Work Text:
After the dust settles, after Bucky is found and taken in and his brain is as fixed as it’s going to get, according to everyone who is paid to know about that kind of thing, there’s really no question of where he’s going to live. He can’t be alone—Natasha is vocal and explicit about what could happen to the former Winter Soldier if he’s left to his own devices. He won’t live at Stark Tower, because now that he knows what he’s done and who he is he also knows who he’s killed, and he has a hard time looking Tony in the eye. Natasha offers to take him in, but it’s a half-hearted offer, one she knows will be shot down.
Steve’s spent long enough without him. He’s not going to let him get away again.
His apartment in DC is still trashed, and he doesn’t really want to go back there anyway, not after everything that’s happened. He still can’t look at the Potomac without feeling sick and dizzy. So he looks into secure Brooklyn buildings, and ends up renting a small, sunny two-bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge. The day after they move in he takes Bucky on a walking tour of Brooklyn, pointing out their old haunts. (The ones he can recognize, anyway—so much has been demolished and rebuilt and demolished again since they were kids that he doesn’t always know what he’s looking at.) Bucky is silent for most of it, keeping pace with Steve easily and following his finger when he points, like a cat.
“I don’t remember that,” he says at one point, breaking through Steve recounting the time Gerald Hennessey dared him to steal Sister Margaret’s dentures. His voice is low and strained, his eyes flickering from one place to another like he’s planning an escape. Steve looks at him for a minute, then hails a cab.
Bucky holds himself close to the window the whole way home, staring out as the city flashes by in streaks of neon and grey. They aren’t touching, but Steve can feel him shake.
He settles a little when they get back to the apartment, and they spend the next few days inside, eating takeout and watching bad TV movies. Steve watches them, anyway; Bucky’s eyes never seem to completely focus on the screen. Fury calls every day for updates on his condition, and Steve is never sure what to say. Bucky is fine in that he hasn’t actually tried to kill Steve yet, but he sleeps little and speaks less and seems to spend hours checked out, staring into space. Sometimes Steve can see his lips moving slightly, like he’s in some other place, speaking to someone else. Sometimes he wakes up screaming, fighting off anyone who tries to touch him until he registers where he is.
Steve fills up the silence as best he can, and tries to recognize when to shut up.
Bucky was released from custody only under certain conditions, and one of them is biweekly therapy appointments in an old-fashioned brownstone in Manhattan. At first S.H.I.E.L.D. sends a car for them, and Steve rides with Bucky, sits in the waiting room for an hour reading last year’s magazines, then rides back with him. Then one day, as they’re putting on their shoes to leave, Bucky looks at him and asks, his voice hesitant, “Can we take the subway?”
Bucky never asks for anything. “Of course,” Steve says, and ducks outside to send the car back.
The subway ride is not exactly smooth—Bucky flinches and goes tense every time someone jostles him, and when a man cuts him off on a landing platform he spits a long string of Russian obscenities in his direction, nearly starting a fight—but they get to the therapist’s office only five minutes late, and after his time is up Bucky emerges with a tiny smile.
“Did you tell her about getting the subway?” he asks as he stands up, pulling on his jacket. Bucky nods, and the smile grows wider. It stays there the whole ride home, and Steve can’t stop looking at Bucky and grinning like a maniac.
After that day they don’t make use of the car at all, and it eventually stops coming. They just use the subway to go to therapy at first, but as time goes on Steve tests the waters a little, suggesting detours and pit stops. They discover used bookstores on their commute, eat in tiny, empty restaurants and cafes (Bucky still isn’t good at crowds, and Steve tries to keep him away from places that would have a lot of people). They go to movie matinees, when they can have the whole theatre to themselves, sitting in the dark and letting the images wash over them for a few hours. They go to the park a few times, but joggers make Bucky nervous, especially when they’re coming towards him, so instead they start to take walks around the city in the early hours of the morning, when the sun’s just coming up and the streets are relatively deserted.
Steve has to fight against the urge to take Bucky’s hand sometimes, just like he did when they were kids, just like he has to fight against the urge to lean into him when they’re sitting on the couch or doing dishes. Like he has to fight against the urge to kiss him and bury his fingers in his hair. But that’s fine. It’s enough that Bucky’s here, alive, more or less okay. Asking for anything more would be selfish.
That doesn’t stop him from thinking about it. Sometimes it feels as though he never thinks about anything else.
