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Steve’s given up pretending he isn’t pacing.
There’s a lot of floor to pace in the room T’Challa gave him, that made Steve ask what was between a palace and an upscale hotel and Sam say A casino without looking up from his phone. Even the bed, which is larger than any bed Steve has slept in or imagined himself needing doesn’t take up too much of the place. There’s soft light and vibrant green plants, a large computer/TV and a bathroom bigger than the apartment Steve grew up in, and he’s been staring at nothing but the door as he wears the lush carpet down to threads.
He wouldn’t have left the lab, but Bucky basically shoved him out and shut the door on him:
You’re sure you don’t want me up here for this?
I’m sure I don’t want you yelling every time I twitch and glaring bayonets at the techs until they put this thing on backwards. Go on, Steve. It’s gonna be hours. I’ll come find you after. We’re fugitives, remember? It’s not like you’re gonna wander off.
So he paces and he worries and gets mocked by Sam via text – Tell creamsicle I said hey and no self-love until he gets a handle on the new gear. He’s so intent on waiting for Bucky that the door manages to whisper open and let Bucky into the room while Steve’s looking at some of the books on the shelf.
“Anything good?”
He wheels around, his hand shoving the book back on the second blind attempt while he looks Bucky over. He’s still in the sleeveless white shirt and grey cotton pants he’d been wearing when Steve saw him last, but where his left arm ended at the metal shoulder joint, now there’s a smoothly shining arm, near-black metal that reminds Steve of T’Challa’s suit even though it’s not vibranium, just by the sleek power of it. It’s still obviously mechanical, but somehow more organic.
He’d seen the schematic when Bucky had signed off the final version, knows there are compartments and extra tech folded in, but the plates are almost seamless, every join hard to spot unless you really try.
Bucky lets him look, standing there until he snorts and walks over. His gait’s still a little uncertain, his balance not quite centred. “Well?”
“You tell me,” Steve says.
“It’s... different,” Bucky says, looking down the length of the arm, bringing it up between them. “It’s lighter, and there’s more precision to it, but it’s stronger too, and I can dial that up or down now.” He flexes his fingers, makes a fist, and Steve has to strain to the hear the sound it makes. “But really it’s the feedback I’m getting used to. The old one was like—like someone was telling me what it felt: this much pressure, that much friction, high or low temperature. The rig in this lets me feel it.”
“That’s good,” Steve says, starting to smile, watching Bucky turning his elbow and running his other hand over the metal of his forearm, fingertips following the lines separating the pieces he can retract to access inner compartments meant for ammunition, tools or anything else. Sam suggested snacks. Bucky flipped him off.
Then Bucky puts his new hand flat against Steve’s chest, fingers splayed out, and Steve’s breathing becomes a conscious struggle. Bucky smiles slowly to himself.
“I can feel your heartbeat,” he says when Steve gives him a questioning look. “Probably better than I could with my regular hand.” He glances up at Steve and smiles wider. It doesn’t make the breathing easier. “It’s going kinda fast there, Steve.”
“Well, you startled me just now,” Steve says. He bites his lip as Bucky moves the hand up to the side of his neck, exhaling through his nose. “Gonna check my blood pressure next?”
“I look like your nurse?” Bucky shoots back, and Steve’s smile escapes his control.
Bucky takes his hand away, then brings it slowly near Steve’s face, Steve looking past it at Bucky’s expression that’s kind of here and somewhere else at once. There’s no heat coming from the arm, even this close, but it’s not the ambient, draining cold he remembers from the old one.
“It’s okay,” Steve tells him, maybe not loud enough to hear. But Bucky brings the tips of the fingers against Steve’s temple while Steve holds himself in place, the barest pressure. Bucky’s fingers run down next to Steve’s eye, to the skin underneath, then down his cheek, close to his mouth before they divert along his jaw.
“I can feel it,” Bucky says, soft like he didn’t mean to. Steve swallows, blinking, and turns his face into the touch, palms damp and the air slipping too heavy and overheated into his lungs. Watching Bucky watch him. Seeing Bucky be carefully, achingly surprised by his own gentleness.
