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It was only a couple of weeks before the end of Bucky’s suspension when Steve got a mission from SHIELD. Steve had almost forgotten that Coulson planned to send Steve on missions while Bucky was still grounded, and he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to stare at the text message.
He felt, though he knew it was absurd, that Coulson was summoning Steve to remind him that his time belonged to SHIELD, rather than Bucky. But probably Coulson really did need him, and Steve had sworn his services to SHIELD, after all.
But he couldn’t shake the feeling. After he’d walked a couple of blocks, he stopped in a deserted park and gave Coulson a call. “Do you really need me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
No other clarification. Okay then. “What for?”
“Classified.”
“This is a secure line,” Steve said. “And I’m going to be fighting it tomorrow.”
“You’ll hear about it tomorrow,” Coulson said, in his infuriating calm voice.
The chilly October wind nibbled at Steve’s hands. “Your team can’t handle it on their own?” Steve tried. That was a low shot. Coulson adored his team and believed they could handle pretty much anything.
“Nope,” Coulson said, and Steve felt a little ashamed of himself. Coulson also wouldn’t put his adored team in harm’s way if he thought they really needed Captain America along. “We’ll be gone about a week.”
“Okay,” said Steve. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
When Steve got back to the apartment, Bucky was lying on the couch, listening to The Beatles on Steve’s MP3 player. He turned it down a little when Steve came in. “You get the apples?” he asked, sitting up.
“Yes.” Steve tossed one to Bucky. Bucky took a bite. Steve almost chickened out on telling Bucky about the mission, because he knew Bucky was going to explode on him and they’d been having a good day – Jesus Christ, an entire good week.
But it would only get worse if Steve waited. He sat down beside Bucky on the couch and said, “SHIELD’s assigned me a mission.”
Bucky went rigid, his teeth still in the apple. He took it away from his mouth slowly.
“I’m leaving tomorrow morning,” Steve said. “I’ll be gone about a week. I called Sam and Natasha on the way home, and they’re both going to stay with you while I’m gone.”
Bucky stared at him unblinking. Then he lifted the apple to his mouth and crunched out another bite. “You mean I don’t have to see your stupid face for a week?”
It hurt. Steve was almost positive that Bucky didn’t really mean it, but it hurt anyway. “Yes.”
Bucky ripped another bite out of the apple. “I don’t need two babysitters,” he said. “Take one of them with you.”
“Bucky, I’m going with Coulson’s team. They’ll look after me.”
Bucky didn’t reply to that. He tore another bite out of the apple, chewed, and then tossed the rest of the apple across the room with such force that it exploded against the refrigerator. “This suspension is bullshit,” Bucky burst out. “It’s not gonna tell you anything about whether I’d hurt anyone next time I’m in medical. It’d be more to the point to hand me over to some doctors and let them poke around – ”
“Bucky!” Steve said. “No one’s going to hand you over to doctors for experiments. No one wants to experiment on you – ”
Bucky looked pleased, like he always did when he appalled Steve. “Doctors always want to experiment, moron. I’ll hold still, I’ll show them I won’t attack anyone, and then I could go on the mission with you.”
“No.”
“C’mon.” Bucky’s voice had taken on a playful giddiness. “You won’t be handing me over. I’m offering.”
“Bucky. You’re going to finish the suspension. I’ll be fine on my own. I went on plenty of missions for SHIELD before you came back – ”
Bucky jumped off the couch. “You got yourself killed on your very first mission without me, moron.”
The Valkyrie. “It didn’t stick,” Steve said.
“Fuck you,” Bucky said. He stalked across the room, paused as if he were considering kicking a hole in the wall, and then stalked back again. And again. Steve watched him pace.
“I’ll be back,” Steve offered.
“I don’t care,” Bucky snapped. “I’m sick of you anyway.” He circled the room two more times, and then burst out, “And you can’t promise you’ll be back! People die in the stupidest fucking ways. Vovka stumbled on a landmine when he went out to piss one night.” He went to the window and leaned on his crossed arms on the sill, blocking out the light. “You can’t promise anything.”
