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The light of the bodega is harsh and white, and Bucky thinks if he spends another minute here he’ll surely get a headache. The store is nearly empty, the floors are still wet from mopping, and there’s a small pair of speakers by the counter that are playing a tinny rendition of Last Christmas.
Bucky sidles up to the front of the store and puts the items in his arms down on the counter. A bottle of Merlot, a box of chocolates, a bag of chips, and two cans of fancy cat food. He came here for the cat food.
The man behind the counter pays him little mind as he punches numbers into the cash register in front of him. He looks tired, and there’s a coffee stain on his sweater that Bucky can’t help but notice looks remarkably like Ohio.
“Sixteen dollars fifty-eight.”
Bucky fumbles for a moment to open his wallet with his cold fingers, then hands him twenty. “Keep the change.”
The man shoots Bucky a warm smile. “Merry Christmas.”
Bucky smiles back, though he feels it doesn't quite reach his eyes.
“Yeah, you too.”
He forgot to bring a tote bag again -- because he really was just going to buy Alpine some fancy cat food as a sort of Christmas present before he decided to treat himself -- so he balances his purchases in his arms as he steps back out into the frosty air.
His breath comes out in little clouds in front of him as he begins the three block walk home, and he makes sure to avoid the icy puddles that are so wont to have pedestrians sprawled out on the sidewalk. There are a few other people out on the street, though most have gone inside to shelter themselves from the dark cold. Some couples are still ambling home, huddled together for warmth, and Bucky watches as a young woman hails a definitely overpriced taxi. A cat crosses the street.
He can feel his ears start to freeze and wishes he had thought to grab a beanie on the way out. But then again, he had committed to the messy bun for the evening and hadn’t wanted to ruin it, so now he’s suffering the consequences.
New York is denying its ever hopeful inhabitants another white Christmas and giving them a dry, freezing one instead. For just a moment, everyone had been optimistic as the streets were painted white in mid-December, but then the snow had melted away into puddles that turned into black ice overnight. The ice is still there, along with a bitter wind, and there’s no snow expected until after the New Year. Bucky’s not surprised, but he can’t help but wish there was snow anyway.
The clock of the church a block over strikes eight just as Bucky approaches his front door.
He fumbles for a bit, trying to get his keys out of his coat pocket without dropping his groceries. The box of chocolates falls to the ground, and Bucky swears under his breath.
Though his keys are usually in his left pocket, he can’t feel them there, so he switches his groceries to that arm and then starts shuffling through his right one.
He still can’t feel them.
With a huff, he starts setting his groceries down on the house steps; The wine, the chips, the cat food. He picks up the box of chocolates and lays it beside them.
He puts both of his hands in his pockets then, feeling around for his keys. In his left, he feels a mitten, a tissue, his wallet. In his right, a mitten, a lip balm, and his phone. He doesn’t feel his keys.
Frowning, he then checks the pockets of his jeans, but these are predictably empty. Then, he checks his coat pockets again.
And even though he knows that this is a cheap coat from H&M that barely keeps him warm when it’s this cold, he opens it up to see if he somehow put his keys in the inside pocket he knows doesn't exist.
Predictably, there’s nothing there.
He checks his coat pockets again, takes everything out of them as though his keys are so small he might have missed them. They have a giant red star keychain, so they really shouldn’t be that hard to feel.
They’re not there.
He swears out loud this time, because fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck. Fucking shit.
Bucky used to be notoriously bad about forgetting his keys when he went out, but he thought he kicked that habit back before he moved out on his own. When he had a roommate, he could just call them to let him in.
But now, the only one in his apartment is Alpine, and while she may be a little shit that can open way too many cabinets, he doesn’t think she can open the front door. And even if she could, she would never let him in. Maybe if he bribed her with the cat food, she would, but not otherwise.
Bucky has to force himself to focus back on the facts, because his tangent about Alpine's theoretical response to his problems if she was humanoid really isn’t helping to solve them.
There’s anxiety gnawing at his bones, so he tries to make a list of what he knows and has. He has some groceries. He has his gloves, and his lip balm. He has his wallet, and he has his phone. What he doesn't have is his keys, and thus, a way to get into the house. It’s after eight pm on Christmas Eve, and it’s below freezing outside. His mother has his spare key, and ordinarily he would call her, but right now she’s nearly 4000 miles away. There’s no way she would be able to help him.
“ Fuck ,” he proclaims out loud.
A pigeon on the sidewalk across the street flutters away.
Another voice cuts through the cold. “You okay?”
Bucky looks up to see a silhouette on the fire escape two floors above him. Clearly, he had been swearing louder than he intended to.
The figure is clearly male, and built like a fucking brick house, but the light behind him makes any other features vague and indistinguishable.
“Uh, yeah,” Bucky says dumbly. “I just- I forgot my keys.”
“I’ll let you in.”
The silhouette disappears from view.
Bucky steps forward to retrieve his groceries from the steps of the building, and has just picked up the last can of cat food when the door opens. He looks up to meet the man who saved him from hypothermia.
And what a man it is.
He is indeed built like a fucking brick house, with shoulders so wide they nearly fill the entire door way, and arms and a chest that are equally massive. But he has golden blonde hair and blue, blue eyes and a pretty face, one that almost negates all the beefcake and makes him look like a Greco-Roman statue.
He’s giving Bucky a warm and almost apprehensive smile and he’s wearing an off-white cable knit sweater that makes him look unbelievably cuddly, and Bucky is too fucking cold and grumpy and tried to deal with any of it.
Suppressing a groan of both attraction and exasperation, he tries for a smile. “Thanks.”
“ ‘Course.”
Tall Blond And Handsome steps aside to let Bucky into the hall, and Bucky brushes past him. He sighs at the warmth of the building and lets it seep into his cold skin. He probably should have worn more than a thin knit turtleneck under his coat.
The door closes with a click, and Bucky turns back to his savior to thank him, again. In the relatively bright lights of the hallway, he looks oddly familiar. Maybe he’s seen him around the building.
“You saved me from probably hypothermia, so thank you. Again.”
“Sure,” Tall Blond And Handsome smiles. He shrugs almost sheepishly, like he’s shy, and becomes an enigma. “Hypothermia isn’t fun, I wouldn't wish it on you.”
Bucky looks him up and down, he can’t help himself. “ You know what hypothermia feels like?”
A blush travels from the tips of Tall Blond And Handsome’s ears down over his face and into his collar. Huh. “You’d be surprised.”
A silence falls between them. It’s uncertain, slightly awkward, because Bucky is still key-less and grocery-laden and Tall Blond And Handsome probably wants to retreat into his own space, back to his wife or girlfriend or family. It is Christmas Eve after all.
The dull sound of laughter rings out from 1B, the apartment to their right. It’s followed by a bark.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Bucky supposes.
He’ll try and break in, and if all else fails, he’ll drink his Merlot in the hall and call the landlord in the morning.
Tall Blond And Handsome frowns. “Do you have a way to get into your apartment?”
“I’ll figure something out.”
He expertly raises an eyebrow, which should look tacky, but somehow only makes him more charming. “That’s a no.”
Bucky opens his mouth to argue again, but Tall Blond And Handsome beats him to it.
“You’re not spending Christmas Eve in the hallway,” he proclaims. “Come on, I’m in 3F.”
“I wouldn’t want to intrude…” Bucky trails off. Truth is, he doesn't want to sit in a room full of loving strangers and their Christmas traditions.
Tall Blond And Handsome shoots him a rueful smile. “Pal, the only thing you’re intruding on is me, frozen pizza, and Nat King Cole on repeat.”
Huh.
That’s… unexpected. It almost makes Bucky feel better, that this beautiful stranger is also alone on Christmas Eve.
“Well,” Bucky tries. “How do you know I’m not a serial killer?”
“How do you know I’m not?”
And Bucky finds he really doesn’t have a good answer to that, so he follows Tall Blond And Handsome up the carpeted stairs.
When Bucky steps into the apartment 3F -- first, because apparently Tall Blond And Handsome is nothing short of chivalrous -- he finds that Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song is indeed ringing through the apartment. It’s nice, Bucky thinks. It’s always been one of his favorites.
He steps further into the hall as Tall Blond And Handsome closes the door behind them with a click. He offers to take Bucky’s coat, and Bucky lets him.
“I’m Steve, by the way,” Tall Blond And Handsome -- Steve -- introduces himself as he turns from the coat rack. He holds out his hand.
Bucky smiles, and takes it. It’s bigger than his own, and calloused, but so incredibly warm. “Bucky.”
Steve’s left eyebrow raises again, but to his credit, he doesn’t ask.
There’s a beat of silence, and both of them seem to simultaneously realize that their hands are still joined. They break apart, Steve blushes again. Bucky smiles.
“You, uh-” Steve clears his throat. “You can put your groceries in the kitchen.”
Bucky follows him through a doorway into the living area, an open kitchen and dining space that lead directly into the living room. The apartment has the same layout as his own.
As Bucky sets his groceries down on the corner of one of the countertops, though, he finds that despite the nearly identical set-up, it feels very different from his apartment. It feels less like a home.
It’s very clean, very organized, and all the furniture looks matching and new. It’s nice, but almost entirely void of personality. There are a few photos on the wall, but if it weren’t for them and the music and the mug and notebook on the coffee table, the apartment wouldn’t look lived in. There are no holiday decorations.
There is, however, a still wrapped fir leaning in the corner of the room. It’s a giant tree, not easily missable, but it sinks into the shadows of the room like a forgotten relic.
“Will your cat be okay with you locked out of your apartment?” Steve asks suddenly.
Bucky looks back at him with a confused frown. How the hell did he know about Alpine?
Steve motions at the groceries. “Unless the, uh, cat food is a gift or something.”
“Oh.” Bucky tucks a stray strand of hair back behind his ear. “No, yeah, she’ll be fine. She’ll be a bitch about it, I’m sure, but she’s been fed already.”
Steve smiles. “That’s a relief. Wouldn’t want to be on any cat’s bad side.”
“You don’t like cats?” For some reason, Bucky finds that he really cares about the answer. He wants Steve to like cats.
Steve shrugs. “I like cats just fine, I just feel like they don’t particularly like me.”
“Well, they generally don’t like anyone, so I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Steve laughs, and Bucky is unreasonably proud of himself. It feels like a great achievement, somehow.
And because Bucky has no chill and is obsessed with his white, potentially evil, ball of fluff, he can’t help himself when he asks, “Do you want to see a picture?”
What he isn’t expecting is the warm, hearty laugh and the genuine interest in those bright ocean eyes when Steve says yes and sidles over to Bucky.
Bucky grabs his phone out of his back pocket and doesn't even have to unlock it to see Alpine’s round face and big eyes. He shows it to Steve. “This is Alpine.”
“Okay,” Steve admits with a smile. “She’s adorable.”
Bucky wonders if he notices how close he’s standing to Bucky, with his shoulder brushing against the back of Bucky’s. He probably doesn’t, and Bucky knows he’s being ridiculous at how giddy and warm it makes him.
He pulls away before he spontaneously combusts.
“Yeah,” he says, pocketing his phone. “Surprisingly so, considering I found her in a dumpster.”
Steve looks surprised, letting out a single hollow scoff over his incredulous concern. “Jesus,” he breathes. “That’s fucked up and I’m glad you found her.”
“Me too,” Bucky smiles.
He decides he likes Steve, right then and there, because he didn’t laugh, even though Bucky phrased it as a joke. And if he was using it as a test, that’s no one’s business but his own.
They teeter back into a slightly uncertain silence. Steve brushes his blond hair out of his forehead only for it to fall right back into place.
The Christmas Song starts back over.
Bucky doesn’t want to pry, but he also can’t help his curiosity. “What’s with the tree? You don’t celebrate?”
When he turns back to Steve, the large man just shrugs. “I mean I do, I guess. Sort of.”
Bucky raises an eyebrow.
“I was raised Catholic,” Steve explains, “but I just didn’t get around to decorating. It didn’t seem important, if it was just for me. The tree was a gift.”
Bucky musters him. Gorgeous Steve, in his chunky cable knit sweater, who’s spending Christmas alone and kind enough to let Bucky into his space on Christmas Eve, who’s Catholic and has someone that gifted him a seven foot tree and listens to Christmas music. Chivalrous Steve, renting a nondescript apartment that he didn’t decorate.
An enigma indeed.
And then, for lack of any other way to spend time with a man he’s only just met, Bucky makes a suggestion.
“Well,” he offers, “it’s not just you now, so if you want, we could set up the tree and drink my cheap wine?”
As soon as the question is out of his mouth, Bucky thinks it may have been a stupid suggestion, but Steve’s face breaks out into a grin. To a devastating effect.
