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In a perfect world there would have been more of a build up than what there was; Bucky knocking on his door and holding a six pack was never going to be a cinematic moment, especially with the frequency with which he turned up. Superheroing has more down time than you’d ever think, the kind of thing they never show in the compilation videos on YouTube ; though Sam is fairly sure there would be a market for footage of a lot of good looking people sitting in hotel rooms watching basic cable and drinking cheap and rapidly warming bodega beers while they wait for the shit to hit the fan again, mostly because the stories that fly about are pretty fucking great.
He had only hung around with the main Avengers a few times, but he and Bucky have fallen into that tradition pretty easily in their long, long weeks of enforced close quarters. Perhaps it is a Steve thing; maybe he started the tradition and they’re all keeping it going in his memory. As usual, a six pack barely touches the sides, and the actually decent film that was playing in the background has inevitably turned, through time and TV scheduling, into a little bit of basic cable tits and ass that Sam should feel a bit self-conscious about even half-watching, but he’s tired, and so he just lets the bad dialogue and creamy skin wash over him like pleasurable static.
The man on the screen is massaging the busty heroine's shoulders and she’s moaning, her top falling down a bit, and as far as Sam can tell, everyone’s having a good time, and maybe this is a bit more 90s Skinemax than he was expecting when Bucky snorts at it and says under his breath, “terrible technique.”
“It's acting,” Sam replies, as the heroine nearly climaxes from the hero’s prodding.
“Sure,” Bucky kvetches, “but I’m just saying, it's a bad technique. No real understanding of muscle groups of erogenous zones or anything like that. He’s just…pinching her.”
Sam squints at the TV, and yeah, Bucky’s probably right about that, but it's more fun to disagree. It's been a long night, after all, and he’s starting to think nothing is going to explode at all.
“What, was this a sideline for the winter soldier? Did they have you massaging Brezhnev on the weekends or something?”
Bucky doesn’t rise to the bait, only shrugs and says “I used to massage Steve sometimes,” with a faux casualness that makes Sam sure that Bucky would be a demon at poker, the way he keeps his eye on the screen and sips his drink like that was a totally normal thing to say about Captain America. Sam's raised eyebrows cause him to swallow quickly to explain further, “not like that; it was some asthma thing at the time, to open up the lungs. It worked, actually, so I got good pretty quickly. Turned out to be pretty useful, not just so that Steve didn’t die, but just in general. I got this job downtown, and started hooking up with this girl, great rack, huge,” he gestures a foot in front of himself, and Sam chuckles, “and her shoulders were always hard as rocks, so I massaged them, and well, one thing led to another, and she...well, she enjoyed it. A lot. A lot more than I should really say, being as she’s most likely dead now. Anyway, when we broke up she told me flat out that I could get good money giving massages, that I had magic hands, and if I wanted she knew some girls who would be interested.”
Sam carefully kept his face straight. “That is some ‘I never thought it would happen to me hustler magazine bullshit, my friend,” and instead of getting mad Bucky just smiled wistfully and said “Yeah, well, it didn’t really become a whole fantasy type thing until I got known by the ladies upstairs at the magazines, not just the secretaries and typists. They were more my speed, usually, but the big wigs, the editors and the writers, the society ladies, they liked that I would take my time, that I'd drive them wild. We never really talked about it, but man, I could get $200 for an afternoon sometimes, just working my way down the building giving -”
“Happy endings.”
“Yeah. I guess you could call it that.”
“For $200?”
“It was a lot of money back then. Like, $4000, something like that.”
“Huh. That’s something, I guess,” Sam said, meanwhile thinking “what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck”. Bucky went back to sucking down his beer, and then before Sam could ask any follow up questions a building exploded nearby and their whole quiet night was mercifully ruined.
It was nice though, Sam reflected hours later when he managed to crawl into a bed. Bucky always told weird stories from the past, and Sam believed probably half of them. He didn’t doubt that Bucky was good with his hands, the man obviously was dextrous, and he loved Steve, and a quick google did establish that there had been a fad for lung opening massage around the same time, and so while Sam didn’t believe that Bucky had been a sexual masseuse to a whole building of independent 1930s career women with tits out to there, it didn’t matter. The point of a story like that was to get a rise, to talk big, to make your friends laugh, and it was weird, but nice, that Bucky had gotten that far in his deprogramming to even be able to talk about the before-times at all. The best part of a story like that was Bucky himself, the way he smiled boyishly whenever talking about the happy pre-war days of the 1930s, where he and Steve lived in abject, gnawing poverty, chasing girls and having fights and making money however they could, and how free they seemed even though their lives were objectively shit; eating crap and living under the spectre of a world without antibiotics, where maybe one story in ten would end with “and then they got dysentery and shat themselves to death” or “and then someone dropped a beam on him and that was that”. It was the kind of bad times where it was luxury to just gloss over it, and so you held onto the good just all that tighter.
