Chapter Text
Steve's building is nice. Like, nice nice. Bucky's feeling pretty underdressed when he steps into the lobby—how many buildings in this part of Brooklyn have lobbies?—and takes in the spotless interior, front desk that actually has someone behind it, and various locked doors leading to amenities. He spots a gym, a pool, and a sign that says saunabefore he reminds himself to focus.
"Hi," he greets the front desk worker, a woman about Bucky's age who eyes Bucky with unjustified suspicion. Sure, the beat-up leather jacket, helmet-mussed hair, and jeans that have really seen better days don't exactly scream ritzy but he hardly looks like he's here to rob the place. "I'm here to see someone. Steve Rogers? He's expecting me."
She ticks an eyebrow. "Steve Rogers?"
"Yeah."
"Which unit?"
Oh, she absolutely knows which unit. She's testing him. "He didn't give me the unit."
"If he lives here, I can't give out his room number or let you roam the building unaccompanied. It's policy."
"Seriously?" Bucky leans against the counter, having to set his helmet on it to free up his hands. He doesn't want to have to bother Steve about not being let up; that ruins the fun of showing up right at his door like he used to do when they were kids. "Look, I know he lives here, the punk just forgot to give me the unit. I'm a friend of his."
"I'm afraid I can't do that."
In the background, the elevator dings and the doors rumble open.
"Fine. I'll call him and we can get this cleared up."
"Feel free."
Side-eyeing the employee, Bucky gets his phone out. He doesn't even have time to get to his contacts before movement out of the corner of his eye catches his attention. Tony and Sam both pause in their trek across the lobby.
Sam grins. "Oh, now I get it."
"Good," Tony declares with a nod.
Bucky furrows his brows but neither of them elaborates, they just keep walking.
"He's good, Maria!" Tony calls over his shoulder with a wave. He spins on a heel for a couple strides to finger-gun at Bucky. "I'll have Pep update your schedule tonight. Consider yourself reinstated."
Then he's out the door and Bucky's left staring. He'd expected to have to do more to get his job back, but…okay?
"Well," he says to Maria, "can you send me up now?"
She doesn't look thrilled about it, but she nevertheless tells him Steve's unit number.
Bucky's pleased smile drops when he reaches the elevators, which need a keycard to function.
"Sorry," Maria calls, sounding not sorry at all. "Looks like you'll have to take the stairs. I can unlock that door from here."
"Not the elevators?"
"Unfortunately not."
He plasters on a smile and resolves to find a way through her guard. Her choosing to dislike him for no reason, well, that's her choice, but he'll change her mind. He'll find a way somehow. Just…not right now, since she seems liable to sic security on him if he looks at her funny. Maybe she is the security.
True to her word, she unlocks the stairwell door when he gets close. Then it's just a climb up to the fifth floor, a journey that definitely doesn't leave him pausing on the last landing to catch his breath.
Yeah. He really needs to make a good second impression.
Once he's pretty sure Steve won't be able to tell he's still a little winded, Bucky locates Steve's door and gives three solid knocks. Then he's spending the seconds he has before the door opens straightening his jacket, running fingers through his hair to try to detangle it, and shifting his stance into something a little more casual, all so when the door does open he can look Steve in his pretty blue eyes and say—
"Hey."
"Hey," Steve breathes, before hitting him with a smile so full of sunshine that it warms Bucky from head to toe. "Come on in."
He follows Steve inside, stepping around a backpack leaned up against the shoe rack, and takes in the interior. He can't help releasing a low whistle. Just like the building, Steve's actual apartment is nice. A seventy-something inch flatscreen over an entertainment cabinet packed with hardware, a luxurious curved couch facing it, a kitchen that would put some restaurants to shame and an actual, honest-to-God dining room table mark it as somewhere with time and money put into the décor. A couple of closed doors indicate bedrooms. There are, by Bucky's count, at least three, plus the loft overhead.
"Sorry about the mess," Steve says while he gets them both glasses of water.
"Mess?" Bucky repeats. Does Steve think the jackets tossed haphazardly on the backs of the dining room chairs or the handful of loose papers scattered around counts as mess? Bucky's studio would give the man a heart attack. Because he likes causing problems, Bucky sheds his jacket and tosses it on the nearest chair not yet claimed. "I guess I'll forgive it."
