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you wrote me, oh so many letters
and all of them seemed true
promises look good on paper
especially from you, from you
(the wrote and the writ, johnny flynn and the sussex wit)
Bucky’s crying before he’s off the boat and he’s the least surprised out of anyone to realize it.
He’s always been a softie, a leaky faucet, and the war hasn’t changed that, so he doesn’t know why the sob that smacks him startles him bad enough that he grips the strap of his bag doubly hard, ready to swing it around like a battering ram, ready to find that cloying, invisible enemy. He’s not being ambushed, on his belly in the muck and camellias, cypress hanging low, moonlight casting an eerie smile upon Lake Como like it’s enjoying the hell out of muffled gunshots and the wet grunt of lifeblood spattering onto the undergrowth. He’s not trucking through a river that sucks at his boots like quicksand kisses, gun raised and one eye squinted shut to peek through the scope. He’s not under the street in Liverpool clutching his own hand to hide the shake, catching Peggy’s eye across the deep dank dark like she’d have anything solid to give him besides that wan shrug.
That’s done. He’s safe.
He’s just a weenie.
He can hear Dugan saying it in his head, his stupid, stupid hat tilted over his forehead, jaunty and jovial and shoving exploding bullets into the barrel of his gun, you damn weenie, Barnes, give it here about Morita’s pisspot moonshine, you weenie when he gags chewing on canned beans when he was raised so good on his ma’s chicken and apple tart, you fuckin’ weenie through tears while perched on the edge of Bucky’s hospital cot, a handful of Bucky’s shirt in his fist, Bucky’s arm a thing of the past.
Bucky has schlepped himself across Europe, up and down mountains, through rivers, into foxholes like the mausoleums Catholics stick their corpses into, caskets lining the walls like picture frames. He was a thing of the dead, a dirt thing, a dust thing, and now he’s on a boat, a few hundred feet from shore, from his city, from that jagged skyline he’s traced with every finger, the thimble-numbed touch of familiarity, of the buildings he’s stood at the top of, of the alleys he’s bled into, of the parks he’s ran through with burning lungs and his sisters trailing him, Tag, Bucky! You’re it! You’re it!
It’s wild, comparing the places he tore through as a kid to Italian cliffs and German forests, but that’s life, he guesses. Unpredictable to say the least. Same as this crowd. This boat. Getting shoved shoulder to sh—shoved, anyway. Filing off, all these bodies, the men Bucky has come to recognize by face, though they’re the mystery of all fucking mysteries: just like him and entirely fucking different, too, because he sure doesn’t know them, doesn’t know their names, but that guy has Bucky’s blank eyes, and that one has his shaky fingers, and that one presses on his chest when he looks over the water, and that one prays before he sleeps, so Bucky knows them, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t know shit, really, except the planks of this dock and the faces collecting upon them, all Brooklyn’s best, Mister Liu from the fish stand and Miss Cabrera from the grocery, with their smiles when they see the jaunty cap on his head on his shoulders and their blank shock when they don’t see an arm connected to it.
Bucky doesn’t blame them. He was shocked when he saw, too.
Bodies. Bodies, and walking, and Bucky carts his pack with his papers and his extra suit and all his letters, everything he’s kept on his person like a hoarder, a fucking hoarder, he always kept everything he could manage to carry so he could press it all together and riddle out a man when he was a gun, and that’s become habit. Even now that he’s here. Here, where he is not a gun, where he has never touched a gun, not even when Tim Fletcher brought his dad’s to school in his pack to show the guys and got suspended for a week. Where he is—his family’s. His city’s. Light caught sharp on a silver platter. An oil slick at dawn. Stained glass and wrought iron.
Bucky’s walk off the dock is Orpheus’s first steps into Hades: looking for his gal, lyre in hand, ready to do what it takes, a dozen pretty words waiting at the taper of his tongue. The pavement is a Lethe of his own making: wash away the memories, take a long fucking sleep, this is the fundamental Him, sun-baked and safe. Nothing else matters when he’s here. He feels, he feels like Bucky again.
“Barnes,” someone calls. Another, “Bucky!” A gal, “James!” “Barnes! You’re home!” “Buck!” “Hey, James!” “Is that you, kid?”
And Bucky waves his hand, gives little salutes, tips his cap, “Hiya, yeah, hey, pal!” Asphodel, wandering, listless, until—
“Jamie?”
And that’s—that’s fucking Rebecca, his heart is in his ass, that’s Becky, with Chava on her hip and Catherine at her side, that black-haired bunch with their steamed dresses, Chava snotty and Cat’s pigtails are all crooked, Becky looks old, she’s a whole woman, and Bucky is running for them, for his Ma and Da at their shoulders, he hits them like thunder finding its footing, cap squished in his fist, an armful of Barnes’s, Da’s cigarette stench and Ma’s yeasty neck and Chava is trying her toddler best to climb into Bucky’s arm but he’s got the bag, he’s got—he’s got his bag with everything inside, so he kisses her hard on the forehead, tugs on her curls, says, “My best girl! You remember me?” She’s crying, because the crowd and the noise and the squalor, but she says, “Bucky,” and that’s enough for him, he’s got tears on his face, he drops his bag and everything in it, he’s holding Cat and his heart is going stupid, it’s in his throat, right there in a lump with the tears, she smells like sunshine and strawberry jam. “Hi, kid, look at you, look at you,” he says. He kisses her temple once, again. God.
“Buck,” she says, smiling, alight, not a tear to be seen.
“Did you lose a tooth? Jee-sus, let me see,” he says, tilting her face by the chin, and she pokes her tongue through the gap, and Bucky tosses his head back and howls. “You could fit a steamship through that tunnel, Cat, man-oh-man.”
“S’not as bad as you,” she says, holding his shoulders all rough, the same way he’s always grabbed for his girls, like they’re bones and nothing soft, like there’s no way to hurt them, and he’s grateful, he’s glad she’s not scared, not the way Chava is, not the way Becky is looking at him like she’s afraid he’s gonna collapse, not the way Ma is crying and Da is holding her tight round the waist. “You’re gonna be crooked forever.”
“Oh, I’ve seen him worse than crooked,” comes a voice, the voice, the voice, Bucky is turning, he’s pinching his nose against the fucking tears. “This is nothing, trust me.”
