Work Text:
They wake Bucky up again on the fifty seventh day.
‘They think they know how to get rid of the code, Buck,’ Steve says.
‘Who’s they?’ Bucky asks, levering himself out of the cryo chamber like the lumbering beast he is these days, collared and chained. He hates Steve seeing him like this in a dull, resigned kind of way. Steve’s seen him much worse, after all.
‘They’ turns out to be T’Challa’s crack team of scientists. They stare at Bucky like they want to be the first ones he knocks out when he gets turned again.
‘They’re not Banner, but I think this is the best shot we got under the circumstances,’ Steve says, crossing his arms over his chest.
‘Alright,’ Bucky acquiesces. He sits down and waits. He doesn’t need to be told what they’re going to do. After a certain point, all scientific experimentation is the same, and God knows he’s seen enough of that.
They set about strapping him down and he lets his muscles relax in that practised, learned way that isn’t really relaxation at all. He lets his mind wander, far away, until Steve’s voice brings him back.
‘Wait, what are you doing?’
Steve’s staring at them, frowning, his fists at his sides now. Bucky can’t help but smile.
‘You gonna fight ‘em, Steve? These people who are trying to help?’
‘They can do that without strapping you down, Buck.’
Bucky doesn’t know what to say. It seems bizarre that Steve should object so hard to this one tiny thing, which is the least of what Bucky struggles with, but then that’s Steve all over. Even in the middle of fighting a war a million times bigger than himself, he had time to stop and fight for the little things too. He’d have halted a ten man rescue mission to fish a stray cat out of a tree.
‘It’s fine, Steve. I’ll just – if it’s gonna help.’
‘We can find another way.’
He looks at the team as if suggesting they go and find that other way, on the double.
‘I love it when you get all bossy,’ Bucky says as they’re leaving, grinning in that slow way which still seems to be connected on a molecular level with the rising blush on the back of Steve’s neck.
---
They don’t find another way.
‘We don’t know how he’ll react to the treatment,’ the lead scientist says anxiously, holding onto her clipboard like a life raft.
‘What exactly is the treatment,’ Steve says slowly.
They tell him.
‘Bucky, you don’t have to do this,’ he says later, looking so earnest Bucky wants to slap him upside the head. The scientists want to reset Bucky’s brain like a computer, hack right in and plant a second set of code words over the first.
‘I know that, Steve. Just because I didn’t have any for six decades doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what free will is.’
Steve looks at him in that way he has when he’s thinking so hard about how Bucky’s not funny that the thought seems to pass right out of his brain and into Bucky’s. Not that it has that far to leap.
‘Did your eyes get even bluer while you were in the ice?’ Bucky asks, apropos of nothing. Steve glares at him harder, which really only proves Bucky’s point. ‘Because I really think –’
‘You’re not blabbing your way out of this one, Barnes,’ Steve says softly, grabbing Bucky’s hand where he was twisting it in his shirt without realising. He frowns down at it. Spontaneous self-soothing movement had been trained out of him long ago, and it was one of the things that hadn’t come back in the two years he’d been free. Of course it’d only take a handful of days in Steve’s company to bring it back again. Bucky never had known what to do with his hands when he was around Steve, unless they were touching him.
‘I don’t want to hurt anyone else,’ he says. It sounds rough and raw, scraping against the deep insides of him as it comes out.
‘I know that,’ Steve says. ‘And you won’t. We burned the book, there’s no footage from the interview. You took care of all the HYDRA operatives we didn't get to first. No man alive knows that sequence, Bucky. No one can make you do anything you don’t want.’
‘That’s what I thought last time,’ Bucky says, shifting his weight with a sigh. ‘It’s what I think every time. They can’t make me do it again. And they always, always do.’
Steve swallows and looks away.
‘I hate that someone did that to you, Buck. I hate it. I should have told you before but I’m trying not to think about it – and I know it’s not about me, but I think when they did that to you, over and over, I can’t –’
‘I know, sweetheart,’ Bucky says, gripping Steve’s hand so hard it whites out. Steve lets out a sharp breath. Bucky brings Steve’s hand up to his mouth and kisses it, fierce, and Steve looks at him. Bucky breathes out unsteadily and drags a smile up from somewhere.
‘I was right,’ Bucky says. ‘They are bluer.’
Steve snorts helplessly, wide smile spilling across his face like a patch of sunlight across bare floorboards.
‘Do you remember when I had pneumonia,’ Steve begins, and Bucky snorts.
‘Which time?’