Neither of them, Steve thinks, have really been rebuilt for tender things. He’s so grateful for this that it hurts.
Finally Steve brings his own hand up and covers Bucky’s against his cheek, holds it there. The itch in him to turn his head and kiss Bucky’s palm sits at the top of his spine, fizzing like a lit match thrown in water. He lets go, and Bucky drops his hand to his side.
“Wanna sit?” Steve asks. There are chairs in the room, but he nods at the bed, and Bucky sits on the end of it next to him, flesh hand next to Steve’s between them. It’s a clean smell that comes off him, not a hospital one, the kind Steve swears hasn’t changed at all. “You tired?”
Bucky shakes his head. “They reversed the stuff they gave me pretty early on, once they finished with the first few connections in the shoulder.” He didn’t want to be sedated at all when it was brought up, sitting in the lab giving Steve pale-faced looks full of Don’t let me hurt anyone. But they needed him motionless for the initial installation stage, so Bucky’d nodded finally, jaw like stone and his eyes aimed at nothing. Thankfully Wakandan medicine is as far ahead as the rest of their science.
“Hungry?” Steve tries. “Or there’s a lot of places in the city you haven’t seen yet, if you feel like getting out of this building for—”
“Steve,” Bucky says, putting his hand on top of Steve’s. “What’re you doing right now?”
He looks down at their hands, the crossed backs of their palms between his thigh and Bucky’s. He catches Bucky’s pinky finger between his and his ring finger, mouth quirking when Bucky snorts.
“Stalling,” Steve admits after a second, reluctantly looking up to where Bucky’s watching his face.
“Why,” Bucky says quietly, eyebrows ticking up.
“Maybe you make me nervous,” Steve returns in the same low tone.
“You’re not gonna hurt me, Steve,” Bucky tells him, which isn’t what Steve was thinking, but it goes right through him anyway, cutting through the briars to the roots of everything. He doesn’t say that, based on the evidence, it isn’t true.
It’s hard to spend a life saying no and still feel like you’ve won. Say it enough and yes fits all wrong in your mouth.
“Okay,” he says finally. There really isn’t another honest choice in him. “Okay, Buck.”
Bucky sits back, studying him. “Huh,” he says, exhaling through his nose.
“What?” Steve asks, tilting his head, trying to place the shape of Bucky’s expression.
“I was thinking you might have changed your mind,” Bucky says. He’s aiming for lightness, but there are stones tied to it.
Steve gives that the look it deserves, shoulders straightening and his jaw set. “Yeah, well, you never were too bright, I guess.”
“Fuck you, punk,” Bucky huffs cordially, both of them smiling, slowly and in a clockwork kind of way.
“I’m not kidding,” Steve says, squeezing the fingers Bucky’s got curled against his palm. “I’ve always known that about you.” He squeezes Bucky’s fingers again when he can’t get the eye contact back, watches the motion of Bucky’s throat as he swallows, rubs his thumb against the back of Bucky’s hand.
It’s so easy to fall back into this, to step right back onto old ground, that Steve’s waiting for the lurch when he comes across the hidden trap, the wound he won’t notice under later. Maybe there isn’t one. Or maybe the angles of it are still just that sharp.
“Not like I’d blame you. It’s been a long time,” Bucky says, sotto voice, like he doesn’t want to disturb the air too much. It still unnerves Steve how totally still Bucky can get when he wants to. “Seventy years.”
“No it hasn’t,” Steve says. “We didn’t get seventy years, Buck.” He sees a quick flipbook of images, ideas of what they could have done, or been, and tries to ignore the bitter tinge in his throat.
They could be old now, really, honestly old. They could have lived their lives and been forgotten. The war might have ended.
Bucky just laughs, gripping his hand. “What, Steve, you think we would’ve had a house somewhere? Dogs? Rings?” His voice thins, a little ragged at the edges Steve can’t quite see. Bucky’s eyes catch onto his, shaking his head. “You know what I thought we’d get? When I was dumb enough to think about it?”
“No,” Steve says. He’d never asked, maybe because he’d known it too, something written on the air he was careful to keep over his shoulder, in the corner of his eye.