“Oy,” Bucky says, staring at Steven fuckin’ Grant top-to-toe with something scratching at his throat, ready to fall to his knees on the pavement because he looks so good. He looks healthy, healthier than Bucky ever saw him, with color in his cheeks and a little meat cocooning the tendons that used to jab near through the skin on the backs of his hands. His hair is corn silk and the whites of his eyes are unblemished and that stupid ugly bump still sits on the bridge of his nose and Bucky’s hand comes up of its own accord to clap on Steve’s cheek, to hold him something tender. He scritches his fingers behind Steve’s ear and Steve leans into him like a cat, smiling so big and smug and pleased, and Bucky laughs, he can’t help it, having a handful of Steve, the way it makes his stomach do a rolling, roiling Lindy. To the roots of his teeth, it clings under his fingernails, truth like a breeze off the bay, he knows he would never hold anything else if he had the choice—a thought that used to make him want to toss himself into traffic, but now he’s looking right at the kid when he thought he wouldn’t and, Christ, Christ. “God, Stevie,” Bucky croaks, and he laughs again. “What a sight for sore eyes you are.”
Steve squints all crooked in the sunlight, the whole of him turning pinkish like tender peach skin. “You could be easier on mine, pal,” he says. He brushes fingertips over the scruff on Bucky’s chin, along the dangling clump of overgrown curls falling onto his forehead, Steve has always seen with his hands since his eyes are so shit. Joking, fumbling the clip at the end of Bucky’s sleeve between his fingers, he adds, “This, for example? Boring. Lacking that je ne sais quoi you’re so famous for.” He says it like jay nay say qouy and Bucky can hear Jackie scoffing somewhere between his ears, the campfire crackling, Dugan with a cigar between his teeth, the whole lot of em laughing it up over nothing at all to fill the gaping silence. “You’re better than this old binder clip. We could switch it up with a nice broach, a real statement piece. Something sparkly.”
“A penny,” Bucky says, still laughing. He drops his hand and feels Steve’s warmth stick to his palm like a fresh coat of paint. Something yellow and orange and all curlicues. Feeling insane. Feeling so good. “A penny on a piece of tape, Stevie, that’s all we can afford.”
“Well, don’t bitch about it,” says Steve. “Be grateful we got the penny and the tape. That shit’s awful expensive, you know.”
“I do know,” says Bucky. “S’why you use torn up newspaper pages to give your drawings nice edges. I know you’re all sacrifice. A martyr of your own making.”
“Exactly,” Steve says, clapping a hand on Bucky’s chest. Steve winces. “You bony shit. You’re even skinnier than me now. I could play you like a fiddle, all strings. Oh, your ma is gonna have a field day of feeding you up. You’ll have to bring me the scraps.”
“The scraps,” Bucky repeats. He shakes his head and looks up to God, “The scraps, he says. The kid thinks the best he’ll get is scraps, after all these years, bless his stupid heart.” He reaches to tug Steve’s earlobe. “As if Ma won’t give you the choice bits of the brisket. The crispy edges, with the best bread, the end with all the crust—holy cow, I’m at half-mast just thinking about it.”
“Watch your mouth,” Da says, but it breaks, it’s so glad. Bucky had nearly forgotten them. His brain gets so full of Steve, so full of holding him—he grabs onto Becky’s free hand just to balance it out, because Steve’s head falls backwards when he laughs and really means it, and Bucky can’t look away. It’s rare, but he’s done it since they were pups kicking up clods of dirt in the Park and stirring street dust while running away from the stall they’d just sticky-fingered a pair of apples from, and it’s made him seasick since the very first time he saw it.
“Gee,” Steve says. He’s grinning. At ease. “I hate to say it, but I might even have a better shot at the dance hall than you now, pal, and ain’t that a kick in the head.”
Bucky’s nose wrinkles. “I can be footloose and fancy free even if I've only got one hand to swing a partner.” He twirls Becky just to prove it, and she huffs a tearful laugh as Steve says, “Should I call up Molly from across the hall and tell her you’re ready to trip the light fantastic, or can you hold the receiver and spin the dial at the same time?”
“Hey,” Bucky says, pleased that Steve isn’t tip-toeing around it. He didn’t think Steve would, but it’s so good to hear, he feels out of his head, punch drunk. “Alright, jerk.”
“We’ve got food waiting at home,” Ma says, the first words Bucky hears from her, and they’re welcome, they’re fucking welcome, thick as they are. “Come on, the Marinellis offered up their car for the day. To bring you home.”
“Sheesh, we’re riding in style,” Bucky says, lifting Becky’s hand to his lips. He kisses her knuckles, loud. She laughs, still crying, eighteen and so old. “You lead the way, Becks. Teach this rickety old showboat how it’s done in ‘forty-five. I’ve got catching up to do.”
“And I’m your professor?” she says.
“All’a you are,” says Bucky, giving them a sweeping look, wishing like hell he could pull the lot of them to his chest in one big move, like he used to. “I’ve got a helluva lot to learn, I’m sure.”
“We’ll have to be patient,” Steve says to the Barneses, dripping with fake earnestness. “We all know he’s slower than most, so…”
Bucky scoffs, that son of a bitch, that thing of the sun, and goes to cuff him with the hand that isn’t there. For just a moment, he freezes, confused, and they notice, he knows they do, he sees them and they know him so good, it must be impossible to miss. “Oh, come on,” Bucky says. He kicks Steve’s ankle. There. Adapting. He’s good at adapting. “I’m still better than you, you old square. Who failed fifth grade math. Not me, that’s for sure.”
Steve rolls his eyes, big, too big, putting on a show. “You keep telling yourself that, Buck. You just keep on saying it.” He takes Ma by the elbow and leads her off through the swathes of ribbon-hell, the shouting crowd, like Chiron. Bucky can’t fucking believe he’s really getting his feet back into the city. Onto these streets. He worries he’ll blink and it’ll be some Kraut’s beady eyes beating down on him. He’ll blink and it’ll be a cuff round his wrist rather than Becky’s hand. He’ll blink and it’ll all be a dream.
Good fucking dream to have, he guesses. Unless he does wake up. Then it’d be by far the worst of all.
the weight of all those willing words
I carried all alone
you wouldn't put your pen to bed
when we hadn't found our own, our own
Steve finds him in their old bedroom, sitting right next to his bag, both of em sagging open on the floorboards like wounds. It's dusty. Bucky can see clumps of it under the bed. Steve has always fucking hated dusting under the bed. Clumps. Big old clumps, like brushing a cat. Where the fuck does dust even come from, dust like this? Steve isn’t a mess. He knocks his pencil shavings around, maybe, and sometimes he misses the trash bin when he’s skinning potatoes, but—Steve’s no mess, he fits right here, right perfect, why is there dust under the bed? Why is Bucky’s half of the mattress unfuckingtouched?
“Hey,” Steve says, leaning against the doorframe.
“Hey, kid,” Bucky says. He knuckles an eye. “Fuck.”
“Am I interrupting something?” Steve says.
“Always,” Bucky says. Shakes his head. “Get in here.”
Steve does, and Bucky watches his stupid sock feet scuff against the nicked-up hardwood. The ankles of his slacks are so wrinkled Bucky wants to tug on them until they straighten out.
