Chapter Text
When Gale walks out of arrivals at LAX, Bucky is already idling by the curb with the bed of his rust brown pickup sticking halfway into traffic. He’s preoccupied, fiddling with the radio, but easily identifiable just by the sharp cut of his nose and the sunglasses nestled atop it. Gale throws his duffel in and climbs onto the passenger seat with a, "Hey," and then Bucky is punching him in the arm before grabbing it tight.
"Gale!"
"Jesus," Gale says, half-heartedly trying to tuck himself against the door.
"I didn't even see you. You look like a hippie, what's going on here?" Bucky crows, though Gale's hair is barely curling off the back of his neck.
Bucky rubs at a lock of it, then switches to a gentler open-handed patting on his shoulder, all the while steering into the road with his other hand before parking enforcement can blow their whistles. He keeps turning to look at Gale as if double, triple-checking that he's actually there. Gale, for his part, studies Bucky as well -- his hair is also longer now, a mop springing curls everywhere, but mostly he looks the same.
"Gale," he announces again. He pounds the steering wheel. "Finally."
"John. Good to see you too," Gale tells him through light, slightly awkward laughter, as he always does when suddenly confronted with the specific brand of exuberant emotion that Bucky seems to ooze during every waking moment. It just takes him a minute to acclimate, is all.
As promised, the weather is pleasant. Some high clouds, a cool breeze, palm trees swaying against the sun in a jarring contrast to the city he'd left behind. A quick glance to the dashboard informs him that the speedometer is permanently stuck at 20mph and there are multiple warning indicators lit up in traffic light colors.
"Stereo's intact, though," Bucky says astutely, tracking Gale's silent inspection.
"I'd be worried about you if it wasn't," Gale tells him.
Bucky grins, showing teeth this time, and bangs along to the drum solo that starts pounding through the speakers. Here he is, alive and kicking, careening them around the freeway entrance and onto the 405.
-
They've been exchanging at least weekly emails ever since Croz's wedding. Bucky's messages range anywhere from three words to several paragraphs, occasionally peppered with pictures that have no explanatory captions: pornographic close ups of a cold cut sandwich dripping with olive oil, a random unrecognizable scene playing on a CRT TV, an overexposed shot of a cut on his palm with shards of a broken lightbulb littered over the floor. Gale tends to provide life updates in bullet-pointed journal style, though there's never too much to say in that aspect, and makes sure to respond to every single one of Bucky's disjointed thoughts in a separate set of bullets.
Except for this odd pen pal relationship, nothing much has changed for Gale. He's still in the same apartment in Boston, working part time as a lab associate at BU and watching his checking account meet a new baseline low each month, while Bucky has moved three times. First to Anchorage, and then to someplace in Shasta County, and now further south to LA, which coincided with Gale's newfound grad school aspirations. Ostensibly, he's visiting to check out UCLA’s astronomy and astrophysics program. In a more real sense, he doesn't know what the hell he's doing out here, except that Bucky had made the suggestion in the first place.
if you're interested in the west coast at all, i heard ucla has a one, Bucky had written. (i heard it bcos i googled it). the roommates are gonna be gone the weekend of the june 19th. if you come out then, i'll be free as a bird to house you and show you around. if you’re not interested, then come anyway. boston sucks in the summer.
The invitation was a swooping bird-like thing, coming to nest after a year and some change, fantasy and reality meeting in a terrible moment of truth. At least, that's what it was in Gale's mind. He'd thought about Bucky a lot after the weekend in Iowa. Figured it was safe to, from three-thousand miles and three time zones away, and hoped none of that came through in his emails. To Bucky, it could very well have been off the cuff, a casual offer that held neither the weight nor inevitability that Gale was giving it.
An hour later, another message came: i mean it, btw. in case you were trying to wait me out.
And then a third: which i know you were.
Gale reread the words about twenty times, assigning a different tone with each repeat. That night, he backspaced through his original draft of, Was thinking of staying east, actually.
Okay, he wrote instead. I'll look into it.
-
Bucky's apartment building is a squat three-story indistinguishable from others lining up and down the block. Behind the gate, there are stairs with wrought iron railing, but he passes it for the elevator inside a breezeway chilled with the welcoming cool of Stucco.
"By the way, you gotta take the bed," he says as the car arrives.
They crowd in, shoulders touching, and Bucky presses ‘2’. The interior is covered with moving blankets that strip away any reverb from the outside world and Gale hears him softly suck something from his teeth, an intimate, personal noise that makes his ears go hot.
"I don't need the bed," he says. "It's your bed."
"What I meant was, I need the floor. It helps my back."
Gale looks at him. He's got his sunglasses propped up on his head now, and there's that profile again. Oftentimes Gale can't remember what he ate for lunch or what clothes he'd worn the day prior, but he remembers that profile like it's been branded into his brain, a carved-out shadowbox holding space while other memories ebb and flow around it.
"What'd you do to your back?" he asks.
"Lived thirty years in it." The elevator doors open. Bucky steps out and turns right into another breezeway, enumerating on his fingers as he goes. "Uh, tweaked it in basic, tweaked it during RAP Week, scorpioned myself coming down an inflatable slide headfirst when I was ten, fell out of a helicopter -- I don't know if you remember that one -- "
"Alright, I get it," Gale cuts in.
Bucky grins. "But mostly I helped my neighbor move a couch two days ago."
"Alright," Gale says again, more amused this time. "You didn't tell me you were such a philanthropist."