“I’ll get the decorations,” he announces, and then he’s disappearing back through the hall.
Bucky smiles a little and makes his way to the tree in the corner of the room. Given its size, he struggles a little to get it upright, and he’s just about to start shimmying it out of the corner when Steve reenters the room and rushes to help him.
Whereas Bucky was swearing under his breath trying to get the damn thing to even move in the direction he wanted it to, Steve takes it off of his hands with ease and effortlessly carries it over to the big window across the room.
When he looks back at Bucky, he has the audacity to look almost embarrassed about it while Bucky files the image of the last few seconds under things to think about at a later date.
He really needs to get a grip.
He shakes himself out of his dumb stare and walks over to where Steve had dropped the boxes of decorations. There’s two of them, one larger than the other, and they’re definitely not light, but while it may look like it next to Steve, he’s not wholly incompetent and actually consideres himself to be quite in shape.
He tucks both boxes under his chin and makes his way back over to where Steve has begun freeing the tree from its confines. If Steve notices that he’s struggling, he doesn't point it out and leaves Bucky some of his dignity, which Bucky is grateful for.
With some semblance of grace, he makes his way over, and is already mentally patting himself on the back for it when he sets the boxes down a little too crookedly and one of them knocks heavily into the cabinet to his left.
He catches the box before it can fall to the ground, and is immensely grateful for his reflexes as he reaches out just in time to catch the photo frame he had nearly knocked from the cabinet to the floor. The last thing he needs to be doing in this stranger’s house is breaking things.
Bucky doesn’t mean to look at the contents of the frame as he stands it back up on its spot, but it's kind of inevitable. He doesn't know what he expects from it, but it’s surely not what he finds.
It’s an old black and white photo, grainy and faded, depicting a group of soldiers. They’re huddled together for a photo op in a coniferous forest covered in snow. There are seven of them, and they’re all somewhat familiar, but none so much as the one in the middle. There, with the pretty face and big shoulders that are so fresh in Bucky’s mind, stands Captain America in his ridiculous uniform.
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
It explains quite a lot, actually.
But holy shit.
Bucky hears how Steve stills, stops ripping at the net of the tree. Bucky quickly sets the photo back on its spot. He straightens, tucks a stray strand of hair behind his ear. For some reason, he feels like a kid that was caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
He clears his throat. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. I knocked it down by accident.”
When he looks up at Steve, he finds he can’t quite read his face. Its gorgeous features have morphed into an unfamiliar masked expression.
The blond smiles, but it’s a little tight around the edges. “It’s fine. You just-- you didn’t know.”
Bucky shakes his head.
A silence stretches between them, miles wide, a question mark in its center. There should be a shift in their dynamic now, undoubtedly. After all, the man before him is a war hero, an A-List celebrity, an American Icon. There’s a statue of him in Prospect Park. Bucky remembers learning about him in history class and watching one of the silly promotional movies for one of his college courses -- unbidden, he recalls pausing the video to examine the sharp line of Captain America’s jawline and curve of his brow before shaking his head and repressing the flicker he detected behind his sternum. He remembers his midterm essay about the importance of the Howling Commandos for military integration. The man across the room from him saved the city, maybe the world , from extinction by aliens just earlier this year. He should be untouchable to Bucky.
But he’s also Tall Blond And Handsome, Steve, who let Bucky into his apartment on Christmas Eve and blushes too much and agreed to drink Bucky’s cheap wine and set up a Christmas tree with him. And he’s also alone on Christmas.
So, Bucky tries to shake himself of the awkward air and smiles. “That explains the Nat King Cole, I guess.”
The air isn’t fully broken, but it lessens under Steve’s answering huff of a laugh and his relieved smile. “I’m also open to other suggestions, I just have no idea what’s good.”
“Oh my God,” Bucky grins. “You, old man, are in for a treat of my off-key singing.”
And then Steve laughs, and the air is decisively broken.
It takes them about ten minutes just to untangle the tree from the net it’s wrapped up in, and by the time it finally stands at its full breadth, Bucky is already humming along to Christmas Wrapping.
“Jesus,” Bucky remarks, looking at the frankly magnificent tree in front of them. “Who’s gifting you two-hundred-dollar Christmas trees?”
Steve turns to him with a smile somewhere between sheepish and exasperated. “Tony Stark.”
“Right. Yeah. That would explain it.”
They each get a glass of wine from the kitchen, and though Steve insists he doesn’t need to share, Bucky opens the box of chocolates for both of them. It’s really the least he can currently offer in return for Steve’s hospitality. Besides, it wasn’t a great investment.
He toasts to Steve’s first Christmas in the 21st century, and Steve gives him a smile as their glasses clink, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. Bucky can’t imagine it’s easy to feel festive in an environment so alienating, but he doesn’t quite know how to breach the topic without being weird and intrusive, so he says nothing.
They wander back into the living room and set their glasses down on coasters that look like they cost as much as Bucky’s entire outfit.
“So,” Bucky wonders as they begin to unpack the baubles, “are there no fancy Christmas parties you could be attending right now?”
Steve huffs. “There’s plenty. I just didn’t feel like going.”
“Too glitzy?” Bucky finally manages to break through the seal on the golden baubles he was struggling to open and straightens to grab another.
“Yeah. And just- Yeah. Not my scene.”
It’s clear that he wanted to say something else, but didn’t. And it makes sense -- they’re barely more than strangers -- but something in Bucky tugs, wishing Steve would have said what he meant.
“What is your scene, then?” Bucky asks instead.
Steve frowns, shrugs, his expression a little too sincere when he says, “I don’t know.” And then, in a half hearted attempt to divert attention away from himself, “Decorating trees with forgetful strangers, I guess.”
Bucky scoffs in spite of himself. “I am not forgetful.”
“Oh, yeah? Your keys just decided they weren’t coming, then?”
Bucky can’t help but look up from the baubles and over at Steve then, who’s sporting the grin of someone who’s way too pleased with themselves at being a little shit. Bucky barks out a scandalized laugh.
“Okay, first of all, ouch. The whole thing is probably on Alpine for distracting me.”
Steve narrows his eyes playfully, like he doesn’t quite believe Bucky, but then just smiles. “Sure.”
“And second,” Bucky continues, reaching down to pull tape off of the last box, “AP US History had a whole chapter about Captain America and yet it neglected to mention that you, Steve Rogers, are a punk.”
Steve starts coughing suddenly, and Bucky looks up to find his face reddening as he puts his wine back on the table -- the one he had evidently just choked on.
Bucky laughs. “Drink much?”
Steve gives him a look Bucky can’t quite decipher, then just quirks his brows and looks away. His face is still (adorably) red.
“Sorry,” Bucky says, “it’s a stupid thing my mom always says. You good?”
Steve nods. “Yeah,” he smiles. “I usually do know how to drink. It’s just- wrong pipe.”
Bucky nods.
Across the room, Ariana Grande begins to ask Santa to tell her if he really cares. Bucky feels a strand of hair slip out of his bun and fall into this face. He absent-mindedly tucks it behind his ear.
“So,” he muses, “do you have any preference as far as decorations goes? I feel like there’s more baubles than actually fit on the tree.”
Steve crosses his arms -- to absolutely devastating effect -- and looks down at the array of opened containers on the floorboards. He pauses, studies them. “I guess we could go with the red and gold? I’ve always thought holiday decorations should be warm.”
Bucky smiles, his lips stretching a bit wider than the situation calls for. He gives Steve a lazy salute that’s definitely not army regulation. “Amen,” he agrees.
Pushing the boxes of silver and blue aside, they begin to hang up the red and gold baubles, some matte, some shiny, some sparkly. Steve takes the right side of the tree, Bucky the left.
And because Bucky promised he would, he begins to sing along to the music as they work, purposefully a bit off-key in the hopes of making Steve laugh. It works.
The random playlist Bucky found on Spotify isn’t actually half bad, and while he has no idea what the music taste of a man born in 1918 must be like, he’s glad to find Steve’s head bobbing along to the Pogues and smiles at his patterned socks tapping along to Hall and Oates. When he says he likes ‘Thank God It’s Christmas’ and checks his phone for the artist, Bucky represses his urge to make some flirty quip about Steve being a man after his own heart. The last thing he wants to do is sleep out in the hall because his gay ass tried to come on to Captain America.
(Part of him suspects Steve would never be so cruel, but the fear is still there. Besides, even a kind letdown would be an awkward one, and Bucky values his Christmas Eve, and his dignity.)
“So, what about you?” Steve asks him as the song ends. “Are you seeing your family tomorrow?”
Bucky rises and shakes his head. “Nope. My sister is doing a year abroad in Germany and my parents went to see her. I was supposed to go too, but my passport expired and I didn’t notice in time.”
“Shit,” Steve says. “That really sucks.”
And Bucky has heard that phrase from just about everyone he’s told, but it rarely sounded so sincere as out of Steve’s mouth. A look at Steve’s face confirms the genuinity.
“Thanks,” he responds a little dumbly. “It’s fine, though, at the end of the day. We’ll facetime tomorrow, I’m sure.”
Steve hums. “Still. It’s rotten not to be with your family for the holidays. Or loved ones, at least.”
Bucky agrees. “Who are you spending Christmas with?”
“No one, really.” Steve shoots him a rueful smile. “All my friends and family are dead, so.”
Bucky knew that, but it’s no less jarring to hear it said out loud. “Right.”
The Jingle Bell Rock ringing out of the speaker feels inappropriate all of the sudden, and Bucky thinks he understands why Steve was sticking to Nat King Cole.
He doesn’t know what to say to that, not really, and he senses that Steve doesn’t really want to keep talking about it.
Just as the silence stretching between them begins to strain a little bit, and Bucky is taking a sip of wine to avoid floundering for a segue that doesn't sound entirely dismissive and disrespectful, Steve apologizes.
“Sorry to be such a downer,” he says. “I’m really not very good at festive-ness, it seems.”
Bucky shakes his head. “That’s okay. I appreciate your honesty. Besides, it really isn’t a Christmas until there’s awkward tension and I reach for the wine. I should be thanking you for the authentic experience.”
Steve chuckles. “Anytime. I’m great at awkward silences.”
The air between them shifts into something lighter, something more jovial, again, and Bucky can’t help but find Steve’s self-deprecating humor unbelievably charming.
“Well then,” he says, repressing that thought as much as he can, “you would love Christmas dinners with my Aunt Carol.”
Before he can tell himself to shut up, Bucky then finds himself ranting about awkward family dinners for a few minutes, before the conversation steers to general awkward encounters. Bucky brings up his coworkers, and then Steve chimes in with a few anecdotes of his own.
The conversation is easy, coming more naturally than Bucky would have supposed it between two people who are basically strangers, and definitely easier than he would have supposed a conversation with a hundred-year-old superhero.
Tuning out that last information about Steve is also easier than he would have thought it possible, but between rants and comments and shared amused glances, Bucky nearly forgets about the Captain America thing all together. Or at least he forgets to be intimidated by it.
It confuses and entices and warms him all at once. Bucky can’t help but hug the feeling close.
The tree is big, but between the two of them, it doesn’t take long until the deep green of the branches is disrupted by the glisten and glitter of scarlet and gold as the baubles reflect in the light of the living room. They each take a step back to examine their work, and Bucky thinks that the tree doesn’t look bad for barely 20 minutes and a handful of generic store-bought decorations. Not bad at all.
“We are kicking ass at this decorating thing,” Bucky proclaims.
Steve chuckles. “We are indeed.”
They retrieve the lights from yet another box out of that back corner and begin the task of untangling them. It takes way too long considering they’re fresh out of the package, but Bucky guesses it’s just like necklaces -- it's in their nature to be in knots for no rational reason.
The endeavor of putting the lights on the tree is a tad more challenging.
For one, the tree is taller than either of them. Bucky usually thinks of himself as rather tall, and Steve has a few inches on him, but they both have to stretch beyond comfort to really get the lights where they want them on the top few branches.
And when they think they finally have that down, they realize they have to restart the process because neither of them thought to check they were starting from the middle of the light chain. Bucky jokes that he takes back the kicking ass comment.
“No, no, no,” Steve insists. “We can’t give up now. Kicking ass isn’t always a linear process, we can still beat this.”
Bucky laughs. “I guess I can take your word on that one, Captain America.”
Steve narrows his eyes as he slips into a slightly different stance, one more familiar to Bucky from the old new reels and that one Avengers press conference. The changes are minute -- a tension in the shoulders, a twitch of the jaw -- but Bucky notes the transformative effect it has. It’s fascinating, really, to watch Steve turn into Cap.
Even if, in this case, it’s just for a silly joke.