Steve sits, cross-legged, across from Bucky. Their knees almost touch. Steve, without thinking, closes that last inch, opposing poles, magnet men, they've always been closer, touchier, but Bucky's known Steve so long that they're extensions of the same bleeding, beating body. “You having a moment with your socks?” Steve says, lifting one out of his bag. It hangs off his crooked pointer finger. A white flag.
“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Told you, you’re interrupting.”
“‘Scuse me,” Steve says to the sock. “Pretend I ain’t here, alright.”
“No, you,” Bucky says. “Why, huh.”
“Huh, what?” Steve says.
“Huh, why didn’t you—I don’t know, do something while I was gone?” Bucky says. “Meet someone.” Fuck. “A gal. Someone nice. Bring her home, treat her good—”
“Buck,” Steve says with a spasm across his brow, like Bucky is ha-ha-hilarious, “what'd they do, take a piece of your head? Then try to throw us off track with the arm. As if we wouldn’t notice.”
Bucky turns his head away. He was in a hospital cot, and Steve was cold, too. Both of ‘em cold, like the arm Bucky left behind was meant for Steve to have. He’s—he swallows, rough. “Shut up, alright. You coulda’ got a girl, easy. I just mean—Steve, what are you doin’ here, alone. Living in our empty fucking house for two years, what if I—?”
“You weren’t gonna, and I wasn’t always alone,” Steve says. He balls the sock, then lobs it at Bucky. It lands draped over his shoulder. “I went round your ma’s for Shabbat dinner every week.”
“Good, great, that’s great,” Bucky says. He rubs his eyes, thumb and forefinger. “What about the other six days, smartass? Did you just sit around, wondering? Writing me those fucking letters and—counting stars.”
“I didn’t cry on the couch for you, if that’s what you’re saying,” Steve mutters, sour, and Bucky huffs an almost-laugh, because Steve is so loud sometimes even when he’s quiet. “Look, Buck. I didn’t—you know. Not like what you’re thinking.” He kicks Bucky’s knee, so Bucky looks over at him. He’s got hair in his eyes, fine and blond, all sandy as summer comes around. He must be sitting on the fire escape sometimes. That’s good. Fresh air. “I taught classes, I did good. I drew some’a those awful Tijuana bibles for the guy with the shop down the street, the one that looks half-horse, with all—”
“All the ear hair, yeah, Stevie, I seen him,” Bucky says, starting to smile. “Here I was, picturing you languishing in your abandonment and crying into a carrot stick, but you didn’t even miss me a little. Sat around drawing naked dames every day, didn’t you?” He lurches forward and scruffs his hand through Steve’s hair. Steve grunts and smacks him away, even as he leans into the touch with his eyes closing. “Geez. My best guy ditched my maybe-ghost for a painted pin-up.”
“Alright, mook,” Steve says, smiling with one corner of his mouth. His head hangs on his thin neck, and all Bucky can see is eyelashes and the bridge of his nose, the highest peaks of those cheekbones, all of him lit up by the sun yawning its golden way through the window. “I missed you. I did. Every day, I missed you, I couldn’t sleep half the time wondering if you were alright.” He kicks Bucky’s knee again. Bucky’s chest is all bubbles. “And I had roommates. I did, honest, to cover the rent, I had to, but we just put up a cot in the front room by the windows. I didn’t need to bring anyone here, not in this room, ‘cuz all I need was comin’ home soon enough, alright? Knew you were coming home. You took my stupid with you, remember? You wouldn’t’a croaked without giving it back, just to spite me.”
“Aw,” Bucky says, beaming. “You’re right. I kept it real safe for ya’, in my jacket pocket, ri-i-ight over my heart—”
“Shut your mouth,” Steve says, sour again, shoving Bucky flat down onto the hardwood, and Bucky lets him, lands on his back with a thump, with a whoosh of breath and a laugh. Steve stands over him and looks down like David to Goliath. God. Bucky really did keep the stupid safe, captured in every word of that one letter of Steve’s—the thing Bucky really kept in that heart-pocket, where Jackie kept his wife and Jonesie kept his girl, the one Bucky made a real show of pretending was empty. “Would’ve felt sacrilege, anyway, with you sending me all your checks.”
“Would’ve been cheating,” Bucky says, feeling lavender come up in the valley length of his stupid stomach. “You’re damn right, pal. Me first. Hm? Who’s your best guy?”
Steve flips him off with two hands and slumps his way out of the room like a grumpy old Victorian ghoul rattling about in the halls of some dust-caked manor. Bucky feels something so big it makes him sick.
your sentences rose high at night
and circled round my head
the circle's since been broken
like the priest before me is breaking bread
Bucky thinks, sometimes, always, that he wasn’t made for war. That he wasn’t supposed to be a killer.
He’s meant to romp down these selfsame sidewalks with enough joie de vivre to scuff his shoes and then spend the night shining em back up nice and neat. He’s meant to braid Becky’s hair, and Catherine’s, and Chava’s, and his ma’s when her arms get too tired from scrubbing the laundry. He's meant to squirt on a little too much cologne and watch Steve bat the air like it stinks something terrible, laughing all the while. He’s meant to cook up enough latkes for all the tenements on their floor and bring them door to door with a smile and a cigarette wagging between his lips as he makes sweethearted small talk with the little old ladies. He's meant to peel the New Year's orange and sneak into the bathroom to sniff the waxy juice on his fingers, under his nails, over and over for an hour, savoring it. He’s meant to dance himself silly and etch smiles onto tired faces and pray and jig and drink and write until his arm goes numb, but the war took that from him, too. A left-handed bastard gets his left arm ripped off. What’s a fiddler without his bow? Steve without a stick of charcoal? It’s Bucky, now, without a smudge of silver ink messying the empty air where he used to take up brilliant space.
But Peg, just as strong and sure as she was overseas, stronger than Bucky could ever be and braver too, pulls him into the SSR headquarters for these talks beneath the light of a warm-bulbed lamp, and she’s always got this cut of red lipstick on and her eyebrows drawn in all dark and long and Bucky wonders why all the men in this place are too stupid to tremble at the sight of her, to cower in front of pure force incarnate smushed into a clay figure and brought to life with the sole purpose of bleeding her way into utter importance. Peggy taps her heels under the table and grills him for anything he can remember and he’s cried in maybe three of the four talks trying to dredge it all up—Barnes, James Buchanan and all the numbers he’ll never scrub out of his head and the serum and the shocks and blue behind his eyelids—and Peggy holds his hand with her non-dominant one and keeps on writing, mouthing his words back to him as she goes.
It’s not that she hasn’t got sympathy or anything. She just knows what it’s like to have to power through pain and adversity and whatever the hell—to feel words poised on the tip of her tongue like it’s the springboard at the YMCA, to need them to just bounce off already, to smack down into the free pit of themselves before the board snaps.