Steve hits him with another sunshine smile while passing off the water. Dazzled, it takes Bucky a second to recover his train of thought—a train that had stopped at the realization that, in stopping by Steve's door, he'd failed to process that there were no other doors in that hallway, meaning that this apartment takes up the entire top floor of the building.
"How the hell did you land a place this swanky?" Bucky asks, and he truly doesn't mean for it to come out as bewildered as it does. Thankfully, Steve doesn't take it as an insult. In fact, it draws a small chuckle from him.
"It's Tony's. I couldn't afford this place on my own."
"Yeah, no offense, I kinda figured that. How…?" He flashes back to the lobby. "You're all roommates. Roommates and…Tony's also your landlord and boss?" As he speaks, Bucky contextualizes that weird interaction with those two. If he had to squint through the blinding light radiating off Steve all morning, he'd be curious about the reason behind it too.
"I'll admit it's a weird situation."
"I'm pretty sure ironclad friendships have burnt to the ground over less."
"We get along well. Sam is a good mediator when we don't."
Bucky trails after Steve to the couch. "How'd all this happen, anyway? Did you go to school together?"
"No, we met later." Rather than sit, though, Steve starts taking the cushions out. Bucky's confused for a second until he remembers what Steve offered the previous day. Grinning, he follows Steve's example.
"So you moved in with a couple'a guys you barely knew."
"Give me some credit."
"Give me a reason to."
"I met Sam when I was out running. We had the same route."
"Uh-huh."
"A little while later, I got commissioned by Pepper for murals in a new venue that was opening up nearby. Tony, Sam, and I hung out a lot while I was doing that work. Tony heard about our living situations—don't give me that look, I wasn't homeless—"
"Were you living in a pillow fort?" Bucky taps the dining room chair he's co-opted for structural support. Steve, in the middle of spreading out a blanket for the roof, rolls his eyes.
"No, I was not."
"Were Tony and Pepper already dating? Kinda weird for him to move in with two guys at that point."
"They were still figuring things out, I think. Anyway, after we'd gotten to know each other, Tony proposed—"
"Proposed, did he?"
"Shut up. Tony offered up this place and Sam and I took him up on it to save on costs for a while."
"Wow. That almost makes it sound like you didn't move in with two guys you barely knew."
Steve chucks a pillow at him, which Bucky catches and adds to the stack he's using to brace a broomstick acting as a tent pole to keep the blanket-roof from collapsing. As their fort-building expands and they start having to work from the interior, a thought strikes Bucky.
"I, uh. I don't think Maria likes me. The lady at the front desk, I mean."
Steve pokes his head out from behind one of the couch cushions acting as an inner wall. Their fort's up to three small rooms, though Bucky's about to suggest an open concept plan for ease of shenaniganry. "Really?"
"She made me take the stairs."
"Oh. Uh." Steve scratches the back of his neck. "She may have heard about how we fell out."
"May have?"
"And I might've forgotten to clear things up."
"Might've?"
"I'll talk to her. She's good friends with Pepper, she'd hear about it eventually."
"You're not inspiring a lotta confidence right now, pal."
"I'll fix it."
"Just like you can fix that wall you just bumped outta place."
"Did I? Damn."
They keep working. Inside the fort, with its blanketed floor and ceiling and its soft pillow and cushion walls, all sound is slightly muted for lack of echoes, and it's warm. Cozy. Bucky declares his work on the main space done and flops into a small nest of blankets Steve pulled out of the closet a little while earlier.
"Done already?" Steve asks.
"It's important to take breaks. C'mere, it's comfortable. What's the point of a pillow fort if you're not relaxing in it?"
"I'm pretty sure we used to pretend we were fighting off alien invasions."
"Well, lucky for you, there are no aliens. Hydra had that whole team-up issue with their nemeses to fight off the common enemy."
"You read the tie-in comics?"
"Yeah, they were way cooler than the actual shit going on with the band. Plus the art was just good."
"Did they tell you what they're going to do with the Winter Soldier?"
"They can't really do anything." Bucky raises his left arm and brushes the blanket above with his fingertips. He can't feel any contact that gentle, but he can see that he is making contact by how the blanket moves. "Hard to find another guy with this kind of arm. Or one who's willing to lose an arm to get this one. Lotta copycats have come out of the woodwork, though."