“You sure can, son,” Steve declares in a voice that sounds deeper, more assertive than the one earlier. “To win this fight, we’re going to need to keep believing that we can.”
Bucky can’t help the loud belt he lets out, even if he almost wishes he had been more subtle about it. “Oh my God ,” he says in a breath. “The Cap schtick is really something, huh? You’re real good at it too. I feel like I was back in bootcamp watching recordings of those speeches you used to give.”
Steve is back to being just Steve when he meets Bucky’s eye again. “I had a bit of practice,” he says, and Bucky thinks that his cheeks look just a bit pinker than they did before. “But yeah, it’s a whole thing. Weird to think that they’re still using it in bootcamps, honestly. Army?”
“Yeah. Three and a half tours.” Bucky wants to smile, but he’s not sure it works. He doesn’t say that it felt like more, that he sometimes feels like he’s still in it, somehow. How the scar tissue all the way up and down his arm brings him back to it every day.
The smile Steve gives him seems to mirror the gravity, though it's a bit softer at the edges. “Thank you for your service,” he says after a moment.
It seems ridiculous to hear it from Captain America. “Thanks. You too,” he says a little dumbly. “And thanks for saving New York. Twice.”
This time, it’s Steve who gives the salute that’s not army regulation. “Someone’s gotta,” he says with a smile, and Bucky realizes that it’s this attitude exactly that makes Steve so great.
Beyond the stars and stripes and stupid army reels, Steve is in it to fight. Not for himself, and certainly not for any agendas -- maybe not even for the United States -- but for those who can’t. It’s not about glory or fame, but about protecting people and protecting their freedoms. Steve seems to embody not so much the country as he does his own values: that he has to do everything he can to fight the good fight, even if he’s the only one doing it.
He’s always been Bucky’s favorite superhero.
Trying not to linger on his admiration too much, Bucky simply steps back toward the tree to help Steve with the lights. This time, they’ve actually started right.
The chain only gets caught once, maybe three times. And if Bucky gets the damn thing tangled around his arm, it's only because of the nerve damage, and he really could have gotten out of it on his own just fine. But Steve steps in close and spins him around and out of the lights until Bucky is laughing and red-faced from something other than humor.
He reminds himself for the uptenth time to be a mature adult about this and get a goddamn grip.
When the lights are finally wrapped all around, Bucky makes a whole little ordeal of plugging them in. Steve rolls his eyes a little bit, but he indulges Bucky in his excitement and announces a little countdown in his Captain America voice.
(Eight-year-old Bucky would be over the moon, and 28-year-old Bucky honestly isn’t too far behind.)
When Bucky sticks the plug into the socket, the tree lights up the living room in a warm yellow glow. He grins, and then cheers. Steve leans over to high-five him, and Bucky feels a genuine pride at having decorated the tree even though he knows it's childish.
“So,” Steve sighs a moment later. “There’s one festive activity. Any other ideas?”
“A movie?” Bucky suggests. “I personally would love to melt into some couch cushions for a bit.”
Steve smiles. “I can offer fluffy blankets, too.”
Bucky launches himself onto the couch in a rushed enthusiasm, and revels in the way it makes Steve laugh.
“Count me in.”
Steve indeed provides some fluffy blankets, and by the time he’s turned on the TV -- to a smart TV display that Bucky can only assume is Stark Tech -- Bucky is so completely covered by one that only his head sticks out the top. Sporadically, his hand will emerge from the fluffy navy to help itself to the box of pralines that lies beside him. It’s not cold in the room at all, really, but Bucky likes to be cozy, and since it’s Christmas Eve it seems all the more pertinent. Steve has thrown a green blanket over his own legs where he sits on the other side of the pralines.
“So, what do you want to watch?” Bucky asks him as he grabs one of the almond truffles.
“I mean, I really don’t know anything,” Steve tells him with a rueful smile. “I’m sure you have things you want to show me. Or I have a notebook of lists of recommendations to catch up on, if you want to rattle anything off of that.”
Bucky frowns. “Okay, but is there anything you know that you want to watch? Anything you want to show me ?”
Steve just stares at him in a way Bucky can’t quite decipher.
He gives him a look in return, and lets out a slightly self-conscious little laugh. “I’m not tripping in my belief that they had movies before 1945, right?”
That seems to snap Steve out of it, just a little. Bucky watches as the blond looks down at his lap and shakes his head, a strange expression still identifiable on his face.
“No, yeah,” he says after a moment, meeting Bucky’s eyes again. “They did.”
Bucky swallows past the mystifying tension that has materialized between them and tries for an easy smile. “Okay, good. I wasn’t amazing at history but I also don’t think I was that bad.”
It works to elicit a little laugh from Steve. Bucky breathes out at the sound of it.
“So,” Bucky concludes. “If you want to watch something familiar, I’m totally down.”
Steve smiles at him for a beat, and then seems to think about it. “Well. We didn't really have a TV or anything -- God knows we couldn’t afford it -- so I really didn’t see many movies. I guess later, after my mom died, I snuck into the pictures with my roommates a few times. My friend Arnie always loved them, and I sometimes think he would organize double dates for us just for an excuse to see the corny romantic ones.”
Bucky laughs a little. “Sounds like my kind of date.”
Steve smiles, but again, his smile is touched by something elusive. “Yeah, it was fun. He was great.”
Another moment of silence lapses between them, with Steve lost in his memories and Bucky trying to parse just how to read Steve’s enigmatic nostalgia. He kind of wants to ask, wants to find out everything about young Steve and his roommates and the pictures he used to sneak into.
He swallows the urge and asks a more simple question instead. “Do you remember if there were any festive ones? I’m sure your Stark TV could find it.”
“There was one, I think” Steve muses, “I’m trying to remember the name. It was with Cary Grant. And Katharine Hepburn.”
“Oh my God, I think I know which one you mean,” Bucky voices.
And then they’re both looking at each other with narrowed eyes, trying to remember the name of the movie. There’s a laugh floating between them that never fully lands.
“Wasn’t it like-” but Bucky doesn't finish the sentence because he can’t think of it.
“Holiday!” Steve exclaims suddenly with a snap of his fingers.
“Yes! God, Rogers, you’re a genius.”
Steve hums, giving Bucky an amused look as he leans forward to grab his glass of wine from the table. “Yeah, sure,” he says, “I think the enhanced super-serum memory is helping me remember the titles of 1930s romance movies.”
He’s being a little shit again, and Bucky can’t help the way it lights him up. “God bless America, or whatever.”
Steve snorts and makes a silly sputtering sound into his wine. Bucky laughs.
“Sorry if that offends your delicate patriotic sensibilities,” he adds.
Steve just shakes his head, leaning forward again to put his glass down. There are little stains on his sleeves from where he had caught the wine. “What sensibilities?” he asks in a voice that somehow manages to be both joking and wry. “I did not choose my own stage name. Superhero name. Whatever.”
Bucky should be surprised, maybe, but he isn’t. “Noted,” he just says, and reaches out from under the blanket to grab his own wine glass and tip it in Steve’s direction.
The Stark TV does indeed have Holiday among its endless array of movies. The colorful banner on the menu makes Bucky wish they still painted movie posters like that.
“This feels strange,” Steve says as the opening credits begin to flicker before them.
“How so?”
Steve shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve watched a black-and-white movie since I woke up here.”
Bucky turns to him quickly, a curious frown between his brows. “Really?” he asks. “Why?”
“I had more than enough to catch up on,” Steve explains.
Again, Bucky senses that there’s more to it, but he won't ask. If he were braver, he might, but he’s always been a coward. After more wine, he will. Maybe.
Now, he just hums as he turns his attention back to the screen where the movie is opening with a shot of the Brooklyn Bridge and a Manhattan skyline that looks incomplete and foreign.
God , he can’t imagine knowing that New York and waking up to this one.
He pushes the melancholia out of his mind as Cary Grant appears on screen and starts telling his friends about the woman he met on holiday. They sit in silence for a few minutes, just watching. Every now and then, the movie will be interrupted by a burst of sound from the traffic outside, because not even Christmas Eve is exempt from the New York traffic. Steve snorts when Cary Grant does his out-of-nowhere backflip. Bucky makes a comment about the fur-collar coat one of the characters puts on.
Bucky is pleasantly surprised at how comfortable it is to share silence with a near stranger, and maybe it’s that comfort or the wine that fogs up Bucky’s brain-to-mouth filter.
“God, I almost forgot how gorgeous Cary Grant is,” Bucky hears himself saying. “That man is a tall drink of water.”
Steve hums. Bucky is scared, suddenly, that he's given too much away, but if Steve is startled, he doesn’t show it. “Yeah,” he says after a moment. And then after another, “Arnie always liked him, too.”
Bucky catches Steve’s eye in a surprised, if not curious gaze, but Steve just smiles conspiratorially.
Huh. Not a hundred-year-old homophobe then.
Bucky regards Steve’s profile for another moment, his heart doing some silly fluttery thing, before he turns his attention back to the screen. Cary Grant is getting lost in what is truly a spectacular home.
“God,” Steve muses. “What a house. Could you imagine living in something like that?”
Bucky snorts. “Not in a million years, pal. And honestly, even if I could afford it, I don’t think I would want it. That thing looks more like a museum than a home.”
Steve says nothing, and when Bucky looks over to him, he’s surprised at the smile he finds leveled his way.
“I knew I liked you, Bucky,” Steve says, before he’s quickly distracted by the next ridiculous somersault-round-off gymnastics move Cary Grant pulls out of nowhere on screen.
Bucky misses it, of course. He’s still reeling from Steve’s lovely sincerity and then taking a large sip of wine.
He realizes he should put the glass down, actually, so he does. It makes a soft clinking sound against the marble coaster.
The movie is nice, Bucky thinks, and familiar to him not in the way that it is to Steve, but reminding him rather of his grandparents' old house with the turquoise couch and the big windows, and the way his grandfather refused to get a color television for so many years. He likes the crackly quality of all the voices.
He also likes the way their rapt attention to the movie is interrupted by little comments such as “Why is his fiancée wearing a weird fucking witch's hat?” and “I think we should bring ‘strange bird’ back.” Bucky overenthusiastically points at the TV when Cary Grant supposes the house is a museum, and Steve laughs.
“Wait, this is New Years?” Steve asks as the party on screen goes into full swing. “Okay, maybe the super serum didn’t work and I misremembered that this was a holiday movie.”
Bucky laughs. “Well, it is called ‘Holiday’, so I really don’t think this one is one you, pal.”
Steve hums.
The movie plays on in all its romantic chaos, and Bucky thinks they should bring little songs and puppet shows in movies back. They should definitely bring back dancing gymnastics that seem to have no real purpose for plot other than making the characters more fun. He examines Katharine Heburn’s brother’s character and realizes that the trope of the queer-coded side character who provides life and love advice has deep cinematic roots.
“Red flag,” Bucky points out as Cary Grant’s finance dismisses his friends’ introductions.
Steve gives him a questioning look. He cocks his head, just a bit, and it looks insanely cute.
“It’s like-” Bucky thinks for a moment. “It’s used to point out an instance or a characteristic in a person which makes them iffy for you, platonically or romantically. Like, a common red flag would be when someone doesn’t like animals.”
Steve nods, his brow furrowing. “Got it. So, it’s like a bad omen for someone’s character.”
“Bingo.”
Steve smiles. “What’s your red flag?”
Bucky laughs, a little startled. “You mean what I consider a red flag in other people, or what my red flags are?”
Steve lets out a little half of his own. “I was actually asking about the former, but now I wanna hear yours.”
“Oh, god.” Bucky sits up a little straighter, tucks a stray strand of hair behind his ear. The movie is still playing on in the background, but now Steve’s knee is up on the sofa and he’s turned more toward Bucky than the screen.
“There’s a few, probably,” Bucky says a little ruefully. “I spend way too much money on way too sweet coffee drinks, and also on my cat. I know every Taylor Swift song by heart. I actually did two years of business in college, which is a pretty bad one. I like to drink milk just so, just cold out of a glass. Also, there’s the whole traumatized army vet thing but that’s not entirely my fault.”
“The milk one is the worst one, for sure,” Steve says earnestly.
Bucky snorts into his hand. “One of my exes was very disturbed by it, actually. Now, what about you?”
Steve smiles. “The former or the latter?”
“Well, you made me expose myself,” Bucky says with a pointed look, “so the latter.”
“Well, for one, I’m ninety-four.”
Bucky laughs a little. “Yeah, but you’re also rich, so I know a lot of people who would spring for that. Plus, you look really good for ninety-four.”
He shoots Steve a little wink, and revels in the way Steve’s cheeks turn a little rosy. “Right. Thank you.”
