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“You’re doing it again,” Steve says.
Bucky stuffs his hands into his pockets and stops gawking.
“Sorry.”
It might be better to study the cement floor of Steve’s officer barracks for a little while anyway. Looking at him now—it gives Bucky that lurching, displaced sensation of misjudging the distance between risers on the shoddy staircase back home. There’s an unsettling disconnect between reality and his expectations. Expectations colored by a lifetime of memories.
Bucky tells himself that’s the only reason he doesn’t want to look at Steve right now.
“I thought you were gonna yell at me,” Steve says.
“You sound disappointed.”
“That would at least be…familiar, I guess.”
Bucky winces a little, because everything is different now and it’s all his fault. Well, it’s mostly his fault.
Besides, it’s not that Bucky isn’t happy. He should be happy. Look, he is trying very hard to be happy.
Hasn’t he spent the better part of his life trying to get people to see Steve? Not by association with Bucky, or because Bucky’s cajoled them into a double date, or because they’re looking at him piteously—but really, actually see him. And now they do. He’s kind of hard to miss.
But they don’t see that immovable, fierce little shit with a broken nose and bloodied knuckles. It’s then that Bucky realizes, with a bright pang of loss, that now they never will.
That crooked ridge in Steve’s nose, the marker of Bucky’s thumbs resetting it poorly over their kitchen table, is gone. Straightened out by that—serum.
Despite feeling hot all over—and he desperately doesn’t want to think about why he feels hot all over—Bucky hides a shiver in a shrug.
“What is it you want me to say, Steve?”
“Oh, you know. ‘I told you not to do anything stupid,’ ‘You shoulda stayed home where it was safe,’ ‘How the hell could you go and jump on a grenade—’”
“I never expected you to—wait. What?”
Something mean and bitter rises up in Bucky’s throat. Because of course Steve did. Of course he would do something selfish and call it selfless. Sign up, no questions asked, for an untested medical treatment? Sir, yes sir. Jump on a grenade? Sure, why not.
Put everyone else’s life above his own like he isn’t worth a damn, like nobody would give a damn. Like Bucky hasn’t always been right here trying to tell Steve that he gives a damn.
Bucky’s rearing up to let him have it when he cottons on to Steve's smug expression. His impish grin, his chin tucked so he’s looking at Bucky knowingly from under his eyelashes.
It knocks him right in the heart, that look. Because, yeah, there he is. There he is.
That little shit.
Bucky opens and closes his mouth stupidly. “You’re such a punk,” he grumbles.
Steve’s grin narrows into something more self-effacing.
“It’s still—Buck, it’s still me.”
He rubs his hand over the back of his neck. It’s a well-worn movement made unfamiliar by the long, muscular limbs doing all the moving.
Bucky narrows his eyes and crosses his arms over his chest.
“Go on. As your questions already,” Steve grumbles. But he looks a little hunched and apprehensive as he says it. Like he’s trying to make himself smaller.
Bucky takes pity on him.
“Did it fix your shitty rhythm?”
Steve huffs a laugh. The tension bleeds away from the set of his shoulders.
“Y’know, I think it got worse? Hard to judge the distance between things. Doorframes. Water glasses. Toes, too, I’m sure. If there was time for any a’ that.”
Bucky would very much like to see this Steve fall all over himself, same as he liked watching that little guy, too. Liked his too-wide eyes and self-deprecating grimace.
Homesickness tugs sudden and sharp against his rib cage. He misses a lot of things that feel impossibly far away now—so far that he wonders, distantly, if they’ll ever be his again. Careless movements at a dancehall. Walking aimlessly through the snow, because he could.
Sprawled across their threadbare sofa, reading a dime store paperback about a different future than this one. The steady, soothing scratch of Steve’s pencil blurring into so many other sounds of the city.
“D’you still draw?” Bucky asks softly.
“‘Buck.” Steve rolls his eyes, but whatever expression he finds on Bucky’s face softens his tone. “Yeah. I do. Just took some getting used to. Broke a lot of pencils.”
