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So it isn’t the music Steve would pick if anyone had asked him (they didn’t), and the volume is far, far louder than it needs to be, but frankly, he’s happy enough just being here—and now, finally, in the actual future again, where the only dinosaurs are fossils and birds—that he doesn’t feel like voicing either of those complaints.
Tony means well, and it’s Tony’s Tower—still ugly, even after their extended prehistoric adventure, so absence doesn’t make all the hearts grow fonder—so Tony gets to throw the party and gets to choose the music and gets to play DJ to his heart’s content. Currently, he’s making a joke Steve doesn’t quite follow but grins along with.
And Steve? He’s spinning around the dance floor with his best guy in his arms, one hand on Bucky’s waist, the other lacing his flesh fingers together with Bucky’s metal ones, his feet moving on solid, even, level ground without a fern or a pine cone in sight.
He could not be happier.
It’s been ages since he and Bucky did this, since they grinned at each other and turned the radio up, since they knocked over that lamp entirely on accident and never mind that it was a star-spangled gag gift from Barton, that it was ugly, and that neither of them liked it much. Pure accident.
It’s been even longer since they danced where others could see them, nearly a century. And back then, it was serious and real and meaningful on the inside, and goofy and pretend and playful on the outside. A party their dates had managed to get invited to, and they’d paired off for the laughs and to save Steve’s date’s toes.
He remembers how hard it had been to keep the heat out of his eyes and off his cheeks, and how Bucky’s hand had felt at his back, and how he’d smiled, that little rise at one corner of his mouth, the laughter in his eyes, all warm and soft.
They don’t have to pretend anymore. Now when they dance, they can just dance. Can trade off who leads, now that Steve actually has more than two dance moves. Can let hands and eyes wander and linger. Can let whatever awful music Tony’s picked work its way through them and tug them along into a waltz and a jitterbug and a salsa and whatever else the tempo demands.
“This is fucking nuts, you know,” Bucky says as they rush past Nat and Barton hatching some plan or other in the corner. “We’re going to break one of the four legs we have at our disposal and then where’ll we be?”
Steve laughs. “Laid up for a few days, tops, and then back out in the field, making Barton jealous because he’s got to put in invalid time and we never do.”
He gets another look at that corner as they turn, and sure enough, Nat and Barton are working on something, and that something is Sam—flat out refusing to do the chicken dance, but with a smile that says he’s just waiting for them to poke a few more times, because he wants to do the chicken dance.
Steve’s glad they’re having fun. Glad they’re all having fun. It has been far too long since they all had fun together, as a group, a team, a family.
“Geez, Steve.” Bucky’s looking at him weirdly.
Maybe he doesn’t approve of the chicken dance. Bucky has some odd hangups still, and it wouldn’t surprise Steve to learn that the chicken dance was one of them.
“Are you even awake right now?”
Of course he’s awake. He’s dancing. You can’t dance when you’re asleep. And Tony and the rest are there, with Banner lurking in a corner half asleep over his drink and Thor… Well, somewhere. Probably on Asgard. He’s not always on hand for these things.
“Steve.”
Bucky spins them off into a hallway painted to look like the bottom ten feet of a redwood forest, which is new. Maybe it’s wallpaper. He doesn’t recall any wallpaper or murals in the Tower.
“Steve. For fuck’s sake.”
Bucky holds him still, refusing to do even one more twirl down the hallway, and that’s pretty unfair, because they hardly ever get to dance anymore, and—
There’s a crunch and whatever was underfoot—a pine cone? a Christmas ornament? a pine cone, definitely a pine cone, and that makes no sense at all. Why would there be pine cones in the Tower, even if it was Christmas? Tony doesn’t go in for that sort of holiday decor…
“Hey,” Bucky says, still holding onto his shoulders with both hands. The concerned frustration on his face in the filtered moonlight loses all traces of irritation.
“Where—?” Steve looks around. Nighttime forest. Trees so big he can’t see the branches unless he tips his head back. “What?”
Bucky lifts his right hand to push Steve’s hair—now three weeks past due for a trim, and he never lets it get this long, so why…?—back from his eyes. “Hey, welcome back. I got you, babe. You’re okay.”
Steve lets out a long, slow breath and closes his eyes. “We traveled through time.”
“Yep.”
He knew it. “We’re in the Jurassic Period.”
“Near as we can guess.”
Steve opens his eyes again. “I was dreaming.”
“Sleepwalking is probably more accurate. Sleepdancing.” Bucky pulls him close and then steers him back the way they’d come with an arm around his shoulders, like old times, but a bit more evenly matched. “I got up to check on you. Glad I did.”
“Why did you…?” Bucky’s paranoid, sure, but he can’t have thought Steve would leave him in a dinosaur forest. Where would Steve even have gone? To the other side of the dinosaur forest? To swim out over the sea-lake-ocean-they aren’t even sure how big it is?
Bucky shrugs. “A quick piss in the night is usually pretty quick. You were taking forever, so it was obviously something more involved.”
“Bucky,” he says. He can hear the waggle in Bucky’s eyebrows, and there’s really no need for euphemism, and if there was, there’s no need for that tone of voice. That damn elf comic is bad enough without having actual conversation turn crass.