“You,” Bucky says, “dying on me before you hit twenty-five. Me making sure you went in that plot alongside your folks. Trying to do something with the rest of my life, who knows what, making do without the parts of me that would’ve gone into the ground.” He shrugs a shoulder with the faintest sound of mechanisms whirring away. “Okay, so maybe we didn’t get a fair deal. But maybe there’s no fair deals at all, Steve. We’re here, mostly anyway. You’re here.”
Steve swallows, blows out a rush of a breath. “And that’s enough?”
Bucky leans into him, nudging his shoulder. “It can be. If you want.”
There’s no such thing as longing without memory. No bravery without knowing what it was like, once, to be brave.
Bucky never would hear that he was the braver one, just because Steve was more stubborn, was angrier, like those are the same thing when you really look close.
“It always was before,” Steve says, following when Bucky leans away, chasing the warmth. “I picked my side. Nothing’s changed.”
“Right,” Bucky says, raising the new arm, turning the hand so its smooth plates and near-invisible joints reflect the light. It’s almost perfectly silent. Or Steve’s heart is beating too loud. “Nothing at all.”
“Here,” Steve says, holding out his free hand, “lemme see it.” He takes the chilled metal hand in his when Bucky brings his arm across them, and Steve gets a weird flash of old and new in the circle they’ve made of themselves. Bucky curls the fingers when Steve presses on the inside of the knuckles, turns it when Steve feels over the place where the wrist is almost delicate. “It’s beautiful,” he says honestly, touching the joints, the faint ridges where tendons would be. The other one was too, in its way, but that was an axe where this is a sword, beauty outweighing utility.
He wants to sketch it, the angles of it, how the planes fit to make a curve. Where it flows gracefully up to Bucky’s shoulder, moving with the muscles in his chest and back.
“Oh sure,” Bucky nods. “Slices, dices. There’s not even any blood on it yet.”
“It’s still you,” Steve says, letting Bucky take his hand back, shifting to face him. “That’s all I care about.”
If Bucky remembers saying something similar once in a tent in Germany, face full of bruises and both of them delirious from exhaustion, he doesn’t show it. Steve thinks he does. Hopes.
“What d’you want, Buck, really?” Steve asks, because he has to, sooner or later. He knows what he wants, always has, but he won’t take it if he’s cheating Bucky of something. It’s that familiar, worn-in guilt: that he’d be giving back less than he was getting.
A small laugh chuffs out of Bucky’s nose as he leans back, looking Steve in the face. “Stop doing that, Steve.”
“What?” Steve blinks, eyes on the shape of Bucky’s mouth, the animated smirk that’s all Bucky and isn’t a question of resemblance.
Bucky thumps him lightly on the shoulder, then smoothes over it, like Steve keeps bruises anymore, like he’s still breakable. Hell, Bucky never cared when he was. It was one reason Steve fell for him in the first place.
“Giving me all the choices,” Bucky says, tone fond and about a hair’s breadth from calling him an idiot and smacking him upside the head. “I don’t need them.”
And I don’t want them, Steve thinks, then frowns at himself. “Sorry,” he says instead. “I wasn’t—”
Bucky rolls his eyes, then uses a few quick-sharp pushes to put Steve on his back, tumbling him until his hands are on Steve’s shoulders and his knees are set either side of Steve’s hips. Through the soft material of the pants and Steve’s jeans, he can feel where Bucky’s getting hard, pressing up against him, knows by Bucky’s face he can feel the same from Steve.
Bucky pauses there, just staring down, eyes moving over Steve’s face like there’s anything he hasn’t seen, hasn’t touched, doesn’t know. If there is, Steve doesn’t want that either.
“What,” Steve says, pulling bravado from somewhere even while his breath hitches two or three times on the inhale, “you need an invitation?”
Bucky grins, wide and genuine, creasing the corners of his eyes, and God, a dozen little moving parts in Steve’s chest come off their tracks. He leans down, Steve’s image of him blurring up close, a sooty smudge of lashes and his hair brushing Steve’s cheeks, his grin turned into a bright flash like sunlight on seawater.