“Good, that’s—good.”
Steve still cocks his head, Bucky realizes, if he doesn’t speak loudly enough. But:
“You still don’t like loud bars,” Bucky says. It’s not a question. Just hours before at the Whip & Fiddle, they found themselves in a quiet corner, like they might’ve back home. Same as then, Bucky had leaned in close, talked low in Steve’s ear, having drank enough to forget he didn’t have to do that anymore. Drank enough to forget more than a few other things too.
Enough that he should still be pleasantly dazed right now, but isn’t. He shakes away the thought.
“It’s just that I can hear everyone’s conversations all at once. It’s sort of overwhelming.”
“Tell me you’re not complaining about your hearing being too good now.”
Steve snickers. “Can you believe that shit?”
The longer they talk, just the two of them, the more Steve sounds like Steve, and less like he’s performing a version of himself for a crowd of middle-aged women in Milwaukee. Man-With-A-Plan voice.
On the long march back from Azzano he even saw Steve—saw Captain America —chastise a young soldier for swearing. For swearing . If anyone had tried a thing like that on Stevie Rogers, that punk would’ve told them to shove it up their ass. And definitely not in that voice .
Part of him hates that voice a little.
A strange silence settles over the room, heavy with the knowledge that silence never used to feel so loud between them.
“I know you didn’t want me to find a way in. I know. But. Is it really that bad?”
The wounded look on Steve’s face is all wrong, too. Doubly so, because Bucky is the one who put it there.
“That’s not—I’m not mad you found a way to fight for what matters. You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t.” Bucky rakes a hand through his hair. “What gets me, what really makes me fucking furious, Steve, is that those people decided the kid from Brooklyn wasn’t enough.”
He makes himself meet Steve’s eyes again.
“And you—you believed them.”
Bucky can see the makings of that glower forming—set jaw, determined stare—like Steve’s squaring up to punch his way out of the accusation. Just as quickly, he seems to think the better of it. He heaves a sigh and lets his face fall.
“I have a chance to do more now. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“It’s not that I don’t…” Bucky looks down at his feet. “Look. I’m glad you’re here. Happy now?”
Steve smirks. “Because you’re hopeless without me.”
It’s a familiar refrain of his, uttered from the couch when Bucky burned breakfast. From a subway platform when Bucky blew all their train fare.
And once, from their fire escape, when Bucky was shipping out the next morning.
Bucky watches the realization cross Steve’s face. The moment he remembers. His eyes dart away. A flush creeps up his neck.
He gets distracted, too relieved that Steve’s cheeks still turn pink like that. Then he gets caught staring again. It’s a goddamn chain reaction of blushing.
What a mess he’s made of everything.
It seemed so small at the time, considering the magnitude of everything else that was about to happen to him.
They were sitting on their fire escape, squeezed shoulder to shoulder, while they sky bled black into blue into pink above the rows of Brooklyn brownstones. Bucky was trying to stretch time a little longer. To hang onto home a little longer. Even then he knew that he’d never be here again, not really. Even if he made it back—even if he came back to this very same spot in this very same building—it wouldn’t be the same.
He wouldn’t be the same. Nothing would ever be the same.
Steve had been withdrawn and sulking since Bucky came back from basic training. But he still tried his best to distract them both from the inevitability of the rising sun.
Bucky was distracted, alright, but that had more to do with the smell of Steve’s skin from sitting this close. From the graceful angles of his wrists when he talked with his hands.
“I still don’t know what they’re gonna do with you,” Steve said.
Bucky threw his hands up, playing along. He already knew what they were going to do with him. Knew from the way his drill sergeant’s eyes lit up that very first time they passed him a rifle.
“You’re awful with languages,” Steve ticked off on his fingers.
“Oui.”
“Never seen you clean a dish in your life.”
“Never? That can’t be right—”
“No sense of direction.”
Well, yeah, that part was true. But only because Steve goes and he follows.
“S’what maps are for.”