“Figured it could be the fern leaves deciding they didn’t like to be eaten after all, maybe a dinosaur was being a pest, maybe you got turned around…” Bucky squeezes his shoulder. “‘Cause if you were just having a good time with yourself, you’d have at least invited me to join in.”
“Bucky.”
Bucky laughs as he unhooks the head-high pseudo-tripwire that serves as their “was something big and potentially hungry here while we were away” alarm system—because it’s nice to know, even if they can’t prevent a single thing.
“Well, I know you’re awake now, Steve.” The look Bucky gives him is more than half jovial, but there’s an undercurrent of worry hidden deep in his eyes. “Maybe next turn around the forest floor, we make sure we’re both awake for it, huh?”
“Yeah.” Steve looks out through their fern fencing with a frown. Dancing in the dinosaur forest. At night. Thinking it was… “Yeah,” he says again. “We’ll both be awake for it.” And maybe it really will be in the future, among their friends, and not here and now.
Bucky’s quiet for a moment, silently watching him with an expression Steve could place if he was looking at it directly, but he’s not. If he looks at Bucky, sees what might be concern there, this could become a whole thing. Twenty questions about the fears he’s trying to ignore.
“You want to talk about it?”
He doesn’t, really. If he talks about it, talks about how wonderful it was to be back, to be home, to be surrounded by their friends… Bucky’s not nearly as sensitive about certain things as when he first came back, but Steve doesn’t want to take the chance that he’ll take it as a statement of his not being enough.
And… talking about it makes it more real that they aren’t back, aren’t home, aren’t surrounded by their friends. It makes it more real that… that they might never be back, home, surrounded by friends.
And there’s no one he’d rather be here with than Bucky, but he’d like for him and Bucky to be almost anywhere else. Anywhen else, and that should not be a thing, should not be a distinction that needs to be made.
“…Sam was going to do the chicken dance.” It’s pretty clumsy, Steve knows. But Bucky’s not someone he’s ever practiced misleading.
Bucky raises his eyebrows. “Sorry I interrupted that.”
Steve is half sure he’s going to ask again, but Bucky seems to take the attempted misdirection as an answer in and of itself, and instead just follows Steve back to the shallow cave Bucky’d found them and the woven and fern-padded palm nest inside it that he’s spent the last two and a half weeks feathering—sometimes literally, when they’ve successfully brought down something with a lot of feathers.
And if Bucky chooses to spend the rest of the night sprawled more than a little on top of him, with his right arm serving as a pillow for Steve and his head squarely on Steve’s left pectoral, Steve supposes he can’t blame him… and he doesn’t mind, anyway, since that makes it much easier to turn his face into Bucky’s neck and breathe him in. And the solid warmth of him, even on these balmy, humid nights, is as much a security blanket as anyone could ever wish for.
Steve isn’t sure whether Bucky sleeps much the rest of the night, but there’s no objection to his twisting his fingers through Bucky’s hair, winding strand after strand of it around index, middle, ring, pinkie, thumb. Sometimes just carding his fingers through, root to tip, gently so that he won’t end up tugging at a tangle. Somehow, five weeks without a drop of shampoo or conditioner, Bucky’s got remarkably tangle-free hair.
Maybe he’s born with it, Steve muses. Maybe it’s super serum.
“Oh, come on!” Bucky throws a cherry tomato at the screen and hits whoever that is on the nose. “Are you fucking kidding me with that?!”
Bucky flips off the guy being interviewed. “Just because they didn’t have calculators, they couldn’t have— What, like math is so hard? I never had a fucking calculator in my back pocket, and I did the math just fine! On fucking windy days, too! So-called impossible shots over so-called impossible distances. Not a calculator in sight!”
And it’s a sure sign Bucky’s actually irritated and not just putting on a show if he’s using his own success as an assassin to back up a point about… supposedly alien-guided stone masonry? Bucky pretty much never volunteers anything from before he showed up again. Never so much as alludes to it unless it’s already a bad day to start with.
Steve half-listens to whoever is on the screen natter on about laser-precision while pointing to rocks that don’t look the part. “If you don’t like the show, Bucky, why do you watch it?”
Bucky hunches forward on his couch cushion, eyes still glued to the screen. “Someone has to,” he mutters. “Gotta keep track of these idiots.”
“Not really, no.” Great. This is a paranoia thing now. How did he miss the moment when Bucky stopped hating the show for glorifying conspiracies and started thinking of the show itself as a conspiracy? “And if someone did have to watch this… for whatever reasons… does the someone have to be you?”
“Look at this guy. Steve, look at him.” Bucky gestures at the screen, palms up, as though presenting a particularly ugly cake. “Someone carves up a dozen-odd big honking rocks, and they have funky heads and are huge, so obviously they’re meant to represent alien visitors and were carved with borrowed alien technology.”
“Well, aliens do exist, Buck.” Steve goes to stand behind Bucky and rests his hands on Bucky’s shoulders. And it’s nice, even if Bucky is a bit unnecessarily agitated by the show itself. This sort of thing—hands on shoulders, or even just approaching from behind—wouldn’t have been even remotely possible when Bucky first came in. They’ve come so far, it’s hard to imagine what they’d started with.