"I better get a bench dedicated to me when I die, that’s all I’m saying."
They stop at a door announcing itself as 212 in rusted gold digits. Bucky turns the key and does a complicated move with the knob, lifting while pushing it open in a drag over high pile beige carpeting. Inside is what Gale assumes is a typical layout for this area: living room with an L-shaped maroon sofa, a dining nook in the back where the carpet gives way to cheap shiny lino. A kitchen is hidden next to it, enclosed by cabinets hanging from the ceiling.
"It's nice," he remarks, looking around.
"It's fine. C'mon, come put your stuff down."
Bucky takes off his shoes, so Gale follows suit, trailing him to the hallway and down toward the end bedroom where the blinds are drawn. It could belong to anyone, with hardly any decoration or personality added to the walls except for a calendar a month out of date, but it smells like Bucky. Something that could be Old Spice body spray overlaid by Tide and deodorant. True to his word, there's a whole setup on the floor by a white laminate Ikea desk. Sleeping bag, books, two regular pillows and a longer cylindrical one, and a small lamp that was dragged down from the bedside table judging by the dust pattern left behind.
"Did you quit smoking?" Gale asks, dropping his duffel by the closet's sliding doors.
Bucky blows out a flappy breath of air. "Nah, I just learned how to cover it up. Got a smoking jacket out in my car. Do I smell better?"
Gale chooses not to answer that and gestures at the floor instead. "This doesn't look good."
"I'm treating with Motrin. Walking it off. It's what they would tell me to do anyway." Bucky shakes his head. "Hey, you hungry? Must be getting late on Eastern time."
Gale wants to call Bucky on the subject change. Wants to ask if he even knows he's doing it, which maybe he would've done over email after a good hour of crafting his word choice, but the last thing he'd eaten was an overpriced and ill-timed sandwich from Logan that had too much mayo and left him queasy for almost the entirety of the flight. Hunger cramps his stomach at the reminder of it.
"Yeah, sure," he says. "I could eat if you're gonna eat."
"You're allowed to be hungry, Buck." Bucky nudges Gale's shoulder with his own. "You might even be allowed to tell me about it."
"Fine, okay, I'm hungry," Gale relents. "I gotta use the bathroom first though."
Bucky points it out, heading back to the kitchen to grab a glass of water. "Make yourself at home, I don't share it with anyone else."
Gale goes in and closes the door. There are flecks of toothpaste sprayed almost halfway up the mirror but the sink is mostly clean and the towels smell fresh. He pisses and flushes, holding the tab down extra long just in case, then closes the seat and lid back to how he found it. Washes his hands, dries them, and rearranges the hand towel to hang like it was before. When he stares at himself in the mirror, it doesn't feel as weird as he'd been expecting, seeing an unfamiliar background behind him.
Bland curiosity has him opening the medicine cabinet to take a peek. Numerous pill bottles line the shelves, the largest of which is a CVS-brand ibuprofen with the label worn and almost certainly past expiration. A new bottle of gabapentin, an older bottle of pregabalin; lidocaine patches, Salonpas, Ambien, prazosin, most of them almost full, though he picks up an alprazolam bottle containing a single rattling pill. The label says Qty: 60.
"Ready?" Bucky yells as Gale steps out.
"Just about," he calls.
He cuts back into Bucky's room to grab a sweater and takes the opportunity to glance over the mess on his desk. Magazines, more books, letters with tri-folded creases and envelopes torn along the sides. Gale processes everything without really meaning to, a skill that served him well in the military but likely reduces him to a nosy snooper in real life. He touches a stack of letters from the VA about missed appointments and how to reschedule them. To John C. Egan, they all say, and it's strange to realize that he knows Bucky's favorite sandwich but doesn't know his middle name.
"Tick tock," Bucky says from the hallway. Gale's fingers twitch. "Don't stop, make it pop, DJ blow my speakers up, tonight -- "
"Okay, okay, I'm ready," Gale interrupts, walking out to where Bucky is flipping his keys around, waiting for him.
-
Bucky takes them to a taco truck parked next to a used tire shop, where they order burritos and eat while sat at one of the two plastic folding tables off to the side. In between the zips of power tools and clinking lug nuts, he extols the virtues of Southern California burritos -- "They stuff 'em full of rice up north, I'm not into it" -- and speaks longingly of the ones in San Diego, as well as their carne asada.
"They put french fries in everything," Gale points out. "That's like the same thing as rice."
Bucky flicks an unopened hot sauce packet at him. It's a bullseye, skittering over the table to hit Gale's elbow with a sting of serrated edges.
"French fries are crazy enough to work. Not rice." He takes another enormous bite, washes it down with a glug of his IPA, and asks, "So how've you been?" around a churning mouthful.
"Fine," Gale says reflexively. "You already know all there is to know."
Bucky coughs. "Goddamn, Buck. You are the most closed off person I've ever met."
He says this with sincerity, as if the two of them aren't weird reflections of each other at the root of it. Gale clenches his burrito in an inadvertent emotion-nerve-muscle chain reaction, which he covers up by licking off the trickle of green salsa oozing out. Maybe this was just one of those things that was impossible to recognize within yourself.
"Grad school apps are taking up a lot of my mental space," he concedes. "I don't know. I think I just need to get out of Boston, probably. Move on."
Bucky makes a considering noise, focused on picking out a stringy piece of meat that he wipes onto a napkin. Apparently he's decided to keep the ratty mustache around. The aging porcupine of a stripe would look cheesy on anyone else.