“Besides,” Bucky continues, reaching out for his wine glass. “You’re not actually ninety-four. You just have a different life experience.”
Steve levels him with that look again, the one that’s a little bit surprised and a whole lot of kind and warm. The one that makes the hairs on Bucky’s neck stand up with how beautiful and sincere it is.
God , he doesn’t think he’s being that profound, is he? Is Steve really not getting even this much understanding from anyone else? Bucky wants to set the building on fire.
“You know,” Steve starts, like he was in on exactly what Bucky was thinking, “I think you’re the first one in this century to realize that. And I know I’m out of time, plucked straight from everyone’s history books into their own contexts, and everything looks different and I don’t get their references and it took me way too long to figure out how to charge my metrocard, but it’s just- I don’t know. I’m still just a kid from Brooklyn, you know? And I’m twenty-eight, I’m not dead.”
Bucky feels his lips part as he lets out a bated breath. There’s a set to Steve’s jaw that’s just as sad as it is angry. His demeanor is painted in grays and blues.
And it makes perfect sense, suddenly why Steve would let a strange neighbor so easily into his home on Christmas Eve. Sure, it’s because of his genuine kindness and his relentless belief in the fundamental goodness of people, but mostly, it’s loneliness. Steve has been alienated from everything, plucked from one century and dropped into the next. Everything, everyone that he knew is just gone, and it seems like no one has stepped up in a genuine effort to fill that void at all.
But while the world has had seventy years to craft their image of who Captain America was and is, Steve had been an asthmatic kid with knobbly knees just two years ago.
It would be enough to drive anyone insane.
Bucky doesn't know what to say really, but he nudges his knee into Steve’s in what he hopes is a comforting gesture. “Are you in therapy?” he asks, before he can shut his stupid mouth.
Luckily, Steve just lets out a wry little laugh. “Not really,” he confesses. “Not since the SHIELD psychiatrist they made me see for a few weeks before I could be cleared for duty.”
Bucky can’t help the scoff that escapes him. “That is fucked up. I’m giving you a New Years resolution, and it’s called see a therapist. Or maybe just go to the VA. I’ve got a buddy.”
Steve gives him a grateful smile. “Thank you, Buck.”
Bucky returns the smile and then tips his glass to Steve in a lazy toast. “Of course.”
On screen, Cary Grant starts arguing with his future father-in-law.
“Hey,” Bucky says in an attempt to lighten the conversation, “you only gave me one red flag.”
Steve lets out a surprised little laugh. “Wasn’t that whole conversation a series of red flags?”
“Nope,” Bucky says, popping the P. “That emotional availability was actually a very green flag, so you still owe me some embarrassing anecdotes.”
Steve shakes his head, but he’s smiling, and then he opens his mouth a moment later. “I mean, apart from that whole century-old traumatized army vet thing, I can’t cook, like, at all. I can’t hold a tune to save my damn life, but I sing all the time anyway. I was arrested for my hot temper quite a few times growing up, so that’s probably pretty high up there. I wear socks in bed because I had to as a child and now I can’t shake the habit-”
“Oh, that one’s bad ,” Bucky interrupts.
Steve laughs, and then narrows his eyes at Bucky. “ Also , I coerce strangers into my apartment when they have nowhere else to go just so I can embarrassingly overshare, like, an hour later.”
Bucky scoffs, “First off, sharing is not oversharing . ”
Steve narrows his eyes like he doesn't believe it, but lets it go. “And second?”
“I don’t really have a second,” Bucky confesses, “but as you said, this was your choice, and if you wanted to avoid this whole thing, you could’ve just let me die of hypothermia.”
“I’m way too virtuous for that,” Steve points out. “Who would I be to carry the shield if I let my neighbor die outside and did nothing?”
“An average American individualist?” Bucky suggests.
Steve barks out a laugh. “Yeah, maybe,” he concedes. “But I hope to be better than that. Besides, I-”
Steve falls silent for a moment. Katharine Hepburn sings. Bucky says nothing in a challenge to prompt Steve to continue.
“I didn’t go to all those parties,” Steve starts slowly, sounding almost tentative, “because they were too full of people I don’t know, and I’m so tired of the introductions. But you don’t really feel like a stranger at all. Is that weird?”
It is. But it isn’t, because Bucky knows exactly what he means. This whole thing should feel awkward. Captain America or not, Bucky met Steve less than two hours ago.
“No, it’s not weird.”
Steve’s smile widens, and his eyes crinkle at the edges.
Bucky nudges the knee on the couch with his own again.
They finish the movie in relative silence. They missed part of it with their side conversation, but the plot is straightforward enough for Bucky to follow it anyway. They have a short discussion about the political messages of the film, and the not-so-subtle nods to comparing the wealthy family with Naziism because it was 1938 and nothing was free of the liberal propaganda. Steve ruefully points out the familiarity of that aspect in particular as he takes another sip of his wine.
“Wait,” Bucky asks, “can you get drunk?”
“Nah,” Steve says, but then he smiles and downs his glass in one go.
“What a waste ,” Bucky proclaims, but then he leans over to fill Steve’s glass anyway.
And as Bucky leans into his space, he is suddenly engulfed by his air. Steve smells clean and sweet, like the wool of his sweater and the praline chocolates and something warm and encompassing that might be just Steve. Bucky stops himself from creepily breathing it all in and miraculously manages not to spill the wine.
For the rest of the movie, he tries and fails not to replay it in his mind, and curses himself for acting the way he is. Jesus , it’s like he’s never experienced the simple kindness of an attractive man before.
(Except has he? He thinks, and then forces his brain to shut up).
Katharine Hepburn, at least seems to be having far more luck than he and his love life are. She gets Cary Grant in the end, because she’s pretty and witty and not obsessed with image and monetary success like her Nazi family. Bucky loves her, but then resents her for the happy ending.
“Love wins,” Bucky proclaims, voice flat, as the music swells and the closing card flickers on screen.
Steve responds with an ‘amen’, though Bucky’s not sure he knows the whole backdrop of contexts and connotations behind the statement. But either way, it rings true, and Bucky is too tired to go into that whole debate right then.
At the thought, he feels a yawn rise up out of the back of his throat. Part of him wants to give into temptation and just close his eyes right then and there, sink into the soft couch with the fluffy blanket warming him. The other part of him doesn't want to be the rude stranger nodding off on Steve’s sofa.
“Oh my God,” Steve says suddenly.
“What?” Bucky turns to Steve with a frown, and then follows the line of his focused gaze to the window.
And there, behind the glass against the darkness of the street outside, he sees the room’s light illuminate flurries of white. It’s snowing.
“Oh my God,” Steve repeats, and then he’s up and off the sofa before Bucky can blink.
He slides open the window in one smooth movement and somehow manages to stick half his torso through it. A gust of cold air penetrates the living room.
“Careful, big guy,” Bucky says, pulling his blanket a little father up his chin. “I’m not keen on scrapin' you off of the sidewalk. Also, that is cold. ”
Steve doesn’t acknowledge him. “We should go outside.”
Bucky levels him with a look. “Did you not just hear me say that it’s cold?”
“We have coats,” Steve says easily, and then he’s closing the window and turning off the TV. He turns to Bucky with a grin. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”
Bucky groans. “You’re a menace," he says, but he untangles his legs from the warmth and gets up anyway.
Steve’s excitement is childlike and infectious. He’s smiling wide as they move into the hall, and his mannerisms remind Bucky of a golden retriever who was just told he’s going on a walk.
Yeah, Bucky thinks, watching Steve roll back and forth on his toes as he reaches into the closet. The comparison is apt.
“I take it you like snow?”
Steve lets out a little laugh that sounds somehow both embarrassed and unapologetic. “Well, I never really got to enjoy it between always having a flu or a war to fight. So, you’ll have to forgive me for dragging you out into the cold.”
Forgiven , Bucky thinks. Steve’s beaming smile makes it easy. And then Steve shoves a thick scarf in Bucky’s hand and it gets even easier.
“You weren’t wearing one out earlier,” Steve says. “But I’m not letting you get frostbite on my watch.”
Bucky gives him a look, but wraps the scarf around his neck anyway, because the material is soft and green and Bucky begrudgingly admits (just to himself) that he really could use a scarf.
The hat Steve shoves at him really is a bit overkill, and Bucky calls him a punk for it, but then he’s untwisting his scrunchie and putting that on, too. His hair falls over the scarf, and he’s reminded again that he needs to call his salon in the new year.
All bundled up now, Bucky checks for his gloves in his coat pockets and then looks back over at Steve. He’s slipped on a navy wool coat now, and it looks warm and fancy and like it costs about as much as a month’s rent -- it's frankly also doing amazing things for Steve’s shoulders, but that’s neither here nor there. What he isn’t wearing is a scarf or cap, which Bucky won’t allow if Steve is making him wear them.
“Where’s yours?” he asks. “If you’re shoving knitwear at me, you’re gonna havta participate.”
“You realize I scientifically can’t get sick, right?”
“Shut up, punk,” Bucky fires back. “You can still get cold.”
Steve shakes his head, but he’s smiling again and his cheeks look a little rosy, though that might just be a trick of the light.
“God, you sound almost like my ma,” Steve says in a slightly softer voice. And then, to soften the melancholy touch of it, “You’re bossin’ me around just like she would.”
“Well, maybe,” Bucky says with a pointed look. “Your ma and I are right. Take a damn scarf.”
“Jerk,” Steve says, but then he levels him with a look, his eyes still playful but softer than they were before. They’re swirling with something warm, like the sunny sea on a hot summer day, and Bucky begins to sweat under his layers.
Steve relents and grabs another scarf out of the closet -- this one a simple light gray -- and wraps it around his neck. It looks unfairly good on him for being such a basic garment.
They scuffle out of the door a moment later. Steve makes a joke about taking his keys, which makes Bucky call him a punk for the third time in five minutes.
The staircase is empty. The sounds of Christmas parties ring out from some of the doors they pass. Bucky hears an off-key rendition of Last Christmas from behind 2B and decides he’ll keep an eye out for the resident of that one.
Steve bounds down the staircase before him, and Bucky thinks again of the golden retriever. It’s reinforced when they actually get outside, and Steve has rushed right onto the curb of the sidewalk before the door has even fallen shut behind them.
Steve’s face turns heavenward, his smile never wavering. Snowflakes are falling around the scene in a heavy, silent blanket. The neighborhood is already painted white. Bucky looks around at the twinkling ground and decides that when the snow isn’t turning into the inevitable brown New York slush and making his shoes wet, it is actually kind of nice.
It looks so peaceful now, turning the whole neighborhood into its own secluded little snow-globe world. The rows of apartment buildings have white powder on their roofs like gingerbread houses, and every street lamp seems to serve only to illuminate the falling snow. The coat on the sidewalk is smooth and glittering, free of the usual bootprint scuffles Bucky is so used to seeing.
When he looks back over at Steve, the blond’s nose has turned adorable pink. His chin dips back down to meet Bucky’s eyes.
“It’s so beautiful,” Steve says.
Bucky feels like he’s in a cheesy Hallmark movie when his first thought is an agreement not referring to the snow.
“It’s fucking freezing is what it is,” he says instead, but he’s smiling, too.
They turn eastward, start walking through the white powdered blocks. They’re not the only ones out to enjoy the Christmas Eve snowfall, but it really is frigid and it’s after 10pm, so the strangers to greet with a small smile and a ‘Merry Christmas’ are few and far in between.
Because of the desolation and the dimming effects of the snow, Bucky thinks Brooklyn has never felt so quiet, so peaceful. The air is glittering, and so is everything else.
He and Steve make little comments as they go -- about window light decorations or the rat paw prints already visible in the snow -- but mostly they walk in silence, happy to enjoy the icy air and snow-globe neighborhood.
Bucky’s glad that Steve made him take the knitwear really, now that his cheeks are tingling with the cold as his toes are icy. He doesn’t tell Steve about the gratitude or his bad circulation. If Steve really didn’t get to enjoy the snow as a kid or a soldier, he’s damn well earned it now. So, instead of focusing on his cold toes or the wetness he feels gather between his chin and scarf, he tries to enjoy the quiet crunch of the snow under his boots and the warm presence of Steve’s steady breath beside him.
It’s only been a few minutes, but the snow is already coming on two or three inches.
“Look at that,” Steve says suddenly, his voice quiet. “It's reflecting the lights.”
Bucky follows the line of his gaze to the small patches of snow collecting on the street before them. The twinkle on the white blanket looks iridescent under the neon glow of the Coca-Cola advertisement above it.
It’s almost dystopian, really, but it's somehow magical nonetheless. He tells Steve as much.