The story of Bucky making money getting enlightened Manhattan broads off in their offices, under their husbands’ noses, in the middle of the day should have blended into all the others, but for whatever reason Sam never really forgot that one. Maybe it was just because it was a good story. Maybe it spoke to him on a level he didn’t understand, something he had never considered before. Perhaps it was just because it was so shocking, novel, and maybe it was just that Bucky told it with excellent attention to detail and fine narrative tension.
It must be that.
Perhaps, eventually, Sam would have forgotten it, if not for the bad landing he caught during the whole flag smasher debacle. It was barely a hiccup in the flow of the fight, he’s made that landing hundreds of times before with nothing more than a twinge in his knees to show for it, but somehow, this was the one that went wrong. He misjudged a low hanging wire, and caught one of the wings in a way that wrenched his whole body to the side; his shoulders, spine and ribs all screaming in pain as he forced himself through it, forcing himself to not lose pace, keep up the chase and get his man.
After the fight ends, once the police and paramedics come and take away the bodies alive and dead, it’s Bucky who takes one look at him and hauls him to get looked at, first by a lingering paramedic, who tells him to rest and ice it, and then to some backstreet doctor he knows, a guy who smokes through the whole consultation but who tells Sam he’s lucky he has no broken bones, and that if he can just rest and relax he’ll get back to normal in a couple of weeks. Sadly, the end of the world never happens on Sam Wilson’s personal schedule, and so instead of an evening of sleeping it off with the help of some grey market Xanax, Sam’s instead on a plane with Bucky’s pet terrorist, and it's some twelve hours to Madripoor. He manages the long, long hours by double fisting painkillers and treating himself to half a Valium to take the edge off, but under the circumstances nothing could be good enough to prevent the slow, inexorable tightening and knotting up of his poor, neglected muscles.
Obviously, Madripoor becomes a shitshow as soon as they arrive, because somehow Bucky is all in on letting Zemo make the plans, even though the man is obviously even more insane than Sam had thought, wearing a fur trimmed coat on the literal equator, and so by the time they stop running for their lives, up there in Sharon’s suite in Hightown, Sam is frustrated, furious and in absolute screaming agony.
He doesn’t mind complaining when it works, and this is one of those situations. Sharon gives him really great muscle relaxants and painkillers that push him up until he’s vaguely floating on a cloud of not-pain for the first time in what feels like days, and she even takes pity on him and leads him to a cool dark room away from all the nonsense so he can have a nap away from the superhero/international terrorist bullshit that is his life right now.
The cocktail of drugs works, somewhat. He manages to sleep for a bit, but when he climbs back into his suit a few hours later his range of motion still fucking sucks. He does a few stretches, some pilates a bendy ex-girlfriend taught him years ago that usually do the trick when he’s got the weight of the world inconveniencing his shoulders, but he’s still able to feel the pain beneath all the benzos and designer drugs. It gnaws at him, sets his teeth on edge and across the room, he catches Bucky watching him like a hawk, his eyes dark and concerned, but also tinged with something else.
“You alright, man?” Sam asks, which Bucky takes as an invitation to come over and get up in his personal space, and Sam’s query dies on his lips as Bucky presses his thumb against a spot right below Sam’s collarbone and rubs gently, and it is such a weird, nothing spot and yet his eyes water and he groans as the place beneath Bucky’s thumb feels like all the pain in his body is concentrated in that single spot, and Bucky is finally clearing it.
“What the fuck, man”, he swears, once Bucky pulls his hand away, but Bucky gestures for him to test his arm, and hey, what do you know, something has released, has shifted. There’s an unsatisfying click of something visceral releasing some of the pain that makes him lose his breath, but his shoulders are significantly less painful after.
