Chapter Text
The last thing Steve does before the quantum leap (that Bucky knows he has abso-fucking-lutely no plans to come back from) is hole up by himself and go through Natasha’s stuff. Logically, it makes a lot more sense for someone a little less emotionally invested to do that, but Steve fucking loves him some self-flagellation, so Bucky doesn’t even try to stop him.
The same way he lets him get up on that platform and disappear without a fight.
Bruce is counting down. “Three… two… one…”
Bucky wonders fleetingly if Steve would have stayed if Natasha were still here, but there’s no point in asking. He blinks, and everything has changed once again.
They talked about this last night, he and Steve. In a roundabout sort of way. Steve never exactly said he was staying in the past, but there was a lot of talk about how done he feels with hero work, how he wants a calm, domestic life. Bucky gets it, he totally does. It’s not that.
It’s frustrating in a way he can’t describe that Steve doesn’t think he can have that in the modern world, but it’s not Bucky’s decision to make. And frankly, Bucky knows better than to try and make Steve Rogers change his mind once he’s made it up.
“You could come with me, you know,” Steve had said, eyes darting sideways to look at him, and that’s when Bucky knew that taking the stones back was a one-way ticket. Steve doesn’t say how much he wants Bucky to tag along, but he doesn’t have to. Bucky knows.
And it’s not that Bucky is averse to the idea of living out the rest of his life hanging out with Steve. They’ve had so little time together here; it feels cosmically unfair. There would be comfort in seeing the streets of Brooklyn again, too, and his sister. Where Steve’s going, she’ll be teaching her first year of middle school science. She’ll change hundreds of lives, inspire many future biologists and doctors.
But Bucky turns Steve down without hesitating. He’d give a lot to hug his sister one last time, but watching her die of breast cancer in 1978 might be too high a price to pay. Leaving the present would also mean abandoning any chance of Bucky himself having a normal life.
Bucky can begrudgingly admit that Peggy Carter might actually be Steve’s best shot at normalcy, but the 40s don’t have much to offer for someone like Bucky, who has crippling PTSD and a vibranium arm that needs to be upgraded every year, by a specific person who wasn’t born until 1998. Also, his sexuality was still considered a disease back then, so.
And the present has Sam.
Sam, who Bucky hasn’t spoken more than ten words to without it turning into an argument, but who he loves nonetheless. Sam landed in Wakanda with everybody else two-days-slash-five-years ago, Bucky caught a glimpse of him over Steve’s shoulder as they hugged and he just—
He knew. Like a south magnet senses a north magnet and knows exactly where it’s headed. The clarity in his mind that he’d worked so hard on developing during his time in Wakanda had narrowed its focus into one shining point, and Bucky knew with an unwavering certainty that everything going forward would be moving inexorably towards Sam.
Every second he spent with Sam leading up to that final battle only further cemented his surety.
Bucky had seen him, and then he had said, “Hey, Wilson,” in a tone of voice that he wasn’t aware he could pull off anymore. Hovering somewhere between friendly and a come-on. How he used to talk to guys in bars he was maybe looking to go home with, before he’d finished sizing up whether or not they seemed game.
Sam had just glared at him and said, “That new arm is badass, and you smell a little better than you used to, but don’t start thinking you’re hot shit now or anything,” and Bucky had felt like fucking singing.
And okay, maybe this whole Sam thing is a little bit of an extreme reaction—probably because of the trauma or whatever—but Bucky is not about to let go of the best, brightest feeling he’s had in decades. He wants Sam. He wants to be with Sam, in whatever way Sam will have him.
Sam may not love Bucky—or even particularly like him—but he could probably use his help, because Steve is going to offer the shield to Sam tomorrow. Sam will accept, because he is the only person in the universe deserving of the honor, and he has that same self-sacrificing streak that always drove Bucky crazy about Steve. Although he’ll never ask for it, Sam could probably use some assistance navigating his new job. Who better to offer that than the old Captain America’s best guy?
So Bucky stays, and he feels right.
Bruce is a shaking mess as they walk back to the car, muttering gibberish about timelines and radiation that Bucky doesn’t understand a word of. Sam is silently carrying the shield, looking very dazed, but no less beautiful than he always does. For the first time in many, many years, Bucky is the one with his shit together. Guess he’s driving, then.
“Let’s put that in the back,” he tells Sam, gesturing toward the shield and unlocking the car with the key fob.
Which is when Bucky discovers there’s a cardboard box waiting for them in the trunk. “From Natasha” is written large on the top, in Steve’s handwriting. It’s full of alphabetized manilla envelopes, also labeled by Steve. Among others, they are: Barnes, James. Barton, Clinton, Laura & Kids. Hill, Maria. Maximoff, Wanda. Parker, May & Peter. Wilson, Samuel. Some are thicker than others. Bucky’s is one of the slimmest. Clint’s is positively stuffed; it’s so full that the flap on the front won’t even reach the brad closure on the back. Sam’s is somewhere in the middle.
Bucky sighs. He’s gonna have to deliver all this shit, isn’t he? Bruce squeezes into the back, and Bucky gets into the drivers’ seat. Sam sits beside him, and away they go.
*****
Bucky didn’t know Natasha very well, but it kind of feels like he did. She was nice to him, way nicer than he felt like he deserved at the time, and if anyone understood what it’s like to be brainwashed into being an assassin, well… He doesn’t think he could handle a goodbye letter from one of the few people he was actually excited to say hello to again.
Mercifully, there isn’t one. The only things in the envelope are legal papers and a set of brass keys. He reads through the papers.
They contain details of a bank account with a modest sum tucked away in savings, and a lease to a studio apartment on Riverside, in Natasha’s name. He’s not sure how she did it, but despite the fact that he did not physically exist at the time it was rented, Bucky is the co-signer. She had a home ready and waiting for him. Because she believed he was coming back.
This actually might be worse than a note. He’s supremely regretting not doing this in private because, even though he understands in theory that it’s okay to cry in front of people, he has trouble on the follow through with that one. Next to him, Sam takes in a great big sniffle.
“Goddamn,” he breathes out, shaky as hell. Bucky narrowly resists the urge to hug him.
“She get you a place too?” he asks, voice much wobblier than he’d like it to be.
“Uh huh,” says Sam, biting the inside of his cheek. “In D.C.”
Okay, well that’s not gonna work.
Sam sighs, still shaky. He pulls out a set of silver keys and flips the page he’s reading. “Near my parents’ house. It’s a two bedroom, too. Don’t know who she thought I’d be taking with me.”
“Want me to come?” Bucky asks, before he can stop himself.
That get’s Sam’s attention. “What?”
Shit shit shit. “I…”
Love you? Want to live with you because I’m in love with you?
“You’re gonna need some help, right?” Bucky asks. “Learning how to use the shield.”
Wrong thing to say. Sam frowns. “I think I can figure out how to throw a giant frisbee by myself,” he says, a little icy.
“No, I know,” says Bucky. “I just mean, while you’re learning to get it to ricochet right. It’s a pain in the ass to keep runnin’ after it every time you throw it.”
Sam just stares at him.
“That’s what I did with Steve,” Bucky continues, because now that he’s digging his own grave he can’t stop, “we’d just find like a big clearing nobody was bombing for a few minutes, and he’d throw it and I’d run and get it, bring it back.”
Silence, for a few terrifying seconds. Then Sam speaks, staring at Bucky with utmost suspicion.
“So just to be clear,” he says, grabbing the lease out of Bucky’s hand and skimming, “you’re turning down that…” —he raises his eyebrows— ”Upper West Side apartment to go play fetch with me in a field in Dulles, Virginia.”
“Yeah, I am,” says Bucky, trying not to sound as enthusiastic about it as he feels. Please, Sam, please…
“Are you secretly a golden retriever?” Sam asks. “Cause that would also explain why Steve goes all John Wick every time you’re in danger.”
“Who’s John Wick?”
“I… Nevermind,” says Sam, closing his eyes. “Okay. Yeah. Fine.”
Fuck yes.
“But just to be clear,” Sam continues, pointing, “I’m not gonna be in charge of your exercise, feeding you, making sure you have enriching toys or whatever. This is strictly a roommate situation. I’m not Steve; I’m not gonna be babysitting you. Deal?”
“Yeah. Deal.”
*****
“Harder!”
“It won’t go any further!”
“Yes it will! You got a vibranium arm; use it!”
“I’m not gonna use the vibra—you want me to break it?”
Bucky has survived: being captured and tortured by Nazis, falling from a train, being captured and tortured again, decades of HYDRA brainwashing, years hiding from Steve, Sam, and the governments of several major world powers, and the actual apocalypse, only for his downfall to be...trying to put together a bed frame with Sam.
