Chapter Text
For a formerly weaponized spy assassin, Bucky was not particularly good at stealth. He’d been back for fourteen months, three weeks, two days and nine hours, not that Steve was counting, and right now he was on Steve’s couch ostensibly watching the Humphrey Bogart marathon, but really just staring at Steve over the jumbo bucket of popcorn down to its dregs between them.
“I was born when she kissed me,” Bogie said on the big screen. “I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me. You like it?”
Gloria Grahame and her dead eyes didn’t seem too impressed, but she opened up her rosebud mouth to talk to him about it anyway. Not that Steve heard what she said.
“So did you change your mind?” Bucky said. His words were sparing these days, always with a touch of gravel about the edges, as if each syllable were hard-won. Steve turned his head to meet his eyes. Bucky didn’t blink.
“Did I change my mind about what?” Steve said.
“Being married to me,” Bucky said, and simple as that, all the air was sucked from the room and Steve felt time contract and render him a 90-pound asthmatic with a vise around his lungs. He forced himself to haul in a deep breath.
“I didn’t know if you remembered that,” he said. Bucky’s brow furrowed and he tilted his head, the ghost of a smile touching just the corners of his mouth.
“Seems a funny thing to forget, Rogers,” Bucky said. “Being as we were bumpin’ uglies about ten years before I took my little trip off that train, and my memory’s not complete Swiss cheese.”
Steve reached over to poke the remote, and the TV went dark. He shifted enough in the couch to face Bucky fully, shoulder rolled inward.
“Well, I didn’t wanna pressure you,” he said. “Things have changed. We’re both different. I couldn’t know if we still wanted the same things. If you wanted those things.”
“Could have asked, genius,” Bucky said. The side of his mouth was tilted up as if Steve were the most quaint and amusing thing on the planet, and the exposure of one canine zinged Steve right in the base of his spine. It was a familiar feeling he’d learned to clamp down on in the past year.
“Talking’s never been what we’re good at,” Steve said, and he caught the flick of Bucky’s gaze to his lips. His heart picked up speed.
“So let me lay it out for you,” Bucky said, moving the popcorn away to slide into its place. “I’m still ass over teakettle for this kid from Brooklyn, I think you know him. Wonder if he feels the same way?”
Steve couldn’t help it: he closed his eyes and shuddered, but Bucky was there, propping him up, as warm and steady as ever.
“Yes,” Steve whispered. “Always, yes.”
Bucky reached up with his right hand and brushed the hair from Steve’s forehead.
“Wanna get hitched?” he asked. “For real real this time.”
“You hang out with Tony too much.”
“Just answer the question, punk.”
“It was real last time,” Steve said, linking their fingers. “It’s always been real.”
“Yeah, but this time we can actually wear our rings,” Bucky said. “We can hold hands on the street. We can get tax breaks. We don’t have to hide.”
“You sayin’ you’ll never take me on a fake double date again?”
“Mmm, and share you? Nah.”
“Dancing?”
“Only if mine are the toes you’ll be trampling on the dance floor,” Bucky said.
“That a promise, jerk?”
Bucky raised his right hand and settled his left over Steve’s heart.
“That’s why God made steel-toed boots, pal.”
A watery laugh bubbled up out of Steve’s throat, and he kissed his husband for the first time in seventy years.
End