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Sometimes Steve sees Bucky staring at him. Usually he pretends he doesn’t see, but this morning when he looks up and meets Bucky’s eyes, Bucky doesn’t look away.
"You look like him," Bucky says. No prompting, no nothing. He just speaks, like this is a thing he does.
"What?" Steve asks. He didn’t really hear it, too stunned by the fact that words were coming out of Bucky’s mouth to understand their meaning.
"You look like him. So did Pierce." His voice is soft, gravelly from disuse. "Is that why they picked you?"
Steve’s heart plunges like an elevator with the cables cut. “Buck, it is me.”
The hard line of Bucky’s mouth softens just a little. “Sure,” he says.
Steve stares at him while Bucky eats the last of his breakfast, methodically shoveling oatmeal into his mouth and swallowing. When he’s done, he folds his hands in his lap and stares straight ahead, waiting for instructions.
*
Steve searches for things only he could possibly know. He tells stories of their life before as if he’s praying. Maybe he is. It wouldn’t be the first time in his life prayer was all he had, probably won’t be the last. One night, Steve suggests they watch Snow White and makes some stupid crack about not having to worry about not getting dive-bombed by dumb birds and Bucky looks at Steve with a frown.
“I don’t remember,” he says. Steve holds his breath. “I don’t remember telling anybody about that.”
It’s like there’s something stuck between his lungs, like something’s pulling them apart in his chest. “You mean about the bird?” he whispers.
Bucky looks at him. Not staring, not really, but looks at him like Steve’s looked at paintings before. Like he’s trying to work out how it’s done.
“That little bird,” Steve says quietly. When he speaks, he speaks like the words are a spell or a prayer. Like the words are going to reach into Bucky the way his name once did. Like they’re going to catch his arms and pull him up to safety. This secret they both kept. Something so little, so inconsequential that no one has touched it. “That thing you said you never told anybody about. Do you remember what happened that day?”
“We were walking,” Bucky says. “It hit the window beside me.”
“Yeah. It hit the window. You went over and picked it up.”
“Small. Warm,” Bucky murmurs. “Bad omen.”
The softness goes out of Bucky’s face, and his eyes seem to shutter without actually closing. Steve knows there’s no point in talking any more. He puts on the movie, but neither of them actually watch it.
*
Steve’s discovered Bucky likes perogi and he tracked down the one place in town that makes them by hand, and pickles their own cabbage too. He’s trekked across the city and back, a styrofoam box in his hand. Bucky looks at the food like someone who’s only heard about it, never actually seen it. And then he looks at Steve.
“I brought it for you,” Steve says. He doesn’t like them. Didn’t mean to buy the frozen ones that first time, it was an accident. Bucky exhales a long, slow breath and he begins to eat.
Steve watches. It’s so rare to see Bucky do anything in a way that betrays pleasure. It’s always eating like an automaton, cleaning the plate or the bowl. It’s always a three minute shower in the morning. It’s always what Steve suggests. But this is, well it’s pleasure. He eats fast, cheeks bulging, a little sour cream on his chin.
“Hey, slow down,” Steve says and Bucky looks up and stops chewing. “I mean, don’t choke, okay?” Steve amends. He wishes he hadn’t said anything. There was something childlike about the abandon. “If they’re that good I’ll get you more.”
Bucky looks at him, not moving, for a long time and for a moment Steve thinks he might speak. He holds his breath. Slowly, like an engine starting up, Bucky starts chewing again. He eats the last one very slowly, cutting it with the edge of his fork, cutting it and cutting it again, and portioning out the sour cream as if this some miniature feast.
Bucky swallows the last morsel, and then a few minutes later he looks up again. His eyes are a little wide, his forehead creased, his mouth a little taut at the corners. “You’re kind,” he says. “So was he.”
“Who?” he whispers.
Those eyes. They look from side to side, as if he’s trying to untangle something. “Pierce,” he says at last.
*
Steve spends a fair bit of time in the shower. The bathroom is the only room in the whole place that’s got a lock on the door, and even though it’d take about a half a second for Bucky to take that door off its hinges, at least it feels like privacy. Every night, he turns on the fan and turns on the water and strips and gets in and tries to wash it all away.