“S’more like it,” Bucky says, right against Steve’s mouth, and Steve opens up for it. As if there were ever locks or hinges to begin with. He tips his face into the pressure, lets it pry his lips apart. Bucky’s tongue slips against his, Steve’s blood rushing at the taste of him, the heat and weight that makes Steve feel suddenly attached to his own body as somewhere he lives instead of just a thing he was given to use. Something he owns and can hand over if he wants to.
Bucky’s hands come off his shoulders and run up the sides of his neck, metal and flesh thumbs finding the clattering pulse in his throat, bracketing his windpipe, pressing at the vulnerable softness under his jaw. Steve turns his head, breaking the kiss to catch at them when they get near his mouth. It’s pure, thoughtless need, putting his tongue to the length of whatever fingers Bucky gives him while Bucky hangs above him, all painted-ceiling beauty and heaving chest as he groans, loud and uneven. He strokes his fingers against Steve’s tongue, Steve’s eyes barely open, awareness strangled down to sucking at the tang of metal or the salt of skin, spit running from his held-open mouth.
Steve’s hands pull at Bucky’s waist, his back, until Bucky’s flat against him, cock trapped in his clothes alongside Steve’s, both of them rolling their hips, rough, inelegant motions that hook at each other. Bucky’s forehead leans hard against Steve’s temple, fingers still playing with Steve’s lips, more fingers in Steve’s hair while Steve grips frantically at his shoulders, feeling Bucky shiver when he touches the join between skin and metal.
“Tell me,” Bucky says, all hot breath washing over Steve’s cheek, into his ear, emptying fistfuls of shudders down his spine. “I want to hear it.”
“Anything,” Steve says, no pause, the first and most true thing he can get a grip on. “Anything you want.”
Bucky tsks, scrapes his teeth high on Steve’s cheekbone. He pushes himself up, breaking the chest-to-knees contact and sending Steve bowing up after him, tethered to the heat, cool air hitting where his shirt’s stuck to him. “C’mon, Steve. Do better.”
Steve blinks, hazy and wet-eyed. His hands coast along Bucky’s ribs, one hand going to Bucky’s cheek, just because. For no reason at all. Bucky’s smile reforms lopsided and unselfconsciously lethal.
“Fuck me,” Steve says, swallowing, watching Bucky’s pupils eat away the colour around them, feeling the reaction in a tremble under his hands. “Make me feel it.” He remembers that first time, in a colder room on scratchier sheets in a different world, smirks and adds: “I dare you.”
Bucky sits up on his knees, lips kissed a fierce red, still shining. His eyes run down Steve’s body, Steve shivering and pushing up onto his elbows. Tensing, he holds himself up as he reaches back and tugs the shirt over his head, sends it sliding over the side of the bed to the floor, smiling when Bucky makes a low gut-punch noise.
His fingers fumble at the buttons of his jeans until he finally tugs them open in a rough jerk, and Bucky jolts back into motion to drag them down his thighs, Steve biting his own swollen mouth as Bucky’s hands brush his skin. The jeans hit the floor with a loose clap, until Steve’s reclined on his elbows again, dick outlined in his underwear, the fabric stuck to the smear of wetness at the head.
“All of it,” Bucky tells him, and Steve swallows thickly, shoves the briefs down as far as he can reach and letting Bucky push them off his legs. He lets Bucky see him, legs spread until they hit Bucky’s knees, cock twitching against his belly in an echo of his pulse, a slow drip of precome trailing to the hair below his navel.
“Just gonna look?” he asks, skin on fire, Bucky kneeling over him with his tongue showing pink between his teeth.
Bucky’s gaze darts up, mouth curving. “Not a bad idea,” he says. “Get you to touch yourself, put on a nice little display for me. You were always such a show-off for the right kind of attention, Steve.”
It curls around the base of his spine, makes him dig his heels into the bed, hands clenching at the sheets. “Not what I asked for though,” he says, throat dry even while his mouth is flooding.
“No,” Bucky agrees, peeling his shirt off from the waist in a roll of his body, shoulders and chest shifting with muscle. He throws the shirt in the direction Steve’s went, storm-dark eyes tracking the rise and fall of Steve’s ribs. Of course there are scars, beyond just the arm, but it’s Bucky. Steve’s heart wants to give out, but it’s Bucky. He’s afraid, but it’s Bucky.
