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Daisy was in the next room playing dolls with Jeanie, Becca sat on the rug sewing ribbons onto Ma’s bonnet, and Ma herself was in the kitchen fixing supper when Bucky heard the telltale scrapes of a key scraping futilely at the front door below and, snapping shut the book he’d been reading aloud to keep Becca company, came to a decision.
It wasn’t anything like the Decision he had been diligently avoiding over the last several months, his brain forever boiling and stewing over it like a pot simmering the world’s toughest beef, for all he’d worked at setting it instead to anything and everything else—rereading his favorite novels, teasing his sisters, helping out with a new Lincoln down at the garage. But it was a decision anyway, the urgency of it suddenly itching in his veins, and it was better than hanging around for what everybody knew would come to no good. Today Pa was home early but when he came home like that, swearing and sputtering as he kept missing the lock at the front door, Bucky knew, as no one else in the house was willing to admit, that that meant Pa had already had a few drinks on the way home and he was looking forward to having plenty more.
And Bucky decided he didn’t particularly feel like sitting through his Pa’s usual tirade again tonight. He was a grown man now, even if Pa kept making fun that he wasn’t. Maybe he’d catch hell for it when he got back, but tonight, as he heard the key finally sink home below and the lock tumble over under George Barnes’s frozen, fumbling hands, Bucky couldn’t stand to even think of staying home another second.
Becca was already eyeing him apprehensively as he sprang up, caught up his jacket and hat, stuffed things uncaring into his old school satchel.
“I’m going out,” he told Becca, who knew better than to pry. “Tell Ma I got another shift tonight at the drug store.”
She nodded, because they both understood he really meant to tell Pa, whose mouth never did stop running when it came to Bucky unless work happened to be involved. Bucky kissed Becca, her cheek cool to the touch even though the heating was already full on. Everybody kept saying this would be another terribly cold winter for New York. “What time you coming back?”
“’Are,’ Becca. ‘What time are you coming back.’” Nimbly he dodged the thimble she threw at his head. “Tomorrow. Probably. Don’t wait up.”
He opened the window and felt bad when Becca shivered in the sudden blast of wintry air, so he climbed out even quicker than usual and shut the window behind him before he could think twice. If he went by the front door he’d have to pass his Pa in the hall and then he’d never get going. The ice-rimed metal of the fire escape clung to his gloves but he’d done this before, and maybe he’d grown another inch or two since Christmas but it was easier than ever to go over the railing and drop to the yard below, then stroll into the street with his hands in his pockets, pretty as you please. In the gathering gloom nobody paid any attention to him anyway, passersby huffing and puffing clouds of breath and loudly exclaiming to one another about the bleak weather. Bucky pulled his cap down low over his ears and started up the street, trying not to regret the cozy warmth he’d left behind.
Bucky’s komoyo beads hummed against his wrist, jarring him out of the scene. Incoming communication. Bucky could have disabled these alerts while he was in what Shuri called the holodeck—probably another reference to some TV show again, Shuri was all about references and Bucky had given up trying to keep up with her—but he preferred to keep that anchor to reality, didn’t want to lose himself too much in the holograms. Sometimes he didn’t want to do the holograms at all, not quite trusting any of it, not quite trusting himself. But Shuri kept prodding him.
She could only destroy what Hydra had put directly into his brain, she said, sever the forced connections, neutralize wholly false memories. She couldn’t make new ones or restore the old as they’d originally been. She said his advanced healing factor over decades of captivity meant he had all but locked in Hydra’s distortions, the fabrications and mutations grown in and over like a sleeping castle overgrown by a forest of thorns, all of these still molding his thoughts and shaping his behaviors; and even her most finely tuned technology was too blunt an instrument to peel back the many gossamer layers of manipulation, unweave true from untrue.
“It is the human instinct for survival, the brain’s own resilience,” she’d told him, almost as an afterthought, trying to make him feel better. The body accepted mutilation, she said, took pain in stride, overcame trauma, even if sometimes that meant sealing in bullets, scabbing over poison. Bucky couldn’t argue.
Only he could help himself now, she said: remember and recreate. If he still wanted to. When he felt up to it. She showed him proudly around the holodeck, one of her passion projects for a nation so rooted in both warfare and spirituality, and left him to his own devices, promising absolute privacy.
This was maybe his eighth try. Some attempts he hadn’t even made it out of his house: his mother had been a nagging harpy, his father had knocked him around, said he’d taken after his mother’s brother Charlie whom no one ever talked about. Bucky had had to dig deep but by now, weeks of false starts later, he remembered—his Pa had liked drink like any Irishman, there had been a time he hadn’t let up on Bucky for chasing skirts or hanging around Steve instead of really applying himself to a job; but he’d never raised a hand to him or any other member of the family.
Grasping his komoyo beads, Bucky swiped up for the alert Shuri had thoughtfully forwarded to him: one Steven Grant Rogers arriving at the palace imminently on official business. He didn’t use “Captain” these days, whatever anyone else wanted to call him. T’Challa would probably meet with him first on some classified assignment he’d taken on under Nakia’s oversight. After such meetings Steve had yet to miss the opportunity to be with Bucky for a few hours or days, whatever his schedule allowed. They didn’t do much, mostly just sat around the lake or Bucky’s tiny house shooting the shit. By some tacit agreement they avoided weightier discussions, although Bucky wasn’t even sure what weightier discussions there were to be had. But Steve, he knew, was just waiting on him.
He dismissed the alert. He had a few hours to himself yet.
Seventeen, he reminded himself, breathing carefully as he went back into the memory.
Bucky bounded up the wooden staircase more to get his blood going in the bitter cold than out of any real enthusiasm, or so he told himself. Warm yellow light glowed through the Rogerses’ front window, heartening in the blank starless night that had fallen over the city, but Bucky frowned when he saw the tall shadow cast across the frilly curtains and heard the nasal murmur of an unfamiliar male voice.