He stands in the shower, in the steam, with his forehead resting against the tiles, and tries to ignore the way the water doesn’t quite cover the little hitching sounds he makes. Some people are good at it, but Steve never could get the hang of silent crying.
*
“That bird,” Steve says, because they’ve been silent for two days now, and he’s exhausted by it. “Do you remember that bird? The night we went to Snow White?”
Bucky nods.
“You picked it up. Remember?”
“Yeah.”
He wished it was a better memory. Something happy. Not something gloomy and stupid. But it’s all he’s got. “We still made it to the movie.”
Bucky’s eyes move, as if he’s tracking something, tracking the memory maybe.
“Steve sat on my left.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Leaned on me.”
He smiles. “Yeah.”
Bucky looks at him. Steve shrugs.
“The spring in my seat was poking into my butt. And…” He shrugs again. “And you were crying over that stupid bird through the whole movie.”
Bucky’s head comes up a little. His forehead creases. Steve smiles at him. “I know you think I didn’t notice, but I did,” he says softly.
They’re outside, and the cool air stirs their clothes and his hair. Bucky looks at Steve and then looks to the right of him, eyes fixed somewhere in the middle distance. “It was dead when I picked it up,” he says.
*
Steve takes a long, long shower, and it’s a bit before he pulls himself back together again, wiping snot and spit and tears from his face and then scrubbing his face in the stream from the shower head. The water so hot it’s made him kind of dizzy, he turns it down, to cool, and then turns it off and sweeps aside the shower curtain. He yelps like a dog. Bucky is there, standing by the door, as if he’s a bodyguard, legs braced, hands at his sides.
“Jesus,” Steve whispers. A small part of him is ashamed to have been caught sobbing in the shower, but the greater part of him is angry that Bucky should have witnessed that and not understood. And the biggest part of him wants to crawl back into the shower and turn the water on again and pick up where he left off. “What are you doing in here, Buck?”
“You get sick,” Bucky says. There’s an uncertain, sort of hesitant quality to his voice that Steve’s never heard before.
Steve sighs. “I’m okay now,” he says. It’s a lie.
“He used to get sick. Same sort of noises. Is that why they chose you?”
He starts talking and his throat closes up and his will crawls up behind his ribs and won’t come out. He starts talking and all that wants to come out of him are those little hitching noises. So he closes his mouth and shakes his head and says nothing at all.
“Can I call you Pierce?”
“No,” Steve whispers.
Bucky closes his mouth hard. “I won’t call you the other name,” he says softly. He raises his chin and it might be the first time Steve has ever seen anything like defiance in Bucky since they recovered him.
“Okay,” he whispers. He sees the flicker of confusion. “You… call me what you want. Not Pierce. Anything else. But my name is Steve and I’d prefer that.”
“Is that why they picked you?”
“You picked me, Bucky,” Steve says wearily. “You picked me.”
That softening of the mouth and the jaw again, like Bucky’s in on a secret he can’t share with Steve. “Sure,” he says and Steve hates it. It twists in his chest, but its been twisting so much that he’s scraped raw behind the breastbone and it’s not pitiful anymore, it just hurts, and the pain makes him angry.
“You picked me. You’re the one who came over and picked me up after the MacInnes boys beat the stuffing out of me. You’re the one who introduced yourself. You could have just walked away and you didn’t.”
Bucky looks back at him. His emotionless face heightens the awful ache in Steve’s chest. “He flew that plane into the ice and he died,” he says softly. “They showed me the newspaper.” For a moment Steve thinks maybe he should say something, but there's nothing in him to say. Then Bucky smiles just a little. “But you’re close," he says. "I see why I picked you.”
*
It’s the crash and boom of thunder that wakes him from a dream of mortars and of guns, and when he wakes the light is weird in the room. The geometry of nighttime shadows all skewed by lightening. He turns over in his bed and realizes it’s not just the lightning that makes the shadows wrong. He sits up in bed, sweat-damp sheets sticking to him.
“Buck?” he asks the shadow. He doesn’t ask because he doubts it, he asks to tell Bucky that he’s awake. That he’s seen him. That whatever it is that made him come in here and stand silent in the corner and watch him, he can tell Steve now.
“I loved him. I remember telling them that.”
In the shadows, Bucky moves just a little, swaying like a sapling in the storm.
“After that, they gave me Pierce.”