There’s one morning, a grey one with a sky so thickly overcast that Steve’s been looking up anxiously every few minutes to see if the rain has started yet, when they go for a walk in one of the seedier parts of Brooklyn. Those are the neighborhoods that Bucky likes most, the ones that look a little dirty and dangerous; Steve likes to think that this is because it reminds him of where they used to live, although he’s never said. They’re about to cross a street when Bucky suddenly turns and stops, staring at a store front.
“What’s the matter?” Steve asks, joining him. Bucky doesn’t answer right away, just keeps on staring. It’s a tattoo parlour, its windows plastered with flash art and photographs of finished pieces. The Open sign is off.
“Was there a guy we knew who had tattoos?” he asks finally, turning away.
Steve smiles. Bucky remembers the strangest things sometimes. “Gabe did,” he says. “He got one in Paris while he was drunk. I think it was the name of his girl back home. Lucky that he ended up marrying her, I guess.”
Bucky shakes his head. “No,” he says. “Someone else. When we were younger?” The question sounds almost like a plea.
And then Steve knows who he’s talking about. “Mr. Carmody!” he says, a little too loud. “He ran a fruit stand close to our last apartment. A weird fella—used to tell the kids that he’d escaped from the circus. He had tattoos all up his forearms. He wore his shirt sleeves rolled up, you could always see them.” They were horrible things, greenish and blobby and distorted, and Steve had hated to look at them. They didn’t look much like the tattoos in the pictures Bucky’s looking at, which are all crisp and clean and sharp. Maybe that’s another thing that’s changed in the last seventy years.
Bucky nods, turning his eyes back up to the store. “What were they?” he asks.
Steve thinks for a moment. “There was a tiger, I think. A heart and banner, a skull, an anchor. Some of them you couldn’t really tell—they weren’t nice like these ones. I think he might have done some of them himself, with a needle and India ink.” He smiles. “A lot of people have tattoos now, have you noticed? Way more than when we were kids. Even dames. Some of them are real pretty.”
Bucky doesn’t answer. The first drops start to fall, and they begin the walk back to their apartment.
Steve really should put two and two together the next week when he wakes up to find Bucky’s bed empty. But he doesn’t. Instead he puts in frantic calls to Hill and Fury and Natasha and anyone else he can think of and rushes out to scour the streets of Brooklyn, looking in alleys and behind buildings, checking his cell phone every two seconds and calling Bucky every five. He doesn’t give up for hours, and when he returns to the apartment, limp with exhaustion and panic, Bucky is sitting there at the kitchen table, drinking coffee.
“Where the hell have you been?” Steve demands. He has to fight the urge to touch Bucky again, this time so he won’t shake him. “I woke up and you were gone!”
Bucky looks at him and shrugs. “I wanted to go out,” he says simply, and shifts. His shirt moves away from his skin for a second, and Steve can see something dark above his hip there, like a bruise. His anger evaporates.
“Buck,” he says, crossing the kitchen and kneeling in front of him, “is that—did you get hurt?” His fingers brush the hem of his shirt, nearly grazing the skin beneath. When Bucky doesn’t move he lifts the shirt a little, looking closer at the mark on his side.
It’s a tattoo, a series of numbers, impossibly black against Bucky’s pale skin.
Steve is speechless for a moment. He lets his fingertips trace the air over it, not quite touching. He recognizes Bucky’s serial, can still see him spitting it through his teeth in Zola’s lab. “Did it hurt?” he asks, for lack of anything else to say.
Bucky shrugs. “Not as much as some things,” he says.
“Was it the place we walked by the other day?”
He nods. “They weren’t busy. I guess not a lot of people end up there that early.” He smiles, that same tiny smile that had appeared after their first subway ride. “It was expensive.”
“Everything is now,” Steve replies. He can’t stop looking at the tattoo, the raised ink settled under Bucky’s skin like the finest wire. He also can’t stop looking at Bucky, the jut of his hips and the slight gap between the small of his back and the top of his jeans, so he straightens and looks at his face. “Do you like it?”
“I think so,” Bucky says, and it sounds almost like a question. “That was my serial, right? I remember saying it after Zola. I guess I repeated it so many times it kind of stuck.”
“Yeah.”
He nods, the little smile widening. “I thought so.”
