Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

'First things first,' Gina starts by telling him and the five other people in basic training. She's shorter than Natasha but her voluminous black curls seem to make up for what she lacks in height through sheer exuberance. When Steve had first arrived, she’d taken one long look at him with raised eyebrows and then turned away, exhaling a long and measured breath, and proceeded to act as if he were invisible. All things considered, he preferred it that way.  

'If I was a nicer person, I might start by telling you that I value your contribution to our program, to these kids. I might tell you that every minute you spend with them, getting them back in the world after they witnessed it being stomped all over, is precious, and that you should all give yourselves a pat on the back for being such fine upstanding citizens.'

She surveys them with a challenging look that reminds Steve of Peggy so much he has to put a hand over his mouth to hide a smile. He doesn’t want to get singled out for insubordination before they’ve even begun working together.

'But I'm not a nice person,' Gina continues. 'I'm trying to get things done here on a shoestring budget and fewer volunteers than it takes to run a coffee morning at the PTA. I don't want people who are going to walk away just when I've finally started remembering all their names. If you stay for this orientation, you need to really want this. I'm not interested in people who only want something to put on their college applications. This is heavy stuff, and you all need to be prepared for that.'

She leaves a pause here, apparently waiting for people to take their leave if they've been intimidated into it. Steve isn't surprised when there aren't any takers; he recognizes the power of a speech like that. Probably they're all even more determined to prove themselves now, to demonstrate that even if it might look like it, they're not just here for the sake of their resumes.

'No takers?' she asks with the slight hint of a smile. 'Alright. Then let's get started.'

---

Natasha had been the one who suggested it. This was surprising to Steve at first – usually it was Sam trying to help him find new purpose – but after a while he thought he understood why. Natasha was always trying to take care of them in her own way, although she often refused to acknowledge that she was doing it, and she knew more than any of them what it meant to try and sweep up around the giant crater left by your own negative impact. If anyone was going to direct him toward a way he might be able to alleviate his own guilt while actually doing some good into the bargain, it would be her.

'Do you think they'll accept me?' he'd asked doubtfully, staring down at the flier. VOLUNTEERS NEEDED! it bleated at him in sour Hulk green, which he thought demonstrated a serious lack of tact considering it was an advertisement calling for people to work with kids left with PTSD after the Avengers levelled half their home city. 'I mean. I'm the one who caused half the mess.'

'While defending the earth from aliens,' Natasha pointed out.

Steve had frowned, tapping his fingers against the flier. There had been a documentary on TV the other day entitled Heroes or Villains? The Rise and Fall of the Avengers. Documentaries and talk shows on the Avengers were a dime a dozen but the title of this one stuck out: Steve wanted to ask who had the authority on when they’d fallen, or arguably whether they had ever risen in the first place.

The footage of the Chitauri invasion and the helicarrier crashes was even more damning when viewed in HD magnificence on the widescreen in the tower’s communal living space. When you were living it – when you were in the middle of the fight – it was impossible to appreciate exactly how much damage you were doing, damage to people and to infrastructure, so much of it that repairs weren’t even close to completion a year after SHIELD had been dissolved. There were entire blocks downtown that were still levelled and unusable, huge chunks torn out of now-uninhabitable skyscrapers that still had hazard tape mournfully strung across them as if waiting for someone to pull on the loose thread and bring the whole thing tumbling down. Steve had emailed the city zoning commission about it offering to help or contribute to the reconstruction but nobody had ever been able to give him a satisfactory answer about what was needed. There also seemed to be some confusion over who exactly owned the land and therefore whose responsibility it was to rebuild, especially after the dissolution of SHIELD and subsequent selling off of its properties and other myriad assets. Tony had thrown so much money at the reconstruction effort after the invasion that Steve couldn’t imagine asking him to do it again, give more, patch up Manhattan one giant Stark Industries-stamped hay bale of money at a time. He was probably already doing it anyway and Steve just didn’t know about it; Tony had a surprising number of charitable and non-profit bodies up his sleeve that he didn’t like to discuss or even own up to. Steve felt this was indicative of his inability to accept praise for the genuinely worthwhile things he did outside of the Avengers, while simultaneously insisting he be loudly and effusively praised for what usually amounted to a random series of explosions in the lab when he was working on his suits.

Bucky had watched the documentary impassively for twenty minutes, flashes of red and gold and acid green reflecting in his eyes before Steve couldn't bear it anymore and jumped up off the couch, announcing he was going for a run. They had already been for one this morning with Sam but after a moment Bucky had nodded and come with him anyway. Steve tried to keep a conversation going but everywhere they ran he kept seeing the footage superimposed over the flashy signs, the bustling streets of Manhattan: screaming children cowering underneath teetering stacks of drywall and brick, the guts of a Chitauri leviathan steaming hot on the sidewalk while people slipped and cried and clawed their way through the mess in an attempt to escape.

'I don't know what good I'll be,' Steve admitted to Natasha. 'I might even make things worse. I could give them flashbacks, Nat.'

'This isn't a movie, Steve,' she said sharply. 'They're not going to take one look at you and run screaming just because you were there that day. There were lots of other people there too. It’s a big city.’

He wanted to smile at that, hearing something of his ma in it: giving him hell for singling himself out yet again to take a beating. There were lots of other kids who coulda jumped in too, weren’t there? You’re not as special as all that, Steve. Let someone else take the punches for once.

Natasha watched him silently but he only looked back, unsure what she expected him to say. Yes, there had been lots of other people there. He tended to stand out, though; he’d been brandishing a fairly recognizable target at the time. Plus, he’d been one of the guys doing all the punching.

Eventually she sighed.

‘They might even remember that it was you saving them, Steve. You could get something out of this too.'

He wanted to argue that this wasn’t about what he needed but he was pretty sure that would have proved her point somehow so he stayed silent, unconvinced, until she unfolded her arms and sidled up to him. He wondered sometimes whether she knew she did that, approached people as if every conversation would end either in a fight or in sex, and then he felt stupid for wondering: of course she did.

'It'll do them good, Steve,' she said in a softer voice, as soft as she got. 'To see that somebody cares.'

'I do care,' he said. That wasn’t the issue; he just didn’t want to muscle in where he wasn’t wanted or needed. The Avengers had already been accused of treating New York like their own personal playground, and he didn’t want to compound that impression; throwing his weight around didn’t come as naturally to him these days, even now he’d finally gotten used to having more of it.

'I know you do. Everyone knows you do. It just doesn’t seem like caring from the sidelines is enough for you lately.'

He frowned at her.

'You've been spending too much time around Sam,' he told her seriously.

He'd thought about it for a long time though, after she left. Bucky came back from the gym two hours later and Steve was still sat at the kitchen table thinking about it, folding up the flier ready to toss in the recycling and then cautiously unfolding it again, the creases now forming parallel white tracks in the garish glossy background design.

Bucky looked exhausted, just punched out, which could mean it was a good day in which he had achieved a new personal best or could mean he'd wanted to make somebody hurt him, which the other Avengers and their personal trainers often had to adjust to on the fly, with varying degrees of success. There was really no way to tell except to ask, and neither of them were responding particularly well to Sam's pleas to use their words instead of their fists to communicate these days. Sam had suggested to Steve once, half a joke, that this might be because men from the forties weren’t as accustomed to discussing their emotions. Steve had ruefully nodded along with this but he didn't really think it was true. To him it seemed that actually there was far too much to say: whole paragraphs stacking up in his throat when he opened his mouth to try and say anything meaningful to Bucky – which inevitably dissipated at the blank and unforgiving expression Bucky usually produced at any sign of encroaching emotional vulnerability. Steve just had no idea where to begin. Everything that had been done to Bucky was such a violation, and warranted such constant vigilance over his body and mind even now, that it seemed intolerably cruel to ask him to share anything else. He had already had to give his past, his body, his peace of mind; how in good conscience could Steve possibly ask him for anything more by trying to start a conversation about it?

Bucky's skin gleamed with sweat as his throat worked, draining a water bottle straight from the fridge. Steve caught himself watching and looked away quickly, trying to shrug off the familiar prickle of guilt along the back of his neck.

'Natasha find you?' Bucky asked unnecessarily, eyes flicking to the flier, after a minute of silence during which Steve realized with irritation that he couldn't even open his mouth to say hello.

'Yeah,' he said, a little choked. He got up to make coffee. He didn't really want it, but he wanted something to do with his hands, which usually got too obviously jittery around Bucky, especially when Bucky had a lot of skin on show. ‘She wants me to sign up as a mentor, or – like a counselor, I guess. Volunteer stuff. For the kids who were around during the invasion.’

It’s a little more complicated than that – Natasha had explained that kids could only qualify for the program if their parents provided financial statements indicating that they couldn’t afford professional counselling, and if they had a written note from the kids’ teachers to demonstrate that their behavior was disrupting class to the extent that some preventative measures needed to be taken – but Steve could barely get his head around those details himself, let alone explain them to anyone else. It seems bizarrely cruel to insist that kids should only be allowed to apply for therapeutic help – and amateur therapeutic help at that; the group sounds more like a social gathering intended to have a positive, relaxing effect on the kids rather than a genuine therapy session – if they’ve been proven to cause a disturbance, as if the quiet ones don’t need attention just as much. It’s one of those situations that is irritatingly familiar in its baffling dismissal of those in need; it reminds him grimly of the forties, and is actually making him swing more toward signing up than rejecting the idea. These kids already have the odds stacked against them, how can he add to that? Maybe he could do something about the candidate criteria while he was there. He doesn’t mind so much throwing his weight around when it’s for things like that.

Bucky was silent in response, and when Steve finished fiddling with the coffee filters and turned around to lean against the counter, he was methodically stripping the label off his water bottle, watching his own fingers move with eerie grace. He looked up at Steve and smiled a little, one knowing glance that propelled Steve back to their teenage years when Bucky had worn it most, when he’d found or done something he wasn’t supposed to have done or found. A lot of people seemed to think that Bucky had run around after Steve when they were younger, because Steve was always getting himself into fights Bucky had to pull him out of, and Steve couldn’t tell them the truth without betraying too much of the things they’d never really talked about, even just between the two of them: that it was Steve who was the follower, Steve who followed whenever Bucky beckoned and who was helpless to the siren call of Bucky’s need, even when it wasn’t directed at him.

‘You should do it,’ Bucky said unexpectedly. ‘It’ll be good for you.’

‘Yeah?’ Steve asked, trying not to perk up too obviously and apparently failing, judging by the way Bucky affectionately rolled his eyes.

‘Stop you moping around the apartment all day,’ he said teasingly, his voice so low it was almost a growl. Steve looked down at the ground, sure he was flushing. He still wished he could switch parts of his brain off sometimes, just like he had whenever any of the USO girls had flirted him into incomprehensibility, but this was probably more to do with his nervous system, which never had known which way was up when it came to responding to Bucky.

‘Plus it’d be nice to help with the relief effort,’ Steve reflected, and Bucky snorted, getting up from the table and heading toward his bedroom. Steve clamped down on the longing tendril inside him which wanted to wind around Bucky’s wrist and cling. Bucky never lingers in any communal space for very long anymore, usually retreating to his own room after a few minutes of conversation, which has had the unfortunate consequence of making Steve a little manic whenever they are alone in the same room together, determined to make the most out of whatever attention Bucky is willing to toss his way that day. It’s a supremely unfair way to think about it, Steve knows that, and so he would never say anything about it. Bucky has fought hard to reclaim his own right and desire for privacy and Steve has no right of his own to wish for more than what Bucky can give him. It’s only that Steve can’t help falling on what Bucky does give like a starving man, stashing it away for the times when he is left alone to make his peace with the pitiful fact that he will never get enough for as long as he lives.

‘Yeah,’ Bucky called back now. ‘I think you really need to worry about that, Steve. You’re ranking a little low on the martyrdom scale these days.’

Steve gave a snort of his own.

‘You’re one to talk,’ he retorted. ‘How many anonymous donations to the VA are we up to now?’

Bucky threw up a silent two fingered salute as he made his way down the corridor to his room, and Steve struggled not to sigh at the familiar sight of his broad shoulders disappearing through the doorway, head bent down, the soft click as the door closes behind him.

---

It wasn’t that they hadn’t tried to talk about it when Bucky had first returned to him. It seemed to have been one of the motivating instincts that led Bucky back, eventually, to where Steve had only dreamed that they might find him: back in the Smithsonian, staring at the Howling Commandos exhibit with a hunger that stopped Steve in his tracks, actually panting from how fast he had run when the museum staff’s call had finally reached him. Bucky had shown up dressed in the same clothes as last time, plus several weeks’ worth of beard growth, and stood there for hours while the room slowly emptied around him. Determined not to let him get away this time, one museum employee had gotten close enough to confirm what they suspected and they had contacted Jarvis, who immediately interrupted the call Steve was on with Tony about facilitating some kind of initiative for teenagers with superhero potential. Steve had been in the middle of a run, which he had found was one of the only ways to alleviate the tension inspired by conversations with Tony, and had changed directions so quickly to get back to the Smithsonian that he had left a screeching skid mark on the sidewalk.

Bucky had turned to see Steve as if he was not in the slightest surprised to find him there, just a minute shift of his body to acknowledge Steve’s presence. There was no reason why he should be surprised, after all; if he remembered anything of the two of them, it would be easy enough to make the deduction that Steve would have run much further to find him. Steve took a moment to be thankful that he hadn’t yet left Washington with Sam on their search, or he would have no doubt been forced to commandeer a plane to get back here in time to stop Bucky leaving again.

‘They’re all,’ Bucky started, then seemed to choke, flinching, before he swallowed and continued. ‘They’re all gone now.’

‘Yes,’ Steve confirmed, standing stock still where he’d stumbled to a halt. He’d realized his hands were out as if he were hoping to ward off a wild beast and he forced them back to his sides quickly. Bucky was glancing all around him now, keeping his head low. He was holding his left arm ever so slightly away from his body, the way he had started to hold his rifle towards the end, when he didn’t want to be associated with it anymore. ‘It’s just you and me, Buck. And Peggy,’ he added, which made Bucky look up sharply.

‘Peggy Carter,’ he murmured. Then he frowned, making sudden hard eye contact with Steve. ‘Red.’

‘The red dress,’ Steve said, feeling the words come out of his mouth with no intervention from his brain. Then the impossibility of the moment overwhelmed him for a second, as sure and consuming as the vast expanse of the Potomac, and he couldn’t speak. But it was vital that he must speak: he must tell Bucky how much he’d been missed, how much he was loved, how little Steve cared what he had done in the intervening years so long as he would come back, come back home with him, and let Steve love him again.

‘Bucky,’ he said in the end, helpless to encompass everything except in the one word which had always meant so much to him; around which the world, for him, revolved.

‘Steve,’ Bucky said back, and the intonation had been a little different, Bucky’s voice raw and rusty from disuse, but the look in his eyes, for that brief unbelievable moment, had been exactly the same as it had been when Steve had pulled him off Zola’s table: just as stunned, and just as relieved.

In his lowest moments since that day in the museum, Steve has yearned for that look, and has never once seen it replicated. At first he’d been too preoccupied with the day to day essentials of helping Bucky resituate himself in the world, in helping him remember that he was a person at all, to worry about whether Bucky remembered what they had meant to each other back then. It hardly seemed relevant when they couldn’t even get Bucky to speak more than three words at a time and most of those were in Russian, and it was a good day when Bucky hadn’t incapacitated any of them or curled up on the floor having a panic attack. The only person he would allow near him when he was hyperventilating was Steve, but he wouldn’t let him touch, so Steve had to just sit there, hands clawing white and strained into his legs, watching Bucky shake and come back to himself in stages over and over again. After the fifth time Bucky reset during the night and tried to attack him, Natasha finally convinced Steve to sleep with a Taser under his pillow. He doggedly refused to put a lock on the door, though; he wouldn’t take the chance that Bucky would find it locked when he needed Steve the most, and that rejection would forever color Bucky’s willingness to reach out to him.

While the progress Bucky made was gradual, it was still progress; three months after he came back, he had seemed to be slowly coming back to himself. He was talking to a psychiatrist – or he was sitting in a room with a psychiatrist for extended periods of time. He could go outside alone, although he still wasn’t doing great in crowded public places. Definition was beginning to emerge: he liked Steve to play him the records they’d listened to when they were kids, he remembered how much he hated cooking anything more complicated than eggs. He made quiet, laconic jokes about the rest of the Avengers that made Steve grin and look down, away, because Bucky’s watchful expression was so achingly familiar; he had always liked making people laugh.

The longer Bucky was out of cryo, the more his own identity had time to reassert itself, and the harder it was for the HYDRA programming to overcome him. Steve had optimistically begun to hope that any changes in personality need not noticeably alter their relationship, if that was what Bucky wanted too – after all, he was a different man than he had been in the forties as well, having been forced to adapt quickly to the twenty first century with little or no guidance as to how he might do so without going mad. All that had made absolutely no difference to his feelings about Bucky. But however much Bucky seemed to want Steve around for ballast, he couldn’t seem to understand why. Steve could see it when Bucky looked at him sometimes, before Bucky quickly looked away – as if he was trying to remember something which he knew to be important but couldn’t quite internalize or believe. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that Bucky’s feelings for Steve could not have remained intact, when everything else about him had been so thoroughly broken down.

And yet there were moments – incandescent moments of hope and shock in which Bucky remembered something Steve hadn’t already volunteered, in which Steve could see the shining splinters of the man he used to know poking up through the scorched earth. There had been entire days and weeks and months in which meaningful discussion of the past still seemed like a possibility; Bucky remembered in flashes, but almost everything stuck once it had appeared. There were times when Steve had gone to bed almost giddy with the progress Bucky had made that day. But it always ended the same way: Steve would wake up in the morning to find that Bucky had panicked in the night and run again. He always came back a few days later after leaving Steve nauseated with worry, slipping back into his bed without a word to anyone. More than once Steve had fallen asleep in the chair in Bucky’s empty room and woken to find him curled up in the bed, his hair tugged loose from its bun and splayed out over the pillow, face set in a snarl that sometimes eased when Steve was forced to speak, answering a call from Natasha or Sam to say Bucky had come back again.

Steve would watch him in these moments, sure that Bucky would want him to leave him in privacy but unable to deny himself until the guilt became too great. He would wish that he could claw himself open and let Bucky climb inside, wander around in there and explore as he pleased. He thought it might be the only way they could ever really be at ease with each other again, with no doubts over whether Bucky’s return was cherished or resented. Because he knew Bucky thought him resentful – pining for the man he used to be and, in his grief, incapable of loving the one he was now. It would have taken more words than Steve could reasonably hope to string together to explain that his love was not conditional on anything as unyielding as Bucky remaining the man he had been in their youth. In any case, all the qualities he had adored in Bucky were still there, even in these most trying of circumstances – his kindness, his generosity, his dry humor. It wasn’t just their shared history that kept Steve hoping. He was powerless in the face of what he felt for Bucky; he always had been. It just didn’t matter what Bucky had done, or whether he remembered everything or nothing at all. Bucky looked at Steve and Steve adored him. There was nothing Steve could do about it.

---

‘I don’t know what I’m doing, Sam,’ Steve admits, sounding a little out of breath even to himself. In theory the serum had enhanced his circulatory system to the point where hyperventilation should be completely impossible, but apparently all it took was a community center room full of scowling preteens to prove medical science wrong on that score. ‘I have no idea how to talk to kids.’

‘That is a bald-faced lie,’ Sam says down the phone, voice exhilarated and slightly too loud from altitude. He loves to split his attention while he’s flying and deliberately calls people while he’s practicing maneuvers. Tony likes to say this is because that way he can actually pretend he’s a real bird who doesn’t even have to think about it. ‘You love kids. Sometimes when they make you kiss babies on camera, I’m kinda worried you’re not gonna give ‘em back.’

‘Yeah, but these ones are all –’ he takes another darting glance through the pane of glass again, examining the group of kids sat moodily at their tables for anyone who might seem happy or even accepting of being here, but no dice ‘– scowling at me. I’m not even in the room yet, Sam, and I already feel like they’re scowling at me.’

‘They’ve been through a lot,’ Sam reminds him. ‘Wouldn’t you be scowling too?’

Steve sighs.

‘Plus, you’re Captain America,’ Sam points out. ‘I don’t think they’re going to throw rotten tomatoes at you.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ Steve says darkly.

‘Shit!’ Sam yells with no warning. Steve jerks the phone away from his ear. ‘Oh. Never mind. Sorry, thought I’d hit a bird. It’s all good.’

‘I’m going to go now,’ Steve says calmly, ‘before you give me something else to worry about.’

‘You’re gonna do great,’ Sam says, obviously trying to sound sincere to make up for nearly bursting Steve’s eardrum. ‘Just be yourself.’

‘Right,’ Steve says, and hangs up before he can point out that being himself doesn’t seem to be helping anyone else lately.

When the rest of the volunteers and Gina have arrived and they’ve all exchanged greetings, most of them also looking as if they want to puke, they go into the hall as a group, a move that makes Steve want to half-hysterically make a joke about the Avengers assembling. But he hangs back for a second in the doorway and watches the wary looks on the kids’ faces as they scope out the volunteers, more adults who’ve promised to help when the system failed to, and he loses the urge to joke. He wonders wildly how any of this is going to work at all – the kids are individually sat at around a dozen small round tables, some of them leaning across to whisper to each other but mostly staring in silence at the front of the room or out the window, the familiar blankness of someone who might be in the room physically but is leagues away in their mind. All the volunteers are lining up at the front, toting nervous smiles like they’re about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. It’s all incredibly off-putting and awkward, and for a second Steve wants to turn around and walk away, and never have to think about doing this again. But then Gina turns around and looks at him expectantly, and he remembers what she’d told them in training – that the first session was always the worst, but that these kids deserved people who would keep trying anyway – and he takes a deep breath and keeps walking.

Which means he enters the room last, to a puzzled and then startled silence. Contrary to popular belief, it’s actually not all that difficult for him to get around in New York so long as he doesn’t talk too loudly about Avengers business on the subway or wear any combination of red white and blue. Not that many people know what he really looks like; the cowl is more effective a tool for disguise than people give it credit for, and only real history buffs tend to have read enough about him to recognize his face on sight. Besides, it’s New York – odds are, there’s something weirder going on down the street than just Captain America getting groceries.

That doesn’t mean to say people never double take when they realize what they’re actually looking at, though. He quickly fishes out his showgirl smile, which is what he reverts to when he’s so nervous he knows it wouldn’t look natural if he tried anything else less brash. It’s the usual mix of responses; a few of the kids look like they’ve been hit over the head with a board, some of them look excited but as if they’re trying to stay cool, and most of them look as if he could be doing cartwheels fully suited up and they still wouldn’t be impressed. These kids have a little more reason than most to fall into the latter category, he supposes.

‘Alright,’ Gina says. ‘This is just a preliminary session so everyone can get to know their partners and see if we need to make any changes. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna make anyone do any icebreakers or introduce themselves or anything like that. We want you all to feel comfortable here, so just try to have fun with it, okay?’

A black girl wearing dungarees and a giant yellow bow in her hair rolls her eyes so expansively at this that Steve immediately feels a kindred connection with her. That one, he wants to say. That one for me.

But he gets paired with a short skinny kid called Aubrey who stammers so much it takes him nearly five minutes to get out his first sentence, which is a question about whether or not Steve has to get his shield repainted after every time the Avengers have to fight.

‘Not every time,’ he says, thinking back through the past year’s missions consecutively and rapidly editing content until they turn into anecdotes he might be able to tell a ten-year-old. ‘Like when those creeper vines came out of the sewers a few months ago?’ They’d spread, insidious, from manhole covers and up through subway platforms until they reached the surface and flowered into deeply poisonous but kind of pretty giant purple flowers. It’d taken them two days to track them back to the underground lab from which they’d sprung, some kind of experimental growth hormone backfiring on the long-gone still unidentified scientist. The stories where there’s no one big to fight but there’s still a lot of clearing up to do either take up more or less news coverage depending on how explosive the mess; this had been medium, and had occurred shortly after the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade so sadly all the news crews had already been present to record Banner being sucked, disgruntled and pounding his fists on the crumbling sidewalk, into a manhole, one tree trunk limb at a time.

‘Uh huh,’ Aubrey confirms. 

‘Well, they needed us to clear the source of the vines,’ Steve says, ‘but I didn’t have to fight anybody, so I used my shield mostly just for chopping off the vines as they appeared.’

Aubrey nods seriously, as if he wishes he could be taking notes. Steve looks at him, encroaching panic threatening on the horizon, before he remembers Gina’s advice when they weren’t sure what to say next.

‘Just ask them stuff,’ she’d said. ‘None of you would be here if you didn’t at least have a fringe awareness of how to talk to kids, so try and let the conversation flow naturally. And remember that in the end they’re just people, and people love to talk about themselves. Ask them stuff: ask them about school and their families and their pets and whether they like baseball and what they’re looking forward to.’

‘Aren’t we supposed to get them talking about the attacks?’ Moira had asked. She was a smartly dressed psychology graduate who listened to everything Gina said with a perpetual small frown of dissent, but she didn’t usually speak up.

‘They’ll talk about it in their own time,’ Gina had said. ‘The important thing is that they get comfortable with you first. This isn’t a psychiatrist’s office; it’s a place where they can come to feel safe, and if we start by poking them with sticks they’re not going to feel like that.’

Don’t poke him with a stick, Steve reminds himself, watching as Aubrey absentmindedly gnaws on a hangnail, staring at the table.

‘So,’ he says gently, ‘what grade are you in at school?’

Aubrey looks at him and takes a deep breath, frowning.

They fumble their way through a conversation until it’s snack time, during which Steve stands desultorily next to the table with the coffee canisters and little baskets full of sweetener and creamer, trying not to make eye contact with anyone.

