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The house was about the size of a garden shed, but it had all the amenities. A galley kitchen with a tiny stove and a tiny sink, a long counter with three low barstools overlooking a spectacular view of the mountains, and a back room with a worktable and walls hung with dead butterflies encased in glass. The ceiling hung low over the workroom, because the builder had somehow fit a mezzanine above it to hold a double mattress.
And that was it. No couch, no easy chair, not even a rug to make sleeping on the floor slightly more comfortable.
It took away Steve’s appetite for dinner. He and Bucky hadn’t bunked together since Prague, and maybe that wasn’t the reason why Bucky hadn’t asked Steve to get him off since Prague, either – it wasn’t like he’d been too picky about the time and place before – but still. He didn’t want to know how Bucky would act in the face of that temptation.
What was he even afraid of? It wasn’t like Bucky had ever forced him to do anything against his will.
Steve must have been staring at the bed with tortured eyes, or possibly Bucky’s mind was just working on parallel lines to his own, because Bucky set his fork on his now-empty plate and said, “You could sleep on the floor.”
“You could sleep on the floor,” Steve replied. Bucky was the one who was the problem, after all.
Bucky was incredulous. “Fuck no,” he said. “I’m not the one freaking out.”
And of course to Bucky that made Steve the problem. Steve’s already-missing appetite abruptly descended into nausea. He shoved the gluey spaghetti across the table at Bucky.
Bucky shoved it back. “Eat,” he ordered. “You get cranky when you’re hungry.”
Steve managed about half the plate. Bucky finished it for him, a little frown between his eyes as he ate.
They played cards for a couple hours. Bucky remembered all the rules to poker, and he still played better than Steve: he won two times out of three. Steve suspected the ratio would have been higher if Bucky actually cared, but he looked like he was bored stiff.
Before Prague, Bucky probably would have enlivened the evening with an assassination story or two. He was on his best behavior with Steve, since Prague: no more gleefully gory stories about past assassinations, even though Steve could sometimes see him visibly biting them back. Mostly he didn’t talk at all anymore, unless he had to.
Steve didn’t miss the stories, and he didn’t miss letting Bucky use him for sex. But he missed feeling close to him, and knowing that the closeness was mostly imaginary didn’t make him miss it less.
When the sunset started to fade behind the mountains, Bucky suddenly announced, “I’m going to bed.” He tossed away his cards and disappeared up the rope ladder to the darkness of the bed. His boots thunked on the floor as he tossed them down, and then the little house was silent.
Steve picked up Bucky’s cards, just to see. He had a royal flush. He would have won.
Steve gathered up the cards, shuffled them, and laid them out for solitaire. He had hated solitaire ever since he was a child: he played far too many games when he was feverish, because his mother worried that reading too much when he had a fever might make him go blind. It was an old-fashioned worry even then, but neither of them knew that, and Steve still associated solitaire with sore throats and itchy eyes and the worry, in the back of his mind, that the itchy eyes meant that even solitaire was too much stress on his vision. Maybe the only way not to go blind was to lie down, stare at the ceiling, and try not to die of boredom before Bucky dropped by after school.
Growing up, the corners of his cards were worn smooth and soft, and the colors in the kings and queens and jacks were faded and dull. These cards were still new and crisp enough to make little almost-clicks on the counter as Steve moved them about. In between the intermittent gusts of wind, it was only sound in the little house, and it began to get on his nerves like the tick-tock of a clock. The dead butterflies on the walls seemed strangely bright in the dimness of the cabin.
Montana must be an awful place to be a butterfly collector.
The cabin was getting cold. He tossed his cards away, switched off the lamp, and followed Bucky up the rope ladder.
Bucky was asleep already, of course. Steve settled down gingerly so as not to wake him, then lay and stared up at the rough board ceiling.
He couldn’t relax. He might as well have slept on the floor: it would be at least as comfortable as the bed, when he was lying on it with all muscles tensed. He took a deep, slow breath, and let it out, and tried to focus on his own breathing. But the wind blew up outside, mournful and howling, and Steve couldn’t hear the sound of his own breath. He sat up, listening to the wind, and despite himself he glanced over at Bucky.