He was right. Stupid mistakes, freak accidents, equipment failure, overwhelming odds. Anything might happen. “Okay,” Steve said, and it was hard to say, because he wanted so badly to keep promising Bucky that he would be back that the words seemed to choke in his throat. “You’re right. I can’t promise.”
But Bucky didn’t reply.
“You’re right,” Steve said, more loudly. Bucky didn’t so much as move. Steve crossed to the window, leaning next to Bucky and looking in his face. “Bucky,” Steve said, but Bucky was gone. He wasn’t looking out the window at all, just staring glassy-eyed at nothing.
It always unnerved Steve. “Bucky,” he said, a little louder. “Bucky – ”
No response.
“Soldat,” Steve said, and Bucky blinked and gave his head a little shake and looked at Steve.
“Do you actually need me for something, or did you just do that ‘cause you’re an asshole?” Bucky asked.
Steve was taken aback. “Sorry,” he said. “I just – it worries me when you go away like that.”
“Why?”
Bucky’s voice was sharp, aggressive. Steve slowed down to think about it before he answered. “Because I don’t know where you go,” he said finally.
“So?” Bucky snapped. “It’s none of your business.”
“Can you tell me if it’s somewhere nice, at least?” Steve asked.
Bucky kicked his toe against the baseboard. “It’s just elsewhere,” he said.
“And is it nice? Elsewhere?” Steve pressed.
“It’s just elsewhere,” Bucky said. He sounded frustrated, like Steve ought to understand what that meant, but Steve was even more than usually out to sea.
“Do you want me to stop waking you up? When you go away in your head like that?” Steve said.
“I dunno.” Bucky had his hands wrapped around his elbows, holding tight, and he sounded almost close to tears. “I’m so fucking tired of – ” He seemed to draw into himself, tightening his arms and sucking in a breath.
But then he let the breath out, and leaned his head on Steve’s shoulder.
Steve was so surprised that he didn’t react at all at first. Then, cautiously – as if he might spook Bucky – Steve lifted his arm to put it around Bucky’s shoulders. Bucky didn’t pull away, and they stood there a while. Steve leaned his head against Bucky’s.
That was too much. Bucky twisted away, ducking under Steve’s arm. “When are Sam and Natasha getting here?”
“This evening. For dinner,” Steve said. “I’ll be heading out in the morning.”
Bucky dropped down on the couch, grabbing one of the pillows and hugging it to his chest. “Don’t let anyone punch your face in.”
“You’re the only one I let do that,” Steve said.
For a moment Steve thought he shouldn’t have said it. But then Bucky began to laugh, and kept laughing, and was still gasping a little when he said, “At least you don’t go sacrificing yourself for just anyone.”
***
It turned out that SHIELD did need him: they went up against a lab guarded by Hydra’s latest attempts at super-soldiers, and even with Steve along they almost didn’t get through.
Afterward, as the Quinjet chased the sunset across the Atlantic, Steve sat by a window with his head against his hand. Fighting three supersoldiers at one time was a little much even for him, and he felt sore all over, not just in his body but in his mind. The superserum had worked out pretty great for him – and that made his image a great recruiting tool for Hydra. Let us experiment on you and you’ll be like Captain America in all those awful movies, they promised.
(After the battle of New York, Tony had sent Steve a complete boxed set of every Captain America movie ever made. Steve watched the one starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman, which was supposed to be the best. He spent most of the movie with his head between his knees to calm his churning stomach, but he made it to the part where Paul Newman fell off the train, and screamed the whole way down – and maybe, probably, Bucky had screamed too, but Steve hadn’t heard it over the damn train – and then the camera panned down to the dark lump of his broken body in the picturesquely stained red snow –
Steve made it to the bathroom before he threw up. Even now, years later, that movie worked its way into his nightmares.)
No one ended up like Captain America in the movies. Ninety percent of their subjects ended up dead and the other ten percent became Hydra slaves.
But the movies had probably saved Steve, so he shouldn’t complain about them. If Captain America had been forgotten after World War II, the way so many other heroes were forgotten, then after Steve defrosted Hydra might easily have shipped him away to one of their little fiefdoms within SHIELD for brainwashing. The Winter Soldier could have had a buddy. The Summer Soldier. It had a nice ring to it. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.