"You heard about the one in Florida."
Snorting, Bucky lets his hand drop. The blankets help to muffle the thunk of the metal against the floor. "Yeah, I heard. Of all the places, they thought the Winter Soldier would go to Florida? I'm almost offended. That guy deserved to get unmasked as a fake as fast as he did." He purses his lips. "It's weird to think about. People liking that character so much they want to be him. I wish I could tell them it's not worth it." He feels Steve's eyes on him and realizes he does not at all want to retread this ground while trying to enjoy the comfortable atmosphere of the blanket fort. "Anyway, they can do what they want, I'm not gonna stop 'em, and I'm definitely not gonna let the paparazzi find me by outing myself."
"Won't your arm give the game away?"
"The last person to see it thought it was just a tribute to the band."
"Seriously?"
"Yeah. Then she got a little, uh," Bucky's face is on fire, "distracted."
Steve's silence is painfully drawn out. "Distracted. Is this the woman you've been talking to at the bar?"
"It was, she was, I—her name's Claire."
"She seems nice."
"She is." Was he too quick to say that? Maybe. "That was temporary, though. Just a fling. We, uh. We were kinda using each other."
Steve rolls over to look at Bucky, frowning.
"Hey, we're adults," Bucky protests. "We knew what we were doing."
"And what were you doing?" Steve asks, eyes intent, and Bucky's mouth goes dry.
Making a mistake, he wants to say, but that's not gonna be helpful. Instead, he says, "Wasting time."
"So are you still…flinging?"
Bucky can't stifle his laugh in time. "No, Steve, we're not still 'flinging.' What are you, seven?"
Steve rolls over to put his back to Bucky. "Shut up, I've never had to ask anyone that before."
"I can hear your blush."
Steve's answer is to kick Bucky's leg. Bucky kicks him back, only to feel his calf bump into something when he finishes the motion.
Something that moves. Something like the broomstick holding up the ceiling.
"Oh, shi—"
The whole fort collapses on them. First the blanket, and then from its weight all the cushions forming the walls thud down. Bucky shields his head as the fort tumbles down. When things begin to settle, a noise and accompanying vibrations makes its way through the many muffling layers around Bucky: laughter.
"Like you've never done that," Bucky says dryly. Steve just keeps laughing.
Once they manage to extricate themselves from the ruins, they give up on the fort and move to another old haunt: the fire escape. This is a different building than the ones they grew up in, sure, but the size is the same and the idea of not burning to death is also the same.
Bucky does spare a second's attention to glance at Steve's desk on the way to the window. There's a cheap plastic ghost keychain hanging from the lamp. Glow in the dark, Bucky remembers. That had cost extra tickets. He smiles.
New building or not, he feels right as home the second he crawls out the window after Steve and finds a seat next to him with his feet dangling over the drop to the alley below. Even the way the metal rattles under their weight brings comfort.
For a little while, they talk about nothing in particular. It's nice to just bask in the old routine. The fire escape has changed, they've changed, even the city has changed—but in this small way, it's all still the same.
"Hey," Steve eventually says, in a tone that tells Bucky he's probably not gonna like what comes next. "What you said, about it not being worth it…"
"Don't worry about it."
"I mean, I'm gonna worry, Buck. Did you like any of your songs with them? I mean, it's not like you have to like any, but…there's gotta be something you enjoyed."
He trails off at the end almost like it's a question and Bucky can tell Steve wants him to have an answer. Steve wants to know Bucky wasn't miserable the entire time. And hell, Bucky would like to know that too.
"Hm." Bucky rolls the question around in his head. "If I had to choose, Partial Recall. They gave me the most freedom on that one and the rest of the guys didn't pull their usual bullshit when we performed it." Even if they never played it again after the first handful of shows. It didn't fit with the rest of the band's sound as much, so it got buried in the depths of their discography.
"Usual bullshit?"
He waves a hand. "Surprise solos, abrupt transitions to other songs, tempo changes, there was even the time they decided to do an acoustic version on the spot." He chuckles lowly. "That stunt was early on. I wasn't the only one who hated them for that—whole crowd and the sound engineers had a bone to pick. A whole skeleton, really. God, I thought they were gonna start throwing things."
