Work Text:
So many stars.
The sky looks different in Wakanda. He lies in the grass, hands clasped beneath his head, and thinks there are constellations above him for which he doesn’t have the names. To live here is to walk into an unknowing of language. He likes that best, the humility of it, confronted with glottals and arch, secret smiles. English only carries you so far.
Steve feels his fingers twitch as he counts the stars. It’s been a long time since he felt he could draw the heavens. Since he felt he could try. The midnight wind dips the tall grass, flutters the open pennant of the tent behind him. The wild dogs are all asleep inside. Steve hears them breathing, knows the cadence of each beast’s breath. They haven’t responded very much to the names he presented to them when he first got here. Each hound rejected them like bright and useless pearls, a valuable currency for everything but the sea itself. They teach him their names in different ways, in the hot nuzzling out of bed before dawn, the deliriously happy yawps of joy during rabbit chase, the companionate whining as he plucks each shaggy hare free from gentle jaws that could kill him or anything in three bites.
He closes his eyes, sees stars patterned on the insides of his lids, gold against ink darkness. The colours bleed when he squeezes them tighter shut, whirling. Steve thinks, lying there with his eyes shuttered, that he’d know this river blindfolded. He’s walked it, lengthwise, in the hottest months of the year, and swum it from deepest point to deepest point, emerging from the water with small bruisemarks on his ankles. As with every mark he’s earned in Wakanda, he wishes it lasted longer, as a way to surrender yourself to a place you weren’t born. Who knows how much blood he gave to Red Hook, before he grew out of the expected confines of his pre-arthritic bones? He’d like to give this place something special, something that means something.
The wind keens, brushing the high veldt against his bare arms.
Take away the back-benefits, the quinjet, the armor and the shield. Take away everything he’s already either forfeited, staked as collateral, or given back to the people who made it, and he knows he doesn’t have much. But his blood’s his own. He’ll give that.
He thinks, as he’s thought since he fled here, that the actual earth beneath him is blessed. Maybe not by God. Who knows, when it comes to that? Blessed, though. Enriched. Filled with a greatness of deposit and sediment, ore and metal and precious matter, and none of it used to start something savage. Steve thinks it’d be a damn shame to call anyone on this continent savage. The grass licks at him, leaving minute sensations of prickling heat, like being dotted by a hundred tongues sharpened to a sweet point, each one bladed with a moment of searing that fades into a fragrant spark. He likes this, being lit up by the ground under his back. He wonders how the stars taste tonight.
“Catch your death, asshole.”
Steve doesn’t open his eyes, but he smiles.
“I’ve had colder,” he offers, and is rewarded by Bucky’s delicious laugh, a loud, half-grunted snort that blooms into a brassy, furnace-bellows thing, and Steve would be lying if he said that very laugh hadn’t been doing funny, filthy, sexy, tender shit to his insides since he was pretty young, and awful sick. The thought makes Steve prop himself up, looking sideways at Bucky in the moonless, star-heavy night.
“Buck. Is there anything you don’t want on the record? The documentaries,” he supplies, when he hears the unasked huh? in Bucky’s silence, “the BBC reenactments. The records. I don’t, no, I don’t,” he punches the other man’s shoulder, grinning hard at the rejoinder chuckle, “wanna be in ‘em anymore than you do. But say we got a choice. To tell our story. Our. What’s ours. Is there anything you ever want me to leave out?”
He falls quiet again, listening to Bucky’s breathing. The wind’s picking up, bringing rain in its sigh. When Bucky stands, silent as he was when he emerged from their tent, he reaches for Steve, hauling him up. It’s hard to forget, Steve thinks as he goes into Buck’s grasp, letting himself be led down to the water, how many times Bucky’s had to lift him when he was sick and getting sicker. It almost doesn’t matter that it was a lifetime ago, and people they’ve loved and fought have died, been swallowed whole by the space in between. It almost doesn’t matter that they scrabbled and scuffled to earn a place in a new New York, and had to abandon it, too. It’s a different kind of draft, this exile. This one’s got a home on the other side of the border crossing.
The sweet grass bends under their bare feet, damp blades sticking to soles and between toes. In the distance, a river heron cries, out of sync with its slumbering kin. It sounds like a guttural warning shout, far enough away to seem like another village, not theirs, is on fire. Far enough that nothing stirs, knowing the river is safe on the edge of war.
They face each other in the starlight, and Steve does shiver, a little, when Bucky peels his shirt away. Pants are kicked and dragged down, soft patterned silk that falls to their ankles in geometric whorls. “Nuh uh, look at me,” Buck cautions when Steve closes his eyes. It’s becoming an immediate response to Bucky touching him, and it’s got everything to do with prayer. The water is cold and unforgiving, lapping at their shins and calves, drinking them in as they wade. They know every inlet, every treacherous rock, every sudden drop. The only way to learn that geography is body-first. How little the river cares for maps.
“Everything,” Bucky suggests, kissing it helpfully into the corner of Steve’s mouth. “I mean it, Stevie,” he protests, snort-giggling as Steve chases the kiss, threads his fingers into the thick hair at Bucky’s nape, curling it into small revolutions between thumb and index. “If dinosaur aliens, ghost succubi, laser beams from the future, or the US government blows up the spot of earth where I’m standing, tomorrow, or five fuckin’ minutes from now, don’t tell ‘em jack shit. Not,” he elaborates, kissing Steve’s nosebridge, his cheeks, his beard, “how I carried you up eleven flights of stairs when I thought you were dyin’, and carried you back down when the ambulance came, not how you threw up in the backseat of the first and only car I stole, which convinced me that stealing it was damn stupid, and, like you said, uncharacteristic of my intelligence, not nothing before the war or after it, or before it or after it again, or before it,” he pauses to take a breath, and to tug them deeper, so they’re treading water, “or after it, again.”