The rising light turned golden. So did Steve. His gaze was gentle, but his eyes were so, painfully blue, bright enough that Bucky could see the flecks of green.
“Hopeless,” Steve said.
Oh, that he was. For about as long as he could remember.
It struck him then, just how trivial, how misplaced all that fear was. The next time they put a sniper rifle in his hand, there’d be a man in the scope, and this—this is what he’d been atoning for each year, for all this time? For picturing Steve’s long, lovely fingers slipping under his shirt? For watching him worry at his bottom lip and wondering how he might feel between Bucky’s teeth instead?
It would be such a small thing, he thought, compared to the lurching dread in his gut. It wouldn’t matter all that much to lean in, to tip Steve’s chin up with one knuckle. Not after learning the weight of a trigger underneath the same finger.
But the second his lips met Steve’s, he knew he was a goner. A sucker of the highest magnitude.
It wasn’t small. It still mattered.
And now Steve is here and Steve is different and they’re different—the two of them, together. Everything is different. He wants to go home, he wants to go back to before, he wants to put it all back as it was.
But it doesn’t work like that. He can’t go back. Because they—they did something to him. And he’s different now, too.
Bucky digs around frantically in his pockets for his cigarettes and lighter.
“Fucking-fuck-fuck,” he mutters because he’s trembling too badly to start a spark.
He misses Steve stepping into his space until his hands brush over Bucky’s, grabbing the lighter and cupping the flame around his cigarette.
It gives Bucky vertigo all over again, realizing that they’re eye-to-eye now.
And yet. There’s still a swirl of green in Steve’s blue eyes. His fingers are just as long and lovely.
The crease between his brows is plenty familiar too.
“Are we really not gonna talk about it?” Steve asks.
He means the table in Azzano. Not the fire escape in Brooklyn.
Because Steve already gave him an out for that one.
Bucky had pulled back, too dazed and stupid on soft lips and the soft sound Steve made to think anything other than, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. But when he blinked his eyes open, the light of a new day startled him awake.
Holy shit. They were out in the open. Steve’s eyes were wide. It was Steve , why did he—how could he—what in the absolute fuck was he thinking?
Just when he was debating the merits of hurling himself off the fire escape, Steve stammered,
“You’ve…had a lot to drink tonight.”
It was an offering. And Bucky took it, even though it had been hours and hours since he wandered home from the fair and the dancehall that followed. Because as scared as he was of the ship that was waiting for him, losing Steve to the god’s honest truth—losing him any kind of way—well, right then, it was the most terrifying thing he could think of.
But he’s about to anyway, isn’t he? Steve doesn’t need Bucky to watch his back or finish his fights. He’s someone else now. And Bucky is—
Bucky doesn’t know what he is yet. But he’s starting to get a damn good idea from that monster they saw on the scaffolding. He wants more time, as much as he can get, before Steve sees it too.
“Just tell me what to do, Buck,” Steve says. His voice sounds so small.
“Can we just pretend everything’s fucking normal?”
Bucky tries to keep his voice even but his eyes are burning—is everything burning? Is that just in his head?
“I know it’s not, I know, but maybe if we just—” His voice dips out so he cuts himself off on a long, shaky drag of his cigarette.
Steve’s hand hovers hesitantly for a second before drawing back, like he was reaching for Bucky’s shoulder and changed his mind mid-gesture. It’s replaced with a worried, pitying look. Like Bucky is something frail and breakable.
On the one hand, he wants to shove Steve hard enough to prove him wrong. On the other, now that he’s on the receiving end, he’d sort of like to apologize for all the times Steve found that same fretful expression on Bucky’s face instead.
“How bout you bunk with me tonight?” Steve asks.
Bucky looks over at the narrow bed in the corner of the room and laughs a little too loudly.
“Pal, I don’t even know how you’re gonna fit in that thing.”
“We can put the pillows on the floor. Make like we’re back home.”