“Steve?” he called as he knocked, because a guest meant he couldn’t just clatter at the door like he usually did to annoy the neighbors and get on his best friend’s nerves. “It’s me.”
“It’s open,” Steve called back, sounding distracted.
Bucky stepped in, pulling the door shut quickly behind him against the weather. “Hey,” he said, then hesitated. In no apparent hurry, a tall dark-haired young man straightened up from where he’d been stooping over Steve seated at the kitchen table, a shiny guitar across his lap.
“Hey. I’m Sal.” The young man smiled and extended a hand to Bucky, the same hand he’d had curled around Steve’s only a moment ago, fingers tracing fingers. Bucky wasn’t blind.
He forced a smile through his teeth and shook the offered hand. “Yeah, I’ve seen you around. Name’s Bucky Barnes.” Sal’s fingers were long and brown and strong. He worked at Mr. Biagio’s restaurant next to Mrs. Hooper’s grocery store where Steve helped out a few days a week; Bucky had stopped by once and found them stacking crates in the same back alley. Sarah Rogers would have thrown a fit if she’d known her scoliotic son lifted crates for a living, which was why she didn’t know.
“Sal’s teaching me the guitar,” said Steve, and for once his smile left a cold and empty feeling in Bucky’s gut instead of a warm and happy one.
“That so.” Suddenly Bucky wanted a cigarette to chase away the winter that had somehow found its way into him, but that wouldn’t do inside the house. “Gonna be a regular Eddie Lang, are we?”
“Steve’s a natural,” drawled Sal, stooping again over Steve to sketch something on a piece of paper on the table. Steve crowded close to look, his blond head nearly tucked under Sal’s arm. Bucky glared at Sal’s behind, which looked a little more upturned than strictly necessary. Bucky’s Ma had at least taught him better posture than that.
“So in this one”—Sal’s voice dropped; he was speaking only to Steve this time, in a silky hum Bucky strained to hear—“your index finger goes here, and your middle finger goes here...”
Sal was putting his hand on top of Steve’s again on the neck of the guitar and Bucky looked away, curling his hands into fists and swallowing back he wasn’t sure what, but something that tasted bitter in the back of his mouth. Not knowing where to put himself, he slumped into the threadbare couch and pulled his book out of his satchel and fiddled with the radio.
“...As we all know the last few winters have been particularly brutal in the city and this one’s shaping up to be no exception, with subzero temperatures forecast again for tonight and what might be snow and sleet later into tomorrow morning...”
“You had supper yet, Steve? ‘Cause I haven’t,” and Winifred Barnes would slap him right across his smart mouth for interrupting so rudely, making Sal glance over just as Steve strummed another cautious, jangly chord. But then Winifred Barnes wasn’t here, was she? That was kind of the point, that was why he’d come all the way over here on the night of goddamn Armageddon, as it was turning out to be. Anyway this guy had been rude first. As Sal eyed him across the way Bucky stared fixedly at his book, the book he’d been reading to Becca when this halfwitted idea came to him not three hours ago and he gave in to it like a twit. He read the same two lines at the top of the page over and over because his brain was bubbling by itself all over again.
Suddenly Bucky resented his Pa on a whole other level now. But then another part of him was glad he’d come by tonight.
“Ma left colcannon in the pot,” said Steve, his tone still distracted. Setting his book aside, Bucky stood up and stalked over to the stove, trying not to dwell on the visible, slow stroke of Sal’s thumb over Steve’s. Why learn the guitar when he could just as well learn the fiddle or something? At least Steve’s ma would love that, too. “And some bread pudding, I think.”
With dried cranberries. That made Bucky feel a little better. “I stopped by the hospital and your ma sent me on with some ham.” He went to get the package from his satchel and took the opportunity to fix their guest with a decidedly inhospitable look. “You stayin’ for supper, Sal?”
Sal smiled at him. It was a nice enough smile, Bucky supposed, if you liked snakes. “Nah, it’s gettin’ late.” As Bucky gritted his teeth and hunted up a fry pan, Sal turned back to Steve. “You just need a little practice. Study the notes. I don’t need the guitar til Sunday.”
Sal reached out and ruffled Steve’s hair, Steve’s eyes blinking and blue under his hand, and Bucky tightened his fist around the wrought iron pan before he could sink it into somebody’s face. The pieces of ham began to sizzle in its own fat.
“See ya ‘round.” Sal pulled on his coat and gloves as he sauntered to the door. “Pleasure meetin’ ya, Bucky Barnes.”
Waving at him mutely from the stove, Bucky wondered if Sal might fall into the river somehow on his way home and get frozen dead. Ice on the sidewalk could be real slippery sometimes.
The door finally closed behind their detestable guest with a last whiff of cheap cologne, and Bucky couldn’t help rolling his eyes.
“I saw that, Buck.” Steve set the guitar down in the corner with a muted jangle of strings and came over to get plates and cutlery. “Sal’s all right. There’s no need to be mean.”
“He’s Mr. Biagio’s nephew, is what he is. And Mr. B’s carryin’ on with Mrs. Hooper.” Bucky liked to look out for Steve, was all, whether Steve liked being looked out for or not. “Becca could teach you the piano, y’know,” Bucky offered, a little less aggressive now that the interloper was gone, but no less mulish.
“Can’t really carry a piano around, Buck.” But Steve was grinning as he set the table. “Don’t worry, when I get good enough I’ll teach you. Girls love a guy who can play.”