“Feel better?” Bucky asks. The air conditioning is aggressive, and Sam almost feels like he’s dreaming, with the combination of cool air, dull pain, jet lag and pharmaceuticals in his system, and Bucky’s face inscrutable and yet more open than it's ever been.
‘Yeah. Thanks,’ is what Sam should say, but instead he says, “I guess you do know your stuff, after all.”
“You should see what else these hands can do.” Bucky says, and it should be a joke but it absolutely isn’t, and then Bucky steps away into the shadows like the dramatic weirdo he is, and Sam is left with the impression that a decision has been made, one that Sam honestly can’t think about right now.
Before he can outrun his better demons straight into Bucky’s contrasting hot and cold hands, they’re leaving, walking down the stairs like a bunch of bad ass mother fuckers without a care in the world, ready to party like there’s no tomorrow. As they enter the room Bucky catches his eye, and Sam rolls his shoulder over just to feel the change, and thinks about it.
The party is great, obviously. Sam suspects that a lot of money has been spent on ensuring that everything is just so; the drinks mixed perfectly complex and ice cold, the music the exact right volume to the decibel to erase the top third of human consciousness, so that all that’s left are those most primal urges; dance, smile, connect.
He dances for a while, but even with his shoulder having technically popped back into alignment under Bucky’s devastating thumb attack, he’s still out of whack, muscles sore and swollen. His suit holds his spine in the stiff, proper posture of the man he’s pretending to be, but he wants nothing more than to let go and climb back into his own skin and be comfortable, be himself.
He smiles at the Madripoorean who had been trying very hard to take him home and takes himself to the bar, where he gets a couple of fingers of good whisky and finds himself a seat in an artfully arranged corner. The sofa feels like it costs more than his apartment, and he lets himself breathe out fully, close his eyes, and just let it all wash over him.
The lights are dappled and blue and he can see the impression of them still through the thin skin of his eyelids, and so he notices when a shadow is cast across him, even if he didn’t hear someone approach.
Bucky nods to him and sits on the sofa. He has a drink, a big, elaborate, fruity thing that Sam had considered before chickening out. There’s a trace of pale yellow foam on the edges of his beard from the pineapple foam, and Bucky radiates warmth from where his thigh touches Sam’s ever so casually.
They sit in companionable silence until they each finish their respective drinks, letting the sound bath of thumping techno wash over them. Wiping his mouth, Bucky swallows the last mouthful and then leans over and yells, “You should let me do it,” in Sam’s ear.
“Do what?” Sam yells back, although he knows.
“Massage you.” Bucky yells.
Sam grunts, and circles his shoulder. It's still stiff, but the previous pain hasn’t returned since Bucky did his voodoo release thing.
“Yeah.” Sam yells, and then leans in close, sliding his hand along Bucky’s forearm so he can put his lips right against Bucky’s ear so as to give his reply at a more normal volume. “I probably should just give you free rein over my body, right? Since you know it so well.”
Sam feels the way that Bucky’s skin shivers and the brush of his head as he nods. Sam leans back and mouths the lip of his beer, even though they both know it’s empty. Bucky follows him, leaning right back in and says hot and low, right into his ear, “I’ll sort you right out,” and it shoots right into the heart of Sam’s defenses and knocks them down.
Sam wants to call uncle, but if this was about his injury he’d have already dealt with the whole thing; he’d have gone to some guy downtown who he could trust to put his back into it and beat his disobedient, recalcitrant late 40s muscles into submission, straighten him out enough to heal. It's not even about that, Bucky is of course stronger than any physical therapist, and that metal hand could probably get right into the knots for as long as they needed to without tiring, and lord knows Sam is very, very tired of being in pain, but this isn’t about that anymore. It’s about opportunity, and unspoken things that nevertheless are very well understood.
“Okay.” Sam says, and Bucky double-takes, like he never expected Sam to take him up on it, despite the heat he had put into his proposition. “Let's go. Before I change my mind.”
No one sees them leave. They linger for a second on the balcony, and watch the dancers below, the way Sharon dances contrasting with the myoclonic jerk of whatever Zemo’s doing, and then, as one, they step out into the foyer.
The elevator back up to Sharon’s apartment is silent. In the reflection of the glass Sam sees how tense he is, compared to Bucky’s loucheness. He nods, and in the reflection, Bucky nods back.