He probably would have been a rival rather than a buddy, though. Hydra operatives would have loved pitting the Summer Soldier and Winter Soldier against each other.
By the time the Quinjet landed, Steve’s cogitations had given him a headache. And he still had to go home and deal with Bucky. Maybe he could just sleep in SHIELD headquarters that night and go home in the morning, when he was fresh?
But Natasha and Sam were waiting for him in the hangar.
Steve’s gaze bounced around the big room, like Bucky might be hiding up in the rafters or something. But of course he wasn’t there, none of them were supposed to be there, something must have gone wrong –
“He’s alive, he’s uninjured, he’s fine,” Natasha called, and Steve’s legs strengthened again and he crossed the room to them.
“Coulson said they’re done interrogating him, so you can take him home as soon as you got here,” Sam said. “He’s in a cell right now.”
“A cell?” said Steve.
“You know you’re not living right if SHIELD doesn’t decide you’re a menace to society every once in a while,” Natasha said brightly.
***
“He freaked out,” said Sam, neatly dividing the banana in his banana split.
“He did not freak out,” Natasha contradicted.
“He climbed out his bedroom window like a fifteen-year-old with a date,” said Sam.
“Exactly! It was a carefully executed plan,” said Natasha. She stole the maraschino cherry off the top of Sam’s sundae and ate it. “We didn’t catch him for nearly a week. He’d thought it through.”
Steve was halfway through his second cheeseburger and struggling to chew while smiling so hard. Bucky hadn’t killed anyone, blown anything up, or defaced public or private property. As his unsupervised jaunt had changed Sam and Natasha from Steve’s two friends who were polite to each other to friends in their own right, Steve was hard-pressed to hold it against him. SHIELD had overreacted, as usual. There was no need to lock him up.
“A plan for what?” said Sam. “Steve was already two days gone by then, it’s not like Bucky could catch up.”
Natasha licked chocolate sauce off her spoon. “He wasn’t trying to catch up.”
“Of course he wasn’t. I think he thought Steve wasn’t coming back and he just couldn’t sit still and wait for it any longer.”
“No way,” said Natasha.
“Yes way.”
“He thought Steve was auditioning us to be his new handlers,” Natasha said. “That’s why he ran away, not some temper tantrum. He wanted to make sure all of SHIELD knew that we couldn’t control him.”
Steve swallowed down his last bite of cheeseburger. “Now wait,” he protested. “I wouldn’t do that to him.”
“But he doesn’t know that,” Natasha said. Her jaw clenched infinitesimally. “My first handler didn’t tell me he was retiring till five minutes before his last day was up.”
“Jesus,” said Steve.
Natasha shrugged. “I still send him a Christmas card every year.”
Sam and Steve were both staring at her. “You do?” Sam said.
“It’s more of a ‘I know where you live and you don’t have any clue what I’m up to, so fuck you, Andrei Nikolaevitch’ card,” said Natasha. “It’s festive. Steve, you should eat your sundae before it melts.”
Steve pulled the turtle sundae over to him and dug in. “So he climbed out the window,” Steve said. It was only six stories up; nothing to a supersoldier. “Why did he wait two days before chasing after me?”
“His patience snapped,” Sam said.
“Or he’d been waiting to give us a false sense of security,” put in Natasha.
Sam rolled his eyes. “When we were both asleep, he climbed out his window, ripped the tracking device off your motorcycle – ”
“You put a tracking device on my motorcycle?” Steve interrupted. He was impressed. Natasha must have guessed Bucky might try to run for it.
“No, the tracker SHIELD put there,” said Natasha. “I didn’t think to add one. I didn’t even wake up till I heard your motorcycle start.” She sounded annoyed and admiring at the same time. “He’d let the air out of Sam’s tires. It took us a few days to catch up with him.”
“He was in Shenandoah National Park,” Sam added. “Anything special about that?”