"I'll have to give it a listen."
"Here." Bucky pulls out his phone and starts scrolling through his music library. He catches Steve peering at the screen and grins crookedly. "I didn't have a ton of interest in listening to my own music, but I wasn't cutting myself off. We had some really good opening acts. Besides, like you said, there were some things I enjoyed."
He finds Partial Recall amid the grand collection of four Hydra songs he has on his phone and starts playing it, setting his phone on the landing between them so he doesn't have to keep holding it. The lonely bass drum, a solitary beating heart, escapes the speakers. Bucky closes his eyes, remembering the time he spent testing out different intros. He'd started with big, grand statements. A flooding through of memory, something violent, something painful. In the end, he'd decided to start slow. The recall was just a distraction right up until those violent bits he cannily recycled for the chorus came crashing down and made it impossible to ignore.
Steve didn't say anything until the song's outro—that same heartbeat, slowing to silence—faded out.
"It's a good song."
Bucky chuckled. "You don't need to be nice to me, my ego can take it. I know it's not your style."
"Right. It's yours. I like your style."
Well, didn't that make a guy feel good. "You're gonna make me blush, pal, sayin' all these nice things." He said it lightly but there was heat in his cheeks threatening to become a real blush. "Did you ever listen to their songs?"
"I did when I was working on a commission a while back, you know, to get into the right headspace."
"Anything stand out?"
"Uh. Honestly, not sure I remember their titles. There was one—something about a bridge?"
Bucky brightens and starts poking at his phone again. "Hey, yeah! A Man on A Bridge. That's a good one, I can see why you'd like it."
"Is that another one of the—how many do you like, actually? Your face made me think it wasn't many."
"Like? Four. Partial Recall, A Man on A Bridge, Ravine, and Insight. Those last two I only really like because they're real workouts on the drums."
"Angry songs?" Steve guesses.
"Exactly. Plus, Insight is over 170 beats per minute, at least until the outro. Ah, here it is."
They lean in close over Bucky's phone again and Bucky is painfully aware of Steve's proximity the entire time. He hopes the music drowns out his pounding heart. If he breathes too deep, he gets a lungful of Steve's ocean-scented deodorant, and that's just patently unfair to a guy trying to maintain his composure.
As the song plays, Bucky watches Steve bob his head to the beat while Bucky swings his legs. There's a minute of perplexed and focused brow-furrowing until it hits the chorus and Steve smiles in recognition.
"Yeah, this is it. I remember getting confused by that line."
"Confused?"
"I mean, the song is all about meeting a guy on a bridge, right? But that—'there is no me'—I dunno, it just made me wonder if there was even a second guy at all."
Bucky laughs. "Congratulations, you stumbled on one of the biggest debates Hydra's music ever caused."
"What, how many people were on the bridge?"
"You know how it's a song all about finding some source of stability in a time of transition?"
"Uh, sure." They pause to listen to the next verse, and Steve nods. "Okay, yeah. A bridge, I get it."
"Right. And if you listen, there are lines that could go either way—whether there's just one guy on this bridge or two. 'I knew him' and 'he didn't even know me' but it really sounds like they're being spoken by the same guy, right?"
"I…yeah, I can see that."
The song plays in its entirety and Bucky scoops his phone back up. "Still like it?"
"Yeah. I'm glad I know the title now." Steve smiles in a way that makes Bucky's heart flip. "The drumming was nice."
Bucky snorts. "Flatterer. The drumming was always nice."
"So what's the answer?"
"To what?"
"The debate. How many people are on the bridge? You were in the band, you were there when it was written."
"I was," Bucky confirms, "and I'm not telling you a damn thing. That ruins the whole point of the song."
"You wanted a debate?"
"Yeah, this whole album—Project Insight—was all about making our audience think. That was the idea, at least. Didn't really turn out that way." The titular track was more about not thinking because of all the chaos. Schmidt had been so proud of himself for that subversion of expectations. "Anyway, the answer is whatever you need it to be, not whatever the band says. Maybe you're the only stability you need. Maybe you're more stable than you think. Maybe you really do need a helping hand reaching out. Meaning is in the ear of the listener and all that."
"That's not how the saying goes. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You can't just plug words into popular sayings."
