Archive of Our Own ^beta

On their first night at The Stafford, Bucky pulls a bottle of vodka out of his pack and declares he wants to get rip roaring drunk. 

“I don’t see how that’d help things any,” Steve says, dealing a game of two-handed Euchre from the formal sitting area left behind by a British Major General. “Been better off trading that if you wanted to get anything out of it.”

Bucky grins around the lip of an etched crystal glass, also the Major General’s. “What do you think I did with the other bottle?” 

Which—okay, that would explain Stalingrad.

Buck sets out a second glass next to his and pours a double, at least, in both. The etchings are of berries, the stem so delicate Steve wonders if it’ll snap between his fingers.

“S’what we woulda done before,” he says. One brow ticks up, daring Steve to argue.

“Before?” Steve grumbles, because he always argues. Because the smooth and soft sip doesn’t burn a thing like before , like bathtub gin that melted fuzzy-warm in his belly, got Bucky laughing high and loud. Like inky summer nights passing through a pinhole—all that time and no place to go. 

Yeah, there were a lotta things they might’ve done before.

“Before you got your tights all in a twist,” Bucky finishes for him, even though he swore, he swore, that he was through teasing about it. He’s smiling, though, as he breaks his promise, and not the false kind either. That too-wide grin he used back home to hide stolen gin from Mrs. Giordano and again, out here, to hide just about everything. 

Bucky ducks his head now. He does that a lot—hides the real thing.

“Gimme that,” Steve says, snatching the bottle out of Bucky’s hand for two long pulls that burn pleasantly in his throat, for all the good it’ll do him. 

Bucky tosses his own glass back, throat long and stubbled in the lamplight. Then pours himself another.

“That’s gonna get you sick before it’ll get you drunk,” Steve says.

“Not if I drink it fast enough.” He takes the five cards Steve dealt him, then three more. “We starting or what?”

Steve wins the first three tricks, but gives up just as quickly on matching Bucky drink for drink.

“Buck,” Steve says gently. He doesn’t need to look up from his hand to know Bucky’s brow is creased, his mouth thin and pressed. “They’ll still write. I know they will.”

“That’s not what Ma said, though, is it?”

What Missus Barnes had said, in the last letter she sent was, I swear to god, if you get yourself sent to the Pacific instead of home, consider yourself transferred out of this house.

“She’ll still write. You’ll see.”

Bucky shrugs a shoulder and starts drinking from the bottle. 

The riotous, celebratory sounds that fill London’s streets night after night have faded by the time Bucky’s heaving the contents back up again in the en-suite toilet.

Steve tips his head back against the door and stuffs his hands in the pockets of his dress greens, useless as he feels when he’s not in the other uniform.

Morita did say they were the only pair of G.I.s on the continent who could get a weekend pass as a disciplinary measure.  

Steve chokes back a laugh.

“Go on,” Bucky rasps from the other side of the door. “Go on and say it.”

“No,” Steve laughs again. It’s hard to stop now that he’s started. “No, I ain’t. It’s not—”

“Spit it out.”

“The guys, they think we got no idea how to find a good time.”

“Yeah,” Bucky huffs. Then groans. “We showed them.”

The funny thing, really, is how well the fellas know them considering how little they know. They know Buck is careful and calm when he’s gotta be; overbearing and overprotective when he doesn’t. 

They didn’t know Buck when he was quick with a laugh to put people at ease. Never saw him on piano at Georgie’s place, when he could hear a song once and play along by heart. 

Buck’s been quiet in there long enough that Steve raps on the door, says, “Bed’d be better for that, I think.”

“Maybe if I’d’a won, it would be,” Bucky says, the sound muffled. Steve can see his cheek pillowed in the crook of his elbow, because that’s the way Bucky sleeps. 

“You had me beat at drinking, though.” A thud ricochets off the door, deep and loud enough that it can only be Bucky tossing a shoe at him. “So how ‘bout we call it even.”

“Don’t gotta go easy on me.”

“Somebody should. Hard as you are on yourself.”

“That’s rich, pal,” Bucky grumbles. 

The taps squeak, water splashes. The door swings open fast enough that Steve stumbles back.

“If you take the floor,” Bucky yawns, “I’ll kill you in your sleep.”

He stumbles out of his rumpled dress greens and his one remaining shoe and on top of the crisp, white coverlet. The bedding smells clean, floral and powdery when Steve crawls in next to him. The weave is soft and fine.

Bucky kicks at him a few moments later. “Quit movin’.”

“Sorry.” Steve rolls to face him. “Not sure I remember how to sleep on anything bigger than a cot.” 

Bucky rubs his cheek against the pillow. “Think I’ll manage just fine.”

His eyes are ringed with shadows, but he looks more loose-limbed and easy than he did every night these last two years, back-to-back in Steve’s bedroll. 

They heal fast, now—it’s just that it takes a lot out of you.

“You feelin’ better then?” Steve carefully picks a curl off Bucky’s forehead, stuck there with the splashed water. His skin still feels cool and damp. 

Bucky’s brows draw together. “Mm. Head hurts,” he mumbles, so Steve combs his hair back and back off his forehead.  

Bucky always liked this before, when he let Steve work the Brylcreem out of his hair from Steve’s slanted couch, propped up by a stack of books.

Steve moved four times after his ma died, but he had that three-legged couch, and most nights, he had Bucky. 

“Sorry,” Steve says again, because they don’t do that anymore. 

Bucky only makes a contented sort of hum instead of putting space between them.

His hair is shorter now. Soft, without the styling cream. 

“Can’t believe you ain’t gonna say it,” Bucky mutters.

“What?”

Bucky cracks one eye open. Then rolls it.

“Aw, I’d never rub it in like that,” Steve says.

“That’d be a first.”

Steve scratches circles against Bucky’s scalp. A drunken rendition of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” rises up from the street and drifts in through the cracked-open window. 

Steve says, “But I did warn you.”

“There he is.”

“Can’t help bein’ right all the time.”

“A heavy burden to bear.”

Steve stretches his long muscles. “I manage alright.” 

Bucky digs his thumb into the inside of Steve’s elbow while Steve yelps and tries to twist out of his grasp. He doesn’t try very hard. 

Bucky relents first, groaning with the too-fast movement and squeezing his eyes shut. 