SHIELD put a tracker on my motorcycle? “Um. Uh. Shenandoah was a Civil War battlefield,” Steve said. “He used to love Civil War stuff.” Probably he still did. Just because he didn’t say anything about it didn’t mean he didn’t feel it.
“Unfortunately by the time we found Bucky, SHIELD realized that something was up,” Natasha said. “Probably because their bugs didn’t pick up anything in the apartment for five days – ”
“They’ve bugged my apartment?” Steve said.
“What do you mean, the bugs in the apartment?” said Sam at the same time.
“ – so they sent one of those pint-size Quinjets to pick us up. So melodramatic.” Natasha shook her head, as if criticizing a staging choice in a play, and scraped the last of the melted ice cream and dripping caramel sauce out of her sundae bowl.
Steve had lost his appetite for his sundae. “They’ve bugged my apartment.”
“Of course they’ve bugged the apartment.” Natasha sounded amazed that either of them could think otherwise. “They bugged your old apartment before the Triskelion fell, remember? And now there are two wild cards living there instead of just one. Of course they’ve bugged it again.”
***
Bucky was in the same cell where he’d been imprisoned for the first three weeks after he came in from the cold: the windowless basement cell with an energy barrier rather than bars. Steve stopped on the stairs and looked at it, trying to fight the distaste oozing up and down his spine.
Steve hadn’t liked it when SHIELD put Bucky in that cell the first time, either, but at least then it made sense: SHIELD had been terrified that Bucky was still brainwashed and working for Hydra. “He wouldn’t give us so much intel if he was a mole,” Steve argued.
“Most of it’s out of date,” Coulson said.
“Of course it is! He’s been on the run for months!” Steve said. “Look at him, Coulson. He’s so thin. Wouldn’t Hydra have fed him better than this if they had him in custody all this time?”
“Not if they wanted us to believe he’d been on the run,” Coulson said, and cut Steve off when Steve tried to reply. “Captain Rogers. You have to accept that he might be a Hydra plant. They may have sent him here for the purpose of finishing you off.”
“And if he wanted me dead, he could have killed me with the plastic fork the very first time I stepped into his cell with a slice of cake,” Steve replied.
“They would want him back afterward,” continued Coulson, unperturbed by Steve’s sarcasm. “He would have orders to wait until he had a clear getaway route.”
Steve didn’t believe it. But it was possible and he knew it, so he let Coulson keep Bucky in the cell and interrogate him, and focused on getting Coulson to let him visit as often as he could.
Steve had wanted to visit regularly: Sam always emphasized how important regularity was for trauma victims. But Bucky’s interrogation schedule changed every day, so Steve saw him at odd times. Four am on Tuesday, midnight on Wednesday, no visit at all until Friday and then not till eleven pm.
“Are you trying to frighten him?” Steve demanded of Coulson.
“Yes.”
And it worked: it wasn’t until Steve convinced SHIELD to let him take Bucky out of that cell and back to his apartment that Bucky started sleeping properly or gaining back any of his lost weight.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, Steve thought at the time. But that had been a hopelessly optimistic diagnosis. The traumatic stress wasn’t past by any means. Even now, Bucky didn’t believe it was over. At ebb tide, perhaps.
Steve had been so suspicious of Coulson’s rebuilt SHIELD back then. But he’d told Bucky so many times since then that SHIELD was trustworthy, that they weren’t going to hurt him, and the walls didn’t have ears, that he’d made himself believe it.
But maybe Bucky was right. A tracking device on your motorcycle. Of course they’ve bugged the apartment. It had been two years, and they still didn’t trust Bucky. He disappeared for a few days and he ended up right back in the same cell, facing an interrogation again.
At least it was shorter this time.
Steve descended the stairs. Bucky was asleep, curled up on his side on the narrow cot, and he didn’t rouse. The energy barrier worked like a one-way mirror: Steve could see in, but the cell occupant couldn’t see or hear anything outside unless the barrier was calibrated for that.
Bucky looked thin. Supersoldiers dropped weight easily, Steve reminded himself: it didn’t mean that SHIELD wasn’t feeding him properly. He’d probably lost weight on the way to Shenandoah, and after all, he’d only been in the cell for a couple of days.
