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The air in the Quinjet is still and stifling.
Well it isn’t, not really - they’re over Belarus and there’s frost on the windows. They’ve stayed high, to avoid being spotted by radar, but it’s been about two hours and no sign of any bogies or anyone on their tail. It’s the silence and anticipation that make the air feel thick in his throat.
Steve eases his hands off the controls with a sigh and shakes the tension from his shoulders. “It’ll be a few hours,” he says. “Get some rest. There’s a bunk in the back.”
“I’m all right,” Bucky says, and then nothing else.
Steve stares down at his hands, still gloved. There’s a bit of sticky stuff on them, from Tony’s Spider-Man. He picks it off, rubs his fingers together, and watches little wisps drift to the floor. He sighs and shucks the gloves.
Bucky watches Steve as he stands and makes his way to the little galley at the back of the jet. He keeps it stocked with dense nutrition bars, nestled in with electrolytes for Bruce, dried fruit for Natasha, and candies and chocolate for Clint and Tony. Steve unwraps what he’s never quite stopped thinking of as a K-ration and manages to put one end of it in his mouth. Bucky’d asked - what’ll happen to your friends? - and the not knowing gnaws at him. Sam will - he’ll look out for Wanda. Keep everyone together until Steve can come back for them.
He glances up, and Bucky looks away.
“Eat something, if you’re not gonna sleep,” Steve tells him, and watches Bucky chew that one over. HYDRA had thought of him as the knockoff version, second-rate to Erskine’s serum and outdated by the other Winter Soldiers, but Steve hasn’t won a fight against him since 1927. His metabolism runs as hot as Steve’s, according to the files. He’s gotta be starving.
Bucky shifts himself out of his seat. If Steve hadn’t been looking so closely, he would’ve missed the barely-there wince that crosses Bucky’s face. “You hurt?” Steve asks.
Bucky shakes his head. It’s not a no, exactly, and it’s followed by another wince and the heel of his palm pressed against his ribs. “That guy in the cat outfit,” he says, and his lips quirk. “He sure knows how to hit.”
Steve says, “Lemme look at it,” and then, when Bucky just frowns at him, swallows the dry nutrition bar clogging up his mouth and tries again.
“No, it’s,” Bucky says, and touches the place he’s hurt: high up on his ribs, close to his armpit. Left side. “I’m fine.”
“I don’t,” Steve says, but doesn’t finish the sentence. Can’t even think of how he would, how to tell Bucky all the things he lacks the words for. Speeches: Sam used to tease him about giving speeches. Everyone did. They expected them out in the field. At press conferences, to justify whatever the Avengers had done that week. The simple explanations were never good enough, and in truth Tony was always so much better at that part than Steve. Steve just never had the words.
“Yeah you do, Steve” Bucky says, low. He points a wry smile at the floor. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but you haven’t looked at me for more than three seconds in a row since I woke up stuffed in a vise.”
He takes a ration bar from Steve with his right hand and rips it open with his teeth. The fingers of his left hand make little whirring noises, or maybe it’s the arm itself.
Bucky’d torn the sleeve off his jacket before he’d even put it on. They’d stopped outside of Potsdam to pick his gear up from a bus station, a locker Bucky’d stuffed full of guns and cash and clothes and passports. Sam had gone in to empty it out, less conspicuous as a lost American tourist than Steve and Bucky could be with their faces plastered all over the news. He’d been gone for almost half an hour, long enough that Steve was glad to have something to else to worry over to keep him from stealing glances at Bucky in the rearview mirror.
He thought Bucky would’ve caught him looking, but every time Steve had flicked his eyes up into that mirror Bucky’s had been closed.
“I made a mistake,” Steve says. Bucky’s smile broadens and gets playful. I don’t know I’m worth all this, Steve. “A few weeks ago, in Nigeria.”
At this, Bucky looks up and Steve looks down. “You remember someone named Rumlow?” Steve asks, staring at his hands. “He was HYDRA, I don’t know if you -”
“I remember him,” Bucky says, in a way that tears holes around Steve’s chest.
