them, utterly alone, but Sam still strains to hear him, doesn’t step into his space. “I asked him why, and he told me because I’d been buried here, and his mom’s grave’s surrounded by others, too public to be private. He said she wouldn’t have minded it, so long as he was buried with family.”

Sam doesn’t say anything, lets Bucky talk. There’s a numbness to him that he doesn’t know how to confront, looking at Steven Grant Rogers, 1918-2023, The Best of Us engraved onto the stone. “Even after everything,” Bucky continues, sounding hoarse, “even after five years without me, he still chose to be buried here with my family. With me.” He breathes in shakily, exhales just as brokenly. Sam wants to touch, to reach out, but he knows how Bucky’s been. “Now that he’s gone, who’ve I got left?”

“How could you say that?” Sam finally speaks up, willing away the prickles in his eyes and the quiver in his tone. “After everything, how could you believe you wouldn’t have me?” Or that you wouldn’t let me have you? “As long as I’m here, you have someone. You have me, Bucky. You know that.” And I need you, now, more than I need Steve to come back and act like nothing happened and say he’ll stay. More than I’ve ever needed anyone before.

Bucky’s silent for a while, and Sam lets himself shudder, stopping the tears even though it’s—it’s just them, god, it should be easy to let his guard down like he’s done countless times before but it isn’t. He’s tense and he’s holding himself together but he’s tired of it, tired of all of it. He just wants to go home.

Bucky was home, and yet. And yet. “It shouldn’t be me, Sam,” Bucky says, monotone and raspy, not looking at him, “it should be someone else, someone that can handle—” you, he doesn’t say, but Sam hears it clearly enough, dropping on him like a bucket of ice cold water. It hadn’t occurred to him that Bucky’s tired too, that Bucky might not want this from him anymore. That Sam’s too intense, and memories of him in his younger years flit back, Jesus, Wilson, will you back off? The fuck are you so clingy for? Leave me alone, okay, I can’t deal with you right now.

It hits him that Bucky had lived two years in Wakanda without his intensity, and had survived it, glowing and happy and smiling when they saw him again while Sam had been miserable. It settles in his bones like a parasite, and it makes him tear up for different reasons now. Like what destroyed his previous relationships, it destroys this one too.

Goddamn it.

He looks at Bucky, who watches him with a sad, withdrawn expression. “I don’t wanna...” Bucky trails off, but Sam can’t hear it. Can’t, no, it’ll hurt too much, please, god, it’ll hurt, but he needs to hear it. He doesn’t want it to end on uncertainty, and he doesn’t want it to end, but Bucky braces himself like it absolutely must, so Sam readies himself. He squares his shoulders, puts on a brave face, and waits for Bucky to say the words.

He doesn’t. He looks at Sam, opens his mouth, and shuts it. Then, just like that, he turns around and walks away.

Sam doesn’t follow. He knows when the end means the end, even if. Even if.

"Anyone looking at them would’ve been lost at the sight; Bucky’s hand clamped around Sam’s throat, titanium thumb pressing into his pulse point, and Sam’s palm pressed against Bucky’s cheek, tender and gentle like a breeze."

Fanart by my wonderful friend, Riley! You can find them on their Tumblr and their AO3.