A couple of days of solitary confinement with nothing to do would seem like an eternity to Bucky. Fuck SHIELD, anyway.
Steve poked uneasily at the keypad that controlled the cell. Fitz had explained the keypad to him, back in the day, and Steve had felt wary of it ever since Fitz mentioned that one of the buttons sucked oxygen out of the cell. Why was that even a setting? What possible non-nefarious use could that have?
Bucky woke up at once when Steve let down the barrier. He sat up, blinking sleep out of his eyes, and then his gaze fastened on Steve.
He didn’t smile or say anything, just stared for a long time. Then, irritably: “You forgot the cake.”
Steve cracked a smile. He had always brought Bucky something sweet when he visited, cake or pie or brownies. Once he brought a slice of German chocolate cake and nearly cried when Bucky, who had always hated coconut (Steve had forgotten. How could he forget?), meticulously extracted the cake from its coconut-polluted icing.
“We can pick something up on the way home,” Steve said.
Bucky sprang off the bed. He paused just briefly to put his hand out to check for the energy barrier, jumped across the line, and then kept pace with Steve as they left the SHIELD facility.
They didn’t talk until they were in the hangar picking up Steve’s motorcycle. Looking at it made Steve say, “Why’d you run away?”
“Felt like it,” Bucky replied crisply.
Steve dropped the subject. He did care why Bucky had decided to go for a joyride, and later on he’d try to dig out a little more information to see if Sam or Natasha had interpreted it right. Or if Bucky was thinking of something else entirely when he climbed out his bedroom window and ripped the tracking device off the motorcycle.
God, the tracking device. Right now Steve was deeply, uncontrollably pissed at SHIELD for locking Bucky up, and putting a tracker on his motorcycle, and bugging his apartment (if they really had bugged his apartment; maybe Natasha was wrong) –
With all that spinning through his head, it was hard to think about anything else. Like traffic safety. He shot out of SHIELD doing eighty and sped up when he got on the interstate, swooping between cars and semis and even occasionally taking the shoulder if that was the only way to get past. It was stupid and he knew it, the kind of driving he always yelled at Bucky for, and probably some idiot at SHIELD was looking at the speed figures on the tracking device and saying, with relish, “God, we got Rogers good and mad.”
Fuck them.
When he spotted a Dunkin’ Donuts sign, Steve pulled into the parking lot so sharply that back wheel of the motorcycle popped off the ground. He brought the motorcycle to a stop, and as soon as he turned it off he heard Bucky laughing, delighted. “That was fun!”
Steve got off the motorcycle. “We’re going to get some doughnuts,” Steve said, and his voice was so sharp that Bucky’s gaze snapped to his face. “But first. Where did they put the tracking device on the motorcycle?”
Bucky stared at him for a long moment before pointing at the front wheel well. Steve figured they would have moved it somewhere new after Bucky ripped it out, but no, they’d attached a new one in just the same place. Steve ripped it off the bike, stomped on it till it was in pieces, then ground it to powder beneath his heel.
Bucky watched with interest. “I think we should get a dozen doughnuts,” he said.
“Anything you want,” Steve said grimly.
Bucky restrained himself to a dozen doughnuts and two large coffees, and steered Steve to a sunlit corner table to eat. He didn’t seem upset by his two-day stint in a cell. If anything, he seemed unusually relaxed: leaning back in his chair to bask in the sunlight, giving his coffee time to cool rather than scalding his mouth, savoring his doughnuts rather than wolfing them down.
He did, occasionally, glance doubtfully at Steve, who was crushing a cruller into smaller and smaller crumbs. After Bucky had finished his sixth doughnut, he asked, “Was the flight bad? Any turbulence?”
Flight was for the benefit of the Dunkin’ Donuts baristas: code word for mission. Steve shook his head. “I heard my apartment has cockroaches.”
Bucky paused, a Bismarck in midair on the way to his mouth, inspecting Steve’s face. “Well,” he said. “You do keep the place pretty filthy.”
Steve suspected that meant I told you so. “Will you help me clean up?”