“He said your name,” Steve tells him softly. The floor of the Quinjet is scuffed with boot marks. He almost thinks he could pick out Natasha’s stride in the mix of them. “It was all he needed to say, and I - people died because I lost focus. I couldn't let that happen again.”
Bucky’s silent for a long time, both of them staring anywhere but each other. Steve’s fingers tighten around themselves, knotting around everything he can’t figure out how to say. “Just you and me now,” Bucky says, finally.
“Yeah,” Steve says. “Just you and me.”
It’s quiet in the Quinjet. Quiet enough that the zipper on Bucky’s jacket rasps in his ears. He doesn’t look at Steve as he drags the zip down, holding the jacket by the wrist of its remaining sleeve to slide it off his shoulders. It’s leather - heavy and fleshy as it hits the floor. Underneath he’s wearing only a grimy undershirt, and for a moment Steve is thrown so violently into the past it makes him feel sick: sixteen, Brooklyn, summertime, watching Bucky dig weeds in the little garden his folks kept behind their place. It’s the smell, heavy and metallic, which had been the chicken coop then and is blood and cordite now but also Bucky himself, that sweat-and-skin smell that comes off him like a wave.
Bucky’s jaw is set, his fists balled up. He’s staring somewhere off to Steve’s left, the same middle ground he’d been looking at when they’d had him locked up in that box. “Okay,” Steve says, and God bless all the saints and angels, it actually comes out halfway steady. “Okay, let’s have a look.”
Steve turns around to get the medkit and sets it on the galley countertop. Sometimes he heals so fast that bits of rubble and gravel seal up inside him, which is almost more annoying than getting hurt in the first place. You either have to dig it out or wait for whatever keeps him ticking to eat away at it. It’s easier to just clean the wound when it happens than listen to Sam hassle him about a rock under his skin for a month.
When he turns back around Bucky’s used one hand to roll the dirty edge of his shirt up and stands patiently waiting for Steve.
Steve hunkers a little to get a better look. The edges of the wound are peeled back, ragged-looking, trying to crust over with dried blood. This didn’t come from King T’Challa’s claws - it was something blunter, wide enough to bruise from the bottom of Bucky’s ribs all the way up to where his shirt’s still covering him. Hadn’t slowed him down much; wouldn't have slowed Steve down either. If he sat still long enough he could probably see the gash start to close itself up - the way he sees on himself sometimes.
He gets a wipe and steadies his other hand on Bucky’s side. Bucky’s stomach jumps, but he doesn’t move away so Steve keeps it where it is and keeps his eyes on the work.
All he can smell is Bucky - stale sweat, smoke on his skin. There’s a faint smell in his hair from the river they both fell into. Something that tickles the inside of his nose that must be - it must be the arm, whatever’s powering it. Steve had touched it to put him in the vise. It had been just as warm as the rest of him.
He has to use both hands to tape a bandage over the wound, and at the top his fingertips brush metal. “Steve,” Bucky says, and it’s something desperate in Steve that opens his mouth and makes him say, “Not ticklish anymore, huh?”
Bucky’s stomach jumps again. “No,” he says, flat. “HYDRA took away my greatest weakness.”
Steve looks up quick and finds Bucky actually looking back. “What?” Steve says.
“Ticklish,” Bucky explains. He’s trying to smile. The corner of his mouth twitches uncertainly. “I’m not - ”
A laugh sticks in Steve’s throat. His head jerks, half a nod. He straightens and shifts back, and Bucky follows him - chest first, leaning into the places where Steve’s hands had been. Instinctively, Steve presses back, wrapping his fingers around the solidity of Bucky’s ribs.
Bucky’s breathing hard. The arm whirs and clicks, still held awkwardly away from his own body, away from where Steve is touching him.
“You’re bigger than me again,” Steve says into the silence. He smooths his palms down Bucky’s sides, careful around the bandage and the raw, red edges beneath it. It sounds admiring when he says it - which he is - but Bucky snorts.
“Am I?”
“Built like a house,” Steve says. “Could give Charles Atlas a run for his money.”