“It is dystopian, maybe,” Steve agrees. “But Kandinsky was painting colorful snow a hundred years ago, and I think he’s always been right about that. Monet was, too, if in a more subtle way, and that was even earlier.”
Bucky is taken aback for a moment, but then he remembers a line from one of his history textbooks, nothing more than a subordinate clause.
“You went to art school.”
Steve looks up at him with pleasant surprise written plainly on his face. “I did,” he smiles. “It was only for a year, but yeah.”
“That’s so cool.”
Steve looks genuinely happy to hear it and takes on an almost bashful smile.
“D’you still draw?”, Bucky asks, adding, “that was your medium, right?”
“Yeah, it was,” Steve breathes. “Is. But I haven’t managed anything more than rough sketches since- everything.”
Bucky gets that, really. He loves to write, but he hasn’t really done that since- everything, either. “Creative hobbies work like that sometimes,” he hears himself tell Steve, a vague echo of his old therapist’s words echoing from where he had tried his best to internalize them. “But if you want to find your way back to it at any point, I’m sure it’ll welcome you with open arms.”
Steve's eyes crinkle at the corners, and when he looks over at Bucky, the look in them is so genuine that it makes Bucky want to combust. “Thank you,” he says.
“Of course,” Bucky says, offering him a smile.
The flakes are starting to come down harder then. They obscure the buildings with their rapid white flurries and catch in Bucky’s scarf and Steve’s hair.
Steve laughs, and then leans back and opens his mouth to catch them on his tongue. Arms lifting lightly from his body, he begins to spin around slowly in the middle of the snowy street, a light laugh bubbling out of his throat as his cloudy breath mingles with the falling whirl of snow.
Bucky stares.
He doesn't know Steve, really, but in just the few hours he’s known him, he’s seen a few hues of his character. He’s seen the blue tints of timid and wry, the darker shades looking almost like grief. He’s seen loneliness bleed gray into the fabric. He’s watched the touches of evergreen that accompanied Steve’s nostalgia and seen the happy memories turn emerald. He’s seen tones of warm amber sun in Steve’s kindness and warmth, woven so into Steve’s being that it feels like part of his essence. Steve’s conviction, he’s seen, bleeds as red as stripes on the flag and the blood in his veins. Bucky has adored the bright colors of Steve’s cheek and punkishness when he met Bucky with a playful challenge.
But all the colors of the rainbow have nothing on the dazzling, warm yellow of Steve’s joy. It’s blinding, really, and maybe Bucky should look away, but he doesn't want to. He wants to soak it all in, bask in Steve’s sunshine, whose warmth he feels travel all the way down to his frozen toes.
Before he tells himself to, and without any of the self-consciousness embarrassment Bucky suspects he almost should feel, he joins Steve. His smile is so wide that his face hurts when he opens his mouth, but as he looks up at the dark sky and watches the white flakes descend on him in a trippy, glittery flurry, he feels Steve’s same laugh rise up in his own throat. The snowflakes are soft and cold on his tongue and he feels them flutter over his eyelashes.
It’s coming down, silently, all around him. He’s lost in it, like flying in a dream, but before he falls entirely, he feels something cold smack the side of his head.
The enchanted laugh he had felt in the back of his throat materializes in a form something more like a scandalized bark.
“Punk!”
And then he’s leaning down to grab his own handful of snow, his hands packing it together on muscle memory. He launches it in Steve’s direction.
It hits Steve square in the forehead.
“Jerk,” Steve exclaims as he sakes the cold snow out of his hair. “How the hell is your aim so good?”
Bucky shrugs with false humility. “Oh, I don’t know. I played varsity baseball. And was a top-ranked sniper in my special ops team.”
“Yeah?” Steve asks. He’s painted in a red again, bright and easy. “Well I’m Captain fucking America.”
The next snowball breaks apart on Bucky’s nose. He barks out another scandalized laugh, and then they’re on.
They circle each other, snowballs in hand. They try to catch the other in the moments leaning down to grab another handful of snow. Bucky’s aim is a bit better, but Steve dodges faster, and he has the advantage of a body that doesn't numb his fingers into a biting frost a minute in.
They’re still in the middle of the street, and their laughter interrupts the snowy serenity in loud shouts that echo between the buildings before they disappear into the cold air. They’re being obnoxious. Bucky knows that if he lived behind one of the windows on this street, he would probably be rolling his eyes, but he can’t bring himself to care, not when he’s having so much fun. There’s snow in his hair and his gloves and his coat, but he feels like he’s ten again, so it doesn’t matter.
They tumble into the snow at some point, when Bucky’s hands are too cold to form a decent snowball and he’s out of breath from all the laughter. He makes a snow angel, and doesn’t allow himself to feel silly doing it. Then, he shoves another bit of snow into Steve’s face as he gets up, just because he can. (He’s an older sibling, it really isn’t his fault.)
Steve starts to chase him back to their apartment building and catches up with him in about two seconds. The snowfall has eased up, and the powdery white beneath them is turning into an icy slipping hazard.
At the door, Steve digs his keys out of his pocket and Bucky’s feels wet and cold down to the bone. He can’t feel his hands or feet and his sleeve is soaked, but Bucky finds that he doesn’t mind -- or rather, he wouldn’t trade it. Not for the colorful snow or the laughter between the white flurries. Certainly not for Steve’s joy, or the look on his face when Bucky pelted him with well-aimed snow artillery.
He shakes the wetness out of his scarf, and basks in the simple childlike wonder of Christmas snowfall.
After the frosty, snowy cold, the warmth of Steve’s apartment is almost overwhelming. It burns Bucky’s cold cheeks and tingles in his hands as he regains feeling in his fingers. The snow in his hair turns to wetness.
When he takes off his coat, he’s not surprised to find that the cuffs of his turtleneck are soaked. His left sleeve especially is drenched up all the way to the elbow, and Bucky just hadn’t noticed because of the half-numb scar tissue. There’s a cold wet spot or three on his collar, too.
He asks Steve for the bathroom, and is pointed to the first door on the left of the hall. The room looks straight out of the glossy pages of a standard modern interior design magazine, and Bucky thinks the whiteness of the tiles looks a bit cold, despite the way the floor heating is thawing his toes.
When he regards his reflection, he’s met with red cheeks and messy hair. His eyes are bright, and it feels like a glimpse of who he used to be, of who he wishes he was. He swallows, and then dips down to splash his face with warm water before he can think about it too much. He doesn't worry about the way water runs down his forearms and onto his sleeves.
He slips the garment off then, and is left in the old band t-shirt he was wearing under it. He tries futilely to dry some of the melted snow with one of Steve’s fluffy hand towels. It doesn’t really do the job.
“Steve,” he calls out of the cracked door.
“Yeah?” Steve calls back. Bucky watches him step into the dim light of the hall.
“Do you have a dryer I could use?”
Steve steps closer, an inquisitive frown painted across his features. He spots the wet sweater in Bucky’s hand. “Sure,” he says. “But you can also borrow a dry sweater, if you want.”
Bucky’s first instinct is to decline. It feels too kind, like more trouble than Bucky is worth, but then he recognizes that he’s being ridiculous. If Steve is genuinely offering, then he would be stupid to say no. He would be stupid to turn down an opportunity to be engulfed in Steve’s smell. He stomps down that thought along with his senseless complexes.
“Are you sure?”
“Course,” Steve responds easily.
“Thank you,” Bucky says, and flicks off the bathroom light behind him as he leaves the room.
When he looks back up at Steve, the blond’s gaze doesn't meet his. It hovers somewhere lower.
Bucky suddenly remembers he’s wearing a t-shirt. He also remembers why he doesn't usually wear them.
He feels the way he retreats into himself, even when he doesn't mean to. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, rationally, but it reminds him of why he’s changed, and it’s certainly not pretty. The scar tissue runs along his whole arm, from faded light patterns on the back of his hand to tendrils reaching for his left pec. Some parts are silvery white, and others are still light pink as a reminder of when they were once an angry red. Bucky remembers the way those spots of skin had burned for months.
He still feels the phantom pains sometimes, even years after it happened. Really, he’s lucky to have his arm, lucky to even be alive, but it scares him to think it will never stop happening. He won’t complain, though, not ever, not when he was the only one to make it out of that spectacular trainwreck of a mission. He’ll take the numb, tense skin and the burning phantom aches as penance for lives he couldn’t save.
It doesn't mean he likes people to see it. He certainly didn’t want Steve to.
But when he studies Steve’s face to parse his reaction, he doesn’t find the pity he’s used to, and he certainly doesn’t find the mild disgust he’s witnessed in the faces of random Grindr hookups. Steve’s expression doesn’t change much at all, really.
His demeanor shifts a bit, and there’s an ounce of surprise in his eyes. The dark blue of his grief is touched by a short flare of red, and then a warm, golden pigment that Bucky hasn’t seen before. It’s bright, shining, saturated.
“The half tour,” Steve says, mostly to himself, it seems, like Bucky’s earlier comment finally makes sense.
Bucky swallows, and nods. “Yeah. Got an honorable discharge right after I left the emergency unit.”
Steve lets out a breath. “Can I ask- I mean-”
Bucky lets out a nervous little laugh. “You can ask,” he assures. He takes a deep breath, fiddles with the sweater where he’s still holding it in his hands.
“I was in Iraq,” he begins. “It was my second tour there, so I knew the lay of the land. I’d been with the same guys for most of it, so between the moments of actual combat it felt familiar at that point. I had just gotten Sergeant, and was planning on finishing one more tour and then heading home to study, together with one of my pals. But then that day- It was a standard op mission, really. We were supposed to be clearing a base intel told us was small. It was nothing we hadn’t done a hundred times before. But our intel must have been wrong, or maybe the circumstances had changed, because it turned into an ambush. We’d good as deemed the building all-clear when an explosion took out the whole team. There was fire everywhere, and I didn’t know up from down, but I- I’m lucky, really, that I even made it out alive.”
Steve nods. He thinks for a moment, then says, “But I’m guessing it’s hard to feel lucky sometimes?”
Bucky nods. And, really, Bucky doesn’t know why he’s surprised. Steve is a war vet himself, and Bucky’s sure he’d dealt with similar survivor’s guilt. It's honestly impossible to grasp the full extent of the horrors he’s borne and witnessed between the Second World War and hostile alien invasions. Of course he’s empathetic.
“I’m glad you’re here, though,” Steve adds. “For whatever it’s worth.”
It’s worth a lot actually, it warms Bucky from the inside out, but he doesn’t say that. Instead he just smiles. “Thank you. And ditto, obviously.”
Steve returns his smile. It dwindles a bit as he gestures back to Bucky’s scarred mess of an arm. “Does it hurt?”
“No,” Bucky tells him. Then, “Not technically.”
“Right.” Steve clears his throat. “You still want that sweater?”
Bucky nods, and then follows him down the hall to one of the doors on the left. He’s happy he told Steve, he thinks, but he’s also happy for the easy out.
At first glance, Steve’s bedroom looks just as impersonal as the rest of the apartment. It’s furnished in the same style -- modern, simple, practical -- and looks like it's kept neat and clean. The windows are obscured by a layer of sheer, white curtains.
After a moment, though, Bucky sees Steve’s personality breathe through the utilitarianism. There are some books and trinkets on shelves and on the bedside table. Bucky spots a complete Tolkien set. There’s a few faded photos in frames, and a cactus on the windowsill. A folded compass sits on the end of a cabinet. The rug at the food of the bed is a woven mix of bright, warm colors.
“I like your rug,” Bucky says, just to say something. It’s true, really, but he feels silly as he says it.
“Thanks,” Steve replies. “I got it at one of those overpriced artisan markets.”
The thought makes Bucky smile. It’s quite an image to picture Steve with his big shoulders and timid kindness among the throngs of tourists and muesli parents.
Steve slides open the door of his giant closet, the one that runs all along the back wall with white chrome material doesn't match the rug at all. Inside, Bucky spots neat rows of matching hangers laden with neatly pressed pants and dry cleaned shirts. He wonders if the Captain America suit is in there somewhere, but it doesn't feel appropriate to ask, not when Steve is pulling open one of the big drawers and prompting Bucky to take his pick.
Steve has nice sweaters, all soft-looking wool and yarn that won’t unravel after a few months like the sweaters Bucky usually buys from Zara. There’s a deep maroon one in the corner that Bucky reaches for, but when he does, something else catches his eye.
Behind it, stuffed in the back of the drawer, is a dash of red and white. The yarn is bright, almost garish in comparison to the muted, mostly dark palette of Steve’s knitwear. Curiously, Bucky reaches for it.
What he pulls out draws a surprised laugh from his lips.