Bucky thinks of the handful of times he passed out on Steve’s daybed, somewhere between too drunk and too emboldened to move to his own room. And after Sarah died, when he woke up fitted around Steve’s curled body, like a matched set of nesting dolls.
His throat feels tight.
“Would that be alright?”
“Okay,” Bucky says. “Alright.”
But as soon as they’re in a nest of pillows and blankets, Bucky remembers why they haven’t done this in ages. It hurts him to be this close. To feel the warmth of Steve’s skin stretch across the small space between them.
Although, there’s a strange comfort in it too. In the constancy of that longing.
They took something from him. But they didn’t take that.
“Are you ever afraid of it?”
Bucky isn’t sure why he’s whispering, but Steve whispers back. Like they’re in a schoolroom, sharing secrets.
“Afraid of what I can do now, you mean?”
Bucky nods.
Steve rolls onto his side so Bucky can see his thoughtful expression, long lashes sweeping his cheeks.
“I think I’m afraid I won’t be able to do enough.”
Bucky thinks of the Steve he saw leading 400 battered and weary men past miles and miles of danger. Every last one of them saw it, too. They saw him. And it didn’t have a damn thing to do with that stupid voice.
“You were always enough,” Bucky says.
He doesn’t miss the way his eyes soften, then thread down Bucky’s face.
Steve turns too quickly onto his back and holds himself too still. He closes his eyes and breathes deep.
“Bucky, I don’t know if I can keep pretending. About…that.”
Really though, where’s a fire escape to launch yourself off of when you need one? Bucky’s face feels hot, so he hides it behind his hands.
“I’m sorry, okay? I wish I knew what else to say.”
“That’s not what I’m getting at—”
“I wasn’t in my right mind. It will never happen again—”
“Bucky–”
“—I swear. You don’t hafta worry—”
“I can't stop thinking about it, alright!” Steve hisses over him before lowering his voice, face reddening.
Bucky’s mouth goes too dry to swallow.
“Oh?” he says. Like an idiot.
“Yeah, ‘oh,’ you jerk.”
The heat under Bucky’s face has nothing on the furnace that is Steve’s body, inches from his. There’s so much of him now—so much warm, inviting skin and muscle.
“So. Then. What do we do?”
“How the hell should I know? You’re the one that got us into this.”
Bucky snorts. “Man with a plan my ass,” he mutters, then yelps when a serum-enhanced elbow lands between his ribs.
Bucky shoves back, but even that brief playfulness feels stilted. He knows Steve feels it too from the strained silence that follows.
“Maybe we…get it out of our system,” Steve says to the ceiling. “Then everything’ll go back to the way it was.”
It is the stupidest idea Bucky has ever heard. Wanting Steve isn’t so much a thing coursing through his veins as it is a vein unto itself. An electric current running, always, under his skin.
But he wants so badly to kiss Steve’s stupid mouth again until neither one of them can breathe.
“Good idea,” he says.
It happens in one quick motion, like Steve’s afraid to lose his nerve. The turn of his body, a rustling of blankets. Steve’s lips pressed to his. Quietly, carefully. Maybe because Steve is still being careful with him.
Bucky is just wishing there was more when Steve’s mouth parts on a low hum and a soft breath. A small thing, but a burst of senses all the same, enough to hook into his core and yank him back, hard. Back to a quiet morning, a rush of cars, a threadbare sofa. The steady cadence of pencil on paper.
“Holy shit,” Bucky breathes.
He opens his eyes. It’s a mistake—Steve looks incredible, all flushed lips and imploring eyes.
“Bucky,” Steve says. He sounds incredible too. Awed and a little hoarse. “I can hear your heartbeat.”
Bucky moves his hand over his own chest, self-conscious. As if that’s something he could secret away.
Steve reaches to frame his neck instead.
“Yeah, that’s you,” he murmurs, fingertips circling over Bucky’s pulse. “That’s you.”
Steve’s eyes bore into his so intensely that Bucky wonders if he can see him, too—muscle and bone, blood and electricity. Right through to the poison he doesn’t understand, that’s pumping alongside the rest.