"Why grad school? Why can't you just leave a place?"
"Do you know me?" Gale asks, half-rhetorically, and the way Bucky takes another satisfied bite is answer enough. Bucky does know him, inasmuch as Gale's allowed him to, with the skips and jumps that come with fitting someone into your life right smack in the middle of it.
"Yeah, no, I get it. A few years of cushion with school and the comfort of routine, yadda yadda. Did you use up your GI Bill yet?"
"Not yet. Plus I'll get a stipend for teaching or doing research."
"Sounds like a grand plan, then. Got my support."
"Rubber stamped?" Gale asks, and Bucky nods heartily. "What about you? How've you been?"
"Pretty good," Bucky says. Gale stifles a laugh, but a second one follows it and he lets that one out. "What?"
"You…" Gale prompts, "are…the most…closed off…"
"Whoa, hey," Bucky cuts in mildly. "God's honest truth. Right here, right now in this moment, I mean it. Too early in the weekend to get into all that shit, anyway. Let a guy get his bearings a little."
"What, are you planning to take us to some ayahuasca retreat in Mexico tomorrow? Are we gonna reveal all our secrets to each other?"
Bucky snorts. "Honestly? I would, if I wasn't so suspicious that you'd take the opportunity to just disappear into the wilderness. You seem like the type."
Some people would construe that as an insult, but to Gale, pitifully enough, being thought about for long enough to be assigned a type is a compliment in and of itself. Underneath that, he understands that Bucky is trying to turn the conversation around again. Gale could do so right back. Bring up the meds and ask if Bucky's been taking them, or point out how the VA is clearly on his ass about following up on whatever it is they want him to do. Ask about the leg that's now crooked over his other knee in a figure four, pant leg riding up to reveal an inside-out sock with a distorted, thready Nike swoosh.
Lamely, he asks, "So do you like it here?"
Bucky takes another chomp. "You’re really bad at this," he informs.
"How’s the leg? You never told me that," Gale shoots back.
"There we go," Bucky says in a sing-songy voice. He squeezes Gale's knee, right where he’s ticklish, and hangs on even as Gale twitches, then stuffs the last of his burrito into his mouth and crushes the foil into a tight ball. "Hey, let’s go to the Getty tomorrow. I think you’d like it. You took a few art history classes, didn't you?"
At Gale's stare, he decisively crumples the rest of his trash and makes to get up. "Alright, it's settled. Getty tomorrow."
"What’s the point in goading me into asking questions that you’re not going to answer?" Gale says.
He wants to be annoyed, but mostly he's taken off-guard at Bucky remembering that piece of information at all; a reminder that he takes up room in other people's lives, that he exists even when he's not physically present.
"I just want to know if you want to know," Bucky says. "And now I know."
-
The mountain is subzero cold. Gale stares up at the palm trees, their leaves a healthy green even though there's ice hanging off the precipice above them. It must be the middle of the night judging by how black the sky is, but everything is glowing via some strange internal light source.
From beside him, Bucky says, "No one's coming."
"They are," Gale tells him. "We just gotta wait."
"How much longer?"
"I don't know."
He watches the leaves sway, the whole of his posterior chain cramped and cold and wet, from his boots to the back of his head. Cold and wet. Mixed brain signals. When he holds his right hand up, it's bloody enough that only a sliver of skin shows through. Cold and wet and red.
"Bucky," he says. He can't move. Gropes around and only touches snow. "Bucky. John."
There's a noise from far off. Maybe from the wreckage. Maybe Bucky had crawled back down there, back to Curt. Maybe he was never there at all.
"Bucky," he says again. "Bucky!"
Gale jerks awake in the middle of yelling something unintelligible into the dark. For a disorienting second, he doesn't know where he is. The window is on the wrong side of the wall and the sheets smell different. Then the lamp clicks on and Bucky is there, warm and present, blinking at Gale in the low light with the back of his hair standing wild. His sleeping bag is mostly unzipped and he's got one hand curled around the flap, ready for a quick exit.
Gale's brain finally catches up at the sight. The mountain collapses down into Bucky's enclosed room, four walls and a ceiling as protection. He shakes his head in a quick little shiver, letting himself flop back down onto the mattress as he covers his face with his hands.
Bucky lets him breathe for a bit. "I got some clonidine," he says, voice gravelly with sleep.
Gale shakes his head again. Clonidine is mostly preventative, but he figures Bucky knows that. In any case, the adrenaline is draining out of him already, leaving plenty of room for embarrassment to take its place.
"I'm okay," he says.
"Okay." Bucky goes to turn off the light. Pauses with his fingers around the switch. "You sure?" he asks. When Gale nods, the light flicks off and Bucky resettles into his sleeping bag.
Gale lays his forearm over the pillow and studies the popcorn ceiling until little phantom static bursts start overtaking his vision. Bucky is awake too, he can tell. If he looks over, he might see Bucky's eyes, two intelligent dots fixed on him in the dark.
He shifts onto his side and stares at the wall instead.
-
The next morning, his eyes open instinctively to low-slung sunlight. It's late by East Coast standards but still early here. On the floor, Bucky's sleep nest is empty, an indentation of his head left behind on the pillow.
Gale takes a brisk shower before getting dressed and emerging into the living room. The TV is on low, local news anchors gesturing to a full row of bright yellow suns as they talk about the weather.