“Yeah, I know. I saw the footage.” Bucky dismisses it with a wave of his hand. “And they haven’t devoted even a single episode to pointing at the space whales and going ‘there, see, we were right, that’s called a vimana.’ They haven’t even compared it to a single tapestry, and you know they’re all about finding aliens in tapestries.”
Steve frowns. “Wait, so are you upset that these guys are claiming that aliens shaped the course of human history, or are you upset that they aren’t talking about actual aliens?”
“Both.” Steve can’t see his expression, but the tone of voice borders on petulant. “I can be both.”
Steve bites back a chuckle. Even if he can’t see the pout, he doesn’t want to chase it away. Bucky’s pouts are adorable.
Bucky makes another derisive gesture at the screen, this one a little closer to flipping the screen off a second time, and then puts on a German accent. “Oh, look at me, I am sitting in a dark room surrounded by creepy ceremonial masks, and I am therefore trustworthy—a quirky academic with weird alien fantasies. Just a pop-culture nut-job. Look no deeper.”
Steve sighs. Normally, this is when he’d say something like, “well, enjoy the show you hate,” and leave Bucky to it. But they’re home, and they’re happy—aside from the paranoia—and Steve doesn’t want to miss a moment of this.
“You know, Buck,” he says, giving his shoulders a light squeeze. “I don’t think I’ve watched the latest Blue Planet.”
That will do the trick. That always does the trick. Bucky will never say “no” to Blue Planet of any variety, particularly not if it comes as a request rather than a suggestion.
Predictably, Bucky switches the channel over to the perpetually streaming nature documentaries JARVIS scours the globe to present. “What’s the last one you watched?”
Steve considers his options as he comes around the sofa to sit beside him. “Well, there’s the updated version of Walking with Dinosaurs.”
Bucky groans. “Come on, Steve. We’re living that one.”
“We’re not that old,” he objects. “No matter what Nat has to say about it.”
Bucky turns to look at him, with a little frown. “Are you sleeping again?”
“Sleeping? Why would I be sleeping?” Steve laughs. “We’re going to watch one of your nature shows. We haven’t started it yet. I’ll wait to fall asleep until after it’s been on for a while.”
Bucky narrows his eyes. “It’s been ‘on’ for over a month, now, Steve. Wake the fuck up, babe.”
“I am—”
The Assemble alarm goes off, and Steve jumps to his feet. So much for a relaxing evening watching Bucky watch nature documentaries. He wonders who is attacking what this time, and also why the alarm sounds less like an alarm and more like a howler monkey crossed with a demented, shrieking bird.
He’ll have to ask Tony about that. He very much prefers the old alarm.
“Hey,” Bucky says, low and soft. “It’s okay, it’s just the Christmas grackles, Stevie. Full moon. They like the light.”
The what? Christmas…
Right.
Red feathers on pebbly green skin, with the bright green feet and fingers. Christmas grackles. Right. Because they’re literally walking with dinosaurs.
Steve rubs at his eyes, and then runs his fingers through shaggier hair than he feels comfortable with. He’s apparently been staring at tree trunk. He sighs and sits back down.
“You planning to make this a weekly thing?” Bucky asks, tone light but not unconcerned.
“It’s nothing,” Steve says. “I just have really vivid dreams sometimes, is all.”
Bucky looks unimpressed. “Really vivid dreams, my ass.” He crosses his arms. “You’re fucking sleepwalking, Steve. I know that shit, and I know it well. You gotta talk it out.”
Steve carefully doesn’t so much as think about it, let alone talk about it, and instead picks at his fingernails. Definitely time to slice them down with one of the smaller knives. “Thought you hated talk therapy. ‘Load of crap,’ you said. Only you weren’t that polite.”
“Hating it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Sometimes. In a way.” Bucky scoots closer to him and pulls him into a side-hug. “The S.H.I.E.L.D. people are doing it… I don’t know. They’re probably not wrong for most people’s trauma grab-bag, but they’re not doing me much good. There’s better methods out there.”
“So you’re a connoisseur, then?” Steve wishes he didn’t sound quite so belligerent. Starting a fight over this is the last thing he wants to do.
“Hardly. But… I don’t know, Steve. I’m a light enough sleeper to keep you from wandering off too far, but I don’t want to be alone out here. Now,” he hurriedly adds. “Don’t want to be now without you. So it’s in everyone’s best interests if you don’t sleepwalk yourself off a damn cliff.”
Steve puts a smile on. “I’m not going anywhere, Buck. And definitely not going over a cliff.” He can tell that doesn’t satisfy Bucky, but he can also tell that Bucky isn’t any more willing to turn this into a fight than Steve is, and isn’t going to press him to “let it all out” or anything like that.
“You know,” Steve says after a moment. “I’m actually kind of tired.” Because, hey, that’s true. He’s exhausted. And Bucky’s bound to be just as tired, maybe more.
“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Okay. Yeah, I could sleep.”
It’s another night—or another partial night, anyway—spent with Bucky draped over the top of him, this time fully burrowed in with his legs between Steve’s and his arms tucked in tight instead of sprawled out, his head jammed up under Steve’s chin.