“I think,” he says drowsily, “I would remember you drinking yourself sick.” 

“Not sure you would.” Steve pushes the same stubborn curl off his face. “You were seeing Lucienne.”

“Who?”

“Village in Grand Est. Her family ran the laundry.” She had light eyes and light hair, a scowl for each of the Howlies, but a smile for Buck. 

“Aw, Steve…”

Steve cracks a smile. “I think we had enough fun for one night, huh? Why don’t you get some sleep.” 

But when he looks up, Bucky’s eyes are open. Clear, searching. Patient, the way he’s always patient with Steve. And he doesn’t miss a thing.

Buck made sure all of them knew how to spot for him, how to calculate distance and wind speed. How to assess for impact. At first, looking through his binoculars and describing the scene laid out below them, Steve had the strange sensation of being in two places at once, a part of him still people watching from the fire escape outside Bucky’s bedroom. When he’d sketch out details in rough, fast strokes with Bucky’s breath hot on his shoulder, describing the shape of Mrs. Giordano’s newest hat and naming the baby rabbits his ma kept in the yard below. 

The men in Buck’s scope blur together. They scratch their ass, they wipe their nose on their shirt sleeve. They tuck letters and notebooks into coat pockets. And then they don’t. 

Bucky was always patient, and he never missed a thing. 

“Steve,” Bucky says, half muffled by the pillow, “I didn’t do it to hurt you.”

For most of Steve’s life, patience was a luxury beyond his reach. But he’ll wait, when it’s Bucky.

Eventually, quietly, Bucky says, “I just wanted to feel normal for a fuckin’ second.”

“Nothin’ wrong with you,” Steve snaps without thinking, so fast it’s practically a reflex.

“Like you don’t know. You’re like me. You know.“

There’s a familiar, sickening shiver in Steve’s belly. He felt it in the Alps, looking at himself disguised in Bucky’s uniform, at Bucky disguised in his. He’d never named it out loud before, but he wanted it. He’d wanted it.

You’re like me. 

Time and guilt have twisted up the envy. But it’s still right there, so threaded through the deepest, darkest part of him that not even Stark’s blinding radiation could burn it out. He’s like Bucky, and Bucky is like him, and now…

“I’m sorry, Buck. We can’t even drink right anymore.” 

Bucky laughs through his nose.

“See, that’s why I didn’t wanna tell you about Austria in the first place.”

“What?”

“That,” Bucky says. “That face you make.”

“I’m not making a face,” Steve sputters. 

Bucky cocks a brow. 

Steve murmurs, “I’m not trying to.”

“I know. You’re just only ever you.” Steve must be making another face, because Bucky smiles, says, “It’s a good thing.”

“We wouldn’t’ve caught Zola if you never told me.”

“You’d have found a way.” 

Steve studies the swirl of flowers carved into the crown molding on the ceiling. 

“You’d really keep a thing like that from me?” 

Bucky’s right, is the worst part. Steve sounds so painfully, hopelessly honest.

But he can’t unhear Bucky’s low voice under the rattle of a sleeper car when he told Steve about the medical bay, about pain writhing under his skin like a live thing. About lifting a turned over jeep off Private Balicki with nothin’ but his bare hands, and he didn’t think anybody’d seen it, but what if they did, what if they saw, what if they knew? 

The girls are one thing. The girls—they are what they are. 

But that had been real, as real as a hundred other secrets spilled between them in the dark. A real part of Bucky that he didn’t want to give to Steve.

Bucky’s eyes are sunken and tired and very blue when they drop back to Steve’s face. “I liked the way you looked at me before.”

Steve reaches out to curl his hand under Bucky’s head. He strokes Bucky’s forehead and watches his eyelids catch in long intervals.

“How am I looking at you now?” Steve teases.

He remembers, hazily, that Bucky once did this for him. Steve was laid up and hurting and they weren’t—it hadn’t meant anything, then. Yet. Maybe it doesn’t have to mean anything now.

“Scared,” Bucky says, without opening his eyes.

“You think I’m scared of you?”

“Tough guy like you? No. No, that ain’t how I mean.” 

Bucky murmurs, “It was no use anyhow.” His breath is hot and damp, his voice heavy with drowsiness. “No use hiding anything from you.”

Steve dreams of home again. This time it’s the apartment after his ma’s, the first firetrap he could afford, with perpetually dank hallways and debris in the yard. But it makes sense, in a way. Bucky’d lived with him for three weeks on end in that apartment. His da had been driving him up a wall, he’d said—or maybe it was one of his sisters. 

Bucky left his dishes in the sink and shoes in the middle of the floor. He talked over Steve’s favorite radio program. He woke Steve up most mornings with the scrape of his whiskers against Steve’s neck, his belly. He sang off key, ““Goodnight Sweetheart,” against Steve’s ear when they danced in slow turns on the rug.

In Steve’s dream, the apartment is bare. The street is empty. Quiet in the way that comes after a volley of shelling, or once, after Dugan fired his Colt too close to Steve’s ear. Everything airless and still. 

The angle from the window is the same as he remembers. His reflection is broad inside the glass.

He jerks awake to Bucky kicking him.

“Steve!” he hisses. “I’m tryin’ to sleep!”

Steve blinks back the darkness of their London room, tries to breathe even and slow. 

“Wha’ was it,” Bucky grumbles, voice rough with sleep.

“Nothin’. It’s stupid. Sorry I woke you.”

“You should be,” Bucky sighs into a stretch. “I was dreamin’ ‘bout Kingsway’s pastrami.”

He’s lying, probably. Bucky, when he dreams, wakes up thrashing. But it’s a nice thought. 

“It was just my apartment.” Steve rolls to his side, tries to find the outline of Bucky’s features in the dark.

“Which one?”

“Riverside.”

“No wonder, then. The roaches in that one had wings.” 

Steve knees him lightly. “Told you it was stupid.”

Bucky is still looking at him expectantly. The night is so quiet that all Steve can hear is his slow, steady breathing. 

“Tell me anyway.”

The mattress squeaks as Steve tries and fails to get comfortable.

“Back when the army wouldn’t take me,” Steve laughs, “getting left behind was the worst thing I could think of. Stupid right?”