"Morning," he says.
Bucky's head pops up from the arm of the couch. "Hey," he rasps.
He's lying down, phone in hand and flipping it around like he's thinking about something, but sits up to make room for Gale. Gale sees that his torso is bare, shirt discarded onto the carpet like an afterthought. On screen, they're predicting mid-80s, no clouds, moderate air quality.
Gale looks away. "Looks nice outside," he comments toward the TV. The cushions are warm under his thighs when he sits.
"It's mostly always nice here."
Bucky tosses his phone back and forth before seemingly making up his mind. "When's the last time you went out?" he asks, adding, "Like to a party?", as if he knows Gale was about to give some bullshit answer about going out all the time, to the grocery and the gym and for take out at the restaurant he and Marge used to frequent together.
"Like -- a dinner party?" Gale hedges.
"A dinner..." Bucky trails off. "No, not a dinner party, you geriatric."
Gale hedges again. "Can you use geriatric as a noun?"
"I don't fucking know," Bucky groans. "Septuagenarian then, are you happy? Anyway. Getty first, and then I know we had a quiet night planned, but," he pinches his thumb and pointer finger together, "I was thinking about a slight tweak. Similar vibes, different activity. You okay with that?"
"Sure, Bucky," Gale says, and Bucky scrambles off the couch.
"Great. Okay. I'm gonna go pick something up real quick and you can let me know if you change your mind."
Rather than bending down to retrieve his shirt, Bucky nudges a foot underneath, then kicks it up to his hands and pulls it on over his head, all in one smooth movement.
"Throw me my keys? Side table," he asks, still adjusting the collar when Gale tosses the keys. He snatches them out of the air one-handed, forearm arcing downward in an easy swoop. "Alright, I'll be right back."
He shoves his feet into a pair of slides and the front door closes behind him. Gale remains on the couch with his gaze on the TV, not processing a single word.
Bucky puts effort into being a flashy guy, but the flashiest things occur when he isn't even trying. Gale has found that that terrible spark in him catches and recatches with these unremarkable moments. Like when Bucky cracks his neck by violently whipping his head to the side, or, as demonstrated just now, when he does something as straightforward as put on a t-shirt and show basic hand-eye coordination.
If Gale could somehow predict these events, he could maybe control his reactions. Blow out the match before it catches into something bigger. As it stands, he lets the rest of the news play out while staring blankly at the screen the entire time.
-
The Getty is up on a hill, light-filled and hushed even with the crowds of visitors roaming around for the weekend. After touring the sterile interior, they head out to the gardens containing a shrubbery maze and manicured flora. Below them, the city sprawls miniature, with more greenery than Gale would've expected. Downtown LA rises in the distance in blocky 8-bit shapes.
"This is good," Bucky comments, crunching away on a bag of chips. He nods to himself. "This is nice."
"You haven't been here?"
Bucky pours crumbs into his mouth, then folds up the empty bag and sticks it into his pocket. "Nah," he says, brushing off his hands. "Never got around to it."
"Why not?"
"You know how it is. You get to a place with all these grand plans, but then work starts, and then a routine starts, and then your world gets kind of smaller and smaller, and then it's like one giant ass groove of existence."
"Yeah. I get it," Gale says, and Bucky knocks at his elbow with his own. "You've moved around a lot."
"Mm."
"Why?" Gale asks again.
"Don't know, exactly," Bucky muses. "Don't know what I'm looking for. And do not say myself."
"I wasn't going to," Gale defends, even though he was, and Bucky says, "Sure you weren't."
They've wandered out to a sloping lawn. Other people are lying about, so Gale does too, settling down with the sun on his face even though he might burn. In contrast, the grass under him is cool, soft instead of scratchy. He hears snatches of conversations, a gentle breeze, the rattling of branches in response. It's an idyllic day, the kind he always pictures himself enjoying outside with a book and a coffee back in Boston but never does.
Bucky sits down beside him, knees tented up. "You know what I did learn, though," he offers.
"What."
Instead of answering, Bucky sucks his lips inward and clamps them there. He's squinting at the sky with his eyes hovering a centimeter away from fully shut. The lift to his chin brings his jawline into pale relief, all the way to where it curves up by his earlobe. Gale can't stop looking.
"Just say it," he prods. It comes out like he actually believes it’s that simple. Which he does, when it comes to other people.
Bucky leans back, burrowing his fingers into the grass. "Alright. This is gonna sound stupid, but. There's a flipside to the freedom of nobody knowing you. Because like -- that means nobody knows your default or what you were like before, so it's hard to measure any changes in yourself."
Gale hums. "That doesn't sound stupid."
To their left, birds are chattering back and forth. He breathes in the smell of grass and thinks about Marge, how they had lived through their history together linearly. They still talk sometimes over e-mail. He had gone to Wyoming with her for her father's funeral six months ago, driving family back and forth, helping put away food into the deep freezer in the Spencers' basement, sitting beside her at church in the same pew he sat in as a kid.
It was as easy and familiar as much as it was suffocating, which was bizarre. He'd always thought of himself as someone who preferred easy and familiar over anything else.
"Hard to suss that kind of stuff out on your own," he says. "And I didn't even have to leave Boston to learn that."
He's prepared for the playful punch that comes, aimed high on his belly so as not to actually hurt. Bucky retreats after only one attempt, fist momentarily getting tangled where Gale is curled in like a pillbug.