In Bucky’s defense, furniture assembly is not a skill he’s had much practice honing. Most of what he had growing up was secondhand, and moving from one off-the-grid location to another for the two years he’d been living on his own didn’t leave a lot of opportunities to peruse IKEA. Those were always pretty much mattress-on-the-floor situations. His place in Wakanda, on the other hand, came fully furnished.
So Sam has mostly taken the lead on this project. Bucky’s job is simply to do what he says.
“Are you sure it’s the right piece?” Bucky grits out. He’s this close to punching a hole through the fucking headboard, and it’s only partially because it won’t fit into the goddamn side part.
The other reason is that it’s hot today, and they’ve been working on moving in for the whole morning, which has left a fine sheen of sweat all over Sam’s gorgeous face and neck. Bucky is having trouble focusing on literally anything other than the way Sam’s shirt sticks to his chest, and it’s affecting his ability to screw pieces of wood together.
“I mean,” Sam glances over at the booklet of instructions. “It says it right here. B7 slots into—” Sam pauses, squinting. “You know what, you’ve got that J piece upside-down. I think that’s why it’s not flush.”
Bucky looks at the slab of wood in his hand and realizes Sam is correct. He grunts and turns it around, and it slides in smooth as butter.
“Told you,” says Sam, neglecting to mention that his original advice on this step would have ended up in another trip to the admittedly charming mom-and-pop furniture store they got this from. He wipes his sweaty forehead on the sleeve of his gray shirt. God. “Go grab me another flat-head screwdriver, would you? This one’s too big.”
It’s another two hours before Sam decides to call it quits for the day. The living room currently consists of a couch—a fantastic couch, red and cozy, that was their unanimous first choice—surrounded by dozens of boxes. Everything in the boxes technically belongs to Sam, because Natasha apparently went to his old place, carefully packed everything up, and kept it perfectly preserved in a storage unit. She labeled everything too; Guest Bedroom, Kitchen, Hall Closet… He and Bucky had stood there collecting themselves in front of the unit for several minutes before emptying it into a rented U-Haul.
Bucky had driven the U-Haul, following behind Sam in his red Camry, which Natasha had stored in a nearby garage. She must have paid someone to come out and check on it, turn it on every few months, because the battery isn’t even dead. Or maybe she did it herself. Bucky wishes he could ask her.
It just stings. Natasha’s handwriting on the boxes still gives Bucky a pang in his heart every time he looks at it.
They also have some big plastic bags full of stuff from last night’s trip to a humongous store called Target, which is a place that seems to sell literally everything. Bucky is sort of familiar with department stores; he’d gone to see the new Sears, Roebuck and Co. building as a kid when it first opened, and a couple times after that. Never had enough money to actually buy anything, of course, but he remembers being dazzled by the experience. Even so, Target is a lot.
When Bucky caught sight of the logo, he’d said, “Hey, you think Clint shops here?”
Sam had been scanning the parking lot for a stray cart, since there weren’t any available at the front of the store. “Clint’s a dad, Bucky, I know he shops here. Why do you ask?”
And then a pause.
“Oh, because—” Sam had turned to him, “Aw, I see, I see. The Winter Soldier is making jokes now, huh?”
It had been absolutely packed, which makes sense given that the number of people needing things has suddenly doubled, but they’d managed to pick up enough essentials to get by. Toiletries, some food, less conspicuous clothes for Bucky because tragically, the US has yet to pick up on the latest Wakandan fashion trends. Bucky hopes they’ll get there at some point though. Those wraps and tunics are really comfortable.
Sam explained to him earlier that it’s a good idea not to unpack all the way before they paint, because it will be easier to just move the boxes around from room to room as they go. But painting the apartment is going to take at least a few days, and they have to have somewhere to sit and sleep in the meantime.
The T.V. is plugged in and propped up against the fireplace. Mounting it to the wall is on the agenda for tomorrow, but Bucky’s not even willing to wait until then to indulge in the pleasure of having sports on in the background and not really watching them.
Sam finishes screwing a drawer pull onto the end table and stands up, stretching his arms above his head. His back makes an incredibly satisfying-sounding series of pops as his shirt rides right up his stomach, showing the v-cut of his hips. Bucky sits down hard on the couch to avoid swooning like a Victorian maiden.
“Shower time,” Sam declares, swooping back down to rummage through a box labeled Sam’s Bathroom, and emerging with an armful of towels. He grabs some soap from one of their Target bags before turning down the hallway and into his bedroom suite.
Bucky locates the T.V. remote in one of the boxes and turns it on. He finds a rerun of a Mets game from 2019 to barely listen to, drops the remote into his lap, and snuggles down into the cushions. Relaxing, really concentrating on doing nothing at all, is something he never got the hang of before Wakanda. It’s a real, legitimate skill, as it turns out, and Bucky has gotten damn good at it.
Even back in pre-war New York, which was definitely the best era of the unending misery that was his life before Wakanda, he was worried all the time about his family, and Steve, and money, and Steve, and work, and Steve, and the war, and Steve. He doesn’t remember ever unclenching his jaw in between 1929 and 2016, but now he checks in with himself regularly, reminds himself to loosen up, starting with his toes and going all the way up to his forehead.
Though he’s never seen this particular game before, watching baseball has a familiar and calming feel to it. It’s not even close; the Reds are getting clobbered. Bucky has a passing thought about how much this pitcher looks like Steve’s buddy Thor, who is apparently a literal Norse god and in league with the talking raccoon who keeps trying to steal his arm. Bucky doesn’t know anything about that nonsense, but he figures Rhodey or someone will fill him in if it becomes relevant. For now, he rotates his ankles in little circles before moving on to swinging his knees back and forth.
He’s gotten as far as his shoulders when there’s the sound of a door opening behind him, and Sam comes sweeping back into the room wearing nothing but a dark blue towel around his waist.
Bucky can only hope Sam didn’t hear the little noise that came from the back of his throat without his permission.
“Forgot my razor,” says Sam, and he bends over to rummage through the Bathroom box, which, Bucky notices a little belatedly, puts Sam’s mostly nude body perilously close to Bucky’s face. Bucky tries to take a deep breath, but just ends up inhaling a big ol’ whiff of man.
Jesus fucking Christ.
It feels swelteringly hot, somehow even hotter than it did at midday when they were hauling furniture into the house. Bucky is warm all over, particularly in the middle. Like there’s blood rushing away from his hand and feet, which is weird. His heart rate is noticeably faster than it was a minute ago. Is he dying? He’s having a hard time looking past the shifting muscles of Sam’s naked back as he roots around in the box, trying to focus on...um, this batter or whoever, who is arguing with the umpire.
There can’t possibly be that much stuff in the box, but it takes Sam approximately ten years to locate his razor. Once he does, he stands up, and Bucky thanks whatever god is out there—Thor, maybe—that Sam is about to leave the room. He’s not even entirely able to put his finger on why he needs Sam to leave, just that he does. Urgently.
But Sam doesn’t leave. He takes a couple of steps, turns back around, and stares at the T.V., hands on his hips. He cocks his head to the side, which would be adorable if Bucky didn’t feel seconds away from imploding.
“You think it’s gonna be too high above the mantle?” Sam asks. Bucky’s eyes are refusing to listen to his brain, and have instead followed Sam, choosing to focus on his incredible pectorals. Like, god damn. It should be illegal to look as good as Sam does right now.
Bucky is having a crisis. Luckily, Sam appears wholly fixated on the T.V.
“Nah,” says Bucky, who has barely registered the question and hopes that a negative answer is the one that will require the least amount of discussion.
“We’ll test it out later,” Sam says. “You can hold it up and I’ll take a look. I don’t want it so high that your neck starts hurting if you watch too long, you know?”
“Yep,” croaks Bucky. “Mmhmm.” His mouth is completely dry, unlike Sam’s abs, which still look a little sweaty.
“Cool,” says Sam, apparently done torturing Bucky for the time being. He and his abs disappear back into the bathroom, where, Bucky’s brain helpfully reminds him, Sam will presumably be soaping them up under running water.
He needs a second of quiet to get back on track, so he reaches for the remote to mute the game. Except that as he does, his forearm brushes against something unexpected and he almost jumps out of his fucking skin at the shock.
He looks down at his lap because what the fuck is—oh my god.
The something is his dick, which is pointing upward, making a ridiculous-looking tent in Bucky’s sweatpants. Because it is hard.
Bucky just stares at it. The warmth, his heartbeat pounding in his ears, this all fits together. He’s turned on—not just mentally, but physically too, which is something that hasn’t happened since… he’s not even sure when. Sometime during the winter of 1943 is his best guess.
