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Bucky gets rescued. That’s how it starts.
He didn’t think he still stood a chance. He had given up hope, because it seemed like the smartest thing in his position: if they were going to torture him and fuck with his brain, the least he could do for himself was not lie about his situation. Not think about it too much, either. Instead he thought about home. Even with the certain knowledge that he would never get to see it again, thoughts of Brooklyn were more sweet than bitter.
Brooklyn was were Steve was. Steve was a firecracker and troublemaker and general stubborn mule and also the sweetest thing Bucky had known in his life, even if Steve would have clocked him on the jaw if he’d ever told him that. Tiny, asthmatic Steve who was probably going to die without Bucky, but at least wouldn’t have to see Bucky die. At least wouldn’t have to get his idealism broken into pieces and reshaped into cynicism by endless bombs and endless beans and mud, so much mud. It’s the little things that really still hit hard after months of shellshock. If he shines his boots, they’re dirty again before he’s had a chance to put them on.
Or were, anyway. He doesn’t need boots when he’s locked up in a cage.
But, mud or no mud, nostalgia about skinny asshole Steve and his charcoal dusted fingers or not, Bucky gets rescued. That’s how it starts.
Then there’s an escape, and a trek through the woods, and a welcome to the camp like they’re all goddamn heroes, and cheering for the only real hero in their midst and talking and food and a visit to the med tent and a free cig and it just doesn’t seem to end, there’s no end to this day, even though Bucky was dead on his feet even before they started walking from the Hydra facility. By now he feels like he’s just a ghost floating slightly up and to the right of his actual body.
And then, suddenly, he’s alone with Steve in a tent. He’s not sure how it happened. He’s not sure he cares. He thinks Steve must have talked Phillips into it, somehow, possibly to keep an eye on Bucky.
And isn’t that just the strangest thing? Steve is now the physically stronger of their duo, looking out for scrawny Bucky who can barely stay on his feet. Bucky sinks down on one of the just two mattresses - hard, lumpy things that feel a cloud to Bucky in the moment - but it’s more because something in the back of his mind tells him that that’s what he would do than because he wants to, because that bone-deep tiredness that drags at every cell of his being is abruptly forgotten now that they’re alone.
It’s only then, when it’s just the two of them in their private tent, that Bucky finally lets himself absorb some of the disaster that was this one day.
Yes, he’s been rescued, and yes, so were about four hundred other POWs, but he still has to wonder if it was worth it. He looks across the tiny sliver of space between the two beds and encounters a giant wall of muscle, because Steve stands there, back to Bucky, unnecessarily making his already made bed, even though he’s about to get into it and mess up the military straight corners anyway. It’s odd to even see Steve perform these actions that have so clearly been drilled into him at some point since Bucky last saw him. It’s new.
Steve.
A muscled giant.
Bucky is absolutely sure the inability of his brain to combine those two concepts in his head has nothing to do with how little sleep he’s had since Hydra strapped him to a table like a lab rat to be dissected. This is something he would have struggled with even if he’d been the smartest man in the world.
“Are you even real?”
He only realizes he said those words out loud when Steve turns to look at him. There’s a frown on his face, and that part’s familiar enough, but how far Bucky has to look up to see it is totally alien. “I am, Buck. You remember what I told you about Erskine and the serum, right?”
“Yeah,” Bucky says. “I’m sorry,” he adds, because he is, for so many things. He feels he should be celebrating, should be happy for Steve and his new scientifically perfect body, but instead he just feels hollow and wrong-footed and like he’s lost something important to him.
“What for?” Steve asks, because he’s too nice to suspect such selfish concerns on Bucky’s part.
Bucky just shrugs. Even if he wanted to explain, he doesn’t have the words.
Steve ignores his own bed and sits down next to Bucky on his. The mattress dips an unexpected amount. “You know none of this is your fault, right?”
Isn’t it, though? If Bucky had stayed in Brooklyn, would Steve still have found a way to become a guinea pig for some mad German scientist so he could fulfill his imaginary duty to the world? The answer is yes, probably, because Steve is Steve and even Bucky can’t change that. Still, it feels good to take some of the guilt onto his own shoulders. He’s been covering for Steve’s mistakes since they were kids.