‘Hey,’ says a voice, and when he looks around it’s the little girl who’d rolled her eyes during Gina’s opening speech. Steve smiles, opening his mouth to ask her name but she cuts him off. ‘I know your secret,’ she says.

A few things flash through Steve’s mind at that, none of which are suitable for public consumption.

‘Oh yeah?’ he asks, raising an eyebrow. ‘And what might that be?’

‘You don’t really wanna be here,’ she says triumphantly. ‘I saw you talking to Aubrey and you looked like you wanted to run away.’ She points to where Aubrey is now sat chatting avidly and with barely discernible pauses for stammering to Celia, a spiky haired twentysomething with a beautiful sleeve tattoo of a grandfather clock overflowing and bursting open with sunflowers on her left arm. Celia collects baseball trading cards and appears to have found a kindred collector in Aubrey, from whom Steve can faintly hear the words ‘mint condition.’

‘Huh,’ he says to himself.

‘Yep,’ the girl says. ‘I think we should swap,’ she continues, grabbing Steve by the arm and propelling him with a startlingly firm grip in Gina’s direction.

‘How come?’ Steve asks, trying not to bump into anyone as she tugs him through a series of disgruntled volunteers and the other kids. ‘Sorry, sorry – do you not like Celia?’

‘Celia’s fine, but you’re Captain America,’ the girl says disbelievingly, ‘that’s how come.’

‘I don’t know if we can just –’

‘Besides, I don’t really want to be here either,’ the girl says, stopping so she can fix him with an unexpectedly serious stare. ‘We can both not want to be here together, okay?’

Steve looks down at her small hand, bunching up the material of his sweater in anxious, apparently unconscious movements that belie her determined tone.

‘Okay then, sure,’ he says. ‘That sounds good, but you should probably tell me your name first.’

‘Michaela,’ she supplies readily, turning away and tugging him towards Gina again.

‘Then it’s nice to meet you, Michaela. My name is –’

‘I know what your name is –’

‘My name is Steve,’ he says over her, ‘and I look forward to us working together.’

‘You’re so old,’ Michaela says, which is when they reach Gina, who turns away from what looks like a heated discussion verging on an argument with Moira to raise an eyebrow at them.

‘Yes?’ she asks.

Steve nudges an apparently now tongue-tied Michaela forward with a slight smile.

‘Go on,’ he says when she glares at him, ‘this was your idea. I’m just along for the ride.’

---

Bucky isn’t officially part of the Avengers, a concession they had to make to practicality when it became obvious that having more than one Soviet ex-assassin on the team was going to ruffle the sort of feathers not even Tony’s soliloquies of distracting flattery can smooth. This doesn’t make much of a difference to his presence at any and every mission the Avengers embark upon though; Tony had tried to delete him from their group conversation and restrict his access to JARVIS as precautionary measures after he’d recovered enough to start making noise about hanging around the apartment all day while Steve was out risking life and limb, but he kept showing up anyway. When Steve found out what Tony had done he had been so angry he started packing all their stuff to move back out to Brooklyn before Tony conceded and revoked the restrictions. They had all tried several times since to talk Bucky into staying away from their missions, or at least pleaded with him to stay out of the public eye for the duration – all of them except Steve, because he knew that set of Bucky’s jaw and wasn’t about to waste his time arguing with the patented Barnes stare of stubborn refusal, and also because he’d take as much of Bucky volunteering to spend time with him as he could get – by pointing out that Steve had managed not to get killed in the intervening two years in between waking up and Bucky reappearing.

‘I mean, the closest he got was the time you tried to kill him,’ Tony had pointed out, which had only made Bucky scowl harder.

‘Tony,’ Steve protested quietly.

‘Don’t ‘Tony’ me,’ Tony said irritably. ‘And quit with the puppy dog eyes. Seriously, are you not seeing the irony here? As well as the, you know –’ he gestured between Bucky and himself ‘– actual iron?’

Steve isn’t convinced it’s really about Bucky wanting to protect him as much as it is about Bucky just falling into a familiar pattern for lack of more appealing options – he’s been a soldier longer than any of them have lived, at this point; who are they to take his most finely honed skill set away from him? Steve’s presence is probably coincidental, and Bucky is only falling into old habits by protecting him so voraciously, and to the exclusion of all the other Avengers.

‘Um, no,’ Natasha had said, staring at Steve like he’d spontaneously sprouted a dunce hat when he mentioned this. ‘It is totally, definitely about you. He actually redirected one of Doom’s drones at Tony the other day, remember? Right after he picked off one that was about to land a hit on your right shoulder?’

‘He said that was an accident,’ Steve said staunchly, and while Natasha had rolled her eyes and changed conversational tack probably so as to avoid getting exasperated beyond her capacity to speak, the subject had played on Steve’s mind for hours afterward. He understood their trepidation, and he wasn’t so blinded by affection where Bucky was concerned that he couldn’t see how Bucky’s bone-deep loyalty to him was manifesting in such a way as to warp the team dynamic, but he was at a loss as to how he should confront it. The very thought of inviting that kind of attention and speculation into his and Bucky’s relationship made him want to throw up; he could tell they were all painfully curious as it was, and he didn’t want to violate Bucky’s privacy any more than he had to by explaining what he could barely admit to himself. In any case, he didn’t think he could bear to hear Bucky confirm what Steve knew in his gut was true – that it was just muscle memory; that it was just left over from the war; that Bucky wants to stop taking care of Steve but his body, his hindbrain, his instincts won’t let him.

None of this stops Steve enjoying it when they work in tandem, however. Despite a series of tectonic shifts in their team training sessions which have allowed them to work more efficiently (notwithstanding titanic clashes in ego), Steve doesn’t fight as naturally with the Avengers as he used to with the Howling Commandos. It’s not a matter of skill or even preference, just a fact as brutal as any of the others that Steve can’t let affect the day to day running of the team. Working with the Avengers is a job and one Steve is happy and satisfied to perform, but nothing is ever going to replicate the ease, the breathless exhilaration of those early missions against HYDRA, when the clockwork efficiency and chemistry of the Commandos seemed simultaneously both endless and fleeting; there had been an end in sight, and in a way that is what Steve misses most, now. Too often it feels as if all he can do as part of the Avengers is try and stem a flood that never entirely ceases, for a population that can never entirely be pleased. At least when they were fighting HYDRA for the first time, Steve’s naiveté allowed him to believe that once they were finished, the war would be over, and won, and he would be able to rest and do as he liked. Of course, in between missions he can rest and do as he likes. But the war the Avengers are fighting is of a different caliber; it is constant, its moving parts are perpetually changing appearance and severity, and it is everywhere.

Particularly in New York.

‘Are you even keeping track of your arrows anymore, Hawkeye?’ Tony taunts as he pulls out of a dive just in time to yank a shaking businessman out of the way of an oncoming slathering wolf creature with glowing red eyes. They haven’t figured out exactly what percentage of the wolves are cyborg yet, but Tony had been almost overjoyed when they got the call. ‘Wolf robots!’ he had yelled. ‘Wolfbots! Wolf! Robots!’

Clint loudly says nothing as the arrow he’d implanted in the back of the shuddering alpha wolf finally bears fruit and causes it to fall, twitching, to the ground in a dead faint.

‘Gotcha,’ Natasha says quietly as she slams and straddles the suddenly wildly shrieking man camped out in a nearby skyscraper surrounded screens and remote control panels.

‘Can we try and stay focused here, people,’ Steve says, as usual feeling as if he is shouting into the void, ‘we still got a dozen of these things roaming around and they’re still programmed to attack civilians.’ The ghost of hard metal lands briefly in between the rigid line of his shoulders as Steve stands from knocking out one of the creatures with the shield, and he has to stop himself smiling foolishly, too widely for it not to be heard in his next words: Bucky lands gracefully, almost silently in front of him. Well, he’s trying to stop himself smiling; he doesn’t think it’s working, from the way Bucky is looking at him. Even with the mask on, the returning smile is there in the fine lines around his eyes.

‘Yeah,’ Tony says, sounding bored, flying over them so low Steve ducks automatically with a curse, ‘we should really all stay focused on the mission, huh, Cap? I’d hate it if any of us were to get distracted from our mission objectives by something like –’

Thankfully, Clint grabs onto Tony’s left foot to hitch a ride downtown and startles him enough that he doesn’t finish his sentence. Bucky’s already gone when Steve spurs himself into action again; he never speaks over the comms on missions, presumably as part of the fiction that he isn’t really on them, but if he did, Steve is fairly sure Tony would have to find a way to disable his microphone out of sheer self-preservation.

By the time they’ve rounded up the rest of the wolfbots Bucky’s mask has gone astray, hanging from his fingers in two pieces still connected by a fine torn thread; the wolves’ claws must be cybernetically enhanced. Steve lands not two inches away from Bucky at the end of a pirouetting twirl, bringing his shield up to deflect a final snarling leap meant for Bucky while Bucky simultaneously slingshots a throwing knife into the paw of the creature to pin it to the ground, where it gives a howl that fizzles out into electronic stutter and eventually falls silent. Steve doesn’t pay any attention; he and Bucky are staring at each other, standing so close they’re in danger of stepping on each other, both breathing hard. Bucky gives a faint smile, eyes flickering down quickly to Steve’s mouth, and Steve returns it with elation. Whatever else may be wrong between them, this pleasure remains intact. Steve’s blood is rushing with the exhilaration of the fight, the joy of the violent collaboration; no one has ever fought with him the way Bucky does, as if they are attached to the same nervous system, just folding parts of the same machine, especially now he uses his body just as readily as a rifle. Bucky was always beautiful when he fought, but this is more than simple beauty; it is perfection.

‘Jesus,’ Tony mutters over the comms, and Steve drags his head up finally, breaking Bucky’s gaze with reluctance.

‘More incoming?’

Then there is what sounds like a brief but fierce whispered argument. Bucky raises an eyebrow and Steve shrugs, mystified, unable to pick out any specific words, everything melding into hissing noises.

‘Nope,’ Natasha says firmly, after a minute. ‘We have them all rounded up and the crazy guy with the controls is cuffed.’

‘Yeah,’ Tony interjects, at which point Bucky sighs and steps away from Steve slightly – who naturally feels the familiar lurch of rejection at Bucky moving so far out of his personal space that he can’t hear his individual breaths anymore – ‘so if you could just carry on what you were doing, with the staring and the – it’s all very poignant, I understand, very Brief Encounter –’

‘You wouldn’t understand if it hit you right between the eyes, Stark,’ Steve says wearily, and Tony makes a wounded noise, so loud and distracting and demanding of Steve’s attention that Steve doesn’t even register the way Bucky stops at his words, his hands hesitating as he fiddles with the straps of his mask, his eyes following Steve as he traipses across yet another street become a battlefield, hastening toward the group of civilians clustered next to the bank, clamoring to be released.

Chapter Text

When Steve first lived back in New York, before Bucky's return and their move to the tower, he had taken the subway everywhere. It wasn't that he had forgotten he could walk or run for absurd distances without getting tired, but more that he was just used to not being able to in this particular setting: he had never lived in the city after the serum so he had never learned it as a man who could run marathons in a day, only as one who could barely walk down the block without getting out of breath.

After the invasion, when he was still wrestling with the move to DC but not quite decided yet, he had realized this with a jolt. Like so many of those early uncomfortable realizations it had been Natasha who had needled him into it.

'Getting tired, old man?' she'd teased, when he'd asked to be dropped off next to the subway station after a meeting in the tower.

He'd only given her a brief uncertain smile – he hadn't been used to her yet then, often stung by what he now recognizes as her early attempts to offer friendship – and left, ignoring her slight sigh as he shut the door quietly behind him. It wasn't that he didn't want to participate more readily in SHIELD's raucous and comfortably military team dynamic, but that he couldn't. Where he seemed to have boundless energy to take out on punching bags, he had next to none for basic human interaction. Every time he thought of something worth saying, he didn't even open his mouth before he remembered there was no one worth saying it to, no one who would understand. For them, he had had time to expand into a legend larger than the space he could possibly occupy but for him, Bucky had fallen from the train and his outstretched hand only a few months ago; he had said goodbye to Peggy over the radio so recently he could still recall his exact words. There was no place to go but down; the world was bound to be disappointed with him when their expectations had been so astronomically high. They thought he was boring, awkward, irritable with the future and not afraid of showing it. They weren't even necessarily wrong, but he had no idea how to tell them that it wasn't anything to do with them: it was all Steve. He didn't want to make new friends, new connections, new partnerships. He wanted people who could never reappear to him. He wanted Peggy, he wanted the Commandos, he lay awake at night wanting Bucky beside him so desperately that he sometimes managed to convince himself he must be having an asthma attack. But of course he never had those anymore; it was only grief lurching around inside his chest, rearranging all his organs, amending the geography of his body to its liking.

He felt most of the time as if he was being piloted by somebody else, maintaining routines he didn't understand, reading papers and watching TV about events and stories that had no sphere of context for him and so about which he had no opinions. Everything felt simultaneously disinteresting and urgent; there was so much to catch up on that he didn’t know where to begin, and so he didn’t. Every day he woke thinking he would try harder, he would make more of an effort to resituate himself – today would be the day when he would stop missing Bucky so much, when he would start trying to move on. And then he would look outside and see a lump of newspapers lying on the stoop of the apartment building opposite and remember how once Bucky had stolen a whole building's worth on a dare and run with them for five blocks before he'd stopped, waiting for Steve to catch up, rolling his eyes when Steve said he had to take them back. And he would feel a sinking in his chest, the weary recognition that it still was not getting easier, and would have to force himself not to just get back into bed and stay there all day, until the sunlight had worked its way all around the room and faded finally into grey.

That was his principal achievement, in the months after he had first woken up: that he didn't succumb entirely to depression and grief. Or rather, even if he had, he didn't look like it. He was still walking around, acting like a person, getting the subway, working out, eating six meals a day like his new doctor had recommended. If he wasn't doing a very good job of being the person he used to be, then that was his business, and anyway there wasn't anyone around to notice it and make him explain himself.

This is what, even now, he can't satisfactorily explain to Bucky: that even if Bucky remembered nothing at all, even if Bucky had left the day he dragged Steve out of the Potomac and Steve never saw him again, the very fact of his continued existence would be enough. Just to know that Bucky was back in the world again was more than enough; it was a boon Steve had never expected, and to have Bucky back living with him was treasure heaped on treasure. He hardly felt deserving of it, and woke up often needing to be convinced that it had not been a dream after all, but he also knew that he would never be able to give it back. He had thought horrendously cruel things in the immediate days after Bucky had fallen from the train; he'd looked at Morita or Gabe and thought, why not you instead? I would trade you in an instant. He was horrified and ashamed to have thought those things, but he did. He was so blasted open by Bucky’s death that it seemed inconceivable he would ever feel another loss. Everything else was so negligible in comparison, even the prospect of his own death. A part of him was sure, with a dull certainty, from the moment he saw Bucky drop into the abyss: now I have nothing else to fear.

So to get Bucky back – to have made endless 4am deals with God and have his prayers finally answered – is still, a year later, often more than Steve knows how to cope with. The person he loved most has been returned to him; the swell of Steve’s grief has faltered and changed direction, still threatening in its vastness but less so in trajectory. He still walks into the kitchen first thing in the morning sometimes to see Bucky sitting there drinking coffee and looking grumpy and has to take several deep, calming breaths to orient himself in the present day. You don't have to do anything, he wants to tell Bucky. Just be here. Just be yourself. Just live.

Steve walks now instead of riding the subway, when he can’t sleep. It’s nice to watch the city ticking along at night, the soothing constancy of the streetlamps and the 24-hour drug stores, the restless hum of another undercover population that comes out at night, people who just can’t keep still, who also can’t sleep, and won’t judge him for not being able to do so either. It looks more familiar to him at night, as if with just one more right turn he might find himself back in 1941 again after they’d got their own apartment, sighing as he drags himself up the three flights of the rickety fire escape, experiencing nothing more complicated than the simple joy of anticipation, letting the door swing open, hearing Bucky humming some lover’s tune, the creak of a floorboard as he steps inside: home.

---

Sam’s perceptions of Steve’s boundaries are accurate and almost uncannily attuned to Steve’s shifting moods, something he shakes off as a baseline awareness of what Steve looks like when he wants to punch someone in the face. Steve thinks this probably also has something to do with that fact that Sam is the best judge of character Steve has ever met, and is also just a good guy: he never wants to push Steve into doing something he thinks Steve should decide to do himself. It’s all a part of the process, Sam has told him before, with a faintly longsuffering expression. It’s like with smoking: if the person doesn’t really want to quit, forcing them into it isn’t going to do anything but make them resent you, and crave nicotine twice as hard because now they’re stressed at having their choices taken away on top of withdrawal.

‘And what exactly do you think I’m withdrawing from?’ Steve had asked warily, lifting up another punching bag and hanging it on the hook.

Sam had watched him with a carefully neutral expression. They hadn’t found Bucky yet. This was a week after the helicarrier crashes, two days after Steve had gotten out of hospital, and they hadn’t found Bucky yet. Every moment slipped away from Steve like quicksand, but he had no idea where among the grains he should begin to search. He’d stayed up all night reading Bucky’s file, pounding whiskey that couldn’t touch him and throwing up at what he read, and had come to the helpless conclusion that whatever Bucky wanted now, he should have. If he wanted to run away from Steve and never look back, then by God, he should be able to. He should have whatever the hell he wants; Steve can barely bring himself to look, to even think about driving Bucky into a corner again, when for the last seventy years his world had been made of nothing but corners, and needles, and ice.

‘Just a guess,’ Sam said, ‘but I’m betting it’s not that weird new roast of the week down at Starbucks that’s got you all bent out of shape.’

‘You know how I feel about good coffee,’ Steve said grimly, getting in a few sharp small punches to start.

‘If you liked good coffee, you wouldn’t be going to Starbucks,’ Sam sighed. ‘C’mon, man, help me out here.’

Steve held the bag still, staring down at the ground, not meeting Sam’s eye.

‘I don’t know what you want from me,’ he said finally, and even as he said it he felt bad. Sam wasn’t like everyone else who wanted Steve’s attention these days, plucking away at him, always asking for one more favor, one more thing, until he felt like his bones were picked clean. When Sam asked him to do something, it was usually because he wanted Steve to think real hard about doing it, whether doing it would make him happy, and finally, why Sam had asked him in the first place. It had taken longer than Steve liked to admit to recognize the kind of friendship Sam was offering because he had only ever had that with one other person, and that was the person he was currently decimating upwards of dozen punching bags a day over. He shouldn’t frame this as if Sam was asking him for something he didn’t want to give; all Sam ever wanted from him was for Steve to look after himself.

But Sam only cocked an eyebrow at him, looking unimpressed.

‘Yes, you do, because I’ve told it to you in short sentences about a dozen times now, and I know you’re getting old and tired and all but I didn’t even use any long words.’

It had been Steve’s turn to sigh.

‘You want me to go to therapy,’ he said, letting the punching bag fall again and starting to unwrap his hands. The concept of talking about any of this – all of this, any of it, same difference; once the floodgates are open there’ll be no stopping what comes out – makes him feel taut, wired, ready to run another marathon just to escape the idea.

‘I do,’ Sam said calmly. ‘Just the VA group, even. Anything, man. Frankly, I can’t believe SHIELD let you run around without it. It was downright irresponsible.’

‘Yeah, makes all the other stuff they did look like child’s play,’ Steve said, letting the strap of his bag fall off his shoulder and land on the floor with a pointed thump. He’d turned to look Sam and his good will in the face, finally. ‘Look, they figured out pretty early they couldn’t really make me go if I didn’t want to. I just don’t think it would help, Sam. I’d be wasting their time.’

‘You think you’re so special no trained professional can help you, oh boy,’ Sam said, raising his eyes to heaven and starting to walk off, which had been so unexpected that Steve had started after him without even really thinking about it.

‘It’s not that,’ he tried to explain, frowning. ‘I just don’t –’

‘No, I got it,’ Sam said, waving him off. ‘Shared life experience, I know,’ and started to talk about what he had ostensibly come to discuss in the first place: the HYDRA locations they would be investigating on their upcoming search for Bucky. The search had obviously finished before it had even begun, but Sam’s ulterior motive had borne fruit in its stead. It had only taken Steve a few days to capitulate to weekly therapy sessions after that conversation, even though he had recognized what Sam had been doing. He just couldn’t shake the voice in the back of his head, the one telling him only an arrogant punk would have lived the sort of bizarre truncated life he had and expect to come out of it without needing his head shrunk. He didn’t need a therapist to tell him whose voice that had been, either.

Steve wishes now he could have reassured himself; he’d imagined so many nightmare scenarios, usually revolving around someone just mentioning Bucky’s name and Steve dissolving into tears, but it hadn’t been like that at all. Whether or not Doctor Lehmann is actually letting Steve drive the conversation, she’s damn good at making him feel like it, and that makes it easier, somehow, to pretend he might be able to hide from her the things he can’t bear to tell. She’s actually so quiet that he usually ends up babbling about something he didn’t intend to bring up anyway, just to fill the silence. It’s not that going therapy is some kind of miracle cure, but it had unstoppered something inside Steve that made it possible for him to speak, even if at first all he told was lies. He hadn’t even really meant to, it was just the stuff that usually came out when people asked how he was – he said he was fine, and that he had nothing to complain about.

The trouble with Lehmann – the good and the bad thing – was that she’d smiled when he told her this, in his first session, nodded patiently and then said, ‘alright, now let’s hear the truth.’ It had been so unexpectedly refreshing that Steve had been taken aback. He hadn’t even really thought about the lies, because they were just the things you said when people asked those questions; you said you were fine. But obviously it worked differently when you were in therapy: apparently they wanted you to tell the truth. He remembered why he had fought so hard against going in the first place.

Broadly speaking, Lehmann’s approach is to listen quietly to Steve’s bullshit until he runs out, and then ask the kind of questions that remind Steve of the precision of heat-seeking missiles – ‘why is it that you seem to be able to forgive Bucky for leaving you when he had no choice, but you can’t forgive yourself for the same thing? Or is that just posturing?’ – until she pokes something honest out of him. It isn’t a particularly pleasant experience, but while he usually ends up leaving vaguely confused or disoriented, he is also usually brandishing some shiny new piece of self-knowledge, and even if it’s disappointing, at least it’s his. At first he’d wondered how he was going to make himself go every week when it was so invariably exhausting, but now he’s at the stage where he’s wondering what he’ll do if Lehmann ever decides he’s ready to stop.

‘I mean it’s not like I didn’t understand that our missions had consequences,’ he’s saying to her, a few days after the first meeting of the support group. ‘You can’t get away from it, it’s all over the news. But I guess we’re kind of shielded from the worst of it, in the tower.’

After that session had finished, he’d finally found time to look through some of the charity auction and benefit invitations Pepper always sends his way, curious about the other ways to help he might have been accidentally discarding all along. There were more than he’d realized, mounting up in his inbox, and he felt so guilty looking at them after a minute that he’d almost closed the window but he made himself look at the first, and then the next, and then the next. Most of them were for relief charities. Not just generalized relief effort either, a lot of which had petered out after the immediate aftermath of the invasion and New York had begun to dismiss it out of hand as something that had happened and was now over, with that faintly callous robustness that characterized the city. But it hadn’t been over; a year later and Steve was still being invited to benefits for survivors of the invasion, children who’d been orphaned in the attacks. There were some fundraising invitations ostensibly for small businesses that were trying to build their way back up that looked more like publicity stunts for the minor league politicians involved, their names bolded and a bigger font size than the names of the business owners in question. Steve figured at least some portion of the money raised had to be going their way, but there had to be a better way of coordinating donations than that. He wondered whether Pepper would know more about how that kind of thing worked; there must be a way to anonymously donate without having to throw a big party.

There was also a respectfully somber invitation to the unveiling of the Chitauri Invasion Memorial, a kind of rockery garden made of bits of blunted glass and metal which looked like a warzone from far away until you got close and realized that every splinter held the name and age of a victim. Steve had actually been witness to the unveiling although it had been incognito; he’d watched from long range on a nearby rooftop and felt almost foolish about it, like he was doing a bad impression of Clint. He’d thought paying his respects from afar would be better – he hadn’t wanted to steal any of the spotlight – but he realizes now it might have come across as if he just hadn’t cared enough to go. His world got so small sometimes, despite his awareness that it should more open and full of possibility than it had ever been in the forties; he was always trying to stop the persona consuming him to the point that he forgot how to be anything but a soldier, but it was moments like these that made him wonder whether his success depended on him not being one at all.

He becomes conscious that he’s been staring at the slowly rotating little globe figurine on Lehmann’s coffee table, lost in thought. Why the hell does she have that thing in here? It’s so distracting. Does she use it to hypnotize people? Is that why Steve has been blathering on about the reconstruction effort for half an hour instead of politely asking her how her daughter’s spelling bee turned out last week, like he’d meant to when he first opened his mouth?

‘This is part of it,’ he realizes, frowning, staring at the globe. ‘The helicarriers, the experiments with the tesseract – when Fury was talking about war being fought on a bigger scale, he wasn’t just talking about gods and aliens.’

‘You think he was talking about you too?’ Lehmann asks.

‘Maybe. I don’t know, maybe that’s arrogant.’ He frowns. ‘But I think sometimes I forget – because it’s all happened so fast for me, I forget what the serum meant. That we were all playing God, back then. And once you start that, where does it end?’

He looks at her, but Lehmann doesn’t say anything. It’s alright; Steve already knows. It ends with Natasha, eight years old, in a cold dark room, being handed a gun. It ends with Bucky strapped to a chair, hair lank, eyes glassy, the red mark of a slap still painted on his cheek.