"So," Bucky says, elbows resting on his knees. "Last night."
"Yeah," Gale says, relaxing, except Bucky doesn't go on, squinting again into the smoggy distance. Gale tucks onto his side and slides a palm under his cheek, waiting.
At length, Bucky says, "I almost choked a guy out when I was living in Alaska."
He pauses, as if to gauge Gale's reaction. When Gale doesn't give him one, he goes on. "One minute I’m asleep and the next I’m opening my eyes because I'm about to crush his throat and he’s clawing at me like a fucking cat. I stopped doing roomshares after that."
Gale doesn't bother asking why. The why is obvious. The why doesn't even matter.
"Roomshares are shitty anyway," he says.
"True." Bucky chuckles to himself. He pulls out a single blade of grass and starts peeling it lengthwise. "He was kind of a dickhead. Always eating my eggs and pissing all over the toilet."
Gale rolls onto his back again and closes his eyes. He could fall asleep here and maybe he wouldn’t wake up screaming. Maybe his brain would understand it’s daytime, in public, and react accordingly.
"I tried getting a housemate after Croz's wedding," he says into the red-orange nothingness behind his eyelids.
"Yeah? I didn't know that."
"Not much to know. He moved out after a month."
"You never told me."
"Easier to tell you something after it's already over. I guess it seemed unimportant by then."
"How'd you know it was gonna be over?"
Gale shrugs. "Just did," he says. Something lands on his eyelids -- first his left, then his right. Soft, almost weightless. "What are you doing? You're not supposed to pick anything."
"They were dead already," Bucky says. Gale hears him shift around. "Wind blew 'em over right to me. Kismet."
He goes quiet for a bit. A gust of wind rattles lightly at whatever is on Gale's face and he swipes them off.
"Tickles," he states.
He cracks his eyes open. It's melting into golden hour and Bucky's taking full advantage without even knowing it. The sun is a ripe apricot, highlighting the hair on his arms and shins. Gale refocuses to pick at the grass in front of his face, then pokes his finger against Bucky's sock, flipped inside-out yet again. He wonders if he does this on purpose.
Bucky wiggles his leg side to side. He catches Gale's eye and gives him that close-mouthed, hopeful sort of smile that makes Gale want to disappear into the ground.
"Why do you think I keep leaving?" he asks.
"I don't know," Gale says honestly. "Easy answer is you're escaping something, right?"
"Yeah."
"Or maybe you want someone to follow you."
Bucky snorts. "Corny."
"Well, I don't know what to tell you," Gale says. "You're a corny guy. And that mustache doesn't help."
"It's rugged," Bucky declares. "Makes me look handsome."
"Don't know that you need any help in that arena, Bucky," Gale says.
He closes his eyes again before he can see the smile that Bucky aims down at him. Feels the weight of it anyway, fond and warm, like a broad hand placed right over his heart.
-
As it turns out, Bucky's definition of 'similar vibes, different activity' vis-a-vis an early dinner at a local Japanese restaurant and a showing of Suspiria, is to attend a desert rave and drop the ecstasy he'd gone to pick up that morning.
"A desert what?" Gale repeats. "Ecstasy?"
"You'll see," is all Bucky says. "You alright with that, though? We definitely don't have to. You know I'll be fine with whatever."
"No, I'm -- I'm okay with it," Gale says. "I'm, uh. Trying new stuff."
"I'll only ask if you're sure once."
"I'm here, aren't I?"
"Good enough for me," Bucky says with finality.
They drive on I-15 for hours, until Gale notes that they seem to have formed a caravan with a handful of cars all heading in the same direction, driving on and off multiple cloverleaf ramps as the wide freeway turns into a seemingly never ending one-lane straightaway that spits them out into open desert. The air is cold enough that Bucky closes the windows most of the way, leaving a high-pitched whistling bolstered by the guitar lines of chugging '90s rock as they continue their journey.
Gale nestles his skull between the headrest and the seatbelt hanger. The position puts him at an angle that allows for sneaky glances at Bucky, how any oncoming lights glint off his eyes. He's driving with an underhanded grip on the wheel and his opposite knee nudged in for support. Sometimes he ducks forward to check over his shoulder before passing the car in front and settling back in his seat.
"You're a good driver," Gale tells him.
"I've got precious cargo," Bucky says without taking his eyes off the road.
By the time they slow and roll to a stop between a minivan and a Nissan with a missing bumper, it's well past nightfall. There's nothing around for miles except for sandy mountains colored a deep gray, more like a lunarscape than what Gale has always imagined California to be like. They could be back in Afghanistan, traveled back to five years ago on one of those nights where the sun disappeared and left them so cold they might as well have been on the moon.
"You know where we are?" Gale asks, peering up through the windshield, ears ringing in the sudden absence of wind.
"Somewhere past Barstow. Near the Mojave, maybe."
Gale nods as if he understands the local geography. They get out to a faint, thumping bass ringing out from somewhere in the distance. More cars continue to pull up as they weave their way through the makeshift parking lot, shadows bobbing and stretching in front of them under passing headlights. Eventually a crowd of other shadows comes into view and the music gets louder and then they're very nearly in the middle of it all, bodies whipping from side to side, chins nodding along to the beat.
Bucky touches Gale's shoulder. "You sure you're good with this?"
"Yeah. Just don't abandon me or anything," Gale tries to joke.
"I won't," Bucky says, again solemn when Gale least expects it. "Do you trust me?"