‘And you had to fill in for me at the Thanksgiving Day parade,’ Steve talks over him. Bucky frowns, thinking of Macy’s and giant shiny corporate floats, but Steve’s watching him intently and then Bucky remembers, a switch flicking – brown crepe turkeys and hats made out of shoeboxes. Tiny trailers filled with all the cans their street could spare, Bucky leading the way to the orphanage and thinking about Steve every step of the way. ‘Father Doherty needed a kid to lead and the rest of them were all so small still –’
Bucky breaks out in a laugh, surprised.
‘I don’t think I was what they had in mind. Swearing a blue streak and stepping on all the costumes.’
‘But you were there,’ Steve says. His voice is going all soft. He’s so close to Bucky now, gazing at him, their hands still intertwined. Bucky wants to touch him so bad he can’t breathe but that used to happen all the time, regular as clockwork. It’s the oldest thing about him.
‘I wanted to stay at home with you but you wouldn’t let me,’ Bucky says. 'I swear to God, you were yelling at me so much it was making you sicker.'
‘Someone had to do it,’ Steve says. ‘And if it wasn’t me –’
‘It was gonna be me,’ Bucky finishes. They stare at each other, clock ticking. The crack team of scientists disappeared a long time ago. It could have been five minutes, half an hour, who cares. The entirety of the moment is embodied in the soft sweep on Steve’s thumb across Bucky’s hand.
‘I always thought you were some kind of miracle, Buck,’ Steve says, softly.
‘You’re gonna regret saying that,’ Bucky says, voice cracking, and kisses him.
---
‘There has to have been someone, Steve,’ Bucky says, disbelieving, when they lie in a heap in Steve’s bed later, worn out on kissing and touching and the sheer velocity of their own greedy bodies after sixty years on ice. Steve’s covering him like a big cat, hot and smooth everywhere they touch. ‘And not just that Sharon Carter, I’m talking something real. I know a goodbye kiss when I see one.’
‘What, you think I’m that easy?’
Bucky swats at him and Steve doesn’t even budge out of the way, just smiles into Bucky’s shoulder, nuzzling at his stump. Bucky stares down at him for a minute, stupid. Christ. He used to have dreams like this, when he was under. He’s already counted to a hundred once to make sure it was real and he was focused and yes, this was true and real and happening to him, this sorry sonofabitch. Not a man alive has ever been this lucky.
‘I just – you didn’t let anyone else love you? Not all the time I was gone?’
It makes him want to cry, the idea of Steve having no one else to touch him, make him feel good, that all he ever had was memories. Knowing Steve, if Bucky hadn’t come back, that would have been all he had for the rest of his life.
Steve softens, understanding.
‘I couldn’t,’ he says, propping himself on Bucky’s chest and looking at him. ‘I’d look at someone and think maybe, maybe I could – and then they’d turn or laugh or say something and they weren’t you, and I couldn’t.’
‘Baby,’ Bucky says softly. ‘Sweetheart.’
Steve rolls his eyes and twists his mouth like he hates being called what he is but he’s flushing like always, like he could never stop himself doing. Bucky’s heart gives a little jump of joy like a goddamn puppy dog.
‘You can now,’ Bucky says. ‘We can.’
Steve looks at him and almost shudders with it, the relief, like letting go a thousand years of grief. His skin is so soft and smooth and warm, everywhere Bucky can feel him, his eyes and mouth all lit up with happiness like the Empire State.
---
They don't have to wait to go any of the places they want; there's nothing to wait for, once they've made up their minds.
'Yeah,' Sam says, glancing between the two of them and then down to where their hands are joined. 'I can see you got some stuff to sort out.'
'Nothing to sort out there,' Bucky says cheerily. Steve coughs. Sam rolls his eyes.
'There's just a lot of things we never got to do,' Steve explains, as if any of this needs explaining. That's Bucky's comeback, if anyone's planning on asking them what they think they're doing, fucking off when the world is still in dire need. They're in dire need too, and they have been for sixty years, and anyone who wants to complain about Bucky finally getting to see the goddamn world like he always wanted to while holding the hand of his childhood sweetheart, then they can kiss his crotchety ass. He's done being someone else's puppet. Steve needs someone to make him be selfish for once in his goddamn life, and Bucky is happy to be the one that does so. It's the closest thing he's ever had to a sacred duty.
'Anyone asks, I'll tell em you're on vacation,' Sam says, grinning. 'God knows you've earned it.'
‘Wait, no, don’t tell them that,’ Steve says, frowning. ‘Tell them you don’t know –’
‘For God’s sake, man, get outta here,’ Sam says, rolling his eyes again. ‘I have got this.’
Sam shoos at him until Steve goes. Maybe Bucky can see his way to them getting along after all.