The room locks twice and then they’re standing there like awkward prom dates who are finally alone and have no idea what to do. Sam sucks in a huge breath and stands on the precipice of whether to do this thing that he dearly, dearly, viscerally wants to do, both physically, in his tired and tense muscles but also because he knows that this is an excuse for them to have sex, to break this weird sexual tension that they’ve had between them for years now that he’s never really allowed himself to think about, but has gone past the point where they’d be able to do anything to resolve it without ruining something else. He doesn’t want to have that conversation, doesn’t want to have a conversation at all about sex, just wants it.
“Okay. Let me have a shower first, though?”
Bucky nods. “Good,” and Sam watches him rub his hands against his jeans. They’re tight, and he looks like his normal self, crawling out from under the fiction of the Soldier. The Bucky he’s seen late at night, over beers, with the charming smile and the stories Sam can’t ever forget.
Sam feels lightheaded, a little, and when he heads for the bathroom there’s a moment when the jet lag and top grade pharmaceuticals catch up with him. It's not like his wobbly legs immediately go out from underneath him or anything, he’s just tired, but Bucky darts towards him all the same, a hand on his arm.
“You okay? You sure you -” he says, and Sam snaps “I’m fine”, in response.
And then Bucky says, “I dunno man, maybe I should shower with you, in case you know, something happens.”
And Sam says “Yeah, sure.” Like it's a thing.
They step into the bathroom and close the door. Bucky takes it upon himself to start the shower, and Sam watches him test the temperature and pressure with his hand, making careful adjustments until he is satisfied and turns back to where Sam is standing, still fully dressed and completely still. Bucky steps close and slides his hands beneath the bright suit jacket and slides it carefully off Sam’s body, folds it on the side. Does the same with the shirt, and then with his own, so they’re standing, bare chested together in the steamy air. Bucky leans in slightly, and undoes Sam’s belt efficiently, slides it out of the belt loops and wraps it around his hand in a way that makes Sam’s mouth go dry with illogical lust, and places it on the pile. Undoes the button of his trousers, and helps him out of them. It’s efficient, and somehow that makes it more erotic. They aren’t talking about how this is sex, they’re both pretending that this thing isn’t sex, even though Sam is already hard as a pole, Bucky acts as if he doesn’t notice.
Sam steps into the shower and the heat and steam makes him lightheaded. Behind him, he feels a gust of cooler air as Bucky lets himself in. It's a small shower, really; who makes a shower big enough for people to politely shower together? You only shower with someone if something is happening, and yet the polite fiction continues. Sam braces himself against the wall so that Bucky can get some of the spray, and takes the sponge when Bucky passes him it, thick with soap suds. He soaps his front, down his arms, and hears his breath catch as the sponge ghosts over his dick, as he cleans his balls carefully. Bends over to soaps his calves and thighs, as if its normal to bend over like this, casually showing Bucky how fucking flexible he is, even with his muscles as fucked as they are.
“Do you want a hand?” Bucky asks, “I could do your back.”
“Yeah, man.” Sam says, casually, as if this was normal, and passes the sponge back.
Bucky is naked, and they’re both hard, but they’re still not talking about this. Bucky soaps him and even though he doesn’t linger, doesn’t touch much, every touch is already too much. This is a terrible idea, but fuck.
Bucky squeezes the soap down his back in a long line, runs his hand in its wake, all the way down, over his buttocks and down his thighs and calves, and then back up, and then - oh. Oh. The sponge is scratchy but that is Bucky’s hand behind it, sliding between his buttocks and touching his hole, velvet soft and almost, almost, innocent. Sam doesn’t moan, he’s not that kind of man, he’s too involved in this ridiculous fiction of bros soaping bros. He turns around and washes the suds off, looks at Bucky, takes in the heft and impression of his erection with his peripheral vision. If he was to take a step forward, they would be touching, dick to dick. Instead, he turns off the water, and Bucky nods. Steps out and retrieves the big towels and holds one out, rubs Sam down until he is bone dry, and then leads him back into the bedroom.
Bucky helps Sam lie on the bed, gives him a pillow to rest his head on. He doesn’t put on any music or light a candle, why set a mood when the air is already thick with it? Sam feels like he’s going to choke on how much is going unsaid as it is.
There’s a click of a bottle, a slow glug of something viscous and lovely smelling spreading across Bucky’s palm, and then the mattress sinks slightly as Bucky steps forward and rests his weight against it.
“I’m going to touch you now”, he says, and Sam nods, head buried in the pillow.