During the daytime, Bucky’s face rarely relaxed out of a frown. But he looked peaceful now, sleeping; and the wind died away, and Steve lay down again, and stared some more at the shadowed ceiling.
The knotholes were darker whorls against the wood in the night. Steve stared at them, one of those strange, half-hallucinatory night frights growing in him as he stared: as if something would climb out of those dark holes, bats or snakes or reaching hands, and land on him in the darkness.
He didn’t think it was a nightmare, but it must have been, because abruptly he woke up. The ceiling, close above his head, was just a ceiling again, and the knotholes just dark marks on it. Steve took a breath of relief, and then realized that Bucky was moving restlessly beside him.
There was only one thing that woke Bucky up. Bucky had a hard on.
Steve’s entire body locked up. No, no, no, no, no. He didn’t want to deal with it, he didn’t, but he didn’t want to deal with turning Bucky away either: he wished he were a million miles away and had turned down Bucky the first time that Bucky asked him to “deal with it,” instead of trying to indulge his own lust by giving Bucky a hand. How had he been so stupid?
Steve was so locked into his own thoughts that he almost didn’t notice, at first, that Bucky had made no move to touch him. He might not have noticed at all, except there was a flicker of movement at the corner of his eye and then a banging noise: Bucky had kicked the wall.
Relief unlocked Steve’s paralysis. Whatever else was wrong with Bucky (and Steve could have filled a book), he kept his promises. He had promised not to kill any civilians, and he hadn’t; and he had promised to stop telling Steve assassination stories, and he hadn’t; and, while Steve hadn’t wrangled a promise out of him to stop using Steve for sex, he wasn’t going to do that, either.
He wasn’t even going to get himself off with Steve lying there: hence the wall-kicking. He was trying to distract himself from his hard-on. Of course Bucky would need some privacy to deal with it himself. Steve slipped out from under the covers, swung down the rope ladder, and grabbed his jacket before he headed outside.
He wasn’t sure where he was going, and in the end he didn’t end up going anywhere: he just sat on the tiny house’s tiny staircase, which was barely wide enough for him, and looked up at the Montana night.
The West had seemed almost mythical to him as a child, as distant and unreal and unlikely a destination for a poor Brooklyn kid as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars. The sky was brilliant with an amazing swirl of stars – more stars than he ever saw in Brooklyn – cut off abruptly by the dark mass of the mountains. Steve had never smoked, but he wished for a cigarette: cowboys always smoked in movies.
Steve stayed out far longer than he probably needed to. But when he went back inside, the little house was quiet, and it smelled like pine sap and sagebrush and only a little bit like sex. Steve climbed to the loft and discovered that Bucky had opened the loft window a crack: airing it out, even though that let in the cold air. And Bucky hated the cold.
Steve took off his warm jacket. He wanted to tuck it in around Bucky, but when he draped it over Bucky, Bucky half awoke for a moment – he woke as easily as he fell asleep – grabbed the collar of Steve’s jacket, pulled the warm leather up over his nose, and scooted away from Steve.
***
The next morning, Steve felt positively chipper as he tossed the pancakes, despite the chilliness of the house. Steve should have closed the window before he went to sleep. But he didn’t really mind. He had coffee, he had pancakes, and he felt unusually fond of Bucky: it was a good morning.
Bucky clumped down the rope ladder and sat down on one of the low bar stools, pulling Steve’s jacket tight over yesterday’s creased clothes. Steve filled a mug of coffee for him, and Bucky huddled over it, his flesh hand wrapped around the warm china. The metal hand would just conduct heat away from the coffee, so it hung at Bucky’s side.
“Sleep well?” Steve asked, flipping Bucky’s pancakes onto his plate and sliding them down the counter.
Bucky shrugged Steve’s jacket off his shoulders to the floor. He didn’t speak over breakfast, which wasn’t unusual. Bucky was even less a morning person than he was an any-other-time-of-the-day person.
But he picked at his pancakes, too, which almost never happened. He looked tired, like for once in his life he hadn’t slept well. Maybe he thought Steve was teasing him.