---
Bucky fucks Steve for the first time in sixty years in a hotel just outside of Cancun. The sheets are so fine and smooth Steve's knees keep sliding further apart, his whole body shuddering with Bucky deep inside, his back arching. Bucky wants to drink from the pool of his spine, soak in the waves of his moans.
'Oh god, please,' Steve says when he can't hold himself up anymore and he buries his face in his folded elbows, pushing back against Bucky, trying to get him deeper and harder and Bucky thinks yes, yes, God, anything, yes.
'You never did me that hard in the forties,' Steve says after, spread out wide across the bed on his front. Bucky would have thought it'd be hard to sound that belligerent after having come three times from nothing but a dick in your ass, but it's Steve, so he manages it.
'You were smaller in the forties,' Bucky mumbles back, curling himself around Steve and burying his face in the small of Steve's back, kissing it in snatches of satisfied sighs. It's perfect, as he suspected it would be. It's a good fucking job Steve never hears half the things Bucky thinks about him, or Bucky wouldn't be able to look him in the eye.
'Not for all of 'em.'
'Well I'm doing you that hard now, ain't I? Quit your whining.'
'Damn right,' Steve says, so deeply self-satisfied Bucky wonders how he managed to dislodge from his own ass long enough to say it. 'And don't you ever think of stopping.'
'Might have to stop when we go for breakfast,' Bucky says meditatively after a moment. 'Maybe when we check out.'
'You're such an asshole,' Steve says.
---
Bucky turns in San Francisco.
They're doing a tour of the country before they go further abroad, zigzagging across state lines and burying their faces in newspapers and each other’s shoulders whenever anyone looks too close, leaving a shredded trail of credit cards and fake IDs behind them. There's no way of avoiding it, it just happens, a car backfires two streets over from their hotel and Bucky comes back to himself twenty minutes later punching Steve in the face – Steve, who threw himself on top of a moving car and grounded a helicopter with his bare hands and nearly killed one of his best friends to keep Bucky safe.
'Oh god,' he says, guttural and ragged like he's been screaming even though he hasn't, he knows he hasn't, he didn't scream anymore after they told him kindly how it would only make things worse. Steve's face is already softening, already forgiving, eyes sweeping over Bucky for signs of lasting harm. 'Oh god, Steve, oh, I'm sorry, I -'
He's stammering it out, hand cupping around Steve's face, his cheekbones blooming with bruises that'll fade just as quickly as they form. But they're there. Bucky put them there.
'It's alright,' Steve says. 'I'm fine, Buck, don't fuss –'
'Don't fuss?' Bucky cracks out, weak. 'Don't fuss? I – Steve, I can't – I don't wanna keep doing this, I can't –'
And he curls up in a ball where he sits, just sits down on the floor and folds into himself. It's always bad; it was always, always bad coming back and remembering with the full weight of his conscience what he'd done, but doing it to Steve –
'I've done worse to you,' Steve says insistently, crouching in front of him and putting his hands on Bucky's knees, thumbs rubbing over the bones. 'We've done worse to each other. I know it wasn't you –'
'But it was me,' Bucky snaps and looks up when Steve is silent, his brow wrinkled. 'It was me when I nearly killed you on the helicarrier. It was me who threw you down that elevator shaft, Stevie, it was my hands did that to you. I put that there,' he says, swiping a rough thumb over Steve's split lip, already knitting itself back together. Steve winces and Bucky pulls his hand back, hating it.
'How can you be around me like this?' he asks, letting his head fall back against the wall with a dull thud then jerking it back up again, so quick it almost makes him dizzy. 'We should have let those quacks fix me up, it might have worked, it might make me better. We could go back, Stevie, we could let them –'
'Or it might have scrambled with your brain again just as we're getting somewhere,' Steve says, sitting down properly. He doesn't let go of Bucky's knees to do it, he just settles down, plonks his butt down on the floor here with him, watches him patiently. It's Steve all over and it makes Bucky want to smile even though he can't. Plant yourself in an impossible position and Steve'll plant himself too; lie down in front of an incoming train and Steve'll lie down with you, bitching all the while about how uncomfortable the track is to lie on.
'They were gonna condition you again, Bucky. Different scientists, a different set of words, same fucking difference.'
'It'd stop me killing you, Steve, that's a pretty big fucking difference.'
'Couldn't kill me on your best day, champ,' Steve says airily, then squeezes Bucky's knee and looks him dead in the eye. 'You couldn't, even when you were half-dead and brainwashed, remember? You still couldn't.'