Surprisingly, it’s a comfortable position even without a memory foam mattress beneath them, and Steve can’t help but spend several minutes hoping that maybe this will become their norm.
Not the sleepwalking—that can go away before he has to admit that that’s what it is and Bucky’s right. But maybe Bucky will start off the night right up in his space, instead of only sometimes migrating there in his sleep.
It’d be nice if something pleasant came out of his restlessness. It’d be nicer still if something pleasant didn’t need his restlessness to jump start it.
He can really hear it coming down, the light pattering of the peripheral spray against the glass of the door, the heavy drumming of the rest of the water against the tiles. Say what you will about the Tower, the water pressure is to die for.
Steve slides the door open and slips inside, letting the water beat against his back and shoulders, running through his hair and down his face. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve been back—he will never get enough of hot showers. He could stand here under the spray until every digit was a wrinkled prune and still want to hop right back in once he’d dried off.
There’s just nothing quite like the brand of clean to be had when there’s soap and shampoo available, something a little gentler than a handful of sand to scrub with, something that can leave skin and hair practically squeaky to the touch without a single trace of sap, or mud, or fern fronds.
He remembers when he first woke up, the way there were too many hygiene products and laundry detergents to pick from, and the way they all smelled powerfully wrong. So much overbearing floral nonsense and… food smells. Apple shampoo? Strawberry? Citrus? Pomegranate? Soaps that smelled like fancy candles and perfumes and desserts.
You didn’t smell clean after using those. You smelled like a fruit salad. Maybe a bakery or a florist’s shop. And it followed you everywhere, because it was you who smelled like that. Your hair. Your skin. Your clothes.
Steve had thought, honestly, that when they got back to the future again, he might have a similar response to all the toiletries with their smells. Even the “fragrance-free” brands he and Bucky used smelled chemical in a way he doesn’t remember soap smelling back in the War. And after years in the far past, it had stood to reason that even those might be overwhelming.
But no. He’d been nothing but thrilled, and he still is. And if Bucky’s hours-long “leave me alone to wash the dinosaur off, or get in here and help me do it, but don’t fucking stand there, you’re letting out the steam” session was anything to judge by, the sentiment had been thoroughly shared.
And remains shared, apparently, because there’s a tiny waft of cool air as the shower door opens, and then Bucky is right there, in his space, under the spray, skin against skin and lips on lips, fingers sliding across his wet skin.
Steve hums a welcome into their kiss and snakes his arms around Bucky’s waist, holding him close and debating whether to turn this into something more than a semi-frisky shower. There’s time for it. More than enough time. They have all the time in the world—millions of years of it, stretching out before them.
At the very least, he decides, he’ll make it a properly frisky shower, nothing halfway about it. Through awkward and occasionally traumatic trial and error, he knows Bucky doesn’t like being pinned against walls while necking on each other—and even less so slick shower tiles—and he won’t pursue Steve if their position is swapped and it’s Steve pressed back. And whatever modern cinema has to say about it, that in no way inhibits a frisky shower.
Steve pulls Bucky tighter against himself with one arm and uses his free hand to gently tug Bucky’s hair—light pressure, not even an unspoken request, more suggestion than anything—until his head tips back and his neck is free to be kissed and nipped and sucked on. The edge of his jaw. That tender bit just below where jaw meets ear.
He can feel the vibrations of Bucky’s wordless murmur of appreciation with his lips, and he redoubles his efforts in response. It’s hard to make a mark stick on either of them, but Bucky’s going to wear these love bites for at least an hour.
Steve might even spend a whole hour sucking them into his skin, crafting each one with care, his lips and tongue and teeth working together like brush and palette knife laden with paint. Might make a design of it, a piece of art on the canvas of Bucky’s torso—jawline to neck to clavicle, drifting slowly downward… Steve might sign his masterpiece on his knees.
“You’re gonna catch cold, you idiot,” Bucky breathes against him. “Come back to bed.”
Steve mumbles between kisses that he doesn’t catch colds anymore and that he’s going to take Bucky apart first. That they can curl up in bed afterward. After he’s pulled every gasp he can from Bucky’s lips, every breathy moan from his throat, every sigh, every whimper, every sound, loud or soft.
“Mmm, tempting,” Bucky murmurs. “But even without a reliable timepiece, I know it’s ass o’clock, Steve. And raining. Come on. We’re both too tired for this shit.”
He reaches up between them and moves his hands along Steve’s shoulders, stroking outward from his neck. “If you want to fuck me, I’m game, but you gotta do it while you’re awake. That’s one of the rules we actually follow.”
Bucky’s fingers dig in with that perfect balance of unyielding pressure and gentle glide that unravels knots and dispels tension like there was never stiffness or soreness to start with. Bucky’s hands are a miracle and Steve would give nearly anything to be able to return the favor.
By every measure, Bucky could use this more than Steve, after all. But while Steve’s gotten past a lot of Bucky’s barriers, this is just not one of them yet. Bucky always shrugs him off after barely a minute—and sooner than that, even, if he uses anything near enough pressure to do some good.