“Oh, is that what this is about? Girls love dancing, Steve, and they love flowers and they love new dresses. Trust me, I got enough of ‘em at home.” This time Bucky’s smile came easily to him, even as Steve aimed a grimace his way. Ignoring him, Bucky brought the food to the table, not bothering with serving bowls. “Just us two tonight, pal. Your mom said she’d be at the hospital till tomorrow, too many of the other staff called in sick.” He went to turn off the radio, because now their guest had gone the chatter was just noise.
“Oh, okay.” Steve gathered up the extra place setting. “You’re not going home later?”
Bucky shrugged, looking everywhere but at his friend as he took a seat at the table, feeling a little territorial. This was where Steve had sat earlier, with Sal-from-next-door practically drooling all over him. “Pa’s just gonna bawl me out again. Figured we could give it a rest tonight.”
Steve gave him a commiserating glance, but Bucky distracted him soon enough with supper. Together they made short work of the food, Steve not seeming to notice that Bucky had given him the lion’s share of meat. Bucky did the same with the pudding, making a mental note to ask his Ma for something similar at home later.
After dinner Steve excused himself to wash up, and as Bucky cleared the table he found Sal’s chord notes set neatly aside. Underneath he was shocked to find a sketch, unmistakable in bold, sinuous lines from Steve’s pencil: a nude male, twisted sensuously on the page to show off every unreasonably rippling muscle in the torso and legs in avid, unrealistic relief. A slightly oversized erect penis jutted out of wiry dark hair between the lean, splayed thighs, and Bucky felt his face burn. Steve had left out the hands and feet and the face was gone above the plush and pouting mouth, but Bucky touched a trembling finger to the jawline he saw in the mirror every morning, the cleft in his chin he’d learned to throw punches for from an early age until every playground bully he’d ever come across finally gave up teasing him for the butt on his face.
Steve had been watching him, he thought suddenly, had been fantasizing about him maybe, and Bucky felt a strange mix of disgust that Steve had seen him in this way and anger and hurt that he’d never said a thing. Or maybe this was actually Sal, because Bucky took some care with himself but knew he still had more baby fat than this chiseled, writhing Greek sculpture of a body, and Sal had looked lean enough under his restaurant uniform. Maybe Steve had seen Sal naked already, dozens of times, done things with him in the rooms above the restaurant where Bucky knew Sal lived with his cousins; maybe they’d been together over and over in all this time Bucky hadn’t been to visit and the both of them had had the gall to act innocent around Bucky. And maybe that was why Sal kept touching Steve and Steve let him, didn’t say a word when Sal ran fingers through that soft blond hair, didn’t shrink from Sal’s hand caressing his. Maybe Steve had even asked that sensual, worldly Mediterranean man to pose for him, taller and prouder and freer with himself than Bucky ever was, then maybe Steve had drawn Bucky’s face on him as if to taunt Sal. Or maybe to taunt Bucky, mocking him for what he couldn’t even admit to himself he wanted, what Steve had found instead with other men. Maybe Steve had intended for Bucky to find this, left it lying around seemingly carelessly in plain sight, so that Steve would come back from his half-bath pink and bare and fragrant and Bucky would look at him helplessly and know—
The komoyo beads pulsed at his wrist and Bucky came back to himself with a gasp. He shook himself hard, but it still took a moment of blank staring before he realized the komoyo beads were signaling the end of Steve’s meeting.
Maybe Steve would look for him at his house. That was about an hour’s drive down from the palace. Maybe he’d see Shuri first about some new communications tech; the kid had a couple dozen projects going on at any given moment and, like any genius, leaped at every opportunity for an audience. Anyway, she was the only one who knew he used this facility and he hadn’t told her he’d be using it this very afternoon. With a vague sense of embarrassment Bucky hoped Steve would take a little more time trying to find him.
He closed his eyes, the better to concentrate, and turned back to the memory.
No, he knew, that couldn’t have been true at all.
Steve had been a follower of the classics, and he’d always been modest and respectful in the nudes that he’d drawn. He hadn’t been a prude exactly, had been too straightforward about the pursuit of his art for that, but he’d been shy enough about having Bucky see the studies he made, and Bucky could imagine him blushing straight down to his stomach and up to the tips of his ears if he ever even thought to sketch something so outrageous.
As for Sal... well. He would’ve told Bucky.
That was how they’d been, that was all. Bucky had told Steve right away about his first time, hot face and racing heart and furtive pride and all, the two boys trading whispers in the darkness of a late-summer night while Steve’s mother snored exhausted in her room. Blushing and stammering, Steve had told Bucky of the live model art class he’d peeked into at school and the real honest-to-God Frenchwoman Mr. Thatcher had procured somehow to lounge without a stitch of clothing in front of fourteen students turning varying shades of red. One more thing the boys had kept between themselves, excited and bashful by turns. There had never been anyone else.
The sketch was of a scene from one of Bucky’s favorite stories: people coming down a floodlit ramp from a landed spaceship to find a mysterious road winding away into the alien grass. Bucky loved sci-fi novels, shared them every time with Steve if he had to read the whole thing through out loud cover to cover while Steve fell in and out of sleep recovering from his latest illness and barely heard a word. Apparently Steve had at least listened to this one.
“Bronson Beta?” Bucky asked, looking up with a grin as Steve came up to the table, wiping his wet face on a towel.
“You recognized it.” Steve’s face was rosy from the hot water, or so Bucky assumed.
Bucky clapped him on the shoulder, headed for a wash himself. “I keep tellin' ya, you’re a good artist.”
Washed up and stripped down to their underclothes they turned out the lights and settled into bed, only for Steve to jump up again, because it had been narrow enough for the both of them weeks ago but now Bucky was turning red from laughing.
“Becca said I got fat over Christmas. All right, all right, I’ll take the couch.” And Bucky made to get up, but Steve was already pushing the couch over across the banged-up wooden floor.