He can’t stop laughing once he’s started because, really, he knows what a child’s body looks like after two weeks in the water. He knows that a howitzer can turn a man inside out. 

“Stupid,” Bucky echoes, low, and he’s not laughing, “cus now they can’t stand to let you go.”

“They will, though. Eventually they will.”

Bucky hums doubtfully, a sound that means he’s too tired to argue. He falls asleep this way, with his leg slung heavy and hot over Steve’s, holding him in place. 

Bucky sleeps straight through breakfast, not even stirring at the smell of Nescafe after months of camp coffee. Steve drinks his cup from a high-backed armchair with the radio down low. The AFN broadcasting at barely a whisper, but Steve hears just fine once they get to word of the 400,000 men planned for redeployment in Japan. He prickles under his skin, pulse thrumming the way he gets between assignments.

He focuses on keeping his mind quiet. Notices his breathing, in and out. The warmth of the mug in his hands. The pale sunlight trapped in Bucky’s bedhead. 

Steve quickly cracks his sketchbook open and gets back to shading the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. 

He waits until 10 to pinch the meat of Bucky’s bicep and choke out, “Mail’s here,” from the swift headlock that follows. 

Bucky releases him, his expression sliding from vengeful to bright as he thumbs through his letters from Winnie, Becca, Ella, and Charlotte. 

His face darkens again when Steve says, “Told you.” But only for a second, the way a cloud passes over the sun.

Bucky pats the spot next to him without looking up from the first page. “This part’s for you.”

Steve has to read Winnie’s neat scrawl twice over, his head’s so full of Bucky’s sleepy-warm smell. He smells ripe, really, and there must be something wrong with Steve, for that to make heat drop into belly.

Eventually, he manages to get the gist of Winnie’s message. Same as the last: two years, she thinks, is long enough to earn a ticket home.

Steve sinks back against the headboard. “I can help, so I should help.”

Bucky nods absently. 

“You know how many men have been here two years and still don’t have the points to get home?”

Bucky fumbles for his smokes and lighter on the nightstand. 

“I still ain’t arguing,” he says, consonants clipped around his cigarette. 

“First time for everything, I guess.”

Steve busies himself with the cathedral again while Bucky writes back against his own drawn up thigh. He lets the other knee splay against Steve’s, unthinking. Probably, he doesn’t even realize. Or care.

Early on, when his socks were always wet and C rations left him foggy with hunger, Steve would daydream about this. No funny business, not like that. Just a Saturday morning with no place to be. The sound of Bucky’s spare key in the lock, his endless yammering, the turning pages of his book, the whisper of Steve’s pencil. A warm, damp breeze through the window, maybe.

He hasn’t thought about that in a while, though. There’s too much distance between home and here, where that kind of stillness frays at his nerves. 

“You ain’t as slick as you think,” Bucky says without looking up from the page. 

Steve’s face heats up. He folds himself over the sketchbook like his bulk’s enough to hide the heavy brow, the sharp jaw taking shape on the page. He’s been drawing Baroque architecture since, hell, ‘42? For all the gawking he’d done back then, it doesn’t exactly hold his attention now. 

“I can’t sit still this long, Buck,” Steve scrubs a hand over his face, “I’m gonna go outta my mind.”

“Fine. You can draw me if you gotta.”

Steve snorts. Yeah, that’s one way to put it. It felt like that, sometimes, like he just had to. Bucky, floating away on a dream if Steve didn’t put the curve of his spine to paper, the curl of his fingers in sleep. 

“Show me after,” Bucky says, cigarette dangling from his lips. “No squirreling it away.”

The afternoon unfurls around them. Gauzy light behind lace curtains. Dreamy horns on the radio. The fluttery swish of Steve’s pencil and the disgruntled scrape of Bucky’s, crossing out another sentence.

He doesn’t pester, though, or steal glances over Steve’s shoulder. Bucky’s good at waiting like that. 

Steve nudges Bucky’s knee with his when he’s done. Holds up the page with sweaty palms for his scrutiny.

Bucky takes the sketchbook from him. Tilts his head to one side and the other. Goes quiet for a while, brow furrowed. He gives Steve an approving nod, then turns back to his letter.

“You know Ella’s gonna be taking the…” he holds up a page, squinting, “National Youth Administration’s Mechanical Training Program for the War Industry.”

“She always was real clever,” Steve says. 

Bucky scoffs. “She was playin’ with dolls still, when I left.”

“She had to grow up fast.” Steve sees himself at 12, shoulders squared against the onslaught of his mother’s advice. Here’s how to stretch a chicken stew with barley, here’s how to stretch an old sole with newsprint, here’s how to fill your belly up with tap water so you don’t notice the stew’s stretched too thin. “We did.”

Bucky tips his head back, exhaling a thin puff of smoke. “She probably wouldn’t even recognize me now.”

“They got your officer’s photo hanging right by the door. Can’t hardly go anywhere without you.”

“That ain’t how I mean.” Bucky takes a long drag of his cigarette, his gaze still far off. 

Steve shuts his eyes for a while and lets the radio program wash over him, no longer about the Philippines but on to Mail Call . It’s a rebroadcast, he knows because it’s hard to forget somebody writing in to ask Carole Landis to sigh into a microphone.

Steve likes this one. Though, probably not for the same reason Dugan and Falsworth did. He likes the idea that you could have something like that, sweet and easy, if you were brave enough to ask.

Bucky’s voice makes Steve start, low and a little rough from smoking. 

“You think my ma’ll recognize me?”

Steve follows his gaze to the sketch. 

“The hell are you talking about?”

Bucky smiles a little. Shakes his head and waves a hand. Rewrites and rewrites another letter.

Steve studies his own drawing, searching for the version Bucky saw. It’s no use, like looking for a hidden image inside this one. A goblet’s stem and two faces. He’s too close to it—he sees Buck everyday. Bucky is Bucky. 

Now, Bucky’s hair is uncombed and sticking up every which way; he could use a wash and a shave. His pink tongue pokes out one corner of his mouth in deep concentration, the same way with a pen as he is with a rifle scope. Bucky is Bucky.

“Let’s go out tonight,” Steve says.

“What, you get word of another protest?”

Steve scowls. “Those boys did the job they came here to do.”

Bucky looks at him pointedly.