“Come on, Steve. Whatever you’re worried about,” Bucky says, fingers inching up the back of his neck and combing along his scalp as he draws Steve closer to touch foreheads, “we’ll deal with it in the morning, when we’re both awake.”
Steve’s not worried about anything. What’s there to worry about? They’re home, safe, and wrapped in one another’s arms.
They are surrounded by their friends—a whole Tower full of them, Avengers new and old. The trustworthy remnants of S.H.I.E.L.D., just a quinjet away, even Coulson back with the living. No one is forever lost to them. Even Peggy, on her good days, is up for a phone call or a visit.
They are comfortable and well-fed, without having to wonder what the next meal will be, or how they’ll cook it, or whether it will try to eat them when they hunt it down. When Bucky’s metal arm gets glitchy, there’s a whole lab full of tools and a genius engineer to wield them.
The time for worrying is over. All the problems—the really immediate problems—are solved, and Steve is eyeing the evening’s itinerary and likes what he sees in the lineup.
“Yeah, okay.” Bucky sighs and pulls back a bit, giving his shoulders one last squeeze, but leaving his hands on them. “Then how’d we do it? How did we solve the puzzle, get back home, all that. Hm?”
Steve frowns. Bucky doesn’t remember? It’s concerning that Bucky’s forgetting something as… Huh. Well, maybe not as memorable as that. How did they do it? He knows they did, or they wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be now, wouldn’t be standing in the steam under the spray of hot…
There’s a crack of thunder.
And Bucky isn’t standing in the shower with him, naked and pink from the heat and ready to be painted with love bites. He’s standing in a little clearing in the ferns with him, fully dressed, hair plastered to the sides of his face, shirt and pants clinging to him.
Bucky still looks concerned, but that’s a frown with a good measure of frustrated “what the fuck, Steve” mixed in.
“Do you remember how we fixed it all?” Bucky asks. He rubs his thumbs in little circles along Steve’s shoulders—not his skin, but his sopping wet t-shirt. “No? That’s because we didn’t. Haven’t yet. You’re dreaming again. And I need you to wake up, Steve.”
Steve closes his eyes in a long blink, and sighs. “I’m awake now, Buck.”
“About damn time,” he mutters.
Bucky pulls him close and wraps his arms around Steve’s shoulders, and Steve can feel the tension and the relief warring with each other in how tightly Bucky clings. He slides his arms around Bucky to hold him just as tightly.
“I’m sorry,” Steve whispers. “I’m sorry to make you worry, Buck.”
“I’m not worried,” Bucky says, his voice harsh. “I’m fucking terrified. You’re going to walk off a cliff or wander out into the open to get squished like a bug.”
Steve can’t hold him any closer without squeezing the air out of his lungs, so he merely maintains his hold. “I won’t. I’m sorry. I’m just getting used to the new camp is all.”
“Bullshit,” Bucky mutters. “And you are going to talk about it, Rogers.”
And talk about it they do.
Bucky has a fire going in a surprising amount of time, given how wet everything is from the storm that’s still raging high above the forest canopy. He’s got the makeshift drying rack out and ready to be draped with their wrung-out clothes like it was an intentional laundry day and not a mistake.
He’s got a look on his face that says he’s facing a firing squad, too, and that makes Steve distinctly uncomfortable.
Steve wishes the circumstances were different. He wishes this was their room in the Tower, that they were both comfortable and safe, and that there was any other reason for Bucky to grimly strip out of wet clothes while Steve’s still there. He wishes that Bucky weren’t grim about it.
Because Steve wants to appreciate Bucky’s form, his figure, the play of muscles and even the way the scarring shifts with his movements. There is a sort of beauty in the meeting of metal and flesh, even if it’s a harsh beauty and brought about by horrible things. Even if it’s a beauty that he knows makes every fiber of Bucky’s being squirm with discomfort.
Since it’s not better circumstances, since it is something brought about through worry and stress and not openness and a desire to finally share something, Steve does his best not to watch the transition from sodden fabric to scarred tissue. It’s the transition that bothers him, after all. The movement from clothed to unclothed, from naked to dressed.
He doesn’t know why that is—Bucky has never shared and Steve has never pried—but he does know that it is. And so he keeps his eyes on his own hands, his own fingers, his own pants being pulled down off his own legs to join the t-shirts on the framework of branches by the fire.
He tries not to think about whether standing out in the rain arguing with him has been damaging to Bucky’s metal arm, even if only in the most incremental of ways, even if it is a drop in a bucket that will eventually gather enough drops to spill over.
“I am sorry, you know.” Steve looks sheepishly from his hiking pants to where Bucky is already sitting in front of the fire. The transition is over. Now he can apologize well enough to avoid wasting their time with a run-down of his current dreams.
Bucky sighs. “You can be as sorry as you like,” he says, “but you don’t have to be.”
Steve goes to sit next to him, settling on the second of the flat rocks they’ve hauled over to avoid sitting in the dirt or getting splinters in unfortunate places. It’s actually already warmed by the fire, a little.
“You don’t wanna talk about it. Fine. I get that. I don’t talk about my shit, either.” Bucky pokes at the fire with a stick. “So I’m gonna go first, and when I’m done, you don’t get to chicken out. I spill my guts, you spill yours.” He holds out a hand.