If memory serves, there was a fairly standard course of action he used to take when his dick did this back in the day. It involved a locked bedroom or bathroom, his hand, and something slippery. Vaseline, that’s what he used to use.
Right, right. It’s all coming back to him.
Technically... he could try it. Sam is busy being extremely sexy, probably, in the shower, and Bucky does have his own bedroom and en suite bathroom now. It’s a little sparse at the moment, but it has a mattress on a bed frame, which is more than he can say for half the places he stayed in while he was on the run. He could lay out the old sheets from Sam’s guest room, get comfortable. Pull down his sweatpants and boxers...
Right now though, that sounds really daunting. He’s afraid to even touch it, like it’ll disappear in a puff of smoke if he so much as tries to adjust himself. What if he does try it, and what if it doesn’t work? Now he knows he can get hard—and that’s a big deal because he truly thought that erections were a thing of the past for him—what if that’s where it stops? What if he can’t finish?
Check in with yourself, says his therapist’s voice in his head. What do you need right now?
He’s feeling kind of overwhelmed, honestly, like he might burst into tears or something equally unhinged. And he’s not sure he could handle the disappointment at the moment, if it turns out that this is as far as things are going to go.
Sam is singing in the shower, loudly and badly, and is unlikely to resurface anytime in the next few minutes. Bucky concentrates on that for a second to ground himself, then takes a deep breath, and picks up the remote, turning up the volume on the game.
He closes his eyes. Wiggles his toes. Rotates his ankles in little circles.
By the time he reaches the top of his head, the erection is long gone. Sam comes back into the living room, fully dressed and asking if Bucky feels like ordering a late lunch from some vegan pizza place he spotted on the way back from the furniture store.
“Hope you like spinach and mushrooms,” he says. Bucky doesn’t mind.
*****
The next day, it happens again. This time, ignoring it to death doesn’t work.
They’re sitting on the couch together after a long, long day of fucking prep work for painting. Bucky has never painted anything before, but he’s already sick of it and he hasn’t even picked up a brush yet.
It’s the fucking taping.
This has been the script for the day:
INT. LIVING ROOM - DAY
SAM
Is it straight?
BUCKY
Yeah, I think so.
SAM checks his work.
SAM
No it’s not, I can see that little bit in the corner there.
BUCKY removes the tape and tries again.
Repeat scene ad infinitum.
It’s just… the pieces lose their stickiness after being placed incorrectly six times in a row, and then some get twisted up and stick to themselves and have to be thrown out. Sam is ruthless in his criticism of Bucky’s tape work, because the lines have to be perfectly straight and even or else. It won’t matter whether or not Bucky decides to cut his hair if he ends up ripping it all out of his head in a frenzy of taping-induced frustration.
But he powers through because, tomorrow morning, they’re going to Home Depot to pick out some paint colors, which sounds like it would be very boring, except that Bucky is learning that he kind of likes shopping with Sam. For clothes, groceries, whatever. So he’s quietly looking forward to it.
The prep work has undoubtedly lessened the excitement though. Bucky is, as Sam put it, grouchy. He has spackle under his nails and, somewhat more concerningly, in the grooves between the joints of his vibranium fingers. It comes off his right hand when he washes it, but he’s probably going to have to put some real thought and elbow grease into cleaning the left one. Maybe loosen the joints and scrape them out with a screwdriver. Next time, he’ll remember to wear gloves for this, like Sam did.
Sam makes them a taco salad for dinner and brings it to the couch to eat. He starts telling Bucky about the protein content, and the healthy fats, and Bucky must be looking at him like he’s grown an extra head, because he sighs and says, “Look, not all of us are supersoldiers, okay? If I’m gonna be able to keep up with…” he trails off, but Bucky gets the message. You. The ghost of Steve’s legacy looming over my head.
Not that there’s anything at all wrong with Sam’s extremely hot body—but, as a chemically-unenhanced Captain America, he’s going to have to keep it in impossibly good condition for his own safety.
Bucky takes a bite of the salad.
“It’s good,” he says, and he’s not lying. “Really good.”
“Thanks,” says Sam.
“I could probably stand to start eating better, too,” Bucky muses aloud. It’s not strictly true that what he eats affects his body condition—the serum pretty much handles all that for him—but no need to bring it up when it seems like Sam could use a little solidarity. “I shouldn’t have so much junk.”
“Yeah, right. Look at your arm, man, that bicep,” says Sam, reaching out and squeezing the top of Bucky’s right arm. “Goddamn.”
And then he says, dripping with sarcasm, “I can really tell you’ve let yourself go.” He rolls his eyes so hard Bucky’s surprised they don’t fall into his salad.
Bucky recognizes the signals from last time: his heart rate, the warmth, a sudden tightness in his balls. Breathing exercises won’t work, because all he can smell is Sam, and Sam’s aftershave, and Sam’s clean, soft-looking pajamas. Oh, and this delicious dinner that Sam has made Bucky out of the goodness of his wonderful heart.
It’s not going away. It’s not going away.
There’s only one thing to do.
“Good god, Buck,” says Sam, eyebrows practically on the ceiling, watching Bucky scarf down dinner with all the decorum and finesse of a Saint Bernard. “Glad you like it, I guess.”
Sam calling him Buck like that isn’t helping the situation. Bucky’s gotta move fast. His pajama bottoms are a thin jersey material and fucking striped. Frankly, they already don’t leave as much to the imagination as the off-duty clothing Bucky usually goes for, but the boner situation is going to become extremely obvious extremely quickly.
“I think I’m gonna go lay down,” Bucky tells Sam, abandoning his empty paper bowl on the end table and, twisting his lower body away from the couch, vaulting towards the hallway.
“You okay?” Sam calls.
“Yup,” Bucky calls back as he power walks to his room.
Door is shut, door is locked. Phew.
He’s burning hot, even though logically he knows it’s pleasantly cool out, so he rips his shirt over his head and tosses it on the floor. Having it off feels a lot better, somehow.
He sits down on the bed, back resting against the headboard. His behavior over the past several minutes has been, at best, very suspicious, but maybe Sam will think—
Oh no. There are footsteps in the hallway.
Sam knocks gently. “Is this because I touched you?” Sam asks through the door.
Yes. “No.”
“I’m sorry for not asking first,” Sam continues, as though he’d heard the yes in the no. “Lots of people don’t like being touched, especially vets, and I won’t be offended if—”
“No,” says Bucky again, and he can’t think, he’s so hard he can’t even think. He blurts out, “I like it when you touch me.”
Pause.
“I don’t think I caught that right, can you say it again?” Thank god Sam doesn’t have supersoldier hearing.
“It’s fine,” says Bucky, hoping he sounds more normal than he feels. “You can touch me. Really. It’s not that.”
“Okay,” says Sam. “You sure?”
“Yeah,” says Bucky. His dick throbs in his pajama bottoms. Real sure. “I’m good. Just...need some. Alone time.”
“No problem,” says Sam, and Bucky can hear the warmth in his voice even through the door.
He’d do anything for Sam to come in here and kiss him. Anything except ask for it, that is.
Sam’s knuckles rap lightly against the doorframe. “Goodnight, Buck. See you in the morning.”
Sam’s footsteps retreat back down the hall. Bucky’s gonna have to fix this later, but he can’t even gather his thoughts enough to come up with a plan until he deals with his dick.
Focus.
Okay, okay, okay. Bucky can do this. In fact, he’s even a little bit prepared.
During a trip to the Walgreens down the street this morning, Bucky had stumbled upon a section in the store filled with personal lubricants, which is apparently what the kids are calling slick these days.
Well, stumbled upon implies he had been looking for something else when he found it. Which he was, but the thing he was looking for was Vaseline, to be used for the same purpose. Turns out they keep Vaseline with the band-aids now, actually.
The personal lubricant section had been very impressive. Many bottles filled with clear, sterile-looking liquids. Pink and purple labels with flowers and hearts on them, or else black and red packaging. More than a little silly, Bucky had thought, to have such obviously gendered packaging for an item that is presumably intended to be used most often by a man and a woman at the same time. Whatever.
Water-based. Oil-based. Silicone-based. Blends of those things. Stuff that warms, cools, tingles, numbs…
Overwhelmed by options, he’d picked out three based on type of container. One pump-bottle of liquid, one squeeze-tube of gel, and one little plastic tub. The tub was closest to the format he’s familiar with, although Vaseline used to be in a glass jar with a metal lid. He’d taken them through the self-checkout, along with the paper dishes he’d actually gone there to get, and he stashed them in his bathroom under the sink when he got home.