He blinks back a sting, having no way to say I don’t regret any of you that won’t break either the moment or them sealed inside of it. No matter how much of it was meant, I don’t regret it. Like peace, fragile after the conquering.
Both of them are shaking, just enough to notice. In Steve’s chest there’s a hunger like a living thing, testing boundaries, feeling out its new lack of shame.
Leaving his weight on one arm, Steve holds out the other one, and Bucky lowers himself down again. Steve wraps his arm around Bucky’s body while Bucky braces with his metal hand above Steve’s head, arm flexing as he pushes the pants over his hips along with his underwear, kicks them free. Flattened against the mattress, Steve’s hands slip up Bucky’s sides, absently registering knife scar, bullet wound, burns, Bucky. Bucky. Bucky, like an undertow dragging him along.
The feeling of nothing but hot skin when Bucky lets Steve take his weight steals Steve’s breath, would make him arch if he wasn’t pinned between the bed and Bucky’s body moving slowly against him. Bucky looses a pained sound against Steve’s throat, teeth sharp on his Adam’s apple when Steve shoves his hips up to meet Bucky’s, the slide of his cock along Bucky’s sending his head snapping back, mouth opening around a groan.
Bucky’s breath fogs into the hollow below Steve’s neck, his lips hot on Steve’s collarbone. Steve’s hands grip at Bucky’s shoulders, muscle bunching against his palms, the dip of Bucky’s spine slick with sweat. Bucky lets words go in a hush against Steve’s skin, right where his own get stuck, that gray place between his mouth and his lungs that’s crowded with captive things, admissions and pleas like flocks of doves, wing-clipped. Steve tries to let them go, but all that comes out is Bucky’s name, splintered.
He winds his fingers into Bucky’s hair, clumsily tries to answer the snaps of Bucky’s hips against his, grabbing at the swell of Bucky’s ass to work them off against each other, using the solid metal of Bucky’s upper arm to keep him there.
“You’d better have something we can use,” Bucky says, mouth moving down Steve’s chest.
“Bedside,” Steve breathes out with what little air he has while Bucky sucks hard on the skin over his sternum. Doesn’t matter if the bruise’ll be gone almost as soon as it’s visible, it’s perfect anyway. Steve’s dick jerks against the hard-packed muscle of Bucky’s stomach, leaking all over him, friction going smooth with precome.
“Yeah?” Bucky says, firebrand noise and breath and tongue over the mark he’s just left, teeth tugging at the skin before he moves so he’s looking into Steve’s face again. Bleary-eyed and panting, Steve can’t tell if he’s imagining a fleck of blood on Bucky’s mouth, Bucky’s hair shutting out the light from either side of them. “That what you do in this big bed, Steve?”
Steve groans when Bucky punctuates it with a slow, cruel roll of his hips, pressing down on Steve’s cock, watching every motion of Steve’s face. “Sometimes,” he says, biting at Bucky’s lips when they get close enough, sucking on his tongue.
“You’re gonna show me sometime,” Bucky says against the corner of Steve’s mouth. “You with your pretty fingers in your ass. I remember how much you love it, having something in you.”
It hits Steve like a molten weight, something glowing bashed up against an anvil. “Yeah,” he says, baring his neck when Bucky’s mouth goes for it. “I want it, Buck.” His voice breaks right between Bucky’s teeth, a vertigo spin making him clutch at Bucky tighter. “Fuck. Want it all the time.”
“I know,” Bucky shushes him. He presses Steve firmly down, metal palm like cool water over the bruise he’s blotted onto Steve’s chest, thumb brushing at Steve’s nipple. “Gonna give you what you need. Take care of you.” He stretches to rifle through the drawers by the bed.
Steve strokes fingers through Bucky’s hair, tucking strands behind his ear, unsticking them from his forehead. He runs a hand up Bucky’s forearm to where the metal joins his shoulder, feeling Bucky’s dick twitch. New sensation, he thinks, and grips harder, hearing Bucky curse under his breath.