Steve ignores him, the anger in his throat again, same as when he and Buck got sent to allied-occupied Austria to drum up some morale among restless military personnel. 

“They got no word when they’ll ever see their families again. They deserve to know when they’re going home. They were gonna get jailed instead.”

“But they didn’t.”

Steve scoffs.

“But they didn’t, ‘cus I went in swinging, same as you.”

“Okay. You’re right.”

Bucky gestures at him with his cigarette. “And don’t you fuckin’ forget it.” He rolls out his shoulders, lean muscles moving under his skin. “All I mean is, the brass sent us here to keep a low profile.”

“Come on, just one drink.”

Bucky closes his eyes. “Don’t say drink.”

“Music, then. Dancin’, even. Doesn’t matter.”

Bucky pokes him in the cheek. “What’ve you done with Steve?”

Steve slaps his hand away. “We could go see a flea circus for all I care, I just gotta get outta this room. Can't stand waiting around like this.”

Bucky gives him another once over, slightly less suspicious this time.

“No strikers?”

Steve shakes his head. 

“No agitators?”

“I swear.” Steve smirks. “I’m all yours.”

Bucky ducks his head, combing a hand through his greasy hair. It’s awfully endearing.

“Suppose it’s not insubordination if we’re only going to the bar downstairs.”

“Was hardly a direct order. More of a strong suggestion.”

Bucky blinks at him for a long second. “Guess you are Steve after all.”

He shouldn’t be surprised when Bucky never makes it back to Steve’s quiet corner with their drinks. A group of enlisted men, dates on their arms, hold out a comic for him to sign and Bucky makes sure to give them their money’s worth. He spent ages in their bathroom cleaning himself up, so he looks every bit the movie star from their OWI reels. 

Steve’s hearing is real good now, good enough to eavesdrop on Bucky’s rendition of Resia and wonder which one of them is remembering it wrong. He knows it happened, that they ran into a hailstorm of mortar fire to press the forward line. But that part’s out of focus.

The time that came after is what he remembers most, when they spent two days hunkered down in an empty pantry waiting for their delayed pickup. The excruciating dullness of it all was so vivid in contrast to the exhilarating blur. 

A lilting voice breaks through the din. “Hiding from your fans, are you?”

She’s small, no taller than Steve was once, but he always thought women looked outsized in their field uniform trousers.

“No—I. Like the quiet,” he says. “Old habit.”

Steve scans for an exit. That’s an old habit too.

“I bet that’d be worth a lot of money someday, now that this is over.” Steve isn’t sure how to stand, or where to put his hands, while she looks him over. “And then what?” 

“I’m sure they’ll find a way to sell more comics.”

He likes her smile, wry and a little mean. She quirks a brow, a pointed, wordless question. 

There’s a few different answers, though, all of them honest.

The truth: Steve hoped he’d get to make comics someday, not star in them. But here, that feels like childish fantasy. Wasteful.

Truer still: he could open his mouth and give shape to the nameless dread coiled up in his chest. 

Steve feels Bucky’s eyes flick to him across the room, no doubt disappointed in what he finds—Steve, after everything, all this time, still unable to fit in. 

Buck would smile shyly and tell her, That’s classified.

Steve says: “My last job, I worked for a green grocer.”

Her funny little smile widens, genuine and a little teasing. Steve feels himself grinning back. It’s a ridiculous picture, really, his obscene bulk taking up all the space behind the counter. Feeling for the ripeness of an Open Orchard peach without bruising it.

“What about you, miss?” 

“I have a new flat I’ve hardly seen. A new husband I’ve seen even less.”

“You’d leave all this then?”

“No,” she says, tracking his eyeline to red stripes on her sleeve. The smile slides off her face. She takes a long sip of her drink. “Could you?”

“Suppose it’s not really up to me.”

There’s something like pity shadowing the look she gives him next, so Steve asks her about herself. Her husband and her patients, about sugar rations and silk shortages. 

Steve’s usually a good listener—girls used to tell him he was a good listener—but he gets distracted by the melodic tilt of her voice. The Cork intonation is not so different, he thinks, from the accent his mother had once, before she practiced flattening her vowels in the bedroom mirror each morning when she thought Steve wasn’t looking. 

“Do you dance?” the nurse asks. The music fades, brassy and low. 

“I never really had a chance to learn,” Steve says. It’s not all the way a lie. 

At the bar, Bucky is pilfering a cigarette from one of the fellas. He sets it between his teeth on a wide, dazzling grin aimed in Steve’s direction. 

“You were smaller once,” the nurse muses. She’s squinting at him, like that’s something you could see in the right light.

“You did read the comics, then.”

“The boys in the recovery ward, the very young ones, they like them.”

Steve looks at his shoes. “I’m glad.”

Her eyes catch across the room, where two more nurses are waving hugely at her as they walk through the front door.

“It was nice meeting you, miss,” Steve says.

“You as well, Captain Rogers.” She pauses, looks back over her shoulder. “You know, I don’t think I believe all that.”

“Believe what?”

“That nobody’d give you a chance. Before.”

She’s gone before the heat crawling up Steve’s neck has a chance to reach his face. And then he’s alone, scanning the crowd for the familiar angle of Bucky’s shoulders.

Steve finds him in an alley behind the hotel. Steam billows from a nearby exhaust vent that blankets the night in the fresh, rosy smell of detergent. 

“Fun’s back thattaway,” Bucky says.

“Some fun, I couldn’t even get a drink in there.”

Bucky passes him the cigarette. “Yeah, well. Seemed rude to interrupt.”

The first long drag leaves Steve a little lightheaded. Or maybe that’s the way Buck’s teasing smile has turned brittle at the edges.

It’s tempting to push into that like a bruise, see how deep that vein of jealousy runs. But distance softens familiar piano chords, faraway and dreamy. Steve grinds out the cigarette with the heel of his boot and holds out his hand.

“Do you wanna dance, or what?”

“Steve,” Bucky says warningly, tilting his head toward the empty street.

Steve takes another big step back, where the slanting street lights can’t reach them. He waggles his hand. His heart beats like a drum. 

“Well, do you?”

Bucky rolls his eyes. Then reaches back.