‘Tell me about Bucky,’ Lehmann suggests, like she always does after the silence has gone on too long, and Steve wants to laugh. She might not talk much but she knows exactly how to cut to the heart of him; she must have snuck along behind him all those times he went walking off down memory lane. Steve should probably be more embarrassed about being so easy to read.

He shakes his head to clear it.

‘He’s fine,’ he says firmly. ‘He’s – we’re both good.’

Lehmann raises an eyebrow, and opens her mouth to make him talk about it.

---

In the first few weeks, Bucky had remembered only struggling, and killing, and Steve. His memory was a blank room with no furniture illuminated only by brief, blindingly violent flashes of light. He seemed to jump randomly from the memory of one assassination to another, and then lurch back in time to their childhood. Just looking at Steve could draw something out, most days, until Steve started to feel like one of those buzzers contestants used on gameshows, his arrival in a room setting Bucky off in a series of marionette-like jerks as he slammed back into his own body over and over again, each time loaded down with new knowledge of himself.

'It's like this,' Diana had said firmly. She was an extremely talented psychiatrist friend of Tony’s who had become immediately available to them on short notice after Bucky had had his first panic attack, which had resulted in their kitchen cupboards needing new metal handles after Bucky had held on so hard he warped them. Everything she said made Steve want to melt into the ground with relief. For the first few weeks of Bucky's rehabilitation all he'd wanted was someone to show him where he stood – he had a lot of really specific ideas about how he wanted to help Bucky, lots of hugs and food and sleep and to kill every person who had ever had a hand in strapping him down – but they weren't particularly scientific, and now here was the best solution Tony could come up with standing in front of him, and Steve was going to be owing Tony so big for years, and he didn’t even care. Thank God, he wants to say: tell me what I can do to help, tell me how this is going to be; please, for the love of God, draw me a map.

'You don't keep every one of your long term memories in the forefront of your mind all the time, right? You'd never get anything done, you can't just have them on a constant carousel. So they're stored somewhere until you need them, or until something reminds you. The trouble with Bucky is that he doesn't know where they're stored anymore, so he can pretty much only remember something when he's triggered into, which is obviously kind of a stressful experience for everybody. He's regained a lot of memories that way just from being in close proximity to you, Steve, and probably will continue to do so. The problem with that, obviously, is that we're not going to know if he still has the memory or not until we start poking him. Until we test it, the memory could or could not still exist, it's equal odds.'

'Schrodinger's memory,' Sam said, and Diana had beamed at him.

'Yeah! That's a great analogy. So what we're going to try and do with Bucky in therapy is help him find a path back to where his long term memory banks are, so to speak, so that he can get there on his own.'

And it had worked – as thoroughly as it was possible to judge that it had, anyway. Steve had to keep reminding himself that this wasn’t his battle; this was Bucky’s recovery, not his, and that Bucky would take things at the pace he found most comfortable. It was only – Steve was so ready to do whatever Bucky needed, so ready to throw himself forward at the first sign of something he could reasonably fight, and then, unexpectedly, Bucky scarcely seemed to need anything from him at all. He went to therapy, he trained, he ate, he slept. He ran away, and he came back. Sometimes he wanted nothing from Steve but for them to be in the same room together, not speaking, for hours, and those were simultaneously the moments Steve treasured most and the times when he felt his need to help rising up seamlessly through his skin, every moment a struggle not to throw himself forward, offering something – anything – he didn’t even understand himself. He only knew that he wanted to give back, but Bucky wasn’t showing any signs of needing to take.

‘It’s understandable,’ Lehmann says often, tilting her head sympathetically. ‘You want to help, and you don’t know how. Have you considered that maybe all Bucky needs from you is just for you to be there?’

It wasn’t an unreasonable suggestion; after Diana’s therapy had begun reintroducing Bucky to his memories in a fashion more similar to a drip feed than a flood, Steve’s presence had stopped triggering Bucky into confrontation with his past self, and he seemed to regain a measure of peace in Steve’s presence that was never to be replicated whenever there were other people around. Steve clung to this, selfishly but unrepentantly, as a sign that his presence was still useful to Bucky in some way, even when Bucky could do nothing but glare at him from across the room, when nothing could convince him that he was finally free from HYDRA: he wouldn’t let anyone else in his room on days like that, but he would let Steve in, just to sit in the corner or bring in the record player so they could listen to music. Bucky would let him stay, and Steve couldn’t find anywhere within him the will to ask for more.

So Steve was trying, still, not to put forward anything Bucky showed no sign of wanting. He hovered around in the apartment; he was always contactable. They actually spent a fair amount of time together, when Bucky wasn’t running off to his room, but he was so much quieter than he used to be that Steve was still adjusting to it. Bucky had been full of himself when they were younger, in the most literal sense of the word: there had been a lot of him to go around, because at least on the surface he was so sure of himself, so easy with his words and yet always committed to them, stalwart. He was generous with his time, especially with Steve; he had become the most loyal friend Steve had ever had about a week after they met, not that there had been much competition. Steve was still gradually getting used to the fact that Bucky was quieter because parts of him had been stripped away and shook up and he was still figuring out where they all were; still turning them over and then gluing them carefully back into place.

To Steve’s ears, the silences between them got heavier and deeper with every passing day that they didn’t talk, but he still couldn’t drop anything into the well. That was their problem, he thought: they just couldn’t get started.

It’s easier on nights like this, though: already quiet and still, Steve coming in from an evening walk and dropping his keys gently into the bowl only to see Bucky still awake, pressed up against the window pane and watching over the city. It’s hard to overemphasize how much of an achievement this is; it had taken months for Bucky to get used to lingering near large windows, open doorways, and rooms with no easily accessible sightlines to all exits. That Bucky is doing this without having a panic attack speaks wonders for how his therapy must be going. Steve’s seen him sometimes with his jaw set as he tries to stop his hands shaking, staring out at the unguarded city; he thinks Bucky tests himself on purpose, playing with how much open space he can stand. Sometimes he hangs out on the roof with Clint surveying the city and rarely speaking, so far as Steve can tell. A year after he came back to them he still can’t go near Tony’ or Bruce’s labs or sit in a dentist’s chair, but who the hell can blame him? He’s working on what he can, and no one on earth could say he’s not trying hard enough: Steve will gladly make all the room in the world for his new idiosyncrasies.

He turns to look when Steve comes in, rearranging himself a little against the window frame, slight frown of discomfort easing out into lethargy. Bucky becomes simultaneously more fractious and softer with the heat; he stretches into it like a cat extending its claws.

‘Hey,’ Steve says softly. Sometimes in moments like this it feels like danger lurks under everything he says, the possibility of inadequacy in every unsaid syllable, but right now he just feels whole, and safe. It’s hot as hell out and he’s sweating through his clothes and so is Bucky, breathing long sighs out into the silence of the apartment; the sheer impenetrability of the heat should be making Steve irritable but he just feels a heavy low sense of satisfaction instead. The volunteer group had had its second meeting yesterday and it went okay; everyone turned up, although it had seemed to be long odds on it for a little while. He’d been early and sat waiting at their table glancing at the clock every minute until Michaela finally came barreling through the door, ignoring Gina’s greeting, scowling at everyone and everything until she thunked down in her seat. She sat silently, her glare near burning a hole in the table, not even bothering to take off her backpack.

‘Hey,’ Steve had said brightly after a moment. ‘Everything alright?’

‘What do you care?’ she asked rudely, folding her arms across her chest.

‘Well, I was going to ask how your day was, but I think I can figure it out for myself.’

She turned her glare on him for a second.

‘You would think that,’ she said. ‘Grownups always think they know everything, even when they don’t know anything.’

Steve doesn’t really have it in him to argue with her on that one.

‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding. ‘I think sometimes we’re only acting like we know everything though, because we’re scared of admitting we don’t.’

Michaela didn’t say anything, but shifted in her seat a little. Steve waited for objections but barreled on into the uneasy silence when she gave none.

‘Like when I’m on a mission, fighting somebody,’ he said, really flying blind now, but hey, at least she was looking at him, ‘and I have to give orders to the other Avengers.’

‘But you’re Captain America,’ she said, clearly nonplussed. ‘You’re the leader.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, his mouth twisting in a half smile. ‘But – and don’t tell anyone I told you this – I don’t actually know everything.’

Michaela rolled her eyes at this, but there was a hint of a smile. She’d unwound her arms from around her body at some point and now she started shrugging off her backpack.

‘Well I knew that,’ she said. ‘You don’t even know Beyoncé, Steve.’

‘I do,’ he objected. He’d heard her mentioned before, but after their first session he’d gone home and done some googling, and then rang Sam up to complain about not being directed to her earlier. ‘I listened to all her stuff the other day.’ Bucky had told him he was going to get Jarvis to lock Steve out of their speaker system if he didn’t cut it out.

Michaela was grinning at him, so he smiled back. Then her grin faded and she sighed, and it was so world weary Steve wanted to ask if he could do something to take some weight off her. But he knows that’s not how it works, and at her age, he would’ve probably punched anyone who implied he was weaker than whatever problems he had to carry. Michaela’s got the same set to her shoulders; maybe that’s why they took a shine to each other.

‘Beyoncé probably wouldn’t hit someone just ‘cause they popped a balloon behind her,’ she mumbled, crossing her arms on the table and laying her head down so it was hard for Steve to hear. Her eyes flickered up to Steve. ‘Would you?’

Steve had had to think really carefully about what he said to that, because his immediate responses were all variations on either ‘Absolutely’ and ‘What’s this kid’s address?’

‘I’d try not to,’ he said eventually, and she’d looked at him shrewdly enough that he could be sure the qualification hadn’t gone unheard. He frowned. ‘Why did they do that, though?’

She shrugged, sitting up again.

‘Thought it was funny, I guess. Mr. Sivan kept me after school but he let ‘em go home.’

‘Did he know why you hit them?’

She shrugged again, staring at the table. She looked less angry now, more resigned.

‘Did you tell him?’ Steve asked, beginning to get the picture.

She shook her head, darting a look at Steve.

‘Everyone thinks I’m weird anyway,’ she mumbled. ‘Cause of when I get all –’ she held out a hand and made it shake, made her eyes go wide. ‘Now they think I’m even weirder.’

Steve looked at her, struck anew by how mean kids can be, and had no idea what to say.

‘My mom says I can’t go swimming for two weeks if I do it again,’ she said glumly. ‘But what am I gonna do if they pop another balloon behind me?’

‘Tell ‘em you know Captain America,’ Steve said out of nowhere, instead of telling her to confide in her teacher like a normal person, ‘and he’ll come in and talk to Mr. Sivan if they do it again.’ He shut his mouth and wondered whether he’d just got himself into a whole heap of trouble.

But Michaela’s face lit up.

‘Really?’ she asked. ‘Will you really?’

‘Well, sure,’ Steve said, feeling trapped, and then – then she darted across the table and gave him a brisk but firm hug, too fast for him to even return it before she was back in her seat. He sat back in shock while she started chattering nervously about a birthday party she was going to next week, as if she was worried he was going to take it back, and he couldn’t help it. He probably shouldn’t have said it, it was unconventional as all get out and Gina would tear him a new one if she heard, but – Michaela looked a damn sight happier than when she’d walked in. Hell, if the threat didn’t work, he probably would go into her class. Gina’s been looking for volunteers to give mental health awareness talks to schools affected by the invasion. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d acted rashly for the benefit of someone he cared about more than he hated giving speeches.

However impulsively given, his promise had lent him a calm that lasted all the way through to the next day. He was feeling so peaceful he hadn’t even needed to walk for long tonight; he got a few blocks away and then halted, realizing he was setting off out of habit, a desire to balance something that, tonight at least, already felt even. No one’s calling for his help right now, no one needs punching, he’s helping out some people who need it, and he knows where Bucky is. Bucky who is looking at him now with a slow, cautious smile, letting his head fall back against the window frame. Bucky is so beautiful, the fine cut of his cheekbones illuminated in the flood of light from the window, a few strands of hair escaped from his bun hanging around his face, the glinting parallel lines of his arm and its reflection. The amused set of his mouth that Steve can still, after all these years, read like a history book. Bucky is so beautiful it makes something tender abruptly collapse inside Steve and he can only smile helplessly, adoringly back.

It doesn’t even matter if Bucky doesn’t want him, doesn’t love him like he used to, if Steve still gets to have moments like this. He can’t even chastise himself for allowing it to turn him mute. It seems only right that he should be struck dumb in the face of a miracle like this: Bucky Barnes, alive and whole, sat in their apartment, smiling at him like Steve is a dumbass, but Bucky is still grateful that he’s home.

‘Hey,’ Bucky says back. He looks out over the city again, and Steve hesitates where usually he would hare off to his room, trying to get out of Bucky’s way. Bucky would have slapped him upside the head for referring to anyone as a miracle when they were kids, but that was all horse shit because he’d referred to Steve as that several times anyway after they reunited in Austria. Steve had been kind of worried at first that Bucky might end up proposing marriage purely to Steve’s new lungs or immune system and leave the rest of Steve out of the bargain. Bucky had run his hands so disbelievingly over Steve’s new muscled chest, laid his ear to Steve’s heart and listened, rapt, for minutes at a time. He’d been so happy to see him it almost burned out the hurt, leftover from what Zola had done to him, and it makes Steve look down now, blinking hard, just remembering it.

Hadn’t it actually helped more, back then, when Steve had forgotten to be so damn careful with Bucky? Hadn’t Bucky seemed happier, more like his old self, rolling his eyes and flushing and squirming with fondness in those moments when Steve had forgotten to be respectful, and kind, and tentative with the lines? Bucky had scowled less when Steve grabbed him in a hug without warning than he did when Steve asked him first; he damn near melted into the contact, reveled in the casual touch. Maybe that’s what Steve’s been doing wrong, all this time. Because it’s not about making Bucky better at all, is it? It’s about showing Bucky he knows that, and accepting him, and letting him know he’s loved, and that Steve will still be here, no matter how little or how much Bucky wants from him, no matter if he never really gets all the way better at all.

‘Um,’ he says, and Bucky turns around, a little surprised – not to see Steve still there, because Bucky now possesses a constant and depressingly accurate spatial awareness of the geography and content of every room he walks into – but that Steve apparently had something else to say. Does he? He fumbles for a minute, rusty with words, jammed up like a kid with a crush: ask him about his day! How is he feeling? Just start the conversation somehow, Rogers, it doesn’t matter how! ‘How was sparring with Natasha?’

‘Educational,’ Bucky says, accompanied by that crooked soft smile. Steve smiles back reflexively.

‘I remember when I first sparred with her after I came outta the ice,’ he says, jerking out of his fixed posture and heading over to the couch, sitting down with a sigh. ‘She sure taught me a thing or two.’

‘Knocked you flat on your ass?’

‘More than once,’ he admits.

Bucky nods, then seems to hesitate.

‘She reminds me sometimes of –’

‘Judy,’ Steve fills in, something tripping over itself in his chest in its eagerness to get out, and Bucky looks at him with a startled laugh. ‘Judy Ellis from the perfume counter –’

‘Judy Ellis,’ he marvels. He laughs again, and it gives Steve such a buzz to see it – to feel the way the room is relaxing around them, not a big wide empty space anymore but something for their stories to expand into, a room big enough for their tenderness and awkwardness with each other to fit. ‘God, I thought her brothers were gonna kill me.’

‘You woulda deserved it,’ Steve says sourly. ‘She broke it off with Nick Rumancek over you, Buck. I thought they were gonna beat down your door.’

‘First fight you got into over me instead of the other way round,’ Bucky grins slowly, and God, maybe we can do this after all, Steve thinks, and it doesn’t feel like the desperate daydreams he used to chant to himself despite all the contradictory evidence in Bucky’s glares. They’re still out of practice with each other, their glances nervous with the desire for this to go alright, but it’s good, too, it’s finally real, and Steve’s so caught up in it that he doesn’t process what Bucky just said for a minute.

‘That is a goddamn lie,’ he says, offended. ‘First fight I ever got into over you was in third grade, and it was over pencils.’

Bucky just looks at him for a long minute, and Steve realizes he must not remember. He smiles apologetically, ready to start talking about something else, when Bucky interrupts him.

‘Tell me about it,’ he says, shifting so his back is pressed to the window and he can make eye contact with Steve without having to twist his neck. ‘Tell me about this fight, and I’ll decide whether it really deserves the name.’

‘Alright,’ Steve says slowly, looking down at his hands then back up at Bucky again, smiling. ‘Alright, so –’

---

Bucky had run around with a lot of girls when they were younger, many more than Steve had, but he’d stopped the day they kissed – just stopped cold turkey, like it didn’t cost him anything at all.

‘I haven’t wanted anyone but you for years, and now I’ve got you, I’m not gonna go with anyone else,’ he’d said, one of the rare times he’d been able to look Steve in the face when saying something that earnest. Steve had watched him cautiously for any signs of insincerity and then felt guilty for doing it when he didn’t find any. It was just – it seemed too good to be true. Steve still felt like the dumbest lug in the world for not realizing what the pull between them had always meant – but how could you know what it was you were lacking when you courted the gap it left every day? He’d never had time to really feel deprived; Bucky was always giving him what he wanted, sometimes before he even knew what it was. And now it seemed as if Bucky had been waiting for this a lot longer than Steve, who had in fact had no idea he was about to kiss Bucky until he did it as a sort of punctuating gesture, a hello, how are you: like they’d been doing it all their lives. He was starting to think they might as well have.

‘Are you?’ Bucky had asked, a tad irritated, when Steve had just stared at him and made no answer, trying to figure out how he was going to square this one in church on Sunday. Not because he felt ashamed, but because he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to give thanks for a windfall this far beyond what he deserved.

‘Well,’ Steve said after a moment, feeling a little cruel but also infinitely sweet, heart fluttering at the way Bucky was watching his mouth, as if he wanted to catch all the sounds it made and keep them in a box somewhere, ‘I’ll have to call off all my dates, Buck. The female population of New York will no doubt be devastated. They’ll hold a parade in my honor, probably – dames weeping in the streets – so much potential, they’ll cry – the lost manhood of Steve Rogers –!’

‘Oh my god,’ Bucky muttered, making to get out of bed. He let Steve tug him back though, so he obviously didn’t really want to go in the first place.

‘I’m not gonna go with anyone else,’ Steve said firmly, wrapping himself octopus-like around Bucky and tugging him down to kiss, marveling at the way it made Bucky’s breath catch. ‘You know I’m not. This is what I want, Buck, you’re all I want.’

‘Alright then,’ Bucky said, squirming a little, obviously het up about it, shy in a way Steve had never seen before. That was the miracle of it too; that now there was a whole new side to Bucky that Steve got to discover. He wondered at it sometimes when Bucky was asleep next to him, curled up on his side and leaning toward Steve like he always did, one part of him always reaching out, a contented hand on Steve’s arm or waist – they’d always touched a lot but he’d never known Bucky could be tactile like this. It seemed to give him pleasure just to lay a hand on Steve, like it eased something grasping inside him. Steve’d had no idea that sex could be so good, either – he’d read, and he’d seen some dirty pictures, and Bucky had told him in tones full of bluster that made a lot more sense in hindsight about what he’d done with girls – but none of that seemed to bear any relation to what it felt like when Bucky touched him, when Bucky was inside him, when they moved together. It made him feel like he was giving himself over entirely to the sensation of being part of something bigger, and deep down he had always longed for that – it was why he still spoke to God long after he had good reason to believe He wasn’t listening any more. Looking down at him, breathless, while he pulled Steve’s legs up around his waist, Bucky made him feel both powerful and more naked than he’d ever been before another human being, and Steve was overjoyed to discover an answering nakedness in Bucky; a willingness to be drawn out, and vulnerable, and more playful in love than Steve had ever known it was possible to be. The appeal of the act seemed to have no upper limit: the more they did it, the more they both wanted. Bucky kept wanting him, even though Steve still got sick a lot and he didn’t turn into a sexual powerhouse overnight, and sometimes it was so cold in their apartment that Steve didn’t want to throw the covers off and they had to do it in a nest of scratchy, woolly blankets, and Steve snickered at the way Bucky’s face went red until Bucky threatened to stop and Steve pulled him back in, breathless and still laughing, saying nonono don’t, come back, come back –

The longer they were together, the more stupid Steve felt for never seeing it before – after a few months it seemed frankly unbelievable that he might ever have looked at Bucky and not wanted to kiss him first off, more than he wanted to do almost anything else except keep him safe. He remembered telling his ma proudly when he was six, after he’d known Bucky for all of a week, that they were going to get married someday, and he wanted to clap a palm to his forehead in light of the fact that he’d had brains enough to realize when they first met but had somehow forgotten it for more than a decade afterwards.

'Don’t go making any promises you can’t keep,’ his ma had teased. ‘Maybe one day you'll find someone you like even more than Bucky.’ Even then Steve had wrinkled his nose at the concept. Like someone more than Bucky? He hadn't thought there was a bigger amount.

Later, after the serum and Zola and the nauseating panic of having nearly lost half of himself had started to die down, he had tried to explain it to Peggy too, although it seemed as if it hurt her for him to even try it. He felt as if he owed her that much; she’d had to see the look on his face when Bucky pulled him into an empty tent after the celebrations held by the raucous 107^th had finally started to quiet down. Maybe she’d even been looking for him, he thought with a lurch of guilt, and this was what she’d found instead – Bucky holding onto Steve’s lapels, tugging him down with a softness in his eyes that made Steve want to throw himself in front of whatever might come for them next; Steve so eager to go where he was led that he hadn’t even taken the precaution of checking if they were alone.

It was her sharp intake of breath that had alerted him and Bucky both, her hurt sound that led Steve’s eyes to her, just over Bucky’s shoulder. She looked shocked, then irritated with herself for it, and then she left, so quickly Steve didn’t think he should follow, not when the only thing he could offer her was an apology.

'I'm an intelligent woman, Rogers, I don't need a diagram,' she had muttered the next day when he finally got her alone. She wouldn't put down the map she was holding until Steve took her hand instead, because she was his friend and he'd upset her.

'I know that,' he said. 'But I wanted to explain that really, it's nothing to do with you.'

She looked at him in disbelief, clearly a second away from wrenching her hand back.

'That came out wrong,' he said quickly. 'I mean – it would have been the same with anyone. It's not even that we –' and here he blushed, wondering how specific he needed to get, and Peggy's mouth quirked and he thought for the first time, with a rush of relief, that this might be alright in the end, that she might not hate him ‘– although we do, but – it’s not even really about that. He's a part of me.'

That was as close as he could get to articulating it, what it was like to be with Bucky: so familiar it was like being alone, and yet with all the comfort and warmth that solitude could not provide. It was physical, obviously, of course it was, but Steve had felt the same before sex had even been part of the equation. His whole heart went out to Bucky; there was no room in him for anyone else to take greater priority.

'I see,' she said, examining him for another long moment and then sighing, a gust which seemed to release most of her ill feeling toward him in one go. 'Well, at least you threw me over for someone not only prettier but more accomplished. His marksmanship was apparently starting to scare the rest of the men.'

'It's starting to scare me,' Steve said ruefully, eyeing her as she turned away with her empty coffee cup, wondering whether things between them were going to be different now. Bucky had argued with him about going to talk to her, seemingly of the opinion that actually explaining might give her all the more reason to get spiteful about it, but Steve knew her by now, and he’d been more afraid of her leaving still hurt than of her trying to hurt him.

It turned out Peggy understood even better than he had known. When he went to visit her again after Bucky came back, all glazed eyes and shaky hands from too much coffee and not enough sleep even for a supersoldier, she’d taken one look at him and taken his hand. It was a lucid day, one where she remembered him enough that they didn’t have to go through the shock and elation and tragedy of it all again, and he couldn’t help but be grateful; he’d had damn near his fill of tragedy recently.

He’d told her about Bucky, staring off out the window without realizing for most of it, and only looked around when she squeezed his hand, her grip unexpectedly firm.

‘Oh, Steve,’ she sighed. ‘You boys never did know when to give up, did you?’ And suddenly he was gripping her hand hard and sobbing, crying like he hadn’t since his mother died, and he had to sit forward so she could reach to stroke his hair and murmur quiet things to him and oh, it had hurt so much, to be so accurately understood – because it was true. He would never give up on Bucky, he could never give up, but he had done so when it mattered most. He had never looked for him; he had piloted that plane into the ocean thinking he would find Bucky dead if not alive, and it turned out he should’ve dived out of the plane and gone back to throw himself into the Alps instead. He didn’t know what to do. He’d never been so catastrophically wrong to such great effect.

‘I should have gone after him,’ he said bleakly, face still wet and red with crying, and Peggy tutted at him. ‘I should’ve, Peg, I should’ve thrown myself out of the goddamn train after him –’

‘And then both of you would have been taken,’ she said almost savagely, and it took that to stop him crying, startling him into silence. ‘And where would you be now? You’d be dead, or in the same boat as Bucky, completely unable to help. He wouldn’t want you to torture yourself like this, love.’

Steve had to concede to that, knowing it was true, but Bucky wasn’t here now to stop him blaming himself, so Steve was going to do it all he damn well liked. He wasn’t ready to forgive himself yet, and maybe he never would be. It didn’t seem like much of a priority right now.

‘Be kind to each other,’ Peggy said as a parting suggestion as he left, and he’s wanted to ask her since then exactly what she meant. He thought he knew what that was, and that had been what he was trying to do: make sure Bucky had enough energy and resources to try and recover himself, and that he knew he had a place to stay, and sleep, and that Steve wanted to know how he was getting along with therapy and sparring and whether he needed anything. But he thinks now about how well she’d known him back then, and maybe she hadn’t meant that at all. Or rather, she knew as well as he did that those were the obvious things to do, and he had done them, and now it was time for the rest of the task: to give Bucky the kind of love he needed, the language of affection they had invented for themselves. Because for him and Bucky, kindness had always been more about the tender, comforting awareness that someone else knew you off by heart, and that because they knew you so well, they could rag on you just as much as they liked. Bucky had called him sweetheart and darlin’ and babydoll back then, but he’d called him punk and asshole and jerk, too, and it all meant the same thing: I know you, Steve Rogers. I know you and I love you, and you’re not getting out of this life without me by your side.