“Can’t go back to the way it was, Stevie.”
“Nope,” Steve agrees, pulling Bucky’s mouth back to his.
There’s more intention now in the tilt of his head, fingers pushing into the fine hairs on the nape of Bucky’s neck. But the same caution, too.
For all Steve’s brashness and courage in schoolyards and alleyways, he used to be so hesitant, so insecure when it came to this sort of thing. Maybe Bucky should be relieved to find that he still is. That he hasn’t been test driving this new body of his, not with starstruck fans, or showgirls, or intimidating ladies in red dresses.
Instead, that thought makes him a little sad. Even now, with all those eyes on him, Steve still doesn’t see himself.
How many times can a fella say it? Bucky tries to show him with reverent hands sliding up his now-broad back, urging him closer. A lazy press of his hips to move closer still. Steve’s mouth drops open, surprised, and Bucky licks into it, just a flicker of tongue exploring the seam of his lips.
“Yeah, that’s it,” he murmurs. “Lemme taste you.”
Then his tongue is pressed to Steve’s with a quiet moan—his, he thinks but isn’t sure, because he’s busy losing his mind to the rush of heat from Steve’s mouth. Bucky drags his hands into Steve’s hair and nips at his lips until, finally, he meets him back with some of that dogged determination of his.
There, in the echo of Bucky’s faint, encouraging sounds. In the hands working eagerly at the tuck of his shirt.
Well, a little too eagerly.
“Oops,” Steve says to Bucky’s ripped dress uniform.
“Christ. How the hell am I supposed to explain that?”
“Take it up with your commanding officer.”
When Bucky tilts his head, a wry smile tugs at the corner of Steve’s mouth.
“That’d be me now, Sergeant.”
Apparently, certain parts of him do not hate that voice, because Bucky drops a whimper instead of a clever remark, throwing his arms over Steve’s shoulders and kissing him roughly. He doesn’t even care that Steve snickers into it, not when his hands are pushing up under the torn fabric and running over his stomach, just the right side of too hard.
“Steve,” he whines, urging and wanting that. Wanting his body to forget everything but a claiming touch, the curl of need down his spine.
But somewhere over his ribs Steve pauses, leaving Bucky mumbling a complaint until he catches it. That same fretful look, now twice as distressed and directed at Bucky’s shirtless frame.
“Don’t.”
“Bucky...”
“I said don’t,” he snaps, because he shouldn’t have to explain that Hydra didn’t serve steak and potatoes and he can’t explain the gnawing hunger that’s followed him every day since.
He only wants to chase that flicker of lightning that made his mind go blank, so he pushes hard at Steve’s chest instead. Not hard enough to move someone the size of a boulder, but Steve goes anyway until he’s flat on his back.
But there’s still something there that Bucky doesn’t want from him, just below that soft expression.
“Not made of glass, Steve. You understand?”
“I'm sorry. I know,” he says, breath catching as Bucky runs his hands up those long damn legs, from calf to thigh.
In his mind, Bucky has done this a hundred times. He’s climbed over Steve’s body on the floor of the kitchen, on the couch, in his bed. In the sand at Rockaway beach. On the fire escape even—now there’s a heady thought—with his palm covering Steve’s mouth so nobody’d hear them.
Bucky looks over him now, reconciling blurry fantasy with vivid reality. The Steve he left in Brooklyn and the one who found him here, in this terrible place.
It takes him longer than it should to realize that Steve is shrinking a little under his sharp gaze.
“You hate it,” he says.
Bucky shakes his head gravely.
“You look like a dream,” he murmurs, ducking down to nuzzle against Steve’s stomach, breathing deep. The starch of his uniform, cigarette smoke from the bar, and Steve underneath. “Did then, too.”
“T-those sort of lines work for you back home?”
Bucky lingers over the nip of Steve’s waist and pinches, snickering at Steve’s full-body jolt. Same as when they were kids.
“Not droppin’ lines,” he says.