"Watch me. And while you're doing that, beholder, why don't you tell me what you see?" He grins when a bit of color hits Steve's cheeks, then decides to take pity on the guy. They didn't decide to hang out to have deep philosophical lectures. "Enough about me and mine. What have you been up to all these years? How'd you get," he gestures at all of Steve, "that?"
Steve goes fully red and rubs the back of his neck. "Guess I was pretty small, last you saw me."
"Well, you were thirteen, so you had an excuse. What, did puberty hit you like a train or something?"
"Or something. There was a, uh, experimental trial. A kind of gene therapy. Don't ask me how I ended up on the list of patients, I don't understand it either—maybe they looked at my chart and thought they couldn't possibly make it worse."
Bucky snorts.
"It took a couple years and more needles than I care to count, but the end result is," he gestures at all of himself, "this."
"This," Bucky declares, "is pretty nice. That night of my surprise gig at Tony's, I saw you but I didn't even recognize you. But you looked familiar. It was driving me nuts."
"If it makes you feel any better, I was feeling the same thing."
"So, what was it like? Did you just," he mimes raising a hand higher, "shoot up, fill out? Because you look fresh off a lacrosse field these days."
"Now who's gonna make who blush? It happened pretty fast, honestly. Remember when you had that growth spurt when you were twelve?"
"How can I forget? I couldn't wear my favorite pants or my favorite neon shoes anymore. It was devastating."
"Right, it was the same for me. Didn't have to endure every awful part of puberty again, but it wasn't pleasant. God, you know the worst part?"
"Hit me."
"I had to learn to draw all over again. All my muscle memory was off, I was in physical therapy for months. For a while I thought I'd never be able to draw again."
Goosebumps prickle Bucky's arms as echoes of that same fear but for drumming lap at his thoughts like waves on a beach. He leans forward to rest his shoulders on the railing supports. His face dangles over the drop. "I had to learn to play again." He waggles his left hand, trying to keep the worst of his melancholy out of his voice. "Took 'em almost a year to get it calibrated to the point it felt like a part of me. Broke a lot of sticks. And it was too big at first, until I grew into it. Hurt like hell." He doesn't miss those spine-tearing nights when pain dragged him awake, what little sleep he did manage to get plagued by nightmares of the crash and the horrifying split-second he spent witnessing his own arm getting torn off before he lost consciousness.
"Jesus, Buck."
"Hey, don't look like that. I'm fine now. Works like a dream and the whole goddamn world can attest to my playing getting back up to par. I didn't—I'm just trying to say I get it, y'know? Been there, done that."
Steve purses his lips. Bucky flicks his forehead. "Hey. What is it?"
"Nothing."
Bucky flicks him again. "Keep lying and I'll use the hand made outta metal."
"Ow, okay, okay. I just—I had a choice. You didn't. Doesn't feel right to pretend it's the same."
"You and your guilt. If I say it's fine, it's fine. I give you permission to empathize with me, Steven. Does that help?"
"Jerk."
"Punk. Stop sulking and tell me what you're using all that drawing practice for these days. It can't just be dive bar murals and my hand."
"It's not a dive bar."
"Hole in the wall."
"You're breaking Tony's heart," Steve says with a grin as he pulls out his phone.
"He's my boss. I'm legally obligated to give him a hard time."
"Technically, Pepper's your boss."
"She's my manager."
"And?"
"Big difference between boss and manager."
Steve pauses his search through his phone's apps to stare, so Bucky elaborates.
"Managers can be bosses and bosses can be managers, but not all bosses are managers and vice versa. A boss is the person you complain about to all your friends and coworkers, the person who comes in and might make things better for other people but always makes them worse for you. A boss is all big picture, trees for the forest type.
"A manager, on the other hand, is all about the trees. They've got that balance between boots on the ground and eyes in the sky. They're there to get you what you need when you need it so everything runs smoothly. They're the ones who try to stop any bosses from throwing a wrench in the gears. You got a problem, you go to the manager."
"All that nonsense to mean, you're not giving Pepper a hard time because you like her more than Tony."
Bucky leans close to stare at Steve's phone. "So, that art."
Shaking his head, Steve just hands the phone over. It's an Instagram account, with other social media linked in the profile. "Take a look."
Bucky starts scrolling through the photos on reflex before he processes the follower number. He stares. "Jesus Christ, Steve."