We almost died together, Gale wants to say. Out loud, he says, "Of course."
"Alright. I'm keeping an eye on you the whole time." Bucky hands him a small pill and pretends to cheers with his own. "Down the hatch."
-
An hour and some change later, everyone else is jumping around to the relentless four-on-the-floor but Gale's got sea legs on land and can't move. The feeling expands from his chest with every breath, vibrating and dynamic in a way he hasn’t been since the moments following their crash, multiplied tenfold with every nerve sparking. He's suspended within the very center of a plasma ball, air crackling around him in an almost celestial presence. Each strand of hair seems to be its own separate entity.
"Gale?" Bucky yells over the music. "You okay?"
His sweat-dampened hand is still clamped over Gale's shoulder, weighing as much as a boulder, a geological force surviving through millions of years of floods and earthquakes and droughts. It feels like an extension of himself. Gale was born with Bucky's hand on him. He was woven into being from the dregs of the universe with Bucky's hand on him.
"I'm -- a ground rod," he says with a thick tongue, unsure of whether to pitch his voice louder or softer. Bucky has his head ducked close to hear. "Everything is moving through me."
"That's good." Bucky pulls back to grin. He squeezes his grip, then moves closer to hug Gale's neck within the crook of his elbow. "That's good, keep feeling that."
The music pounds on. Time seems to dilate and splinter into nanoseconds. Everything far away swims in Gale's vision, but he swears he can see all the way down to the individual filaments of Bucky's shirt, interlaced, undulating to the beat on a microscopic level. It's the pill, Gale reminds himself, though that inner voice of logic is quiet as it's ever been. It's the pill, it's the pill, it's his eyeballs buzzing around in their sockets.
He thinks he could sober up if he really wanted to, but there's no need for that out here in the middle of nothingness, so he allows himself to slip under the jelly layer of electricity like passing through a cell membrane. He wants to touch Bucky. Realizes that he can touch Bucky, and it's the easiest thing in the world to just do it. Put one fingertip to Bucky's bare arm and smash the fine hairs there. He lifts back up and watches them rise anew. Squishes them again. Each time, his body shrinks more and more until he's condensed down into atomic parts, a molecule living on that tiny expanse of Bucky's skin.
"You okay?" Bucky asks again.
Gale's body slowly unfolds and expands into its normal shape. Wrenching his gaze up requires an effort similar to climbing a sheer rockface. He sees Bucky's eyebrows pulled up into a penitent angle, and it's so intense that Gale can't open his mouth for fear of crying, or saying something heinously embarrassing.
He molds his hand around Bucky's jaw, thumb rubbing over his bristly mustache and grazing over the softer skin of his lips. Those dark eyes are locked on him, pupils like portals ringed by the thinnest sliver of blue. Something you'd see in another galaxy.
"My hands are sweaty," Gale tells him.
Bucky's mouth moves. Sound catches up a second later. "The first time is always intense," he's saying. Gale feels the words on his thumb.
"Big assumption, that it's my first time."
"Gale. You haven't even smoked weed before. I didn't forget that." Bucky turns them around. "Come on, let's get out of the scrum."
They stumble toward the edges of the crowd and further still, to the first row of parked cars where the volume isn't so all-consuming. There are hundreds of them now, gleaming like dormant creatures under the moonlight. Bucky maneuvers Gale onto the hood of a white sedan and makes him scoot up until his feet catch on top of the bumper.
"Whose car is this?" Gale asks, to which Bucky shrugs. He's situated himself between the spread of Gale's knees, back facing the crowd, and is searching Gale's face all around, flitting his gaze up and down and side to side, hair standing wild with sweat. His dumb mustache is also beaded through with it. He's staring at Gale openly, like he always has.
Without really intending to, Gale says, "You like me."
He means for it to be accusatory. It comes out sounding more like a statement, an unequivocal fact.
Bucky's eyes crinkle. "Yeah," he says.
"You're attracted to me," Gale corrects himself.
"Well, yeah. Obviously. Who wouldn't be? But I like you, too."
"Why?"
"I don't know. Why do you like me?" Bucky challenges, and this is the most infuriating thing about him: he's too easy for Gale to project onto. The kind of person who's unknowingly been in imaginary, sweeping relationships with hundreds of strangers over the globe, and Gale is one of them.
"I don't," Gale says.
"Uh huh."
Suddenly, Bucky presses close, close enough for some of the moisture on the tip of his nose to transfer onto Gale's. Gale wants to balk at it, but his body does the exact opposite -- sways right into Bucky in a helpless pull, just as Bucky is easing back.
"Uh huh," he says again, and Gale repeats, "I don't."
Then, he admits, "I project onto you."
It makes Gale ache, the way Bucky's entire being folds into a smile. "I get it. I'm easy to project onto."
"Stop," Gale orders. "You're making it worse, doing that." Another wave of pure sensation hits him. He reels forward, legs weak. "Jesus. Is it always like this?"
"Kinda. Depends. These are good ones. Last time I hid inside a portapotty and googled pictures of horses for three hours," Bucky recalls, and Gale feels his face split into a grin that Bucky mirrors back. "You need to lie down?"
Gale shakes his head. He wraps his arms tighter around Bucky, though he's less Bucky and more just a warm, thrumming body melding against his own. That thought only lasts until he inhales and then it's Bucky again, smelling like sweat and dryer sheets. He pictures him doing his laundry, measuring out detergent and fabric softener; pictures him doing stupid everyday things like placing his coffee tumbler into the car's cupholder, flossing, stooping to water the healthy plants on their balcony.