Steve has been this way for two years, and he’s still mapping out the wonders, the grief. His stomach doesn’t burn, his spine doesn’t ache, his feet don’t tingle with numbness; he can’t tuck his head under Bucky’s chin, can’t fold himself into wide, familiar warmth. 

But when Bucky’s hand slides up between Steve’s shoulder blades, presses them cheek against cheek, they fit just right. They move just right. 

“You can’t keep telling those poor girls you don’t know how to dance.” Bucky’s low voice against his ear, a hot twist in Steve’s belly.

“Easier’n explaining why I never learned how to lead.”

Funny, it’s the simplest thing to turn his face into the crook of Bucky’s jaw and breathe him in. His cologne ran out ages ago, it’s just his clean sweat smell, his powdery aftershave. 

Bucky’s throat clicks when he swallows.

“I’m trying,” Steve says. “But I can’t help it.”

“Hey, now. You’re good at plenty of other things.”

Steve scoffs. The melody softens, piano chords trailing, time slipping and slipping. Steve, determined to hold on, pushes closer still. 

“Don’t you miss it?”

Bucky’s nose nudges Steve’s temple, his sigh tickles at the hairs there. 

“‘Course I fuckin’ miss it.” 

Why, then? is halfway out Steve’s throat, because he always argues, why. Why they can’t anymore, why Buck had to go and make a simple thing so hard.  

Bucky explained it like this: He could be someone who survives this. Or he could be Steve’s. But not both. 

His head was tipped back against a tree trunk, the forest damp seeping into the seat of their pants. The dawn was so shrouded in fog all the world might’ve fallen away behind it.

The sky is clear tonight, the shadows bleeding into the warm light of the city, every shop and pub with their doors flung wide open. A chorus of laughter as much of a melody as the band. 

“I been thinking about that walk-up apartment, the one Mr. Levi was renting out, above the grocery. How he might rent it to me, maybe.”

“What, you think he’d want your big feet clomping around?”

“I’d put down a rug.” 

Bucky turns them deeper into the dark, singing softly off-key, Goodnight sweetheart, goodnight. 

“There are two bedrooms in that apartment,” Steve murmurs. “Nobody’d think anything of it.”

“Lotta miles to go between there and here, Steve.” 

“Won’t be that long, now. You get the same reports I do. Just a few more months even, and we—”

Bucky cuts him off with a sharp, disapproving sound. “You’re just asking for bad luck now.”

Like his mother, who spit three times on the floor of their kitchen for bad news and carried salt in her pockets, Bucky has always been terribly superstitious.

Steve’s not inviting the evil eye, he’s not counting his chickens. He wants to know things won’t always be this way.  

“Steve,” Bucky murmurs, “They might not ever let you go. You know that right?”

“The hell I do.”

“Jesus, you’re impossible,” Bucky grits out. He sighs. Grumbles, “Ask me again.”

“What?”

Bucky’s hand slides up and up, cupping Steve’s neck.

“In a few more months, ask me again.”

Bucky’s hand on his skin is rough and wonderful. “That’s a long time to wait,” Steve complains.

Bucky’s chest shakes with quiet laughter. “You’re impossible.” 

The last lingering notes stretch into silence. Bucky pulls back to look at Steve’s face, suddenly serious. Steve’s grip tightens on his arm, bracing for the fragile moment to break, but what Bucky says is, “Did you mean that?” with his chin tucked to his chest. “You still mine tonight?”

Steve’s startled laugh bounces off the cobblestones. He knows from Bucky’s glower, the color high on his cheeks, that whatever game he’s playing at, Steve isn’t following the rules.

“I’m sorry!” Steve says, tugging Bucky back to his body before he can push away, petulant. Quieter, with their faces so close, “I’m sorry. But Jesus Christ, Buck, that was a stupid question.”

Bucky hauls up and kisses him. It’s downright mean, is what it is, too sweet and too soft for all that it makes Steve’s knees watery. A knowing smile curls against his lips. Bucky always did fight dirty.

Steve takes the loss in favor of sticking his tongue in Bucky’s mouth. 

He pulls Bucky in by his belt, swallows his sharp breath when their hips meet.

“Hell,” Bucky hisses, looking back over his shoulder. It has the effect of exposing the curve of his neck to the gentle scrape of Steve’s teeth. More breathless than sore, he whispers, “Slow down, ya animal.” 

Steve thought about this—of course he’s thought about this—and in the vivid color of his imagination, he was sure he’d do just that. Slow, a whole molasses-sweet afternoon spent just kissing, holding on and being held. When they were warm and dry and ordinary, when Bucky was quicker with a laugh, when he let Steve love him again. 

Course, none of that’s true tonight, and Steve’s not a patient man. 

“Hush,” he murmurs against Bucky’s throat, pulling them deeper into the shadows until they’re backed against a brick wall, solid and cool. It’s a stark contrast from the hot line of Bucky’s body pressed against him. “Or somebody’ll come looking.”

“We oughta take this someplace,” his breath hitches with Steve’s tongue in the hollow of his throat, “someplace else.”

“Hey, I got a place near here.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Uh-huh. Real nice, too.”

Bucky gets Steve's face in his hands so he can drop kisses across the curve of his jaw.

“If you can look past the pencil shavings in the sink, maybe.”

Steve pants, “And the boots in the middle of the floor.”

That gets Bucky shoving and snickering, real and bright. And hey, maybe Steve can get a little drunk after all, dizzy with Bucky’s arm slung across his shoulder, champagne bubbles buzzing under his skin while they carry on all the way up to the fourth floor. 

They jostle through the doorway, pushing and pulling, and pulling, and pulling, and then Bucky’s lips are moving against his again, easy as that. The simplest thing to keep sliding between friendship—brotherhood, that’s what they called it on the newsreels—and this. Maybe that’s been the problem from the start.

“You weren’t kidding,” Bucky breathes against his lips, “This place is pretty swell.”

A gilded cage is what it is, what it feels like. “I got a radio,” Steve brags. “And an empty bottle of vodka.”

“You must be real important.”

“Nah. Just another punk kid from Brooklyn. But you knew that.”

“Damn right.”

Bucky shoves him down by the shoulders and Steve goes, smiling hugely up at him while he untucks Bucky’s shirttails. Then there’s only a few buttons between him and Bucky’s soft belly. Steve presses his face there and breathes and breathes. Pushes his hands up Bucky’s shirt to feel the tensed, coiled strength of his stomach, his chest. 