Finally, as he attempted to wash the griddle in the miniscule sink, Steve ventured, “Look, Buck, I’m sorry…”
“I hate boysenberry syrup,” Bucky interrupted.
The griddle dripped soapy water onto the counter as Steve considered how to answer. So Bucky didn’t want to talk about last night. Okay. “The syrup is not my fault,” Steve said.
Bucky just glared at the lacerated pancake on his plate. He mashed it into one mushy, syrup-soaked ball, shoved the whole thing in his mouth, and chewed. A line of syrup trickled down his chin. Steve felt suddenly sad, looking at Bucky in yesterday’s clothes with yesterday’s kohl smudged around his eyes, and his hair hanging in his face all in tangles.
Bucky used to care so much about his appearance. At the time it drove Steve crazy. Watching Bucky primp his hair always made Steve want to touch it, which of course he could never do. “Who do you think spent more time primping for this date, you or Eileen?” Steve once asked Bucky, as Bucky paused by a store window to give his perfect hair one last touch-up with the comb he always carried in his pocket.
“Me,” Bucky said cheerfully, flipping the comb around his fingers and slipping it back in his pocket like it was a magic trick. “She just rolls out of bed looking like Rita Hayworth.”
Even when the Howling Commandos were traipsing around Europe, Bucky carried a comb with him. But nowadays Bucky slapped some kohl around his eyes, finger-combed his hair, and called it a day. And it had gotten worse since Steve had rejected him –
Steve tried to push the thought away. He hadn’t rejected Bucky: just stopped letting Bucky use him.
But of course that wasn’t how Bucky would feel about it.
“Can I comb your hair?” Steve blurted.
Bucky turned his head slightly to look at Steve through his hanging hair. He swallowed the ball of pancake, his throat bobbing like a python’s, and asked, “Why?”
At least that wasn’t derisive. “Because it’s a mess,” Steve said.
Bucky shrugged. He pushed his empty plate over at Steve and turned to stare through the window at the yellow grass and the mountains. Dismissed.
Steve dumped the plate into the sink, too. The tiny house didn’t even have proper cabinets, just a sort of fancy tilted dish rack that hung above the sink. It was clever, actually: once he put the plates up to drip-dry he wouldn’t have to move them again, and the angle of the rack showed the plates off, too. A futuristic china cabinet. Some of Steve’s favorite things about the future were the simple ones, stuff they could have had in the forties, only no one had thought of it yet.
He dried his hands on his pants, and said, “I guess we’d better get going. We’ll be a little early to meet Tompkins, but we can get some pizza or something first, I guess.” And maybe Steve could find some chocolates or something for Tompkins. The poor guy had nearly cried when he heard he had to work with Bucky again.
“Weren’t you going to comb my hair?” Bucky sounded annoyed.
“Uh,” said Steve. He had taken the shrug for a no. “Yeah, sure,” Steve said, and half-regretted it, because he was pretty sure that letting Bucky pull manipulations like that was one of those things he was supposed to be setting boundaries about.
But he could hardly take it back now, when he had already agreed…
That was just a rationalization. His hands were practically tingling with anticipation of smoothing Bucky’s hair. This is how I felt just before I got him off the first time, Steve thought, a slightly hysterical bubble rising in the back of his mind. But this wasn’t the same: it wasn’t nearly as intimate.
Steve ran his fingers through Bucky’s hair, breaking up the worst of the tangles before he started with the comb. “In the future,” Steve suggested, “if you want me to do something, you could say yes when I suggest it. And that way I won’t forget.”
Bucky grunted, possibly because he was listening, but probably because Steve’s fingers had caught on the tangles and it hurt. He wasn’t at all shy about vocalizing pain.
But Bucky’s hair wasn’t badly tangled at all, and Steve had the worst knots out already. Probably Bucky realized that SHIELD would insist on a haircut if his hair knotted up into a rat’s nest. Bucky’s hair was warm and soft: probably much nicer to touch, now, than it had been back when he loaded it up with Brylcreem.