“Gave Captain America a run for his money,” Bucky mutters.
Steve can’t help but laugh. His fingers curl against Bucky’s skin.
Bucky makes a noise between his teeth - soft, startled - and pushes into Steve, that metal hand coming up and gripping Steve’s elbow hard. Keeping him in place. If Steve breathes deep enough his chest will probably brush up against Bucky’s. He can almost feel the rolled up edge of Bucky’s shirt against the thick padding of his uniform. The air between them is abruptly charged, crackling.
“S - sorry,” Bucky says, and lets go. He moves back, out of Steve’s reach. His shoulders hunch up towards his ears but he doesn’t look defensive. He doesn’t even look scared. He’s rubbing at his own chest and arms, fitfully.
“Nothing I haven’t seen before,” Steve says, and Bucky’s mouth twists, the kind of ugly expression he used to make when he thought Steve was full of shit. “Not unless HYDRA gave you an extra dick too,” he adds, and that works: Bucky laughs and presses the fingers of that metal hand over his eyes.
“Not even the future cured that smart mouth on you,” he says.
“It’s metal, isn’t it,” Steve says. “They both metal?”
“You fuckin’ -” Bucky says, shaking his head.
It hurts to breathe. It hurts to even breathe. His face aches from smiling, from Bucky smiling. His chest feels overfull. He’s sweating a little in the costume. Overheated, thirsty. Bucky’s sweating too, a little gleam along his collarbone, his forehead. One hand under his shirt, pulling it up a little further. Restless over his own skin.
“You never let up, do you?” Bucky asks. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
There’s nothing to say to that, so Steve doesn’t say anything, just watches the shift of Bucky’s expression. He tucks his chin into his chest, the line of his mouth wavering and then firming up. He uses both hands to pull his shirt the rest of the way off. It fluffs his hair up into a stupid frizzy halo, which he pats down absently, getting only part of the mess. Back home he’d spend half the morning that way, peering blearily into space until Steve got some coffee in him.
“Bucky,” Steve says, and can’t think of anything in the world to follow it up with.
So he takes a step forward, and then another. Bucky lets him do it, still and watchful, like a caged animal. When Steve puts his hands on Bucky’s shoulders he shivers into the touch, eyes sliding closed. It’s thrilling, terrifying: he keeps shivering as Steve strokes down both arms, feeling the differences in each one, the shifting metal plates with his fingertips. Bucky’s nipples stiffen up under his palms.
Back then he’d been so eager. Both of them had. Fooling around in the empty apartment at the top of Bucky’s folks’ place, when it was empty, or in Steve’s ma’s room, when it wasn’t - crushed up in the corner where the neighbor couldn’t see them through the window, across the airshaft. He feels as nervous now as he did then, nothing about this as easy and comfortable as was in between. They’d jerk each other off in foxholes just to relieve the boredom.
But this, this part he remembers - dim and cloudy with time - how his gut had clenched the first time he’d ever stuck his hands down Bucky’s pants. How strange it had been to feel someone else’s dick, the slickness dripping from it, the thick hair around it. The angle all wrong, making his wrist ache.
“Steve -” Bucky says and grabs Steve’s hands just as they were about to brush against the front of his pants. He pins them back against Steve’s own thighs, shuddering all over, his face burning red. Coming - until Steve realizes he isn’t, that he’s holding it back.
He drops his head onto Steve’s shoulder, grinding his forehead into Steve’s collarbone. “Steve,” he says again, panting.
“Thought you grew out of that hair trigger,” Steve says, and presses his face against Bucky’s hair.
“Guess not,” Bucky whispers. His whole body’s rolling forward, rubbing against nothing but air. Holding Steve just far enough away that they don’t touch except where Bucky’s hands are holding his wrists together, where Steve can feel Bucky’s sweat against his throat.
“Hey, you remember when,” Steve says, without thinking, but he feels Bucky’s lips pull back over his teeth.
“My bar mitzvah,” Bucky says, gritting it out.
