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"Okay, Buck. Okay. Uh. Thanks for telling me."
He stands up, backs away. Knowing it’s rude. Knowing – because god knows he does the same thing – that Bucky’s going to freak out, going to take his silence in the worst possible way.
But Steve can’t.
Changed his. Mind. It makes a blank space in Steve’s head. He needs a minute. Just a minute to think. He just needs to take a second, to figure out what that even means.
He shuts his bedroom door with deliberate gentleness and sits on the floor, within arm’s reach to hold back any intrusion.
Not that Bucky will try to break in.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ he tells himself. Bucky wouldn’t.
But. ‘Changed my mind about touching.’
It’s. What is that? What does it mean? And why can’t a guy have a little warning?
Steve knows he ought to be prepared for regular shocks after all this time. It’s not like they’re a rare occurrence, since he woke up in the future. Since he came out of the Vita-Ray tube. Since that moment of perfect stillness in the middle of the road in DC, Bucky’s face. Alive. And everything after it. One long succession of shocks and miracles.
Which one is this? Steve needs a second. Just to figure that out. And for his hands to stop shaking.
Changed his mind. About what part?
The dubious benefit of a near-eidetic memory is that Steve can recall with perfect agony every word from Bucky’s mouth the day he fell apart right after they moved into the tower – even the ones Steve’s convinced Bucky didn’t know he said aloud. Those two voices speaking in succession: the flat, emotionless tone that he’s come to know as Bucky’s freak-out voice; and the other one – panicked, higher pitched, and so much like Bucky’s childhood voice that it had physically hurt to hear it – spilling out the worst parts, the details, the fear, all the while begging ‘don’t tell Steve, keep it hidden, it’ll only hurt him.’
In the middle of all of that, still – to protect. The very thing that pulled Bucky out of all that horror in the first place and made this person, sitting upstairs in their apartment, wanting … something.
He’s clearly Bucky, despite his insistence that everyone but Steve call him Barnes, despite the blanking out and the mystifying three-part personality and all the baking. The spooky affection for knives. Maybe not the Bucky from the history books, with a girl (he’d tell you to say women, Steve) on each arm, pulling Steve out of fights in every alley in Brooklyn.
More like the Bucky who worried each time Steve got a bad cold, who worked every day after school since he was 8 to help his family through the lean times. Who screamed ‘not without you’ across a wall of fire. Steve would infinitely rather do without the charm if he gets to keep the loyalty, the care. Even the mile-wide protective streak.
Steve doesn’t think of himself as brave. Bravery never comes into it: you do what needs to be done and put a raw steak on your face or rebuild a bridge later. You take the hits and move forward and hope you don’t fuck things up.
Bucky is brave. More than Steve ever knew, staying on after Azzano despite his terror and his body going haywire.
Despite (come on, Steve, admit it) his own getting so caught up in everything – new body, new purpose, Peggy – that he never even noticed. Just assumed that Bucky would be there just like always, to clean up the mess.
And everything in the here and now. Bucky making a new self for himself. Making a place, without ever once failing to let Steve know that he comes first. He’s the priority.
It’s too much, sometimes. This gift of. Steadfastness. Is that a word anyone even uses anymore? Half the time Steve has no idea how to try to live up to it. Jeez, especially while having to keep his distance. To be around, but not too close. It’s one of the things Steve beats himself up for on the regular, how hurt he still is, every time Buck’s shoulders stiffen, every time he pulls away from a hug.
Is that what he means? By changing his mind.
Steve wants to call Sam. But Sam will say the same thing he always does: “Man, what are you calling me for? The dude’s right there.”
He needs to move. This is. It’s too much.
He changes into running clothes, and he can hear the plates in Bucky’s arm shifting the minute he opens his bedroom door.
‘This is your fault,’ he tells himself.
Bucky’s probably sitting like a statue in his chair, but his arm going like that is never a good sign.
Steve just needs another minute. Just a little bit. Then he’ll make it right.
He promises to stay in the building. That much he can do. And he can stand in the elevator, pretending to be calm. He can climb up onto the treadmill as if it’s just a normal, everyday run.
A slightly less dubious benefit of a near-eidetic memory is that he can remember every second of making time with Peggy – the small, warm space of her mouth, her breasts heavy in his hands. He had never dared to ask whether she’d also been a virgin before: certainly neither of them had any idea what they were doing. But they figured it out, in tents and half-ruined buildings. In bomb shelters and, once, a hayloft. The curve of her neck where it met her shoulder smelled of freesia. That was just a word to him until the future, when he saw the flowers for the first time. He always takes them to her when he visits. Flowers that remind him of her body curved against his in the dark, the slick heat of her, the secret taste of her, and the moments when she stopped being so damn polite and sank her teeth into his shoulders.