Of course she knows. She’s the one who disobeyed direct orders to come out and save them, just her and Howard Stark in his airplane and one hell of a gun. She marched out with the remainder of the one-oh-seventh at her tail and one hell of a dedicant in Bucky. He’d do just about anything to repay that debt. Even sitting in this cold fucking room and staring in her eyes and biting his tongue. Stripping his jacket to show her his scars. The shock in her eyes and the shake in his hand and the conditions his men sat through for months before she came storming through the double-doors of Hell-or-Azzano.
He always comes home exhausted. After Steve sees his face at the end of the first one—pokes Bucky's cheeks, tugs on his fingers, says C'mon, Buck a dozen times, offers to hunch over and beg for change so they can get a milkshake, says he'll shine Bucky's shoes if Bucky gives him one old Barnes smile and Bucky finds himself even incapable of that much—he starts waiting outside the building on the street for Bucky to be spat out onto the sidewalk so they can take the train back to the Smith-Ninth Street station together. They sit slumped and silent, shoulder to shoulder, and Bucky lets Steve do all the looking out while Bucky wrangles Barnes, James Buchanan into something closer to a whisper than the shout that rings between his ears like a helluva gong hit.
Bucky was not made for this. He was made for something sweeter, and the worst part of it all is that he knows it damn well.
I'm being asked to drink the blood of Christ
and soon I'll eat his flesh
I'm alone again before the altar
shedding all my old regrets
“Come on, pal,” Steve says, snarling, bloody teeth and bruised knuckles, his collar is stained, that is going to take Bucky an hour to get clean. “You done already?”
“You wish,” says the guy, some bastard with a baseball bat, Bucky hates Steve like hell sometimes, hates him like holy hell, like twelve layers and a center made of ice. He regrips the bat, ready to swing, and Steve darts out of the way, into the wall, just in time for Bucky to yell, “Hey, King Kong!”
The egg with the bat turns. He’s got a face like a brick and army suit pants on with his deep-dirty oxford. His eyes are wild as he spits, “You want some too, huh?” Then he looks at Bucky. “Man,” he says.
“I’m taking the kid,” Bucky says, holding the guy’s gaze, hand up. Understanding passes between them, silent and creeping. “Alright?”
Steve is scowling, standing crooked like he’s got a bruised rib, and Bucky is going to kill him. “Who’re you calling kid?”
“You shut your trap, or I’ll let him take another swing,” Bucky says, low, and Steve growls a little, all feral cat, so Bucky grabs him by the neck of his collar and tugs him away like the cat’s fucking mother, looking over his empty shoulder to give a nod of—appreciation? Recognition?—to the poor guy in fatigues, who has started to stare confusedly at the walls of the alley like he can’t remember why he’s there or when or who. This is fucked. They turn the corner, Steve half-dragging his left foot. “What is wrong with you, Rogers? Huh?” Bucky shoves Steve up against the brick, just enough so he can bend and look into his eyes and make sure his pupils aren’t all crooked, his nose isn’t broken again, his split lip isn’t hiding a chipped tooth.
“That wasn’t the plan,” Steve says, famous last words, famous Steve words, if he had an epitaph that would be it, and Bucky really doesn’t mean to yell, but the “No shit!” slips out like he’s been choking it back for twenty years or something. He takes a sharp breath, whirling away. “I can handle myself,” Steve says, rough. Glaring so hot that Bucky feels it on the back of his neck without having to see it. It'd blind him, if he did. Staring straight into the sun and all that. Bucky likes warm days, likes warm sun, likes it so much that he forgets it's hot. “Leave me alone. Jesus.”
“No,” Bucky says. “Hey.” Steve walks, and Bucky follows. “Hey. Look at me.”
“Don’t wanna. Too ugly.”
“Well, you’ve got that face on your face and I still manage. What’s that make me, a saint?” Steve huffs, then slows just enough for Bucky to catch up. “I ain’t leavin’ you alone any time soon,” Bucky says, going to shove his hands in his pockets and finding only the one. He glares at the absence, feels that swoop in his stomach like his legs getting kicked out from under him, and wonders if it’ll ever stop. If he’ll ever stop being surprised by it. Hating it, and what it means. What it means is that he’s been inside the minds of all the bastards who beat up on Steve, that’s what it fucking means, and it coats his throat like mercury. He doesn’t want to understand them. To know where they’re coming from. To run his five fingers over the rough raw layers of scarring on the stump and feel their pain, too. They’ve got scars like his. Under the skin, maybe, sometimes, but scars all the same. Bucky knows. Bucky has seen them, on Dugan, on Monty, on Gabe and Jimmy and Jackie. On him, when he wakes up in the night, stock-still, unable to move, convinced he’s strapped to that table, with ice in his veins and a rubber guard between his teeth. He digs his fingers deeper into his pocket and finds the letter. He runs his thumbnail along the corner of the fold. “Alright? Did you hear me? Look at me, Steve, please, alright? Please.”
Finally, Steve does, squinting in the sun with this unimpressed look, and Bucky wants to pull him in, but he’s walking on the wrong side to touch, the wrong side, everything is always the wrong side, dammit.
“Buck,” Steve says, brow knitting. “You alright?”
“I can’t pull anyone off you anymore,” Bucky says, strained. “Alright? No, no I’m not fucking alright, because you’re walking around killing yourself and I’m over here like a fuckin’ planted beanpole, I’m just the schmuck on the sidelines—”
“Hey,” Steve says, and he bumps into Bucky, into the empty space, “alright, alright, calm down. I can handle myself, Barnes.”
“You—yeah, fine, you can, but what about when you can’t,” Bucky says. “Huh. What then. You—fuckin’ maniac.”
“I did it for two years, Buck,” Steve says. His lips twist. Bucky blinks and sees a green helmet cupping that pointed chin, hears his scrape-steps as if those are boots on his feet, Bucky blinks harder, desperate to see anything else, anything fucking else. He probes the corner of the letter over and over, a mother frantically patting the back of her snotty kid. “You missed a lot, alright? I know you don’t like not knowin’ everything, but you missed a lot, there’s a lot you didn’t see, and here we are and we’re both—we’re both still fine. So. You just worry about your damn self.”
“Never,” Bucky says. “How could I, with you using up all the worry in the whole city? Like a big old lightbulb. A mainline right to you, every worry is about you, Steve. Hey, don’t go picking fights with us zombies. They won’t… it’s different. It’s different, with us. The ones who came back are real different.”
“Different to fighting with the old hometown crowd?” Steve says.
Bucky’s head is all static. Kraut blood on his knuckles, he sees the ghost of it, it was three weeks before they found a river to wash it off in. The butt of his rifle cracking the young skull of some Italian kid who looked at Dugan wrong, a split pomegranate. He shuts his eyes, exhales hard, just can’t. “Yeah. Different.” He rubs his thumb on the letter fold again, frenetic, then pulls his hand out of his pocket. He doesn’t want to rip it up. “We won’t know when to stop,” Bucky says.