“Bucky, I barely fit on the couch now. We’ll fit fine on the bed.” Bucky helped him shove the couch up against the side of the bed that wasn’t next to the wall. Steve leaned on the kitchen table and pretended he wasn’t trying to catch his breath. Bucky pretended not to notice. “This way you won’t roll right off.”
They had bickered enough over the years that Steve didn’t even try anymore to insist that Bucky take the side by the radiator. Bucky eyed the bed doubtfully but climbed in, lying on his side up against the couch so as to take up less space. “Well you're not gettin’ rid of me now, anyway.”
“Not in this weather. I’m not a total monster, y’know.”
And Bucky couldn’t have cared less about the snow already starting outside, but he heard the slight choke in Steve’s words, saw the shiver lick up and down his thin frame and the muscles tic across his face as he clenched his jaw tight, trying not to show how cold he was. “I brought an extra blanket from the house, nobody’s gonna miss it.”
They burrowed down into the additional layer of heavenly warmth, Bucky thanking his stars that his smartest and dearest little sister had seen him taking his sheets right off his bed and looked the other way. Maybe he’d take her to that new exhibit at the museum she’d been wanting to see. He could bring Steve along to talk with her because Bucky for the life of him could look at only so many pretty pictures before he got sleepy.
“You’re not fat, Buck.” In the darkness Steve’s deep voice didn’t startle for how odd it sounded coming from his slim body. Bucky liked how low and steady it sounded, a voice finally to match all those big ideas and those expressive large hands. “You’re just getting bigger. All that work at the boxing gym.”
“Sure I’m fat. It’s winter. I’m hibernatin’.” Skilled from years of practice, Bucky kept up a good inch or two between his body and Steve’s. He wobbled sometimes as there wasn’t much room to spread out in for balance, but he’d known long enough now that they couldn’t just tangle together anymore like they used to when they were kids. Still, underneath the blankets Steve’s back blazed welcome warmth across Bucky’s front and Bucky’s nose filled with the scent of soap and skin. He found himself breathing deep and wondering, with a bitter stab in his chest, if Sal had gotten close enough to smell Steve like this.
“So what’ve you been doin’ all week?” Steve sounded wide awake. Outside the window a street lamp haloed bright against an opaque sky, picked out snowflakes drifting down. “You see Betty Carlisle again last Friday?”
Hadn’t he. Bucky scrubbed his hand across his face, which suddenly felt overheated even though the top of his head peeking out of the covers already felt like it was growing frost. It was fine if he let his arm just rest like this against Steve’s back, right? His back wasn’t supposed to get cold anyway. “Yeah, I took her out. She said she was feeling sick pretty soon after we left though, so I took her back home early on.”
Bucky could hear the smile in Steve’s voice, supportive as usual. “You have a good time though? Betty seems swell. She’s real pretty.”
“She’s okay.” Bucky opted not to mention that she’d said “I’m glad you didn’t bring your little friend around this time” as she’d led him up the stairs to her room, all of a sudden the picture of health. He stuck his face out of the covers in an attempt to cool it off. Outside the apartment it was probably freezing already. “I don’t think I’ll be seein’ her again.”
“Oh, well, that’s too bad. Not your type?”
Bucky recalled tangled dark curls, cherry-red lipstick smeared in a low-lit grin. Her ma had gone to bed already and her pa wouldn’t be back til Monday, she’d said. Though he hadn’t liked what she’d said about Steve he’d gone along with her all the same; she’d only been his third girl ever, it had been dark enough and she’d been enthusiastic enough that he’d at least managed to do his part. He’d lit out of there as soon as was just barely polite. “Not so much.”
“That’s a shame,” said Steve again. Bucky felt vaguely irritated. “You said last time you liked that she could keep up with you. Dancing, I mean.”
“Yeah, well, that was last time. You like her so much, you step out with her.”
That came out a little crankier than Bucky had intended, and he felt bad as soon as the last words left his mouth. He was about to apologize when Steve let out a little laugh, ceding the point.
“She’s not really my type either.”
There was a new note in that deep, familiar voice that made Bucky snap to attention. Steve always came off so sure about things, his tone full of a invincible certainty that Bucky clung to sometimes like it was an anchor in the sea of wheedling, cajoling, upselling noise that was New York, and sometimes he knew it rubbed people the wrong way and he’d have to step in soon and defuse the situation before it came to blows. Maybe it was the way Steve quietly tensed under the blankets, but Bucky found himself looking forward to whatever fresh new truth Steve had apparently just discovered about the world.
When Steve uncharacteristically let the silence stretch on between them, though, Bucky decided to needle him into talking. “That Sal guy walk you home from work?”
“He didn’t walk me home, Buck.” Steve was immediately annoyed, and Bucky couldn’t help grinning to himself. “I saw him after my shift with that guitar, I asked a couple questions, he said he’d teach me if I wanted.”
“He couldn’a taught you right there in the street?” It was only half a joke, and Bucky reminded himself too late it was none of business. He was always blurting things out around Steve lately, stupid-like. Maybe now he was getting older he felt Steve was one of the last people he could still be stupid with.
“That’s real funny, Buck. Anyway it’s not like I was expecting any visitors tonight.”
Steve’s tone was dry and Bucky bit back whatever pointed thing he’d been about to say, instead playfully hooking his nose on Steve’s shoulder and breathing through the provocation. So he’d been busy; Steve had been busy too, Bucky hadn’t been by in a while, it couldn’t be like when they were little anymore and they spent whole days just hanging around. He was here now, wasn’t he? Making up for lost time and all. His neck would kill him if he kept this up but he’d bother with that later. “Well, I guess you could do worse. You’ve always wanted to learn an instrument. You can sit down while you’re playin’ so your back won’t hurt. And I s’pose you’ve got the hands for it...”