The cap opening on the little plastic bottle is like a branch breaking. Steve’s heart bolts off somewhere, untrackable.
Bucky appears over him again, kisses him, softer, more deliberate, like something he’d meant to do and forgot, so now it means more to get it right. Steve sighs into Bucky’s mouth, sore lips scalding against Bucky’s tongue. Then Bucky sits up, straddling him, looking fucked-out already, wild around his eyes and edges.
“No,” Steve manages to say when Bucky starts slicking his fingers. “Other hand.”
Bucky goes preternaturally still again, a transfixed look aimed somewhere near but not meeting Steve’s eyes. His cock’s hard and curved tight to his belly, covered with wet from both of them.
“You don’t have to prove anything, Steve,” Bucky says, voice rusted over, somewhere between angry and fraught and something else, hotter.
“I’m not trying to,” Steve tells him. His hand skids across his body down to his dick, stroking slowly, watching Bucky’s eyes get dragged there. He circles his thumb around the head, groaning in his throat, smiles when an echo comes out of Bucky’s. “I’m telling you what I want,” he says. “Since you told me to.”
Bucky’s throat bobs as he searches Steve’s face, turning it all over for something hidden, a little stashed-away treason. Then he switches the bottle into his other hand.
“On your side,” Bucky says, rough, dropping the lube and pushing at Steve’s thigh with his right hand as he rubs the fingers of his left together.
Steve goes, tucking his knee up, exhaling hard against the sheets, limbs uncoordinated. Bucky kneels in close, the heat of his skin spilling up Steve’s body. Cool, wet fingers slide along his ass and he chokes on a breath, Bucky’s hesitation making him look down over his shoulder.
“If you ask if I’m sure, I’m kicking you off this bed,” Steve warns him.
“Manners, Steven,” Bucky says in a sincerely frightening impression of an exasperated Sarah Rogers standing outside a church. Steve would fire back at him for it, but right then Bucky slides a finger all the way into him, and his voice hisses out of his throat before he can hold it back.
“You—Oh, fuck,” Steve groans, head lolling when Bucky’s finger pulls back and hooks on his rim, tugging before he pushes it back in again.
“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Now I remember the real upside to this. Not that you don’t make a pretty picture, Steve.” His other hand rubs over Steve’s ass, pulls him open as his finger fucks lazily in and out, little waves of heat and light flickering up through Steve’s nerves.
“Don’t think we’ve got another seven decades, Buck,” Steve says after a minute, slurring his words. Bucky scoffs and slaps him on the ass, does it again harder when Steve moans from down in his chest, hips rocking against the bed.
“Masochist,” Bucky says fondly, rubbing over the heated, reddening skin. He curls his finger up against Steve’s prostate, pressure driving Steve out of his head, out of his body everywhere except for that spot. A second finger nudges at his hole, slips in alongside the first. “Fuck,” Bucky says, sounding like it’s forced through his teeth. “I can feel how hot you are.” He twists the fingers, spreads them, the lack of give in the metal working Steve open, other hand keeping Steve’s cheeks spread so he can see. “Always so goddamn tight.”
Steve gets lost in it, bodiless in the rhythm Bucky sets as he fucks Steve looser on his fingers, dark and bright switching places over and over behind Steve’s lids, his breaths these ramshackle things that teeter under their own weight. Bucky’s right thumb plays around his hole as a third unyielding finger goes one, two knuckles deep, feeling Steve spread for him, the dull aching stretch of it turning Steve’s hands to fists as he tries to work back on it, get it right into the empty place he can’t stand.
“God, Steve,” Bucky murmurs, closer now, bending over Steve’s body like armour, a tidal motion in his hips matching where his fingers are fucking into Steve. He fits himself over Steve like it’s a shape he’s been hammered into, kissing up Steve’s side, his shoulder, his neck. “If I give you more,” he says, fourth finger just there, where it’d be so easy to twist inside, “are you gonna come?”