Hopefully they’ll move to a new home in his bedside table once he and Sam get around to assembling it. For now, he and his comically distended pants waddle into the bathroom to fish one out. He goes with the jar, because it’s probably best not to change too much at once. This is already going to be a Big Experience. No need to go gettin’ fancy about it.
Bucky tosses the slick onto the bed, takes a deep breath, and pulls down his pajama bottoms and boxer briefs in one movement, leaving them in a pile with his discarded shirt.
He climbs back into position on the bed, fully naked, and opens the jar of slick. Digs some out with three fingers, closes the tub and sets it down.
It’s harder to warm this stuff up one-handed than he anticipated, even though it’s a lot meltier than Vaseline. Actually, it wasn’t something he had anticipated at all, because the last time he did this, he had two flesh hands. It’s okay though. The heat from one hand is enough eventually, at least enough not to be uncomfortable.
Bucky closes his eyes. Thinking about Sam, while undeniably arousing, seems like an extra layer of complicated that he doesn’t need right now. So he concentrates instead on the feeling of his hand closing around his dick, right at the base.
His hand glides upward. Oh.
Now he remembers.
A rush of fiery joy courses through his body—rips through him, really. He used to like doing this. It was fun.
This isn’t a chore. It’s not something he has to work on, not some mission to complete. It’s just...an enjoyable activity. The only goal he’s trying to achieve here is making himself feel good.
And the muscle memory is still there. There’s a smug pleasure in the idea that, even after all the years of torture, HYDRA wasn’t able to shock this out of him. His hand strokes slowly, his mouth falling open. It feels so, so exquisitely good. And he knows suddenly, with a solid certainly, that it’s going to work. He’s going to come.
The inevitability of it is unexpectedly soothing. There’s no pressure anymore. He’s just going to keep stroking, keep feeling each finger passing over his frenulum, until he comes. Which he will.
Bucky could stop if he wanted to, wait a minute or two, and then start again to draw the whole experience out. He used to do that, he remembers, when he wasn’t on a time constraint, and it made it even better when he finally let himself finish.
Next time, he thinks, and there will be a next time. For now, he doesn’t slow down because this first orgasm can’t come soon enough. He rocks up into his fist, over and over. He’s aching for it.
It feels like he's chasing after it, like rounding the bases. Home is in sight, and he’s already hit the ball out of the park, so there’s nothing to do but enjoy the run.
The little tingle starts up low in his belly, that first signal, and he sucks in a breath. It spreads, spreads, his toes curl up in the blanket, his vibranium hand in the sheet next to him.
“Ohh.” It crashes into him with the force of a planet, knocking the breath right out of his lungs. His muscles tighten, his mind is floating. This must be what flying is like, he thinks, and an image of Sam swooping through the air flashes past.
The feeling of his hand being coated in his own come is like sinking into a warm bed after a battle that lasted a hundred years.
His head smacks painlessly against the headboard as he lets go of himself and falls backward, panting and revelling in the way his heartbeat slows, moment by moment. There’s a lot of jizz on his stomach, even a little on his chest. Apparently, he got some distance on this one, which makes sense given the eighty-year dry spell he’s just broken.
Cleanup is a thing that needs to happen, he recalls, because that crusty feeling when it dries for too long is very unpleasant. With all the grace and poise of a newborn giraffe, he gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom to grab some tissues.
Once he’s wiped off and dressed again, the bed feels...cold. Lonely. It’s embarrassing to admit, even to himself, but he wants Sam. Well, he always wants Sam, but this is a new way of wanting him—he wants to hear Sam’s voice, to sit close enough that he can feel Sam’s body heat radiating off of him. There’s something about his post-orgasm brain that demands nothing more or less than Sam’s company.
It’s not exactly a walk of shame, because Sam likely has no clue what Bucky’s been doing in his room for the past quarter of an hour, but he certainly feels sheepish as he pads back down the hall and into the living room.
“Hey,” says Sam, turning to face him. The wanting—despite the fact that he came all over himself not ten minutes ago—slams into Bucky like a fucking sledgehammer. He ignores it. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah,” says Bucky, shuffling over to sit next to him on the couch. “Changed my mind about being alone. What’s on?”
“Serena.” Bucky doesn’t know who the fuck Serena is, but Sam is very clearly watching tennis.
“Who’s Serena?” he asks Sam, mostly because he thinks the question might get Sam to talk. Bucky just wants to hear his voice.
“Who is—what is wrong with you?” Sam asks incredulously.
“That’s a big question. Where should I start?”
Sam snorts. “Smartass. Well we can start with how you don’t know who Serena Williams is.”
And then he’s off, tennis matches, the inimitable Williams Sisters, Serena is the best player in history… Bucky listens, he takes it all in, and it occurs to him that sitting on the couch watching Sam rant about tennis is going to have to tie for the best part of this day.
He can’t remember the last time he felt this good.
*****
Home Depot, unlike the hardware shop a few blocks from the brownstone Bucky grew up in, has more than ten paint colors. Which is something Bucky probably should have expected, but he certainly wasn’t prepared for hundreds and hundreds of shades. Each one is almost indistinguishable from the next on the card, but eventually turns into every hue Bucky could’ve imagined, and some that maybe he hadn’t even thought of.
Sam has a lot of ideas about what they should be looking for. Bucky isn’t sure if he’s just been researching on his phone since they got back, or if this is all knowledge he’s collected over the years of living on his own. However, his methodology is, in Bucky’s opinion, too abstract to be really useful to anyone outside of Sam’s own brain.
“The idea is to look for a color that matches the mood you want for the room,” he’d said as they walked through the entrance of Home Depot. “Like, do you want it to be calming, or motivating, or invigorating—”
“Motivating and invigorating are the same thing,” Bucky had replied.
“No, they’re not.”
“Yes, they are. Pretty sure they’re synonyms.”
Thesaurus.com disagrees. And according to Sam, invigorating is for feeling more energetic. Motivating is for getting things done.
It is unclear to Bucky how this translates to the difference between Cherry Fizz and Lovebirds.
He and Sam have been enjoying looking at swatches for over an hour, although likely for wildly different reasons. Sam has thrown himself into fixing up their place with the kind of absurd zeal Bucky didn’t know existed outside of sitcom dads. He is beginning to suspect that Sam’s efforts may be some kind of cosmic “thank you” directed at Natasha. Like somehow she’ll know they appreciate her gift if they pick just the right millwork for the kitchen cabinets.
Bucky, on the other hand, likes decorating the apartment with Sam because it kind of feels like they’re married.
“I keep coming back to the No More Drama,” says Sam, holding up a card full of reds for the fifth time.
“It’s kind of a lot for the living room,” Bucky says, also for the fifth time. It’s a nice color, and Bucky doesn’t actually have a whole lot of concrete opinions about paint, but he’s absolutely enjoying listening to Sam wax poetic about the pros and cons of Lingonberry Punch versus Cheerful Tangerine, and so what if his new happy place is the Home Depot paint aisle? What’s it to anyone else, huh?
“Well if you don’t like it, why don’t you start making some suggestions?” Sam says. It’s possible he’s starting to catch on that Bucky might actually keep them here forever if no one stops him. “I can’t just point at every color in the store and go how about this one? You gotta give me something to work with here.” He goes to put the red card back where it came from.
Bucky, who has been moseying up and down the rainbow for at least forty-five minutes, forces himself to focus his gaze somewhere at the opposite end of where Sam’s been looking, just to be contrary, because he thinks Sam might fight him for some kind of red or orange and then they can stay longer. So it seems like a good place to start. As he walks toward the cards to get a closer look, he narrows in on this one…
His plans to pick a fight fly right out the window.
“Sam,” he calls. “Come look at this.”
He pulls the card out. Sam walks up and leans in close to him, close enough that Bucky can smell his cologne, and then he’s quiet for long enough that Bucky starts to wonder if something is wrong.
“Yeah,” says Sam, finally, running his fingers over the shade. His voice is as soft as the heat of his body next to Bucky’s. “Yeah, I think we got a winner.”
Perfect Landing, it’s called. A light slate blue.
Bucky turns his head and catches Sam’s eyes. And Sam, god, he looks back, like he’s really looking, verging on the territory of gazing. If he just…
“Can I help you gentlemen with anything?”
Sam clears his throat, taking the card from Bucky’s hand.
“Hi, yeah,” he says to the employee who has just approached them and ruined everything. “Can we get, uh...a gallon and a quart of this?”
Then he turns back to Bucky. “We thinking matte or eggshell?”
Bucky sighs.