Then again, Steve doesn’t seem to think this actually is a mistake, but Steve’s an idiot. All Bucky knows is that Steve has tripled in size and is suddenly exactly where Bucky was telling himself Steve would never have to be.
Steve’s hand lands on Bucky’s shoulder, heavy. “Buck?”
“What did they do to you, Stevie?”
Steve bites his lip. He clearly doesn’t want to upset Bucky, but also isn’t sure where to go from there. “They fixed me.”
Maybe that’s what Bucky was looking for: a red-hot spark of anger. “Ain’t nothing about you that needed fixing, Steve.”
Steve’s hand falls away. Bucky immediately misses its warmth. He chances a look at Steve, still thrown off kilter by what he sees. Steve’s head is bowed now, shoulders a little hunched. It’s strange to see a small man’s body language on a large man’s frame.
It’s a while until Steve responds. He talks slowly, choosing his words with care. “I know it must be a shock. If this changes things, I understand.”
“Things? What things?”
“You don’t have to stay friends with me now just because you used to look out for me back home.”
He punches Steve on the arm. It’s not very gentle, but it wasn’t meant as a friendly gesture. Steve doesn’t even flinch but Bucky has to shake out his hand.
“Sorry,” Steve says. He looks genuinely remorseful, two seconds after Bucky tried to punch him out of practically nowhere.
“Fuck you,” Bucky spits.
“I’m just saying that it’s okay if you don’t agree with the choices I’ve made and you don’t -”
“Jesus Christ, would you shut up?”
Steve shuts up. He jams his hands between his knees, also a habit of a man with much less muscle mass.
“Good. Finally.” Bucky rubs his smarting hand one last time, then drags it across his forehead, because this conversation is giving him a headache on top of everything. “I’m glad you don’t expect me to agree with you on what you did, because I’m not sure I can. It was stupid and reckless and you could’ve been killed. But you know how I know you’re truly world’s greatest idiot? You thinking you need to give me an out. Damn you, Steven Grant Rogers.”
Steve breathes in deeply and Bucky knows without having to look at him that he’s relieved. Bucky may be weaker now, but he lifted a weight of Steve’s shoulders that Steve, idiot that he is, had been carrying around for absolutely no reason. For a moment they just sit there, and Bucky listens to Steve’s even breaths. It’s soothing.
“I still have moments where it feels like I’m dreaming,” Steve admits to the silence.
“I’m not surprised. You look like the hero in one of those comics.” Bucky wants to laugh about it, to make it all a little easier to swallow, but he can’t yet. It gets a chuckle out of Steve, though, which is almost as good.
“Does that mean I’m gonna save the world and get the girl?”
“Yeah. With all of your muscles and being tall and shit.”
Steve turns to him, then. There’s a look in his eyes that makes Bucky want to punch someone. “Do you want to see?”
Bucky does, almost desperately. He still thinks he should definitely say no, perhaps even more so for the sheer fact of how little he wants to. He compromises and nods, which isn’t so much a compromise as an unsubtle way to say yes without saying yes, but he’s killed enough people that he’s going to hell anyway. Nothing really matters, everyone ends up three foot under in the end and Steve offered first.
Steve isn’t aware of Bucky’s internal struggles with his nice catholic upbringing. He gets up and shrugs out of the leather jacket that still has a large hole in the shoulder, because contrary to Steve, it didn’t survive the day’s crazy activities. The jacket is thrown across the tent onto the empty bed. He pulls off his boots, two mud-caked things in a ridiculous red which were apparently part of a stage outfit, a fact Bucky doesn’t even try to wrap his mind around. He unbuckles and disposes of his belt and that should really be it, but then he’s pulling his shirt from his pants and over his head, and he’s half naked, only wearing those blue tights that look two sizes too small.
Bucky’s throat feels very dry. It’s oddly hot for Europe in fall.
Steve moves to sit next to Bucky again and looks down at his own bare arms like he’s never seen them before, evaluating. He turns his gaze to Bucky, who can only stare back mutely. “What do you think?”
