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“How many shirts have you tried on?”
Steve is leaning against the doorframe of Bucky’s room with a smirk that Bucky would threaten to wipe off his face if he weren’t so damned preoccupied with finding the right shirt.
“Four,” he answers, and heads back to the closet.
“Blue is kinda your color, Buck,” Steve says, and Bucky looks back at the bed, where four blue shirts are crumpled in a heap.
“Blue’s boring. He’s not into boring.”
Steve chuckles. “This is Clint we’re talking about, right? The man can sit on a couch for eight hours straight if there’s something shiny on the television.”
“Are you saying he’s boring?” Bucky asks, turning to glare at Steve. Clint’s the most interesting person Bucky’s ever met. He’s not even close to boring. “He only sits for eight hours when he’s injured.” Which is way too often for Bucky’s taste, but that’s a different argument.
Steve puts his hands up in defense. “Okay, he’s not boring. I just think he’d like the blue shirts.”
Bucky looks back at his closet. “I think white.” He pauses and looks down at the pants he’s got on. “With different pants.”
This time Steve laughs outright and moves to sit down on the bed. “Buck,” he says, and Bucky has to go sit next to him because Steve is using that voice that drips with ‘you’re being ridiculous, let me help you so you don’t embarrass yourself.’ So he sits and puts his head in his hands and stares at the floor. He’s already embarrassed.
“Why are you changing clothes five times?”
Bucky sighs and shrugs. “We’re goin’ out. Wanna look nice, you know?” He has a sudden vision of Clint in a suit, like the silver one he was wearing at the last fancy function for Stark. That suit made Bucky’s mouth go dry at the sight and made Bucky’s body take interest in a way that it hadn’t since the 1940s.
“You’ve been out before, though,” Steve says. He puts his hand on Bucky’s shoulder and squeezes, and it feels good. It feels like Steve might be able to hold his crazy in for him for a bit.
Bucky leans into Steve’s touch a little. “Yeah, we have. But this is different.”
Steve just raises an eyebrow.
“We’ve been to the movies, to the dive bars with the best darts, and for drives in Tony’s cars.” Bucky grins at the memory of driving with the top down on the red convertible and Clint belting some group called The Eagles at the top of his lungs. Bucky had never heard of a witchy woman before, but the song sounded good in Clint’s sexy voice.
“But tonight?” Steve prompts.
“Tonight he wants a ‘real date,’ and he -“ Bucky stops. Clint’s voice had lost its usual snark when he’d asked. He sounded so sincere. “It means a lot to him.”
“A real date?” Steve asks. “Wh-“
“He said he wanted to show me that he’s not always a dumpster fire.” Bucky pauses at Steve’s laugh. “Only he was serious. He - he said he hasn’t dated much, and that he wanted to show me a good time - Steve,” Bucky practically whines, because he can whine to Steve, “He really wants us to work and now I want to show him we can work and he deserves a god time, you know?” He pauses and looks at the shirt in his hand. “White shirt and black pants. Definitely.”
Steve rubs Bucky’s shoulder and stands up. “Where are you two going?”
Bucky ducks his head. “He said it was a surprise but to dress up a bit, but I might’ve convinced Natasha to spill that he’s taking me dancing,” he says with a sigh. It sounded great when Natasha told him - dancing at a dance hall all open and with a guy sounded like a fantasy he used to have as a teenager. “Course,” he shrugs, “I haven’t danced since the night you met Erskine.”
Steve’s face goes all soft and sad at the mention of Erskine, the way it always does, but then he smiles. “Clint’ll love dancing with you.” But then his face falls a little. “Buck, dancing today isn’t the same as it was when we were kids. I mean,” and Bucky could swear he visibly shudders, “Have you been to a dance hall since then? They don’t even call them halls anymore. They're clubs.” He pauses. “And they’re very noisy.”
Bucky shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. It’s what he wants to do, and he’s dressing up, too,” he says with a wicked grin. “Said he’d gotten a sharp new outfit, and that’s good enough for me.”
Steve laughs. “Put your pants on, and I don’t wanna hear about when he takes ‘em off of you.” He stands up and heads out of the room.
“You sure?” Bucky replies, feeling better about the whole thing, “It’s fuckin’ hot!”
Steve flips him off as he closes the door and leaves without a word.
Yeah, Bucky feels better about the whole thing. Clint wants to dress up and go out. Bucky can work with that.