Buck makes a wounded little sound and shoves Steve’s head again, impatient.

Steve licks a wet stripe over the skin above his belt, snickering at Bucky’s full-body shiver. Once he gets Bucky’s pants undone, he’s not laughing anymore.  

“Oh, fuck you,” he groans, forlorn.

Bucky combs Steve’s hair with gentle fingertips. “Yeah,” he agrees.

The shimmery ivory between the vee of his button fly is impossibly fine against the rough weave of their dress greens. 

“How the hell did you even get these? Thought there was a shortage.”

“There is. It’s parachute silk. German paratrooper crash landed in the garden of a nice young lady I met in Dorset,” Bucky says with a shy smile, his eyes heavy-lidded.

“Hell.” Steve traces along the waistband of his panties. “Lemme see.” 

Bucky slowly loosens his tie and unbuttons his shirt. Steps out of his pants without taking his eyes off Steve’s face, searching out his reactions. 

Steve’s eyes slide down the rise and fall of the silver dog tags on his chest, the hollow of his stomach, and finally, the tap pants. Silk from the nip of Bucky’s waist to the top of his thighs.

He knows enough about making do to recognize the care in each stitch, the resourcefulness in using every last bit of stolen fabric. 

Steve touches the hem of his little shorts, where there’s a paneling of lace and Bucky’s pale skin underneath. Bucky sucks in a sharp breath, thighs flexing. His long legs used to be honey-tan in the summer, Steve remembers. Now, he’s pale all over, cream against cream. 

“She thought I was bringing home a souvenir for my sweetheart.” 

Bucky’s tongue slides over flushed pink lips, turning them even pinker. An old nervous habit all his girls mistake for a come on. 

Steve understands the rules of this game now, he thinks.

“They’re beautiful,” he says, with every ounce of feeling Bucky deserves.

Bucky is as beautiful with a rifle over his shoulder as he ever was in nylons. But he was beautiful in his southpaw stance, too, and when he was slipping a right hook. And squinting at sums for his da in the low light of the Barnses kitchen lamp, hardly enough to read by. When he was listening intently to Becca’s awful poetry, arms crossed and eyes closed. When he was practicing his French with Gabe by firelight, and when he was hunched over a piano. 

Steve has seen how war flattens young men the same way three days of shelling strips a forest bare.

But Bucky is still all of these things. He is more. 

“What’s the occasion?” Steve asks, his thumbs shaping small, careful circles underneath the hem. 

“I thought, maybe,” Bucky says, “if you were very good…”

Steve headbutts Bucky’s thigh. “I can be good.” He watches his hands slide up the little shorts until he’s thumbing the crease of Bucky’s hips. “But not very good.” 

Bucky’s stomach muscles clench. He rests his hand on Steve's hair. “Let’s see.”

Steve skims his other hand over the fabric. His shield calluses catch on the silk, pulling it that much tighter against Bucky. He gives up a quiet, shaky exhale through his nose.

“They feel good, huh?”

Bucky gives a choked sort of laugh as Steve pets the tops of his thighs, the divot of his hips, the hair on his stomach—everyplace except where he’s getting hard under the thin fabric.

“You had these on all night?”

“Been driving me outta my mind.”

Steve sees Bucky jostling and joking, always so at ease among groups of fellas that still set Steve on edge, make him brace for the worst. Only now he knows that Bucky’s nerves were lit up and jangly all the while.

“Seem to be enjoying yourself just fine.” Steve leans in to nose at the lace panel, his breath warming the silk and making Bucky’s mouth drop open.

“They keep rubbing on me when everything already feels–” Bucky’s fingers tighten in Steve’s hair while he drags an open mouth kiss over him, lip catching on the fabric.

“Like what?”

“Like, like being 16 all over again. And, shit,” Steve mouths at him, barely a press of lips where he’s blood-hot and hard, watches him twitch under the silk and get even harder, “And I don’t got control over any of it.”

Steve snickers. He’s got some choice memories of Buck at 16. 

“Hey,” Bucky shoves lightly at his head. “It ain’t funny. It’s bullshit is what it is.”

Steve takes pity on him, easing off to stroke up and down his legs.

“The tights were hell at first,” he admits. He hears Bucky’s answering grin before he sees it. “You got somethin’ funny to say?”

“No sir. A promise is a promise.” He mimes a lock and key over his pressed-together lips. Steve kisses his hip, thank you , and Bucky asks, “How’d you stand it?”

In his dressing room, if he had one, rushed and frantic, conjuring up a smoke-deep laugh and pale eyes.

“Well I had the shield, right? Just had to hold it close, yay high, like this.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Yes.” Steve grins up at him, holds his eyes and kisses down and down. “Mostly I got used to it.” 

He sucks a kiss over the base of Bucky’s cock through the panties until he hears the thud of Bucky’s head falling back against the door. There’s a spot of wet where he’s tenting the fabric—Steve takes it on his tongue. 

Bucky curses, pawing at Steve’s hair like he’s torn between pushing him away and pulling him closer. “You’re gonna make me ruin ‘em,” he groans.

Gosh, isn’t that a fun thought. Steve presses the heel of his hand against his cock, aching against his fly.

“Steve, swear you won’t,” Bucky whispers, even as his hips hitch up helplessly.

“I swear,” Steve says, kissing his way back down. He sucks a bruise into the inside of Bucky’s thigh at the same time as he pulls Bucky’s cock through the leg of his tap pants.

“Aw hell,” Bucky whines.

Steve shushes him, heat lancing his gut at the sight of him, pink and flushed, peeking out from the silk, and sucks the tip into his mouth.

Bucky makes a sound, shocked and bitten off and wonderful, so wonderful, Steve needs to hear it again. But one beautiful second Bucky’s hips are jerking into Steve’s mouth and the next, Steve’s getting kneed in the gut. Bucky lunges at him, laughing wildly, “You swore!”

Steve finds himself on his back, arguing, “It was a loophole!”

“A loophole?" Bucky slaps at him while Steve ducks only a little half-heartedly. “You haven’t changed one bit, you overgrown little twerp, I oughta—”

Steve catches his wrists while Bucky writhes around in his lap. He’s been smiling so hard his eyes are still crinkled at the corners, like they used to, like before, like everything’s the way it was before.