Bucky goes out by himself more and more. Steve gets used to waking up to an empty house, just like he gets used to seeing bits and pieces of new tattoos on Bucky’s uncovered skin. Some of them are things he doesn’t recognize: images whose meanings he can’t decipher, lines of text in languages he doesn’t know. Others he understands. The names of the Howling Commandos appear on the side of his right arm, written in a simple bold script that reminds Steve, uncomfortably, of gravestones. He recognizes the compass on his left side, slightly distorted by the jut of his ribs—it’s like the one he used to have, the one with the picture of Peggy in it, and he wonders if he brought in a photograph for the artist to copy. There’s a pair of praying hands that Steve remembers from a picture his mother owned, a rosary like the one Mrs. Evans across the hall had carried with her to the market, even a pinup of a girl with red hair who looks remarkably like one of the drawings in the Tijuana Bible that someone had hidden under the second-last pew of their school chapel. Steve laughs out loud when he sees that one.
“Of all the things for you to get,” he says. His fingers hover over the ink, not touching still, never touching. “Do you remember when Phil Bartlett showed us that thing?”
He doesn’t really expect an answer, let alone one in the affirmative, and he’s surprised when Bucky nods. “We were eleven,” he says, his eyes narrowed slightly, like it hurts to remember. (And maybe it does. He’s still not sure what happened when Bucky was in the chair.) “He lifted one of the tiles in the boy’s cloak room. It looked like it’d been there for years.”
“It probably had.” Steve smiles. “I was so scared someone would catch us, I tried not to look too much. I thought that maybe if I only saw a little bit of it it wouldn’t count as a sin.”
Bucky snorts. “Guess you saw enough to go on,” he says, and he sounds so much like himself, his tone a balance of fondness and scorn, that Steve needs to turn away for a second and pretend to be deeply absorbed in a story Sharon sent to him about a terrorist cell in Dallas.
They don’t get many visitors these days, but one day when Bucky’s out Natasha shows up on their doorstep, letting herself in while Steve watches the morning news. She plops down on the couch next to him and says, without so much as a “hello,” “So I hear the soldier’s gone all Miami Ink on you.”
Steve scowls into his coffee. He really, really hates it when people refer to Bucky by anything other than his name. “We live in New York,” he says shortly, “not Miami.”
Natasha shrugs, like there really isn’t much of a difference between the two. She told Steve once that she finds most American cities to be nearly identical. “Except Detroit,” she’d qualified. “That place couldn’t be like anywhere else if it tried.”
“But he is getting tattoos?” she asks.
Steve sighs, taking a long sip of coffee. “I have no idea how you know this, considering you’ve been in Prague for the last three months.”
“Warsaw,” she corrects him. “And I have my ways. Fury seems convinced that his sudden interest in body modification is a sure sign of a mental break.”
He frowns. Fury’s never mentioned this to him—he didn’t even think he knew about it. “Do you think it is?”
Natasha considers the question in silence for a moment, her eyes fixed on the television. The volume’s turned down almost too low for them to hear, even with their respective enhanced hearing. Steve prefers the quiet.
“After I got out of the Red Room,” she says finally, “the first thing I did was cut off all my hair. I did it myself, with a knife. I had to wear a wig on missions for over a year. When Clint got free of Loki he spent half a year fucking anyone who would have him. I haven’t heard from Erik lately, but Jane mentioned in a debriefing session that he’s thinking of getting out of the sciences, going to trade school or retiring. Tony builds things. Bruce meditates. You knock the sand out of vintage punching bags.” She turns to look at him, the first time she’s made eye contact since she came into the apartment. “People deal with trauma in all kinds of different ways, Steve. I think after being in someone else’s hands for so long, being a tool instead of a person, he needs a reminder that he owns himself.”
Steve thinks of the tattoos that Bucky has chosen so far, the ones that he recognizes and the ones he doesn’t, and how they all fit together.
“You’re probably right,” he says, and Natasha accepts this with a shrug, as if to say of course I am.
“So are you going to get one too?” A rare grin brightens her face. “Because I’d love to see you guys with matching ink. Special supersoldier boyfriend tattoos.”
Steve rolls his eyes. “He’s not my boyfriend,” he says wearily. They have had this conversation so many times he could probably do it in his sleep. She knows about how he feels—he didn’t tell her, but then, he usually doesn’t have to tell Natasha anything. She’s good at discovering a man’s weak spots. “He’s my best friend, and he’s still hurt. I’m not going to try anything with someone as vulnerable as he is. Even if he were likely to be interested.”
