Chapter Text
It feels wrong to sleep in his grandparents’ room. Eventually he moves into one of the spare rooms; it’s got a bunk bed that’s far too small, the mattress hard and lumpy, the ceiling so close to his head he smacks against it every time he sits up.
(It’s the most normal he’s felt in a long time. Since he got back, even)
Half-asleep, his mind drifts to Bucky. Turns him over in his mind a little. The Russian with an American name. Young. Sweet-looking, even if Sam does insist he’s a total asshole. Got a voice like melted chocolate, if melted chocolate smoked twenty a day.
Steve sleeps. He wakes up screaming.
Same as usual, then.
-
It’s been raining all day and Steve’s been stuck inside, cagey and irritable. He’s pretty sure he can see one of Sam’s training pico’s out on the water, every so often twisting into a capsize – by the way Bucky occasionally pauses by one of the windows and laughs to himself, Steve’s probably right. He’s tempted to go down to the beach to watch. But ever since Sam found out Steve’s been cramming himself into the tiny bunk bed (apparently Bucky’s nosy and a total snitch) he’d been getting lectures about “finding normality in discomfort” and “inappropriate ways to reintegrate yourself into home life”. Somehow, he doesn’t think Sam will approve of Steve getting soaking wet and inevitably catching a cold just so he can sit on an empty beach doing shit-all. He can, after all, do shit-all inside, in the warm and dry, and has been very successful in doing just that so far.
He’d dug out a sketch book from the suitcases he still hasn’t properly unpacked – but every time he tries to capture the little pico, darting across the water, the image gets distorted by the rain drops smeared across the window. The picture inevitably ends up a sloppy mess of pencil lines that’s just nightmarish enough to be disconcerting, as if the drawing’s melting across the page, and Steve starts all over again.
He day-dreams the hours away instead, listens to Bucky clean the aga and sing absent phrases of pop songs he must have picked up from the radio Steve likes to turn on when it gets too quiet. He’s got a nice voice, even if One Direction lyrics do end up wildly garbled by Bucky’s accent, and Steve almost feels himself drop off to sleep –
Until the ground’s shaking underneath him and the explosion off to his side is so blisteringly loud it feels as if it came from inside his head, reverberating around his eardrums until all he can hear is a sharp, invasive whine and he feels as if he just concentrated hard enough he could just breathe and –
And Bucky’s stood in the kitchen, eyes wide and horrified. There’s a smashed plate at his feet.
No explosions. No bombs. Just a dropped plate and his muddled, half-asleep brain.
He stands. Bucky’s still staring at him, frozen – Steve wonders if he’d been screaming. When he tries to speak his throat feels raw, so he supposes so.
‘S-sorry,’ Steve stutters out, finds a breath stuck in his throat and swallows desperately.
Bucky continues to watch him. His eyes are a clear, startling blue. Steve had never really noticed it before. The low, murky light of the kitchen throws shadows across him that shift when he takes a careful step forward, shoes crunching over shards of china – he feels himself involuntarily flinch at the sound and Bucky freezes again, hands raised almost pacifyingly.
‘No problem.’
It’s Bucky’s go-to phrase, his key response at any question directed towards him that he doesn’t understand – which is all of them. He’ll chirp it out and about the house, nod and grin it at Steve when he brings him coffee every lunch time.
He gets the feeling that today, Bucky means it.
‘No problem,’ he repeats, a little softer. The familiarity of it in his odd, heavy accent cuts through the haze and Steve blinks to himself, feels the shake in his hands and the emptiness in his chest recede a little.
He heads up to his room and sleeps – for once it’s nightmare-free. When he wakes up it’s dark out, the house quiet and empty.
Bucky left the kitchen light on, which isn’t like him. There’s a sandwich sat on the middle of the kitchen table.
Suddenly, Steve realises, he’s absolutely fucking starving.
St. Mawes is quiet and cold. Not cold enough to remind him of home – it’s a fresh chill, not that bone-deep frozen quality to the air that’ll take your fingers if you let it. The clouds are thick; it’ll rain tomorrow.
The hill leading up to Steve’s house is a steep one and in the dark of the winter’s evening Bucky stumbles a little, rushes his fingers over the wall to steady himself. He keeps it up, running fingers over the rough stone of the sea wall. He taps at it with a metal finger too; sometimes he likes to test it, to see if his brain will tell him the same things. Sometimes, when he shuts his eyes, he can almost pretend his left arm is one of flesh and blood – but then it’ll hum or whir a little, in the quiet of Steve’s kitchen when he’s cleaning the sink, and he’ll turn the radio up a bit louder.
(For some reason, he seems to care what Steve might think of his arm. He can’t wear long sleeves and bright yellow marigolds forever – he knows that, logically. He’ll get through Christmas, he thinks, and then he’ll explain.)
There’s a dull, metallic ping as he flicks the wall and he forces himself to carry on, the dim lights of the sailing club guiding his way. It’s busy – always is on a Friday night, especially nearing a holiday, when all the families start to descend on the village. It’s worse in the summer, he thinks, when people stare at him and little kids point and you can barely move in the water for rich people in boats who don’t know what they’re doing. But Christmas – with the lights strung up along the harbour, and the way everyone blusters into the sailing club with red cheeks, peeling off layers and warming themselves by the crackle of the fire –
It’s cliché after cliché and he loves it, no matter how many times he grumbles and groans when Sam forces him into increasingly ridiculous Christmas jumpers. Sometimes he gets them matching ones.