'I'd kill anyone else who did this to you,' Bucky says, voice low when he brushes over Steve's bruises again. He wants to take hold of the back of Steve's neck and yank him down until Steve’s inside of him, eaten up in a kiss, somewhere none of this can hurt them. Sometimes it feels like they're outrunning something when they fuck, like if Bucky can just go hard enough, deep enough, then they'll come out the other side untouchable. That's how Steve makes him feel, anyway.
'You're my man and you have been since 1937,' Steve says firmly, blushing like a schoolgirl, 'even when one or the other of us weren’t awake to know about it. But I can look after myself these days, Barnes, in case you hadn't noticed. I've grown some.'
'Not enough to stop you being scrappy. You can take the streetrat outta Brooklyn –'
'Yeah, yeah,' Steve says, pulling them both up off the floor with a weary sigh and grabbing Bucky's hand on the way, firm and warm. 'Well, seeing as we just ostracised most of our friends, I'm thinking maybe I should lay off on the fights for a little while, what do you think?'
'They were your friends, not mine.'
'I bet Sam heard that, somehow.'
'Yeah, he was meant to.'
---
Steve nearly gets recognised in Vegas; they're as far to tipsy as either of them can get these days and playing around on the slot machines. It's no Coney Island but Bucky's having fun anyway, which is why the woman sat by the bar staring at Steve with a dawning look of awe strikes him right between the eyes.
He nudges Steve in the ribs and Steve looks up, still snorting with laughter, his cheeks flushed and grinning. He sees the woman right away and his smile dims, laughter stopping with a sigh. God, Bucky hates this goddamn fucking dissatisfactory life. If it weren't for Steve, he'd be handing the damn thing back and demanding a refund.
Before Bucky can create a distraction and usher them out of there, Steve gets up and goes over to the woman, because he's an idiot. She stares up at him like she's seeing the face of God.
'Sorry, can we help you?' Steve asks her, polite. He's smiling, you can hear it in his voice, probably got no idea what he's doing to this poor broad. Bucky rolls his eyes. Steve used to do this in the forties too. He'd never got used to the way people looked at him after the serum. He never expected them to be looking just for the sake of looking, because they liked what they saw; he always thought they needed him to move or something.
'You just,' the woman splutters. 'I'm sorry, it's awful rude to stare, I just - you look so much like -'
'Yeah, I get that a lot,' Steve says, all boyish charm and just a little arrogance, and Bucky grins into his drink, shoulders relaxing a little. Steve fights and moves and confronts every situation with the potential for conflict as if he's never heard the word 'stealth', but he's got this down. Bucky almost feels sorry for her, in a distant, smug kind of way. How's someone supposed to think straight when you've got Steve's everything glinting at you full force like that? It's taken Bucky nearly a century to get used to it and even he still gets distracted like eighty percent of the time.
'I'm sorry,' she says again, not sounding the slightest bit sorry. She bites her lip and looks up, coy. Bucky takes a sip of his drink and waits. 'Have you ever – I mean, did you ever meet him?'
'Before he absconded with a known fugitive? No, I never did,' Steve says, cool as a fucking cucumber. Bucky shakes his head and looks down before someone spots his shit-eating grin.
'I thought it was kinda romantic, myself,' the woman says, looking almost flushed with it, gazing up at Steve with stars in her eyes. 'Running off together like that.'
'I don't know about that,' Steve says, sounding a little strangled. 'I didn't figure him for the rule breaking type.'
'He was standing up for what he thought was right,' the woman says, sounding almost offended. A-fucking-men to that.
'Maybe he just wanted to get laid,' Steve says blithely, and Bucky chokes on his drink.
'You're such a jackass,' Bucky murmurs later, his hips rolling deep and steady as Steve swallows him down. 'Christ, the mouth on you.'
'Guess you'd better do something about that,' Steve pulls away to say, and grins slow when Bucky rolls his eyes and pushes him back down.
---
'I kind of thought it'd be bigger?' Bucky says, squinting. The sun's in his eyes, he needs to get some sunglasses. He didn’t think Georgia would be brighter than Vegas, for Christ’s sake. Steve says he’s got a whole collection back at the tower but they're all hipster shit for undercover ops, as if a goddamn pair of shades and a hoodie is going to stop anyone recognising a shoulder-to-waist ratio that famous.
'You can't disrespect the Big Apple like that, Buck,' Steve says seriously. 'This is a staple of our country's tourism industry, a symbol of –'
'A symbol of what? The sorry state of our great nation's sense of humour.'
They stare up at the moderately-sized apple shaped statue silently for a few minutes.
'It is fucking stupid,' Steve admits. 'I prefer ours.'