Steve surges up to kiss him hard. 

Bucky’s disgruntled little sounds give way to eager sighs once Steve starts to roll his hips. He lets Bucky pin his hands over his head, finding a rhythm that makes both of them gasp out, even if the floor is really fucking uncomfortable, Jesus —

“Christ, Buck, your shoes, fuck!” Steve frees himself from Bucky’s grip to dig a boot out from under his low back. He thwacks Bucky in the rear with it.

Bucky shrugs, otherwise occupied with loosening Steve’s tie. “Speaking of, take yours off.”

It takes longer than it should to get out of his dress uniform when he and Bucky keep swiping and shoving at each other to reach Steve’s jacket first, his shirt buttons, his fly. 

Bucky rocks his hips once Steve’s bare underneath him. The silk slides against his cock, soft and warm and overwhelming. 

“Oh, Jesus,” Steve groans.

Bucky smiles above him with all sharp teeth, his hands opposite Steve’s head on the floorboards.

Steve whines when their lips meet. 

“Oh, that feels—shit—” He holds fast to Bucky’s hips, locking them into a slow grind. 

“Yeah? You feel good, honey?”

Steve nods quickly. Bucky nips at his bottom lip, kisses it better soft and sweet with a hot little sigh in time to the slide of their bodies together.

Bucky licks his lips. “You really like them, then?”

Steve laughs, rocking up hard so Bucky can feel for himself just how much. Which also has the effect of making his toes curl against the floor and grinding whatever shards of patience he has left into a fine powder. 

“Could we?” He reaches around to feel for the curve of Bucky’s ass under the hem. “With them on?”

Bucky’s breath catches. “Yeah—you can—can you push ‘em to the side a little?” He sits back on his knees. “Yeah. Like that. Pass me that bag right there.”

Steve fumbles for Bucky’s pack, endlessly grateful that he dropped it as haphazardly as the boots.

When he finds it, Bucky snatches his first aid tin out of Steve’s hand. Skims enough Petrolatum to slick his fingers and reach back where Steve can’t see, lashes lowering and breath catching. 

“Just gimme a minute, okay?” He grunts a laugh, rolls his long, beautiful neck. “It’s—been a while.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, his throat suddenly raw with it. He can’t stop touching every dear inch of him, it’s been so long. The twitching muscles in his thighs, the sharp cut of his hips, the coarse hair on his belly and his chest. He rests his fingertips in the ladder of Bucky’s ribs, expanding and falling fast now.

“Please tell me you’re ready.”

Bucky sighs, eyes still closed, “Yeah, I–yeah,” and shifts the weight on his knees, wincing. 

“Hey, wait.”

Bucky does.

Steve props himself up on his elbows. “So the thing about this place is: there’s also a bed.”

Bucky narrows his eyes. Then shoves Steve back down so he can beat him there. He does, even with Steve swiping at his ankles. 

The mattress gives a threatening squeal when Steve flops onto it, making Bucky bounce and the both of them giggle. 

Steve gets himself over Bucky so he’s staring down at his mussed hair and his red mouth and each and every one of his laugh lines and then, because he can’t help but ruin the whole thing, blurts out, “I missed you so bad.”

Bucky’s wide smile narrows away one inch at a time. “You’ve had me.” He holds Steve’s eyes, defiant. 

Steve shakes his head; he’s not backing down either.

Bucky looks away first, gaze sliding down Steve’s throat. He touches him there, over his pulse, with careful fingertips. “You got me right now. Okay?”

He’s holding up a rubber from the same tin, then rolling it on and slicking Steve up so tight and perfect that all Steve can manage is please and please . And that’s okay, that’s fine, because if now is all he’s liable to get there's no sense in wasting another goddamn second. 

Bucky makes a broken sound while letting Steve arrange him on all fours, then a sharp one when Steve starts pawing at his panties to make room for himself.

“Sorry, shit, sorry.” He eases his grip on Bucky’s waist. Kisses up the curve of his spine, one shoulder and the other. “I can be careful.”

“You don’t gotta be,” Bucky breathes, even as he’s starting to melt, all the muscles holding him up going lax and easy. 

Steve, because he understands him, even when he’s lying, drops a kiss in his hair. The soft skin below his ear.

“Wanna be careful with you. You gonna let me?”

Bucky does. Lets himself be pulled into Steve’s lap, back to chest, with the panties pulled off to one side. Lets his head fall back on Steve’s shoulder, lets Steve start to push in and in, his lips parted and wet around a shuddering breath.

They pant for a while after Bucky’s flush to Steve’s hips. Bucky’s breath is hot against Steve’s ear, a molten pulse of want beating in time with the throb of his cock. With Bucky’s heartbeat against his chest. A searing thump, thump, thumping ache drowning out everything else.

“Oh hell, Buck.” He can hardly stand to move but he can’t seem to stop the steady grind and twitch of his hips either.

Bucky pants, “We’re gonna die of old age.”

Steve pushes his face against the hinge of Buck’s jaw, where he’s already sandpapery with stubble again.

“I ain’t gonna last two minutes.”

Bucky pats Steve’s thigh. “Just do your best, pal,” he says, because he still knows how to find and push Steve’s buttons. 

Steve’s best must be alright for Bucky, because he keeps making the softest sighs against Steve’s jaw while Steve’s hands wander and slide over the hard muscle of Bucky’s chest, the silk over his low belly. He rolls his palm over Bucky’s prick, still straining against the silk, and then again, just to hear the cutoff whine trapped in Bucky’s throat.

Bucky cups the back of Steve’s neck, tilts him until they’re kissing slow and sweet, more breath than lips passed between them.

“Is it good, Buck?”

“S’good, honey, it’s so good.”

Bucky knuckles at his eyes, fast like Steve won’t see. It’s funny really, Bucky’s been blubbering at matinees since Steve’s known him, and he’ll still get embarrassed about crying like this. 

“You’re always good to me, Stevie.” He laughs weakly against Steve’s cheek, a puff of breath, the nudge of Bucky’s nose, a brush of his lips. “Why’re you so good to me?”