He’s blasted with a wall of heat and the overwhelming smell of mince pies as soon as he wanders into the bar, cloyed with unfamiliar faces. It’s a popular spot, for sure, and he nods to a few familiar faces, sends a scowl to a couple of blokes leering at Nat as she pulls a pint. Thankfully, considering Nat’s just pulled one of them over the bar by the front of his shirt and looks just about ready to murder him, he doesn’t need to get involved.
‘Hey, jerkface,’ he greets the barman.
‘Hey, asshole,’ Clint shoots back, signing a little lazily as he eyes the men at the bar nastily – they’re wandering off, tails tucked firmly between their legs, and Bucky catches himself hoping the door hits them on their way out. ‘The usual?’
‘Sure. And one for Sam, too.’
‘You still tryn’a get that kid to drink this Russian piss?’
Bucky narrows his eyes even as he supresses a smile, and there’s a matching, small smirk on Nat’s face even as she signs sharply;
‘Don’t think I didn’t see that Barton, you shit.’
Clint rolls his eyes in mock-annoyance, sliding over Bucky’s two drinks, getting a quick thank you in response.
Bucky’s been here a few years now, and he knows Clint can lip-read – wouldn’t be able to work at the bar if he couldn’t. But Bucky still sat down with Nat and spent hours perfecting every sign, practicing in the mirror over and over. He’s still not fluent, will maybe never be able to keep up with the rapid-fire pace Nat and Clint can spark up when they’re not thinking of comprehensibility for the people around them – but he learned. It’d take a lot for him to learn English – but he’d learn sign language for Clint Barton all over again if he had to.
He’s so used to the quiet of his communication with Clint that he jumps when Sam claps him on the back, taking a drink of the pint sat down on the bar before he even says a word – and quickly proceeds to nearly spit it all out again as Nat crows noisily from her end of the bar.
‘Fucking hell, I’d almost forgotten what this shit tastes like,’ Sam signs as he speaks, rapid-fire – a little less practiced than Bucky but improving every day – shaking his head as he settles on a bar stool, slaps a hand against Clint’s palm and sends Nat his usual shy nod, trying not to grin when she waggles her fingers back at him. Nat’s teasing, and it’s not really fair – but Bucky does not want to be the one explaining Nat and Clint’s dating history to Sam. Hearing the story for himself was traumatising enough.
‘Your friend,’ Bucky starts up almost immediately, still signing along out of instinct as he talks to Sam in Russian. It’s a confusing jumble of languages in his head – the English burbling around him, Nat and Clint signing to each other at a mile a minute; it’s almost too much and he has to stop, letting his hands still as he takes a breath. When he carries on, this time his hands are still – but the apologetic look he throws Clint’s way is waved off almost immediately, and Clint greets a customer with a smile. ‘Your friend. You didn’t tell me he was…’ He trails off again, searching for the right words.
‘Disarmingly beautiful? Made of sunshine and rainbows?’
‘Weird. I was gonna go with weird.’
He watches Sam narrows his eyes, taking a considering sip of his drink and trying not to scowl against the taste.
‘What do you mean – weird?’
‘I dropped a plate today, and he –’ Bucky pauses, making an expansive, vague gesture with his hands, unsure how to express himself. Sam’s dark eyes follow the movement closely, a frown printed across his expression, and Bucky forces himself to find the right words. ‘– he flipped his shit. I think, perhaps, that your friend –’ in the silence Bucky allows himself, he watches Sam’s expression change; from confused to concerned, maybe a little angry, too. He knows what Bucky’s going to say but he forces himself to finish his sentence anyhow. ‘ – Your friend, maybe he isn’t as over his battles as you think he is. Or as he thinks he is.’
‘Shit.’
Bucky doesn’t know many English words, but he knows that one. Sam’s swiping a hand over his forehead and for a moment Bucky allows himself to tune into all the little sounds in the room – some blonde giant who Bucky’s sure he’s met before, talking in a too-loud voice, shouting something about Thor, God of Sex! The long-suffering skinny guy who’s constantly by his side (maybe his brother, maybe his boyfriend, Bucky can’t remember) buries his face in his hands. Some long-forgotten pop star – went by the name of Star Lord, was in some crappy no-hope band called Guardians of the Galaxy, Bucky can’t remember his real name – is blaring out of the television as he says something about One Direction’s tiny pricks to a scandalised-looking Graham Norton.
When he comes back to it, Sam’s looking out of the window, chin resting on his hand, fingers curled around a half-empty glass of beer. The harbour is bright, now, coloured Christmas lights strung up over the sea wall, a wreath decorating the door of the bakery. There’s a sharp wind out tonight, and the boats anchored up bob on the water a little, something hypnotic about the way they move, pale little blurs amongst the consuming black of the water.
‘He told me that he was better. That he was getting over the PTSD.’
Bucky shrugs. Pats a comforting hand – his flesh one; he can’t think there’s anything warm and fuzzy about the metal one – against Sam’s shoulder as the man huffs out a long breath.
He finds it hard to care about Steve. He’s only known the guy a few weeks, anyhow – and sure, he recognised the look on Steve’s face when he came out of whatever war he’d snapped back into in his own head. But Bucky did his time in physical therapy and psychological therapy and, really, any sort of therapy you could think of. It’s not his job to get hurled back into his own PTSD just ‘cause some American idiot doesn’t have the good sense to go see a therapist and get his shit together.
‘You’ll keep an eye on him, right? Tell me if anything goes wrong?’
‘Uh. Sure.’
Bucky hates lying to Sam. But there’s not a chance in hell he’s getting sucked into whatever deep and personal problems Steve Rogers has going on.
He’s just gonna go to the house five days a week, clean, hoover, and get out of there. Keep his nose out of Steve’s business.
He’s just gotta keep himself to himself.