Which, he reminds himself, he would not be. He remembers all of Bucky’s girls, the late nights and (occasional) very early mornings, the lipstick on his neck and the smell of a stranger’s perfume.
Now it’s her turn to roll her eyes. “Is that the excuse you’re using now? What about when you were younger, or when you joined the Army? All that pining and longing for years and you never even told him how you feel. How did you talk yourself out of it then?”
“Well, first it was ‘homosexuality is illegal,’” Steve replies, trying to make his voice as dry as hers. “Then it was ‘Bucky has a lot of girlfriends, and homosexuality is still illegal.’ And then it was ‘we could both get court martialed and discharged, because homosexuality is still still illegal.’ After that things kind of took care of themselves, what with the ice and all.”
Natasha laughs. She’s one of the few who does when Steve references what happened to him—to both of them—in any lighthearted way at all. “Fair enough, Capsicle,” she says, patting him on the knee. “But sooner or later you’re going to have to face this, you know. Especially now that you live together. Just promise me that when you eventually go for those matching tats you won’t get anything with a heart or a banner, it’s tacky.”
Steve smiles and touches her on the shoulder. “I’m glad you’re back, Romanoff,” he tells her. She smiles back and steals his coffee from him.
Bucky comes home later that afternoon while Natasha is still there. He greets her with a surprised shout and a smile that changes his whole face, makes it less tired and strained. He hasn’t smiled at Steve like that in a while, and he tries very hard not to feel jealous as Natasha and Bucky spend the evening speaking in Russian and laughing, occasionally translating for him but mostly forgetting. Bucky seems to bloom when she’s there, his voice louder and less hesitant, his eyes sparkling and his face animated. It’s fine, Steve tells himself as he makes them all dinner. There are so few people that Bucky feels safe around, so few people he remembers, he can’t begrudge him Natasha’s company just because they used to be… whatever they were. He catches them looking at him a few times, and each time feels flustered and confused.
He wonders if they’re going to get back together. Much as he hates to admit it, it would make sense.
After Natasha leaves, having gracefully declined Steve’s invitation to stay for the night, Bucky sits at the kitchen table in thoughtful silence while Steve cleans up.
“Were we a couple?” he suddenly asks.
Steve is finishing the dishes. He swallows, his mouth suddenly dry. He was sure Bucky would remember this, sure he wouldn’t have to explain it. “Yeah, you were,” he says. “You trained her, when you were still—when you were in Russia. In the Red Room. And I guess it went from there.” He sets the last plate on the drying rack and pulls the plug in the sink. “You were kind to her,” he says over the sound of the water gurgling down the drain. “Later on, after they took you back into cryo, you forgot about her. I think they found out that you’d gotten together, and they wanted to punish you for it. But she still remembers you being kind to her.”
Bucky looks at him. His hands are folded together on the table, like he’s afraid of letting them loose on their own.
“I didn’t mean Natalia,” he says. His voice is quiet and subdued, nothing like the one he’d used with Natasha. He doesn’t blink very much anymore—another strange side effect of Zola’s serum, presumably—and having that steady, unwavering gaze turned on him makes Steve twitch. “I meant you and me.”
Steve’s stomach twists sharply. He remembers a thousand nights when he stayed up late waiting for Bucky to come home from a date, trying not to look at him as he undressed. He remembers the way Bucky used to talk him up to girls, the fuss he’d make of him and the bafflement he seemed to feel when they didn’t want to dance with him. He remembers the warm, heavy weight of him as he dragged him off that gurney, the way his face had twisted as he’d screamed that he wouldn’t leave Steve there to die. That feeling was there the whole time, an ache he’s felt for so long he’s almost stopped feeling it. It’s become just another part of him. Looking at Bucky now, so still and expectant, he feels it rising in him the way it used to when they were kids, before things settled a little bit and he resigned himself to Bucky marrying and moving out and leaving him forever. In those days it had felt as though it was lighting him up from the inside out, like if he opened his mouth too wide it’d come beaming out into the air between them. He was sure people could see it in his face, the desire and the longing and the frustration, but if they had no one had said anything.
I could say yes, he thinks. “No,” he says, as gently as he can. It doesn’t work; his voice is harsh, ragged at the edges. “We were best friends, Buck. That’s all.”