Steve’s chuckle was a nudge of warm, fuzzy skin against Bucky’s mouth. Just a nudge, Bucky told himself. Didn’t have to mean anything. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, buddy.”
“Well I dunno why you’re takin’ lessons from the goddamn Mafia when you could just learn to tickle the ol’ ivories at our house,” Bucky began, but Steve was already laughing, so he left off, satisfied.
“Not every Italian in New York is in the Mafia, Bucky. And I’m not gonna take lessons from your sister.” Bucky liked Steve’s voice best like that, soft and rounded like his mouth in an indulgent smile.
“Why not?” Bucky demanded, mock-peevish. “The girls miss you. Jeanie doesn’t like playing with Daisy half as much as she did with you. Says Daisy keeps bossing her around, breaking her dolls.”
“I don’t got time for that anymore, Buck.” Suddenly Steve was impatient, his tone edged with a contempt that brought Bucky up short. “You know how things are now. Ma and I barely make the rent. Maybe you don’t understand ‘cause your pa’s a supervisor at the plant and all, but not everybody gets to sit around playin’ tea party at home and—”
Bucky shook free, breathing fast, as if yanked from a dream turning sour. Well that had been fairly easy to spot. He and Steve had known each other all their lives, and Steve could never be so thoughtlessly sharp, so bitter over the differences between their families that they’d both known early on they each had nothing to do with.
Deliberately Bucky slowed his breath to an easy rhythm, blinking rapidly as the holographic walls around him muted to gray. One komoyo bead was blinking and he found that Steve had messaged him some ten minutes ago. Bucky hadn’t felt the buzz of the alert on his skin. Steve had been looking for him, asking if he’d eaten. Bucky smiled. Steve was always hungry.
Bucky messaged back to wait at his house and help himself to the leftovers in the fridge. Steve would be fine. Bucky would be done soon. This was farther than he’d ever come yet.
At the mention of Bucky’s sisters Steve’s shoulders had slumped in an eloquent enough response. Kindhearted only child that he was, Steve had always had a soft spot for the girls, but as Bucky told Becca these days everyone was busy fighting for whatever odd job they could find. Idle time was a luxury for the few.
“Tell ‘em I miss ‘em too,” Steve said. “Maybe they can stop by the store sometime and say hi.” And Bucky felt more than heard his quick, reedy intake of breath, the set of his shoulders as if he were squaring up for a fight. “Or starting this Saturday, they can stop by the restaurant.”
Bucky stilled. “Mr. Biagio give you a spot?”
“Washing dishes and such. Just weekends for starters.” Steve sounded guarded already. Bucky would have laughed, but there was an ugly twist in his chest stealing his breath away. “Turns out Sal put in a good word for me.”
“Did he now.” Bucky rolled backward into an impossible angle, half-sandwiched awkwardly against the couch, but he needed some air.
“It’s good money, Buck.” Steve clutched the blankets tightly around himself.
“Bet it is.” Bucky had taken dishwashing gigs before. It was tedious work, hours on his feet with his hands in hot water and he didn’t doubt Steve would be sore all over afterward, but Bucky knew it would be no use warning him off. Any money was good money and Steve grabbed at every chance to contribute at home. Tucking his hands behind his head Bucky gazed up into the darkness, remembering the stink of cheap cologne and wondering whether he should hold his tongue.
Hell with it, he thought. His gut was roiling. “You know he’s a fag, though, right? Sal, I mean.”
Steve stiffened. “Bucky.”
“Queer. Right. I dunno what they call it. Well, he seems it, anyhow.” He’d come across their kind before, falling silent in their groups when he walked past, their bright eyes heavy on him, top to toe. He was never sure what to do about it. They seldom actually said anything to him, just watched him go by til he was too far away to hear what they said to one another afterward, muttering and laughing among themselves. “Temperamental. C’mon, pal, you know I’m just lookin’ out for you.” Bucky knew he sounded exactly like he couldn’t make up his mind between sorry and sulking and somehow felt guilty about it.
“What, so I can’t get a job fair and square ‘cept some perv’s got a thing for me?”
“Steve,” it was Bucky’s turn to say, even though Steve had sounded more amused than hostile and for this Bucky felt vastly relieved.
“Not all of us can get the girls like you do, Buck.”
Bucky chuckled. “When I get a paycheck through a dame I’ll buy you all the fancy paints you want, Rogers.”
Something like a laugh quivered down Steve’s crooked spine and Bucky felt his insides settle somewhat, because at least they could still kid around about it. Steve didn’t sound too worried. Maybe he’d be able to handle it.
...Oh, who was he kidding. Bucky smiled to himself. He’d probably hang around that restaurant in all his off-hours, day and night, just daring Sal to put paws on his best guy. Steve had been right; all his time at the gym had been bulking Bucky up. Sal only had a couple inches on him and Bucky figured he’d stand a good chance in a fair fight, if it came to it.
He shivered and realized the cold was getting worse. Bucky tucked his arms and his whole face back under the covers, poked the tip of his chilled nose right into Steve’s back over his undershirt, hoping to make Steve jump. But Steve didn’t move, didn’t so much as grumble. He was preoccupied, staring straight at nothing.
“What if I’m like that, too,” he said quietly.
All Bucky could think of was that the blanket had covered his ears; he couldn’t possibly have heard that right. “Say what now?” But he stayed where he was, covers pulled up over his head, eyes shut tight in the hot, stifling darkness dampening Steve’s skin. He told himself he’d heard Steve say something, he just hadn’t heard what it was. Even though he’d known that tone of clear, quiet certainty right away and it had sent a sickly sort of prickle clean through him.
“A—a homo. Like you said. A queer.”