Steve wraps his arms all the way around and squeezes. He has a wild thought of keeping Bucky that way forever, safe in the cage of his embrace.

“Jesus, Buck. Why the hell d’you think?”

Bucky noses at Steve’s temple and kisses his hair as he lowers himself flush to Steve’s lap and makes them both moan. 

“Hey, don’t let go, big guy.”

Bucky plants his heels and starts to move. Steve smoothes his lips across the rolling muscles between Bucky’s shoulder blades and makes the mistake of looking down, past the curve of his spine, past the lace, and tries not to shoot off right then and there at the sight of him sliding in and out of Bucky, where they’re joined together.

“You gonna come? You are, aren’t you?”

Steve shakes his head hard. 

“You are,” Bucky breathes, and Steve can hear the smirk in it. “You’re shaking with it.”

“I’m not ready.”

Bucky shushes him. It’s a hot puff of breath against his ear, a soft scrape of teeth that carves its way down his gut. He crashes through his orgasm as soundlessly as he can manage, torn between Bucky’s teeth in his neck and the hot clutch of his body, every bit of him holding on so tight.

Bucky kisses his last shuddering breath off his lips. He bites back a wild, delighted smile. “You still make the same face.”

He groans when Steve pulls out a little too fast, then squeaks when Steve shoves him on his back to bite the skin below his navel through the silk. 

“Jesus, you animal! It was a compliment! It was a compliment!”

Steve gentles without meaning to once he gets his mouth on the fair, tender skin on the inside of his thighs. Licks over the bruise he left behind.

“Please, Stevie, no more teasing,” Bucky says, teeth grit and neck arched. “I can’t. Please make me come.”

Steve glares from between Bucky’s legs. “What do you think I’m doing down here?”

Bucky hooks a calf over his shoulder, tugs Steve in that much closer to where he wants him.

Steve hovers over the tiny button closure on Bucky’s panties, impossibly delicate. Steve’s hands aren’t shaking anymore, but they’re still too big, still alien if he looks too close for too long. But he can be careful, he can, he’s sure he still can.

He slides the panties down Bucky’s legs with as much care as he can manage with Bucky wriggling impatiently the way he is. Bucky moans with relief when he gets a hand on himself, lazy strokes like he’s just taking the edge off. He watches Steve mouth his way back up with dark eyes and kissed-red lips. 

Steve has to taste him there, too, licking into his mouth just to hear those desperate little sounds rise in pitch before he ducks back down to tongue through all the slick Bucky’s been making. 

Bucky chants, oh god, oh god, oh god, as he feeds his cock into Steve’s mouth. He’s coming before Steve reaches his own knuckles.

He winds up slower the second time. Rakes his nails through Steve’s scalp, thighs shaking around his ears. Finishes with a long, lovely sigh and his back arching up and up. 

With his cheek against Bucky’s hip, Steve drifts for a while in calm, familiar waters: the earthy smell of sex, Buck’s sharp-sweet smokes. Steve props himself up on one elbow to reach for the cigarette Bucky holds out to him. It scrapes against the raw feeling in his throat, but it’s a good kind of tenderness to match the pleasant ache in his jaw, his groin. The kind that wraps him up a blanket of calm. 

“Have you? Since…?” Bucky gestures with his cigarette to the long length of Steve’s body.

“No.”

“Did you like it?” 

Steve almost laughs at him— did he like it? — but Bucky’s lashes are swept low over his cheeks, his lips frowning around the cigarette.

But relief is the only name Steve has for the feeling flooding his chest. When he was smaller and locked inside his body, when he could have this, when he could make Bucky shake and curse and pray. He knew then, what it felt like to be wonderfully made. He still does. It is a relief.

“Was it like that for you?” Steve says, quiet. “After.”

Night is awash with color for him now, no longer grayscale but deeply blue into purple where the curtains dampen the nightglow from the street. 

Bucky says, “It’s not like this with anybody else.”

Steve holds his hand out for the cigarette, takes one last drag before putting it out on the ashtray on their nightstand. 

He curls, thoughtless, into Bucky’s side, but Bucky holds him back with a hand on his chest before he can fit his head under Bucky’s chin.

“Hang on,” he says. “Lemme get a good look at you.”

Maybe Bucky doesn’t see the way he does, because he feels out Steve’s edges like he’s blending the shadows with charcoal. Lazy strokes along the damp hair at his temple, the bow of his lip, the jut of his chin, bringing the shape of him to life.

Thing is, Steve doesn’t spend much time spotting for Buck if he can help it. He’s useless there, so far away. He’s better suited for drawing them out, for close combat. So that’s what he does. That’s what he’s done.

Bucky is too close. It’s too much, he’s being too gentle. 

How strange, the things his body remembers. The things it forgets.

“Can I say it now?” Bucky whispers. “Now that all those Hollywood bigshots agree with me?”

“No.” Steve covers his face with the crook of his elbow. “Same rules apply.”

“But sweetheart,” Bucky coos, syrupy sweet. “You look like a movie star, you know that?”

“Still a terrible line,” he mutters.

“Nuh-uh. Now it’s a verifiable fact.” 

Steve hums doubtfully. 

“They got this face,” Bucky pinches Steve’s chin,  “plastered over half of London.”

Steve cracks one eye open. He jokes, “You think my ma’d recognize me?” 

It’s a joke. It’s just a stupid joke and—

And Bucky’s hands are on Steve’s face so fast, thumbs smoothing the corners of his mouth, where his smile has started crumpling. Bucky laughs, a relieved breathless sound.

“I did.”

“Sorry,” Steve hears himself murmuring, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” because love leaves you flayed open, and he’s no good at hiding that away, not like Bucky.  

Bucky lets Steve curl around him. His arms don’t fit around Steve’s back, but he holds on just as tight.  

It feels safe enough to ask here, under the cover of darkness, “What do you do with guys like us after this is all over?” 

“Thought you had all a’ that figured out.” 

Steve’s laugh is a little watery.

“I figure, we know how to make the best of things. You and me.” His lips move against Steve’s hair, the words muffled there, and Steve feels the heat of them seep through to the core of him with all the heat of stolen gin. “Will you really wait a while longer?”

Steve kisses his throat, nuzzles in close.  “Buck,” he says, “you ask the stupidest fuckin’ questions.”