“Alright,” Steve says, forehead all wrinkled. “Buck, hey. Are you—?”
“Shut your trap,” Bucky says. “Just shut your trap, alright? Jesus. Let me walk you home.”
“Where the hell else would we be going together?” Steve tugs on Bucky’s belt loop. “Jerk.”
Steve must not be too angry, though—or maybe he just senses Bucky’s got his feet on the ground all crooked—because he listens when Bucky tells him to sit on the edge of the dining table, and he lets Bucky probe his stupid bruised rib, and he lets Bucky wipe blood off his chin, and sits silent like the moment before a shell cracks while Bucky squeezes his neck and leans their foreheads together and breathes that sweet shared air until his heart is a little calmer, until he thinks he might be able to pretend he’s feelin’ just skippy until Steve climbs into bed and starts snoring like one of those lawnmowers from the radio soaps, all happy family in the suburbs with a metal beast tearing up the grass.
Then Bucky can go out onto the fire escape, listen to the iron creak and cars stutter-start, and smoke his way through a pack until the city goes quiet, and his head goes quiet with it.
they're taking pictures of the man from God
I hope his cassock's clean
the burden of being our holy fellas
your halo'd better gleam, better gleam
“Bleh,” rasps Steve, sour as lemon pith, “I’m James Bucky Barnes and I read books and I’ve got nice bone structure and my lungs work so good it’s disgusting. You’re disgusting. Go choke on one. Jesus fuck.”
Bucky blinks. “So do you need a hankie or not.”
“Fuck you, Bucky.”
Bucky chokes back an irrational urge to ask Steve to say his name again. “You sure you don’t need one?” he tries. He’s got his elbow on the edge of the mattress, his chin cupped in his hand. It’s a miracle Steve hasn’t tried to knock him over yet. “All you gotta do is ask.”
“Jee-sus,” Steve says, eyebrows low on his forehead, casting shadows over his eyes. It’s three days Steve's been wearing ass-shaped divots into the mattress by now, hacking snot out of those lonely raisin lungs he's got. He’s usually snippy way sooner than this. The lack of bite is what worried Bucky enough to take off work today—a slapdash sorta gig he picked up with the grocer who's good about hiring Steve when money is tight. Clearly, he doesn’t mind cripples—but Bucky doesn’t want to take all the credit and say Steve’s feeling better just because he’s around. Steve would sock him, no matter how true it is. “Your momma sure didn’t raise you to be a quitter.”
“No, sir,” says Bucky. “Though she obviously raised me to be a right fool, or I woulda’ used my common sense and dropped you at the hospital to die of neglect. Good riddance.”
“Shit,” Steve says. “Guess she raised you without sympathy, too.”
“I ain’t never had sympathy for you, you punk.”
“Mm,” allows Steve. His next words sound thick, but Bucky doesn’t know if it’s from the phlegm actively attempting to mack on his uvula or some sort of rare and unidentifiable Steve Emotion. By that pointedly cool look on his face—Steve never could've been in the pictures—Bucky's vote is for Emotion. He feels himself going all hot in the face under Steve's earnest stare, the one that feels like embalming, like stiff limbs that last forever. “S’the only thing that makes sticking around your sorry ass bearable, and don't you forget it.”
“Ah,” Bucky says, a little proud, a little sheepish. Steve doesn’t say shit like that, so when he does…. Bucky knows how much Steve has always hated all that—nice words and looks of sympathy and soft touches. It’s why Bucky knocks him around so much. Why they tussle, why Bucky pushes him fierce enough to rattle his brain around in his skull. Because Steve can take it, and Bucky’s the only one who acknowledges that. Besides, Bucky gets it now. Feels it himself when Steve ties his shoelaces for him every morning. He can’t braid Becky and Cat and Chava’s hair anymore. Shaving is a damn event. Steve doesn’t treat Bucky like an invalid for it more than Bucky ever did him. They’re all roughed up, the two of em, a pair of old marble statues weathered by time and harsh touches, but they know each other’s chinks and foibles and can side-step them with grace while still treating the other about as delicately as they’d handle a sack of potatoes.
"Really. I'd drop you for one'a the Williams brothers down the street at first notice. If they didn't always try to carry my groceries for me."
A grin cracks onto Bucky's lips. He feels like he's caught in a ray of afternoon sun, spilled honey creeping across the kitchen table. “I’ll, uh, keep that in mind.”
Steve watches Bucky for a long moment, a languid look from Bucky's eyes to his nose to his jaw and then back up again. Affectionately calculative. An artist's look. Bucky knows it so well, knows it well enough that he looks at Steve's hand and sees it twitch into pencil-holding shape for just a second. Steve doesn't ask for his sketchbook, though. He grunts and closes his eyes. All he says is “You do that.”
Steve’s not delicate. He’s got callused hands like Bucky, though his are from pencils and Bucky’s are from a gun. His nose is all aquiline, or maybe just busted. His eyebrows are a natural disaster, he really ought to let Bucky fix those for him sometime; his lips are red and swollen from chewing on the skin; his knees are knobby and thickly scarred with tiny thighs and tiny shins jabbing like pretzel rods from either end. He’s not delicate. He’s just skinny. Bucky can’t say skinny ain’t ever killed nobody because the Depression hit the Rogers’s part of Brooklyn like an A-bomb, but Steve’s skinny isn’t the type to make him give up the ghoul, not anymore. He’s got constitution now. The constitution is made of pillow feathers stuck together with apricot jam, but that’s damn better than nothing: bird bones, slapdash angles, a vague impression of boyhood, a wisp, everything he was until Bucky left and blinked and came back and found this Steve, the one that might look dependably built in the right light. Like a rusty rake you might’ve had in your garage too long, but it still does the job. Always there when you need it. Feels sorta nice in your hands, all familiar and such. Like a pal. Like—like you kinda love it, just a little, because it’s been there, because it’ll keep on being there, for a dozen reasons and for none at all.
Steve’s pretty like this, too, with his hair dangling down his forehead and a splash of pink over his nose and cheekbones, hot under his wash of summer freckles. If Bucky plugs his ears to hide the wheezing, he might think Steve were Aurora waiting at the top of the tower, and Bucky is always ready to knock the king from that story, he’d relish taking a sword to that crumbly old heart, that’s for sure. Save the princess the right way. Well—save Steve the right way, anyhow. Bucky’s had his turn with a dozen princesses from all corners of Brooklyn—dames with curls and dames with straight hair, skin like ice and skin like ebony, loud laughs and little giggles and dames that dance and dames that won’t, coy ones and brave ones and ones that kiss him goodnight—but none of them keep him dreaming the way Steve does.