"What?"
"That's an m."
"Uh." Steve goes a little pink. "Yeah, I guess it is. I mean, compared to the Winter Soldier—"
"Shut up. If we're being fair, we're comparing it to James Buchanan Barnes, who has a whopping zero. Over a million, jeez." He starts scrolling again. There's a huge variety of works, but lifelike pencil and paper seems to be the most frequent. Every few posts there's some glorious full-color piece whose subject ranges from a dragon to a famous character to—
He stops scrolling. The Winter Soldier sits on the screen, whaling away on a set of drums, the impact of his sticks sending out a spray of color. Noticing his pause, Steve leans over.
"That one—all those with that transparent watermark in the middle—those are commissions. It's not official art or anything, this guy just really liked the Winter Soldier and wanted a poster design."
"Did you…Do you listen to them? Hydra?"
"A little, but they're not really my taste." He rubs the back of his neck, going even redder. "Always liked the drummer, though."
Bucky leans closer. "Really. Because of his talent, right?"
Steve leans away. "Maybe he was good-looking, too."
Laughing, Bucky gives him space. "Good looking? You couldn't see anything!"
"I'm an artist. I could fill in the gaps."
Bucky grins sharply. "How'd your artist's imagination do?"
"Didn't do it justice."
"Did you ever draw it?"
"Yeah, and you're never seeing it."
"Oh, fuck that." Bucky scrambles to his feet and ducks into Steve's bedroom, ignoring Steve's squawk of protest when he slams the window shut to buy time.
He's not completely unfair; he doesn't lock it. Steve catches up to him in the front hall, where Bucky's rapidly flipping through the sketchbook he dug from the backpack Steve drags with him everywhere. Steve tries to rip the thing out of his hands but Bucky's faster, ducking and sidestepping and then half-dancing out of his reach while continuing to flip pages.
Steve's efforts get more and more insistent. Bucky responds in kind, a challenging smirk twisting his lips when Steve attempts a particularly tricky feint-and-grab.
"Ooh," Bucky says, finding sketches of the first night he was in the dive bar while he circles the couch he's using as a barrier. "Not bad."
Steve's face is approximately the color of a tomato. He starts throwing pillows helpfully scattered around from their efforts to build a fort. One catches Bucky in the face, and he uses his left arm to whip it back twice as hard at Steve's feet. Steve, protecting his head, doesn't see that coming and accidentally steps on it, causing him to tip sideways onto the couch.
This notebook isn't the one he's looking for; the sketches are too recent. Must be an older one. Bucky tosses it on top of Steve and thinks. If he were Steve, where would he keep old sketchbooks? Tony and Sam's rooms are right out, as is the kitchen area.
His eyes land on the doorway to Steve's bedroom. The stack of books on the nightstand.
"Finally done?" Steve asks, holding his sketchbook to his chest like Bucky's gonna take it away again.
Instead, Bucky runs for the nightstand.
"Hey, no!"
Heavy footsteps come after him. The bed's in the way; Bucky goes for efficiency and dives across it, landing on his stomach with his outstretched arm grabbing the first notebook he can reach. It's from the middle of the pile and the rest tumble down. Before he can even think to maybe pick them up, a body crashes down on top of him and drives the air from his lungs in a wheeze.
Steve straddles him, knees on either side of his middle, and presses Bucky's arms down onto the bed so he can't even flip open the notebook he's holding.
"Drop it," he orders.
Bucky gets very, very hot all of a sudden. To distract himself and stop Steve from noticing, he pulls out a few tricks he learned as the Winter Soldier to throw Steve off and send him crashing to the floor. By the time Steve's recovered, Bucky's found what he was looking for: a whole two-page spread full of exploratory sketches of the Winter Soldier's face.
Some are even in color.
Recognizing his defeat, Steve sits heavily on the bed next to him while Bucky sits up and crosses his legs.
"I was close," Steve says petulantly.
"You made my eyes blue. How'd you know?"
"I didn't. I just wanted them to be."
"Did you ever think…?"
"Once or twice." Steve can't look him in the eye. "I thought, if you'd made it that big, you'd tell me. Or I'd just know for sure, I guess, recognize you. I didn't, so I…talked myself out of it being possible."
