Work Text:
“Steven.”
Uh oh. Bucky never used his first name, unless he was really, really mad.
Steve looked up from where he was sprawled on the living room floor, sketchbooks and pencils spread around him like blossoms from a cherry tree. Bucky was standing at the edge of the rug, wearing his ratty cut off shorts and an oil-stained tank top, their laundry basket balanced on his hip.
Oh, no. Steve knew immediately what this was about, and he already felt his shoulders drawing up around his ears in embarrassment. Unfortunately, having shoulders the size of small boulders meant that Bucky also saw their traitorous ascent.
“I see you understand why I’m here,” Bucky bit out, his irritation showing on every inch of his face.
“Uh.” No one said Steve was eloquent. And wasn’t there a thing about anything you say being used against you? He knew it was for a court of law, but honestly? In this house, and generally in Steve's life as a whole, it was the Court of Barnes that worried him most.
“If I find. One more. Gym bag. Full. Of. Post mission laundry.” Oh, so many sentences out of so few words, all of them coming out from between clenched teeth. Bucky was pissed. It felt as though Bucky were getting taller by the second, or that maybe by sheer force of will, he was shrinking Steve back to his original size. There was thunder in Bucky’s face, lips stretched tight as he forced the words out in a reasonable volume, if nothing else.
“Sitting in the back of the goddamn closet again, I will make sure you eat nothing but boiled fucking turnips for a month, I don’t care if I have to buy every turnip on the eastern seaboard, I. Will. Do. It!” With that dire pronouncement, he whirled away towards the laundry room, and Steve, well. Steve had never known when to keep his mouth shut.
“Aw, c’mon, Buck,” he whined, rolling onto his side, one elbow propped underneath him. He’d been having such a nice time of it, stretched out like a cat in the patch of sun their living room in the Tower got in the afternoon, Manhattan stretched out before him through the windows. He’d heard the sounds of Bucky puttering around the apartment, humming idly to himself and smiled just to have him there. It was like any number of Sunday afternoons they’d had Before, and it did more to ease the ache of loneliness he’d had since he’d come out of the ice than anything else had.
He was brought out of his musings by an absolute mountain of laundry landing on him from above, and Bucky’s footfalls, which he realized he was being allowed to hear as he certainly hadn’t heard them delivering the laundry bomb, heading to the door. He heard the slam as it shut, Bucky probably off to shoot things with Clint or drink tea angrily with Natasha. Steve wondered if Bucky was still wearing his laundry day clothes.
He took a deep breath in, meaning to sigh out in a rather put-upon way, and got a good whiff of the clothes surrounding him, promptly dry heaving at the stench of them.
Oh. So that’s why Bucky had been so mad.
-
When Bucky came home a few hours later, the clothes were folded and put away, and there was a neatly folded piece of paper propped against their pillows.
Unfolded, a cartoon style drawing of Steve with an old-fashioned clothespin on his nose, arms behind his back and toe digging into the ground, his cheeks almost a red as they actually get and giant, hangdog blue eyes.
Underneath it, in Steve’s bold, loopy copperplate it says:
Sorry I’m supersoldier smelly now, too .
Bucky fights his face for control and loses, a dopey smile claiming his mouth as a laugh bubbles up from his chest. He feels two strong arms loop around his waist and the giant barnacle that is Steve in full repentance mode latch onto his back.
“You’re lucky you’re cute,” Bucky tells him and feels Steve’s answering grin from where it’s pressed beneath his ear.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. But I think I’m still a little mad…” He trails off, leaving it up to Steve if he wants to play along.
He does.
“Oh?” The hands on his waist drop lower, teasing the tops of his low rise cutoffs. “Well, I could fix that, if you’ll let me?”
For the next two hours, Bucky lets him.