Chapter Text

‘Why are boys so dumb,’ Michaela asks him, scowling, at their fifth session. ‘They’re all just – you’re all just. So dumb.’

‘Can’t argue with that one,’ Steve says easily, leaning back in his chair a little. Michaela gets kind of exuberant with her gestures when she’s excited about something, and whatever’s got her talking about dumb boys has got her so worked up she’s nearly knocking over her cup of juice. He strategically moves it out of the way, and she scowls harder. ‘Is there a particular boy you’re thinking of, though?’

‘My brother,’ she says moodily. ‘He yelled at my mom because she wouldn’t go on the subway.’

She stops, looking down and to the side, still frowning. In none of their sessions has she mentioned the invasion by name, only ever alluding to the effects of it on her home life and school, and this is an oblique reference that fits the pattern. But that might be the best way of approaching it – from the side, the edges, which is not as difficult as looking it full in the face.

Steve tries to pick his words with care.

‘Why did she need to go on the subway?’ he asks neutrally.

Michaels huffs out a sigh.

‘To visit my school,’ she says. ‘Mr. Sivan wanted to talk to her.’

‘Do you know what about?’

‘What do you think?’ she asks, glaring, and Steve raises his eyebrows at her. She huffs. ‘How I’m doing in class.’

Steve hesitates. ‘You’re not trying to fix anybody,’ Gina had told them over and over again in training, ‘it’s not your job to make them better. It’s your job to help them get less sick, if you can, and you might not even be able to do that.’

A couple of people had stopped showing up after that session, which Steve figures was probably the best thing, if they were pinning all their hopes on turning out a production line of magically healed ten year olds. Sometimes he wonders whether they’re really doing any good at all, but while the scenario may be unconventional – believe it or not, it’s not exactly customary to cram a bunch of kids with PTSD in with well-meaning amateur counsellors and hope for some kind of psychological healing to result – it does seem to be bearing fruit. Aubrey stammers around half as much as he used to, and Michaela didn’t have any panic attacks at all last week, and also didn’t punch anyone, which she was so excited to tell Steve about that she didn’t even wait to say hello first.

Steve thinks – in his completely unscientific opinion – that what they need as much as an opportunity to talk about what happened is just attention: for someone to sit with them an hour a week and listen without distraction, allow them to take a load off without having to stress about making their parents worry. He’s not convinced that it’s an accident most of the volunteers are veterans of one kind or another, either, whether the group was originally targeted at them or not. There’s more than one direction to the counselling going on here. Natasha, he’s said it before and he’ll say it again, is one hell of a schemer.

‘I thought you were doing better with that,’ he says. ‘You haven’t mentioned anything in a while about it.’

Michaela shrugs. She stares at the table in silence and Steve pauses, looking for another way around it.

‘So your mom couldn’t go on the subway,’ he cajoles, and she reanimates, scowling harder than ever. It’s easier, usually, to talk about it when it isn’t your particular problem being discussed, although Michaela and her mother’s issues seem similar enough from the outside. Michaela doesn’t like the subway either actually, but she’s never mentioned why – although it hits Steve now that it would make perfect sense for her and her mother to have been corralled underground during the invasion, as part of emergency protocols instituted after 9/11. Thousands of people had been kept down there for hours, listening to the fight going on outside for hours without any idea of what was happening or what world they would find when they were allowed to reemerge. He remembers Michaela saying she can stand to go on the subway so long as she’s allowed to take her headphones and play her music really, really loud with her eyes closed, and he wants to kick himself for not realizing what that led back to sooner.

‘No,’ she says, voice unexpectedly high. She takes a really deep breath and lets it all out in the next set of words, which run on from each other so quickly Steve can barely keep track. ‘And if she won’t come to the meeting then I’ll get kicked out of school and I’ll have to get a job and I can’t even do my math homework but she’s scared and I don’t like the subway anyway and Troy wouldn’t stop yelling at her and I don’t want them to fight and I don’t want –’

She stops in the middle of the sentence and folds her arms tightly across her chest, looking suddenly aware of how much she’s given away in one fell swoop and panicky about it. Is this what he looks like during therapy, Steve can’t help but wonder; scared of giving anything away, more scared still when he does it by accident?

‘Well, for starters I don’t think your school is going to kick you out,’ he says, and Michaela’s eyes flick unwillingly to him and then away again. ‘They’re not gonna do that just because your mom’s having some trouble.’

‘You don’t know that,’ she retorts, but it looks to be mostly by rote rather than a real rejection. Steve barrels on, having the uncomfortable sensation of trying to pull himself up a vertical cliff using just his hands and with no abseiling equipment in sight.

‘If she can’t get the subway, can she get a bus or a cab instead? Or even walk? Is it super far?’

‘She doesn’t like the bus,’ Michaela says immediately. ‘And she says all cab drivers are lunatics.’

She pronounces each syllable of the last word very precisely, and Steve feels a stab of affection.

‘Well, this is New York,’ he says. ‘So: yes. But also, someone could go with her? Your brother maybe?’

Michaela thinks about this for a minute.

‘If we’re friends again by then,’ she decides, and then, as if to dispel the illusion of intimacy created by the last five minutes of serious conversation, immediately launches into a spiel about the merits of Adventure Time versus Steven Universe, about which Steve knows nothing and so cannot contribute, but about which she seems happy enough to hold court. And Steve sees her talking animatedly to her brother when he comes to pick her up at the end of the session, so he decides to call it a win anyway.

Sam had been so skeptical when Steve first told him about the group; he was trying not to be, for Steve’s sake, but it was obvious to anyone who knew him well. Steve could understand it. After all, how sensible was it to start offering help to kids in need when he couldn’t even help himself? But this was all a part of the bigger picture that Steve was still trying to understand, still working his way through his email invite stack and scouring the internet trying to figure out. It had been easier in a way, in the forties, when the whole world seemed to be at war – they were allowed to make a mess if they had to, because everything seemed in need of a do-over anyway. He felt embarrassingly arrogant now about having thought it, but he knew he’d justified it to himself on account of how everyone else was doing it too, and at least they were fighting for the right side. No one would ever have stopped them; they were so grateful to have Steve on their side that it didn’t seem to occur to them to complain about any wreckage he and the Commandos might leave behind, because the good they were doing seemed to far outweigh the bad. But they aren’t in Nazi Germany anymore, and if they’re going to keep using their bodies like battering rams then they need to make peace with what the aftermath of that tactic looks like: rubble, and dust.

‘So what are you suggesting exactly?’ Natasha asks, raising an eyebrow at him and cocking her hip in a show of irritation. Steve had been grateful when it became obvious that she had grown comfortable enough with him to let a few of her natural tics loose – they’re not entirely natural, of course, but tics she’s cultivated are still chinks in her armor nonetheless, and he’s honored to be allowed to see them – but now he mostly just feels a sharp stab of anticipation for the argument to come. ‘That we – what, that we retire?’

‘No, of course not,’ Steve says, struggling for a moment with the impulse to do something proactive with his hands. He’d called them all up here for a meeting and no doubt they’d expected something about Maria’s birthday next month or an update on Fury’s location, and instead he’s laying down the law. He’s not normally a nervous guy when making these kinds of declarations, but literally everyone in the room is staring at him, and it’s a room full of Avengers, whose stares tend to pack a punch, no pun intended. ‘But – I can’t have been the only one who’s noticed how much the city is still struggling to recover, these last few years. No one can take responsibility for the mess because Loki and the rest don’t exactly hang around to pay up toward the reconstruction effort after, and there’s only so much the government will do in terms of funding and planning when it keeps happening in the same places over and over again. I just thought I’d open it up for discussion, because I think we could be doing more.’

‘He goes to one support group,’ Tony says faintly. ‘I blame you for this, Wilson.’

Sam holds up his hands in mock surrender.

‘Wasn’t my idea. Romanov, you ready to take the fall for this?’

Natasha rolls her eyes and carries on cutting up limes with eerie precision, while still frowning in Steve’s general direction.

‘I’m not hearing any objections,’ Steve says. He sweeps the room, ready for the collective ego of everyone present to leap up and begin pummeling his argument into submission, but there is only a tense silence. Bruce in particular stares down bitterly at his hands, and Steve momentarily regrets bringing this up at all; he knows Bruce is always making donations where he can, and he used to take volunteer shifts at a clinic downtown before the risks started to supersede the benefits, but he’s only one man. The aftershocks of the Hulk’s involvement in any and all Avengers missions always far outweigh any personal contribution Bruce can make. In a way, Steve is speaking most of all to him – and Tony, who has a penchant for dismissing his responsibility to try and contain their impact with the counterargument that he can and will put everything back the way it was afterward, with the healing power of giant piles of cash.

It’s Tony who speaks up now, to Steve’s utter lack of surprise.

‘Not an objection per se, but – I’m not the only remembering the alien invasion a couple years back, right? Where we saved the world? Or the threatened onset of a tyrannical police state in DC? Because both of those were stopped, by us. Incurring a considerable amount of damage, yes, but we can’t exactly pick and choose when these things are going to show up, Cap. I know you were in the ice for a while, but we’re not living our best Minority Report lives yet.’

Tony winks at him, sticking a lollipop in his mouth. 

‘I’m not saying we can control it,’ Steve says, leaning back against the kitchen counter and folding his arms across his chest. ‘That’s what SHIELD were trying to do and I wasn’t exactly fond of that suggestion, if you recall.’

Tony looks like he’s about to say something but Steve gives him a look and, miracle of miracles, he closes his mouth with no more than a disappointed whistling noise.

‘The point is not to beat ourselves up for things we can’t change,’ Steve says firmly. ‘But we could be doing more to alleviate our impact and help reconstruction, maybe by setting up an independent private body concerned with systems of repair and charity, for when things like this happen. Because they’re going to keep happening, obviously. I don’t think any of us are in doubt of that anymore.’

Natasha puts down her knife and looks at him shrewdly.

‘We can’t save everybody, Steve,’ she says, and it’s gentler than he might have expected, for a statement cutting so decisively to the heart of what’s bothering him. Of course it would be Natasha who recognizes that; she’s the most emotionally intelligent of them all, probably because she had those instincts ripped out of her by the roots when she was a child and now has to cultivate them more carefully even than Bucky in order to keep herself in check.

‘I know that,’ he says, struggling with what he wants to say for a moment. ‘But we have to start taking charge of this. We can’t – we can’t just put ourselves out there in the world, wrecking it to save it, and then go back home and forget about the mess we left.’

‘You’re always first to oversee civilian casualties after missions,’ she points out. ‘No one can accuse you of not doing enough. But you’re a soldier, Steve, and I’m a spy, and there’s a point at which you have to separate yourself from the job. What you’re suggesting isn’t a part of that job.’

‘Well, it doesn’t have to be,’ he says, getting a little testy now. ‘Did you hear the part about setting up an independent body to handle this stuff?’

‘Steve’s right,’ Bucky says unexpectedly from his perch on the far side of the room, his voice a little rusty. He meets Steve’s eyes over the lump of elastic bands in his lap he’s taken to playing around with – he’d explained to Steve the other night when they’d stayed up talking that he was trying to cultivate self-soothing physical tendencies as an antidote to just staring at people, entirely unmoving, which kind of freaks them out when it continues over long periods of time. He smiles slightly at Steve, who feels a little caught out by how happy it’s making him to see that in front of so many colleagues who also count as friends, and has to struggle not to let it show on his face.

It’s not that Bucky hasn’t been supportive of him in front of the team before, but this feels different somehow – he really hadn’t been sure how any of them would react to this, and he’d worried it would come across too holier-than-thou, that he’d get accused of feeding his martyr complex. And truly, Bucky doesn’t seem to be entirely without reservations; he’s got that rueful look, the one he used to wear when he thought Steve was doing something kind of dumb but he couldn’t say anything because he was going to go along with it anyway, on account of being just as much of a dumbass.

‘Someone’s gotta clean up this town,’ Bucky continues, frowning. ‘You can’t even get a decent cup of coffee in some parts anymore.’

They all give a collective grimace of agreement over this. With each new attack more businesses have folded, unable or unwilling to fork out the cash to rebuild when chances are good they’ll only have to do it again in a year. Steve had discovered, in his trawl through internet message boards devoted to the topic, that apparently a lot of insurance companies had quickly wised up to New York’s status as supervillain landing pad and refused to pay up on the grounds that many of the Avengers’ more explosive tactics fall into the ‘acts of God’ category, a tidbit that Tony had crowed about for a week when Steve had made the mistake of mentioning it.

‘Shocker,’ Tony says, rolling his eyes. ‘Metallicarm taking Cap’s side, stop the presses –’

‘What sides,’ Steve asks, levering himself off the kitchen island to put some coffee on. ‘No one’s taking sides, Tony –’

‘We could call it the End of the World foundation,’ Bruce pipes up unexpectedly, half-smiling, and Steve pauses with an empty jug in his hands, catching Bucky’s eye again. Bucky huffs a slight laugh, leaning back in his chair.

‘It’s got a ring to it,’ he says, and Steve grins, looking down reflexively at the spotlight of Bucky’s attention, the glint of his watchful eyes.

‘It does,’ he says quietly.

Natasha rolls her eyes and goes back to composing her Thai salad. Tony sighs in a way that implies there will be more rebuttals to overcome in future but that’s alright; Steve can talk about it more. He’s got statistics, he’s got plans, and best of all, he’s got anecdotal evidence, which Tony would never admit to being weak to, but which he totally, totally is. If he can engineer a meeting with Michaela, he’ll have Tony onside in less than a minute flat.

‘Not going to beat ourselves up for things we can’t change, huh,’ Sam clearly cannot resist saying to him after they’ve all begun to disperse, Clint disappearing back up to the roof and Tony stealing morsels of raw carrot from Natasha’s chopping board while she wields the knife threateningly close to his fingertips. ‘Hoo boy. I knew therapy was gonna be good for you, but I didn’t know it was gonna be that good.’

‘Shut up,’ Steve says, knocking Sam gently with his shoulder. ‘It’s not classy to gloat.’

‘Whoever said I was classy? Anyway, I think it’s great, you know I do. Proud of you, man.’

He brings Steve in for one of his patented Sam Wilson ‘you did good’ hugs, which are always simultaneously heartfelt and back-slapping, and usually exactly what Steve needs. 

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Steve says when he’s taken a step back, and then his eye catches on Bucky, who’s still sat by the TV, eyes fixed on them with something soft in his expression. His inner teenage crush shows up again and Steve gives a dorky little wave before internally wincing at Bucky’s slightly raised eyebrows, lamenting that Bucky still manages to play it cooler than him even with only half his memories intact and suffering from severe PTSD.

‘Oh man,’ Sam says, biting his lip on a laugh.

‘Not a word,’ Steve mutters. ‘Not a word, Wilson.’

---

Bucky never runs when they’re on a mission; he walks, he takes his time, and it is, Steve remembers, like watching your death approach you.

That is, whenever he bothers to come out from the shadows and into daylight at all. He’s the most elusive ghost Steve’s ever worked with when he wants to be, even including Natasha; he sticks close to his favored vantage points, to shadows. Steve feels him most as an unflinching constant presence somewhere north of his right shoulder, shooting down hostiles as quickly as Steve can engage them, and sometimes before he’s even aware of their presence.

‘For God’s sake, Buck,’ he’d shouted once to the sky as he stood surrounded by a circle of incapacitated HYDRA agents he hadn’t even touched, the rest of the team struggling to keep straight faces. ‘You gotta let me hit something!’

Bucky had said nothing and disappeared back to the tower without hitching a ride, but Steve had known without needing to see him that he’d been smirking about it anyway.

This time, though – this time Bucky is as present as the gunfire in Steve’s ears, his wide eyes already surging forward into the bright burst of the grenade that goes off not six feet away, illuminating the vindictive grin of the HYDRA agent’s face in the split second before it explodes and scatters Steve like shrapnel, bits and pieces of his brain spiraling off into the atmosphere –

‘– Bucky stop, Bucky, he’s – earth to Barnes, am I getting through here –’

White noise in his ears overlaid with the sound of his own gasps, careful hands under his back, lifting him up but he still can’t see anything, he still can’t –

‘Don’t engage,’ he hears Natasha’s clipped tones from far away, ‘we’d be airlifting him out anyway, this might even be faster –’

‘Faster because he’ll be mowing people down –’

‘He won’t,’ she’s saying, ‘look, if you want to try taking Rogers off him, be my guest, but –’

And his hearing fades, the static overwhelming Natasha’s voice until there is nothing but blank space.

He wakes in a hospital bed with his head still fuzzy, blinking and waiting for the fog to clear before he looks around. He’s done this dance before a hundred times, and looking to his left is more of a reflex action than something he can control, not that he has to look far: Bucky is easily within his eye line, he only has to roll his head. He’s asleep, or he looks it, cramped up in the horrendously uncomfortable looking chair for visitors, a tiny frown wrinkling his brow. He’s still wearing all his combat gear.

‘Nurse tells me he’s been there all night,’ Sam says quietly. Steve looks around as fast as he can while still moderately sedated, startled to realize he hadn’t even registered the sound of the door quietly clicking open. He gives a small, painful smile of greeting and Sam returns it and sits in another chair to the right of the bed. ‘She says he wouldn’t leave. The arm freaked them out some until they got the call from Natasha.’

‘Always on my six,’ Steve croaks out, then swallows. Sam gets him a glass of water and he takes careful, small sips until it feels less like his throat’s being newly shredded with very word. ‘Everyone else okay?’

‘Yeah, they’re alright,’ Sam says quietly, settling back with a sigh. He looks showered and changed if still bone tired, so it must’ve been at least a few hours. ‘You hogged all the attention, as usual, and left us to deal with the clean-up.’

‘Gotta earn your keep somehow.’

Steve keeps his eyes trained on Bucky, whose breathing is still regular and deep in keeping with sleep, but who likes to feign it to avoid social situations he doesn’t want to deal with. Now he knows Steve is alright, this might well constitute one of those.

‘Yeah, yeah. It was all over by the time Barnes took off with you anyway, no one left to fight.’

Steve turns his head to give Sam a faint smile, closing his eyes again. He still feels like he could sleep for a million years. The serum’s good for a lot but whenever he does get injured he basically ends up hibernating while his enhanced skin knits itself back together; the few times this has happened since the origination of the Avengers have knocked him out for days at a time. It hasn’t happened since Bucky came back, though. It must have been a wrench for him, seeing Steve laid out like that; they’ve both gotten used to Steve being near impossible to hurt, especially seeing as Bucky’s made it his mission not to let anyone get near him. All it takes is one second, though, for everything to go off the rails. One second for everything to change.

Steve doesn’t know what he’ll do if their positions here ever get reversed. He always thinks he hasn’t got it in him to pray for Bucky’s life one more time, when he doesn’t even really believe anymore, and he always turns out to be wrong. There’s nothing else for his faith to hang on; nothing else on which he’d stake himself, mind body and soul.

The quality of Sam’s silence is so heavy Steve knows there’s something else about to drop off the end of it, and he can imagine what it’s going to be about, so he waits, and sure enough soon it comes.

‘I think it must take a lot of energy to love someone like you two love each other,’ Sam says finally, sounding fond in a tired kind of way. ‘I don’t know if I ever want to find out how much.’

Steve can’t help smiling.

‘Doesn’t take much at all,’ he corrects, swallowing against the dryness in his throat. ‘Easy as breathing.’

‘Well, you would say that,’ Sam retorts, ‘being a supersoldier and all.’

Steve laughs as quietly as he can.

When they were younger, must’ve been around fifth grade, Bucky played hooky from school one day to sneak in through Steve’s bedroom window and entertain him while he was off sick with the flu. He said it was because they were learning about the founding fathers again that day and he was bored of learning about them – Bucky always wanted to know about the bigger things, the ones outside just their own small world, like space and God and what the future might look like – but Steve knew what it was about really, and even though he told Bucky he should go back after lunch at least, he didn’t fight it very hard when Bucky told him he wouldn’t. When Steve’s mom came home from work on a break to give him soup at lunch Bucky hid under the bed while Steve plastered his most innocent expression, and although Steve realizes in hindsight that she must have known immediately what was going on – there were no flies on Sarah Rogers, and Bucky’s body made a conspicuous bump in the thin mattress besides – she didn’t say anything about it. Steve has held onto that day very hard, even through all the others that came after it where Bucky more plainly expressed his love, because it was one of the first times he could ever remember feeling so explicitly missed: Bucky hadn’t come to him just because he knew Steve would be lonely, but because he was lonely too. They were always lonely, without each other.

As Steve drifts off to sleep thinking about the way Bucky had stroked his back when he coughed that day and fetched him books and blankets when he asked, he is aware that in the details of this story hide the truths he doesn’t know how to speak, the ones that still link him and Bucky with glittering spider web connections despite the changes in their bodies and minds that time has wrought. He’s not trying to act like nobody else but them could understand what love means, but he really just doesn’t know how to explain it to Sam, or to anyone, because he can’t separate himself from it. Where does he end, where does it begin? It’s too much a part of him. It would be like cutting out his heart and putting it in Sam’s palm, folding Sam’s fingers over it one by one, triumphant and sardonic: here it is. You asked.

---

Steve had painted a portrait of Bucky once. Just once; he hadn’t had the oils to spare for more than one, and he wanted it to be special. It had taken him weeks to scrape together the money as it was; he could only just afford sketchbooks and pencils and charcoal, so the canvas and paints were a tall order, and one he had to keep from Bucky besides. He knew Bucky would tell him not to bother if he knew, not because he didn’t want Steve to do it but because he’d already pawned more precious things to keep them afloat than he would ever want Steve to know about, and they needed every penny they could get. Sometimes Steve imagined it like in a cartoon, sly music springing up as a criminal jumped from shadow to shadow trying to keep their loot secret. Him and Bucky both, a pair of prize fools, so busy hiding their sacrifices from each other they didn’t even notice the other was limping from the weight of a cross too.

He still wasn’t sure if he’d gotten it exactly right. He’d gotten Bucky to pose on the old barstool they’d found out on the street the week they moved in, wearing just his undershirt and pants, suspenders running like parallel lines down his chest. Bucky was looking right at the artist, because that’s how he’d been back then, brash and unafraid, and his mouth was curled in a kind of smirk that said he knew you wanted him – and that was right too, because everybody did. Sometimes while Steve was painting it he got distracted and just sat there and stared for a while until Bucky piped up what was keeping him, they didn’t have all night. And then Steve would jolt back into action, blushing and rolling his eyes at how the set of Bucky’s mouth had gotten even more self-satisfied once he knew Steve was looking at him.

He’d wanted so bad to get it right. It was the look in Bucky’s eyes he wasn’t happy about; it was too sharp and vulnerable at once, too much like how he looked when they were having sex, as if he might accidentally cut himself on the jut of Steve’s elbows, a lone strand of his hair. He held himself so open for Steve, even though he was the one doing the fucking; it was impossible to forget even for a moment how much Bucky loved him, when they were in bed. And now Steve’d put it down on a canvas for any old Tom, Dick or Harry to see and as soon as he’d done it he wanted to take it back, because it wasn’t his to share. It was Bucky’s love, and here he was trying to pin it down like it belonged to him.

He was so frustrated with himself that he didn’t want to show it to Bucky when they were done, he put it off for weeks, but in the end he came home from work one day and there it was, unwrapped from its old bedsheet and propped up on the table against the opposite wall, and Bucky was sat on the barstool staring at it. Steve had the surreal sensation that he might have walked into an alternate universe where somehow he’d been gifted with the care of two Buckys at once, but at the same time he felt a sharp sense of purely aesthetic satisfaction, seeing the two of them mirror each other like that; yes, he thought. I got it right after all.

‘I can see why you didn’t want to show it to me,’ Bucky said after a minute of awkward silence, while Steve shifted from toe to toe, wondering whether he could play off his guilt as anger instead that Bucky had defied his request not to look at the painting. ‘It don’t look a thing like me.’

Steve blinked. That had not been the complaint he expected to hear.

‘It does,’ he said, offended. ‘It looks just like you.’

‘Nah,’ Bucky said, turning toward him for the first time and roping him in with a hand around Steve’s waist. ‘I’m not so fine as all that. It’s just how you see me, Rogers.’

It was like a fable, Steve has thought often since then. It was too symmetrical in its absurdity and romance to be true: to have worried Bucky would hate to see his love laid bare like that, when in the end Bucky thought it was Steve who had given himself away. It was the type of story that would look good written on a plaque next to the canvas, but that was not what was written there when the portrait was eventually displayed.

Steve hadn’t given much thought to how his things from the forties might have passed the time since his descent into the ice; truly he didn’t have much to save, only the painting and a few sketchbooks and some things from his ma, her crucifix and bottle of scent. To have woken up with his dad’s old pocket watch still clutched in his hand felt like as much as he could reasonably ask; Bucky didn’t have anything of his old self either. Arguably, he had much less.

But they’d kept them all, it turned out. SHIELD had kept everything they could get their hands on from his and Bucky’s apartment, they’d stored it all, and while a lot of it was in the Smithsonian, some of it had been bought by private collectors. Some bright spark had thought it was a good idea to hold a belated art exhibition, a year or so after Steve was found; a kind of retrospective, it had been pitched to him. He had been alarmed at the very thought, remembering some of the less than modest sketches he had done of Bucky when he’d been struck by the urge. And he’d been struck by the urge pretty often; Bucky was a beautiful subject, his body a continual source of inspiration and fervor in Steve, and sometimes Bucky had had to basically yank the book out of his hands to make him get on with what they’d started doing before Steve had gotten distracted by the curve of Bucky’s thickly muscled calf or whatever.