Bucky nods slowly, looks away, doesn’t say anything for the rest of the night.
A few days later Natasha texts him. Look at his back, it says. Steve frowns at his phone, uncomprehending.
“What’s wrong?” Bucky asks from the kitchen doorway, making him start. He leans against the door frame, his hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans. His hair is rumpled, the lines of his face still soft and slack with sleep. He’s been sleeping more, Steve thinks, for longer stretches of time. That can only be a good thing.
Steve looks at his phone again, then up at Bucky. “Uh… can I see your back?” he asks, unsure why he’s asking, sure of why his ears are starting to burn.
Bucky peels off his shirt with a promptness that makes Steve hurt a little bit. God knows he’s never been modest—he always knew he was attractive, always made sure that other people knew too—but since coming back it seems as though he doesn’t have any nudity taboos at all anymore. (There was a time when Bruce had dropped by and Bucky had emerged from his room completely nude, offering an absent nod as he strolled into the kitchen to get a glass of water. Bruce still hasn’t entirely recovered from that.) On really blue nights Steve finds himself thinking about that, why the programming would have wrought that particular change in him. There must have been a reason. He doubts it was a good one.
Bucky comes a few steps closer and turns, and Steve can’t disguise his sharp intake of breath as anything but a gasp.
His back is tattooed. He knew it would be, that’s not a surprise. But the tattoos are all words, running in orderly columns parallel to the ridge of his spine. They reach from his shoulders to the small of his back, the letters tiny and neat as keystrokes.
Steve reaches out the way he always does with Bucky, not quite making contact, just close enough to feel the heat rising from his skin. The tattoos look mostly healed, although some of the ones toward the bottom are still scabbed over. He leans closer to read them.
James Keller. Dalton Gaines. Jasper Sitwell. Jacques Dupuy. Jefferson Hart. Harry Baxter. Howard Stark. Maria Stark.
They aren’t words. They’re names.
“I don’t remember all of them.” Bucky is close enough that he can almost feel his voice through his fingertips. “But I’ve been reading about them.” He looks over his shoulder at Steve. His expression is unreadable in a way that it had never been before the war, before his fall. “The Stark kid’s been helping me. I wanted to know their names. I want to keep them. I don’t remember them all, but I want to… to honour them, I guess.” He shrugs.
Tony. Of course. He would be able to access the files if anyone could. “Buck,” he says, unable to tear his eyes away from the names—Lord, so many, line after line of them. “That wasn’t you, you know.”
Bucky turns to face him. “It was,” he says, and his eyes are a combination of the men Steve’s known him as—the smart-alec spark of Bucky, the shrewd glint of Sergeant Barnes, the flat chill of the Winter Soldier. “They’re all listed in the HYDRA files. Each one. I did it.”
“But it wasn’t your fault,” Steve says, and God, he wants to touch him, smooth away the furrow in his brow. “When someone gets shot you don’t blame the gun. You blame the one pulling the trigger.”
“Steve…” Bucky shakes his head, frustration pulling his voice strained and thin. “I’m not a gun. That’s the point.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean—I mean you don’t have to—to atone for anything, Bucky. Nobody blames you-“
Bucky laughs. There’s no humour in it. “Yeah? Let me tell you, buddy”—the harsh emphasis of that word, like he’s forcing it out through his teeth—“you should tell that to Tony Stark. When I first went to him and asked if he could show me what happened all those years, he turned me down. Kept turning me down, for weeks, until he broke. He sat with me in the room there while I read about—about all the things I did, all the things they made me do. They were bad, it wasn’t just shooting, it was strangling, stabbing… There was a man in Libya who I tore apart, Steve. I used this arm they gave me and I ripped him in half and fed him to his dogs. There was a woman who—“ He stops, shakes his head again, like he’s trying to clear it. “And Stark read all of it with me. Even the part about his parents. I saw his face. He blames me. He tries not to, but he does, he blames me for his old man’s death, for losing his mother, for being lonely and scared like a kid when he’s a grown man. And I hate that. I do. Because I don’t remember it at all. But at least that means he knows I’m the person who did those things. He doesn’t see me as a man who died seventy years ago, he doesn’t blank me out and replace me with someone who doesn’t exist. I’d rather be blamed than erased, Steve.”
It’s the longest thing Steve has heard him say since his return. He stands there, trying to think of something to say, coming up short every time.