"Wouldn't've taken you for a touchy guy," Bucky murmurs, stroking over Gale's back in long swipes. "Some people can't even stand the feeling of air on their skin."
He scratches his nails over Gale's scalp, laughs when Gale mumbles, "Oh my god," and keeps going. Gale cranes into it, tilting his head back, the night air cold as ice on his neck at the separation.
"You're like a dog, Buck," Bucky says in that soft voice. He digs his fingers in harder. "Who's been a good boy, huh?"
"Fuck off," Gale chokes out. "How are you not feeling it?"
"Are you kidding me? You see this?" Bucky leans in, widening his eyes to demonstrate how Gale is reflected back in his huge pupils. "It's just -- if you're with someone, the less fucked up person is the default caretaker no matter what. Those are the rules. It's what you did for me over there, isn't it?"
"Yeah," Gale manages.
His fantasies always kind of blurred over this part, where vulnerability and letting someone in was a requirement. Embarrassingly, the main idea of this fantasy might've not been the relationship itself, but rather the existence of someone who implicitly understood him without Gale having to work for it in any way, or give any indication that he wanted it, let alone ask for it.
But he had asked for it, the best way he knew how. He had come here.
With no warning, Bucky tucks into the curve of Gale's neck. Bites at his trap muscle with a careful, clean press of teeth, hard enough to skate the line between pain and pleasure, but even the pain is gratifying. After a few eons, he releases the pressure, leaving behind a dampness that cools immediately from how he's breathing on it. Gale scoots closer, squeezing Bucky's hips between his knees.
"Bucky," he says.
"You got me, babe. I'm right here."
Bucky is still scratching at Gale's hair, but he moves his free hand down to sneak his fingers underneath the hem of Gale's shirt. Tucks them past his waistband, just like people do with handguns in action movies.
They won't. Not here. Gale is wholly content just to bask in his body and how it feels to have Bucky right beside him.
"Can I ask you a stupid question," Gale mutters into Bucky's shirt. "If you weren't the less fucked up person, what would you be thinking right now?"
"Dirty version or clean version?" Bucky says, no hesitation.
"Both."
"Hm. Circle of trust?"
"Circle of trust," Gale confirms.
"I'd be thinking about you. Just you. Your face, and your hands, and how you came out to see me. Gale fucking Cleven." Bucky wiggles his fingers from where they're trapped against Gale's lower back. "And I'd also be thinking about this. How I'd eat you out and raw you right on top of this car if we weren't in public."
Gale laughs. Doesn't have time to do more than that before Bucky is shifting to finally kiss him. Both their mouths are too dry, taste buds dragging over one another in velcro-like skips. Bucky huffs; reclaims his tongue to wet it and tries again, better on the reattempt, though still too rough to be as slick as Gale wants. They start laughing into each other's mouths, teeth clacking together in percussion, somehow the loudest noise in a desert full of sound.
He pulls back and claps both hands over the sides of Bucky's face to hold him steady. It seems imperative that he voices this now, like all the threads of his life are converging on this exact moment. A singular intersection of space and time.
As seriously as he can, Gale says, "I want you to be okay."
"I am okay," Bucky says. "Right now. And -- and the leg is, too, for the most part. As much as it could be okay, I guess. Took a nice chunk out and sometimes the nerves get all screwy, but." He pauses. "I don’t really know how to talk about it. It is what it is."
"Can't change it now," Gale says, and Bucky's mouth twists in rueful assent. "How's the brain?"
"It is what it is," Bucky repeats. "Fucked up even before you knew me."
"There's nothing romantic about suffering in silence," Gale tells him, and Bucky grins, the width of it tempered by how Gale is still holding his face.
"I mean, there kind of is," he muses. "It got you out here, didn't it?"
"I was talking about me."
"Funny. I was talking about me, too."
Bucky touches the tip of his tongue along his bottom lip, contemplative, gathering up the courage to say his own piece.
"I never thanked you," he murmurs, "for that night."
"Don't gotta thank me," Gale says, midway through another journey through Bucky's eyes. He wills his brain to remember this, but there's a wall there; he's mourning it even as it's happening.
Bucky leans in to rub their noses, then tucks his chin back just enough for them to stare at each other. Gale knows this view -- knows it from the mountain, under a sky identical to the one stretching above them now, the lip of their helmets touching like magnets. He's dreamed it countless times. Around them, the beat drops out, music peaking into a synth-filled anthemic melody that soars and brings another wave of frisson into his limbs. People are screaming, yelling along to the notes. Bucky is warm and solid under his hands. Real.
"I'm glad we're alive," Gale says.
-
Dawn starts to break about halfway home, slicing up over pale gray roads like a knife. Gale falls asleep for the first time that day, dragged under by pure exhaustion and the throb to his jaw. When he jolts awake unknown hours later, he fumbles instinctively for the sunvisor, groaning. Next to him, Bucky has his hoodie cinched tight over his head and Oakleys hugging his face.
"You want mine?" he asks, gesturing.
"No," Gale croaks. "You're driving. You awake?"
"Yeah. No worries. I'm used to no sleep and early mornings by now." Bucky looks at Gale with an amused pinch to his brows. "You have that campus tour today."
"Oh, god."
Bucky pats his knee, then settles his hand there. "Get some sleep. We can get a couple hours at home, too."