‘It might not be much comfort,’ Fury had said to him after the meeting where this had been brought up to him and he’d had to try pretty hard not to just throw up at the prospect of his and Bucky’s relationship being displayed like that, ‘but you’ll get the final say on anything they want to display.’

Steve had looked at him sharply, understanding at once what he meant, and consequently what Fury had come to know about him without his consent. He wondered when he would get to stop feeling like a museum exhibit people weren’t done picking over and polishing, stripping off layer after layer until he was bare.

‘They?’ he asked after a moment.

‘This wasn’t exactly my idea,’ Fury said, looking a little displeased. Which for him meant someone had probably gotten fired over it. ‘To my mind, we have bigger fish to fry, and this isn’t something you need hanging over you. They should just give you everything and have done with it.’

‘But it’s history,’ Steve filled in, looking past Fury and down at the floor before he continued. He sounded cold saying it, like it couldn’t touch him as it came out, but that wasn’t true. ‘I’m history.’

‘That’s right,’ Fury said, giving him a sympathetic glance. He looks up and down the empty corridor before taking a small, rectangular object wrapped in paper out of his pocket and handing it to Steve. ‘Our very own relic.’

Steve made himself wait until he was on the subway home to open the parcel, but his heart was hammering all the way from SHIELD headquarters because he already knew what it was. He remembered the weight of it in his hands as soon as Fury had handed it to him. It was his sketchbook, the last one, the final one before the war – the one that had everything of Bucky in it, before he’d gotten too caught up in trying to be a hero and hadn’t had time to commit him to the page anymore. He didn’t steel himself before he opened it to the first page, he couldn’t, he was too greedy to even try, and then there it was, just like he knew it would be, a pencil sketch of Bucky looking over his shoulder at Steve in bed, eyebrow arched dryly, strong muscles in his back laid bare to the waist, pillow crease carved into his cheek like it was a scar he’d had for life. It hurt so much to look at it that Steve could hardly breathe, and he had to make himself put the sketchbook back in the paper and tuck it under his arm and wait until he got home to look at anymore, because if he kept doing it on the subway then he was going to cry in public and besides, he didn’t want to risk anyone else catching a glance.

The rest of it had been, needless to say, just as revealing as he remembered. He tried to find out who exactly would have seen the sketchbook before Fury returned it to him, but he didn’t want to ask too openly in case people started wondering why, and no one seemed to have kept any records of whose hands it had previously passed through anyway. From what he could gather, the book had been in lock up in the Smithsonian with the rest of his possessions deemed unsuitable for public display. He thought about Bucky laid bare like that for anyone to see, his own work so stark in its affection and untempered desire, and it made him want to hide himself away in his apartment so no one could ever look at him again. He comforted himself that at least no one too high up (except Fury, who was in himself an exception) could have seen it, and they must have kept it pretty securely under wraps, or the scandal of it surely would have come up at some point in the last seventy years. He was kind of surprised it hadn’t been waiting for him the moment he got out of the ice. He imagined the irritated faces of everyone who still considered him a national icon, their disappointment: you never told us you were queer.

Seeing the portrait displayed to the public was a little like that. It wasn’t as bad, because Bucky wasn’t naked in it, and Steve had in some obscure way intended for it to be publicly viewed – not that he’d ever had particularly lofty aspirations as an artist, but he’d thought that it would be wonderful if people came to see it one day, to admire Bucky as he should be admired. The fact that the portrait was hung as part of the retrospective that, in its final iteration, had been expanded to include the work of deceased wartime artists had made Steve hesitate in his original gut decision not to let them display it. It made it easier to look at, in its surroundings as part of an exhibition that included work of other men who had lost everything and still managed to create something beautiful out of it.

‘I hadn’t even enlisted when I painted this,’ he’d said softly to Natasha, who had unexpectedly turned up to the exhibition dead on opening time, dressed in casual clothes instead of work gear, which had made Steve realize she was trying to be here as a friend and not a colleague. He thought later that this was the kindest thing anyone had done for him since he got out of the ice. ‘This shouldn’t even really be here.’

‘I think you can still tell,’ she said, and when he looked at her questioningly she looked uncomfortable but explained anyway, her voice closer to hesitant than he had ever heard it before. ‘There’s something wounded about it, the way you’ve captured him. Like you knew you were going to lose him anyway, even though it hadn’t happened yet.’

‘Like it was just a matter of time,’ Steve said, thinking about it, and she nodded. When he looked at the painting again it was so obvious he wanted to kick himself. That was what Bucky had seen, when he’d said it was Steve’s perception of him; they didn’t talk about it much, but before Erskine had got involved it was pretty much a dead cert that Steve was going to die first, unless Bucky got it into his head to throw himself in front of a bus or something. Steve had painted Bucky desperately, like time was running out for both of them; he just hadn’t known then how true that would turn out to be.

The portrait has been hung a few more times since then, always on the okay from Steve, and he usually goes along at least once to see it. It’s always a tough day’s work to force himself into going, and it had gotten even harder after Bucky had returned, but he likes to go along as incognito as he can manage and linger at the back, see the expressions on other people’s faces when they look at it. He doesn’t always know what he’s looking for; maybe someone who looks as if they love Bucky as much as he does, which is obviously impossible for a number of reasons, not least being that a person like that doesn’t exist. But it soothes something wretched inside him that mourns at the thought that Bucky in his youth has been inexorably forgotten; Bucky at his most exuberant, his most confident, his most innocent.

Bucky comes with him, this time. The portrait is being hung as part of an exhibition of Avengers themed artwork, with all the proceeds going toward a commemorative sculpture for the six Fashion Institute of Technology students lost in the invasion. They snuck it in on the grounds that Captain America had painted it, so it kind of counted. Steve is assuming the gallery owners don’t know the secret identity of the Winter Soldier, anyway, and his undefined capacity as an ill-tolerated extra member of the team.

The portrait hangs alone on a white wall, a whole room to itself. Bucky stares at it for a long time, baseball cap pressed down low over his forehead so Steve can’t really gauge his expression. He thinks if he were Bucky then he might not be able to restrain the urge to reach out and touch the bumpy, brushstroke texture of the canvas. He remembers Bucky sitting opposite the painting that first time he’d ever seen it and has to shake himself into acknowledging that this is the same man. But then he sees it; the slight crinkling around Bucky’s eyes, the hungry way he’s watching it, unblinking. Bucky looks so starkly vulnerable so much of the time now, except for when he shuts down completely; in a way he’s more like the painting than the man he’d been during the war. By necessity much of his everyday life involves a leap of faith that the people who have taken him in won’t hurt him, or at least not beyond the realms of what he can stand. Steve aches, to think of him that vulnerable without anyone there to repay him for it, or assure him that the gamble is a worthwhile one.

He impulsively takes Bucky’s hand, lacing their fingers firmly together, and is immediately horrified with himself – sure in the second after that it is the wrong thing to have done. But while Bucky blinks down at their joined hands for a moment, confused, he seems to take it in his stride quickly enough. He doesn’t look at Steve – maybe he can’t, not yet – but he squeezes Steve’s hand hard, once, and then again, as if getting used to it.

‘Why didn’t you tell me,’ Bucky asks when they’re back home, Steve putting coffee on and caught with his hands halfway to measuring out the grounds. He hears the question, Bucky’s voice rough and almost angry, and freezes, wondering if this is the question he’s been waiting for Bucky to ask for a year. But then Bucky speaks again. ‘Why didn’t you tell me they had all that stuff? Not just in the Smithsonian – they’ve got other stuff too, haven’t they? And it’s all yours. Why do you let them keep it?’

Steve wipes his hands free of coffee grounds and turns around slowly, aware he’s stalling for time, trying to figure out how to navigate this conversation. Bucky must recognize the look on his face immediately because he gives an eye roll of frustration and thumps a hand down on the dining table. Not the metal one, or it would probably have collapsed.

‘Don’t do that, you’re always doing that – don’t act like I’m a kid you gotta handle, Steve, stop being so goddamn careful –’

Steve sucks in a sharp breath, staring at him, trying to master a retort about maybe if Bucky would stop running away like a kid – Bucky glares back like he can hear it. Steve feels abruptly as if he’s been dropped back into his pre-serum body in the forties, listening to Bucky giving him shit for trying to join up again behind his back.

‘I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to put anything else on you, which I guess you’re not gonna like, considering what you just said,’ he says, searching Bucky’s face for some sign of whether he’s about to get punched. But Bucky just looks regular angry, not HYDRA programming angry, so he tries to get his shoulders to drop and sighs. ‘They keep all that stuff because I didn’t – I didn’t know how to take it back, I guess, after everything happened. It’s not really been the first thing on my mind.’

Bucky’s pacing like someone lit a fire under him.

‘That painting,’ he says, face screwed up in a frown, ‘they had that all the time, Steve, they had that part of me. And you.’

Steve nods slowly. He’s not really sure what Bucky’s getting at.

‘We can get it back if you –’

‘I don’t remember it,’ Bucky says, his voice and eyes pleading, and suddenly, with a lurching sensation in his gut, Steve understands. ‘I must’ve sat for – how long did it take? It must’ve taken weeks, did it take weeks? Weeks of being sat there, you watching me, and I don’t –’

He cuts himself off, running a hand so hard over his hair that it pulls the strands white against his hairline. Steve’s hands twitch with wanting to reach out to him, make him stop doing it, but he doesn’t. Bucky doesn’t look like he could stand to be touched right now.

‘It took me a good long while,’ Steve says, his voice rusty, something dredged up from the seabed. He looks down at his hands and feels himself smiling incomprehensibly. ‘Sometimes I think I drew it out just so I could make you sit still for longer.’

‘I’m not him,’ Bucky says, voice harsh, ‘you can’t act like – I wish I could give you that but I’m not him, Steve, I’m not who you knew –’

‘You already told me that,’ Steve says, looking at him hard, ‘you’ve told me that a thousand times, Buck, and I’m still here. You think I’m gonna kick you out because you don’t remember everything? Because you’ve killed? It wasn’t you at the wheel when you did that, Bucky. I’ve killed too, and then it was my hands, it was my choice.’

Bucky doesn’t say anything but he’s looking at Steve as if there’s an invisible thread stretching between them held up only by the longitude of their stare. Steve moves as far forward as he dares, although the table still separates them. He tries to make his voice quieter. He wants Bucky to believe him, almost as badly as Bucky looks like he wants that himself.

‘Hell, I don’t remember everything myself, Buck. People change. Doesn’t mean you stop loving them.’

‘Maybe you should try,’ Bucky says, swallowing and looking down, then back up at Steve, resolute.

Steve feels his mouth quirk quizzically, like Bucky’s just given him an equation he doesn’t know how to solve.

‘I can’t stop that, Buck,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t even if I knew how.’

Silence while they stare at each other, until Bucky gives a short sigh and looks away.

‘Sometimes you look at me like I make you so sad,’ he says quietly. ‘Did you know that? I don’t want to be someone who breaks your heart, Steve.’

‘You aren’t,’ Steve says. ‘That’s not it. I can’t pretend I don’t wish things had got this way differently, but I’m still glad you’re here.’

He wishes he could think of a better word for it than that, a bigger word.

‘Glad,’ Bucky repeats, raising his eyebrows at Steve, who frowns.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean –’

‘No, I get it,’ Bucky nods slowly. ‘Sometimes I feel like that too. You know, even when I remembered you, I didn’t look for you? Not most times, anyway. I wonder about that. I think it’s because I didn’t want to know for sure you were gone.’

Steve aches.

‘I hated it when you ran away,’ he says, heart between his teeth. Bucky looks so surprised Steve’s bringing this up; God, his face is a picture. ‘I know you had a right to it, I got no say over what you do but every time I woke up and you weren’t here, I –’ he can’t go on with it. His voice breaks, or something in him breaks; there’s no more words.

‘You do have a say,’ Bucky says, his own voice shaky. ‘If anyone’s got any say over me, it’s you.’

‘I’m not your keeper, Buck.’

‘No,’ Bucky says. ‘You’re my friend.’

They look at each other in silence for a long moment, and it’s as if there’s nothing else in the room; the table between them disappearing, the floor, the walls. They might as well be standing in a vacuum. They haven’t looked this close at each other since Bucky got back. Part of Steve has been afraid, not just to look, but to be looked at.

‘I’m sorry if I got some things wrong,’ he says eventually. ‘I didn’t know what to do. How to help you best.’

‘You did what you could,’ Bucky says much too gently. He’s so much quieter now, his kindness resting just under the surface where instead it used to spike at unexpected moments. Maybe that’s what comes of being shown so little of it. Steve knows it’s dramatic but for a moment his adoration overwhelms him and he thinks, only Bucky could take something that painful and turn it sweet. Only Bucky is this generous. ‘I’m not running away anymore, am I?’

Of course, he’s still a jackass too.

He huffs out a laugh at the look on Steve’s face.

‘I just didn’t know what to do,’ he says in response. He sounds exhausted. ‘I felt like I couldn’t – everyone was being so good to me, and you were looking at me like I was Christ himself dragged down off the cross and I didn’t – I just didn’t deserve any of it.’ He gives Steve a warning look as if he knows Steve is about to protest, which shuts him up. ‘I just wanted to go somewhere no one knew me, where no one was gonna be that nice. But then every time I went, I kept turning around to say something to you like have you seen the price of a movie ticket these days, and you weren’t there to say it to.’

‘So you came back just to bitch,’ Steve surmises, and just about lights up with relief when it makes Bucky laugh.

‘Yeah, I guess I did,’ he smiles. ‘No one else but you to complain to.’

‘Well, I,’ and here Steve stumbles again; he would have thought months of therapy would have made this easier to say, ‘I’m always here. For you to complain to. If you want. Whenever you want, Buck.’

‘Yeah, I got that,’ Bucky says, still smiling. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Rogers. I know when I’m on to a good thing.’

He looks up at Steve again, and whatever’s between them expands, lightens, fills the space until Steve thinks he could maybe reach out and touch it. Maybe Bucky wouldn’t even back away.

Chapter Text

Steve had never got used to seeing his face on the big screen during the war. It seemed stupid, the least of what he should have adjusted to after the serum, but he wasn’t easy with it the way the USO girls could be, never got used to the lights and the make-up and the big, frozen smiles. Some of them babied him over it, cooed and called him sweetheart when he got nervous about getting up on stage, mistaking his pained smile for shyness when really it was only an automatic response to hearing that word in a voice that wasn’t Bucky’s.

It was ten times easier to be Captain America out of view of a camera, he found that out straight off when the Commandos started going out on missions. The boys teased him about the propaganda reels, the tour, and he smiled along with it when they called him showgirl, because even though he’d hated it, in a funny kind of way it was true: certainly it had made it easier for him to shout orders like he expected them to be followed after he’d been stared down by the hungry-eyed 107^th. That’d been one hell of a trial by fire, and he still maintains now that standing up on that stage had been more nerve-wracking than actually punching Red Skull in the face. He didn’t have to worry about anything when there was somebody to fight; he could do that. He knew where he was with punching.

He had no idea where he was in front of a camera.

‘We’ve been through this, Steve,’ Pepper says, her voice sweetly confident in him as she brushes non-existent lint off the shoulders of the suit. They’d fought over whether he should wear the suit, because he didn’t want to give the announcement that goofy ‘sponsored by Captain America!’ feel, but Pepper won in the end by pointing out that this was technically an Avengers press conference, and seeing as none of the rest of them had turned up, he had better make up for it. He looks at her balefully, because he’s been chewed out a million times for giving people puppy eyes but that’s nothing compared to what she can get done with just a well-directed glance of disappointment. ‘You’re going to be fine. And please don’t punch anything.’

‘I hate press conferences,’ he mutters, staring down at his notecards and shuffling them into an ever-neater pile. ‘I hate press.’

‘I know you do,’ she says calmly. ‘But it’s for a good cause, remember?’

‘Orphans!’ Tony had been helpfully shouting at Steve as he was going out of the door, glaring at everyone who didn’t have to go and give a press conference today, which was to say, everyone else who lived in the tower. Bucky had given him a twinkling wave with his left hand, smirking, while Natasha blew him a kiss. They’d drawn straws the night before on who had to announce the foundation, and Steve had the sneaking suspicion everyone but him had cheated somehow. ‘Orphans and widows! Soup kitchens! Arts and crafts for veterans! Support groups! Hipster murals –’

‘A good cause,’ Steve repeats, frowning down at the cards again. It shouldn’t be this hard. Sometimes he can rattle something off so easy it looks like it was planned – like his call to arms on the helicarrier – but usually he’s halfway through the speech before he recognizes it for what it is: he can’t handle statements and press and writing this stuff down like Tony can, or even Natasha. Couldn’t he have just announced it when they were beating down those HYDRA scouts the other day? There’d already been a crowd of journalists, and then he wouldn’t be standing here sweating in the freshly laundered suit, wishing he’d never started volunteering in the first place.

‘Just pretend you’re talking to me,’ Pepper says, patting him gently on the arm before stepping back. ‘I’ll be at the back. Just treat it like a conversation between the two of us.’

‘A little hard to do when Tony isn’t interrupting every ten seconds,’ he mutters, and she smiles, but it turns out to be better advice than he gave it credit for. When he’s up on the podium, he spots her at the back almost immediately, and her reassuring thumbs up gives him something to focus on, her bright hair a beacon in the crowd. He wishes momentarily that he’d let her write the damn statement, but there’s no going back now.

‘All of you are no doubt aware why I’ve called you here today so I won’t waste any time,’ he begins when the sea of journalists quiet. ‘Recently the Avengers have been performing tactical search and retrieval operations on underground HYDRA bases which we believe to have held resources of significant value, in the hopes of recouping some of the financial losses sustained during recent attacks on New York.’

Money; they’d been looking for money, and they’d found it. Not just in bank accounts squirrelled away under a string of false names two dozen long, half of which had already been liquidated and divided up among the government bodies which could shout loudest about their need for funding. Steve is keeping a close eye on the other half; he can’t think of a better use for HYDRA riches than benefiting survivors of the attacks.

‘it’s just so mercenary,’ Tony had sighed as he, Steve, Natasha and Bucky stared into the bunker crammed with wartime relics and some choice pieces of artwork it broke Steve’s heart to see locked underground. ‘We’ve already had the conversation about how Stark Industries could fund the foundation for the next twenty years on the revenue from merchandise alone, right?’

‘For starters,’ Steve had said, carefully brushing dust off – Christ – a Matisse while Natasha swept for hidden compartments and Bucky started wrenching at padlocks with his left hand, ‘we’ve had many conversations about how I feel profiting off the merchandise in the first place, Tony. And we’ve had many more about how we can’t just treat Stark Industries like the Bank of New York. The foundation needs to be self-sustaining and impartial, or it isn’t going to work long term. What if –’

‘Don’t say it, don’t say –’

‘– what if Stark Industries folds for some reason? You want to leave all the beneficiaries high and dry? Besides, any non-profit body funded by a sole backer is just asking to get slapped with accusations of favoritism, even I know that –’

‘You had to say it, didn’t you, you just had to say it –’

And on the conversation had run, until they had found a stack of folders on arc reactor technology and Tony had carried it off with wide eyes, presumably so they could be alone.

‘These operations are being carried out as part of the run-up to our establishment of a new non-profit organization aimed at benefiting those who have been affected by the attacks, and also at generating a sustained program of reconstruction focusing on infrastructure and local economy. We will be keeping up with our usual duties during this time, and we hope to bring more news of the foundation soon.’

He surreptitiously starts scooting his chair back so it’ll be easier to make a getaway once they start asking horrible questions, trying not to blink in the flashing of stage lights. He really, really hates press.

‘Isn’t this kind of stepping on local government’s toes?’

‘No ma’am; we don’t intend on inviting ourselves anywhere we aren’t asked to be.’

He smiles sweetly, hoping that didn’t look like he was lying through his teeth. If the zoning commission would stop fighting them so hard on the grounds that community access shelters drive down property prices wherever they crop up, they wouldn’t have any dispute at all. Or not as many disputes, anyway.

‘Does this foundation have a name?’

‘Not yet,’ Steve lies, because he’s still trying to think of a tactful way to phrase Bruce’s suggestion before they go live, a decision spurred on by the fact that Tony had recently ordered three hundred ‘End of The World Foundation’ pin badges and pens with tiny models of Chitauri warriors on top that collapsed when you pressed down on the nib.

‘Will the foundation be open to victims of attacks in other cities? What about DC and New Mexico?’

‘We’ll be open to anyone disadvantaged by recent supervillain or extraterrestrial activity, so long as they can demonstrate that they’re in need of aid.’

‘That’s quite the pool of applicants, Captain – how do you respond to accusations that this is just a publicity stunt provoked by accusations of vigilantism?’

‘Well, it’s not,’ he says, irritated, which gets a small ripple of laughter. He frowns a little, because he didn’t really mean it to be funny. ‘Listen, back in ’43 we had a common enemy, and we made do with the resources we had to try and cobble things together after everything went south. But things are different now; the kinds of wars we’re fighting don’t have another country on the other side, and most major players aren’t stepping up to repair the damage because they themselves didn’t have anything to do with causing it.’

He looks around at the sea of rapt faces, trying to find someone who looks like they understand what he’s saying. He abruptly wishes Bucky were here; maybe he’d be rolling his eyes at what he likes to call Steve’s martyr complex, but he’d know what Steve meant. He’d been there too. He was the only one with as much right as Steve to bemoan the difference they saw every time they stepped out onto the street, and he usually did it even louder, too. Where Steve got sad, Bucky got wrathful; he was especially sore over how much it cost to ride the subway these days. 

‘Everywhere I go in New York I see signs of the invasion that haven’t been cleaned up yet. I see small businesses folding because their insurance companies won’t pay up. I see people scared to go on the subway because they can’t afford help to manage their PTSD. As a private organization with adequate funding and opportunity, I think it would be reprehensible if we didn’t try and do something about all that.’

He stops again, aware that he’s sounding more self-righteous than he intended. Everyone in the room is silent now, and watching him. Now he wishes Bucky were here just so he could see him smiling, because that’s one gesture of encouragement that never lost its power, no matter how irritated Bucky might be with him at the time. Steve’s pigheaded ability to get involved in things that don’t concern him had always mystified and charmed Bucky in equal measure, and it seemed that hadn’t changed: this morning he had squeezed Steve’s hand shyly while he poured him a cup of coffee, avoiding eye contact. Steve had realized immediately that it was for luck, but that hadn’t stopped him staring at his hand like it had caught fire until he’d seen Natasha smirking at him.

He shakes his head and looks down at his notecards, which he forgot to use, then stands, shoving them awkwardly into his pocket.

‘We’re just trying to do a good thing here. Sometimes it seems to me that people have forgotten what that looks like.’

Pepper’s giving him a small grin despite having her phone clamped to her ear in obvious damage control mode, so he feels justified in walking away even when the silence breaks and people start yelling questions at his back.

---

Steve never thought Bucky would take so naturally to the aspects of the twenty first century that clash so glaringly with the world they came from, but in hindsight it makes perfect sense. Bucky had always been ahead of the times in a lot of ways; he’d dragged Steve to more exhibitions and shows like the Expo than Steve could count. Sometimes he said it was payback for all the galleries Steve dragged him to but Steve knew him better than that, and he could read that wondering glitter in Bucky’s eyes. There was a part of Bucky that just couldn’t wait for the future to arrive, levitating cars and all, and so it seems a little unfair that now here it was and they still didn’t have any damn jetpacks or hover boards. Sure, they’d been into space, and what did they have to show for it? Not a colony in sight.

‘I mean what were they up to all the years we were frozen? Thumbs up their asses, the whole lot of ‘em.’

‘I think there was some other stuff happening,’ Steve says. ‘And you can’t say they didn’t try. There’s a space station and everything now.’

‘What’s that good for,’ Bucky objects. He had complained right the way through the documentary on NASA they watched the other day because as far as he was concerned, if they hadn’t at least tried to install a biodome or two on Mars by now, they were missing a trick. 

‘I don’t know, Buck,’ Steve says pointedly, ‘because you were talking over the TV the whole time the show was on.’

It was the everyday stuff Bucky was so good at; he got the hang of every gadget Tony threw at him within a few hours if not minutes, even the ones that had taken Steve weeks and actual painstaking internet research to figure out. Part of it must be to do with knowledge he picked up during his intermittent periods of cognizance on HYDRA missions; once Steve had picked up a weapon that looked like some kind of obscure bass instrument when they were in a ransacked underground HYDRA base and Bucky had walked past him looking pretty grey, muttering he should be careful where he pointed it because it worked kind of like a grenade launcher, and as far as he could remember it had a sensitive trigger.

For everything Bucky has started to give up to Steve – in acquiescence to their shared memory as well as a surprising openness toward Steve filling in what he doesn’t remember – he keeps this part of his history shored up tight. It torments Steve that Bucky might not want to tell him because he thinks it might drive him away; it’s been a life-affirming experience discovering how much of the old Bucky remains and is uncovered every day, but Steve already knows most of what HYDRA did, what they made Bucky do – he’s read the file, after all. It didn’t make a difference then, and it wouldn’t now, hearing it from Bucky’s own mouth. Steve is finally accepting the knowledge his grief has been holding at bay for months: that Bucky will never be exactly as he was in the forties, no matter how much Steve worries over what he’s lost. Steve isn’t the same either, and he’d be a poor friend by his own estimation if he didn’t make it clear to Bucky every way he could that that doesn’t matter. He can’t pretend it doesn’t grieve him that the life Bucky could have had was taken from him so brutally, that he was used so cruelly and for so long without any expectation of rescue. There is no answer for any of that. But there is moving forward, and there is reconciliation: Bucky becomes less of a ghost every day, but Steve is still more than happy to be the home he haunts for as long as he needs.