When they got back to the apartment, Steve didn’t even take off his leather jacket before they started the search. It was slow work, and soon Steve felt like an idiot. Natasha didn’t know there were bugs any more than Bucky did: she just assumed, same as he did. Maybe it was a Russian thing.
But half an hour in, Steve found a bug hidden inside his record player. He held it for a long time, looking at it, until Bucky took it from his hand (when had Bucky gotten over here?) and crushed it to powder between his metal fingers.
They found another in the couch and another behind the refrigerator. None in the bathrooms or bedrooms, which maybe meant SHIELD had some sense of propriety – or maybe just that the refrigerator bug picked up sound well enough to cover those areas, too.
Steve sat down on the couch and leaned his face on his steepled hands. He felt stupid, but that was only a little painful, just a pinprick. He’d trusted people who didn’t deserve it, so what. He’d done it before on a fairly spectacular level with Rumlow and the STRIKE team. He’d probably do it again.
But he hadn’t trusted Bucky; that was the thing that killed him. Not that he’d thought Bucky was a Hydra mole, no, but Bucky had warned him for years that the walls had ears and Steve had been so damn certain that Bucky was wrong, about that and everything else. Steve just dismissed his fears, his whole worldview, like a parent peeking under a child’s bed for a monster, secure in the knowledge that no monsters could possibly be there.
Bucky had probably come to SHIELD hoping Steve would be a friend and an ally, and instead he got a smug, patronizing jerk who treated him like a delusional child.
“Steve.”
Steve pressed his palms over his eyes. “I’m an idiot.”
Bucky took Steve’s wrist in his hand. “Steve,” he said, and pulled so hard that Steve, startled, staggered to his feet. “Let’s go.”
He sounded so firm and sure of himself that Steve followed him without even asking where they were going. They went up the fire stairs to the apartment roof, and Bucky led Steve across the wall and sat him down with his back against the little brick building that housed the AC units. It was late October, but the bricks were warmish from the sun, and Bucky had positioned them to face the sunset.
He expected Bucky to gloat, and God knew that Bucky deserved the opportunity after putting up with Steve for the past two years. But Bucky knelt beside Steve, so he was looking down at Steve’s face rather than up into it, and said, “Stop freaking out about the bugs. This is a good thing.”
“A good thing!” Steve yelled.
“Yes,” said Bucky. “The fact that they’ve finally started bugging us this last summer, it means – ”
“The apartment’s been bugged since summer? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Bucky pressed his palms against the warm rooftop. “We weren’t talking much then.”
Which was true. They were talking so much more now that Steve almost forgot how quiet Bucky had become after Prague. Probably he figured Steve would ignore physical proof the same way he ignored everything else Bucky said.
“Probably they didn’t have the resources to bug us earlier,” Bucky continued. “Which is why this is a good thing, because – ”
“Are you saying this because you really believe it? Or because you don’t want me to go shout at Coulson for bugging our apartment?”
“I was talking, Steve.”
“You interrupt me all the time!” Steve protested.
“You never listen to me!”
Steve almost snapped something back, but he had just been thinking the exact same thing: that he never listened to Bucky, that he never believed Bucky’s paranoid speculations might actually be true. “Fine,” said Steve. “I’m listening. Why is it a good thing that they’ve decided to investigate us?”
“They’re not investigating us, idiot. They’re just storing up information in case you fuck up and they need something against you in the future.” He slid off his knees to lean against the wall next to Steve, stretching out his legs in the sunlight. “I’m not happy that they’re listening to us, you moron. Not that it’ll do any good to complain to Coulson about it. He’ll nod and smile and have them hide the bugs better next time, that’s all.”
“So what’s good about it?” Steve said.
“It means they’re getting stronger. They have time to plant bugs on us, instead of just careening from crisis to crisis all the time. So we’re not going to wake up and find out our people have fallen apart and, oh yeah, we’re working for someone else. I don’t want to do that again.” He sucked in a deep breath, and let it out as a brief sharp laugh. “That’s the good thing.”
“Oh.”