He means it. Back there, after weeks without daylight, he’d looked up into Steve’s face and could’ve sworn he was staring straight into the sun.
“Prove it,” Steve says, the not-so-little shit, as he tugs Bucky in by the chain of his tags.
And sure, Bucky’s got a good imagination, but there’s so much he couldn’t possibly know. The dizzying rhythm against Steve’s tongue. Those slow hands on him, aimless, curious. The sound of his name, low in Steve's throat when he breaks away to kiss the underside of his jaw. God, the smell and the taste and the heat of him—he’s damn well going to remember it right. He’s going to memorize it.
When Bucky runs the flat of his tongue along the curve of Steve’s neck, his head drops back on a soft moan and his body arches up.
Yeah, there it is, the hot clutch in his guts.
“That you, heatin’ up for me?” Bucky drags his hips over Steve’s, where he’s hard for him, just for him, and they both groan. “I get you fired up like that, sweetheart?”
Steve scowls, gripping tight at Bucky’s sides.
“Who you callin’—sweetheart?” he says, then grinds up, leaving Bucky pinned between his strong hands and the pressure of his cock. He’s not sure who looks more surprised by the sound that rises up from his throat.
“Well, isn’t that something,” Steve says.
“Oh, fuck,” Bucky says.
He all but tears at the buttons on Steve’s shirt. “You really are,” he marvels when he can work his hands over Steve’s bare chest, down the tensing muscles of his stomach. You’d think he got electrocuted, the way he writhes underneath the drag of Bucky’s fingers.
Bucky can’t even say where he’s taking this, only that every roll of his hips pools heat in his stomach. He muffles a shivery moan in the crook of Steve’s neck when a sharp thrust makes Steve’s prick jerk against him.
“Look at you. So fuckin’ incredible.”
“Bucky —”
“Can’t believe I get to see you like this.”
“Buck, hang on, just—”
Bucky sits up and searches Steve’s face. His brows are drawn tight, chest heaving, so Bucky moves his hands over those broad shoulders in a soothing motion.
“Talk to me, pal.”
Steve blinks up at the ceiling instead of him. “It’s. Too much.”
Bucky freezes. “Oh,” he says quietly, pushing off of him.
“No.” Steve tightens his grip on Bucky’s hips. “I mean. With the, the serum. Everything feels like. Too much.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t know how to explain it.”
Bucky grins wide. “I made you feel too good?” he offers.
“Shut up, shut up.” Steve turns a very adorable shade of red, from the tips of his ears to his chest, “This is embarrassing enough without you—”
“Shh, shh, s’alright.” Bucky pushes his head back into Steve’s neck. “No more teasing. I swear.”
He makes good on his promise, mouthing along Steve’s collarbone and murmuring encouragements into his skin.
“Bet it just takes some getting used to.” He nudges his nose to Steve’s cheek. “You want me to cool it?”
“That what you want?
Bucky wants Steve to keep looking at him like that. Bravado stripped away to reveal the trust and gentleness. The need.
See, Bucky knows a thing about selfishness, too. It wasn’t selfless, looking after Steve all those years. Because even when Steve was laid-up sick, or nursing a broken nose, or getting bailed out of another scrap, he never did need Bucky. Not really. Not like Bucky needed him to.
“I wanna take real good care of you.” He rubs his thumb over Steve’s lower lip. “Go nice and slow. How’s that sound?”
Steve closes his eyes and hums faintly.
“Can I?”
“Yeah,” he breathes. “I want that, Buck.”
God, but he looks so sweet—parted lips, softly rounded brows, half-lidded eyes. Bucky’s heart aches just looking at him. Well, not just his heart.
He makes his way down Steve’s neck, his chest, with closed-mouthed kisses. Nice and slow, just like he said.
“What’s it feel like? Compared to before.”
He licks up the hollow of his chest and Steve shivers.
“Not a whole lot of before, Buck.”
“Just try.”
He huffs a quiet laugh as Bucky kisses over his ribs.