In the evenings when there are no missions or meetings or therapy sessions to go to, they sit on opposite ends of the couch, curving toward each other like parentheses with their history trapped between the warmth of their bodies. They spar together trading dates and times and names, patching together what Bucky knows of their past, and for every time Bucky forgets what he’d learned the day before, he remembers something new. Steve can’t pinpoint exactly what’s changed but he knows that at some point the floodgates unlatched themselves without him realizing; he forgets to be polite and careful with Bucky all the time, calls him a jerk twenty times a day, and Bucky comes back at him just as hard, throwing out that crooked smirk and catching Steve right between the eyes with it: breathtaking. It feels like being boys again, like a game almost, except they’re only playing with half the board: still Bucky refuses to talk about his life as the soldier, no matter how many times Steve broaches the subject.

‘If you won’t talk about it with me, Buck, are you at least talking about it with your therapist?’

‘None of your damn business.’

And round they go.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Steve says, over and over again, and when that doesn’t work, he tries a different tack. ‘Would you think any less of me if it’d been me?’

‘Of course not,’ Bucky says immediately, then rolls his eyes at Steve’s raised eyebrow. ‘That’s different.’

‘How is it different?’ Steve demands, baffled.

‘You’re just a whole hell of a lot,’ Bucky says eventually, avoiding his eyes, twirling a coaster between his metal fingers, then scowls when Steve doesn’t let up. ‘Stop fishing for compliments.’

‘If they’dve got me instead,’ Steve says levelly, because he thinks he knows how wrong Bucky’s got this in his head and he can’t let him think it for a moment longer, ‘then it would’ve been me shooting at you on the bridge, Bucky, and we’d be sitting on opposite sides of the couch right now, having the same damn conversation.’

Bucky doesn’t seem to be able to look at him. Steve sighs and shifts around until they’re a little closer. Bucky likes to put his hand on the same couch cushion as Steve’s sometimes, almost close enough to touch but not quite. Steve thinks he’s still getting used to touch that isn’t combat oriented, and anyway having Bucky’s hand less than an inch away from his for hours at a time plays enough havoc with his nerves that he’s not sure he’s ready for anything bigger yet, never mind Bucky. Whenever they do touch it’s brief and startling in its intimacy, like when he’d taken Bucky’s hand in the gallery. It also seems to be happening entirely outside the realm of any language Steve could use to decently describe it: it’s not about sex, or comfort, or even necessarily healing. When Bucky touches him now it feels like he’s learning how to do it for the first time, and Steve is a vast expanse of undiscovered country – Bucky looks at him sometimes as if he’s that awed, and that frightened.

‘You think I’m just the man behind the shield?’ Steve asks. ‘There’s nothing more to me than the big guy they all talk about, is that right?’

‘You know that’s not what I meant.’

‘Then what did you mean?’

Bucky continues to scowl silently, but at least he’s looking at Steve.

‘I can’t imagine them breaking you,’ he says eventually. ‘I can’t picture it.’

Steve sighs and flops back against the couch, worn out on it for a minute. Moments like this remind him that there were some screwed up things about them even before the serum and the war and HYDRA shoved themselves in the way; they’re both stubborn as hell, and Bucky will sooner dodge a difficult question than answer it where Steve doesn’t know how to let a conversation drop. Both of them have a tendency to idealize, although Bucky would never admit to it and Steve has repeatedly decided it’s been beaten out of him only to come to the rueful conclusion that that isn’t quite the case. In a way it’s even comforting, that the previous flaws in their characters and their relationship are still apparent despite everything else that’s changed; their trauma doesn’t have to be the thing that defines them, especially not to each other. All these other idiosyncrasies are still there, still belligerent and loud, still taking up space. It feels a little like pulling a dust cloth off an old piece of furniture and affectionately taking note of all the scars and imperfections you’d forgotten about, the uniqueness of which provoke more of a sense of ownership and fealty than any truly perfect thing ever could.

That doesn’t mean Steve has to just let this go, though.

‘You say that,’ he says after a minute, ‘but what I can’t picture is how you managed to come back at all. Everything they did, and you still came back. You still remembered who I was. That must have taken – Bucky, I can’t imagine what that must have taken you.’

Bucky doesn’t say anything for a while.

‘You were the loudest thing in my head, sometimes,’ he says finally, letting his head fall back against the couch and closing his eyes, like he can still hear whatever cacophony he’s describing. ‘Whenever they left me out too long. I always think of it like when you leave meat outta the freezer and it starts thawing, and there’s still ice in the middle but the outside is all soft, and sometimes it looks like –’ he swallows. ‘Like it’s still bleeding. There’s so much of you in me, Steve, the moment anything started thawing, that was what came out.’

He turns to look at Steve with a faint smile.

‘So you see,’ he says, ‘it didn’t really take much at all.’

That night Bucky has a nightmare, one loud enough for Steve to hear from his room down the hall, and by the time he gets there Bucky is wide awake in bed, gasping, running a hand through his hair, wearing the miserable yet resigned expression of someone who barely remembers what it feels like to sleep through the night.

‘I’m alright,’ Bucky says, closing his eyes and pressing his hands against them hard enough to leave marks. Steve’s fingers itch to move them, to unfold the metal of his fist and make him treat himself kindly. They hover uselessly at his sides instead. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Yeah, you look fine,’ Steve says dryly, because it’ll make Bucky laugh, and it does. It’s tired and strained, but it’s a laugh. Bucky even looks at him with a small smile, as if he’s glad Steve came to check on him, which is more than Steve ever used to get. Once on a bad night very early on, Bucky threw a shoe at him, hollering at him like a teenager to leave him be, and Steve had hastily shut the door and leaned back against the outside, sad but happy about it too, because it was the first time Bucky had raised his voice since he arrived. It had been good to know he still had it in him to be pissed off. 

‘Well,’ he says, and Bucky blinks at him tiredly, bunching the sheets up his hands. Steve thinks of something and wants to ask about it, suddenly and urgently, but he isn’t sure if they’re there yet. The peace between them still feels fragile and wavering enough that he can’t get a read on it, and he’d already pushed so hard earlier. If he makes a guess and gets it wrong, he might set them back months. In this, at least, he still has to be careful.

‘Is it,’ he hesitates, licks at his dry lips, ‘is it the missions? Do you not – maybe you shouldn’t –’

‘I can’t not,’ Bucky says tightly, ghost of a smile on his lips. ‘You’ll get yourself killed without me, Rogers.’

Something twists in Steve’s stomach.

‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ he says firmly, ‘I’ll be fine, I got a whole team to back me up now, don’t –’

‘It’s not that, Steve, slow down,’ Bucky interrupts, finally irritated into rolling his eyes and with it, relaxing ever so slightly. His hands have eased in the bed sheets, smoothing out instead of bunching them up in anxious handfuls.

‘I want to,’ he says after a minute, looking up at Steve again, clear and beautiful in his certainty. ‘It’s – it’s good. To help. After –’

He shudders and swallows.

‘After everything. Isn’t it good?’

‘It’s good, Buck,’ Steve says softly. ‘You don’t owe it to anybody but, yeah. It’s good.’

Bucky gives a weak smile and stretches his legs out against the sheets, producing an almost tearing sound that jars Steve into motion. Don’t push your luck, he reminds himself.

‘I guess I’ll leave you to it,’ he says, turning to go.

'Steve,' Bucky says suddenly but quietly, and Steve stops at the door. Bucky says his name so rarely now that Steve responds to it like a dog hearing a whistle. 'Stay. You could stay.'

He is already nodding before he processes what Bucky is asking him, and then when he does he has a real hard time keeping his excitement off his face. He turns to fetch the chair that usually sits in the corner, which they moved out into the living room last Tuesday when one by one the team had drifted up to their floor for an impromptu movie night and they'd ended up ordering takeout and running out of couch space, but Bucky stops him again.

'No, I mean –' and he doesn't finish but Steve can just read in his voice what he means, like how he used to know from the cadence of Bucky’s tread as he came in the door what kind of day he’d had. It knocks him right back where he stands for a minute, pausing because he’s not sure what to do with his hands, before he nods again, his throat suddenly dry. Bucky might sound different now but he still knows how to ask for what he wants and it turns out Steve still knows how to give it to him, after all.

He makes his way over to Bucky's bed cautiously and stands there beside it for a minute, just trying to get it together enough to make his body do what he needs. Bucky is scooting down into the covers, looking at him wide-eyed. Steve has a horrible moment of wondering if this isn’t much too fast, if this moment isn’t going to take the fragile peace between them and snap it like a twig, but then he thinks of the number of times they’ve shared a bed together and he can’t make himself turn away. They did this when they were children; Bucky isn’t asking for anything more complicated than Steve lying down next to him and sleeping in their shared warmth, and Steve can surely do that. There isn’t anything in the world that he knows how to do better.

He meets Bucky’s watchful eyes as he slips between the sheets, making sure they don’t touch. It isn’t difficult; the bed is huge, so even though they’re pretty big men these days he manages to lie down on his side facing Bucky without once brushing against him. Their eyes are locked on each other though, and that feels more intimate than a simple touch would have, in a way. The electricity of their stare feels very familiar to Steve and it takes him a minute to figure out why: it’s the same feeling he’d had in the moment when he first recognized Bucky, after they’d fought and he’d torn off Bucky’s mask. The impossible intimacy of the recognition had been so total and paralyzing that he would have let Bucky shoot him out of sheer surprise if Sam hadn’t yanked him out of the way. It cast a spell on him that remained unbroken in the hours afterwards, until he’d seen Bucky again and could reassure himself that he had been right, that Bucky had been real, and then it hadn’t mattered, even when Bucky was trying to kill him: he’d been delirious with it, felt almost drunk. Bucky had been returned to him. It was impossible, and yet it was true. He didn’t know what he had done to deserve such a thing, but he thought he would gladly spend the rest of his life trying to pay it back.

The first time they kissed had been like this too: an instant of almost wounding vulnerability. Steve had been sick, it had been a very bad day. His back was hurting him too much for him to even really talk, jagged needles working their way cruelly up his gently curved spine, and so he had been throwing Bucky short sentences, clipped and to the point, while Bucky fetched him more pillows and blankets and water until eventually Steve had snapped at him to go out, go on the date he'd been talking about all day, leave Steve to it. And Bucky had raised an eyebrow, unimpressed, and said, 'Steve. You know I'm not gonna do that.'

Steve had woken up hours later when the pain had finally calmed a little and found Bucky asleep, curled on his side in the bed next to Steve, his arms laid parallel to his body and his hands flat together as if he were praying. He'd opened his eyes slowly just as Steve had turned over, woken by the shifting of the sheets and the squeaking of the lumpy mattress, and smiled at Steve. It must have been gone ten at night at least; he hadn't gone out, he had stayed in for Steve, to do nothing but sleep at Steve's side.

It had seemed both like a foregone conclusion and the culmination of something Steve had never expected when he leaned over and kissed Bucky. It wasn't even particularly sexual, just the only way he could think to express the depth of what he was feeling. He did it, just a soft brush of lips, and then he leaned back and looked at Bucky and waited to see what would happen.

That is what this feels like, now. Steve stares at Bucky and waits to see what will happen.

---

The thing about volunteering to work on one of the foundation’s new satellite construction crews is that Steve doesn’t actually know how to build anything.

‘What’s that?’ Michaela asks when she arrives at a session one day to find Steve frowning down at his tablet, trying to remember how Tony does that thing where he makes what’s on the screen jump out into the air. He has a feeling this would all be a lot easier if he’d tried his hand at architecture instead of fine art.

‘An indoor playground,’ he says absently. ‘Kind of. With a jungle gym and all these different play areas for kids with different sensory needs. Maybe a room with a projector so we can have autism friendly screenings. And it’s kind of a long shot, but I’m hoping we can organize some kind of visiting petting zoo –’

‘Oh my god, really?’ Michaela squeaks, and yanks the tablet out of his hands. She stares down at it, making pleased and excited noises while he watches, unsure what just happened.

‘I can’t even read that thing,’ he complains, frowning and trying to figure out how she’s making different sections of the concept designs blow up really big on the screen. ‘How are you doing that?’

She gives him a baleful look.

‘You’re really good with the shield and everything, I don’t understand why you can’t even use a tablet!’ she bemoans, and he rolls his eyes. They’ve had this discussion upwards of a dozen times by now. It usually ends with him triumphantly waving his smartphone in her face, as if the fact that he can use that at all should deny her the right to rag on him about his lack of expertise with any and all other technology.

‘That’s not the point,’ he says, refusing to get off-topic. ‘The point is that I’m going to help them build it. I don’t need to know how to use a tablet to do that.’

Michaela says nothing, and pokes at the screen some more, a small smile on her face.

The problem is, Steve can throw his weight around as much as the next guy with super serum and he can memorize blueprints and floorplans but that doesn’t translate to any level of practical experience. It was Bucky who had worked construction, not him; he’d had neither the strength nor build for it back then, and it wasn’t like with most other odd jobs where he could kind of muddle through until he figured out what was what. The site managers took one look at him and laughed, told him not to let the door hit him on the ass on the way out, and he went back to scrounging for behind the counter jobs and hocking sketches where he could.

They’d really been up against it the last summer before Bucky shipped out, when all the construction started drying up and everyone was looking funny at guys who weren’t enlisting. By then Steve’d been selling comics and dirty drawings and advertisements, anything that would pay, propped up at the table sweating all day with the windows open until Bucky dragged himself through the door and flopped on the threadbare torture device they called a couch, lying so still every miniscule breeze seemed to hit him like a battering ram, bringing forth a stream of petulant sighs. Steve usually ended up pausing what he was doing just to sketch him, even if he was on deadline. It was like a reflex, he couldn’t help it, and he knew Bucky didn’t really mind; at the end of a pencil was where Steve was most vulnerable, aside from in their bed, and he wanted to give that to Bucky, for all the other times he couldn’t make himself softer and easier to love.

Every nerve in his body was standing upright that summer, warning him that they were lingering on the edges of something greater, tugging him in the direction of the recruiting office every chance he got, and Bucky hated it. He got angrier over it than Steve had ever seen him get about anything, and it was the first time they had really differed in such a sustained, immovable way; neither of them were going to win out over the other but they kept arguing about it regardless. Bucky kept cussing him out for putting himself in danger by trying so hard to prove something to himself, and to everyone else, but somewhere deep down in Steve was a soreness that Bucky couldn’t let him have this one thing, the only thing he wasn’t prepared to give up for Bucky: that Bucky would try so hard to make him compromise on doing what was right, when Steve could never live with himself if he didn’t.

‘You don’t know shit about construction, Steve,’ Bucky says, sounding way too chipper about it, leaning over his shoulder while Steve stares at the plans for the indoor playground spread out over the kitchen countertop, having given up trying to use the tablet and instead quietly obtained a paper copy. Steve agrees with him, obviously, but he’ll be damned if he admits it out loud. Everyone on the foundation board keeps advising him against how personally invested he is in the outcome of all the applications brought before them, and even if part of him knows they’re just throwing their weight around because they’re new and need to show him who’s boss, it’s still making him grumpy. It’s like they don’t remember that he was the guy who woke up out of the ice to find out everything he knew and loved was gone, never to return. Of course he’s personally invested in the reconstruction; it’d be weirder if he wasn’t. But Pepper has fine-tuned the make-up of the board so successfully that it’s even odds whether or not Steve even needs to show up to the meetings at all; sometimes they kind of blink at him for a while whenever he makes a suggestion, as if they’re trying to remember who he is and what he’s doing in their boardroom. It’s great, it’s exactly what he wanted – for people who naturally work on a larger scale in terms of money and resources to take the helm – but also, it’s leaving him a little lacking for ways to help.

‘You can’t actually single-handedly rebuild New York, you know,’ one of them had pointed out last week, which was so dramatic it made Steve set his jaw a little, even though he knew he looked bull-headed when he did that. It would take more of a trip down memory lane than he was comfortable with to explain why this was so important to him, so they probably just saw him as this big lug trying to muscle his way in where he didn’t belong. And maybe that’s not totally the wrong assessment, but – it just seems wrong, disrespectful almost, to be walking around like he is, clearly capable of physically pitching in, and not volunteering to do it.

That also sounds arrogant as all hell, though, so he’s not about to let it slip. Although clearly there are some people who know him well enough to figure it out for themselves.

‘And you don’t think the supervisor might have said yes just because they want Captain America on their crew,’ Sam had asked curiously, his mouth twitching, while Steve glared at him.

He stares at the plans now and all he can see is at least six points of entry on the first floor alone should he ever need to infiltrate it as part of a mission. Didn’t he used to be able to see something else when he looked at buildings? He sighs and starts rolling up the sheets of tissue fine paper, conceding defeat.

‘I guess I thought I could carry heavy stuff,’ he says, directing the words a little over his shoulder where Bucky still lingers, not quite close enough to touch. He can’t turn around all the way because then they’d be close enough to kiss and that, he knows, would force a reaction in the chemical spill of their shared space that he’s just not ready for: it’s not like him to avoid confrontation but he’ll avoid this one for as long as possible. As long as he doesn’t have to admit what he wants, he gets to have at least a fraction of it, the fraction that Bucky is comfortable with. And at least he can comfort himself that he’s not getting it under false pretenses; Bucky remembers enough to know all Steve’s moves, what few he has, Steve can tell that much. He watches Steve sometimes like he’s pairing up something Steve is doing with a memory until they’re a matched set, which makes Steve want to stop looking at him from under eyelashes, putting a little sway in his step when he knows Bucky is watching him walk away, but he can’t. His body knows how to flirt with Bucky; it was one of their primary methods of communication for nearly a decade, and now they’re falling helplessly back into the rhythm of it without any idea of how to redirect. They’re both of them trapped in this dance, have been for weeks, like they just exchanged one holding pattern for another.

Steve wouldn’t mind it so much if there was actually any holding going on.

‘You are real good at carrying heavy stuff,’ Bucky muses, finally moving away to get a bottle of water from the fridge. Steve’s eyes follow the line of his back avidly. He’s been in the gym again, his face flushed and limned with sweat, but his eyes are clear and unobscured by demons. Steve used to worry about Bucky punching his aggression out in the gym, thinking it was only going to reinforce an existing connection between rage and violence, until he realized a) it hadn’t ever been Bucky who was murderously angry at the people he killed, it had been HYDRA; b) there wasn’t a soul on earth capable of persuading Bucky to take up arts and crafts like his therapist wanted him to in order to work out his aggression; and c) Steve’s still not his therapist, so he needs to butt the hell out. ‘You know what else you’re good at?’

‘Um,’ Steve says, trying not to think dirty thoughts and then, when that fails, trying not to let the dirty thoughts parade across his face, ‘punching stuff?’

Bucky rolls his eyes.

‘Sure, you set up this whole foundation on the back of not having enough stuff to punch. Maybe you could run a few art classes or something, down at the VA? You know, in case you haven’t got enough to do already, trying to fix the whole damn city.’

He’s turned half away from Steve as he says it, keeping his hands busy like he’s a little nervous to be saying it at all, but he’s smiling when he finally looks up. He knows how much Steve loves volunteering at the group; even though nothing revolutionary happens, they’re all comfortable with the routine of each other’s struggles and triumphs now. Steve thinks it’s maybe the most worthwhile thing he’s done since he got out of the ice, aside from getting Bucky back in the world.

‘That’s a nice thought, Buck,’ Steve says slowly. ‘I haven’t – I haven’t done that a lot in a while, though. I’m not sure I got much to offer.’

‘You used to,’ Bucky says, fiddling with a coaster then putting it down with a disgruntled sigh and making himself look at Steve frankly. Steve smiles and Bucky returns it irritably. He’s been working really hard on not letting himself flake out on confronting his memories, and it definitely helps that he hasn’t had a panic attack for over two weeks, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it. ‘You used to draw all the time, couldn’t catch you without a sketchbook in your hand. How come you don’t anymore?’

‘I don’t know,’ Steve says, shifting on his chair, frowning down at the rolled up plans, wrapping a rubber band around them. ‘Didn’t have much I wanted to draw, I guess.’

Bucky snorts.

‘That’s bullshit,’ he says. Steve sits back a little, smile curling the corners of his mouth, ready to protest when Bucky continues, ‘and don’t give me that look. I saw you watching TV the other night, eyes all glazed over. I know that look. You wanted to be sketching.’

‘Is that right,’ Steve says, avoiding Bucky’s gaze now. Maybe he’s the one who needs to stop flaking out. Bucky isn’t wrong, but it’s more than Steve wants to admit, because admitting that would pull on the thread of why, now, he can stand to think about art again – the most enduring subject of his artistic career having finally reestablished himself in Steve’s line of sight. ‘Well, I dunno, Buck, I’ll – I’ll think about it.’

‘See that you do,’ Bucky says archly. ‘You wanna get truck lunch?’

Steve can’t help watching Bucky go as he disappears off to shower before they head out. Summer has broken thick and slow over the city like a cracked egg and they’re both of them showering three times a day trying to stay fresh – one of the wonders of the future. Bucky’s taken to wearing nothing but soft, stretchy tank tops and sweatpants around the apartment, sometimes nothing but boxers if he can get away with it, lying around on the couch and on the floor, following patches of sun around the room in a clockwork pattern like a cat. The heat makes him slow and syrupy, makes the cautious curve of his mouth into something inviting, but Steve thinks maybe it’s not even about flirting. It’s like Bucky is feeling his way back through the full gamut of his senses, toying casually with touch and space and the sensory possibilities of his own body. It’s a pleasure to see him so freely tactile again even if it is driving Steve a little crazy, and even more so because Steve knows he’s the only one permitted to see it; these days Bucky is private with his body and exacting about that privacy. He doesn’t stretch out dreamily on the rug in a patch of sunlight in front of just anybody. It’s like watching someone slip slowly and carefully back into the confines of their own body after a long time away; it’s beautiful, and it’s absolutely killing Steve.

He has to keep reminding himself to be careful not to scare Bucky away; if he’s not sure what Bucky wants, he doesn’t think Bucky has any more of a concrete idea, and he’ll be damned if ruins months of progress just because his libido has finally decided to wake up and greet the twenty first century. Sometimes it feels like his eyes are so big with wanting anyone might trip and fall into them; he tries to keep busy to distract himself but it’s hard when it takes so long to stop thinking about it and so little to pull his eyes back to the gleam of sweat on Bucky’s bicep, the way his hair curls boyish and damp at the back of his neck. They sleep in the same bed most nights now, which Steve hasn’t mentioned to anyone on account of how he doesn’t want his ears blasted off with warnings and congratulations both, and besides, even he doesn’t know what it means. Bucky still doesn’t touch him much, although sometimes it looks like he’s going to, a sharp determined look in his eye like he’s daring himself before he shrinks back, which reminds Steve that he’ll reach out when he’s ready and not a moment before. And when he does, he might not even be reaching with the intent Steve longs to see – so Steve reminds himself, over and over again, when Bucky sighs in his sleep and arches his back as he stretches and catches Steve’s wrist in his shining left hand before they split up on a mission, squeezing once, gently but with a wicked smile. Sometimes it well and truly feels like Steve’s going out of his mind, he’s going nuts, he wants Bucky so much it makes him feel sixteen again, gasping with his face pressed against the sheets while Bucky tortures him, lets his slick fingers and tongue and cock draw sounds out of Steve he didn’t even know he could make. Bucky’s always showing him new things about himself, but this particular thing is very, very old.

‘Something to share with the class?’ Natasha murmurs at him one day in July when Steve is staring slack-jawed into the distance where Bucky effortlessly takes down a flotilla of amped up mutants hellbent on claiming Manhattan for the Brotherhood. ‘You’re blushing even more gratuitously than usual.’

Steve has to restrain himself from saying something really, really teenage; he ran out of deflections for Natasha asking about his love life around six months ago, until he’d eventually reverted to just barricading himself in empty meeting rooms in the tower when he saw her approaching him with that familiar determined gleam in her eye.

‘I am not,’ is what he comes up with instead. Admittedly, not his finest comeback, and actually still pretty close to teenage.

Natasha rolls her eyes.

‘Relax, Rogers,’ she says, ‘I’m just glad you’re working things out.’

He looks at her suspiciously.

‘Really,’ she says, cocking an eyebrow at him. ‘I think it was giving me an ulcer trying to find someone you’d go on a date with.’

‘Well, I guess me and Buck never really dated,’ he reflects, setting off to see about the civilians rounded up on the ferry the mutants had been using as hostages. ‘We were just kinda –’

‘Married,’ Natasha guesses, and he smiles at her reflexively before biting down on it and putting a hand to his ear to coordinate a lift with Sam.

Even before he knew Bucky was still alive, that had been a part of it, it was true. He knows how most people go about dating these days and he wouldn't want to shame anyone for it, but it's not for him, not even if he wasn't already carrying a torch the size of Lady Liberty's. Even though they could never have done anything about it – not on paper, not officially, in terms of taxes and leases and the rights of next of kin – he had been ready to go all in with Bucky, as soon as he figured out he wanted them sleeping in the same bed for more reasons than just it got cold in winter. It hadn't even been a choice, just another part of what had grown between them; someone could have stopped him on the street back then and asked if he was single and he would have hesitated, because even if he couldn't show them a piece of paper that said it was true, he was already married to Bucky in his heart.

But as sure as he is about everything, he knows not to expect that Bucky feels the same. If Bucky wants to sleep in the same bed with Steve for the rest of his life just for the comfort of being close to another person without having to touch, then Steve will happily do it. He never had any interest in going with anyone else anyway; how the hell could he ever get interested with Bucky front and center in his eye line?