“Stop staring,” Steve says without opening his eyes. “You gowl.”
Bucky can’t help but smile. He leans over the edge of the bed, plopping his head by Steve’s nearer thigh, hand curled by his chin. “Sure, Stevie,” he says. “Anything for you.”
He probably deserves the knee to the nose he takes in response.
the last [regret] I'll tell you now
as it flies down the sink
I never knew a part of you
you didn't set in ink, in ink
“Come on, Carter,” Bucky says. “Gimme’ a break. Please.”
“You,” she says, and her knuckles are white around her pen, “are not finished, Sergeant.”
“Don’t, don't call me that,” Bucky says, eyes closing. Last night, it took three hours of tossing around on the ricotta-soft mattress for him to knock out, and once he finally did, he couldn’t see shit in the dream. All fucking dark, as if that maniac blinded him, just sound, just the buzz like the shocker was charging up but no shock, anticlimax, suspension and no release. Just “Try not to tense yourself, Sergeant, or ze bolt will hurt worse!” Just his stomach aching. Just the memory of bile in his throat and piss on his leg and a whole lot of hell, hell isn’t fire, it’s the raw tongue of a cut wire, and that’s for damn certain. He laid there staring at the ceiling for the rest of the night, watching the sheets rise and fall over Steve’s back like the crest of a tide lapping at Bucky’s jetty.
“What shall I call you, then?” Peggy says. Her legs are crossed, one over the other. They’ve got sandwiches on the table, and she’s eating both of their pickles. How she can stomach it while they talk about this shit, he doesn’t know. Nerves of steel, that’s their girl. That Angie sure is one lucky kid, to have her. “James?”
“Bucky,” he says. The only people who call him Bucky are the ones who know him in this city, and Peg is part of that crowd, now. She’s in. She’s a little uptown, a little Howard Stark, but she’s New York because she’s tough, and because Bucky is still obligated to trek all across the fucking city to her fucking office weekly until she thinks she’s got the whole fucking story. “Call me Bucky.”
“Bucky,” she repeats, like it’s something dirty. Not a swear—she doesn’t mind those—but maybe diarrhea. Even the iron lady would find that worthy of turning her nose up at. “Bucky.”
“Don’t wear it out too quick. S’gotta last me another couple years, at least.”
She sighs, then drops her chin in her hand. Her curls sit perfect at the edge of that square jaw of hers. “You really are wasting my time, you know.”
“Sorry,” he says, though he isn’t.
She’s unimpressed. “You’ll be able to leave, if you talk about it properly. Just this once, be honest.”
Bucky leans back in his chair, hand resting on his thigh. “Got nothing to give you, Agent Carter.”
“You have no explanation as to why you survived intensive electroshock therapy while your body was in an already devastated state,” Peggy says.
Bucky shrugs his good shoulder. The bad one feels heavy, today. Like the weight of the fact that he hasn’t told her about all those injections Zola stuck him with is sitting right on top of it. Making him crooked.
Whatever. He’s already been drafted into a war he didn’t want. He doesn’t fucking want to become lab rat again on top of it. He’s fine. Sometimes things are sharp and bright like some sorta intense camera focus, like lens flares, or the couch feels a little too light, he's started to think he could lift Steve's whole body with his one hand, and he’s fine, because he’s alive, and that’s all that matters.
He’d do almost anything for her. Almost, almost, but not this. He won't open these doors, not even for Peg. Not now that he's free and miraculous and home. He's not risking that for shit.
“Bucky,” she says, business. “Please. Imagine this is off the record, then. This is just for me. This is a pair of friends talking about an experience one of them had. Is there anything that—that gave you strength? Something to live for?”
And, really, what’s he supposed to say to that? That he was so fucking hardheaded, so desperate to get home to Steve that he survived the death camp? That he smelled the bodies burning but love made him lucky? That he swore, he swore in the midst of the fever hallucinations that if he made it out of the hospital with his life, if not his arm, he’d have to tell Steve he wants that kiss he promised in the letter? Because he could not die without telling Steve Rogers he’d been loved from Bucky’s eyeteeth to his knuckles to the weak waver of his ankles when Steve’s laugh is echoing near the washtub? Without smelling their shared soap on Steve’s neck one more time? Love conquers all? A kiss cancels out the fact that Bucky’s a fucking killer, and a fucking good one, too? Because that would be wrong, and—disgusting, and degrading, and Bucky loves Steve, and Bucky also fucking loves Steve, he loves him like a lung and a limb and like bed after a long day and like warmth in his cheeks and a pull in his gut and—fucking hell. Love doesn’t keep you alive. If it did, there’d be a hundred soldiers climbing out of their caskets by the minute. There’d be no stories, no myths, they’d all live forfuckingever.
“Okay,” Peg says, and she closes her notepad. “I suppose we’ll try again next week.”
what of all those wayward priests?
the ones who like to drink
do you suppose they'd swap their blood for wine
like you swapped yours for ink, for ink
Bucky wakes up, sometimes, with this ferocious pain in his shoulder, like it’s being pulled fresh off again, like he missed the last time he’ll ever hold something in his own fucking hand. How fitting that it had been a gun that real last time. Like Beelzebub coming for the hulking Grim Reaper, saying gotcha, fucker, comeuppance is sugar-sweet.
So he goes to his parents’ house. To see the girls, to ask Becky about that egghead that spotted her from across the Nickelodeon and has been courting her like a princess ever since, to help Cat with her math homework, to remind Chava spinach is re-e-eal delicious, come on kid, one more bite.
Sometimes being around all of them makes him tired, these days. Not because they’re tiring, God, Bucky loves them so bad it makes him sick, but because noise and talking and—and bodies, and being touched, it’s all hard. It’s all hard.
His ma holds his hand. Hers are laundry-chapped, yeast-dry, and so proud. “How have things been?” she says. “You’re still working?”
“Yeah, Ma,” Bucky says, wanting to push his hair out of his eyes, unbearably frustrated over the fact that he can’t. “Mister Lopez is near an angel. Wouldn’t be surprised if he pulled off the little green apron and wings came shooting out his back.”
Ma cuffs him around the head a little for that one, but there’s a smile in her eyes. She looks at him like she’s glad, these days. He likes it when she’s glad.
Sarah would’ve boxed his ears for being smart at her kitchen table, but Bucky likes to think she’d have been glad to see him, too.