“Pal,” he manages eventually. He has to swallow two more times to force out more words. “I think they made you a body that’s just about ridiculous enough to match the inside.”
Steve’s back and shoulders relax. Bucky can see the muscles shift under his skin when it happens. He tentatively reaches out, very slowly, so Steve has time to protest and they can laugh it off. Steve doesn’t, so Bucky’s left hand lands on Steve’s skin. There’s still dirt under his nails, and it looks wrong against Steve’s white shoulder, sculpture-like in every aspect except for how it’s almost glowing with how alive Steve is. Bucky can feel it.
For the first time Bucky can see a potential upside to this harebrained scheme. Steve living past thirty is something that had never before been in the cards, but it seems impossible that he won’t reach at least a hundred now, provided he makes it out of this mess of a war in one piece.
Steve leans very slightly into Bucky’s touch. Bucky pointedly does not look at Steve’s face as he trails his fingers down over Steve’s bulging biceps to the crook of his elbow. Steve shivers.
Bucky has difficulty swallowing again. “Oh lord.”
“You’re the first person who’s seen this body and really known what it was like before.” Steve says it quietly, like it’s a secret.
“You were just fine before.” That’s the strongest way Bucky can express his feelings on the matter, because he’s not willing to admit how many times Steve from before had featured in dreams that left him feeling sticky and guilty when he woke up. “But this… This is something different.”
“Good different or bad different?”
“Can it be both?”
An odd look crosses Steve’s face. It’s relief, Bucky realizes a second later. “I think it can, yeah.”
It hurts Bucky to know how much Steve has been afraid of things he shouldn’t ever have had to worry about. Bucky can’t fathom a world where he wouldn’t stick with Steve, small or big, skinny asthmatic or beefy war-hero.
He drags his fingers over the inside of Steve underarm, over the raised blue veins there, to his wrist and finally his hand. Bucky takes it in his, picks it up, and turns it this way and that, studying the changes. He thinks he can still see the old Steve’s delicate bird bones somewhere inside this hand that looks like it could crush most things, including Bucky’s will to live, if he ever lost the person attached to it. “Can you still draw?” he near-whispers. They weren’t shouting earlier, but Bucky feels he’s doing something illicit now, touching this fantasy dream version of his best friend, even if it’s very chastely, just his hand.
Steve also lowers his voice. “Yes. I drew a monkey on a bicycle I think you’d like just before I heard -”
Bucky makes the mistake of looking up at Steve’s face when Steve stops talking. It’s a grave one, and he pays for it with a piece of his heart. “What?”
“I thought you were dead, Bucky.”
And here’s a funny thing: Bucky is the one who was caught and experimented on by the nazis, and still in that moment, he feels as if Steve was worse off. At least Bucky never even for a second doubted that Steve was still save and sound back home in Brooklyn. He wasn’t, of course, but Bucky was secure in the outdated knowledge that he was, and he definitely wasn’t getting blown to pieces on a battlefield. Bucky doesn’t know what he would have done if it had been him in Steve’s place. If he’d been told Steve was considered a loss.
“I’m not,” he rasps. “Not dead. We’re both alive, fucking somehow.”
He lets go of Steve’s fingers and puts both of his hands on Steve’s shoulders, like he’s about to say something important, but he’s used up all his words. He has nothing to add, except more swearing, perhaps, but it doesn’t feel like the time for that. This also means he has no excuse for his continued feeling up of Steve, because touching his arm or hand is one thing, but this is crossing into startlingly intimate territory.
Steve takes one of Bucky’s hands from his chest, very gently, and Bucky is about to withdraw the other, when Steve kisses his knuckles. The breath is knocked out of Bucky more effectively than any kick to the chest ever could.
“I’m glad,” is all Steve says. As if this is perfectly normal. As if he didn’t just convince Bucky he did actually die in that lab and is now in some kind of strange, decidedly unchristian afterlife. If this is hell, he wants to write the devil a thank you note.
Steve’s patience must have grown to superhuman proportions as well, because he waits until Bucky unfreezes. He goes willingly when Bucky uses the hand on his shoulder to push until his back hits the bed and his head is almost on the pillow, legs still on the floor.