He's trying to get it under control for Bucky’s sake though. Which is why it’s so surprising when Bucky decides to let go of his.

Chapter Text

Before the PTSD group meet on Thursdays the hall is usually in use for a homeless LGBT youth support group. Steve’s spoke to a few of the guys he’d seen trooping out of there week after week with their shoulders set like they were fighting their own kind of war, and this time he makes a mental note to check if they’ve lodged any applications with the foundation. He doubts it, unless they were in session during the invasion, but it never hurts to check, and even if they haven’t, he can add them to his list of monthly donations. He hadn’t realized how much change was still needed on that score until he’d looked into it online, and he still ricocheted fast between being grateful for what progress had been made and indignant that they were still waiting on the rest. It seemed almost like a joke the whole country was determined to perpetuate upon him: that he’d woken up seventy years in the future where anyone could kiss anyone else they liked, especially on the streets of New York, only for there to be so many outdated restrictions barring the way when people tried to take it further. It seemed a peculiar back and forth, one that he still didn’t fully understand, and which was only exacerbated by his inability to identify the banner he himself fell under.

In some ways it would make sense to define himself as gay, he knows that; Bucky’s the only person he’s ever been to bed with, the only person he’s ever been in love with. For all that he’d kissed a few dames, it hadn’t done much for him, and he hadn’t felt the need to seek it out after he’d woken up again. He figured for him maybe it was a single target kind of thing; he needed to be in deep with someone before he wanted to make time with them, and that had never happened with anyone but Bucky. Maybe in another life, with Peggy, if he hadn’t already been so thoroughly spoken for – but Peggy was never going to be anyone’s second best, and he wouldn’t have insulted her by suggesting it. He could just imagine the look on her face – and the punch he’d have gotten – if he had.  

He wouldn’t place any bets on exactly how it had been for Bucky, either. They’d lacked much of today’s decisive and varied terminology back then, and also the patience to talk about it more than they had to when it didn’t directly relate to their situation, but looking back, Steve began to identify what he had initially assumed to be willing sacrifice on Bucky’s part as relief instead. He’d always gotten along with girls fine enough, but he’d dropped the ladies’ man thing pretty quick once he and Steve had taken up together, not even condescending to keep up the image for their reputation’s sake. Now Steve wondered whether he’d ever really been that way inclined at all. Bucky hadn’t gone around with any other guys that Steve knew of, but then that didn’t have to mean anything. Neither had he, and look where they were now: still too busy staring at each other to notice anyone else that might be trying to get their attention.

‘Are you even listening to me?’

Steve looks up guiltily to find Michaela scowling at him, all but stamping her foot. He’s kind of surprised she isn’t, even if she is sitting down. This is the third time she’s had to redirect his attention since he turned up, and he’d be sorely tempted to stamp his foot if their positions were reversed.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m really not – I’ve got some things on my mind today, but I’ll put ‘em aside. What were you saying?’

‘Maybe I don’t want to anymore,’ she says, still scowling. Steve sighs.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to ignore you, I just.’ He stops and squints at her theatrically for a second. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

She looks at him warily, but is obviously intrigued.

‘What kinda secret?’

‘Just a little one,’ he lies, imagining that somewhere Pepper Potts is sitting up and frowning at a sudden feeling of encroaching doom. He eases his guilt by mentally promising to let her co-write his coming out speech if he ends up doing another press conference over this.

‘Hmm. Okay, what is it?’

‘I like a boy,’ Steve says, not having to try very hard to make his voice sound wistful. ‘And I don’t know if he likes me back.’

‘You like a boy?’ Michaela asks, nonplussed, and Steve spends about five seconds wondering whether this was a serious lapse of judgment before she nods thoughtfully and seems to note it down somewhere in her brain before moving on to the more important part of the whole equation. ‘And you haven’t told him?’

‘Well,’ Steve hedges, sitting up a little straighter in his chair. Michaela’s judgmental stare could make anyone’s posture spontaneously improve. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘Is he bad?’

‘No, he’s – no,’ Steve says firmly.

‘Is he really super old?’

‘Um. Only in the same way that I am?’

She thinks about this for a second then wrinkles her nose again.

‘Have you kissed him?’

Steve chokes a little taking a sip of water.

‘Uh, how would I have kissed him if I haven’t even told him I like him yet?’

She eyes him suspiciously, some part of her clearly already conversant with what it means when adults dodge questions like that.

‘I don’t get it,’ she says eventually. ‘You should just tell him. If he’s nice he won’t be mean about it even if he doesn’t want to kiss you. Again,’ she adds pointedly, making sure Steve catches her eye. Steve coughs, then sighs.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘Grownups always say that when they don’t wanna do something,’ she says baldly. ‘Just do it. Anyway, I wanna tell you about my dance recital.’

That’s the way it goes most sessions; they talk about normal stuff, and if it’s a good day, they get to talk about something hard. Maybe only for a little bit, but they do it anyway, and that’s the real triumph. Therapy, Steve is realizing more and more all the time, isn’t actually about the big moments, the breakthroughs – that’s the way it looks on TV, and so it’s the way he thought it would be, but that’s because you’re supposed to reach an end with it on TV. People want that narrative; they want the character to get the happy ending that says congratulations! You’re cured! No more mental illness or hang-ups of any kind. When actually it’s more about having that space to go back to, where you can keep untangling yourself indefinitely, painstakingly, with someone who has earned your trust.

‘Have you told the DSM folks about this breakthrough of yours?’ Sam had asked when Steve had gone off about this on a jog the other day, and Steve shoved him in the shoulder and lapped him again just for the hell of it.

‘Nah, it’s good you’re thinking like that, man,’ he had acquiesced when they were heading back to the tower. ‘I mean you know what I think, everyone should be in therapy, especially everyone on the team. This job could wreck anybody.’

‘What, you still think Natasha –?’

‘I think she’d benefit from it if she let anyone inside her head for longer than the time it took to freak ‘em out,’ he said, smiling ruefully. ‘But don’t tell her I said it. She’s still pissed with me for the last time I brought it up.’

‘Do you think,’ Steve said, looking down at the ground then off over Sam’s shoulder somewhere, which is enough of a signal that Sam’s eyes focus a little more readily on him. ‘Do you think it’s helped Bucky? I mean, does he seem – is it – what do you –’

‘Don’t give yourself an aneurysm,’ Sam said, laughing, and Steve rolled his eyes at him. ‘It looks to me like he’s doing better, is that what you were asking?’ he said more gently, and Steve had nodded.

‘I just don’t,’ he’d started to say, trying to figure out how to put it into words. ‘Do you think this is the best place for him? He hasn’t run off for months – nearly a year now – but I don’t want to hold him back.’

Sam had looked at him levelly for a while, then squinted up at the sun as if trying to phrase something delicately.

‘You think he’s gonna run again?’

‘No,’ Steve said. ‘But I want – I don’t want to be keeping him here when he’d rather be off – I don’t know, figuring things out.’

Sam looked at him again for long enough that Steve started to wonder whether he had something on his face.

‘I’m pretty sure that’s the last thing he wants, Steve,’ Sam said eventually. ‘And you gotta stop putting words in his mouth. When in the past has he hesitated to tell you what he needs?’

Sam had a point. The other day Bucky had texted him while Steve was out grocery shopping to request four different kinds of juice, the vast selection of which he regularly argued was one of the best things about the future. He had begun the text EMERGENCY!!!!!!!! and punctuated it with several siren and firework emoji.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Steve said, and Sam smiled, a little pained.

‘I am. And I’d like to state for the record that this is the last time I’m giving you relationship advice about the asshole who keeps stealing my wings for kicks.’

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ Steve had lied unconvincingly, and hurried on when Sam narrowed his eyes.

When Steve gets home after the session with Michaela, Bucky is already in for the evening. He’s doing the dishes, stacking plates carefully one by one, the metal of his left thumb screeching slightly against the china until he course-corrects and lifts it, balancing the plates on the flat of his palm instead, five of them with no sign of overbalancing. The rest of the team make fun of them for doing their own dishes but Bucky couldn’t seem to break the habit even after Tony gave him a lecture about the inefficiency of handwashing over using the giant pristine dishwasher installed in the kitchen. Something about the motions and pattern of it seems to soothe him when he feels most fractious. It must be locked in his muscle memory somehow, because he’d always done the dishes when they’d been living together in the forties. In that other life, Steve couldn’t count the number of times he must have looked up to see the slight hunch of Bucky’s shoulders at the sink as he buried himself up the wrists in lukewarm soapy water that had to stretch to all the dishes they’d used that day. He always used to try and get there before Steve to do it, because he knew it hurt Steve’s back to stand up rigid like that for so long.

‘How was group,’ Bucky asks without turning around, and Steve drops his keys in the bowl and tells him about Michaela’s recital next week, which he has to call her teacher about so he can come and see it.

Bucky’s shaking his head by the time Steve is through, finishing up the dishes and propping himself against the counter while Steve leans back against the wall opposite.

‘You got foster daddy written all over you,’ he says, ‘what’re you gonna do, nurture the entire state of New York?’

‘Already tried that, the foundation took it off me,’ Steve says. Bucky laughs.

‘They don’t know what they got into with you,’ he says, drying his metal fingers one by one on a rag so as to stave off the potential for rust. Tony and probably Bruce would volunteer one of their own arms as tribute before it ever got to that point, but it doesn’t hurt to keep it dry anyway. ‘They don’t know your ma was a nurse.’

‘So what if she was,’ Steve says, relaxing in his chair a little. He feels uncomplicatedly good; he’s home, he’s got Bucky here, they’ll order in some food after or maybe see what’s cooking on the main floor. Something is unwinding, thick and slow, at the base of his spine. Maybe Michaela was right and maybe she wasn’t; it doesn’t feel like a button he needs to press right now. ‘You were always the one who was good at taking care of people, not me.’

Bucky looks at him intently at that.

‘Well, you would think that,’ he says. ‘Seeing as how I took care of you.’

Steve’s breath catches ever so slightly at the look in Bucky’s eyes, but he shakes it off, smiles and hope it doesn’t look forced.

‘Yeah,’ is all he manages to say to that. He starts to say something else, something to diffuse whatever quickly building tension is overtaking them here but before he can come out with it Bucky is coming over and standing in front of him, whole body turned in toward Steve, looking pretty determined. He’s standing so close Steve is unavoidably aware of the banked power of his body – always a difficult thing to overlook about him these days – but also the fragile, soft curve of his lips, the stray lock of hair come undone from his hair tie. Steve suddenly feels a little nauseous. Empires could fall under the brunt of the look in Bucky’s eye.

‘Alright,’ Bucky says, taking a little breath and apparently steeling himself. ‘Let me try something.’

And Steve – Steve pleads fatigue and a solid year of lingering on the outside of Bucky’s room hoping to be invited in; he pleads the last vestiges of his self-preservation instincts. He knows what Bucky wants to do now, he can tell, and he doesn’t think he can get through it if it’s just an experiment, if Bucky’s going to pull away after with his forehead wrinkled, apology in his eyes, sorry pal –

So he scrambles for caution; he tries to give them both an easy out. Bucky’s leaning in and Steve blurts out, ‘Do you wanna talk about it first or,’ in a hoarse voice. Bucky smiles at him a little, as if he knows exactly what Steve is thinking. He doesn’t look afraid at all. Steve used to be the stupid one, didn’t he? The reckless one?

‘No,’ Bucky says. ‘I think we should stop talking.’

And then Steve finally does stop, because Bucky is leaning into him, and Bucky is kissing him, pressing his mouth to Steve's softly, and that’s the only place they’re touching, just a light brush of lips, until Steve is galvanized by the sheer electric shock of the contact into making a small sigh against Bucky's lips, his whole body drawing up in magnetic attraction. Bucky's mouth parts slightly at the sound; his tongue slipping into Steve's mouth and he puts his hands around Steve's waist carefully, slowly, as if he doesn't want to startle Steve into running away. Steve can't process the amount of consideration going into the action because he knows that there is nothing that could make him leave; there is literally nothing in the world that could tear him from this, and they live in a world with aliens and superpowers now.

'Bucky,' he says, just a whisper against Bucky's mouth, just saying his name, stupidly, for the sheer pleasure of saying it – and Bucky smiles into the kiss, and seems to somehow settle into it, his shoulders dropping with a kind of sighing noise, as you might make when unloading a heavy bag upon arriving home. And then everything happens at once: Steve draws his arms up around Bucky's neck and pulls him in closer and Bucky's tongue slides deeper in his mouth, their lips opening wider, and Steve's legs splay automatically to accommodate Bucky's hips and the sheer proximity after the last few months of trying so hard not to touch is enough to make Steve dizzy but he can't stop, he can't stop tugging Bucky into him, as if he might be able to furrow his way into Bucky's veins, his sinews, his bones: he cannot possibly get close enough.

After a minute or so Bucky pulls back abruptly, shaking his head like a dog, his eyes dazed and Steve, panting, says 'What, what,' reaching out to touch Bucky's face in comfort. Bucky takes his hand and clumsily butts his head into it, his slightly open mouth catching on Steve's palm and leaving a smear of saliva as he places his other palm on the door next to Steve's head, bracing himself.

'I can't,' he says shakily, 'I can't yet, I'm sorry – it's too,' and he can't seem to go on, only looks at Steve worriedly, eyes darting all over Steve's face and body in search of a response. It takes Steve a minute to come down and catch on to what he means but when he does, his eyes go wide with understanding. He hadn't even got to the part where he thought about what they'd do next, he was too busy just mashing his body up against Bucky's in delirium at the proximity. His lizard brain had full control of all his limbs; he probably wouldn't have been able to pull back to undo any buttons or unzip anything even if Bucky wanted to.

'Of course,' he says softly, 'of course, Buck, anything you want – I want what you want, anything at all.'

'Alright,' Bucky says, still looking a little uncertain, tentatively leaning into Steve's neck. 'Well, don't go giving it all away like that, Rogers.'

Steve laughs, surprised, and Bucky smiles into his neck. He must be able to feel Steve's rabbit pulse, still racing and sparking. He absentmindedly kisses Steve just there, where his jugular pops, and Steve is abruptly certain that he will cry if he doesn't start talking.

'I didn't know if you wanted anything like this anymore,' he blurts out. ‘Or – not for a long time, anyway.’ Which might not be the right thing to say but is at least true, and is something they should probably talk about before anyone gets any concrete ideas about what is going on here.

Bucky shrugs, clearly uncomfortable. But he isn't running away, something inside Steve sings. He's still here, he isn't leaving. He’s standing here and he’s touching him, he’s making Steve remember what it feels like to be held.

'It never went away,' Bucky replies, and Steve doesn't know what he means for a second until he does and it makes his hand still where he is running his fingers through Bucky's hair. 'Doing for you, I mean. Or wanting to, anyway. It's just been there, like white noise. But no one's touched me, not really – not nice like this – since we were together before. I don't think I know how to do it anymore.'

He sounds so matter of fact about it, Steve is torn between admiring his control and wishing it weren’t so necessary. He struggles to come up with a way of explaining it, relinquishing Bucky from whatever responsibility he may feel. Touch was always a part of their relationship before, but there had been so many layers to it Steve doesn’t even know where to start, and this is only one of those. It doesn't matter, he wants to say. But that isn't quite right.

'We'll still be us,' he says eventually. 'Whether you want to, however long it takes, whether you don't ever want it at all – me being here isn't dependent on that.'

'That's a big ask,' Bucky says, nudging his feet forward until there really is nowhere else to go: in a second he'll be in real danger of kneeing Steve in the crotch. Steve flounders for a second then yanks himself back into the moment: Bucky thinks this is a lot to ask. Bucky is standing here with his nose poking Steve in the neck, his hands shaking on Steve’s hips, thinking he should be offering more. Steve wants to laugh, or cry, still. ‘Anyway, I do want to,’ he says, drawing back to look Steve in the eyes as he says it, looking – alright, Steve thinks, his whole body wanting to rise up to meet that look, alright, he looks pretty damn sure. ‘I want you so bad, Steve, you got no idea –’

‘I think I’ve got some idea –’ Steve interjects, raising an eyebrow, and Bucky continues over the interruption, rolling his eyes.

‘I just need to get used to it, I guess. That alright with you?’

Steve lacks the words to explain how alright with this he is, so he pulls gently at the back of Bucky’s neck until he gets the message and leans in to kiss Steve again, wearing a grin so wide it’s almost goofy. Steve feels glued to the door. Bucky’s hands are still on his waist, and he never wants them to move. If someone came along and rooted him to the ground, he wouldn’t feel the difference.

‘So you’ve been making eyes at me all this time thinking I wanted nothing to do with it?’ Bucky says after a moment when they pull back, bringing a hand up to thumb at Steve’s mouth. ‘Just so we’re clear.’

‘Well, the jury was still out on it,’ Steve says breathlessly. ‘I didn’t want to asume.’

‘Pretty shameless, Steve,’ Bucky murmurs, looking intently at his mouth where it’s open for Bucky’s thumb.

‘I kinda remember you liking me shameless,’ Steve says, low.

‘I don’t think I shoulda got back into this with you,’ Bucky says gravely, his hands smoothing over and so easily resettling against Steve’s hips, where there has been a space carved for them from the last century into this one. ‘I think I’m starting to remember how greedy you were –’

Steve makes an offended noise, which Bucky grins at foolishly, and then he kisses Steve again without seeming to think about it, which makes Steve thrill in his every nerve – that it might become second nature again, to do this – that Bucky’s body might come to know him so well again, that the peeling wallpaper might be pulled back to reveal everything Bucky knew about his body before, and add some new flourishes on top. That he will be able to touch Bucky again, and not even necessarily with any purpose – not just for sex, but for the simple satisfaction of it.

‘I can’t believe you,’ he says when they pull back, and Bucky’s mouth twists like he knows exactly where Steve is coming from – in the context of the conversation, it sounds like a mock-insulted expression of disbelief, but then of course there is that other layer, the one that is making Steve stare now as if he must get his fill of Bucky’s face before blinking.

‘I know, Steve,’ Bucky says, smiling that old slow smirk, as if he’s gotten away with something. ‘Believe me, I know.’

---

Of all the Avengers, Tony has had the most elongated and relentlessly public of social lives, which perhaps speaks to why he feels he has to get so intimate with the rest of the team’s. None of them are strangers to having their private affairs splashed across the news, and sometimes if they’re lucky enough – like Bruce and Steve – then the wholesale destruction of life as they knew it was helpfully entangled with personal devastation too, so they got it all over with in one afternoon. The effect this would have on a sane person (for a given value of sane; an Avengers value) seems to have completely bypassed Tony, which is why according to Jarvis he’s the person who currently holds the world record on number of sex tapes leaked online without actually being a porn star.

‘And that’s not counting the ones before the internet,’ Tony points out. ‘But don’t think I didn’t notice you changing the subject there, Cap. Seriously: what’s with the mile-high grin? Honest hard work never made anyone look that happy.’

‘Nothing,’ Steve says blithely as he bats away one of Doom’s glitching automatons, redirecting the flow of the hostiles toward Thor. ‘Just, uh. You know. Making the switch to green tea.’

There’s a chorus of conspiratorially approving murmurs from the rest of the team. Steve doesn’t look over at Bucky only a few feet away but he knows, just knows, that he is smirking underneath his mask.

‘Aw,’ Tony protests, ‘no fair, everyone knows but me –’

‘Of what are you speaking?’ Thor interrupts curiously. ‘The great captain insists there is nothing amiss, and surely he has no reason to lie.’

‘Well, maybe not just me.’

‘Can we stay focused?’ Steve asks, trying to sound firm rather than pathetic, and assiduously doesn’t make eye contact with Bucky until they’re done with debriefing back at the tower. It’s taking more concentration than he would have counted on; his eye is more drawn to Bucky than ever, and it’s with an almost audible sigh of relief when the door of their apartment finally closes that Steve rotates toward him on the spot and slides seamlessly into a long, deep kiss, Bucky’s hands winding around his waist; the gorgeous, comforting groan Bucky gives into his mouth.

‘We gotta at least try and stay professional, don’t we, Buck,’ Steve pants a minute later, when Bucky’s pressing him back against the counter, his wide palm lodged in the small of Steve’s back, kissing along his neck and using his teeth when Steve isn’t gasping enough for his liking. ‘Remind me why we’re doing that again?’

‘Mm,’ Bucky murmurs, not sounding all that interested in professionalism, as his thumb strokes dangerously close to Steve’s waistband and sends all corresponding nerves into a stomach-dipping frenzy, ‘is that an order?’

‘Oh my god,’ Steve says, and then they mostly stop talking.

It’s not like they’re purposely trying to wind Tony up. They are genuinely trying to maintain some semblance of a division between the personal and the professional, so they haven’t told anyone else on the team about what’s going on with them either. But not for nothing is Natasha a world class intelligence gatherer, and as for the rest of them, well – Steve can only assume they’re using the brains they were born with, and their eyes, neither of which Tony seems to be engaging. Maybe he and Bucky aren’t even acting that differently around each other, in which case he really should have just sucked it up and made a move months ago, but as far as Steve’s concerned, he might as well be wearing a neon sign. He’s forcibly reminded of the way his new bulk had seemed absurd, almost comical to him after the serum, how he had held his arms away from his body and stared, unable to believe it was really him; now he finds it impossible to believe that people might pass him in the street and walk on without instantly recognizing something shining and impossibly rare radiating underneath his skin. His happiness feels too big for his body, unwieldy and giddy, his chest bursting with bubbles of joy like a shook up bottle of champagne. He wakes up in the morning and rolls over to look at Bucky already smiling, and Bucky drags a pillow out from under his head and whacks Steve in the face for being – his words – an insufferable morning person.

‘Can’t help it,’ he says cheerfully through the padding of the pillow. ‘Guess I’m just feeling pretty thankful lately.’

‘What the hell for,’ Bucky grumbles, grabbing the pillow back with a scowl as if Steve was the one to take it off him in the first place. ‘If I’d have known you were gonna be this sappy I would’ve held off.’

‘No you wouldn’t,’ Steve says, still beaming, and Bucky sighs.

‘No I wouldn’t,’ he agrees, eyes still closed, looping an arm around Steve’s waist to yank him in. Steve goes happily, burrowing his face in Bucky’s neck and taking a huge shameless lungful of how Bucky smells first thing in the morning. ‘Weirdo,’ Bucky says fondly.

They haven’t had sex yet in deference to Bucky’s desire to take things slow, but they’re doing more making out than Steve can ever recall having done in their youth, so eager were they to skip to the main event. It has the effect of making Steve hyperaware at every moment of the possibilities of Bucky’s body; there isn’t a day goes past where he doesn’t get distracted into slack jawed confusion at some new angle of Bucky’s physicality that he hadn’t been allowing himself to notice before. He’s started sketching again, and even he can’t pretend that the new sensuality of their relationship has nothing to do with it. Bucky knows it too, and starts draping himself ever more noticeably around the apartment in response to Steve’s worshipful gaze, conducting a kind of expansive flirtation with the entire room that renders Steve usually unable to do anything but follow when Bucky eventually cocks a demanding finger at him. It’s hot as hell to see him so confident in his command of Steve’s attention; both of them had spent about a day feeling shy in the newness of it all before it melted into hunger in the face of their rapidly accelerating need. If discovering sex with Bucky the first time had been like uncovering a great lake inside himself, this time around it strikes Steve more as a network of glittering streams and rivers; he’s never sure exactly where Bucky’s hands on him is going to lead but he’s boundlessly exhilarated and happy to go, to abandon himself willingly to the unknown topographies of someone else’s map.

‘I can’t believe you thought I didn’t want it,’ Bucky pants, straddling Steve on the bed while Steve lies face down, squirming, trying not to make noise. Bucky’s not even doing anything, just running his wide palms up and down Steve’s shoulders all the way down his tapering waist without any urgency at all. Under other circumstances getting a massage like this would be real nice, if they hadn’t just been feeling each other up with Steve in Bucky’s lap before Bucky unceremoniously turfed him out and flipped him, and apparently got pretty distracted by the muscles in his back. ‘I’ve been queer as hell for you since we were sixteen, and you thought I wasn’t interested.’

‘You were queer as hell for me longer’n that,’ Steve says, kind of bitchy, into the mattress.

‘How would you know,’ Bucky says rudely, then: ‘c’mere, I gotta have you –’ and flips him over to kiss him again and then later when they’re nearly asleep and Steve’s forgotten about it Bucky says, halting, ‘you know I always – I can’t remember when I started but I think I always –’ fumbling Steve’s hand up to his face in the dark so he can hold it there to kiss and breathe against, and Steve says ‘Oh, Buck, of course I know,’ and rolls over so he can wrap Bucky up in a hug because it’s true, he already knows.

The first time Bucky calls him sweetheart again is a month or so after they kissed, in the middle of an informal team meeting; they’re hashing out the specifics of a scholarship series Tony wants to coordinate through the foundation, for kids who were financially screwed over by the invasion. It’s been a long morning, and it only looks to get longer when Bucky asks him to pass over a bottle of water from the mini fridge and drops the endearment casually, then freezes as if suddenly noticing the landmine he just stepped on. Steve damn near loses his grip on the research proposal he’s holding, and there are dawning looks of delight on the faces of Tony, Thor, Bruce and Sam which range from almost maniacal to quietly pleased. Clint looks like he wants to clap Bucky on the back. Natasha looks almost bored, but then, she’s always had their number. She gives Steve a small wink, which he can’t return because he’s having a heart attack.

‘I fucking knew it,’ Tony says with relish. ‘Didn’t I say? I totally said – oh man, how long has this been going on? Since the stone age, am I right?’