<><><><>
They meet in the parking garage as planned, and Bucky blinks as Clint gets off the elevator ten minutes late as usual, but looking like Bucky’s never seen him look before. He’s dressed like . . . well, like folks with some money used to dress back in Brooklyn. He even has a fedora. Bucky looks down at his shimmery blue dress pants and white button down open at the collar and can’t help but laugh at his five-shirt attempt at getting dressed earlier.
“I look that good, huh?” Clint says sheepishly, looking down at his pinstripe pants.
Bucky knows that nothing he can say will work to put Clint at ease, so he moves close, fast, and pulls Clint into a deep kiss. Clint melts into it and gives as good as he gets, turns it dirty the way he’s so damned good at, and Bucky has to pull away with a sharp breath and smile. “You look gorgeous.”
Clint grins that genuine and open grin that Bucky thinks maybe only comes out when they’re together and they head for the car. Clint steers them around the usual convertible he chooses and around a corner to a car Bucky didn’t even know Tony owned. It’s a 1935 Buick and it’s a cream-colored dream. He’d drooled over that car when he was a kid and Clint tosses him the keys before he can even run a hand over the hood.
“I’ll tell you where to go. Parking won’t be hard.”
Bucky doesn’t answer, just climbs into the driver’s seat and swallows thickly. It’s a beautiful ride that he never dreamed he’d ever get, and when he starts the engine the car rumbles under him like it’s excited to go. Bucky agrees, so he wordlessly pulls them away from the Tower and follows Clint’s directions. He gets to drive for about thirty minutes, which is way too short, but he can’t help smiling and running his hand over the hood as he gets out of the car.
“Tony’s had it forever, but I convinced him to clean it up and get it going again. You can use it whenever you want,” Clint says as he grabs Bucky’s hand and leads him toward a nondescript one-story building with a small sign in the window that says, “Dance Hall Daze.” That could be better but it’s definitely not a loud club like Steve was warning him about.
“What is this place?” Bucky asks as Clint holds the door for him.
“Come on, you’ll see,” Clint replies, bouncing on his toes, and he looks an awful lot like a kid at Christmas - nervous and excited all at once.
Bucky follows and then stops in his tracks when the music washes out into the lobby they’re standing in. “Clint,” he starts, but Clint just grins wider and puts him through a grey door and into the dance hall.
And it is a dance hall. There are wood floors, polished and shining, and there are old yellow lights giving the place the dimmer, more intimate lighting than modern rooms this size usually have. The ceiling is high and the room is long, small wooden tables with red tablecloths pepper the edges of the room. There’s a bar - an honest to goodness zinc bar - lining the far side of the hall, where a bartender in a red waistcoat is serving drinks to the crowd of patrons. Everyone’s dressed like they stepped out of 1939, and the music, well, Bucky can’t help if his jaw drops a little. It’s a swing band on a dark wooden stage at the end of the hall, and they’re sitting on light oak chairs. The microphone no one is using at the moment is even a silver plated Unidyne microphone that all the bands used in Bucky’s day.
He can’t get his feet to move. He blinks, and he’s seeing Connie, that dark-haired girl he’d taken dancing the night before he left, the one who could dance like a dream with a smile that lit up the hall. He blinks again, and Clint’s in front of him holding his hand out like he might pull Bucky close, but he’s not.
“Buck?” he says, and his eyes are doing that crinkle they do when he can’t figure a situation out right away.
Bucky takes a deep breath and tries to smile, but he looks around again and can’t help feeling like the world got spun back to 1940. The band is playing Duke Ellington. He closes his eyes. “I remember,” he says, and then clears his throat and tries again, louder. “I remember trying to teach Steve to dance. We were in an alley ‘cause there wasn’t any room in the apartment, and we didn’t have any music.” He pauses, smiles. “He had two left feet, go figure, but he tried and tried and tried.” Bucky opens his eyes to see Clint standing close, smiling now. “He got pretty good at it, actually. You’d have been surprised.”
Clint waits, and when there’s no more to the story, he grins and nods toward the dance floor. “Wanna give it a go?”
This time Bucky blinks at him. Here’s a gorgeous guy in a pinstripe suit who wants to dance with him, and who can dance with him. “I guess we won’t get arrested for being queer, huh?” he says, and he’s trying to be light about it, but he knows by the look on Clint’s face that he fails.