“At least take off your shoes,” he says. “That can’t be comfortable.”
Bucky fumbles with the laces on his boots, and then again with his belt. He figures that if he doesn’t want to go to sleep in the rest of his dirty clothes, it’s now or never, because he won’t be getting back up for anything less than the apocalypse if he lies down now, so he keeps going, letting his pants drop and pushing his shirt over his ears. He leaves the dog tags, not ready to part with the only thing that kept him sane, apart from the thought of Steve Rogers.
When he turns back to Steve, the blue tights are on the floor, somehow. Superserum induced horizontal undressing abilities, he guesses. He hovers there for a moment, looking down at Steve who is down to his boxer briefs and takes up all the space in the small bed. He’s too tired to feel nervous, but there still something that tingles down his spine and in his gut.
“I can move,” Steve offers, which is what spurs Bucky into action. He clambers onto the bed without much elegance, and he has no other choice than to straddle one of Steve’s massive thighs if he wants to stay where he is. His hands end up on Steve’s shoulders again. It’s so much. It’s enough to briefly make him forget all thoughts of crashing and stay semi-upright just to wonder at this reality.
“You’re so smooth,” Bucky marvels.
“They told me to shave.”
Steve says it like it’s something to be embarrassed about, but Bucky disagrees. Whoever ‘they’ are, Bucky would like to shake their hand and congratulate them on their decisions. The expanse of Steve’s sculpted chest is dizzying, literally so, to the point where he actually has to blink a few times to clear his head.
He moves his hands down, palms flat, and it’s not like he ever did something quite like this with skinny Steve, but he knows what he would have expected. Hard ribs jutting out under the skin, a chest he would have almost been able to cover with his hands. Now, if he spreads his fingers, thumbs touching, there is still so much space left. Steve’s nipples are hard, but Bucky is too tired to worry about what it means. It might be from the cold.
He drags his palms further down, over Steve’s pecs to his abs, and he doesn’t feel a single rib poking out. There is so much muscle now to cover tiny Steve Rogers’s asthmatic lungs. It’s wild, filling Bucky with both glee and something almost panicky. He slides his right hand up and it’s only after he’s found Steve’s heart, felt it beat under his hand perhaps more strongly than it ever had before, that he feels like he can breathe again.
“Bucky,” Steve says. “You need sleep.”
“So do you, punk,” Bucky shoots back, even though he’s not sure if that’s true. Does Steve still need sleep like regular humans do? He doesn’t look very tired, but it might just be that Bucky needs to recalibrate his sensors for this giant, new, healthy Steve instead of the frail and sickly one who tried to pretend he wasn’t yawning by scowling very hard.
Steve doesn’t answer, but takes a hold of Bucky’s dog tags, dangling from his neck, and pulls Bucky down. Bucky lands half on top of him, where he stays. It’s really the only way for two grown men to fit into the bed, and it’s also warm, and it’s so much skin contact Bucky can almost, maybe, stop worrying about Steve for a second, because he’s right there beneath him and literally can’t go anywhere without Bucky knowing.
Also, Bucky is tired down to his atoms. It’s coming back now. His feet hurt and so do his head and his legs and his heart, even though the last feels like it’s healing. It’s beating in tandem against Steve Rogers’s.
Steve pulls the blanket from somewhere and over them, which can’t possibly be big enough to cover them entirely, but that’s a concern Bucky will have to shelve for tomorrow. Somewhere along the way his eyes have fallen shut. He moves his hand, feeling that it’s very important, and dimly recognizes why when it’s all the way across Steve’s chest and he can clutch at his shoulder. He gets jostled a bit when Steve maneuvers the arm that Bucky is probably depriving of circulation so it can snake around Bucky’s waist, and Bucky can’t remember ever feeling more secure, or sleepy, or loved. They’re thoughts he wouldn’t allow himself to have in the daylight, but here, in the misty lands between sleep and wakefulness, alive in the dark in Steve’s arms, they slip through his filters anyway.
The last thing he registers before he completely sinks into a deep, deep sleep, is Steve’s lips at his temple.