“He’s paying enough?” Ma says, sudden, like that was her question all along and biting it back was a hopeless fucking endeavor. “Because I know how tight it gets, with Steve’s medicine—”
“The pension’s coming through alright,” Bucky says, “and Steve can work inside in the summertime. They’ve got lots of ice for the produce, you know. He says it keeps the shop cold.” They both know Steve’s full of shit, but they can pretend. Steve comes home breathing almost okay some days, and some days he comes home wheezing, and that’s that. Come August, when the schools open back up, he’ll be back in the charcoal dust and dry clay and canvas, and it’ll be anyone’s guess how he’ll survive it, but that type of battle is so familiar it makes Bucky melt. He’d get down on his knees for it, he can fight that one good, because it’s the good fight, that’s the war etched into his bone marrow and sorry sinew. “If things get any tighter than what's comfortable—” and they’re comfortable with tight, they’ve survived on less than what they’ve got now and neither of em would bat an eye before getting geared up for it again if they had to, they know what’s to be done and they know how to do it, “—I’ll sell papers. Put on my old pinks and greens and stand on the corner with my voice all rough, making that one face—” he furrows his brows and makes his eyes real big and desperate, “—and swing my empty sleeve around a little, please, miss, buy a pape’ from a guy down bad.” Ma’s laughing again. “I could sell anything and you know it. I’m irresistible.”
“Of course you are,” she says. “You’re mine, aren’t you?” She lifts his hand to her lips and kisses the knuckles. “My brave boy.”
“Aw, don’t do that,” he says, flipping his hand to knot their fingers together. “No mushy. Alright?”
“Alright,” she says, smiling, smiling, looking at him like he’s a miracle for so long that he wants to crawl out of his stupid skin and hike to Gehenna.
Bucky stands with a grunt. “Where’d Chava end up? I gotta check if she finished her lunch.” He says the last loudly, and he hears her giggle in response, which is exactly why he’d done it. “I’m comin’ for ya’, missy, and I better find that plate shining like the sun!”
the letters that you left behind
no longer shall I read
your blood's between the pages
and I can't stand to see you bleed
September sweeps the city with her silver breath and the scent of baked asphalt hovering, a heady and familiar perfume. The whole town seems tired, seems ready for a nap, heavy and languid like milky chamomile. Kids are heading back to school, tall socks and short pants, and parents are wiping their brows with relief. Becky guesses she’ll be engaged any day now. Bucky met the egg himself at the end of August, on a trip to Coney Island Da had been saving for in secret since he heard Bucky was coming home, the sentimental bastard, and he’s not half bad. He looks at Becks like she’s a moon girl, the prettiest light in the sky, so he can’t be too stupid. And it makes Bucky glad to know she’ll have money. Not that they need money, not really, the Barneses have been damn lucky to never quite be without, they’ve toed the line so good and so long they’re well-seasoned and decorated, but he likes imagining her not worrying. They’ve got it good, these days, all of them. Bucky won’t let himself forget that, not for a minute, they’ve got it so, so good.
Steve’s got his real job back up. Teaching art at Brooklyn College. No stacking cans of beans, no sticking price tags on slabs of meat they could never afford for themselves, no pocketing rotten mushrooms for Bucky to mutilate and stew broth with. He shaves Bucky's face in the morning, all rough tilt and the scrape of the straight razor against scruff, tender in the way they've always been tender—i.e. it is war in the margins and alleys of this place—then rolls his sleeves down and goes marching to the train stop. Bucky could sock him, he’s so proud. It’s everything he’s always wanted: making things with his hands, access to lots of charcoal and paper and all the fancy fixings, co-workers who turn a blind eye when he pockets a pencil or two. Steady income and therefore a steady supply of asthma cigarettes.
And it’s a damn good excuse for them to finally put out and buy the glasses Steve’s always needed. Bucky’s got his pension and he’s stacking the damn bean cans, and Steve’s astigmatism sure doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon.
The ones they’ve chosen—they, yes, they, both of them, because Bucky is planting all the idea seeds and letting Steve pretend he’s pulled up the plans like potatoes all by himself, because Steve’s taste is horrendous and this moment has Bucky feeling distinctly fuckin’ alive, alive enough that he cares about the way Steve looks again, like he’s fancying him up for a night bar-hopping, like he hasn’t done since—anyway—the frames are rounded, thin-rimmed in gold, and Bucky just. He wants to knock himself on the nose, he wants to brain himself, because he wants to slip them off of Steve so he can give him a real good kiss without smudging his nose all over the shiny lenses. He wants to hold Steve’s face with his one good palm, to thumb that cheekbone and poke at the shadow-bags under Steve’s eyes and hold him in place for long enough to suck on that lower lip, that soft curl of a thing, the nicest place in the world. Steve probably tastes like broth, he probably tastes fucking stupid, and Bucky wants to lap it up, God help him.
“You look so fuckin’ distinguished!” Bucky says, and the doctor glares at them, and Steve hushes him, waving his arms wildly, which feels like bragging, Bucky thinks a little hysterically.
“Watch your mouth, are you fucking crazy,” Steve hisses. “There’s girls in here, be polite.”
Ignoring the hypocrisy, not bothering to give Steve’s worn-through shoe soles and crooked shirt an up-and-down, Bucky snorts, still mooning, everything is Steve. “Alright, Madame Librarian.”
“Shut up.”
“S’that your night job? You moonlight at the little desk with your little glasses and—and a little pen, and you write down all the numbers?” Now, hold on. This was supposed to be funny. This was supposed to be funny, and Steve is giving him a nice big eye roll, but Bucky sorta has butterflies thinking about it. He shakes his head to knock them around. God, he feels—light, he feels so good, look at Steve. “Anyway.” Steve is staring at him funny. “What? What’s the face on your face?”
“Have you really always looked like that?” Steve says, and Bucky bursts into laughter so loud they have to leave the optometrist’s, oozing apologies as they pour out onto the sidewalk, Bucky hunched over at the waist, holding his side, and Steve glaring at him through those crystal-cut eyes, behind his new glasses that catch the sunlight all over, it’s hot like hell out and Bucky feels good today. “Jee-sus, to think I used to believe it when people called you a looker. The only thing you look like is if roadkill stumbled into Macy’s and got lost in the wilderness of zoot suits.”
Bucky claps his hand on the back of Steve’s neck, smiling so big, so big. “Pal,” he says. His thumb skims Steve’s purple veins, right near his pulse-spot, and Steve leans into it, squinting at him through one eye, light like honey on his lashes. “Pal, believe me. I only ever tidied up ‘cuz I had to. Nobody woulda’ given me the time of day otherwise.”
“That's what you think, casanova,” Steve says. His eyes are traced on Bucky’s—lips? “This has always been there?”
“What, my big mouth?” Bucky says, but then Steve pokes his chin dimple, sorta nice and gentle, right here in the middle of the street, and it feels so personal Bucky could scream. “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, that’s—been there.”