Bucky lay very still, couldn’t pretend anymore that he hadn’t heard. They put guys in jail for that kind of thing, was all he knew. But hey—he told himself—maybe it was just a phase. Steve liked broads fine as far as Bucky knew, turned his head like Bucky did at the sight of a bit of chest, a pair of long trim legs under a fluttering hemline. Maybe all he needed was a dame that liked him back for once. There was so much they could like about him, they just didn’t give him a chance, but it was only a matter of time, Bucky was sure of it. Somebody would love him the way Bucky loved him, with his strange big voice and his fine-fingered hands and the way he wasn’t scared of hard, honest work anywhere. Or of anything, really, now that Bucky thought about it. Christ, now that Bucky thought of what Steve was actually saying Bucky felt terrified down to the soles of his feet.
Steve had half-turned his head at the long, trailing silence. “Still alive back there, Buck?”
Bucky remembered himself, cleared his throat when his voice caught. “Yeah, buddy. Just—you surprised me, is all.”
“I’m sorry,” Steve said after a beat, the kind of apology that Bucky knew from long experience wasn’t because Steve actually believed he’d done something wrong but because he knew the other person felt bad just the same.
“No reason to be.” Shuddering and not sure why, Bucky acted without thinking and put his arm around Steve, who froze ramrod-straight at his touch. “Hey. Hey,” and Bucky, grasping Steve’s arm, found he was trembling very finely. Bucky hauled him close, almost embarrassed for how easy it was to manhandle him like this. Steve sniffled and then palpably recoiled in horror that he’d given away he was crying, and Bucky couldn’t help grinning in the dark. “You idiot. C’mere.” Steve was coughing out a watery laugh now despite himself; Bucky’s whole arm was up across his chest but Bucky made sure he could still breathe, was still well covered by the blankets. “You’ll give yourself an attack, you crazy moron. Calm the hell down. Okay?”
“Aren’t you. I dunno. Mad?” Steve’s voice in the stillness was all hope and fear and ragged breath.
“Why the hell’d I be mad? You’re the one stickin’ your neck out now like a nitwit.” Bucky pressed his face to the back of Steve’s head, remembering with distaste how Sal had ruffled his hair all out of the blue. Maybe Steve could stand him, but Bucky didn’t like a guy who couldn’t keep his hands to himself any more than anyone else. “Dammit, Steve. Really not gonna run away from any fights, are you?” Steve exhaled a wet chuckle as Bucky shook his head, lowered his voice. “How long’ve you known?”
Steve still mostly hadn’t moved. Bucky might have been holding a sack of potatoes, though one that still shook like a leaf every once in a while, in a torrent of a shudder. Steve had always felt things with his whole goddamn body that way. “A while, I guess.”
“Does your ma know?” Bucky hadn’t thought to care much before, but he’d heard of guys run out of their houses, dumped by their wives, laid off at a moment’s notice once word got around to the wrong people. Sarah Rogers would be crushed. Or maybe not, Bucky thought; she’d moved heaven and earth for her boy before and she would do it again. “Does old Frank know? About his nephew, I mean, or hell, about you.”
“Nah. Sal’s real careful whenever Mr. B’s around.” Steve paused. “And no, Ma doesn’t know. Nobody knows yet except you, Buck.”
Bucky inhaled shakily, as if some of Steve’s shivering had somehow passed on to him. “God, Steve. You make me crazy sometimes, you know that? I worry about you.” His head was spinning, from the sweaty, superheated air inside the blankets and the icy dry air outside them and from what Steve had just dumped on him, he didn’t doubt.
“You don’t have to worry about me so much, Buck,” Steve muttered, his hand coming up to wrap around Bucky’s arm across his chest, in warning or reassurance, Bucky couldn’t tell. “I take care of myself just fine.”
“I been worrying about you half my life, buddy, I'm not gonna stop now. Jesus.” Now all Bucky could think of was Jimmy Clark back in the fourth grade, coming to school black and blue from his pa’s thrashing and the nuns never saying a word about it; Bugsy Murphy, who didn’t come back from his summer upstate and people said his family had forced him into the army like his Uncle Maurice before him. Steve was picked on plenty already for his small frame and pretty face, and Bucky would never deny that it was pretty either, for all he’d never be so reckless as to say it out loud. Suddenly it seemed the most natural thing in the world to mouth a kiss along Steve’s shoulder, and then another one and another one, silent and sad and a little bit angry, because Bucky couldn’t bear the thought of Steve getting beat up for this too. It wouldn't be the first time Bucky put up his dukes for Steve and Bucky thought it would be the best use for them yet.
Steve had fallen deathly still. “Buck?”
“Yeah.” It wasn’t a question. Bucky didn’t want any answers. He had a feeling he wouldn’t like them much. He pressed his mouth hard to the back of Steve’s shoulder, to kiss him again or to keep himself quiet, or maybe both.
“What are you doing?”
“I dunno. Shut up for a minute.”
Steve’s hand crept tentatively over Bucky’s. Bucky let their fingers entwine. It thrilled him like Betty’s lips all over him didn’t.
“You watch out for that bastard Sal,” he gritted out, teeth against the taut slope from Steve’s neck to his shoulder. Steve’s breath rattled in his throat. “I don’t care what he is but I don’t trust him.” Steve’s hair on Bucky’s cheek was as soft and silky as it looked but that didn’t mean anybody could just put their hands on it any old how.
“Okay, Buck.” Bucky felt more than heard the rumble of the words in his arm still mashed up awkwardly against Steve’s back. Steve mollified him like this sometimes, when Bucky let him. “I’ll keep my distance.”
“I worry about you, is all.” Bucky permitted himself a squeeze of Steve’s hand, a slow run of his thumb across Steve’s knuckles. Steve had smoother skin than a lot of girls Bucky knew, and Steve’s thin, bony hands were no exception. Bucky couldn’t name why he kept touching Steve now all of a sudden, except maybe that Steve wasn’t stopping him, and he wanted to. He’d wanted to for a while now, he admitted to himself. “So, I don’t know. What does that make me?”