Bucky opens his mouth and closes it again. Steve looks at him askance, waiting. He knows. He always fucking knows.
'Would you ever want to go back?' Bucky asks eventually. It's so weighted it might as well fall into the silence between them with an audible thud.
'I wanted to go back before,' Steve says, looking back at the statue. 'When I woke up. I spent a while looking around, trying to make myself fit there again, but I couldn't. I saw you on every street corner, Buck. I couldn't sleep waiting for you to come home.'
Bucky swallows around a lump the size of their own tragedy in his throat.
'I'm here now,' he says.
The next part is harder, because he's never said it before.
'I went back once.'
Steve looks at him, startled.
'You mean -'
'When they still had me,' Bucky nods, looking down at the ground then up, swallowing hard. 'Must have been '50, maybe '55. S'all jumbled up. Anyway, it was the first place I went to. I got away from them and I just - there wasn't enough left of me to remember why you wouldn't be there but I could remember where you used to be. So I went.'
Steve looks like he's going to cry, reaches out and takes his hand and squeezes once, hard. They fall into it sometimes, the pit of what happened to Bucky; a pit so wide and vast and encompassing that it's difficult to remember they didn't go through it together. He forgot for whole years at a time what it was like to be touched by Steve. He can't imagine they could yank it out of him again, now, but he knows better than anyone how vast the gulf between what you can imagine and what can be done to you.
'I just sat on the stoop,' he says miserably. 'The stoop of the house on –'
'Nevins Street,' Steve says, his voice hurting. 'Christ, Bucky.'
'They found me inside an hour. I killed fifteen people getting out and then I just sat there on that goddamn stoop. I wasn't thinking so great, you know, but I couldn't figure out why you weren't there.'
'I'm sorry,' Steve says, like he always does, like he loves Bucky. He'd take it back if he could, Bucky knows. If Steve could reverse time and throw himself out of that freight train, he'd do it, even if he died, to spare Bucky what came next. But he can't and that won't happen and instead they got this life together, in a world both more and less complicated than the one they were born into. Pretty much every day Bucky wakes cognizant enough to remember who's lying next to him, that's enough.
'You didn't do it to me,' Bucky replies. 'You didn't, Steve. I know you like to martyr yourself on this one, baby, but it ain't on you.'
'Mmm,' Steve mumbles, noncommittal. 'Don't matter whether it is or isn't, Buck. I'm here now. I'll be there on Nevins waiting for you, if you want me to be.'
'I already found you, though,' Bucky says, smiling a little in the sun. Maybe he doesn't need shades, really. It's nice to feel the full weight of the sun sometimes, even if it does sting. 'Nevins was kind of a dump anyway.'
Steve laughs, looking down and sniffing.
'Jesus Christ, let's get out of here,' Bucky says. 'This fucking thing's so ugly it's giving me a headache.'
---
They do go back, in the end, but they don't go to Nevins.
'I always wanted to buy you a cone of fries,' Steve says, leaning against the bars and looking out over the waves. ‘I kept thinking about it. People’d ask me what I missed and they wanted me to say things were simpler back then, men were men and women were women and all that, and all I could think was they don’t make fries like they used to.’
His hair looks so bright in the sun like this. They should have dyed it, maybe, stop him being so goddamn conspicuous, but Bucky couldn't ask him. That he can still be guilty of being impractical over Steve's beauty is a point of personal pride and Bucky would love him with brown hair or black or orange or no fucking hair at all but Steve shouldn't have to change for anyone else, not if he doesn't want to, not anymore. Waking up beside him is a shot of sunlight every morning. Bucky can't even make himself turn and look at the waves they came to see; he's too busy looking at Steve.
'Is that your greatest wish? Sixty years in the fucking ice and that's what you got? Buying me a cone of fries on goddamn Coney Island? Christ, you're a cheap date.'
'And you made me wait for it,' Steve says, glancing at him with half a laugh. 'Guess I just don't know what's good for me.'
Bucky agrees wholeheartedly with this. He's never heard anything he agrees with more in his entire life.
'Paying for the hotel and the subway and the food,' Bucky says admiringly. 'You do know how to treat a gal right, though.'
'You're a goddamn pain in my ass,' Steve says fondly, licking salt of his lips, and Bucky can't help it, even though his own hands are greasy from the fries and cold with the stinging wind; he grasps Steve carefully by the chin and kisses him soft, sweet, slow like the creep of sunlight across the beaten boardwalk.
'For the rest of your life, sweetheart,' he agrees. 'I promise.'
'You fucking better,' Steve says, wondering, and leans in to kiss him again.