Sam is very quiet in the car on the way home. Maybe he’s just concentrating on driving, but it’s making Bucky feel nervous. Like there’s no way Sam knows what happened last night, but try telling that to his brain, which is currently insisting that Sam knows, and he’s super grossed out, and he’s just trying to think of a way to—
“I—” says Sam, at the same time Bucky says, “You—”
They both stop.
“Go ahead,” says Sam.
“You first,” says Buck.
“No, seriously, what?”
“Nothing,” says Bucky.
“Nothing?”
“Yeah, nothing. What’d you want to say?”
“Nevermind.”
Bucky forcibly steers his thoughts towards the paint they just bought. They went all in on that gray-blue for the living room, but everything else is these little sample jars. Sam says they should test them out on the walls before they commit to buying full-size cans.
This knowledge, Sam claims, is from experience. He apparently once painted his room a very vivid shade of aqua and had to repaint it six months later because, while it looked good on the swatch, a whole aqua room was absolutely unbearable.
That logic doesn’t apply to Perfect Landing. It’s the exact right color. Sam knows it. Bucky knows it too, the same way he knows that he loves Sam.
Sam’s bedroom will likely end up being No More Drama although he’s also brought home samples of Dark Crimson, Firecracker and about four others in the same vein. Which is to say, vivid, deepened red. Like a ruby.
“Isn’t red too, like, energetic or whatever for your bedroom?” Bucky had asked. “Don’t you want something that’ll help you sleep?”
“Nope,” Sam had said. “I want my bedroom to be sexy.”
That’s fair enough, although Bucky definitely thinks Sam’s bedroom will be sexy mostly because Sam is there, even if he decides to paint it Milkweed Pod green.
They’ve got a nice deep teal to try for the kitchen. Bucky surprised even himself by picking out a small selection of soft, buttery yellows to test out on his bedroom walls. They’re cheerful and vintage in a way that appeals to something in his mind that he can’t name, like the best parts of his childhood. No looming specter of war and poverty, just Steve’s mom cooking a lemon pie on a Sunday evening, and Bucky losing a baby tooth in the first bite.
Color, huh? Who knew?
“A gallon and a quart seems like a lot for the living room,” Bucky says, just to start something, because the quiet is getting to him. There are only three walls to paint, because the fourth is an expanse of red brick that they apparently won’t be touching. Where Bucky comes from, exposed bricks means you didn’t have the money to put something over them, but Sam had looked positively scandalized at the suggestion.
“That wall is like, a feature of this apartment,” he’d said. “We’d be crazy to cover it up, it’s gorgeous.”
According to Sam and his rapidly-increasing supply of decorating magazines, exposed brick is very much of-the-moment. This is a weird century, but changes in decorating trends are hardly the biggest adjustment Bucky’s had to make, so whatever.
“It’s more than enough,” Sam finally replies. So he’s not ignoring Bucky, then. “You always want to err on the side of too much. We can get two coats out of that gallon, and save the quart for touch ups later on. You know, like a couple of years from now when Noah Syndergaard finally gives up a run and you punch a hole in the wall.”
The little Bucky knows about name etymology is just enough to make the likely connection between the name Syndergaard and that Thor-lookin’ pitcher on the Mets, but what he really latches onto is the insinuation that he and Sam will still be living together two years from now. His heart flutters.
“I’m not even a Mets fan,” Bucky grumbles, instead of professing his undying love for his roommate.
“Then what’s your team?” Sam asks.
This is a sore spot, admittedly, for Bucky. His beloved Brooklyn Dodgers abandoned him for fucking Los Angeles at some point while he was stuck in a freezer, or committing murders he doesn’t remember, and he’s not over it yet. Maybe he never will be.
To Bucky, becoming a Yankees fan seems on-par with willingly joining HYDRA, in terms of traitorous behavior, so that’s out of the question. If he had to pick a random team to root for, the Mets seem as good as any, but he wouldn’t call himself a fan. It’s hard to muster enthusiasm for a team based on nothing but the geographical location of a team in relation to his former home. Is he really even a New Yorker anymore? He hasn’t lived there in eighty years.
Bucky doesn’t like this train of thought.
“The Brooklyn Dodgers,” he says, trying not to sound as sullen about it as he feels and failing miserably.
Sam winces. “Ouch.”
“Yeah. So, nobody. What about you?”
“Washington Nationals,” he says proudly. “Don’t know if you’ve heard of them. They were the Washington Senators for a while there, and then the Montreal Expos...”
“No, yeah,” says Bucky, nodding. “They were around when I was a kid. The Nationals.”
“If you’re a free agent, I can give you a few compelling reasons to come over to our side,” Sam says, signalling and then turning onto their block. His eyes dart quickly over to gauge Bucky’s reaction.
“Are any of those reasons championship titles? Say, in the last twenty years?” Bucky asks. He’s used to cheering for the losing team, as any good Bums fan would be, but it might be nice to get a win every once in a while. Just for a change of pace.
“Well, one is,” says Sam. “Unfortunately, I missed it.”
“Ah. Better than none.”
“Here’s the thing though,” Sam admits. “So I grew up in Louisiana, right? They still don’t have a baseball team. We were just Saints fans. We all got into baseball after we moved to DC when I was teenager. And then, my sister married a Red Sox fan, became a Red Sox fan, and then made two more Red Sox fans. So now it’s just me and my parents ‘cause my other sister doesn’t like sports, so it’s three against four when we all get together.”
On instinct, Bucky makes a disgusted face at the mention of the Red Sox. Sam sees it out of the corner of his eye and laughs.
“It would be nice not to be outnumbered again,” Sam says, pulling into their driveway.
Bucky thinks, all things considered, that he would need very little convincing to root for the Washington Nationals if Sam’s the one doing it.
*****
The plan for the rest of the day had originally been to test out all their little paint samples and then go back to Home Depot to buy cans of the winners, but they didn’t get that far. Bucky was still staring at the twelve by twelve sections of Polka Dot Skirt and Banana Mania on his bedroom wall when a call came in from Nick Fury.
For Sam, but supersoldier hearing isn’t called ‘super’ for nothing.
This is a conversation they knew Sam was going to have to have sooner or later. He had messaged Fury about Steve giving him the shield in the car right after it happened, and Fury had all but left him on read initially. “We’ll be in touch,” he’d said, and then there was silence for days.
Apparently Fury is now ready to hit the ground running, because he keeps Sam in a virtual meeting for the rest of the afternoon. Bucky wastes hours wandering back and forth through the rooms, staring at the abandoned paint swatches. The taut line of Sam’s shoulders looks tighter every time Bucky walks past the couch.
Bucky hasn’t been invited to this meeting, obviously, and by four o’clock, he’s feeling so utterly useless and anxious that he texts Sam that he's going out. Sam doesn’t look up from his computer, where he’s nodding at something Maria Hill is saying, but he gives Bucky a thumbs up to let him know he saw the message.
The first place Bucky drives to is a bookshop, a big chain-type one he’s seen in a couple of different cities, and he ambles around the three-story building until he eventually locates the cookbooks. It’s not nearly as busy as Target or Walgreens; apparently the legions of people back from the dead are not immediately clambering for novels. Bucky actually considers perusing the fiction section until he sees it in all its enormity. It’s intimidating enough that he turns back around and heads down to the checkout. He’ll come back and check it out another day; his arms are full anyway.
If the sight of the Winter Soldier buying Protein-Packed Meals for New Cooks, eight similarly-titled volumes, and nothing else fazes the cashier, she does a good job of not showing it. Oh, and would he like to purchase a membership with them today to save twenty percent? Sure. Why not?
He flips through his new books while sitting in the car in the bookstore parking lot. He’s probably lowballed his skills a little bit with this selection, but it’s better that than a bunch of gourmet shit he wouldn’t even know where to start with. Objectively speaking, Bucky is toeing the line between a novice and intermediate cook. Before they shipped out, he and Steve just boiled everything. In hindsight, it was disgusting, but they didn’t really know how to do anything else. He’s proud to say those days, at least, are behind him.
The less that can be said about what he ate while he was in the military, the better. That goes double for the shit HYDRA fed him.
Wakanda was the first time he’d really had reliable, working appliances, and he learned how to make eggs, grill some meat, and even throw together a pretty tasty salad with homemade dressing.
But then Shuri started coming by all the time with Tisero Twists and a bunch of other terribly addictive snack foods, and he cooked a lot less after that. Afternoons spent on the futon in his hut pigging out on Bida Bon Bons and watching Wakandan dramas with Shuri are among the things he misses most about living there, which is saying something.
This twenty-minute chicken piccata in Healthy Weeknight Recipes doesn’t look out of the question. Boneless breasts, lemon juice, brined capers, black pepper… He can do that. Probably.