Bucky had been thinking about it off and on, years maybe by now, one of the vanishingly few secrets he kept even from Steve who knew everything about him. Bucky had never really looked at any man that way, he still liked dames, couldn’t get enough of them—their funny sweet little voices, their graceful manners, the way laughter rippled out of them when he startled them with a twirl while they were dancing and how they couldn’t seem to help cuddling up into his side when he put his arm around them. But Steve felt like a scar burned into him, so long ago it might as well have been skin and bone from the start, a thing made part of Bucky before he’d ever formed a brain, a thought, or words. And ever since Bucky had started to notice girls he’d noticed Steve, growing up fast himself even if he didn’t make as much of a show of it: Steve with his sleepy summer-sky eyes and his crooked nose that had always looked too big in his skinny face and his slender sensitive hands that couldn’t make a punch half as well as he could paint and draw and write, but that never stopped him from trying because nothing ever could stop Steve from trying whatever the hell he got it into his mind to do, even if it was obviously a bad idea. Especially if it was a bad idea and Bucky was about yelling his head off trying to tell him so.
And from the time Bucky had ever taken it into his mind that girls might feel good to touch and taste he’d wondered how it might be with Steve too, coming out of his baths all warm and flushed and oblivious to Bucky stealing looks at him. Maybe Bucky had just been curious, because all of his siblings and near all of his cousins were girls, but right now Bucky couldn’t stop thinking how flimsy Steve’s shirt was as Bucky nosed at the strap over his shoulder, how pale and smooth his skin was underneath except where Bucky knew it was pink and pebbled instead, how good he smelled with that little bit of sweat and musk still left under the rough cheap soap.
Steve had half-turned his head, his breath stirring the hair flopping halfway over Bucky’s face. “It doesn’t have to make you anything, Buck.”
Steve was giving him an out again, telling him things he wanted to hear in that sweet steady voice of his. Sometimes Bucky wished he’d do that more often, with other people; it would sure save him a lot of bloody bruises. Bucky nuzzled up blindly, searching the soft skin blooming under his lips, not knowing what he was looking for until Steve’s mouth met his.
For a moment they kissed gently, tentatively, each seemingly waiting on the other, their cold noses bumping; and then Steve let go of Bucky’s arm to wrap his hand around Bucky’s hard cock through his shorts, his palm warm and moist from Bucky’s own skin, and Bucky thought he’d faint for the first time in all his life. Whatever he was, Bucky thought, panting, he probably couldn’t deny it anymore now either.
“Bucky,” Steve sighed into Bucky’s mouth, his own breath hitching. He turned all the way around in the bed to face Bucky now, his other hand molding itself to Bucky’s side, and as he began kissing down Bucky’s throat Bucky couldn’t do much more than throw his head back and try to swallow down his moans.
“You don’t—” As Steve started to move his kisses lower Bucky grabbed at him, light-headed. “You don’t have to do anything, Steve.”
“But I want to, Buck.” Steve punctuated his kiss with a little bite into Bucky’s lip and Bucky shuddered again. “If you’ll let me.”
Bucky had never really been able to say no to him, and Bucky said nothing now, just kind of lay stunned that this was happening at all as Steve went on to lift up his shirt and trace tongue and teeth around his navel and through the coarse dark hair below. When Steve freed Bucky’s hard-on from his shorts and sank him straight into his mouth Bucky thought he’d have a heart attack. He threaded unsteady fingers through Steve’s hair, only just keeping himself from pulling, or pushing or whatever it was he wanted to do, which felt like five different things all at the same time.
Bucky prided himself on his control when he fucked girls, generally they seemed to like it the longer he could keep going and he’d mastered a few tricks already to make himself last; but somehow even with Steve clumsily scraping teeth on him and not really able to take in much more than his head Bucky came embarrassingly quickly, muffling his moans and a few startled tears in his pillow. At first even over the pounding white-hot haze in his head Bucky worried that Steve was choking. But soon Steve was kissing his mouth again, a little frantically, a new, bitter tang in his uneven breaths.
“It’s okay,” Steve panted when Bucky broke the kiss to look at him, heavy-lidded. “You don’t have to do anything, Buck.” Already he was tugging at himself inside his shorts, his long pretty eyelashes fluttering.
“That was my goddamn line,” Bucky growled. Even sweat-drenched and orgasm-limp he knew he was still doggedly skirting that Decision, but he reached for Steve anyway. The heavy, urgent feel of Steve’s fully erect cock in Bucky’s hand was both familiar and dizzyingly not. Steve was already stroking himself, his fingers still slick with his own spit, so Bucky palmed the satiny head the way he himself liked it and Steve’s low, trailing moan sparked straight to his balls.
When Steve came with a choked, stuttering cry, almost a sob, Bucky dragged his mouth wonderingly across the goosebumps that had gone up all over Steve’s arms and didn’t have the heart to tell him to keep quiet. He so rarely got to enjoy his own body like this.
Bucky decided he’d help out however he could. He just hoped the closed windows would keep the sound in well enough.
Bucky came back to himself a little reluctantly, inhaling sharp and deep like he’d forgotten to breathe for a few minutes. Steve hadn’t said anything but Bucky knew he was standing there behind him, only a few paces into the room, rapt just like Bucky had been. Bucky had let him in some time ago with a quick, blind swipe of a humming komoyo bead before he could think twice. Bucky hadn’t wanted to stop the memory, hadn’t wanted to look away when he was finally getting it so damn right. Maybe he’d wanted Steve to see it too.
“Shuri said you might be here,” Steve mumbled, almost apologetically, when the silence had dragged on long enough.