Steve nods and reaches out to shake on it. “Alright. Deal.”
Bucky has got to be insanely worried to volunteer information. Steve wishes he was sharing it because he wanted to. He also wonders just what it is he’s going to learn, and how mad it will make him. How badly it will stir up the fight inside him now that he’s hundreds of millions of years too soon to do anything about it.
“Back in the future,” Bucky says, eyes on the fire, “after that whole debacle with Insight, while I was still— When I wasn’t ready to come back.”
Steve nods, but keeps his mouth shut. It had been a horrible two years. And he has never yet learned all of what Bucky had been up to. Bucky had disappeared like he had a whole team coordinated and ready to bury him in the shadows like the ghost he’d been before. Some of that, Bucky’s mentioned. Most of it, he hasn’t.
Bucky takes the signal for what it’s meant to be, and just… starts… talking.
“My sleep was fucked up for loads of reasons, right. You go that many years with your dreams being wiped away before you can remember them, you don’t know what to do with dreams you get to keep. You don’t really believe you do get to keep ‘em, either.” Bucky pauses, and his eyes lazily drift as he plans out his words.
“Thought they were going to come back and take them away, so I got these notebooks. Stole the first ones, then bought a few. And I wrote… everything down. If I thought it, it went in a notebook. If I woke up, everything went in a notebook. I filled up notebooks faster than pans catching rainwater in a drippy, run-down shack.”
Steve knows about the notebooks. Doesn’t know what was in them, but knows that Bucky had them—a whole backpack full of them, and most of them ratty with overuse—when he came in. He’s never asked what was inside. Because they were like diaries, weren’t they? And you just didn’t ask about that, at least not when trying to make sure someone stayed who could ghost at a misspoken word.
“It was totally insane garbage, Steve. Just page after page of batshit crazy stuff in those notebooks.” Bucky looks up from the fire and meets his eyes. “But it worked. Sure, there are some days when everything’s all fucked up. But talking it out helped. Which is why you’re going to talk it out later.”
He waits for Steve to challenge that, and Steve goes ahead and obliges him. “Writing it out, you mean. In notebooks. On paper.” Which we don’t have enough of, Steve doesn’t add.
There’s a flicker of something in Bucky’s eyes that almost looks like triumph, except that triumph wouldn’t make sense.
“No,” Bucky says, and his voice has the triumph in it, too, like Steve’s fallen for something. “I mean talking it out. Because at first, I… I don’t know. I couldn’t actually write anything down without also saying the words. While I wrote them. Couldn’t read to myself, either. Not without saying it, line by line, word by word.”
He shrugs. “They didn’t want me doing those things without their knowledge, is my best guess. Had to relearn that.”
And there goes the anger monster clenching its fists and ready to go to war for this man, except he can’t. So he just listens, because if he does say something, it will be fighting words he can’t make good on.
“There was a…” Bucky pauses, pinches his nose, and sighs. He’s quiet for another moment or two. “Okay, don’t laugh at this, but there was a little old lady in the next room. And she overheard at least half of the shit I was going on about. Heard it twice, sometimes three times, because if I couldn’t read quietly or write quietly, I sure as fuck couldn’t sleep quietly.”
Bucky pokes again at the fire, sending a few sparks into the air. “And she’d come over. Introduced herself to me every time. Maybe she thought she needed to. Maybe she did need to. I don’t know. I was fucked up enough to forget her day-to-day whether I did or not. But she brought over soup and stuff.”
There’s another pause. “And she made me talk about it. Not just the screaming while I dreamed or the raving while I wrote. But talking about it like a person might. Face to face. A real conversation, her and me. Only two people in the world, sitting across from each other eating soup and talking.”
“Bucky…” Steve takes in a breath. “Why would I laugh about that?” God, he’s never heard so much at a time, and if only he could have been there, if… “If I knew where she was, I’d be on my knees thanking her for—”
“There was no little old lady, Steve.” Bucky cuts a hand through the air, not angry, but forceful. “I made soup and I forgot I did it. Soup is easy! You throw whatever shit you can find into a pot, add some water and boil it until it won’t kill you.”
Steve stares at him. There wasn’t—? Then why—?
“I forgot all kinds of shit. I talked to myself, screamed to myself, introduced myself to myself. I made soup in my fucking sleep, might have burned everything down and slept all the way to Hell. I was utterly fucking nuts!” Bucky’s metal arm does a shimmy but it doesn’t calm Bucky down at all. “I was insane, Steve! A goddamn nightmare! A wreck!”
Bucky takes a moment to resume a more even breathing pattern, but his eyes and his posture say “don’t you fucking say one word or so help me,” so Steve just watches and wishes he could pull Bucky close and convince him that he was not a nightmare, and that he would not have gone to Hell, and that he is loved.
“The only reason I didn’t get into deep-shit-trouble that first half year or so,” Bucky continues, far more softly, but not calmly, “is that I was out of my fucking mind but still paranoid enough to make sure my bolt hole was far enough out of the way and soundproof enough that no one fucking heard me.”