The next trip he takes is to the grocery store. He’s there longer than he’d like to be, unfortunately, because he doesn’t know where anything is and he doesn’t want to ask anyone. He’s never sure whether the sight of him prowling through the aisles for forty five minutes is worse for the poor employees than actually being approached by him, but he also just fucking hates talking to strangers, so everyone has to suffer here.
Brined capers though, he can’t find. Eventually he grits his teeth and asks someone who works there. The guy is perfectly nice and just as nonplussed as the cashier from the bookstore, which leaves Bucky beginning to reevaluate his stance on how scary he actually comes across on a personal level. It’s also very possible that these people simply don’t recognize him, because he’s wearing a Nationals baseball cap (Sam’s), long sleeves, and a glove over the vibranium hand.
Bucky carries all his shit from the car into the house in a single trip, which is one of the perks of the arm. Sam has vacated his spot in the living room and is nowhere to be seen. Bucky resists the temptation to yell out, “Honey, I’m home.” Sam would be able to hear the front door opening and closing, and if not that, he definitely wouldn’t miss the sound of Bucky kicking off his big, clunky boots. He doesn’t need to make an announcement on top of everything else.
Sam… well, whatever he and Fury and Hill was clearly intense, to say the least. If he needs time alone to process, Bucky can give him that. So he plops his books and groceries down on the kitchen counter and gets to work.
The time estimated to make this recipe looked a little overly optimistic to Bucky when he got started, and that hunch turns out to be absolutely correct. It’s about forty minutes from start to finish, and the street lights outside are on by the time he knocks on Sam’s bedroom door.
“Sam?”
“Yeah?” Sam calls back. “Everything okay?”
“I made dinner.” This feels exactly like the time Bucky saved up his allowance for weeks and got a birthday present, a nice, brand-new set of playing cards, for this really cute boy—Ricky Gillespie—in his seventh grade class. He had been so terrified that he’d left it on the steps of Ricky’s brownstone with no note, rung the doorbell, and then run away.
Similarly, Bucky retreats to the kitchen before Sam can reply.
“Oh damn,” says Sam’s voice from the hallway as he opens his bedroom door. “That smells good, Buck. What is it?”
“Chicken piccata,” says Bucky. He’s sure his face is on fire, but it’s not like he can exactly ban Sam from his own kitchen while he works on returning it to a less-red state, so he’s gonna hope Sam just thinks he’s warm from cooking over the stove. “Nineteen grams of protein.”
As he says this, Sam rounds the corner into the kitchen. He looks...well, he kind of looks like he’s been crying. But his face softens at the sight of Bucky standing there, holding out his dinner on a paper plate.
“Nineteen grams, huh?” Sam takes the plate from him. “Impressive.”
The chicken piccata is a solid B in Bucky’s book. How that translates to anyone else’s tastes, he’s not sure. Anything is better than fucking army rations, but he doubts he’ll ever again eat a meal as tasty as the one Shuri dragged him to in Birnin Zana.
Sam doesn’t seem too put out though, so that’s certainly encouraging.
“We’re getting paid,” Sam tells him, apropos of nothing.
“By S.H.I.E.L.D.?”
“Mmhmm,” says Sam. “Not too shabby, either. More than I was making at the VA, that’s for sure. I haven’t finished crunching the numbers yet, but looks like a stipend adding up to around a hundred-and-twenty K yearly with like, bonuses for missions and stuff. Plenty to make rent, pay bills, put together some savings, and some spending money.”
“For both of us?”
Sam gives him a weird look. “No, for me. Nick Fury’s not gonna go over your financial details with me, that’s—”
“You said ‘we’.”
“When?”
“You said we’re getting paid.”
“Oh,” says Sam. “Well, I assume you’re getting paid too. I don’t think they’re gonna ask you to do… your whole thing pro bono.”
The part of his brain that lays prostrate with remorse at all times wants to be like, no, forgiveness is the only payment I require, but... He does need money to live on. Especially at the rate he’s buying cookbooks. He nods.
Sam looks at him seriously. “I know you’re gonna be like, ‘Wow, a whole shiny new dime? For me?’ But I want you to promise me that you won’t settle for less than ninety thousand a year. I’m gonna be really pissed at you if you let S.H.I.E.L.D. convince you to risk your life every other day for minimum wage, got it?”
“Ninety thousand or I go back to Bucharest and live like a hobo. Roger that, Cap.”
They sit in silence, staring at the blank T.V. screen for a few minutes. A coffee table existing in this room is probably going to need to happen sooner rather than later, because the stuff they’re eating is feeling less and less like couch food. Sam finishes his plate.
“Fury wants me to do a big press appearance thing,” Sam says finally, wiping his mouth.
“When?” Bucky asks. Something about his tone gives Bucky the impression that this is what’s really bothering him.
“Sunday.”
Bucky balks; today is Thursday. “And he wants you to say...what, exactly?”
Sam takes in a deep breath, still staring straight ahead. “I’m the new Captain America? Welcome back, everybody? I don’t know. I’m still getting my bearings here, I… Am I ready for this?”
Of course not, Bucky thinks. There is no overlap between the kind of person who would feel ready to be Captain America and the kind of person who would deserve the title. It might have even been a rhetorical question, but Sam is quiet now so Bucky feels like he should say something.
“I can’t tell you that,” Bucky says. “But…”
Something funny is happening inside his brain. It’s like his anxiety about overstepping, saying the wrong thing—any of that—is melting away in the face of Sam’s vulnerability. If Sam can’t be sure, maybe Bucky can be sure for him.
“I don’t know if you feel ready,” Bucky amends. “But you can do this. Only you can do this.”
Sam turns to look at him. Not for the first time, Bucky could have sworn his gaze flicks down to Bucky’s lips, but it happens so quickly he’s left wondering if he saw it at all.
“I’m glad you think so,” he says softly, but he doesn’t exactly sound better. Bucky’s brain is working overtime to think of something to say that will take away all of this...pressure, or anxiety, or frustration, or whatever it is that Sam’s feeling, but none of the words that come to him seem to suffice.
Sam takes another deep breath, like he’s steeling himself for something.
“Not to change the subject,” he says, “but are you aware that the paint you picked out for this room is the exact same color as your eyes? Like, exactly.”
“No?” Bucky can honestly say that this did not for one second cross his mind. Why would it? He has probably spent less than a grand total of ten minutes of his very, very long life thinking about his own eye color.
“It is,” Sam insists.
“Really? I didn’t—we don’t have to—”
“No,” says Sam. “I didn’t mean like—I love it. I like it.”
Bucky doesn’t even breathe. I love it, Sam said.
“The paint, I mean,” Sam clarifies. He clears his throat. “I know it’s kinda dark out, but do you think we could knock out the living room if we bring all the lamps in here? I just… I need to get something done today.”
“Kinda dark” might be an understatement, but Bucky would go out and buy every lamp in the county if it meant helping Sam feel better. Maybe words aren’t what’s needed here.
Within twenty minutes, dinner is cleaned up, the drop cloths are down, and they’re ready to get started.
“What was the point of them putting the cans in that shaker thing if we’re just going to have to mix it ourselves anyway?” Bucky grumbles. He’s already up to his elbows in paint, despite the fact that he’s using a wooden stirrer. Why is stirring paint so goddamn messy?
At least this time he remembered to glove up. He’s actually wearing a dish glove—that’s absolutely going to have to go in the trash later, whoops—on his left hand, for extra protection, because he likes the look of the vibranium arm as it is. He also doubts it would perform as well with a thick, gloopy layer of latex paint all over it.
What he didn’t remember to do before covering himself in paint was put his hair up. It’s going to be a big problem, because it’s too short to push behind his shoulders but long enough to constantly be in his face. He’s really not sure what to do about it, either. His hair ties are all in his bathroom, and if he touches his hair now he’s going to have to cut it off later.
It’s becoming increasingly clear to him that he’s going to have to ask Sam to do it for him, although he hasn’t ruled out sticking his head down the garbage disposal yet. Somehow the second option sounds less humiliating.
Sam is gloved up too, from what Bucky can see through his hair, but he hasn’t touched the paint yet, so he’s clean. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
This is about making Sam feel better, right? Like if they go to bed with a fully painted living room, Sam will be able to wake up tomorrow morning feeling like he accomplished something today? Bucky’s not going to be able to help much like this.
“So are you committed to doing this looking like Cousin It, or do you need to go put your hair up before we get started?” Sam asks.
Bucky winces. Hopefully Sam can’t see it. You are allowed to ask for help, says the voice of his therapist in his head. You don’t have to do everything by yourself.
Bucky holds up his wet hands.
“You think you might be able to do it for me?” he manages to get out. “I’ll talk you through how.”