“You got it,” Steve says quietly, mostly because he likes to tell Bucky yes, even when he’s telling him no. It’s the most Buck has spoken in three days.
They swim without saying too much after that, limbs tangling and separating in the kind of aquatic harmony that might drown anyone else, but keeps them both afloat. Each time their bodies break the dark mirror of the water, it ripples in fractured stars, casting from their orbit like they, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, are the sun. Is that astronomy fucked, Steve wonders, as he splashes Bucky in between kisses. He decides he’s too blissed out to calculate properly. He’s swimming in the only celestial mathematics that matters. Home. River. Buck. Home, River, Buck. Homeriverbuck. He sounds it out in his head til it makes its own word, spoken to the leaking ship of his heart like its own language.
Do stars speak English? IsiXhosa? Do they click their heels when they burn a path home?
“Shiverin’, Steve,” Bucky kisses into his mouth, tasting of mountain weed and roots wine. Steve licks him back, gathering dying traces of molasses and honey, cherry bark and anise. Steve wonders how a star, melting in its funerary rites, would taste inside Bucky’s mouth, wonders how deep he’d dive inside Bucky to pull the last light from the best man the world’s never deserved, wonders whether he’d feel sorry for swallowing it whole and not sharing even a single, sputtering ray.
“I wouldn’t be sorry,” he whispers, answering a question that hasn’t been asked. He presses his face in the cradle of Buck’s shoulder, feels one arm circle him, looping wet stars on his back. Bucky touches all the places Steve should have scars, showing them both their long memories: the things they recollect together; the facts only starting to break through the haze of torture and drugging; the grey and nebulous in-between where both of them colour in the archives, splashing red everywhere.
It’s more comforting than it should be, Steve thinks, surrendering to this mapping. He likes knowing there’s one person who can somersault over the turnstile to his museum, flipping off the docents, striding through the halls to say, I know this motherfuckin’ fossil. I could curate his exhibits with my eyes bartered for stars, and not a one of you’d be invited. Not a one of you really casts that long a light.
Bucky splays his fingers, taps out a nocturne over five bullet holes that should be spangled over the ribs of Steve’s left side. Every time Buck touches the places he’s hurt Steve himself, they wince like they’ve been nipped by benign lightning, startling but not drawing away. It’s as if the sites are live, and always will be. Never mind that the battleground of Steve’s body scrubs itself clean. Bucky knows every place it hurts.
The wind makes a sound like a beast succumbing to a merciful murder, a low whistling sound that carries on forever, finding them in the water. Dark curtains sluice from Bucky’s arm as he patterns Steve, lullabying him with mementos of knife play and riflegore, treasuries of bomb abrasions, hives of stitches sealed with catgut and hail Marys. Steve reflects that he’s been worked over a thousand times more than he ever was when he was sick. He never thought he’d have enough money for doctors. He remembers sitting up in bed at night, chest rattling, lungs collecting more water than air, bargaining furious with God. One breath, then another, you bastard. If the choice is between breathing and bread, I’ll go hungry. God never had joined the game.
They lie on the grass, river wet and thirsty, drinking from each other. Steve turns Bucky, lifting his shoulders, more careful than Buck wants him to be with his stump, settling the other man on him like a cloak of sinew and bone, a living home. When he straddles him, his cock heavy, hurting with the sweetness of so much need, he sees the stars in Bucky’s eyes, glowing dark with their own language. He nuzzles him, angling slick legs and dripping flanks, enters him with a swearing laugh, an oh, oh, fuck that mellows into a giggle, soft and stunned with love. It hurts, and it’s everything. It’s too much, and it’ll never be enough. He could come now, and he could last this night into the next lifetime. It’s a good place to stand your ground, he knows, as he starts to move. And though it’s true that no men who aren’t kings get to choose where they want to die, he hopes the universe will be kind, and grant him this much, when it’s time.
Bucky arches under him like he’s ripe for a killing. When he smiles, he looks like a predator come courting to the edge of the forest, a whole home glistening in his mouth. The jagged promontory of his stump rises and falls, its own flag. He brackets Steve with the strength of his legs, rises up to meet each juddering thrust, fucking himself up on Steve’s cock til they both swear, and laugh, and do it again even though it hurts, Steve flushing as Bucky squeezes him in, the grip of him greedy and hot and not, perhaps, unlike the white-wolf centre of a star. He does it again, and Steve bites into the plush mystery of Bucky’s mouth as he comes, caught off guard, shaking and licking up the rich copper, because Bucky’s mouth has always bled for him, fighting or fucking or loving towards the bridal bed, the rim of the world made sulphuric, baleful and new.
The wind licks at them like a faithful dog stirring itself for meat, for the promise of shelter. Steve doesn’t stop moving til Bucky comes, insisting in him, his cock still hard, his hand on Bucky’s cock busying itself in the cartography of scar-tracing, too. A wound here, and a wound here, and one just here, where no one’s hand has been but mine, Steve thinks, touching and urging Bucky, trailing small, starstruck bites on his leaking mouth, his chin, the sloping hollow of his throat, working in him til something unhinges in Bucky, and he shouts as he comes, hollering the sweetness of murder into the night that teems, listening. Isn’t it fucking something, Steve thinks, slowing down and braceleting Bucky’s wrist, pinning him in the long grass, that there’s not an archivist in earshot but the river? Isn’t it beautiful to the death, and beyond it, that no one will remember this moment when they’re both gone?