It’s a sweater bearing a rough resemblance to Steve’s Captain America suit. The shoulders are navy, as is the chest, with a big white star interrupting the dark stitching in the center of the thorax. Shortly under it, bright red and white stripes begin to stretch vertically down to the hem.
It looks ridiculous. Bucky loves it.
“Oh my God, Steve.”
Steve’s eyes widen as he turns his attention back to Bucky.
“It was a gift,” he says quickly. He’s blushing again, and he really needs to stop doing that if Bucky is to be any less enamored with him.
“From who?” Bucky laughs quizzically.
“Clint. Uh, Hawkeye.”
The laugh that escapes Bucky then is laced with an incredulous surprise, because wow, imagine receiving joke gifts from a world-class assassin turned Avenger. On second thought, it doesn't feel that weird at all. If Steve is just a person, he has to imagine they are, too. He reckons fighting aliens together is grounds enough for playful gifts.
“He gave it to me as a joke,” Steve is explaining, “and I hate it, so it’s been collecting dust in the back of my closet for a few months.”
“Shame,” Bucky says. He holds the sweater out in front of himself again, inspects the gaudy stripes and the big white star. “I kind of love it.”
“Well, you can wear it,” Steve says quickly, and when Bucky looks at him he looks almost surprised that he said it. His cheeks are still tinted. “I don’t think I could, but, it’s yours if you want it.”
“Really?” Bucky can feel his smile widening.
Steve nods, gestures so as to say ‘go ahead’ and Bucky grins as he slips the garment over his head and goes to face the mirror.
The material is soft, and it feels somewhat high quality. The looser fit makes the vertical stripes look ridiculous, and Bucky truly has no idea who made this and for who , but the shoulders fit Bucky quite nicely and it’s a good length. He’s not usually a navy guy, but the color does bring out his eyes, so maybe he should wear it more often.
“Well,” he supposes, “it’s certainly got nothing on you in your suit, but it fits.”
When he turns to Steve, he finds he’s already looking at him. He’s smiling, and there’s something heavy in his gaze that makes Bucky fidgety. He forces himself to stay still, to not read something into nothing and just smile instead, awaiting Steve’s judgment.
“You look great, Buck,” Steve says finally, his voice barely above a whisper.
Bucky’s breath catches in his throat. “Thanks.”
A moment passes, then another. Eyes not wavering from Steve, Bucky fiddles with the soft cuffs of the sweater. Steve’s eyes are so, so blue, and their colors seem to shift like the steady waves of a summer sea. When he begins to suspect he might be drowning, he swallows and looks away.
“Um.” He looks tucks some hair behind his ear. “Pancakes?”
Steve takes a moment to answer, but then he jumps into action and closes the closet in a blink. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”
Bucky laughs as he follows Steve out of the room, and when the door closes behind them, he likes to imagine the sound is trapped inside. He likes to think it will stay there, reverberate between the four walls and then sink into them, into the patterned rug on Steve’s floor, and the seams of the quilted duvet. He hopes it slips between the floorboards and settles there. He hopes it warms the place from the inside out.
While Bucky goes into the kitchen to get things out of the cabinet for pancakes, Steve starts a fire in the living room. Bucky doesn't have a fireplace, so he doesn’t think it’s really part of the apartment complex’s set-up, but he also guesses that being Captain America comes with perks. Bucky wishes he had a fireplace. He’d scoffed when Steve told him he’d only used it twice this year.
After a few minutes, Steve joins him in the kitchen and helps crack eggs into a bowl. He leaves most of it to Bucky, claiming complete ineptitude in the kitchen, and Bucky believes him when he nearly adds baking soda instead of powder.
He just laughs and waves Steve away from the counter. “Sit down, punk. I got this.”
Bucky puts the Christmas playlist back on as he takes to the stove, and hums along to Michael Bublé and Chris Rea. He adds more flour to the batter after the first batch.
It turns out Steve wasn’t lying when he said he couldn’t sing for shit. But Bucky finds it so cute, that he doesn't find it in him to think it’s a red flag at all.
The pancakes are probably not Bucky’s best, but they turn out reasonably well. He feels a silly surge of pride at the stack he carries into the living room, which grows even more ridiculous as Steve greets the sight with an excited grin.
“Oh my God.” Steve reaches out and takes the large plate from Bucky’s hands to put it on the table. “Bucky, these smell amazing .”
“Well I hope they taste good, too,” Bucky says, not quite sure he’s succeeding in acting nonchalant.
If Steve notices how flustered Bucky is, he says nothing and digs into the pile of pancakes. Bucky is almost startled by the way he helps himself to five at once, then remembers the whole super-soldier thing.
He almost wants to ask, but then he figures Steve is probably tired of the questions, so he simply helps himself to two pancakes of his own.
“Well that’s just wrong ,” Bucky says indignantly as he watches Steve absolutely drench his pile in syrup. “Pancakes are meant to be dipped, not made absolutely soggy .”
Steve just gives him a shit-eating grin and shoves a forkful of drenched pancakes into his mouth.
Bucky should get a prize, honestly, for the way he doesn’t let himself hone in on the syrup making Steve’s lips all shiny and the way the blond’s tongue darts out to catch it before it drips to his chin. He deserves an Oscar .
Instead, Bucky just shakes his head and gives Steve a narrow-eyed, half-hearted glare. “Punk,” he just proclaims again, before he pours syrup on his own plate, next to the pancakes.
They eat in silence for a few minutes, filling the room with the sounds of the contented chewing and the occasional bump from an apartment full of rambunctious children above. The pancakes are pretty good, if Bucky says so himself.
The room is illuminated by the warm twinkle of the tree lights, and Bucky admires the pretty sparkle and lets himself, for just a moment, watch it dance across Steve’s face before he turns his attention back to the tree.
As Bucky finishes his first plate -- pretty much simultaneously with Steve, oh my God -- he opens gestures with his fork to the tree.
“You know,” he says as he swallows his last piece of pancakes, “I usually prefer trees with the more mismatched personalized decorations, but this one has won me over.”
“Yeah, not bad for my first,” Steve says, and Bucky is too distracted by the twinkle of the lights in Steve’s blue eyes to immediately parse what he’s saying.
When it registers, Bucky freezes “Wait. This was your first time decorating a tree?”
Steve looks amused at Bucky’s incredulity and shrugs. “Yeah. I mean, we couldn’t afford them growing up, and then I was fighting in a war, and then I was an ice cube, so.”
Bucky blinks, and can’t help the breath he lets out. “Jesus,” he breathes. “Oh my God, I would’ve totally made this a more fun special experience if you had told me that.”
“Didn’t think it was that important,” Steve shrugs again.
Bucky frowns, and knows he’s being the type of dramatic that would make Becca slap his arm as he pouts Steve’s way.
But Steve’s smile just widens until his eyes crinkle. “C’mon, Buck.” He nudges Bucky’s thigh with his colorful sock. “It was plenty special.”
Bucky can feel his dramatic pout turning soft at the edges, and can’t help when it breaks entirely into a smile. God , he shouldn’t be getting this flustered, but then Steve should stop being so goddamn lovely all the time.
“I’m glad,” he says simply, and soaks his last bit of pancake in the gooey warm syrup.
Outside the window, he can still see the snowflakes dancing their way through the air and down onto the streets. He wonders how long it’ll take for them to cover up his and Steve’s steps, and the traces of their snowball fight. Ridiculously, Bucky finds himself hoping the snow will stop so that they never will.
“These are really good pancakes,” Steve says, and Bucky watches as he helps himself to another serving. It makes him smile.
“It’s my mom’s recipe,” Bucky tells him. “There’s nothing identifiably special about it, really, but I like to think it’s just the magic of mothers’ recipes, you know?”
Steve lets out a little laugh, and says “Yeah,” like he has his own mother’s recipes in mind.
Bucky is about to ask him about it when Steve beats him to a question.
“Are you close with your family?”
“Yeah,” Bucky answers automatically, then finds himself pondering it for a moment. “I mean, sort of,” he corrects. “We used to be closer.”
Steve frowns. His hand comes up to cover his chewing mouth as he asks, “May I ask why?”
Bucky thinks that maybe his brain zeroes in on how cute that was so that the question doesn't hit him as hard, but it sombers him all the same, just for a moment.
“I don’t know,” he says again, if just for something to answer as he gathers his thoughts. Steve waits. Bucky can hear his quiet chewing.
“I was always really close to them growing up,” Bucky starts. “My parents are great, they were always really supportive. We lived out in this big house upstate with a big yard and would do family bonfires and game nights and stuff. I have three sisters, two of which are, like, ten years younger, and I was so excited about teaching them everything I knew. My sister Becca is just a year my junior, so we grew up together. I would do anything for her, but then also I pushed her down the stairs once when I was ten, y’know?”
Steve nods and smiles like he understands, though Bucky knows that he doesn't really. “What changed?”
Bucky shrugs. “I grew up. Becca went to college. I joined the army not long after, and I was gone for a few years. When I came back, my younger sisters had grown so much I felt I didn’t really know them any more. And of course I had this” -- he gestures to his arm -- “and also PTSD with the anger and alienation and all the other fun stuff, and I- I didn’t really know how to come home anymore.”
This time, Steve’s nod is empathetic, because of course he gets it.
“I don’t know,” Bucky finishes inconclusively. He fiddles with the hem of Steve’s soft sweater. “I moved out to Brooklyn a few weeks later, and I’ve only visited a few short times since. I miss them, but I don’t know how to be who I was to them, I guess.
“God, I-” the words catch in Bucky’s throat, held back by embarrassment and shame and the fear that Steve will give him the disdainful, disappointed look that Bucky knows he deserves. Even as he feels it, he knows the fear is ungrounded. He’s a fucking coward, but something in him thinks he can trust Steve.
“Can I confess something horrible to you?” he tries again.
Steve meets his eye with a little furrow between his brow and a steady gaze. “Of course.”
Bucky swallows. “I- I noticed in time. About my passport.”
Steve’s eyebrows raise slightly, for just a moment, but his expression doesn't otherwise change.
“I just-” Bucky feels the urge to cry, but he stomps it down for fear of debasing himself more than he already is. “I didn’t really think I should go. I thought that if I just didn’t come, they could have a nice time without the fucked up family member. When I noticed my passport would be expiring, I just- it was such an easy way out that it almost felt like the universe agreed with me. I can’t pretend to be the old Bucky for a full three weeks, and I’m a fucking coward who won’t let them see the new and worse me. So, I lied. To them and you and everyone else.”
“That doesn’t make you a bad person,” Steve says quickly, and Bucky thinks briefly how incredible it is that Steve would immediately hit the nail on the head like that, before he tries unsuccessfully to internalize the words. Steve seems to notice that too, because of course he does. “Are you in therapy?”
Bucky laughs, even though it's a little hollow. “I’ve been, but- Yeah, it’s been a while. I should go back.”
Steve nods and gives him that same encouraging smile. He lays his now empty plate on the living room table with a soft clatter.
“You know,” Steve starts, leaning toward Bucky until his knee is knocking against Bucky’s, “I think your family misses you, too. And I think that- I mean, God, I don’t know these people at all- but I think that if they’re anything like you say they are, they would want to be there for you. Loving people isn’t about only wanting them at their best, right? They won’t love this version of you any less.”
Bucky is embarrassed to find that his eyes are actually damp now, and quickly runs his -- Steve’s, his mind corrects -- sleeve over his eyes. When he meets Steve’s eyes again, they’re nothing but kind.
And God , where has he been he all this time? He’s not articulating anything new, there’s not some great revelation in his words, but it's the surety with which he says them, and the complete lack of disdain or pity in his demeanor that makes Bucky want to crawl up in his words and build a home there.
“They’d be crazy not to,” Steve concludes, because apparently he’s not done making Bucky all soft and mushy inside. “This version of you is wonderful, and anyone would be lucky to know you.”
He knocks his knee against Bucky’s in a kind little gesture and Bucky has the unbidden thought that he wants to drive upstate and hug his mom and maybe take Steve with him.
Bucky shuts that down rather quickly, and just presses back against Steve’s legs for a short, grounding moment. “Thank you.”
Steve just smiles.
“What did you use to do on Christmas?” Steve asks him. “With your family, I mean.”
“Nothing terribly out of the ordinary, I think,” Bucky tells him, “Eat good food, go on a wintery walk, watch some movies.”
“Well, we’ve already done the first two, so how about a Bucky movie,” Steve suggests. He looks excited all of the sudden, and Bucky isn’t an artist, but he wants to bottle up the bright colors and paint with them. “What movies did you watch?”
“Um.” Bucky thinks for a moment. “Again, nothing too special. Love Actually, the Polar Express, Elf… Oh! And there were these movies my mom watched as a kid, the Rankin Bass productions of Rudolf and Santa Claus is Coming to Town. They’re for kids and they’re from, like, the 60s, but Becca and I always loved them.”