The first touch of Bucky’s hands is nothing but therapeutic. If Sam closes his eyes, which he has done against the silk pillowcase of Sharon’s spare room, it could be any massage he’s ever had. Bucky wasn’t lying; he is good at this. He finds the knots in Sam’s shoulders easily, chases them away, massages his neck and the weird horrible gnawing pain at the edges of his scapulae, chases the pain around his upper spine for a long time. He checks in from time to time, when Sam grunts with the sheer pain/pleasure of it. Bucky has the strength to be good at this, but it's also obvious that he learned this before he got serumed to the nines, before his hands could crush someone’s head into a horror show, so he presses down on Sam’s shoulders with the right amount of pressure to cause something to unlock in the depths of his anatomy, and even though the pain isn’t immediately gone, something in his lizard brain which had been sunning itself on the basking rock of incipient sexual activity lets him know that the source of the pain has gone.
There are layers to human communication, subtlety in body language and tone of voice and in the precise choice of words. Maybe Bucky picks up on that deep click, or in the change in Sam’s body language, or just the way his breathing changes to be deeper, more relaxed, but just as Bucky didn’t have to say “I am going to massage you to relieve your wrenched shoulder”, he didn’t have to use words for Sam to know that the track had changed to “I am going to give you the best sexual experience of your life” and “I am going to take you apart”.
It’s just a small change, but it's one that Sam sighs into, relaxes into, and makes room for in his mind and his body.
There’s a dip as Buck climbs onto the bed and rearranges Sam’s limbs so he can start to massage his thighs. He digs his thumbs into the meat of his left buttock and then pauses. Sam hears the click of the bottle again, and then there’s a flood of oil being poured into the dip of his spine, right into the small of his back, and Sam’s mouth goes dry at the implication, at the feeling of the warm oil spreading across his skin.
Both of Bucky’s hands are warm from the exertion, and with all the oil Sam has to concentrate to work out which hand is which when they’re kneading his muscles, but the moment he presses hard Sam can feel the lines and ridges of the metal hand. It makes him feel lightheaded with the thought of all that precision engineering being used to get him off, even before Bucky does exactly that.
The first time Bucky cups both his buttocks in his hands and massages, pulling the skin in such a way that the reservoir of oil slides like a river down between his cleft and over his very, very eager hole, and when Bucky follows that slide with a maddeningly light touch from his human fingers, as if by mistake or as an apology, Sam makes a noise that shatters the fiction that this is anything other than sex now. He’s fizzing with it, his hips rocking his dick against the soft sheets as Bucky carefully massages his hole over and over again as if it was just another sore muscle and this is just a normal thing that a masseuse does. His fingers don’t drift inside, not yet anyway, even as Sam feels like he’s begging for it with every part of his body but his voice. Bucky’s kept him on the edge for what feels like hours, and then Bucky is using both hands to massage his whole cleft, right into the meat of his ass and then slides a single finger right inside him and Sam swears and pushes himself up into nearly downward dog trying to encourage Bucky to do more. It feels so fucking good, he doesn’t feel any of the lingering pain anymore, not with his entire nervous system ringing like a bell and demanding more, more, more, more fingers, more stimulation, more strong, confident touch.
Bucky shifts his whole body then, rearranging himself before beginning what Sam hopes is a game of ‘lets see if I can kill Sam Wilson with pleasure’, and in doing so his dick slides against Sam’s ass like he’s about to stick it into him, but instead he places his metal hand half underneath Sam’s pelvis, his fingers brushing against Sam’s full, swollen balls and pressing against the soft skin behind them. And then there’s oh god, three fingers, three whole fingers brushing against Sam’s hole and pushing inside him, making room and rubbing, massaging against his walls and then firmly, so firmly, pressing a single finger against the nub of his prostate, pulsing it slightly and hearing Sam’s moans be shocked out of him, before moving away and then bringing the devastation of both his hands and massaging his prostate inside and out until Sam gibbers, and rubs his poor neglected dick against the now oil-saturated sheets and comes so hard he feels like he turns inside out.
It takes him what feels like an eternity to just catch a full breath again, not helped by Bucky keeping up the pressure, and then returning to massaging the rim of his stretched out ass, then his thighs and then back down his legs, continuing the massage as if nothing untoward had happened at all.
Bucky encourages him to turn over with a gentle touch to his side, and Sam does.