“Like I got a million more nerve endings. All lit up like a—” Steve sucks in a sharp breath when Bucky brushes featherlight fingertips over his nipple. “—Christmas tree.”
Bucky hums thoughtfully and takes the tip of his tongue there instead. Underneath him, Steve’s hips buck up.
“Seems alright to me.”
“I guess it’s not so ba—ah, ah. Jesus. Yeah, do that again.”
Bucky obliges with another gentle scrape of teeth against his nipple and keeps at it until Steve’s actually biting his fist to keep quiet. Still making all these torturously beautiful little sounds that leave Bucky tracing the outline of his own erection and fighting the urge to thrust. He wants to take his time, but Steve’s too much temptation like this.
To that end, he makes his way down, cooling Steve off with a drag of lips along his impossibly smooth stomach.
Bucky pulls back to admire him for a second, shaking his head.
Steve nudges him with a knee.
“Quit it.”
“Can’t help it. Have you seen you?”
He rolls his eyes, cheeks flushed.
“Oh, you haven’t, huh? How bout I show you.”
Bucky maps Steve’s body with littered kisses, sucking little marks as he goes to quiet gasps and sighs.
“Remember that time you dragged me to the Met?”
“That doesn’t really narrow it down,” Steve pants.
“Look just like Hercules, or somethin’, all carved out of marble.”
Bucky counts the love bites under his breath with his index finger, one for each new muscle. Already, the first are fading.
“Bucky, stop goofin’ around, already,” Steve huffs, squirming.
“Pushy, pushy,” Bucky says, but he gives in anyway—of course he does—moving splayed fingers down Steve’s body to palm him through the uniform he’s straining against. He rocks up into the touch, a low sound caught in his throat.
Bucky swallows hard and drops his forehead to Steve’s.
“Let me touch you?”
Steve moans, nodding against him.
“Please —”
Then they both fumble frantically at Steve’s belt, snickering against each other’s lips between urgent kisses.
When Bucky reaches to wrap a hand around his cock, throbbing and already dripping on his fingers, he curses almost as loudly as Steve.
Has he been touched this way before? Bucky doesn’t know, but desperately wants to be so, so good to him. He lets the rising cadence of all those sharp breaths and bitten off whimpers in his ear guide the movement of his hand. He murmurs all the sweet things he can think of up the long line of Steve’s throat.
“Ah, f-fuck,” Steve groans at a drag of his thumb over the tip. It’s tempting to scold him, but goddamn does Bucky love the way that word sounds in his beautiful mouth. He does it again and kisses the next swear off Steve’s lips.
“Buck, wait—”
“You okay?”
“Yes, I just want—” He takes a deep breath. “With you. Together.”
“Yeah?” Bucky smirks. “Ask me sweet.”
Steve narrows his eyes. Then, honest to goodness growls. And Bucky knows he’s underweight, but Steve flips them both like he doesn’t weigh anything at all.
“Holyfuckingshit.”
Steve looks down at him, then back up, expression so damn smug.
“Like that do ya?”
Bucky nods too quickly because yeah, he does, and because Steve’s working at his zipper and every wayward touch has him just about jumping out of his skin. There’s a distant ping of a popped off button, another sheepish, “Whoops,” but he can’t bring himself to give two fucks about the sorry state of his uniform once Steve’s hands are on his prick. Still gentle and soft. Still artist’s hands. If only for just a little while longer.
Bucky has been touched like this before, but this is Steve—he has to close his eyes and alphabetize the 1941 Dodgers roster just to keep from losing it.
Then Steve drops his hips and it’s skin against skin, an electric catch of their bodies. Bucky muffles a helpless sound against his lips, hands framing his jaw. It’s too much and not enough between one thrust and the next until Steve breaks away from Bucky’s mouth to lick across his palm and reach between them.
His hand is almost big enough to hold both of them in a tight grip, a careful stroke. Their differences here are more apparent, pressed together like this. Nothing Steve hasn’t known since they were boys, when Bucky first had to explain the whole bris business to his wide-eyed Catholic friend.