He can’t answer, voice eaten away like corruption. He doesn’t know how long he’s been here, held apart on Bucky’s perfect fingers, can’t tell, doesn’t care. He thinks he nods, isn’t even sure he hasn’t come already, made a mess of the sheet and his stomach with Bucky’s fingertips held unrelenting against his prostate.
Then the fingers are gone. Bucky shuffles around over him. A noise batters around in his throat, soft like wings against glass, made of loss and need as he tilts his hips up. Steve can feel himself left open in the air, clenching on nothing. Bucky’s hand ghosts along his thigh, bends his knee closer to his chest. There’s heat, and blunt pressure, carefully insistent.
It takes a handful of seconds to realise it’s Bucky making that wounded sound, not him. Bucky’s hand latches onto his hip, pulls Steve back onto his dick as he drives slowly forwards, deeper than his fingers, warmer and thicker.
“Oh, man,” Steve groans, hands slipping on the sheets, cock soaking the bed, precome stringing from his skin. He shudders when he feels Bucky flush up against him, so full that nothing else matters. “Bucky.”
“Yeah,” Bucky says, winded. “Yeah, you’re good. You’re so good, Steve. Fuck, you’re perfect like this.” His hips circle, Steve opening that last little bit for him, trying to grip down as if Bucky needs to be told to stay. Little rolls of building movement drag his dick across Steve’s prostate, the head catching on Steve’s hole before he works back in, relentless motion that propels Steve higher up the bed even while his fingers and toes curl and he bows back, wanting more, always more, anything that isn’t less. Shakes migrate through his whole body, undoing joints, leaving liquid heat and wreckage as he gasps.
He throws a hand back and Bucky catches it, holding tight as he starts to earnestly move, going right into the pace Steve needs, hunched over Steve and fucking quicker, deeper, other hand seizing bruisingly on Steve’s hip, keeping him in place as he dashes the contents of Steve’s lungs out against the pillows.
Steve’s thoughts rattle apart into nonsense, all more and please and the endless homecoming to Bucky’s name and the peal of his heart ringing in his skull. He’s held down and plied apart and fucked until it’s impossible to think at all, and he sinks into that nonphysical, extraphysical place, a mirror-in-a-mirror openness like a lake reflecting the sky returning the lake. He’s pushed past blood and muscle to something brighter, more immaculate, something better than he is, that exists for its own sake.
Why would he not want this? How could he want anything that isn’t this, Bucky inside and all around, past and present happening at once, a kind of belief that’s also knowing. He thinks he’s talking, babbling, something unstoppered while Bucky soothes him and fills him up, warmth replacing years of ice and rime.
Orgasm’s lapping at the borders of him, balls drawn up tight and cock in line with his stomach, but Steve focuses in on the sounds Bucky makes against him, gasps turning into sobs, his grip on Steve’s hand numbing the fingers, the bones creaking. Bucky’s hair is plastered wet to the both of them and the tremors in him are overflowing into Steve.
“Hey,” Steve says. Tries to say. It comes out in three pieces. He grips the nape of Bucky’s neck, jarring him a little, skims his hand down Bucky’s back. “Hey,” he says, swallowing. “It’s okay. Let it go. You’re safe. C’mon, Buck, it’s me.”
He can feel Bucky throttling himself on the edge of giving in to it, clinging to that last bit of control with his teeth, wound so tight he feels like brittle stone where Steve’s touching him. He’s rocking into Steve with sharp, wicked little thumps, shattered groans pouring out with each one, clicking Steve’s teeth together and making it hard not to slip back under.
“I’ve got you,” Steve says, hauling Bucky as close as he can with the strength he can find, until he can press his lips to Bucky’s cheek, forehead, temple, hand on Bucky’s ass guiding him.
“Steve,” Bucky rasps, like the leftovers of a scream.
“Just give it up,” Steve says, bearing down, keeping Bucky buried deep, where he should be. “You’re not gonna fall.”
Bucky shudders hard enough it hurts to be so close to him. A hurt little razor of a sound slices past Steve’s ear, and then he can feel Bucky coming, a filthy, worshipful little rush as he feels full right to the pit of his gut. Warmth spills out around Bucky’s cock and down Steve’s thigh, Steve shaking now too, Bucky’s hold on his hand loosening in spasms, Bucky’s breath cracking and hitching.