“And it shows you suckers are finally doing your due diligence on counterintelligence to make sure we don’t all end up working for Hydra again.” His voice rose suddenly. “You’re all a bunch of fucking hypocrites. You think you’re so much better than me, so much more trustworthy and reliable, when really you all killed people for Hydra too. All those missions SHIELD ran back when it was half Hydra, I bet three-quarters of them were Hydra kills in disguise.”
Steve couldn’t breathe. He knew that, he’d been indignant about that, but he’d never thought it quite so plainly, and – of course it was true.
His whole damn STRIKE team was Hydra. Pierce could’ve gotten Steve reassigned if that got in the way of Hydra missions, but of course it didn’t. They must have known Steve was too stupid – and wanted too desperately to be part of a team – to notice there was anything off about their missions.
And of course all the higher-ups in Hydra would have found it hilarious to have the two old Howling Commandos working in tandem: Steve doing the missions that could be made to look like proper SHIELD assignments (which was most of them; SHIELD wasn’t too picky about its tactics), and the Asset mopping up the few that fell through the cracks.
He was the Summer Soldier after all. No brainwashing required.
Steve dropped his head back against the brick wall, and it hit with a clunk and it hurt, and he wished it hurt more. “I’m an idiot,” he said, and he clunked his head back against the wall again, because he was an idiot and a moron and a condescending asshole.
“Stop hitting your head,” said Bucky. He sounded urgent, appalled, and he put a hand on Steve’s shoulder. Steve grabbed it and pressed it down and held on. “I just said all that because I was mad about getting locked up again. Don’t hurt yourself.”
“You’re right, though,” Steve said. “They had to burn out your memories to make you cooperate and you still ended up screwing them over. They didn’t even do anything to the rest of us to make us cooperate, just told us what we wanted to hear and we damn near blew up the world for them.”
“They did plenty to you, you moron. They lied their asses off and pretended to be your friend and took advantage of the fact that you’re loyal and honest and trustworthy and expect your team to be the same way. They twisted up all the best parts of you so they could use them, and you still ended up blowing their stupid helicarriers out of the sky. The guilt’s all on them.”
Steve could not recall the last time Bucky said so many nice things all together. “Buck – ” said Steve, and couldn’t continue because he choked up. Everything Bucky said was true, and Steve agreed, or he would agree once he had calmed down a little, anyway. But it hurt that Bucky was being so nice to him when Steve had been so dismissive of Bucky for so long.
Steve let go of Bucky’s hand. Maybe Bucky would go away and let Steve pull himself together.
But instead Bucky patted his shoulder, very lightly but repeatedly. “Steve,” said Bucky, and he sounded uncertain. “That shit you used to say to me about how it wasn’t my fault and I shouldn’t feel guilty? Back before you realized that actually you wanted me to feel guilty? You shouldn’t feel guilty either. That’s letting them into your head.”
“I’m not – that’s not the main thing I’m upset about,” Steve said. He took a deep breath, and then another, because it was hard to speak, and began, “It’s just that you’re right. I’ve been very – patronizing to you. I haven’t listened to you. I’ve assumed that I know better than you, even though sometimes I’m just completely wrong. Like about the bugs. And I’m sorry.”
“Oh.” Bucky stopped patting Steve’s shoulder, but his hand rested there, like he’d forgotten about it. Steve put his hand over Bucky’s again. He wanted to press it down, so it would feel like forgiveness. Steve took his hand away instead, and Bucky let his hand drop too.
“And I don’t want you to feel guilty,” Steve added.
“Shut up,” Bucky said. “You would die of happiness if I felt bad about Tompkins.”
“That’s a different kind of guilty,” Steve protested.
“To you.”
“What do you mean?”
But Bucky just shook his head. He watched the sunset, and Steve looked at his face, puzzled, trying to read some of Bucky’s thoughts through the reflection of the sunset in his pupils.
“I don’t understand you,” Steve said. It came out more petulant than he would have liked. Bucky’s mouth twitched into a suppressed smile, but it passed away, and suddenly he looked tired.
“You’re not that bad,” he told Steve.
“Yeah?” said Steve.
“Yeah,” said Bucky. He lay down on the roof, his head on Steve’s lap. “You’re still here.”