“Pfft,” says Sam. “I got sisters. I know how to do a ponytail. Where are you hair ties at?”
“My bathroom,” says Bucky. He tries to wipe the hair away from his face with his upper arm, but only succeeds in pushing some strands further into his mouth. “Drawer under the sink.”
Sam takes off his painting gloves, shoving them into his pocket as he heads down the hallway into Bucky’s room.
And then Sam calls out: “So are they behind all this lube, or am I looking in the wrong place?”
Lube? Lubricant. Oh no.
“LEFT,” Bucky yawps, blood draining from his face. He’d had the right idea with the garbage disposal. “The left drawer.” Did he forget to say left?
What if he just runs? He could just open the front door—even though Sam might hunt him down and kill him for getting paint all over the doorknob—and take the fuck off. See if they’ll let him back in Wakanda so he can live like a hermit amongst the goats.
He hears Sam chuckle. “Found ‘em!”
And then Sam walks back into the room, calm and normal and stretching out a new hair elastic with his fingers. At the look on Bucky’s face, which must be mortified enough to be noticeable past his hair, Sam rolls his eyes.
“Relax, Buck. Everybody has lube. I keep mine in my bedside drawer.”
This has the intended effect of stopping Bucky from throwing himself out the window, but it also flips the light switch inside him from scared to horny, because now Bucky knows that A: Sam masturbates, and B: he does it in his bed.
Both of those are conclusions he could have easily drawn from common sense, or even statistical probability, but there’s assuming and then there’s knowing. And now he knows.
His brain very helpfully starts to provide some vivid imagery of what that might look like—Sam settling into his sheets, pulling down his boxer briefs—but before he can take it too far, Sam steps up behind him.
The feeling of Sam gently sweeping the hair off Bucky’s cheeks makes him feel weak-kneed and concerningly tingly, but it’s quickly contrasted by the way Sam yanks once he’s got all of it in his fist.
“Ow!” says Bucky. “You’re pulling!”
“It’s just gonna fall out if you don’t pull it back tight enough,” says Sam, looping the elastic around Bucky’s hair. “You want me to have to keep doing this every five minutes?”
Bucky sure does, but he’s not going to say it. He’s also discovering something new; having an erection in jeans is uncomfortable, enough so that he doesn’t even get all the way hard, and it’s already going away before he has too much time to worry about it.
And then he picks up a roller and worries about nothing at all for forty-five minutes as he smooths paint in an even W formation over the walls.
Bucky is ready to take back all the nasty things he thought about the painting process once he and Sam step back to look at their finished living room. In spite of the taping part, which was frustrating and tedious, the actual painting goes quickly and smoothly. Removing all that fucking tape, balling it up, and throwing it away is equally satisfying.
The room is positively serene. He can’t wait to see what it looks like once they’ve put up the breezy, white linen curtains they picked out, with sunlight filtering through the window. Bucky almost wants to sleep in here, then wake up and watch the sunrise illuminate that rustic brick wall Sam loves so much. He takes off his gloves.
“Looks good,” says Sam, quietly, and when Bucky turns to answer, Sam isn’t even looking at the walls.
“It does,” Bucky agrees, arms crossed over his chest.
“We should probably clean all this up,” Sam says finally, gesturing towards the rollers and brushes strewn across the dropcloth on the floor.
As Bucky goes to put the lid back on the can of paint, Sam swipes a finger through it and smears a blob across Bucky’s cheek.
“Eugh,” says Bucky. “What was that for?”
“Just,” Sam hesitates. “Just, when we’re done cleaning up. Go take a look in the mirror and tell me you don’t see how you picked your own damn eye color for this whole room.”
There’s paint on his clothes—his painting clothes, he reminds himself, these clothes are meant to get messy—his flesh arm, and even a little in his hair from when it dripped off the roller while he was trying to get close to the ceiling. But he takes stock of himself in the mirror like Sam told him to, once they’ve bid one another goodnight.
And okay, yeah, Sam’s right. His eyes really are this shade of blue-gray. That’s not of much interest to Bucky, frankly, but what is of interest to him is the fact that Sam has apparently spent this much time thinking about Bucky’s eye color. It might say more about Sam than it does about Bucky that he agreed that it was the perfect choice to look at day in and day out. The living room is already shaping up to be the most-used room of their house.
The shower Bucky takes after pulling out the hair tie Sam put in for him lasts until midnight. He rediscovers that heavy feeling in his balls when he draws it out, longer and longer, letting himself think about Sam—brushing Bucky’s hair out of his face, sweeping his thumb along Bucky’s cheek, and now in bed, maybe doing the same thing Bucky’s doing right now—until he’s shaking all over. He has to bite down on his vibranium knuckles to avoid moaning out loud as he comes.
He also rediscovers the wonders of just letting everything get washed right down the drain, and the satiety of snuggling up under the covers, warm and clean, and drifting off into a deep, dreamless sleep.
*****
The first time they practice with the shield is the most strenuous and pleasant workout Bucky has done in years. Not including, of course, fighting for his life against Thanos, which was extremely strenuous and not the least bit pleasant.
His phone, which apparently keeps track of these things, says he ran almost fifteen miles. He’s feeling legitimately exhausted and sweaty, which doesn’t usually happen, by the time they decide to wrap up and go home.
“You’re a lot better with the shield than Steve was when he started,” Bucky says once they’re settled in the car. He turns out of the field—a big, wide open expanse of nothing, except a few dead trees, in Loudoun County—and onto the trail that’ll take them back to the road.
Sam doesn’t look surprised. “Well, I’ve been watching him toss it around all these years. Must’ve picked something up. I can’t throw it as far as he did, though.”
That’s true, but distance is actually a lot less important than accuracy here. Sam can rely on a sniper for distances. That’s Bucky’s most important job, and he’s a little desperate for ways in which he can be useful to Sam. Sam just has to be able to take out targets at close range, and get the shield to ricochet back onto his arm. Bucky brings this up, minus the desperation.
“I think,” Sam says, “I think the years of flying kinda gives me a leg up there. You have to be able to think about angles and wind factor when you’re in the air. There are some similarities—”
The logistics of flying, gliding, and shield throwing are a lot less interesting to Bucky than the way Sam visibly fills up with confidence as he talks about them. He’s really happy with how well this went, which makes Bucky happy too.
A lock of sweaty hair has fallen out of his ponytail and keeps flipping into his face while he’s driving. Bucky is getting really sick of trying to blow it up and out of his way, when Sam—without pausing—absently reaches over and tucks it back behind his ear. Bucky almost crashes the car into a Quiznos, but Sam just keeps talking about bounceback. Somehow they make it home in one piece.
“Also,” says Sam, closing the car door and reaching into the back seat for his shield, “I played a lot of Ultimate Frisbee in college. I was damn good at it even when I was so drunk I could barely walk home.”
Okay then. If having learned it is going to be the thing that keeps Sam from getting killed out in the field, then Ultimate Frisbee is Bucky’s new favorite sport.
*****
Bucky makes it less than a week into their new living arrangements before he has to call his therapist in Wakanda.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. He had wanted to call her on the second day, and he’d been absolutely bursting out of his skin to talk to her by the fourth day, but Sam has not physically left his presence long enough to make a therapy session feasible. Technically, Bucky has his own room and could do it in there, but he doesn’t want to chance Sam overhearing him, because he’s absolutely going to have to talk about Sam during the session.
Bucky catches a break on day five. Sam is finally out of the house.
Bucky’s dialing her number as he hears the car turn over in the driveway. The call goes unanswered, because, he belatedly remembers, she is five hours ahead of him and probably having dinner.
Bucky putters around the apartment for two more hours before he tries again. He’s not worried about running out of alone time, because Sam is at his parents’ and told Bucky not to wait up.
Bucky feels like he should be jealous of Sam getting to see his mother, because Bucky’s own mother died almost a hundred years ago. For reasons that can probably be attributed to Nazis, he barely remembers her. He knows—he can’t say how he knows, but he does know—that somewhere in his brain, there are good memories of her, but most of the ones he can recall aren’t pleasant. The one thing he’s sure of is that she was very religious and made him go to a lot of boring services.
His therapist has told him straight up that he did not have great parents. His dad, he can agree with. Bucky doesn’t miss him at all. But his mom is a little more complicated. She probably never would’ve been up for Parent of the Year, (an honor Bucky would have readily bestowed on Steve’s mom, who was an angel that he remembers in perfect clarity) but he thinks she did her best. It’s possible he wasn’t a great son, either.
So he’s not jealous. He does miss Sam a little bit though, which is absolutely pathetic.