Guilt settles back on Bucky's shoulders like it had never left. "I should've. Told you, I mean."
"You already explained it, you don't need to—I get it. Things were complicated."
Bucky sets his jaw. "Yeah. Still should've. I'm sorry."
"It's not like I told you about my art career taking off."
"It's not like I asked."
The air hangs heavy and awkward. Bucky swallows and looks back down at the paper, the drummer who is and is not him. The nose is too straight—Bucky's is slightly crooked thanks to his childhood misadventures—and he doesn't have the right lips, and the chin is off, but put this guy in the same room as him and they could be brothers. "These aren't bad. But now that you've got the real thing to reference whenever you want, I expect perfect accuracy."
"Whenever I want, huh?"
Bucky tosses the notebook aside and tips up his chin. "Yeah. Whenever you want." He pauses. "Unless I need to work the bar."
"You should wear your Winter Soldier outfit on shift. Tony would lose his mind."
"He wouldn't be the only one." Bucky lets himself fall back onto the mattress to stare at the ceiling. He can see it: the whole bar mobbing the Winter Soldier. Asking questions. Wanting answers. One slip of the mask away from his anonymity disappearing forever. He's seen enough of that chaos when a copycat crops up and he wants no part of it. "You should use that artist's imagination you're so proud of to draw the look on his face."
He flicks his gaze to Steve and just as quickly has to look away. His whole body is still buzzing and looking at the guy makes it sing.
Even though he's not looking, he can tell Steve is still staring at him. "Like what you see, Rogers?"
There's a long pause. Long enough that Bucky looks at him and catches the flare of stubborn light in his eyes. "Maybe I do."
Bucky's stomach drops. He forces an easy grin and teases, "You'll have to get in line, especially if I wear the outfit."
Steve doesn't reciprocate. His expression is tight and so very focused on Bucky's face. Bucky swallows and sits up. He can't mean that. He can't. Bucky's just…desperate. Yeah. Desperate and selfish, wanting to hear things he knows he doesn't deserve. "Keep looking at me like that and I'll get ideas, pal."
And yeah, that pal holds a lot of desperation. This close, he's fighting to keep his focus on Steve's blue, blue eyes and not his parting lips below.
"Buck?"
"Yeah?"
"I've already got my own ideas."
When Steve's hand comes up to rest on the back of Bucky's neck, Bucky's beleaguered brain finally short-circuits. When Steve pulls him close, he loses the fight against the urge to look down at his lips.
When Steve kisses him, a jolt of lightning down his spine forces a system reset. He brings his own hands up to yank Steve closer, but Steve's not ready for that and they tip over onto the bed. Bucky rolls with it and straddles Steve like Steve had done to him earlier, only Steve's on his back where Bucky had been on his stomach.
Plus, Bucky's got his face two inches from Steve's, his hair falling around like a curtain that cuts them off from the rest of the world.
"Ideas, huh?" he breathes. Steve's face is flushed but his eyes are bright, his lips reddened and begging for more.
"Only if you want," he manages.
"If I want," Bucky repeats, and it comes out a little hysterical. "I've wanted this since before I even knew what it was. Fuck, Steve." He expresses the rest of what he can't say by leaning down and biting at Steve's lip. Steve arches under him, sending Bucky's pounding heart fluttering in a way that leaves him lightheaded.
Steve bites back. Bucky grins into the next kiss. That's more like it.
And because the world hates them both, his phone buzzes. They part with quiet gasps and Bucky fumbles the thing from his back pocket. "Sorry, could be important."
Steve makes a halfhearted attempt to shove him off. "You're still sitting on me, how important can it be?"
Bucky lets himself be pushed and smoothly rolls off the edge of the bed, landing in a crouch on the floor. He stands while Steve rolls his eyes and mutters, "Show off."
The buzz was a text from Natalia, just a simple "call me."
"Something wrong?"
"Nat's asking me to call, so the building might be on fire. One sec." He taps her contact, brings his phone up to his ear, and leans against the wall while it rings. He tries to pretend like he's not still shaking from what almost just happened, like he's not looking anywhere but at Steve.
He wasn't delusional. He was absolutely desperate, but he wasn't delusional.
"James, hey. I heard you're back in Tony's and Pepper's good graces, which is convenient. I've got a bit of an emergency."