He drags a strand of hair from the side of his face to put it behind his ear instead. “The one insanity protected me from the other insanity, so I didn’t actually bring HYDRA down on my idiot, amnesiac, journal-obsessed, sleepwalking, soup-making self. No matter how loud I screamed about it to the goddamn fucking figment of my imagination. No matter what rants I shared with the neighbor my hallucinating, fucked-up brain made up wholesale out of fucking nothing. And it helped.”
Bucky doesn’t go on, and so Steve is left with a solid minute of silence, just the crackling and popping of the fire, the patter of water coming down outside their shelter, the miserable, wet cries of the creatures they share the forest with.
“…I would never laugh at that, Bucky,” he finally says, voice as steady as he can make it but still shaking a little. “There’s nothing amusing there. There’s only… Only amazing strength, and willpower, and a fucking miracle that brought you back to me, and…” He shakes his head. “I should have been there for you. I wish I could have been there for you.”
“Well you can’t,” Bucky mutters. “Time travel works in mysterious ways, but apparently not that way.” He resumes poking at the fire for a moment, then continues softly, “I wouldn’t have wanted you there, anyway. I wasn’t ready. Too fucked up. Wouldn’t have known what to do, or whether you were even real.”
He looks up at Steve and the fire’s in his eyes now, determination written across his face. “But right here and now, I’m your little old lady, Steve. Ain’t no one around to hear your fears and use ‘em against you, ain’t no around to put in a noise complaint, ain’t no one around you’ve gotta hide from.”
Bucky points his stick at Steve. “So spill your fucking guts and tell me what the hell is going on in there. Because you can talk all night and sleep-paint the cave walls, but we don’t have the supplies for you to journal in ink and we are not actually painting cave walls for someone to find and put on the fucking History Channel.”
Steve looks from Bucky’s eyes, to the end of the stick, and back to his eyes, with the fire reflected in their depths. And it’s hit him loads of times, sure, but right now? Right now it hits him—really hits him, hard, right in the middle of his gut and almost painfully intense.
He loves this man.
Bucky brought himself back, clawing tooth and nail out of insanity, crawled out of that pit and came home to him, to Steve. And he’d known it must have been hard. He’d known it must have been a struggle. He’d known the odds were against Bucky every step of the way.
But he hadn’t really known. He hadn’t been able to— No, hadn’t allowed himself to imagine what exactly that struggle must have entailed. Bucky had pulled him out of the water, Bucky had disappeared off the very surface of the earth itself, and no amount of searching could pull up a clue. Surely he’d been fully mobile, clear enough in his thinking to travel, smart enough to stay off the radar. His memories might be gone, Steve had thought, but his mind wasn’t.
And he’d done it alone, but the thing is, he shouldn’t have had to. And Steve could do this alone, could wrestle with the similarities, could struggle through the worries, the fear. But he doesn’t have to.
“It’s happening again,” is what he says, finally. Bucky trusts him with his vulnerability and his madness. And he trusts Bucky, but now is the time to prove it.
Steve swallows. “It’s the same in too many ways. I go to sleep with… With Peggy waiting for her dance, and the Howlies mopping up Schmidt’s base, and all the world on the brink of despair but also about to get better finally. I’d lost you, but I…”
Steve takes a moment. “I knew I’d find you again, on the other side. Just as soon as the plane was down.”
He risks a look at Bucky, and doesn’t find outrage or even sorrow, but just acceptance. Acceptance that Steve had taken him for dead, that Steve had sped on his way to meet him there, that Steve had ditched his remaining, living backup and plunged full speed ahead, because his true backup was waiting for him on the other side.
“And I wake up,” he says.
“I wake up and nothing’s real. The room is fake, the noises out the window are fake, the game is fake, the nurse is fake, it’s all fake, and I break free, and—” Steve gestures vaguely. “And it’s the future. Twisted up and loud and fast and bright and huge. And it’s just me. Everyone is… gone. Everything I knew is gone. And there’s no going back, no changing it all, no choosing a different option and hoping for a different ending.”
Steve shifts, gathers up some more thoughts, somehow manages to keep his voice smooth. “We didn’t go to sleep, Buck, back in those ruins. But… it’s all gone. They’re all gone. And what if we can’t go back? What if we can’t change it all, or choose something different, or fix what went wrong?”
He looks up at Bucky again, and his voice is as ragged as his thoughts despite his best efforts. “What if this is it? What if it’s you and me, to the end of the line, but we’re all alone out here, until we get there, until the line ends and— And what if no one’s waiting for us at the end of the line, just like—”
He can hardly say it. But he has to. He needs to. It comes out as a whisper. “Just like you weren’t waiting for me on the other side, Buck, and I woke up alone. Just like I wasn’t there for you when you needed me. What if this is our ravine and they mourn us and move on, and there is no one waiting when we wake up?”
“Then we’re both still better off this time around, at least.” Bucky’s voice is soft, and the fire reflected in his eyes is a warm flicker instead of a hard edge. “You woke up alone. I woke up alone. It sucked all around. Plenty for everyone.”
Bucky reaches out to rest a hand on Steve’s knee. “But we’re not alone now.” He pauses. “We aren’t alone out here, Steve. This is not alone. Alone is you, on your own. Me, on my own. The two of us together, on our own? That’s not alone.”