Gale obeys, and awakens peacefully when Bucky is pulling to the curb to park. In a jarring sight, commute traffic is clogging the intersection ahead, the rest of the world getting started on the day while theirs is just ending. They drag themselves past the gate, into the elevator, and through the threshold of the quiet apartment, moving around each other easily like they've been doing it for a long time before this.
"Gotta eat before we crash," Bucky announces, unzipping his hoodie and tossing it onto the couch as he passes.
"I might die," Gale says.
"You'll die faster if you don't eat anything. It'll be quick. PB&J, my specialty."
He pushes Gale down onto a chair before busying himself with gathering ingredients. It's quick as promised, and they eat in silence, Bucky opening a dog-eared book while Gale fixes his drooping gaze on a whitened heat ring on the table. The first bite is like sawdust but his salivary glands start functioning again and he wolfs the rest of it down, eating around the crusts in a long-ingrained habit.
Theoretically it must've happened yesterday, too. At least this is his assumption based on the ease with which Bucky reaches across the table to grab the ragged leftovers. Just skitters his hand over without even taking his eyes off his book.
Gale sits there dumbly, of course, and Bucky, while chewing and engrossed in reading, says, "What?"
"Nothing." Gale pauses. Amends that to, "You like the crusts?"
"I don't mind the crusts. You always just leave them, so. You know."
"I’ve been here for all of two days."
"Saw it at Bagram, too. I figured it's an 'always' type of habit," Bucky says. "Sometimes I notice things. Ranger school and all."
"Didn't know you were watching so closely," Gale says.
Though Bucky is still looking down, Gale can see the way his face relaxes into an easy smile, wholly comfortable with the implication.
"I think you did," he says.
"Did what?"
"Know. You knew I was watching." Bucky lets that hang in the air for a merciful blip before flicking his gaze up to assess the status of Gale’s plate. "Finished?"
Gale sits back in wordless confirmation. Bucky leans over to bus their plates, but not before nudging his phone across the table.
"Take a look at the pictures from this weekend. I think I got some pretty good ones."
Automatically, Gale picks it up to navigate to the photo folder. It starts with a string of at least five terrible selfies, camera aimed up by Bucky's chin. The next ones are of Gale holding his burrito, washed out by a streetlamp cutting in on the top left corner; a close-up of an ice cream cookie sandwich at Diddy Riese, a bunch of photos of vases and sculptures from the Getty with Gale smeared in the background. The last is also of Gale, hands stacked behind his head on the grass in the garden and two flower buds resting on his closed eyes, unaware of a photo being taken.
Bucky is at the sink, washing their dishes by hand and whistling dissonantly. Gale doesn't move for long enough that the phone screen dims to black.
"What time do you have to be on campus?" Bucky asks without turning.
"Ten fifteen," Gale answers.
He rises. Heads to the sink and hoists himself up to sit on the counter by Buck's elbow. After Bucky shuts off the water, Gale asks, "You remember when we met?"
The sun is beating in through the kitchen window in a corporeal superpowered beam. Bucky dries his hands and shifts over. Everything zooms into a pinpoint as he boxes Gale in with his arms and leans forward, collarbones pressing together.
"I remember everything about it," Bucky whispers, lips almost touching Gale's ear, and it's so tender and private that his smile almost slides into tears instead.
"Yeah?" he asks, for lack of anything better, and his voice seems too soft and too loud at the same time.
"Yeah," Bucky repeats. He has his face tucked into Gale's jawline, holding very still. "You'd barely said five words the entire time we were out on patrol. But then I told you about the stray dog and I could just tell that you got it. And we were walking back to the tents and someone was singing Soundgarden or some shit, and we passed by a lamp and you looked at me and all I could think was, 'what the fuck'."
Gale swallows. Before, there was a part of him that reveled in the torture of this never coming to fruition, believing in the self-fulfilling prophecy that accepting it would speed up its collapse.
He swallows again. Drowns it out.
Bucky pulls back and says, "Hey." Gale focuses in on the way he's looking at him, smile partially faded.
"Hey," he repeats.
"Lost you there."
"Just remembering it, is all. You're a good storyteller," Gale says. "It was Creed, though. They were singing Creed."
He cups his hand around the back of Bucky's neck. Squeezes the muscles running down either side of his spine while Bucky grips his forearm. There’s a tendon there, right by the elbow, that he plucks with his thumb. It makes Gale's middle finger twitch helplessly, over and over, no matter how many times he does it.
"Is this -- " Gale clears his throat. "What do you want?"
"You," Bucky says.
"I'm talking about anything here."
"Just you."
"You don't want a new car, or a house, or a…a dog," Gale falters.
"See," Bucky says, "you can't even list three other things that I'd realistically want."
"You live on the other side of the country," Gale points out.
"Uh huh."
"I don't even know where I'm gonna be next year."
"Uh huh."
"You fall in love with everything," Gale argues. A complete shot in the dark, but somehow he knows it's the truth.
"Uh huh," Bucky agrees a third time. "So what?"
When he smiles, Gale smiles back. He thinks about birth and death, circles of trust and do I still look psyops good? and the misattribution of fear; the passage of time, the here and now. At its core, the idea is so fucking simple: there's a good thing right in front of him, in the shape of a scarred up body carrying the name of Bucky Egan, asking him so what?
Gale's only job is to not actively destroy it. To let himself have it.
So what?
"So nothing," he finally says. "Let's get some sleep."