“Wanna see if we can find them on my TV?”
“Seriously?” Bucky wonders if Steve heard the ‘for kids’ part of the description.
“Why not?” Steve counters. “It’s only fair that you show me one of your favorites.”
Bucky doesn't argue. Instead he just smiles and reaches for the remote.
Again, Bucky is grateful that Steve is such an expressive watcher. His eyes never waver from the screen. He laughs in all the right places, and points out all of his favorite details in the set and character design. He even heads the discussion about the fact that Rudolf ’s Santa is so damn mean .
And Bucky loves it, because it confirms to him that Steve is having fun, and diminishes any silly anxiety that always accompanies showing someone else a piece of media you really love. Steve’s enthusiasm affirms just how cute and fun and lovable these movies are.
Steve also really seems to love Hermey.
“I can’t believe they wrote a Santa’s elf character that’s excluded because he wants to be a dentist, ” he says. “This is amazing.”
Bucky sings along to the misfit song and manages to coax Steve into joining him with his own off-key humming. He knows the melody will be stuck in his head for the next few hours, at least.
The cushions of the sofa vibrate suddenly, and it takes Bucky a moment to understand that his phone is ringing. He swears under his breath as he begins to look for it and soon realizes it must have slipped between the cushions.
Steve makes a move to help him look, ignoring Bucky’s gesture that he needn’t, and finds it first. It was indeed wedged between two cushions.
Bucky glimpses the way Steve pointedly doesn't look at the screen when he hands Bucky his phone, and it’s so cute and chivalrous that it makes Bucky smile. The smile falters, just a little bit, when he sees the incoming facetime from ‘Becca [knife emoji]’.
“It’s my sister.”
“Do you want me to step out of the room?” Steve offers, already moving to get up.
“No,” Bucky says quickly. “You’re too polite, for fuck’s sake. Sit your ass back down.”
Steve puts his hands up in a silly little gesture of surrender and complies.
Bucky watches him, and then, after a short moment of deliberation, rejects the call and goes to text her instead. He doesn’t know how to facetime his entire family on Christmas Eve, and he certainly doesn’t know how to do so when he’s in Captain America’s living room.
To Becca [knife emoji]: What’s up?
From Becca [knife emoji]: ??? why aren’t you picking up?
From Becca [knife emoji]: mom and dad want to say merry xmas
To Becca [knife emoji]: Merry xmas back!
Bucky shoots a quick selfie, close up so that the sweater won’t be obvious, with a little smile and the heart fingers in the corner. He sends it to her with a little christmas tree emoji and some sparkles. He then begins to type another message, explaining that his connection is bad, or that his phone’s audio is being goofy, but then deletes both. Maybe, he thinks, he should be more honest with his family.
To Becca [knife emoji]: I locked myself out of my apartment [clown emoji]
To Becca [knife emoji]: And a neighbor took pity on me so now I’m in his living room
Becca responds to the selfie with a little heart. More messages pour in a moment later.
From Becca [knife emoji]: omg you idiot
From Becca [knife emoji]: is ur neighbor nice at least
To Becca [knife emoji]: Yeah! He’s lovely actually. It’s been a surprisingly good festive time
From Becca [knife emoji]: wait omg
From Becca [knife emoji]: spill
From Becca [knife emoji]: whats his name
From Becca [knife emoji]: how old is he
From Becca [knife emoji]: is he hot
From Becca [knife emoji]: what color are his eyes
Bucky rolls his eyes. He doesn’t know why he thought he could make it through this exchange without questions like that.
He sends her a silly sticker of a cartoon cow with a face that is somehow simultaneously expressionless, uncomfortable, and annoyed.
He apologizes to Steve, because he knows it’s rude to be glued to your phone when you’re watching something with someone -- especially when you suggested the movie in the first place -- but Steve just waves him off.
“It’s Christmas Eve,” he says. “By all means, talk to your family.”
Bucky shoots him a grateful smile. “Thanks. I’ll call them tomorrow in earnest, though. Right now I just need to ward off Becca’s questions about you.”
Steve looks amused. “You told her about me?”
“Oh my God, shut up.” He gives Steve a look, then begins to type out another message. “I just told her that I got locked out and a neighbor took pity on me.”
“Accurate,” Steve laughs.
To Becca [knife emoji]: Shut up
To Becca [knife emoji]: His name is Steve
To Becca [knife emoji]: He’s 28
To Becca [knife emoji]: He has blue eyes
“I’m not gonna tell her about you,” Bucky tells Steve. “Not about the Cap thing, at least. Don’t worry.”
“Wasn’t worried,” Steve says easily, but the smile he shoots at Bucky is grateful.
Becca must be glued to her phone because her responses come through immediately.
From Becca [knife emoji]: sounds hot
From Becca [knife emoji]: can u get a pic
To Becca [knife emoji]: Becca istg
From Becca [knife emoji]: yeah ok sorry
From Becca [knife emoji]: we do hope you’re having a wonderful evening and mom says she’s glad ur not alone! <3
From Becca [knife emoji]: but i can’t help but notice you didn’t answer my third question
The next message is a sticker of the Miranda Cosgrove ‘interesting’ meme. Bucky rolls his eyes, but he knows he’s smiling.
He replies with a sticker a little girl waving and then disappearing quickly down a slide.
To Becca [knife emoji]: Tty tomorrow!!
To Becca [knife emoji]: We are watching Rudolf and I don’t want to miss the island of misfit toys
From Becca [knife emoji]: u suck
But then she sends him another heart, and Bucky is smiling when he sends one back. He really should talk to Becca more often, he thinks. He misses her like crazy.
When he puts his phone back down on the couch -- where it will inevitably fall between the cushions again -- Steve turns to him.
“All good?” he asks.
Bucky nods. “All good.”
Steve smiles, and reaches out to squeeze Bucky’s knee for a moment before he diverts his attention back to the screen. Bucky’s heart just about leaps out of his chest, and he prays to a God he doesn’t believe in that Steve didn’t notice the way that derailed him. He hopes his breathing sounds normal.
If Steve does notice, he doesn’t let on to it, and resumes commentary on the movie again a moment later. He loves the way they stop-motioned with salt on blue cardboard.
“Why do they call it the abominable snowman?” Steve asks then. “I never understood that. It’s a beast, it’s not made of snow.”
Bucky agrees, collecting himself. “I don’t know. But Becca didn’t used to be able to pronounce it so she called it the abdominal snowman for like, way too long.”
It used to make Bucky and his mother lose it every time, and he nearly manages to hold it in this time, but then Steve barks out a laugh and Bucky just has to join in.
“The abdominal snowman,” Steve laughs. “That is gold.”
The room is alight with the color in Steve’s bout of laughter. Bucky wants to swim in it.
Their laughs fade out in time to watch Hermey cure the abominable (abdominal?) snowman from his toothache. On screen, the little figures tumble into the snow in stop-motion.
The elves start singing Holly Jolly Christmas , and as Bucky watches the little reindeer through rubbing his tired eyes, he has a profound sense of deja vu. He feels younger than he has in years.
Vaguely, he feels his eyes grow heavier, and is powerless to stop it when sleep comes over him like a soft, heavy blanket.
When Bucky wakes, he has hair in his mouth. It takes him a moment to remember when and where he is, and when he does, it takes him another two to realize that he’s incredibly warm because Steve had thrown that blue fluffy blanket back over him. The room is silent but for the quiet, rhythmic scratching of a pencil.
When he opens his eyes and stretches out a little grumbly, he finds that he’s curled up on the sofa, and that Steve is sitting cross legged on the floor at its end, sketching. He looks so much smaller like this, Bucky realizes, and for just a second, he thinks that this is a glimpse of who Steve used to be, before the army and the chemically induced beefcake. Bucky holds the image close.
For a moment, Bucky doesn't let on that he’s awake and just watches Steve sketch. The blond’s brow is furrowed in a calm concentration, and he keeps tilting the sketch pad instead of his hand. Bucky can’t see what he’s drawing, but the side of Steve’s hand is smudged with lead.
Bucky makes a sleepy grumbling sound that’s something like a greeting, and Steve’s eyes meet his a moment later.
Steve smiles. “There he is.”
Bucky sits up slowly, rubbing at his eyes. “Ugh, sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep on you. What time is it?”
“Fifteen minutes past midnight,” Steve tells him, as if he just has a watch in his head. “So, Merry Christmas, Buck.”
Bucky smiles. “Merry Christmas, Steve. Sorry I missed it.”
Steve shakes his head. “No need.”
They look at each other for another moment, eyes smiling. Bucky thinks he probably has an imprint on his cheek from the couch, and he doesn’t even want to know what his hair looks like. Steve is gorgeous.
“What are you drawing?” Bucky prompts after a moment. Briefly, he wonders if it’s rude to ask, but he also finds he’s too curious to care much.
Steve holds the sketchbook closer to his chest. “Nothing.”
Bucky raises his eyebrows. He feels a laugh at the cusp of his throat. “Liar.”
Steve doesn’t reply.
“C’mon,” Bucky urges. “Let me see it.”
He scoots over on the sofa, realizing with a short pang of guilt that he must of all but shooed Steve off of it when he stretched out on it in his sleep, and taps the stop beside him. Steve uncrosses his legs, somehow managing to look graceful even as his tall, broad figure rises from the floor and toward the couch.
When he sits down, he’s so close that Bucky can feel his warmth bleed into his own. The air is painted hues of orange and auburn.
Steve gives Bucky another look, one that’s measuring, perhaps a bit apprehensive, before he tilts his notebook down and allows Bucky a glimpse of the page.
On it, in smooth pencil strokes, is a sketch of Bucky. He’s asleep, sprawled out the way he must have been on the sofa just a few minutes earlier. His mouth is open and his hair is a mess, but Steve has somehow made it look artful. The strokes are varied, some stronger and some light, and yet every one looks deliberate and purposeful. It’s a bit smudgy in places, and there’s a finger-print mark on the corner of the page, but Bucky thinks it belongs in the Louvre. He doesn't know anything about art really, but he knows Steve is good.
For a moment, he can’t say anything. He just stares.
Steve makes a small move to close the notebook, but Bucky stops him with an almost subconscious gesture.
“Holy shit, Steve,” he breathes.
“Sorry if it’s weird,” Steve tells him quickly. “I know I should’ve asked-”
“Shut up,” Bucky interrupts. “Shut up, oh my God, Steve, this is beautiful . Screw the Cap thing, you should have been an artist.”
Steve’s cheeks turn that lovely shade of pink again. “I don’t know about that.”
“I do.”
Steve laughs an embarrassed little laugh, and when he closes the notebook this time, Bucky can’t stop him. “You’re being kind, Buck.”
Bucky snorts. “I think you’re overestimating my virtue and underestimating your skill here, pal.”
Steve shakes his head. He tosses the notebook on the table with the empty pancake plates and the now empty box of chocolates.
“You don’t believe me?”
Steve turns to him with an exasperated smile. “I believe that you're kinder than you give yourself credit for and that you don’t know shit about art.”
Bucky barks out a scandalized laugh. “Punk.”
Steve goes pink again. “You know,” he says after a moment’s silence. “I, um- I really think I’m gonna need an updated definition of that.”
Bucky frowns. “Of what? Punk?”
Steve nods.
“Oh, um.” Bucky takes a moment to think about it. “It’s actually a really cool anti-establishment music and social movement from the 70s, but then it kind of also came to mean social outcast or burnout or something, so the way I was using it was more of a silly derogatory thing.”
Steve nods, his eyebrows quirk. “Right, okay, I’ll take that.”
“Wait,” Bucky frowns, taking in Steve’s still tinted cheeks. “What did it used to mean?”
Steve’s blush deepens impossibly, crawling from his ears down over his chiseled cheekbones and under his collar. Before Bucky can stop it, the thought crosses his mind that he wants to see how far down it goes.
“It, uh-” Steve hesitates, swallows. “Back in the 30s it used to mean, like, a usually small, effiminate queer man.”
The words take a moment to register in Bucky’s brain, but when they do, his eyes just about bulge out of his face. “ What? ”
Steve just gives him another rueful, embarrassed look, one that turns amused as Bucky begins to dissolve into laughter.
“I- Oh my God,” Bucky breathes through laughter. “Oh God. I was- I’ve been calling Captain America a twink this entire time. Holy shit.”
Bucky laughs harder than he thinks he has in months, until he’s gasping for air, until his sides hurt and ribs ache
Steve is still red, but he too dissolves into laughter as he watches Bucky absolutely lose it on the couch next to him.