“Mm,” Steve says again. He shakes his head. “Yeah. You’re weird.” And then he walks away, and Bucky follows, still laughing like hell, God, this kid, this city, this day, he could kill himself for ever thinking he wanted to die on that table, in that hospital bed with the infection and the fever and the vomiting and all of it, he reaches deep in his pocket and fingers the letter and thinks soon soon soon, he could just die because now he’s got this, and he woulda missed it all if he’d kicked it then. All of it. And, God, God, this kid, this city, this day. Life is alright.
and I'll soon forget what was never there
your words are ash and dust
all that's left is the song I've sung
the breath I've taken and the one I must
“Quit it!” Bucky yells, “Jesus, Steve, Jesus, how many times do we have to talk about this? Put it down, I’ll get it,” he shoves Steve aside, grabs the mattress, and yanks, sweat dripping down his temples, sweat on his neck, at the well of his back, it’s hot as hell, this September is a fucking killer, and Steve is wheezing, hunched over his knees on the hardwood, hammering on his chest, idiot, idiot, trying to move the mattress out onto the fire escape alone, never mind the air, fuck him, fucking hell, “Steve, what do I tell you, huh? I do it. I do it. Don’t be fucking stupid, Steve, don’t, not when I’m right here, huh? You see me, Steve? You see me? I’m right here. I’ll do it.”
Steve’s back is jumping, but the wheezing has passed. Bucky kneels down in front of him, lifts his chin, and finds he’s crying.
“What?” Bucky yelps. “What? What?”
Steve blubbers, “You’re here.” He gasps, coughs, chokes on a fat gob of snot. “You’re here and alive and—and mad at me.”
Bucky melts like he’s been left in the sun too long, like the heat has gotten to him, like he loves Steve, like he’s the one who’s sick. “Aw, you palooka,” he says. “You dumbass kid.” He needs to do something with his hand, to scoop Steve up and press the tears back into his eyeballs or something, to hold him like a palmful of water and drink him down to the cool pit of his stomach where he can fucking relax a minute. “Come here. Alright, Stevie, come here.”
He collects Steve like loose laundry and bundles him to his chest. It’s the worst feeling, not having enough arms to wrap one around Steve’s little waist and keep one on the back of his head like he’d always done before, but it’s the best feeling too, it’s so warm, they’re both schvitzing like hell, happy fucking September, things fall in September, Bucky, on the other hand, is caught.
“Did you even read it?” Steve says, nose pressed into Bucky’s good shoulder. “Or did you pretend.”
Bucky knows immediately what he means. “Yeah, pal,” he says. “I did.” Recited it to himself in his hospital bed like a fuckin’ litany, when the doctors were gone and he was sinking into the lonely so bad he despicably missed Zola’s prattling, he thought of Steve’s letter, of ten sentences, of how Steve would’ve sounded if he said them aloud, probably all stubborn and vitriolic, red in the face, he’d be so stupid about it, he’s so stupid about feeling things, but Bucky feels enough for them both and he’s better at saying it, too, current example aside.
“Why didn’t you—” Steve says. “Why didn’t you say anything, then.”
“‘Cuz I got my arm blown off,” Bucky says, “and then I came back home to you. Right home, right to you. And—and… I didn’t think—”
“If you’re about to say you didn’t think I meant it,” Steve says, grabbing two handfuls of Bucky’s shirt and shaking him like hell, “I’ll fuckin’ kill you, I’ll kick your ass, I’ll eat you—”
“Eat me,” Bucky repeats. There is this feeling in his chest like sunrise. He catches Steve’s cheek in his palm, and Steve leans right into it, hell, hell, Bucky’s got this pull in his chest, this tide-change-tug, he needs to—he needs to run an augur’s blade down his chest and let Steve sort through the stones, let Steve see his name is written on every one. “You’ll eat me. You said it yourself, kid: not much meat left on these bones.” Bucky huffs, thick, his throat is going tight. This is real. Steve in his hand. What the hell is one supposed to think when they're getting everything they've ever wanted in one fell swoop? “Not much of anything left here, on the bones, off of ‘em, anywhere.”
“You’re you,” Steve says. “You’re still you, alright? You’re still—mine.”
“Yours,” Bucky says. Steve makes a little noise. His eyes are so wide, raw red like he's been rubbing them too hard. “Stevie,” Bucky says. His thumb skims Steve’s cheekbone, the freckles, the warm curve of the best face he knows.
“You really read it?” Steve says. “Really, really? Start to end?”
“Start to end,” Bucky confirms. Steve makes that noise again. Bucky wants to mouth up the length of his neck, find his lips, and swallow it. “You’re not kidding with me, are you?” Bucky says, looking, looking, clear-blue eye to clear-blue eye, glasses and nose and—and lips like a knife gash, pink and sweet and pretty.
“The day I stop kidding with you,” Steve says with that mouth, that mouth, “is the day you oughta look at the sky for winged bacon, pal.”
And then he takes Bucky’s face between his cold-tipped hands like it’s porcelain, like it’s good, like he’s worth holding, and kisses him absolutely fucking stupid. It’s teeth, it’s tongue, it’s Steve’s sweat and Bucky’s tears and both of em both of em have always been all salt. Bucky’s got his arm round Steve so tight that they’re pushed chest to chest, that Bucky can’t even feel the hardwood under his knees no more, that there’s only Steve’s skin and his little undershirt all wrinkled in Bucky’s fist, Steve kisses like hell, like war, like he was born to fight and Bucky is so glad for it, Bucky is so mad for it, it’s good.
When Steve pulls back, it’s to cough. Loose, limp. He clears his throat. Chuckles. Shoves his face in Bucky’s neck like he’s shy, God, he’s unbearable.
“Well,” Bucky says, lightheaded, “that was nice.”
“What, sharing spit?” Steve says.
“You asshole,” Bucky says, and then, “kiss me again,” and, God, God. Does Steve ever.
if you're born with a love for the wrote and the writ
people of letters your warning stands clear
pay heed to your heart and not to your wit
don't say in a letter what you can't in my ear
3 January, 1945
James Buchanan Barnes
The fuckin US Army
Some wet forest, probably
Italy? Germany? France? England? Hades?
Dear Buck,
I’ve been thinking about you night and day.
Apartment is empty without you.
The Marinellis say hi
Chava and I started a garden in your ma’s yard
I drew this sketch for some schmuck’s shop window last week and it reminded me of you because it was stupid and ugly and
I see you everywhere
I want
I keep reading your books to see what you saw in them
I haven’t washed your fucking pillowcase
Squash was on sale this week. Condensed milk, too
I don’t know how to do this without
Come home, will you? I miss you like hell. Got nothing else to say. Nothing else worth saying. I’ve got no brains without you around. No heart, neither. You’ve got em both on you, along w all my stupid.
Would kiss the letter for you to keep a little loving in yr pocket, but I aint asking yr sisters to borrow no lipstick. They’d never let me live it down.
Come home.
Love,
S.G.R.