“No one’s gonna care, and no one’s getting arrested,” Clint assures him, taking his hand with a shrug. “Unless I drink too much and someone looks at me wrong, but that hasn’t happened in about fifteen years, so hopefully tonight will be okay.”
And before Bucky can think of a reply, they’re on the dance floor and honest-to-god swing dancing. Clint’s leading Bucky through the Lindy Hop and his thousand-watt smile is on full, and the moves come back to Bucky like he just did this yesterday. The lights make Clint’s eyes sparkle a green-blue that take Bucky’s breath away.
They don’t stop until they’re both breathless and sweating, and when they move to the bar they’re holding hands and laughing.
“Not bad, Barton,” Bucky says as the bartender hands him the soda water he orders. “Not bad at all.” He reaches to brush a stray hair out of Clint’s face and he can’t help but brush his hand down Clint’s cheek. “Thanks,” he says.
Clint takes a sip of his iced tea and nods. “Sure thing. Night’s not over, but I’m glad this worked. You’re a natural out there, by the way. You probably had girls falling at your feet before the war.”
Bucky grins. “Can’t say I ever had a lot of trouble getting a date, but I always had to convince two girls, not just one.”
“Did Steve ever ask anyone out on his own?”
“He couldn’t say boo to a girl on his own,” Bucky answers. He shrugs. “We had a system, though, and it worked.”
Clint raises an eyebrow and runs a hand through his sweaty hair. “A system? This I gotta hear.”
Bucky laughs. “Well, we pooled our resources, and even though he couldn’t talk to girls, he knew where to find all the cheapest flowers and meals and dance halls, and I knew how to make the cheap stuff seem nice. So I got us our dates and he arranged the evenings.” He pauses. “Not that it happened all that much. We were working and he was sick a lot, so…” he trails off. “It worked, though.”
The usual walls between the 21st century and his life before the war are paper thin tonight, so Bucky gets another memory of Steve sitting at a zinc bar just like this one while Bucky danced with both girls. He smiles at it.
“So, should we dance again?” Clint asks, downing the rest of his drink and holding out his hand.
“Definitely.”
They dance, and Bucky lets his mind settle here, in this moment with Clint, who looks spectacular in his dark suit and whose hands are sure and warm in Bucky’s own as they dance, and whose kaleidoscope eyes are filled with adoration the likes of which Bucky’s never actually known. He loses himself in them and lets the swing music wash over him and chip away at his quickly fading insecurities about Clint really wanting to be his boyfriend.
Later, they leave the dance hall and Clint takes them to a restaurant that’s not very vintage at all, but has the best steak Bucky’s had since that time in Germany the Commandos had saved a village and the people had served them the best food they’d had since the war started. Bucky looks across the table at Clint, who’s doing the whole tell a story with his hands thing that Bucky loves so goddamned much, and he can’t help a dopey grin.
Clint stops talking and cocks his head. “What was that thought, Barnes?” he asks with a dopey grin of his own.
Bucky doesn’t answer right away, just leans across the table and brushes Clint’s cheek with his hand and then sits back. “You’re definitely not a dumpster fire,” he says.
Clint laughs and ducks his head in that adorable way he has. “Not at the moment. I can fool you for a night, huh?”
Bucky blinks and thinks about all the times Clint pulls him off the range when he gets lost in his past, when Clint brings him coffee in bed but doesn’t ask him to get up because he knows what it’s like to not be able to face a day, or when Clint finds Bucky after a mission and crowds in close on the jet home, pressing himself to Bucky’s side like he needs to know Bucky’s solid, still there.
“You’re never a dumpster fire,” he says with a shrug. “Not with me.”
And Clint’s mouth snaps shut and he leans back, watching Bucky like he’s looking for any sign of lies, but Bucky knows that there’s no sign of lie because he’s not lying.
“Not with me,” he repeats. He pauses and adds, “With Steve definitely. You definitely have dumpster fire moments with Steve.”
Clint laughs and shakes his head. “Yeah. Okay. I see how it is,” and they go on eating, and Bucky thinks this is the best night of his modern life, dinner and dancing with Clint Barton, the cocky, sarcastic sharpshooter from Iowa who’s still a thief, apparently, what with the way he’s got Bucky’s heart in his hands. As Bucky drives the Buick back to the Tower and Clint watches him like a hawk because he clearly likes seeing Bucky happy, he figures his heart’s in good hands, and he can relax and enjoy the ride.