Bucky watches him for a little while, like he’s also waiting for him to figure something out, then sighs. “I’m going to bed,” he says, and leaves without waiting for a response.
Things are tense after that. Bucky doesn’t say anything else about the tattoos, doesn’t even acknowledge Steve’s halting apology the next day. He keeps doing what he’s been doing, getting up early or sleeping late, eating or not eating, leaving the apartment or staying in for days. But Steve can see him glance over at him from time to time, eyes narrowed, and he can’t tell who it is looking out from his eyes.
It’s true, he thinks, that he’s been mentally replacing Bucky with his former self. Every time they talk he finds himself thinking of the awkward pauses present in their conversation, wondering how the old Bucky would have filled them. He passes the kind of girls he used to be attracted to and thinks of how Bucky would have sized them up with that easy, cocksure smile of his, when now he barely seems to notice. He sees advertisements for movies that he thinks the old Bucky would have liked and has to fight the urge to bring them up in conversation—they’re all action movies, the kind with lots of gun fights and explosions, and Bucky doesn’t like that kind of thing anymore, for obvious reasons. It’s as though when he looks at Bucky he sees his former self settled over him like a shroud.
“Do you think I’ve been treating him badly?” he asks Sam one morning. They don’t get to see one another as much as they would like these days—Sam’s still in DC, recuperating from their long trek around the country trying to find the man who was the Winter Soldier—but they still call at least once a week. Whatever downsides the future may have, Steve will never stop loving how easy it is to keep in touch with people now.
On the other end of the phone, Sam snorts. He doesn’t have to ask who he’s talking about. “Badly? Steve, you spent half a year trying to get the man to come live with you after he tried to kill you. Twice. I don’t think ‘badly’ is the word I’d use.”
“Well, maybe not badly, but… do you think I expect too much of him?”
“In what way?” Steve can hear the slight frown in his voice. “Is this about Fury’s thing? Is he still trying to recruit him for the new S.H.I.E.L.D.?”
“No, he’s given up on that,” Steve says. It’s not entirely a lie—Fury only mentions it every other week now. “I don’t mean in terms of work, or readjusting. We can spend the rest of our lives figuring that out if we have to. Seventy years of back pay buys you a lot of time.”
“And some of us have to work for a living. You’re breaking my heart, Cap. So it’s not work, it’s not recovery. What do you expect of him?”
Steve sighs. “I keep expecting him to be who he was,” he says. “Even knowing what’s happened, how little he remembers. I keep thinking that if I treat him like nothing’s changed-“
“- Then it won’t have,” Sam finishes for him. A short pause, then: “Think about when they pulled you out of the ice, Steve. They tried to do the same thing to you. Put you in that little room and played a game from 1941. They thought that would make things easier on you, and it only made things worse. They tried to make you believe that nothing had changed, but you knew it wasn’t true. Only it’s worse, because you didn’t change, just your surroundings. Barnes is rebuilding from the ground up. You expecting him to be who he was is only going to interfere with that. No matter how much of the man you knew is left, there’s other stuff mixed in there now. Ignoring it is like putting a baseball game on an old radio and thinking you’ve made it better.”
Steve knows that Sam is right. Sam, like Natasha, is just about always right. “What do you think I should do?” he asks.
“I can’t tell you that, Steve,” Sam says, and Steve can hear exasperation in his voice, and fondness, and the kind of firmness that only creeps into his voice when he’s laying down the law. “Just think, man. Think about what would have helped you when you were trying to put things back together. Then go from there.” He pauses again, for longer this time. “And tell him not to get your name tattooed anywhere on him, alright? Because that is the kiss of death, my friend.”
Steve scowls and hangs up, then immediately feels bad, calls him back, and apologizes before hanging up again. He wonders sometimes if his feelings for Bucky are a secret at all, if all those years of trying to keep them under wraps were a waste of time.
The next day, when Bucky comes out of his room, Steve asks, “Can I come with you to the shop today?”
The tattoo parlour is larger and less dirty than it had been in Steve’s mind, the artist an older man with a brusque voice and gentle, careful hands. Steve feels keyed up and jumpy, especially when he sees the chair that clients are supposed to use—a huge black leather thing that bears an uncanny resemblance to the one in photos of the Winter Soldier’s prep room. He sees Bucky’s eyes fall on it too, and he wonders for a minute if he’s going to fall out of time, start screaming and fighting the way he did when they first found him. But instead he shakes his head and sits backwards on a folding chair, his shirt already up and over his broad shoulders.