The light of the room stings his eyes and he blinks a few times before they adjust and manage to focus on Bucky himself. Bucky is smiling softly, and Sam smiles back, feeling relaxed and still full of the rewards of soft muscles and a well fingered ass.
“You hold tension in your jaw,” Bucky says and presses his fingers to the meat of the hinge of Sam’s mouth gently, and it's another glorious relief of pain; another place where Bucky somehow knows more about Sam’s body than himself, and it just yields under Bucky’s soft, generous touch, and so Sam closes his eyes and swallows as Bucky massages him along his jawline and down the side of his neck, along the tendons and muscles with a practiced, expert touch, pressing on sore spots right on his pecs and collar bones, seemingly unaware of the enormous erection he’s poking in Sam’s face.
He comes back up and massages his jaw again, and Sam lets his mouth gape open, already easier and wider than normal, and he lets his head fall back, and Bucky slides his dick right into his mouth like its a normal thing to do, lets Sam suck him slowly and gently as Bucky massages his nipples, never really something very important to Sam but somehow electric right now. He doesn’t thrust, doesn’t seem to even respond, and Sam would worry he was inconveniencing Bucky with this idle, slack blowjob if Bucky’s dick wasn’t leaking like a faucet against his tongue, if Bucky wasn’t breathing hard right above him.
He finds another horrible tension spot and Bucky says to Sam “breathe, just breathe through it”, and keeps rubbing until it’s like another thing releases in Sam’s chest, some last piece of tension that then lets Bucky lean forward just that little bit further and slide his cock right into his throat like there’s no resistance at all, like his head is just a tube for taking cock. That is when Bucky loses it, gasps and swears and strokes Sam’s face and says his name reverently, and then thrusts a few times, fucks his face and sobs his name and comes flooding down Sam’s throat, a huge fucking load of it that Sam can do nothing but swallow eagerly, simply and willingly.
Bucky pulls out after Sam has finished swallowing around him, gasps and climbs onto the bed and slides between’s Sam’s legs and puts his hands on his thighs, rubs his thumbs hard against a point right underneath his balls and Sam is fully hard again from where he’s been languishing as Bucky fucked his face, and then Bucky sucks him down, desperate and groaning, sucks Sam hard until he’s almost ready to come again, and then rolls him over and rubs his hard dick between his buttocks, right against his hole, his hole that could have taken a fucking fist earlier he was so relaxed, so fucking greased and loose after that internal massage for the ages, and he slides his dick in without saying anything, without asking a question he knows the answer to.
And then he’s got Sam’s legs over his shoulders and his mouth is just there and so Sam does the totally insane thing after he’s been fucked half way into next week and shyly kisses Bucky’s mouth, just a closed mouth thing, like somehow a kiss is over the fucking line even though he’s basically dripping in jizz and bad ideas and Bucky honest to god gasps, and then the kiss just descends into filth, and oh fuck, oh fuck, he’s so fucking ruined, he’s never going to be able to come normally again without thinking about this utterly ruinous experience as Bucky roars and comes right up inside his hyperslicked hole.
They slump down side by side onto the rumpled covers, still firmly tucked where housekeeping had left them. Sam looks down at himself, oil slicked and glorious in the low light, and closes his eyes, imagining how they’d look from above, committing it all to memory.
“How are you feeling?” Bucky asks, a few minutes later.
“Good, man.” Sam replies, quietly. “Pretty good. My shoulder’s not bothering me anymore.”
“Yeah? Good.” Bucky says, and then rolls over onto his side and winces. “‘cause my back is killing me”, and then pouts and laughs when he sees Sam open one eye to look at him.
The force of his orgasms seems to have knocked decades off him, and Sam can see the young man he was, before everything happened, the personification of young, dumb and full of cum, and Sam feels old and impossibly fond for a second, before he takes the bait, hits Bucky square in his smug, post-orgasmic face with a pillow before rolling him back over onto his back so as to kiss him deep and wet.
Sam has no experience of massage, but he can’t help but put his hands all over Bucky, first right over his thumping, all-too-human heart, and then letting the residual oil and slick take them out over his thick chest, until he reaches the ridge of scar tissue and the smooth, cool metal of the arm; all the while feeling the strength of Bucky, the history of him in the old scars and the lingering bruises the serum had yet to erase, and feels Bucky relax and unravel beneath him like it's nothing, nothing at all.