Steve would like for this to be a nightmare. For the pain in his chest to be a broken sternum. For the uselessness of his lungs to be asthma. He would like for all of this to be over, to have never begun.
“But Pierce is too old now, isn’t he? So I have a new handler.”
“Pierce is dead.”
Bucky makes a little noise, and then another, like the sounds are clawing their way out of him. He’s still standing rigid, rigid as a soldier on parade. And he’s crying as he does.
“Bucky, you need to go back to bed,” Steve whispers. His voice is hollow. No surprise. He feels empty as a well. “Listen to me, you have to…” he stops. He hauls himself to his feet and crosses the room to where Bucky’s standing, shaking with held-in sobs.
“Please stop,” Bucky whispers, and Steve freezes in mid-step. “I’ll do what you say. You know I’ll do what you say. Please.”
“Stop what?”
Bucky’s mouth opens but no sound comes out. Like he’s being choked.
“It’s okay, Buck." It's not, but Steve's getting good at lying. "Just take your time.”
“Stop… taking people away from me.”
Steve reaches for something to say, but there’s nothing. “Listen to me,” he says at last. “I’ll stay with you. I’ll stay.”
“Sure,” Bucky says, the word breaks like a sob. “Yeah. Sure.”
*
He wakes in the morning, unrested, and the word Bucky floats to the surface of his mind and there’s no chance of getting back to sleep now. He sighs and slides out of bed, pulls on what he wore yesterday, heaves himself out into the living room.
He hears the thump and he looks up with a start. Bucky’s out on the balcony, hunched down and for an instant Steve thinks the sound he heard was the sound of Bucky dropping down from a height and he has a frantic moment of wondering where the hell he was and how long he’s been coming and going from what it supposed to be a secure wing of Stark Tower. But Bucky straightens up very, very slowly, like a plant reaching toward the sun. His hands are cupped in front of him. There’s a tiny grey-blue bundle of feathers in his hands, and Steve can see the marks on the glass where the bird struck, wings at full extension.
Bucky’s hair curtains his face, but Steve can see the coiled muscles of his shoulders and his back, the careful kindness of the unclosed hands. The little bird shivers, head turning back and forth. It hops onto Bucky’s metal fingertips and then is gone.
Bucky stands a long time, staring after the bird in the direction that it went. Steve slips back to his room and turns his phone over and over in his hand but doesn’t call anybody.
Neither of them talk, the whole day passes quiet.
*
When he comes out of his room the next morning, Bucky’s standing there in the living room, as it he's waiting for Steve, but he’s looking out the windows. Or, at the windows. His eyes are the red-and-black of sleepless nights, and they seems almost fixed in place. He turns his head toward Steve, but his eyes don’t follow. Steve looks too and understands that Bucky's staring at the mark where the bird hit the window.
“There was a little bird,” Bucky says. “Yesterday.”
“Yeah. I heard it hit.” He frowns. “Is it… is that mark on the window bothering you?”
Bucky shakes his head. “I picked it up,” he says. He finally looks at Steve, eyes searching the way they sometimes do, like he could take Steve apart and reassemble him from a distance. His forehead creases just a little. “It was still alive.”
“I know," Steve says, aware, though he's not exactly sure how, that this is delicate. "I saw. It flew away didn’t it?”
“It should have had a broken neck."
“Maybe it should have,” Steve agrees. “It did hit pretty hard.” He remembers the thump.
“I was sure it would be dead. Nice…” Bucky hesitates. He licks his lips. “It's nice to be wrong sometimes,” he says at last. He looks at Steve and Steve sees the way his Adam's apple bobs.
"Yeah," Steve says. His voice is so soft he can hardly hear himself.
They’re so close now, almost touching. Steve wonders, for a half a second, if he’s going to regret this, and then puts the thought away and settles his hand on Bucky’s shoulder and Bucky leans toward Steve a little, head half-turned to watch him from the corner of his eyes.
“You never give them enough credit,” Steve tells him like it’s a secret, like it’s important that Bucky understand this fundamental fact about birds. “They seem delicate because they’re small, but they’re actually pretty tough.”
Bucky's mouth curves just a little at the corners. His laugh is tiny, an exhalation without sound, but Steve knows it for what it is. Bucky leans forward, forehead against Steve’s forehead.
“Sure, Steve,” he whispers. “Sure they are.”
*