But the rest is just the same: echoed sounds and harried fingertips, the rolling tempo of their bodies to the same song.
Steve’s asking in a cracked whisper if this is alright, if he’s doing it right. The best answer Bucky can muster is a tumble of pleas and incoherent sounds and Steve’s name, he thinks.
He’s still begging when Steve goes still above him, all those long muscles taut as a steel cable. Then, that tension snaps—his hips stutter and stop with Bucky’s name in pieces, gritted between his teeth, as he comes across their stomachs.
Oh god, to see him fall apart—it only takes two hard thrusts into the wet heat between them before Bucky follows him there. With fingers wound into Steve’s hair, he tugs him into a sloppy kiss, muffling a sharp cry against his parted lips.
They breathe themselves back together like this for a moment. Well, Bucky tries to breathe as best he can under 200 pounds of super soldier. But when Steve sits up to wipe himself off with the tattered remains of Bucky’s shirt—the jerk—Bucky immediately misses the comfort of his crushing weight.
Just as quickly, Steve tugs him in close, curled around his back. Fingertips in the divot of his hip, a press of lips across one shoulder. That surprises him, for Steve to be the one clinging to small touches. Especially considering his penchant for holding everyone at arm’s length—including Bucky if he doesn’t push and push again.
“This is weird,” Bucky says.
“What?” Steve croaks.
“Roll over.”
Steve releases the breath he’d been holding. “You’re such an asshole,” he grumbles, but Bucky can hear his grin, so he ain’t fooling anybody.
“Yeah. That’s the stuff.”
He nuzzles into the broad space between Steve’s shoulder blades, sighing contentedly. Steve goes quiet for a moment while drawing indistinct shapes into Bucky’s palm.
“Everything’s gonna change, huh?” he says.
Bucky’s reach isn’t long enough anymore to wind an arm around his torso. Steve’s breathing is even and smooth in place of a hitched rattle against Bucky’s chest. But it’s all the same where it counts—Bucky is steady and safe, loose-limbed and warmed all the way through.
“Maybe not,” Bucky realizes. The logistics of this thing, whatever it is, will be…challenging. But Bucky’s been keeping this secret since he was 17 years old. He’s had plenty of practice.
“Still you and me,” he grins into Steve’s skin, “causing trouble.”
Steve shakes on a quiet laugh.
“If those showbiz folks had half an idea a’ the kind of shit we used to stir up—”
“You used to stir up.”
“—they’d ship me back home in a heartbeat.”
His voice drops low and quiet.
“Y’know you’re probably the only person here who knows that. Me. That I’m not just some goddamn cartoon character.”
Bucky frowns, heart heavy, because that’s still all Steve. Surrounded by a veritable army of people now, and still a man alone.
“I missed you, Buck,” he says softly.
“I’m right here." He nudges his nose to the base of Steve’s neck. "And not about to let you forget your humble roots.”
“That a promise?” he teases.
“Promise. Even if you are a trading card.”
“And a comic book, I think.”
“Right, and a comic book.”
It’s an easy thing to promise to someone like Steve. Small or big, on his ass or kicking ass, he’s always known exactly who he was.
Bucky shudders around a memory that intrudes sharp and unwelcome. His own name on his lips, a prayer uttered over and over again, until the words were just a sound. The Hebrew one too—but only in his mind, because it was only his. The last thing left they couldn’t have.
“Y’alright?” Steve asks groggily.
“Steve. This place. It does change you. It will,” Bucky tells him, because somebody has to. “Who I was. Who I want to be….”
He doesn’t know how to explain it right. But Steve understands him anyway. Maybe he’s the only one who could.
“Won’t let you forget,” he whispers, kissing Bucky’s wrist as if to seal the deal.
Before long, the slow rise and fall of Steve’s body rocks him further and further away from all those fears. Until there’s so much distance between him and that table.
In that hazy place between sleeping and waking, Steve’s skin might be magic. Bucky breathes him in and for a little while, he does go home again after all.