Bucky dials Dr. Dzoro again. If she doesn’t pick up this time, he’ll leave her alone, because he’s already toeing the line of being clingy and rude.
She answers on the third ring. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Bucky Barnes.” God, it’s so good to see her face and hear her voice...
“Dr. Dzoro,” he says, trying not to sound as relieved as he feels. “How ya been?”
“Happy to hear from you again,” she says. Even at the less-than-stellar video quality, he can see her eyes shining. “I missed our sessions.”
“Me too,” he says, although he’s getting the impression that she missed him for five years. For him, their last session was last week. In fairness, he had seen her every day for almost two years before the Snap, so going without therapy for a week actually does feel like a lot.
“Your family okay?” he asks. “Your daughter still seeing that guy?” Last week—well, last week five years ago—she was complaining to him about her seventeen-year-old daughter’s somewhat age-inappropriate boyfriend.
“Ugh,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Well, he came by the house last night. He is now twenty-six, my daughter is still seventeen. He has a big moustache now.” She makes a gagging face and Bucky laughs.
“She didn’t look too happy about that,” continues Dr. Dzoro. “Ducked out of the way when he tried to kiss her, told him she’ll ‘let him know when she’s free to hang out.’ I think we’re done with him.”
“Glad something good came out of all this,” says Bucky.
“Yes,” nods Dr. Dzoro. “My wife and I, we’re very relieved.”
Bucky smiles.
“So how are you?” she asks. “Want to make this an official visit? I’m done with all my appointments until tomorrow.”
“Is that okay?” he asks.
“For you, I can spare an hour,” she says, smiling. “Let me get my notes.”
Dr. Dzoro gets settled into her office. Bucky can see the brightly colored tapestries behind her, the little water fountain on her desk. He misses Wakanda with a sudden, fierce pang of homesickness. He doesn’t regret his decision to move back to the states with Sam—he knows that was the right call—but still. Wakanda was the first place where he’d felt like a human being in such a long time. There’s a piece of him that will always want to belong there.
“I hope you’re calling regarding that juicy news you texted me about before you disappeared off the face of the earth for five years,” she says.
“Juicy news? I never said I had ‘juicy news.’”
“Oh, yes you did,” says Dr. Dzoro. “I remember; I spent a lot of time wondering what that could have been, so now you have to tell me.”
“I think what I said was that I had something ‘potentially important’ to talk to you about if I survived, where are you getting ‘juicy news’ from that?”
“Right in between the lines,” she says. “Which one of us has two PhDs in psychology, eh? You or me?”
“Fine,” Bucky grumbles.
“You survived, so spill.”
Bucky says, “I….am in love with someone.”
Dr. Dzoro’s eyes practically bulge out of her head. “Who?” she cries.
“You remember Sam?” he asks.
“Sam…” she mutters, typing furiously on her tablet. “Sam… Sam… ‘Sam wouldn’t move his seat up in the car when I asked him to?’” she reads. “Oh, the Falcon, right?”
“Yeah,” says Bucky. He can feel his face turning some kind of color. Probably tomato red.
“Oh, I’ve seen him on television. He’s very handsome,” says Dr. Dzoro, unhelpfully, because Bucky already knows that.
“You’re tellin’ me,” he says. “But yeah. Sam.”
“Well thank Bast for that,” she says. “If you were going to tell me you were in love with someone you met a few days ago, I was going to have to advise you to slow your roll more than a little. But, this is good!”
“We live together now,” Bucky groans, dragging a hand down his face.
“That’s taking it a little fast,” says Dr. Dzoro. “I’m glad that it’s someone you know, but—”
“No, no,” says Bucky. “It’s not like—he doesn’t know. How I feel. We’re living together for...work reasons.”
“Work reasons,” she repeats.
“Yeah,” he sighs. “I mean, it was my idea, but.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” she says.
“Help, please.” He closes his eyes.
“All right,” she starts and clears her throat. “First of all, I think you need to find out whether he is interested in men.”
“Oh Jesus,” says Bucky, because he’d rather throw himself off a cliff than walk up to Sam and be like, so, you into dudes or what? Bucky feels the odds of surviving the drop are better than the odds of surviving that. He’s fallen off a cliff once, but never had an are you gay conversation with anyone.
Shit was subtle back in the day. There was a code for figuring out whether the guy you were sweet on swung that way, and it shifted over time. Bucky imagines whatever today’s coding is would be unrecognizable to him.
Fuck, people apparently just talk about it straight up now. Not Bucky though. It’s gonna be a long time before he’s ready for that. If ever.
“You want to be in love, you’re going to need to learn how to have difficult conversations,” Dr. Dzoro tells him. One of the best things about her is how she just...doesn’t coddle him. People—cough, Steve, cough—have a tendency to do that, but it’s supremely unhelpful and more than a little infuriating, even when Bucky knows it’s done out of love. Sometimes the stuff Dr. Dzoro says isn’t what he wants to hear, but she hasn’t steered him wrong yet.
She continues. “Start there. Obviously, if he is straight, then we move the therapy in one direction. If not, we go in another. But that’s a fork in the road—we can’t continue until we know what path to take.”
“Right, yeah, okay,” says Bucky.
“And you have to ask him,” she emphasizes, staring right into his terrified little soul. “No shortcuts, no subterfuge.”
Bucky, who is already three steps into formulating a plan to find out whether or not Sam is gay without asking Sam if he is gay, throws up his hands in frustration. “I can’t just do that!” he cries. “You don’t go around asking people if they’re... that’s...that’s…”
“How about this then,” she says. “You tell him you are, give him space to share.”
“No.”
“You want to have a gay relationship without ever telling anyone you are gay?”
“That’s right,” he says.
“Good luck with that,” she tells him, and then softens. “Look, Bucky. It’s a very vulnerable position to be in. I know, I understand.”
Privately, Bucky calls bullshit. Gay marriage has been legal in Wakanda since like the 12th century. He knows she knows, and that she’s also right. It’s just that it’s hard not to be resentful of people who haven’t had to experience that sinking feeling he got in his stomach at thirteen—like watching an anchor he’s tied to be thrown into the Mariana Trench—which was when he got his first boner in a crowded theater because of Chester Morris in The Big House.
The resentment is irrational, Bucky is aware, but he’s only human. Dr. Dzoro is still talking.
“—But this is a step you can’t skip. I think that either way, whether he is gay or not, interested or not, it will strengthen what you have with him. It’s part of getting to know people.”
Bucky hates getting to know people. There are people he got to know by accident—Steve, Dr. Dzoro, Shuri—and everybody else. He doesn’t have a lot of experience intentionally bridging that gap, at least not in this century.
“Ugh,” he says. “Fine. I’ll ask him. Somehow.”
“Good,” she replies. “That’s your homework. Now tell me about—”
“Oh,” says Bucky, just now remembering, “and also apparently my dick works again. How ‘bout that?”
“Really?” she asks, eyebrows raised, clearly delighted. “You were able to achieve an erection? That’s new.”
Achieve feels like a funny word to describe something that originally occurred entirely without his awareness or consent, but sure, he’ll take it. What happened afterward certainly required his participation.
“Not on purpose,” he admits. “But yeah, it happened. Actually, it keeps happening. It can do the… the whole thing too.”
I can come now, is what he means, but his upbringing absolutely refuses to allow him to say that out loud to a woman. So he says it mentally to himself. I can rub my dick and jizz comes out and it feels really good.
Another thing he’s discovered, which he has to assume is a result of the serum, is that his refractory period is more of an emotional thing than physical at this point. He can just...keep going. He comes, he catches his breath, he’s ready for another round. As long as he wants, at least it seems like it. His record is five in a row, in less than two hours, and he only stopped then because he got hungry and, well, kinda lonely.
“At least it can when I’m by myself,” he continues. “I don’t know if...”
“Well, we will cross that bridge when it appears,” says Dr. Dzoro. “But for now, that is very exciting! I hope you’re taking your time to enjoy that new aspect of your life.”
“More homework?” he says, trying not to think about the series of events in his life that have brought him to a professional congratulating him from five thousand miles away for masturbating.
“Absolutely not,” she says. “Only if you feel like it. I just want you to be proud of yourself for reaching a place mentally where your body feels comfortable enough to have sexual reactions again.”
Bucky knows he’s been a doozy of a project for her, and his first instinct is to be like this is all thanks to you because he’s positive he never would have gotten here without her. But he doesn’t because she gets on him for not taking credit for his accomplishments. And it also might be weird to do that in this specific situation. I can only jerk off because of you, but not like that. Nah.
“Thanks,” he says instead. “We’ll see what happens if I ever try it with someone else in the room.”
“Do your homework, and perhaps we will find out.”