Steve was sorry to switch from his fingers to the comb, but he would never get Bucky’s hair neat with just his fingers. He drew the comb carefully through Bucky’s hair, starting at the bottom and moving up slowly, undoing each little knot with his fingers before smoothing the hair with the comb. Bucky leaned back, so his shoulders rested against Steve’s stomach: the right side warm and tense, the left cold and hard. One of the rivets in his shoulder poked Steve in the stomach.
The metal plating on the left shoulder didn’t change, but Bucky’s right shoulder relaxed as Steve continued combing. Bucky’s hair was smooth as water now, and reluctantly Steve gathered it up into a ponytail, running his fingers up the nape of Bucky’s neck to gather the last errant strands. Bucky gave his head a little shake, like it tickled, and a few strands fell out around his face.
Steve looked at the window, searching for Bucky’s faint reflection in the glass. He expected to find Bucky staring into space, glazed and sleepy: but Bucky must have been watching him, because his gaze flickered up to meet Steve’s at once. Steve smiled at Bucky’s reflection.
Bucky looked a little surprised, and Steve realized suddenly, guiltily, that he barely ever smiled at Bucky anymore. When had that happened? For the first couple of weeks after SHIELD caught up with Bucky (in the Smithsonian exhibit about Captain America, of all places: as if he wanted to be caught), Steve had barely stopped smiling at Bucky.
“Keep going,” Bucky mumbled. Steve dropped Bucky’s hair out of the ponytail and brushed his fingers through it again.
“Matron used to comb our hair at the orphanage,” Bucky murmured. Steve’s hand tightened spasmodically on Bucky’s hair. “She pulled. Just like that. Once she ripped off someone’s scalp, only he was one of the bullies so we didn’t care.”
Why did they have to have another orphanage story now?
“Didn’t anything nice ever happen at the orphanage?” Steve asked, and he was aware he sounded plaintive and pathetic, but goddamnit. Things were going almost well. No one needed to lose a scalp just then.
“Sometimes,” said Bucky.
Steve was surprised. “Why don’t you ever tell me those stories, then?”
“’Cause they’re boring.”
“I could do with a little boring,” Steve said.
Bucky hummed, thinking. Steve could feel the vibration through the pit of his stomach. “One time we went up on the roof to watch the pigeons.”
Steve waited, but Bucky didn’t say anything else, just butted his head against Steve’s hand to remind Steve to keep stroking his hair. Steve gathered it up into a ponytail again. “And?” he said, searching for a hair tie.
Bucky held up his right hand, with his hair tie around the wrist. Steve hooked a finger in the elastic and tugged it off. “The pigeons never showed,” Bucky murmured.
Another long pause. Steve tied Bucky’s hair back and rested his hands on Bucky’s shoulders. Bucky’s eyes looked a little unfocused. “And?” Steve prodded again.
“That’s it. That’s the story. Told you it was boring.”
“But – ” Steve had heard too many of Bucky’s orphanage stories. Even though Bucky had promised this one would be happy, Steve was tensed up, waiting for the other shoe to drop (and presumably kill someone as it fell, too).
Bucky took pity on him. “I had to carry you up the ladder to the roof,” he said. “’Cause your leg was still healing from the time the director threw you out the window.”
“Of course,” Steve said, and he felt strangely relieved that the orphanage had reached its usual quota of misery. Now he didn’t have to worry about what might happen next. “We didn’t see anything?” Steve said. “What about the sunset?”
“It was cloudy,” Bucky said.
“Not even a funny-shaped cloud?” Steve asked.
“It’s my story,” Bucky said, annoyed. He shrugged Steve’s hands off his shoulders and spun the barstool around a few times before coming to rest, frowning out the window at the low gray clouds that obscured the tops of the mountains. “You fell asleep, and it didn’t rain, and you slept all the way through until morning.”
Steve waited for Bucky to ruin it, to tack on something awful that happened when they got caught sneaking back in the next morning. But Bucky didn’t say anything. Steve kissed the top of his head, and found Bucky looking at him, startled, in the window. “I like that,” Steve said, and smiled at Bucky again. “It’s not boring at all.”