Bucky shrugged, still hoping for his face to cool before he turned around. “Been doing my homework.”
Steve’s voice lilted with amusement. “You always were top of the class.”
“Aw, shut up.” Cheeks still burning, Bucky gestured vaguely around at the windowless room and the walls that had gone mercifully blank. “Some tech, huh? Shuri said I had to rebuild some of my memories on my own or something like that. She said she couldn’t just cut all of it out.” He was making excuses, he knew, feeling vaguely defensive.
“I believe her.” Steve was only a few steps behind him now, but Bucky still couldn’t quite face him. “Looks like you’re... rebuilding... just fine.”
Bucky opened his mouth for a sarcastic response, but thought better of it. Instead he thrust his remaining hand into his pocket, feeling oddly awkward, and after a moment he heard Steve sit down behind him on the low bench that ran around the back of the room.
“I loved you so much, you know. So fucking much.”
Bucky practically drowned his words in his beard, but in the room’s blank, airless silence Steve heard him. Of course Steve heard him. Bucky didn’t have to look to know Steve was watching him, his pretty face honest and sweet as ever, clouded with concern.
“When they said you’d died I gave it up. I gave it all up.” Bucky stared unseeing down at his feet. “I thought it didn’t matter anymore who knew. Some idiot part of me even wanted them to know, wanted everyone to finally know. The secret we’d always kept. I figured it was all over for me, I had nothing left to lose.” He laughed, low and loathing. “I was so stupid. Of course they were gonna use it against me. Just like they used everything else.”
“You weren’t stupid, Buck,” Steve said softly. “You couldn’t’ve known.”
“I was stupid,” said Bucky again, louder. Steve stopped, frustrated. Bucky’s hand fisted in his pocket.
“Sometimes they made me think I forced you.” Bucky’s whisper cracked and bled. “They’d send a shrink in—real fuckin’ sophisticated brainwashing technology it was. They’d throw me around, drug me up, get me talking. Sometimes I didn’t know anymore what was coming out of my mouth. Sometimes they said you forced me. Used me.” Steve’s arms were already around him, tears soaking into his shirt, but Bucky stared sightlessly forward. “They said it could’ve been anyone. Would’ve been anyone. I just happened to be there that time. It didn’t have to be me.”
“No, Buck. It was only because it was you. It was always only ever you. It still is.”
Bucky didn’t seem to feel the kisses Steve was desperately pressing to his face, into his hair. “We were kids. You didn’t know anything. You were experimenting, it was just a phase. Lots of people have a phase. You can just say so, Steve, I won’t be mad. I let you do it.” His voice, already lifeless, quirked in garish irony. “You know consensual sex between adult homosexuals wasn’t legal in New York till 1980?”
Bucky didn’t move, but Steve held him no less tightly. “They made you hate me. They made you hate yourself.”
“I wanted to hate myself,” Bucky agreed. “It was easier. I couldn’t hate you, I loved you, even though they made me ashamed that I did. But when you hate yourself you can hate anybody. When you can wish death upon yourself...” He didn’t finish. “Hydra was all about order, the system, a hierarchy. The clean from the unclean. You know, the authorities classified homosexuality as a mental illness till the 1970s.”
“We weren’t sick, Buck.” There was that old grim note of utter confidence again in Steve’s voice, that ring of unassailable certainty. “I loved you. I always have. That’s all there is to it. That’s all there ever had to be.”
Bucky had inclined his head, as if trying to place a fleeting, familiar tune. “I remembered that.”
Steve scrubbed at his wet cheek. “I saw. You did.”
“I have to remind myself,” said Bucky slowly, “of what I wanted. What you were. What it felt like. Whatever they said, whatever happened after”—he raised unfocused eyes to Steve’s—“won’t change what happened before.” He thought about it for a moment. “Did I get that right?”
He was dangerously vulnerable right now, he knew, raw flesh under a blister, and that part of him left over from the past seventy years was screaming inside. But Steve would watch out for him. Steve wouldn’t lie to him.
“Yeah,” and Steve trembled now as he held Bucky close. “Yeah, that’s right. And nothing anybody or even I could ever say is ever going to make that less true.”
Bucky smiled then, looking up at Steve as if finally seeing him. “I remembered that time all right, didn’t I?”
Steve chuckled, blushing. “Yeah, that’s how I remember it too.”
Bucky tangled their fingers together. It was nice, he decided, to have the memory affirmed, to know he wasn’t crazy or damaged or wrong, at least on this one single point among a thousand others. But then he was just getting started, he reminded himself. Maybe this was the hardest part, and he’d already gotten through.
“I don’t remember that it snowed that night, though,” Steve pointed out, as an afterthought.
“It snowed.” Somehow Bucky was sure of it. “You just didn’t notice.”
“Yeah”—Steve grinned—“I guess I didn't.”
They kissed, slow and sweet and painfully happy. “I’m calling it a day,” sighed Bucky, suddenly longing to go home. “Still hungry?”
“Starving.”
“I know a place.” He twisted several komoyo beads, closing down the afternoon’s holograms. “Where the hell did you learn to do it like that, by the way? God, you’re lucky my standards were still low back then.”
“Ah, fuck off, Barnes.” But Steve’s grin was broad and his ears were almost purple. “Served me right for eavesdropping on your dance hall partners so much.”
Bucky hadn’t laughed that hard in ages.
Seventeen, goddammit. What a great year.
Later that night at Bucky’s little house, they had the occasion to appreciate the huge advances made in structural soundproofing since 1935.
“Y’know, that holodeck room-thing was great and all”—Steve, over eighty years later, was only slightly winded—“but there’s no way it can beat the real thing.”
“Well, let’s never tell Shuri that,” Bucky said, and changed the subject.
(end)