“I don’t like the chair,” he tells Steve, resting his chin on his folded arms. He doesn’t look relaxed—his body is as poised, as taut, as ready for danger as ever—but his voice is calm, and there’s something peaceful in his eyes.
The artist, busily preparing a needle, grunts in agreement. “I’ve told him again and again that it’ll make him more comfortable,” he says, pulling his own chair forward and flicking a switch that Steve can’t see. The needle begins to buzz, the sound filling the little cubicle. “He won’t listen. Your friend’s stubborn.”
Steve smiles. “He always was,” he says, and watches the needle touch down onto Bucky’s skin.
It doesn’t take as long as he would have thought. Bucky’s back is nearly full by now, only a few spare inches left for the red that remains in his ledger, and the additions today are minor, three names in neat black rows. Bucky’s eyes close as the artist’s hand moves, his mouth falling open slightly. The shadows of his eyelashes seem obscenely long on the rising flush of his cheeks. Steve watches the movement of his chest, losing himself in the sound of the needle and the quiet rhythm of Bucky’s breathing. The face of the man who was the Winter Soldier looks the way it did when he used to pray, before everything that happened got between him and God—not the praying he did at church, but the kind Steve would catch him at every now and then when he was sick or when he got his face beaten by some punk kids or when they were both so hungry they felt like they’d die. Those times he’d wake up or turn around and see Bucky’s eyes closed, face held in expectant stillness, like he was listening to the dark behind his eyes. His face is like that now, open, empty, waiting. Steve looks at it for as long as he can, making sure his eyes are elsewhere when the tattoo artist glances at him.
They pay—Steve has to force himself not to pull out his billfold and cover it himself—and are back outside within an hour.
Later that night, when Steve is in bed reading, Bucky appears in the doorway, a black silhouette against the hallway light.
“Steve?” he says softly. He doesn’t say Steve’s name much anymore, and the sound of it in the quiet of the apartment is beautiful. “Thank you.”
Steve thinks of a lot of replies, but settles on “You’re welcome.”
Bucky stands there for another few seconds, like he has something else to say, then turns abruptly and disappears into his room across the hall. Steve turns off his light, but he doesn’t fall asleep for hours. When he does his dreams are set to the buzz of a needle.
Tony Stark sends him an email the next day that just says his next tat should be a captain america pinup. He includes a crudely rendered MS Paint drawing of what that pinup would look like. It involves a flag. Steve scowls and deletes it.
On the mornings when he wakes up and Bucky isn’t there, he’s taken to drawing at the kitchen table. The light’s not great there, and the chair is uncomfortable, but he finds that different things come out of his pencil there. Most of them are memories, scenes from the Brooklyn of his childhood that is now long gone. The best one so far, he thinks, is the one of Mr. Moretti from down the street unloading boxes in an alleyway, a white cat on a windowsill nearby watching with interest as he manhandles a crate of fish. It’s a scene he remembers perfectly, if only because of the havoc that cat caused a moment later when it tried to leap into the crate and landed on Mr. Moretti’s head instead.
This morning, though, he decides to try something else. He flips to a new page, taking a second to appreciate the rough silk feel of the paper against his hands. He never had decent drawing paper as a kid, and it’s a luxury he thinks he won’t ever take for granted. Pushing his hair off his forehead, he begins to draw.
He doesn’t always notice what’s going on around him when he draws. His mother had made fun of it for him sometimes and been frustrated by it at others, but Bucky had always accepted it, smiling and shaking his head when Steve realized that he’d been asking him the same question for the last ten minutes. So it’s really no surprise to look up and see Bucky standing over his sketchbook, his fingers barely grazing the paper. His eyes follow the curve and swoop of Steve’s pencil.
“Is this the Wonder Wheel?” he asks. “On Coney Island?”
Steve blinks in surprise. “It is,” he says. “It might not be that accurate, though—I wanted to draw the version of it that exists in my brain. The old one. It probably doesn’t look like this anymore.”
“You don’t know?”
Steve shakes his head. He hasn’t been back to Coney Island since he woke up. It’s where he and Bucky used to go. Going alone had been unthinkable, and with Bucky the way he is now, how easily he starts and goes into himself when there are crowds, he doubts it would be a good idea.