Steve turns up the speed on the treadmill.
He remembers the others too, of course. Helen and Wilma from the chorus girls, who took it on themselves to “teach” him and each did a fair impression of an octopus until he was able to escape. Their scorn afterward didn’t bother him: it was no worse than the crap he’d dealt with his whole life.
The blonde from the SSR bunker. All the handsy, pushy women (and a few men) - from fancy parties, officers’ balls, jesus, the damn street – who sized him up like slab of beef and never thought to ask whether he wanted them pawing at him. It had been fun for about a week, until he realized that their intent didn’t go any further: like the Army, their interest was only in this body, this tremendous gift and duty given to him. For a purpose. Not just for fun in the sack.
Dammit.
And it’s not any better in the future, given the several disastrous dates he went on in DC. Not one question about the last book he read, what he thought about – or anything. Just stuff about the Avengers, and fame, and staring at him like he was dessert. Going all octopus at their front doors, outside for everyone to see.
“I hate it.”
And now he’s talking to himself. Great. He’s turning into Bucky.
Steve stumbles right off the treadmill.
Peg in a red dress, Buck breaking about nine different uniform regulations, saying, “I’m turning into you,” and neither of them having any idea how true that was.
No. Steve having no idea how true that was. And not bothering to find out.
He hops back onto the machine and turns it up even further.
In memory, Steve can see clearly in a way he never did, living through it: how twitchy Bucky was after Azzano. How furtive and volatile, pretending badly to get drunk, forgetting to smoke, neglecting to chase girls. Heaving his guts out after nearly every operation. Skinny and hollow-eyed, bossing the Howlers around until the unit couldn’t function without their Sarge. Mother-henning everyone so they wouldn’t notice how he was going to pieces.
Fuck the train. Steve knows he neglected to save Bucky long before that. He turns up the speed.
Bucky and Peg. The only two people alive – the only two people ever, since Ma died – who look at him and always see Steve first. Not the image, or the heroics, or the muscles. Sam and Nat come close, but they didn’t know him before. They never knew the man still there on the inside, who struggled through every little thing, every day, just surviving. Who, for a long time, was loved by only one person on the planet. Had only one person alive who even cared he existed.
And that person’s still here, upstairs, probably cooking something by this point. Panicking in his own silent way. Still one of that select group who never overlooks the person inside the ridiculous body, be it miniature or huge.
Peggy is a gift in his life: a true gift, someone who sees all the way to the inside, and Steve loves her for it.
Bucky sees all of him too.
Steve remembers Bucky in the infirmary after the robots, drugged to his gills, slurring, “You’ve always been my favorite person, Steve, don’t care what size you are.”
Steve turns off the treadmill. It’s starting to smell like burned rubber, and this is not the time to argue with Tony over gym equipment.
He wants to forget himself. To let go, just for a minute, without anyone (Bucky) drawing away with a frown. He wants to lean, not to be leaned on.
He wants to forget all the stupidity about bodies and everything done to them: experimentation, torture, use use use always being used. He’s a person. Bucky is a person (maybe even three people). They are not the sum of the bodies they live in.
Both of them have changed. Both of them have returned from the dead, to a brightly lit, fast-moving world that makes so little room for anything quiet. Steve wants quiet. He wants to feel safe somewhere – safe enough to lay down the burden of always having to be the strong one. That’s so much heavier than the shield.
Bucky would say – his mission would say – “protect.” Even at the worst parts of it, Bucky protects him. One thing Bucky has always done, in any of his lives, is make Steve feel as if he belongs.
What if?
What if.
Oh god.
He sits down hard on the floor.
Steve has things segmented into nice, clean, regulation compartments inside: there is Captain America and there is Steve. There is the super soldier, and there is the asthmatic with a projected life span of 30. There’s the desire to howl in the dark about Peggy, old and forgetful and dying and beautiful, with picture of her children, not his, by her bedside and a ring box that she refused to open. There is loneliness (that’s a big compartment). There is duty: the double-walled steel safe that encloses everything else, locks it all up tight.
“How’s that working for you?” Sam would say.
It’s not working worth a damn.
His pre-serum memory wasn’t quite as good, but it floods through him just the same. A memory locked up so tight inside that double-walled safe that Steve would’ve denied it existed until this minute, sweating a puddle onto the floor of a basement gym in an impossible building in New York, in this impossible year, having done impossible things.
So he can allow this impossible memory of a thing so far from possible that he had tried to kill it within himself:
Heat and foul air, his chest stiff as concrete, too stiff to allow breath. The misery of another beating, sought out because of the misery of the bloody handkerchief Ma took away from her mouth. Seeing that she’d leave him. Knowing he wouldn’t be long to follow. Without ever making any kind of mark on the world.