Steve coaxes him through it, feeling wrung out even though he’s still hard, still leaking. Bucky awkwardly raises himself enough to brush his mouth over Steve’s, the fractured, needy groan he makes leaving Steve’s eyes stinging.
He winces as Bucky carefully, too carefully, pulls out, Bucky dropping more kisses to his neck and collarbone that are mostly just points he touches his lips to with no coordination. His eyes are nearly black when they find Steve’s, and he pushes Steve onto his back again, throat working before he lets go of Steve’s hand and grips his thighs, opening them to make a space for himself.
“Buck,” Steve says, about to offer something, not even really clear on what, before Bucky’s breath hits the slick head of his dick. Then Bucky uses the length of Steve’s cock to open his lips, sliding down as Steve hisses and arches, furiously trying to stay still.
This, this was always Bucky’s favourite thing, the thing he got greedy for. Steve heavy and thick in his mouth, down his throat, cutting off his air. He swallows around Steve, eyes flickering like he wants to close them even while he stares up Steve’s body, over the quiver of Steve’s stomach and chest to his face, where Steve’s not hiding a damn thing, probably.
Bucky’s left hand leaves Steve’s thigh, cool fingers like ice when he cups Steve’s balls, thumbing behind them, then down to Steve’s hole, still open and wet. He circles Steve’s rim then pushes in with two fingers, right to the last knuckle and pressing hard on Steve’s prostate, cheeks hollowed as he sucks and a tear runs out of one eye.
Steve comes like his chest is collapsing, caving in around the crashing of his heart, no air to make noise, fitfully jerking in Bucky’s hot mouth, Bucky’s lips slipping up to pull at the head, tonguing into the slit as his fingers crook deep in Steve’s ass. He keeps Steve like that, spine bending up towards the heat of Bucky licking him clean, holding him in his mouth until he’s nearly soft, turning his head to kiss Steve’s hip, his belly while Steve shakes.
“Shit,” Steve groans when he can, and Bucky huffs a laugh near his navel. “Get up here,” Steve says, tugging at Bucky’s arm, cupping the back of his head to kiss him until his lips are buzzing again. “You okay?” he asks when he can get a look into Bucky’s eyes. They were never as good at hiding as the rest of him.
Bucky just snorts and flicks Steve on the neck, wrecked mouth curving, and Steve grins, loopy as hell, making Bucky laugh.
“Yeah,” Steve says. “I know you are. You blame me for asking?”
“I love you for asking,” Bucky says, pure unadorned bravery, boundaries thrown out like where a river becomes the sea.
It cleaves him, leaves Steve hung apart like a kicked door. “Not giving me any mercy at all, huh?” he asks quietly, tracing along under Bucky’s puffy bottom lip.
“What would you even do with it?” Bucky asks, smiling against Steve’s fingers. It’s a fair point.
“Hey, I’m not as young as I used to be,” Steve says, losing the fight with the giddy hum in him. “You ought’a give me some warning.” He laughs when Bucky epically rolls his eyes and throws more of his weight on Steve, like they’re walking down the street in their old neighbourhood and Bucky’s slinging an arm over Steve’s shoulders, knocking him off balance just so he can pull him in again.
He shuts his eyes on a long sigh, following the spread-apart pattern of their breathing into a doze with Bucky still lying mostly on top of him.
“So what now?” Bucky murmurs after Steve doesn’t know how long, minutes, hours. He blinks at the hazy nearness of Bucky’s face propped on his shoulder, watching him. If there’s expectation there, Steve can’t tell what kind it is.
“Well,” he says, stretching, grimacing at sticky-wet sheets gone cold, messy and tacky skin, “we’re both kind of disgusting right now, and at some point you’ve gotta try that thing in water, right?”
Bucky smirks, flashing teeth. He rolls himself free of Steve and lands impressively steady on his feet, considering. He stands straight, all hewn strength and ruinously perfect, and holds out a hand to Steve. “Come on, old man,” he says, smirk spreading.
Steve huffs and flips him off. Then he takes Bucky’s hand and lets himself be led.