“I remember going there with you,” Bucky says, still staring. His hands are moving slowly, mapping out the lines of charcoal like he can feel them raised against his skin. He looks at Steve. “Did that happen?”
“Sometimes. When we could afford it.” Which had never been often. Steve had been too sickly to work steadily for most of his life, and all the odd jobs Bucky took on in his spare time still didn’t give them enough to live comfortably.
Bucky is silent for a moment.
“There was a day,” he begins, then stops, running a hand through his hair. “I don’t remember how old we were, but I had some extra money. You’d been sick. Coughing a lot. It might have been bronchitis, did you have that?”
“I did. And about a thousand other things. I was sick more often than not back then.”
“But you weren’t sick that day. And it was bright and warm, and I wanted to give you something. A nice memory, maybe. Or a good day. So we took the nickel ferry out to Coney Island. We rode the Cyclone so many times you threw up, and I was so scared I’d made you sick when you’d just gotten better… But then you straightened up and said, ‘Let’s go again.’ You were always like that. Never knew when to quit.” He smiles, looking like he’s not sure if he’s doing it right, and Steve can feel it again, that rising glow that he always feared would give him away. He should look away. He can’t.
“I remember we were walking along the pier together.” Bucky’s fingers dance over to the few details Steve has sketched in for the pier, barely visible in the far corner of the drawing. “We had just enough to buy a hot dog off a street cart. I wanted you to have all of it but you made me take half, wouldn’t hear otherwise.”
Steve shrugs. He remembers this day. He remembers all the days. “You were too thin.”
Bucky’s smile is still there, curled up at the corners. He wants to touch it. “So were you. Thin and little and pale… but you didn’t look pale that day. You were all gold, all—lit up, like someone’d struck a match in you. That wheel turning behind you against the blue. And I was looking at you, and looking, and… I wanted to kiss you.” He looks at Steve, his eyes wondering and sad. “I wanted to. I didn’t, though. Why didn’t I?”
Steve can hear his heart pounding, the dizzying rush of blood beneath his skin. He knows how he should answer the question, the explanations he can give—it was illegal, we were in public, you didn’t really want to, you were just confused, we were friends. He opens his mouth to say those things, and what comes out is, “Do you want to kiss me now?”
Bucky is still, his eyes moving over Steve’s face, settling on his mouth. Then he leans down.
It’s hardly a kiss at all, really. Their lips touch for the briefest moment, skin just barely brushing skin, but Steve feels it all through him, a surging ache that swamps him for a moment and makes him keep his eyes tight shut even after Bucky pulls away. When he opens them again Bucky is still looking at him. Steve isn’t as good at reading him anymore, can’t guess his thoughts like magic the way he used to, but he thinks he looks worried. Or maybe scared.
“I wanted to kiss you too,” he says, the words nearly tripping each other up on their way out of his mouth. Anything to chase that look off Bucky’s face, to make him smile again. “That day. Every day. Then and now.”
Bucky makes a little noise in the back of his throat. He leans down again, pressing in harder this time. Steve has to clench his hands into fists in his lap to keep himself still, and then Bucky’s lips part and he licks into Steve’s mouth and he can’t suppress a shudder. He can feel Bucky stiffen, like he’s going to pull away, and his hands move of their own accord, clutching his shoulders and keeping him close. Bucky laughs—actually laughs—into his mouth, his tongue curling deep and wet. He tastes like nothing in particular. Steve’s hands slide down from his shoulders, under his shirt, onto his skin, and he is soft and hard and smooth and scarred and warm and cool all at once.
Bucky pulls his mouth away, breathing hard. He rests his forehead against Steve’s.
“I ran away once,” he says. His voice is low and fevered, and his pupils are blown. “On a mission. I was in California and I-I snapped and I took a bus and ended up there, walking up and down that pier. I don’t know when it was but it looked different, and I looked at everything and saw other things on top of them, and I didn’t understand why I was there, or why being alone felt so strange. I just knew I had to be there. I knew it was important. And when I found you again…” He laughs again. It comes out in a strange little breathless huff. Steve can feel it. “I guess I know why now.”
His hand reaches down and threads through Steve’s, cool metal on warm, hot skin, and he kisses him again.
It’s a few weeks later when Steve sees the tattoo on Bucky’s right side, a wheel stretched over prominent ribs. He can’t keep himself from touching it. He doesn’t have to.