He straightens. "What's wrong?"
"Last-second large party courtesy of Tony, who's now in my bad graces. We don't have any servers on shift because it was supposed to be slow and Clint's out at the vet with his dog. I'm good, but I'm not handle-the-whole-place-plus-twenty-drunk-bachelorettes good. I heard from Clint who heard from Sam that you're off the no-fly list, so care to lend a hand?"
He waves off Steve's concerned look. "I'm on my way."
"I owe you. We can work on ways to make Tony regret this once you get here."
"Sounds like a plan." He hangs up. "Natalia needs a hand at the bar. I don't mean to bail on you—"
"No, not at all, it's fine." Steve's face is still a little red, and getting redder the longer Bucky stares. "We can pick this up later. Uh. Talk. About this. Us. Yeah."
Snorting and badly hiding a smile, Bucky pushes off the wall and goes to grab his jacket and helmet. "If you're gonna be that tongue-tied when I get back, I have a better suggestion than talking."
He probably deserves the pillow that thuds into his back.
The thoroughly intoxicated bachelorettes stagger through the door in groups of threes and fours. Natalia sees them out with perfect hospitality while Bucky hangs around outside to make sure they all get into the right rides. Once the last is packed away into their Lyft, he heads back inside to help Natalia clean up. They don't have a dishwasher tonight; Scott's out sick and the other guy who usually covers is out of town. Another reason Natalia had been so pissed at Tony for the party.
The five tables pulled together to accommodate that party are a mess. Not anything egregious—they'd been about as polite and painless as a large group can be—but still a lot to take care of. Bucky starts stacking plates while Natalia fetches a couple of tubs from the kitchen.
"So," she says while they're clearing the table.
"So?"
"What did I pull you away from?"
"Not much, really."
She taps just under her bottom lip. "It was still red when you walked in."
He goes to touch without thinking. Okay, maybe it still feels a little tender. "Might've been something in progress, but at the time, wasn't much."
"Steve does like to take his time with things."
Bucky damn near drops a wine glass. "What?"
"Oh, come on. You called me and asked me for help in tracking Steve. You may be an idiot, James, but I'd like to think you're not so stupid you'd do that and then go to someone else."
"Any other secrets of my private life you wanna puzzle out while I'm here?"
She smiles at his grumbling in a way that sends a chill down his spine. Does she…?
"Not really."
He deflates. "Well, great. Yes, I was with Steve. Happy?"
"I'm Russian. I'm never happy."
He side-eyes her and says in Russian, "You find the joy of life in the little things."
She chuckles and waves off the proverb. "Fair enough. Not having to deal with the two of you dancing around each other might be enough to warm my cold dead heart." She catches the way he shifts his weight. "Oh, come on. What now?"
"It's normal to be nervous," he says defensively. "We've got a lot of history. I don't want to hurt him again." He bites his lip and stares down at his mostly-full tub. "I never wanted to hurt him at all."
"Do you think you will?"
"I don't know. If you haven't noticed, I can be a bit of a selfish asshole sometimes."
"I've noticed."
"Thanks." Frankly, he's surprised she accepted his apology during that phone call so easily. Maybe she saw he was worth more than his dumbass decisions, or maybe she's just a little more forgiving than she puts on. Maybe—most likely—he's reading too much into it.
"Do you want my honest opinion?"
"Sure, as long as it doesn't involve any of those knives."
Smirking, she slides the knives she stacked on one plate into a smaller tub and hefts it, now full, onto her hip. "The second you two actually had an adult conversation and were honest with each other, you got through it. The next time you think you're about to put your foot in it, slow down and have another one of those magic conversations. It's blindingly obvious you both want each other to be happy, and you're both happy when you stop getting in your own way."
"Don't go to bed angry?"
"Or have sex about it. I'm not a therapist."
He chokes. Laughing quietly to herself, she heads for the kitchen. He follows her a minute later to empty his own tub.
"I know even someone as dense as Tony has probably picked up on it by now," Bucky says while they work to set up the dishwasher, "but you mind not telling him about…any of this?"
She snorts. "After what he pulled? He'll be lucky if I speak to him again. Your secret's safe with me."
That reminds him: "Which plan do you want to do?"
"It's still not easy to pick only one."
"Why not two?"
"I knew I liked you."