“And you had to walk around like that for hours, hoping your folks didn’t notice,” Steve tells him, and they’re both shaking now, grinning and trembling all over. Bucky lets Steve’s wrists go, moves a hand to the back of Steve’s neck and grips him tight.
“Steve,” he gasps, and groans outright when Steve pops the snap of his pants open, drags them down Bucky’s hips. Soft, faded underwear, a big wet spot in the front of them, thin enough that Steve nearly tears the fabric pulling those down.
But as soon as Steve’s got a hand on Bucky’s dick, Bucky’s there too: metal fingers wrapping around Steve’s, crushing down hard enough that both of them whimper.
“Don’t,” Bucky says, even as his hips jerk up unevenly into Steve’s fist.
“I can’t,” Bucky says, even as he bites down on the thick fabric covering Steve’s shoulder.
“Bucky,” Steve says, and lets go, and Bucky lets go too, grabbing the front of Steve’s uniform with both hands and shoving him back against the countertop. Steve knocks the medkit with his elbow and it goes flying, bandages bouncing and unspooling onto the ground. The zipper for the uniform is hidden where a red panel meets up with a blue one, and even though it’s the opposite side from where it’d been in the war, Bucky’s fingers find it unerringly.
“Feeling a little underdressed, pal,” he says, and he is: shirtless, slick with sweat, his pants held up only by the spread of his thighs around Steve’s, his dick jutting red into the space between their bodies.
“All you hadda do was ask,” Steve says, and feels metal grinding under his hands, how hard he’s gripping the counter behind him to keep his hands off Bucky’s body. Bucky lets him peel open the front of the uniform until it hangs crooked and heavy off one shoulder. His metal fingers click against Steve’s belt buckle.
The counter digs into the small of Steve’s back as Bucky crowds closer, grinding them together, hard enough that he bends Steve backwards. And it’s this - for all that he’d teased, for how hot his blood had gotten to see Bucky so keyed up, ready to go off untouched - has Steve coming first, hard and gasping and undone: the dizzying moment when he feels Bucky’s full weight over him, and realizes that for once in their lives, each of them is as strong as the other.
He’s blinded, eyes closed tight, shocked by orgasm. His hands have clamped around Bucky’s hips, and Bucky’s hands fisted in his hair, rubbing his dick over Steve’s until he’s coming too, hissing through his teeth. He sags against Steve, who grunts softly; he really does weigh a ton.
Steve breathes slow and deep. The engines of the Quinjet throb almost silently under his feet. With his eyes closed he could be anywhere; everything alive in him held in the press of Bucky’s forehead against his own, the weight of Bucky’s forearms pressing down against his shoulders. He touches Bucky’s back. Measures the span of it. Feels the flex of muscle under the skin. Touches the edges of the metal arm, which extends further than Steve realized: all the way across the wing of his shoulder blade.
In Europe Bucky’d gotten so skinny. You couldn’t tell, under the thick coat he wore. They all looked like overly padded bears by the end of things, their winter gear as matted and dirty as fur. When they’d fucked they’d taken off as little clothes as possible, so it was a picture Steve pieced together later, after Bucky had fallen: how he hadn’t been strong enough to use the shield. How he hadn’t been strong enough to hold on until Steve could get to him, because he would have, with just a few more seconds -
Bucky lets go, eases back. He’s a mess. His face is blotchy red. There’s come on his chest and half his bandage has peeled off. The edges of it are tinged pink. Steve looks down at himself; there are smears of sweat or come on the edges of his open pants. His uniform hangs grimly onto one shoulder, the other sleeve pushed all the way down to his elbow. There are copper splotches on Steve’s stomach where Bucky’s blood has gotten on him, and he rubs at them absently with a thumb.
He reaches out. Unsticks the tape covering Bucky’s ribs, and pulls the bandage straight. Bucky makes a face, as if getting a bandage ripped off is worse than vibranium claws. Steve grimaces back and pinches him high up on the ribs, right next to the ridge of metal. Bucky jumps: still a little ticklish after all.
He smiles when he meets Steve’s eyes, and they don’t say anything at all.