Caught up in that knowledge that he was about to lose half of everyone he loved in the world, and Bucky there – like Bucky was always there – magically scrounging up a nickel so they could share a milkshake, telling a constant stream of jokes that Steve barely heard, until finally, “Mam, I’m taking him up on the roof to howl at the moon. He’s not fit for human company today.”
And in the middle of silence, and sleep, the moon rolling out from behind a cloud. Silver light falling over Bucky’s face. Steve had seen that face every day his whole life, had drawn it a thousand times, had broken his fist on it, but under moonlight and shadow, Steve remembers how the quality of his breathlessness changed, remembers the clench in his belly, and the realization: “oh, he’s beautiful.”
Steve doesn’t know whether to laugh or hit something. Maybe both?
Maybe he’s been really stupid for a really long time.
Maybe this is a chance to be less stupid. To be less lonely.
Maybe this is time to learn how to be brave.
Steve wipes down the treadmill and the puddle on the floor. He didn’t leave the free weights scattered, but it feels good to slowly tidy them up.
He hadn’t much cared about dying in 1945. Since that train in the Alps. Even Peggy hadn’t been enough to make him really regret going into the ocean. And to wake up in the future alone? Surrounded by strangers but just as much on display as back on the spangle circuit – just as much wanted only for what he could do, not who he was. Well. It’s not like he would’ve minded being snuffed out by aliens or whatever insane thing the future threw at him.
Until he woke up in that hospital in DC with a smashed-in face, a gut wound, and for once his own purpose. Even the colors seemed brighter, knowing that he had a task of his own choosing: find Bucky, keep him safe. Once found, keep him safe, help him heal. Only to find that Bucky gave himself the same task.
God, they could live another century, the two of them, if Stark’s theories are right. Everyone else in their lives will die, will disappear into gravestones and sketchbooks, but the two of them will remain. Just like always.
The thought of it used to be a physical pain in his chest. But now.
Now he wants to live. He wants to keep finding new ice cream flavors for Bucky to over-analyze. He wants to get more stupid pajamas for Christmas. He wants to get hectored into reading books and spend whole afternoons arguing about them. He wants to know what weird, sweet thing Bucky’s going to do next to fix someone’s problem or make them feel safe.
Steve wants to keep going. He actually wants to keep going, because he won’t have to do it alone.
Time to take the elevator back upstairs.
In the hallway outside their door, Steve can smell the predictable outcome of Bucky’s meltdowns. Given the weirdness of the situation, it’ll be some strange combination of ingredients Steve would never think to put together. The worse the upset, the fancier the baked goods. Steve finds himself able to grin. As coping mechanisms go, it’s pretty bizarre. On the other hand: treats.
Will Bucky stop baking if he’s happier?
‘Don’t be an ass, Rogers,’ he thinks.
So many coping mechanisms. The baking, the pajama-stealing (and –wearing), the 2-hour baths, the lying on the floor. The ones Steve’s pretty sure Buck’s not even fully aware of, like the totally invasive pat-downs after any training exercise or op, or the fact that he talks both to and occasionally with himself (himselves?) out loud when he’s focused on something.
But it kind of works. He’s not normal, but which of them are? It’s a whole tower full of dysfunction.
They’ve been separated by glaciers, decades, and bullets, but they still found their way back here. Bucky walked that amazing road to get here. To overcome everything and still find his way to this stubborn weirdo who regularly breaks out into astonishing wisdom. Who has turned every old person within a 3-mile radius into his devoted fan. Who even Hulk likes, for pity’s sake, and that’s not even getting into the robots.
That’s Bucky. Everybody always loved Bucky, and Bucky always loved Steve.
If that’s the thing that pulled him out of hell, who’s Steve to say no without giving it a chance? They’ve changed; the world’s changed. Maybe the bond they’ve carried for most of a century can stand a little change too.
He will always give Bucky another chance. And another. Until the end.
Steve walks in the door, and the kitchen island looks like a bakery. The apartment smells warm and sweet. Like a home.
Bucky has flour in his hair and a set of streaks across his frayed t-shirt where he clearly wiped dough-covered fingers. It’s ridiculous. It’s one of the best things Steve has ever seen.
He feels like he could lift off the floor. He’d forgotten what it felt like: simple eagerness. They always did know how to raise a ruckus together. Maybe this is another adventure. The two Brooklyn boys, sticking their noses again where they don’t belong and finding: what?
Maybe nothing worth keeping. Maybe trouble. But trouble’s something they know how to handle.
Maybe. Maybe: something else altogether.
“Okay,” he thinks, “okay, yeah. Let’s give it a whirl.”