Steve doesn’t answer. He’s too busy staring at Bucky, who, from his wide-eyed expression, hadn’t known he was going to say it either. The rest of the room feels dim, unimportant. If there weren’t five other people in the room, there isn’t a piece of furniture on earth that could stop Steve from crawling into Bucky’s lap right now.

‘Hmm,’ Bucky says, giving Steve a half-apologetic smile and lifting his hands a little: oops. Steve is going to go to town on him as soon as they get home. He doesn’t even have words for what he’s going to do. ‘Guess the game’s up, Stevie.’

‘Stevie,’ Tony croaks out. ‘Stop, for the love of God, you’ve gotta spin that kind of material out –’

‘Alright,’ Steve says, aware that he’s blushing harder than he’s had cause to in at least a couple of months, ‘can we not – this doesn’t have to be a big deal – I mean it is to me, obviously –’

‘Aww,’ says Clint. ‘Cute.’

‘– but it won’t affect the day to day running of the team,’ Steve says firmly, aware that he’s somehow managing to get the words out while still staring at Bucky with a mixture of disbelief and undiluted hunger. Bucky’s biting his own lip and watching him intently, sitting with the kind of stillness that usually results in somebody getting injured.

‘Sure,’ Tony says. ‘I mean, you were already so weird about each other, what’s a little extra weird? Out of interest, I’m assuming this is why you’ve looked like someone’s been injecting rainbows and glitter directly into your jugular vein for the last month?’

Steve sighs.

‘Can I still get that water though?’ Bucky asks after a minute.

When they get back to their floor Steve slams Bucky up against the door of the apartment and goes to town on his cock the way he’s wanted to ever since they started sleeping in the same bed again; he just sinks straight to his knees and gives it everything he has, loves every second, wants Bucky to keep fucking his mouth until he can’t breathe. Bucky winds his metal fingers through Steve’s hair and tugs until Steve goes tunnel vision with want, thinks he might die happy at the way Bucky moans, so sweet and surprised, when he comes.

‘Christ, are you gonna do that every time,’ Bucky says afterwards, slumped on the floor and looking as if he’s been hit by a truck.

‘I don’t know,’ Steve says, blissed out, head in Bucky’s lap and staring at the ceiling. ‘Do it again and find out.’

‘Congratulations, man,’ Sam says the next morning when they meet up for a run. ‘Glad you finally worked things out.’

‘Thanks,’ Steve says, smiling, probably blushing again, God help him. A flush of warmth suffuses his chest. ‘And thanks for always hearing me out about it. God knows how long it would’ve taken without – not that it was me who, uh – anyway –’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Sam says, rolling his eyes. ‘I’m assuming there was like, an hour minimum of crying and aggressively comparing how much you love each other?’

Steve glares at him so hard he almost runs into a mailbox.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Sam says, staring straight ahead with a wide grin. ‘I’d put money down on it, don’t test me.’

‘I wouldn’t phrase it exactly like that, and it wasn’t an hour, but I take your point,’ Steve mutters, and Sam claps him on the back, cackling.

The next time they have Natasha over for dinner Steve half expects a series of pointed questions about the development of their relationship, which Bucky assures him is unfounded because if she really wanted to know something she’d probably just bug their apartment. She surprises them anyway by instead trying to persuade Steve to start exhibiting his art, under a pseudonym if he wants, now that he’s producing an actual body of work again.

He’s thrown off guard, and fidgets around the topic for a while, not in any hurry to admit that the enthusiastic subject of that body of work is actually just Bucky at the moment, usually semi-clothed at best.

‘You won’t get him to display anything,’ Bucky says to Natasha almost consolingly, as if Steve isn’t sat right there. ‘That old picture of me’s the only thing he loves enough to show off.’

‘It’s a good likeness,’ Steve allows, and meets Bucky’s eyes, soft. When he glances over at Natasha she’s dropped her gaze to her plate, as if she’s been privy to something she wasn’t meant to see.

‘Better’n that one of me getting out of the bath from the other day,’ Bucky complains, at which Natasha smirks, glancing at Steve, who smirks. He’d drawn Bucky getting out of the tub, dripping wet and hissing like a cat, face screwed up in indignation as if he’d caught Steve taking a dirty photograph. It’s probably his second favorite picture he’s ever drawn. He thinks he might have it framed for Bucky’s birthday.

‘I won’t ask if you’re happy, because I’m not an idiot,’ she says when he’s seeing her out at the end of the night, sounding determined. ‘But I wonder sometimes whether getting you to volunteer just gave you another way to beat yourself up. I still think you should have something that’s just yours.’

She’s looking just off to the right of his eye line, something unfamiliar and fragile in her expression. Steve wonders whether it’s really him she’s thinking of here. The arcs of all their lives have been so bent and twisted to suit the needs of others, it’s easy to forget sometimes that they have the right and the responsibility to take hold of them where they can.

‘I think I’ve got something like that,’ he says. ‘Or as close as anyone can get, really. Do you?’ he asks, and she flicks a look of irritation up at him.

‘I’m working on it,’ she murmurs, leaning up to give him a hug. ‘Don’t screw it up. You’ve both been through enough.’

‘I’ll try,’ he says solemnly, face so straight it probably looks pretty sanctimonious, but she just rolls her eyes at him and leaves. Well, it’s not like it ever put any of his friends off before.

---

It happens one morning when Steve’s still dozing, sleepy and slow, the sheets all rucked up around his waist and his legs tangled with Bucky’s, who is waking up with his mouth pressed into the curve of Steve’s lower back, curving around the bend of his body like a comma, arms wrapped around Steve’s waist. His mouth opens with a sigh as he runs his hands all down Steve’s thighs and in between, kissing down his back to the curve of his ass and Steve arches into it, humming, smiling, eyes still closed when without any sign of hesitation or warning whatsoever Bucky runs a thumb down the crease of his ass to part him and then starts licking in there, these long slow licks in between his cheeks that only just brush at his hole. Steve makes a weird shocked noise, twisting his face into the pillow and his hips pivoting back toward Bucky as part of the action, and Bucky gives this low groan that Steve hasn’t heard since the last time they fucked like this, which was before they shipped out because there was never any time for anything more complicated than handjob when they were on the front and oh, God, it hits him like a truck: he hasn’t been fucked good for seventy years, and his whole body is hurting with the need for it now. He starts fervently praying that that’s where Bucky wants this to go too.

‘You loved this,’ Bucky mutters, in between little kitten licks at him, making these pleased sounds like there’s nothing he’d rather be doing than leisurely eating Steve out while he holds his hips firm, giving Steve nothing to fuck into and making him stay still so Bucky can get at him. ‘I remember.’

‘You loved this,’ Steve retorts, trying to stretch out so he can get some friction against his cock but Bucky isn’t having it and just runs his hand up inside Steve’s legs so he can part him further and get in closer, starting to dip his tongue inside deeper, harder, like he’s on a mission to make Steve whine for it. Which he does.

‘Yeah, I can see you’re having a real bad time, wailing for it like that. Still fuckin rude,’ Bucky says, satisfied, and then he pulls his mouth away for a second and Steve swears when he brings it back accompanied by one spit slick finger circling at him, although the position’s a little awkward now Bucky isn’t holding him open, like he’s only trying to keep one hand involved here. That’s when Steve realizes what’s going on, and when he does he immediately starts groping around backwards until his fingers meet the cool metal of Bucky’s left hand and he yanks at it, taking advantage of Bucky’s obvious surprise, pulling it over his hip and directly onto his dick, sucking in a breath at the coolness against his hot skin.

‘Buck,’ he says in a voice so needy he barely recognizes it, and then Bucky’s fingers curl hesitantly around him and start stroking and he has to turn his face and bury it in the pillow, gasping.

‘Jesus, Steve,’ Bucky says thickly, ‘you really – you really like it,’ and Steve mumbles something affirmative and embarrassing like ‘Uh huh,’ into the pillow, which just makes Bucky go at him harder from both ends until he’s so hard he’s pretty sure he’s going to go off the second Bucky gets another finger inside him, gasping and thrusting into Bucky’s gentle metal fist.

‘You love this,’ Bucky’s still saying like he’s not done marveling over it yet, ‘goddamn, Stevie, ain’t nothing hotter than you, I swear to God –’

‘Mm,’ Steve manages, trying not to go off like a champagne cork. ‘Oh, oh –’

‘You’re so tight, Steve, fuck,’ Bucky mumbles, low with want. His hand pauses for a second on Steve’s dick then starts up again jerkily when Steve shifts his hips impatiently, and it’s just at the edge of too-tight, just a little too much, and Steve gasps while Bucky talks, a disbelieving note entering his voice – ‘is that – you been keeping yourself just for me, Steve?’

Steve squirms, face shoved into the plush of the pillow, refusing to answer. Bucky lets out a sharp noise halfway between a laugh and a groan.

‘Is that right? You still mine, babydoll?’ he asks, sounding so viscerally gratified by the idea that Steve lets out a low whine, fingers clamping so hard into the pillow that he hears the fabric tear, but Bucky doesn’t let up. ‘All this time you been waiting for me. Not let no one else inside you, darlin’?’

‘Oh my god, Buck,’ he mumbles, ‘you know I haven’t – please,’ and then Bucky’s hands and mouth leave him abruptly while Bucky jumps into motion, getting on top of him and yanking around with his hips until his ass is up in the air and his face shoved into his elbows and then it’s finally, Christ, finally happening, Bucky parting him with one slick and shaky hand and nestling the tip of his cock to Steve’s opening, starting to push inside before he hesitates.

‘You sure you –’

‘Bucky, I swear to God,’ Steve says as loudly as possible and Bucky hushes him, runs his left hand down Steve’s back maybe in some kind of attempt to relax him but instead it just makes Steve arch into an even steeper angle so when Bucky pushes inside it’s so immediate and deep, so intense, Steve’s mouth opens on a harsh gasp and he cants back against Bucky, who groans like he’s having a religious experience, grabs Steve’s hips with both hands, and gets to work.

It’s so good Steve goes off after about two thrusts, which is no surprise to either of them. Bucky fucks him through the sparking pleasure of it until Steve’s almost flat to the mattress, hard again and groaning into his fist, and Bucky comes with a hoarse, surprised gasp, basically falling forward over Steve’s back. Steve squirms out from under him, rolls him over and sits right back down on his cock.

‘Oh my god,’ Bucky groans, ‘what the fuck, Steve, can’t even give a man two minutes –’

‘You don’t need two minutes,’ Steve pants ruthlessly, ‘now fuck me.’

Bucky glares at him but he’s already unwillingly jerking his hips upward in time to Steve’s rhythm, and before long he’s cursing a blue streak because he hadn’t even had time to get soft. Steve whines about it, starts to slow the motion of his hips, biting down on his lip when Bucky hits him in just the right spot, closing his eyes against the pleasure and letting his head fall back a little.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Bucky says, and when Steve opens his eyes again Bucky’s just staring up at him like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. He starts grabbing at Steve’s shoulders all wanting until Steve gets the message and crowds down for a kiss, open mouthed and sweet. It’s their first since they started this, he realizes with a helpless laugh against Bucky’s mouth, and then neither of them can stop laughing, still kissing too while Bucky moves inside him and Steve grinds down, gasping and smiling, Bucky’s hands big and powerful and smooth stroking down his back and up to his neck, keeping him secure, murmuring sweetheart and darlin’ at him all the while.

After they both come again Steve’s slumped on Bucky’s chest, not having bothered to make Bucky pull out, and he starts idly playing around with Bucky’s metal fingers, sucking one after the other into his mouth while Bucky watches in what appears to be rapt disbelief, which is when Steve remembers how much he enjoys feeling Bucky stiff up inside of him. A little while later they fall off the bed because Bucky’s fucking him so hard they slide right up to the edge without noticing and then end up in a pile on the floor, but Bucky just rolls Steve over onto his back and pushes back inside him with one snap of his hips, and the new angle hits even deeper inside somehow and Steve starts moaning so hard Bucky pulls one of Steve’s legs over his shoulder and pretty much talks him into coming with just the friction of them rubbing against each other and the spark of Bucky’s cock against his prostate, ‘fuck, Stevie, come for me sweetheart, Jesus Christ, nothin’ so good as you –’

At some point later Steve’s sucking deeply and methodically on Bucky’s cock while Bucky lies back with an arm over his face like having this much sex is some kind of goddamn chore, his hips making these helpless little jerks and his metal hand scrunching up a little too tight and hard in Steve’s hair, and Steve has to pull off just so he can say, deeply and sincerely, for the first time in his life, ‘Thank God for super serum,’ which makes Bucky laugh so hard his cock nearly pokes Steve in the eye.

They resurface some time in the afternoon; Steve finally levers himself away from Bucky’s mouth to go to the kitchen for fuel to pacify their rumbling stomachs. He nearly collapses on his second step away from the bed and had to grab at the door handle to keep himself upright on absurdly shaky legs.

‘What the fuck,’ he says flatly, because he didn’t even know that could still happen.

‘Still got it,’ Bucky says smugly, leaning back against the headboard with his hair all mussed, sheets rucked up and destroyed around his ankles, one leg crossed over the other at the knee, might as well have installed a neon sign pointing to his cock. God, Steve could go at him again right now. He should never have turned around to look.

‘Probably just lack of food,’ Steve says heartlessly, and Bucky crows at him all the way to the kitchen and on his way back again. They eat sandwich fixings that haven’t actually been made into sandwiches because Steve didn’t want to stay upright long enough to make them. They get crumbs all over the sheets but it doesn’t matter, they’re all in need of a do-over anyway; they should probably just burn them, to be honest.

Steve’s phone goes off a few hours later when Bucky’s in the middle of giving him what Steve would classify as a whole body blowjob, having started at his toes and worked up to his neck and then started back down again without having actually touched his cock. Steve’s absolutely laid out, he’s shaking, he feels like every nerve in his body is quivering and he’s gonna go off like a shot when Bucky actually touches him, so the ringtone makes him jump about two feet in the air.

He’s still trying to come back down to earth enough to form real words when Bucky stops licking at his nipples and sits up, straddling him and making Steve gasp at the pressure over his hips. He smirks at Steve as he picks the phone up off the nightstand and answers it.

‘Stevie’s phone,’ he says nonchalantly, for which Steve finds a surge of energy to grab a pillow and try and whack him over the head with it. Bucky catches and crushes it in his metal fist, winking at him. ‘Hey there, Ms. Potts,’ he says. Steve falls back against the pillows with a groan.

‘He’s doing pretty good, I reckon,’ Bucky says, ‘haven’t heard any complaints –’ Steve gives another groan, pulling the pillow over his face ‘– but listen, we’re, ah, kind of in the middle of something, is it – it’s not urgent? Oh, well, thank God for that. I’ll get him to call you back later, ma’am, will that be alright?’

‘Maybe we should put an ad in the paper,’ Steve muses when Bucky hangs up. ‘Or we could get Tony to skywrite it with one of the suits: Do Not Disturb, Serum-Enhanced Sex In Progress.’

‘You have all the best ideas,’ Bucky agrees, and settles back down to the task at hand.

---

Sometimes it bewilders Steve to think about how thoroughly he and Bucky have come full circle, and yet how vastly different their lives are. He could never have imagined this for himself when he first woke up from the ice, and yet somehow his life has been built back up again brick by brick until here he is, living with Bucky in the tower, doing their best to help put New York back together where they can, still trying to cut down on the number of times they have to kiss each other before they have to head out the door on missions (although if he was forced at gunpoint, Steve might be able to admit that they’re not trying all that hard).

It’s a curiously animal life they have now, ruled by the next adrenaline spike of danger that crosses the Avengers’ path, although they’re still trying to leave time for proper meals, sleeping, the group, therapy – the stuff of life that gets tossed by the wayside if you’re not careful enough and let yourself fade like a chameleon, like Steve was doing when he first woke up. Unpredictable gaps in their schedule fill with team movie nights and spontaneous evenings out in the city making fun of all the stuff they never got to do when they were kids, although that backfires just as much as it succeeds: they go to the ballet once all ready to scorn their way through and then get blasted with the intensity the moment the curtain lifts. Steve doesn’t feel like he’s back in his own body even after the lights turn back up at the end; he doesn’t really remember the interval. He looks at Bucky on the silent walk back to the tower and realizes he’s wearing the same expression: the rueful recognition of art slicing too sweetly close to the bone. The performance had been about memory, and sacrifice, and not giving up on what you wanted even though you’d end up dead for it in the end. He can’t stop seeing the bewildered openness of the dancers’ posed vulnerability, the tautness of their grief. He takes Bucky’s hand and squeezes, and doesn’t let go all the way home.

‘If you’d have told me in 1943 things’d turn out this way, I’d have thought you were nuts,’ Bucky says meditatively that night as they lie in bed. Steve is resting his head on Bucky’s chest while Bucky combs gently through his hair. It’s the sort of uncomplicatedly sweet thing he might not have let Bucky do before, in defiance of being the smaller one, the weaker one. He always wanted to prove he could take twice as much as the next guy, on account of only looking as if he could take half. Well, if he could show himself where that had lead them, he’d probably think it was nuts too. ‘Even more than you already were, mind.’

‘I don’t think anyone’s brains are built big enough to come up with something like this,’ Steve says, sighing and nestling more firmly against Bucky, wrapping his arms around his waist. The heat of summer is cooling off now but it’s still pretty warm to be lying like this. Steve doesn’t care, and neither does Bucky; he loves lying down together just to run his hands over Steve almost as much as he loves sex.

‘What would’ve happened to us?’ Bucky asks, voice so quiet he sounds much younger than his years. ‘If we hadn’t – if there’d been no war, if you hadn’t gone off and got big, if HYDRA hadn’t – what would’ve happened to us, Stevie?’

Steve thinks about it, relaxing back into the softness of Bucky’s fingers stroking through his hair. Bucky doesn’t want the truth; he knows what would have happened eventually just as surely as Steve does. They would’ve had to let the thread spool out on their romance eventually and get serious about a couple of dames, get married, move out to the suburbs, or risk something a hell of a lot more final than the simple unhappiness of having to hide who they were. Steve might have been inclined to make a go of it – move away somewhere no one knew them and pretend they were cousins or something – but he had a lot less of his life than Bucky to worry about keeping up the fiction for, and if Bucky was going to be happy at all with whoever he ended up with, Steve needed to let him have a head start.

But if it’s just a story he’s telling then he can give Bucky something better than that. He can give their former selves a more fitting tribute than that.

‘Well, you’d have been an astronaut, Buck,’ he says, smiling when Bucky’s chest moves with surprised laughter under his ear. ‘The first man in space, I bet. You’d have been a household name, and when you came back you’d train other people how to be in space too, and you’d sneak me into those simulators after hours so I could see what it was like.’

Bucky’s fingers tighten and release in Steve’s hair, his laugh a little rusty.

‘What would you do while I was up to all this?’ he asks, his voice warm. ‘Darn my socks by the fire?’

‘I’d just keep making my art, I guess,’ Steve says doubtfully, and Bucky snorts.

‘Don’t sound so excited about it,’ he says, shuffling them around so Steve is on his side facing away, Bucky’s chest pressed up against his back, so he can hold him more effectively and kiss his neck. Steve stretches up toward the pillows, closing his eyes, grinning a little at the indignation in Bucky’s voice. ‘You’d have been making trouble on the streets until the day you died somehow. You’d have been protesting something somewhere.’ His voice softens. ‘I bet you’d have worked with kids still.’

‘You think?’

‘Yeah. Comes natural to you.’

Steve hums, pleased.

‘Tell that to Michaela. She’s still ragging on me for letting slip to her mom about crushing on Celia.’ He wonders whether Michaela regrets her original decision to swap Celia for Captain America now, or whether the possibility of embarrassing herself over her crush still outweighs how irritated she is at Steve.

‘Well, you should know better than to reveal a confidence like that, darlin,’ Bucky says sanctimoniously, for which Steve turns his head to bite him on the side of the face, but he gets sidetracked by his mouth, and then the conversation gets derailed.

Michaela condescends to sit at their table making small talk this week rather than just outright ignoring him, which is an improvement at least. It takes around ten minutes of that for her to get bored and really let him have it.

‘You can’t just say things like that to my mom,’ she says for the twentieth time, and Steve throws up his hands in abject remorse.

‘I know, I know, I’m sorry,’ he says, again for the twentieth time. ‘I just – I thought you might already have said to her, I’m sorry.’

‘Me and Mom don’t talk about that stuff,’ Michaela says, rolling her eyes at him.

‘How come?’

She snorts and gives him the side-eye, because they’ve been talking for nearly months now and apparently she’s learned to recognize his amateur psychiatrist voice.

‘Not everything’s about the invasion, Steve, God.’

She sounds so much like a teenager that Steve is distracted for a moment from realizing what she’s actually said. She blinks a little herself.

‘That’s true,’ he says, and she shoots him a thankful look for not making her get into actually saying the word out loud for the first time. ‘I didn’t talk to my mom about that stuff either.’

‘No one does,’ she says, wrinkling her nose. ‘It’d be weird. I don’t even –’ she lowers her voice dramatically ‘– you know I just like Celia’s arms anyway.’

She blushes down at the table. Steve sneaks a look over at Celia and Aubrey, his view of them partially obscured by the boxes of trading cards that always litter their table.

‘Her tattoos?’ Steve asks, lowering his voice a little, playing along although Celia would need a hell of a pair of ears to be able to hear them all the way across the room. ‘They’re real pretty.’

‘They’re cool,’ Michaela corrects him. She sneaks a look over, struck with apparent awe. ‘They must’ve hurt a lot. She must be really brave.’

‘Well, so are you,’ Steve says, in one of those random bursts of honesty that makes him wonder whether therapy has done much for him except remove his brain to mouth filter.

Michaela gives him a startled look.

‘It’s true,’ he insists. ‘Riding the subway without having a panic attack now? Without even needing your music? I couldn’t even look at going on a plane for a while after I got back.’

‘I only went on it a few times,’ she mutters, blushing again. ‘And Troy was with me.’

‘Still good,’ he says firmly. ‘Still brave.’

‘Fine,’ she says petulantly, like she’s declaring the end of an argument. Steve just smiles at her, and after a minute she smiles unwillingly back, then skewers him with a glare.

‘What does that make you then?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Waking up in the future,’ she says, raising her eyebrows. ‘All your people gone. Can’t even use a smartphone –’

‘For the last time, I can –’

‘If I’m brave, what does that make you?’

She sits back with her arms folded, looking at him questioningly.

‘I don’t know,’ he says after a minute. He smiles at her. ‘Guess I’m still figuring that out.’

Bucky’s watching the first Hunger Games movie when Steve gets home, staring at the TV with his eyebrows raised. ‘They put that out for kids?’ he’d asked Steve a week ago when he found out what it was about, appalled, and Steve had reminded him about all the war movies they’d watched as kids, which had probably had a lot to do with him trying so hard to enlist, or as Bucky liked to refer to it, his death wish.

‘Clint’s birthday next week,’ he murmurs, stopping Steve for a humming kiss as he passes on the way into the kitchen. ‘Did you forget? I forgot. Clashes with the new shelter opening.’

Steve groans, letting his head fall back dramatically as he heads to the fridge. He’d fought hard for the shelter, even though everyone on the board kept advising him (telling him) that the space on the border of two prominent downtown blocks would be much better suited to a tasteful memorial installation or sculpture.

‘We’ve got a memorial,’ he’d reminded them. ‘And a sculpture. In Central and everything. Haven’t we got enough memorials? We’ve got enough memorials, come on. We don’t have enough shelters.’

‘This isn’t Rollercoaster Tycoon, you know,’ Hughes had said irritably, tapping his pen against the desk. He was a lawyer Pepper had enthusiastically recommended for the board. He was kind of a dick but Steve still liked him best anyway, because he obviously wasn’t afraid of arguing to get his point across and he had never once acted starstruck around Steve. ‘We can’t just sit them down wherever we want. There are rules.’

‘So do everything by the book,’ Steve said. ‘I know it’s just off-center of one of the worst hit districts, I know it’d look prettier if we did something in remembrance but haven’t we had enough of that? Shouldn’t we be looking forward instead of back?’

‘I hate it when you do that,’ Hughes said after a moment, when everyone else was looking at Steve in disbelief or thoughtful capitulation. ‘It makes it impossible to say no.’

Steve had smiled sweetly.

‘So say yes,’ he’d said.

‘We’ll figure something out,’ he finds himself saying now, catching the tail end of recognition in Bucky’s eye as he does so and redirecting his path so he can go over and kiss him again for longer, watch that small everyday happiness linger on Bucky’s face. Because that phrase had become a kind of code for them, when they were kids; Steve wasn’t sure exactly when it had started, but he’d pointed out to Bucky one day that it was one of those nothing responses that didn’t really mean anything, so general as to be almost entirely without merit, but in the end that was what made it so comforting. It was what Bucky always used to say when they ran out of money before the bills were paid even though he’d been working all the hours God sent down at the docks, or when Steve had given his meat ration to a stray dog on the street before he got home, and Bucky was tearing into him over it. It was an assertion that whatever the problem was, it simply didn’t matter how hard it would be to fix, because they would continue to try until it was, or at least until some makeshift, patchwork solution could be found. When either of them said it, what they were really saying was I’m on your side. I will always, always be on your side.

‘Is that right,’ Bucky asks when Steve pulls back reluctantly, not really a question but cocking an eyebrow anyway. ‘Because the board just sent up twenty cherry-picked applications for the scholarship for you to read, darlin, you think you can figure that out?’

‘Yep,’ Steve says determinedly, taking the folder from Bucky’s outstretched hand but leaning down to kiss him again anyway, savoring the way Bucky always seemed to be simultaneously presumptuous and elated over the recurrence of his affection, ‘I do.’