When Bucky finally catches his breath, he turns to meet Steve’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says sincerely as sincerely as he can through his residual humor. “I really was not trying to call you outdated gay slurs.”
Steve dismisses Bucky’s concern with a smile and a shake of his head. “It’s fine,” he assures. “I’m used to it anyway.”
The way he delivers it, easily, with a quirk of his lips, makes it sound like no big deal, but Bucky frowns. There’s really nothing funny, nothing easy about being used to gay slurs. (Bucky would know.)
“What, because you were short? Fuck them.”
Steve snorts. “Well, yeah, maybe. I did just look a bit punk-ish, really. Or- what was it you just called it?”
“Twink,” Bucky repeats. He fights down the embarrassment at having this conversation with Captain fucking America. “That’s the uh- modern equivalent I guess.”
“Right,” Steve says. “I guess I looked like a twink. And- Well, I didn’t know it as well at the time but they weren’t actually wrong.”
Steve's voice doesn't waver, but the way he fiddles with the cuffs of his sweater betrays his nervousness. Bucky’s brain stumbles to process what Steve just admitted, and then his heart swells.
At a loss of what to say, Bucky lets out an awed huff of a breath.
Steve finally looks up at him in earnest and smiles, albeit a bit tightly. “Yeah, I, um- Turns out I’m not actually just fucked up and confused -- in that regard at least -- just bisexual.”
His joke falls a little bit flat in his anxiety, but Bucky can’t help the laugh that escapes him in spite of it. “Mood,” he smiles, still a little bit breathier than is probably appropriate.
“That’s okay these days, right?” Steve asks. He looks at Bucky with such a cautious hope that it almost makes Bucky want to cry.
“Yes,” Bucky says quickly. “It was always okay, really. But, yes. More people think so now. Gay marriage is legal and all.”
Steve lets out a breath. He smiles. “Well, there’s one good thing about this century,” he points out, and it just makes Bucky smile wider.
“Hell yeah,” Bucky agrees.
“Are you-?” Steve asks, seemingly unsure how to finish phrasing the question.
“I’m gay,” Bucky answers for him. “Or sometimes I like to use the word queer. Whatever. I like men.”
Steve nods, and Bucky watches as the corners of his mouth turn up in a kind smile. Bucky appreciates it, he really does, because as much as he wills it not to, his heart is beating a little bit too fast. It’s been a decade since he first came out, but it’s still frustratingly nerve-wracking every time.
It’s also nerve-wracking because, as much as he tries to deny it, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to avoid how absolutely whipped he is for Steve Rogers. And sure, some of that is the golden hair and ocean eyes, and the frankly obscene waist-to-shoulder ratio, but it seems that with every passing minute Steve gives him something else to like -- he’s so genuine, so kind, speaks to Bucky in the lovely smooth voice and tells him everything he needs to hear at just the right moment; in between Bucky’s own ramblings, he reveals precious little things about himself like he doesn't know how much he’s offering up; he brushes his hair out of his eyes only for it to fall right back into place until Bucky’s fingers itch to reach out and do it himself; he’s funny in a subtle, self-effacing way, and grips at his chest when he laughs; he flusters easily, but he’s sure of himself, and even surer of what he believes in. He’s painting Bucky’s world with the colors of his essence and making it something bright, something beautiful. And Bucky is collecting all of the little details he can about Steve like they’re baseball cards, taking them greedily and stacking them up so that he can put them in his chest pocket, next to his heart. They’ve known each other just four hours.
In short, Bucky is fucked.
But Steve’s leg is pressed up against his, and the fire crackling on in the fireplace has nothing on the heat simmering in Bucky’s sternum, so he won’t back out now, will keep collecting cards like they’re a Christmas gift to himself.
“Tell me about Brooklyn,” he hears himself prompt. He wants to learn everything he can about Steve, and he wants Steve to be able to tell him.
Steve looks up at him with an apprehensive little smile. “Really? I mean, I don’t know what there is to tell you haven’t already read somewhere.”
Bucky gives him a look. “You’re telling me all that information is complete and accurate?”
Steve snorts.
“Right, so shoot,” Bucky insists, knocking his legs into Steve’s. “Tell me your side of the story.”
Steve complies.
He paints the room evergreen with descriptions of his childhood, with images of the Cobble Hill streets and the little apartment he shared with his Ma. He talks about her loud mouth and her shoddy cooking, both of which he inherited, and the Gaelic lullabies she would sing every evening. His father was present only in form of a polished rosary and stories about the most charming young man in Dingle. Steve talks about church and school, and the characters that defined his youth with their love or their hatred or their humor. He missed a lot of that, he says, with all the times in and out of the hospital and a growing list of ailments with expensive medications. The nurses at the ward knew him well by age 7, he says, and it must have been nothing but his mother’s love and his own grit that kept him kicking till eighteen. After his mom’s death, he says, it was Arnie who watched out he didn't do anything too stupid, though Steve usually found a way anyway. He talks about Officer Calahan, who was never rough as he looked, but always seemed to have it out for the little guy. Money was always tight, and Steve couldn't hold a steady job with achy back and weak immune system, but they snuck into pictures and offered to do chores for neighbors in return for a loaf of bread. When the war came, Steve tried to enlist twenty times before Erskine finally gave him a chance.
“And the rest is history, I guess,” Steve shrugs. “They initially just wanted me to make bad movies and sell war bonds, but as soon as they put me on European soil, I disobeyed orders and went out to save the 107th. I don’t know why I couldn’t let it go, but it just ate at me the way those men were just considered lost causes, casualties in a bigger war that wasn’t about them. But it was, wasn’t it? How is war not about protecting innocent people? It shouldn’t be about sending soldiers to their death. Anyway, that was a controversial opinion, I guess. I’m lucky I didn’t get court-martialed.”
Steve suddenly stops, rubbing a hand down his face. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I’ve been rambling for way too long, I-”
“No, no, don’t apologize,” Bucky interrupts. “You should be able to tell your own story, Steve. God knows everyone else has had their hand at it.”
Steve laughs a little, but it sounds hollow, tired. “Sure have.”
“I don’t know why all the books seem to be so set on their false narrative.” Bucky continues. "Nothing I ever read mentioned the extent of the hospitals, or the queerness, or the Irish Catholicism. Or the arrest records. Or the fact that the 107th mission was your idea.”
Steve smiles at that. “Yeah, I guess I shouldn’t expect them to mention any of that.”
He shifts on the sofa, looking out at the flakes that are still falling just past the window panes. Beyond them, the colorful lights of the trees in other people’s living rooms twinkle. Bucky watches the lights of their own tree reflect in Steve’s eyes, and grows warm with wanting him.
“It’s political, I guess,” Steve thinks out loud. “They don’t want their national hero to be Irish, and they certainly don’t want him queer or on the wrong side of the law.”
Bucky hums.
“Or maybe,” Steve continues. “They just wanted to make me likable.”
Bucky frowns. “You were likable.”
Steve snorts. “That’s very kind of you, Bucky, but I absolutely was not. I was loud and foul-mouthed and opinionated and always sporting a shiner from getting into fights I knew I couldn’t win.”
“Exactly,” Bucky insists. “That’s loveable as hell.”
Steve just laughs again. His hair is falling in his eyes, and Bucky wants to reach out. He feels the laughter reverberate from Steve’s chest, through his legs and into Bucky’s own.
“I would’ve liked you,” Bucky insists again, before he even knows he’s opened his mouth. His voice is softer this time, but Bucky is more sure than ever that he’s right.
Steve considers him for a long moment, his eyes measuring, but warm. He looks like he wants to say something once, twice, but remains silent. His hands fiddle with the stitches of Bucky’s blanket.
“I almost wish I had known you then,” he says finally. His voice is quiet. “But then I’m glad you’re in this century.”
There’s a heat blooming behind Bucky’s sternum like he just took a hot sip of tea. He lets it spread through his chest, rushing through his veins until it’s warmed the tip of his toes.
“You know,” he muses, “I think there’s an alternate universe where I’m in both.”
Steve breathes out a grin, eyes bright. When he finds Bucky’s gaze, his eyes are an ocean Bucky thinks he might just drown in.
“That’s the place to be, then.”
Bucky doesn't look away. He can’t. Or maybe he just doesn't want to. And it’s been too long now, but Steve isn’t looking away either, and so Bucky takes the jump, dives right into the warm water of Steve’s eyes.
Bucky can feel the heat from Steve’s leg press into his. Suddenly, he’s hyper-aware of where they’re touching, so nearly skin to skin. A layer of cotton, a layer of denim. And Bucky knows that Steve is extraordinary, chemically augmented and impossibly strong, but right now, with his thigh pressed to Bucky’s on the sofa, he feels delightfully human.
Bucky presses his thigh more deliberately to Steve’s, and feels his heartbeat spike at the answering pressure. He tries to smile even as he’s frozen, transfixed by something inconceivable, something bigger than the whole sky.
“Bucky,” Steve breathes.
Bucky exhales a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He thinks he might kiss him.
But then before he decides if he dares to, Steve kisses him.
For just a moment, Bucky is frozen with the inconceivability of it. It’s when Steve falters against him, appears to pull back in a moment of doubt, when he springs into action. He won’t have Steve think for even a moment that he doesn't want this.
His hands reach up to cup Steve’s jaw, and he kisses him back for all he’s worth.
Steve’s lips are warm and sweet. Bucky tastes the wine and the chocolate and the syrup on them, and he almost thinks he can taste the snow, and the shimmer of Steve’s excitement. He smiles against Steve’s lips, and when he opens his mouth, it feels like swallowing the whole sky.
Steve hands tangle in his hair, and he shifts to fold one of his knees over Bucky’s. The weight of him is so warm, so solid, so true, and Bucky feels like he’s on fire.
It feels surreal, and it feels like the most real thing to ever happen in Bucky’s life. Behind Bucky’s closed eyes Steve’s colors swirl and blend and explode in bright bursts.
Steve pulls back after another long moment, but he doesn’t let Bucky go far. One of his hands falls out of his hair to rest on Bucky’s jaw. Bucky leans into the thumb Steve presses to his dimple.
Steve looks almost transfixed by it, and Bucky watches the dumb expression on his face with what he knows is a similar one. Steve’s lips are slick and kissed red. Bucky thinks he might burst, because he did that.
“I,” Steve utters, his eyes flicking from Bucky’s mouth back up to his eyes. “I’m sorry, I should have asked.”
Bucky laughs a little, but it’s so sweet that he can’t really find it that silly at all. “That’s okay,” he assures. “If it wasn’t obvious, I was very much on board.”
Steve smiles. “Okay, good. I’m, uh. I also hope it’s okay that I’m really glad you forgot your keys.”
Bucky’s smile widens impossibly. “Me too.”
Steve smiles, and it’s so bright and beautiful that Bucky really has no choice but to haul him in again.
The magic of the first kiss does not dissipate with the second one, not with the third, fourth, or fifth. Bucky doesn't know if he’s ever kissed someone like this, for the purpose of just kissing them because it feels nice. It’s certainly never felt like this.
They kiss for what feels like hours, until Bucky forgets where up and down is, because nothing is important except the taste of Steve’s lips and the breaths they share in between. Sometimes, they're smiling more than kissing, and then Bucky will drop a kiss to Steve’s hairline, and they’ll adjust the way they’re curled up on the sofa.
By the time the fire has turned mostly into embers, and the last lights of the apartments across the street have flickered off, Steve and Bucky are stretched out on the couch. Steve is lying half on top of Bucky, his head nestled in the crook of Bucky’s shoulder, and Bucky is drawing lazy circles over his sweater.
Between dwindling, meaningless conversations, they lapse into long, comfortable silences. Bucky is tired, and he’s sure Steve’s warm weight is indicative of his own sleepiness, but neither of them make a move to really go to sleep.
Maybe, Bucky suspects, Steve, like him, doesn’t want the night to end.
“Can I confess something?” Steve asks suddenly. His voice is muffled in Bucky’s chest.
Bucky hums, and looks down to where Steve is propping his chin up to meet his eyes.
“I definitely could have jimmied your lock for you.”
Bucky laughs. He feels Steve hide his face in his shoulder again, and his heart swells with the gesture. It’s crazy to think he could have just sat in his apartment tonight, eating chips and watching Love Actually alone on his sofa. It suddenly seems like the worst possible fate.
“My God,” he smiles as his laughter fades. His hand reaches out to smooth over Steve’s hair and cup the line of his jaw. “I’m so damn glad you didn’t.”
Steve smiles, his face painted in touches of gold, and when Bucky leans down to kiss it, he feels its shimmer infect him, too.
Maybe, he thinks, his forgetfulness was part of some greater plan. Maybe, it was the catalyst to his own little Christmas miracle.