Bucky sighs. “My S.H.I.E.L.D. therapist says we’re codependent as fuck, but I say we’re just in it together, no matter what it turns out to be. Or where. Or when. Or for how long.”
Steve puts his hand over Bucky’s. “To the end of the line, yeah. But, Bucky…”
“We might go nuts,” Bucky says. “But we’ll be insane together. And that matters. You’ve done the alone thing. I’ve done the alone thing. Alone, we’re shit. Together, we’re going to win or break the game trying. Together, we haven’t lost the others, and we aren’t going to.”
Bucky gives his knee another squeeze and then turns his hand over to clasp Steve’s. “I’m not going to feed you some sentimental slop about how the others will live on in our hearts or whatever. This isn’t fucking Hallmark.” Bucky’s lips curl derisively for a moment.
“But we can’t wake up alone if we’re arm-in-arm, and if they’re not waiting for us when we get back, then we’ll fucking hunt them down. Together. This is not our ravine, and they have no reason to think we’re dead unless they see the bodies.”
“Note to self, don’t get fossilized,” Steve murmurs.
“Don’t even joke about that shit. If HYDRA digs up this fucking metal arm and designs it after itself, all of time blows up, or something. Dr. Weirdo’s cape will smother me, for sure.”
Steve smiles, but can’t quite hold it. “What if we never see them again, Buck? What if the only interactions we have aside from with each other, from now until we’re old and gray and dead… are just dinosaurs and more dinosaurs?”
What if he never objects to another of Tony’s over-the-top “helpful” inventions? Or wonders how Nat’s mysteriously discovered a secret he thought he’d kept well? What if he never again trades a quip with Sam or shares a drink with Thor? What if he never again reins in one of Barton’s wilder notions about strategy? What if he and Banner are never again the voice of reason in a chaotic briefing? What if he never hears Peggy’s voice again?
“If that ends up being the case, it’ll suck.” Bucky is blunt, but not unkind about it. The warmth is still in his eyes, even if his words aren’t particularly comforting. “And the same as we’ve done with everything else that’s sucked in our lives, we’ll fucking deal with it. But together this time.”
Bucky frees his hand from Steve’s and stands up to flip their clothes on the drying rack, his form long and leanly muscled in the flickering glow of the fire. When he’s done, he doesn’t sit back down, but instead extends his right arm, palm up. “I want to dance naked around this fire like a fucking pagan priestess. Get your ass up here.”
Steve frowns up at him in confusion, but accepts the hand up. “Any particular reason for this very specific, very out-of-nowhere request?”
“You started this sleepwalking bullshit by dancing. I’m putting an end to it by dancing.” Bucky drags him close, skin-to-skin with his arms snaking around Steve’s waist. “And if you’re a chatty enough dance partner,” he murmurs into Steve’s ear, “I might let you take me home.”
Steve threads his fingers through Bucky’s hair, and starts them off slow enough to avoid anything rolling underfoot. “Are we still talking about the others?” he asks. “Because that might be a little awkward, Buck.”
“Tch. ‘Awkward,’ he says.” Bucky presses against him with a saucy smile. “What’s awkward, Steve, is imagining our good friend Sam doing the chicken dance…” Bucky licks his jawline. “…when you know he’s a hokey pokey practitioner at heart.”
“Wow, Bucky,” Steve says, deadpan. Yeah, so apparently, they’re going full-on awkward about this. Maybe Bucky’s thinking he can embarrass Steve’s sleeping brain into behaving in the future.
Or maybe Bucky’s thinking he can distract Steve’s sleeping brain by waking up something else…
It takes three and a half slow, spinning loops around their fire for Steve to lean into the awkward enough for it to feel somewhat natural—or at least not completely bizarre—to talk about their friends while slow dancing naked in the middle of the Jurassic night during a thunderstorm.
They trade stories about each of the others in turn, everything from rescuing Thor from disastrous microwaved Pop-Tarts to winning an ill-conceived game of Jell-o Pong against Barton simply by having gotten to go first according to the coin toss. Because Pop-Tarts toast in a toaster and catch fire in a microwave, and Barton is an even match for Bucky when it comes to calculating the angles of any given bounce of a ping-pong ball.
And maybe they neck a bit between stories. And maybe they grope each other a bit, or grind against each other, while digging up another amusing tale. And maybe that still strikes some part of Steve as being a bit to the other side of inappropriate, though it doesn’t stop him.
…And maybe Steve would have thought talking about their friends while facing the prospect of never seeing them again would drive that fear deeper. But somehow… Somehow it loosens up all that tightly congested anxiety about loss and starting over.
It isn’t gone, he reflects later, while inspecting the ceiling of their little cave and running his fingers through Bucky’s hair. It’s all still there, waiting to come out. Needing to come out. All that worry about this being the rest of their life, about their friends being lost to them, about there being no one and nothing but one another for the rest of time.
But it’s not a congealed mass lodged deep in his heart and growing by the day. It’s a thousand smaller somethings, and maybe Bucky’s right, and talking about them will chase them out, one by one.