Work Text:
He found him by the lake, where she’d said he would be: back straight, gaze empty, unmoving as the breeze caressed the reeds around him. His exposed shoulder was freckled from the sun, despite the UV filtering of the shield of Wakanda’s dome. Behind him, the border post village bustled: cattle lowing and children running and laughing, fathomless technology humming beneath the surface of everything. But Bucky was silence and stillness. He was his own ghost.
Steve made sure the grass shushed in his wake as he drew nearer. No sudden moves, startling noises. Only the faintest flinch of Bucky’s shoulders hunching revealed he heard Steve approach.
Steve’s hand itched. He wanted to rest it on the bare shoulder, warm his own exposed fingertips there. He’d forgotten what it felt like to touch Bucky, and now he was so close, so ready to remember—
He hooked his thumbs inside his utility belt to keep them in place.
“You’re late,” Bucky said.
Steve’s heart soared, but then crashed back down when Bucky didn’t look at him. “We were in Syria. It’s a warzone right now, this civil war—”
“I know,” Bucky said. A faint twist to his lips, the shadow of his old sardonic grin. “Shuri gets The Economist.”
“Oh, well, you must know everything, then.” Steve squared his shoulders and tried to smile. His face ached. He never used to have to fake it around Bucky. Hadn’t needed a smile in a while anyway. “That I’m a war criminal—”
“Person of interest. It’s not like you committed genocide.” Another flinch. “Political assassination.”
“All right, let’s go with international fugitive, then. And that Sovokia’s getting rebuilt—”
“It’s good for Wanda. She needed something to do.”
“What about that article in The Atlantic? They tell you about that, too?”
Steve’s heart thumped. He hadn’t come here to talk about that. He hadn’t come here to talk about any of this. It was all going so horribly off-track. He wanted to know what Bucky remembered—how Bucky remembered. He wanted to know how much Bucky was really left. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Shuri—he’d seen her, wild-eyed, relentless, gleeful, like Howard Stark but with passion instead of entitlement. Determination instead of confidence. This world was everything the UN’s prison wouldn’t have been. The best possible conditions. If there was still a Bucky there for them to draw out—
“I feel like you’re testing me,” Bucky said, his brows drawing down. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
A lump welled in Steve’s throat. Idiot. He was pushing too hard.
He shouldn’t have come here at all.
Bucky was better off without him.
“I didn’t know you still had it,” Bucky added, softer.
Steve turned away, to the fields gilded with sunset. “It had been in my belongings, back at Command. When they thought I—Someone must have gone through it, when they were pulling together the archives for the Smithsonian, but they must have—Peggy, I think—”
“She knew better than to let it fall into someone else’s hands,” Bucky finished.
Steve swallowed, but his mouth was still too dry. His eyes, too wet. “The world wasn’t ready for it then. Probably still isn’t.”
“The Atlantic seemed to think so.”
“It was in my things back at the Avengers compound, this time. Anyone who would’ve held onto it to protect me, well, guess they ended up on the Raft.”
Bucky’s mouth twitched. He looked full and whole—absent arm notwithstanding—but his voice, his gaze all felt hollow. Almost the opposite of the man in the photograph. In the photograph Morita took of them, dark circles lurked under Bucky’s eyes and his lower lip was sliced from a Nazi who’d tried to punch him and got his own dagger shoved through his throat. Yet Bucky was happy. They leaned together on the mountain overlook, hands linked, bent knees crooked toward one another, heads bowed. Foreheads resting together. Smiling. Smiling a way Steve wondered if Bucky ever could again.
WHY DID CAP SACRIFICE IT ALL FOR SGT BARNES? the headline read.
“Do you want to know if I remember?” Bucky asked. “Do you think they scraped that out of me, too?”
Steve blinked back tears and forced himself to look at Bucky. The straight slope of his nose, the way his chin tucked in from a profile. He’d drawn it a thousand times, those thick lashes and plump lips. Run his fingers over them. Wanted to do it still.
“She would if I asked,” Bucky continued. “It’d be so easy to slice it out.”
“She wouldn’t take your memories away. That’s not how it works.”
“But she could defuse them. Strip out that emotion. Make them nothing more than a photograph that I only vaguely remember taking.”
Anger spiked up Steve’s neck and warmed his face. “Is that what you want, Buck?”
“It would certainly be easier.”
Steve staggered back with a bitter laugh. “Yeah, I’ll bet it would.”
The memories hit him, full force. Slow-dancing in the darkened apartment, Bucky bending forward to drape his arms around Steve’s slender shoulders. Cold nights in the Alps with their bodies pressed together, bare skin searing, and yet Bucky’s mouth so cool it tingled against Steve’s tongue. He’d pinned Bucky against a tree, once. Why did he have to remember that now? Shoved his wrists up over his head and held them there in his firm grip while his other hand roved the sniper’s body, unfastened his trousers, worked him up. Bucky had squirmed and seethed and nipped at him, loving every minute with the kind of zeal only a man who’d cheated death could have. When Steve was inside him, it was a revelation. When he was in Steve, he made sure everyone in earshot knew.
“I meant it would be easier,” Bucky said, “for you.”
Finally Bucky turned, looked at him. The force of those blue eyes was like being back in the ice.
“No,” Steve whispered.
“They’ll never let me fight at your side. Not as a killer. Certainly not as your lover.”
“I don't care what the world says.”
Bucky pressed his lips together. “But you should.”
“I can’t mourn you any longer, Buck.” He bit his lower lip, trying to tamp down the wellspring of emotions. “I can’t keep losing you, again and again and again. If anyone should have it cut out of them, it’s me—”
“Don’t be stupid. You can move on. Already have, right? Like Peggy, the minute I was off to war. Like Sharon.”
“Sharon isn’t like that—”
“What about Natasha? Sam? I’m just some ghost, Steve. Not your ghost—mine. You’ve tried to make me into something you have to atone for. All your mistakes given form. And if you really loved me—”
Bucky stopped. Squeezed his eyes shut. The breeze drifted by them, saffron and cumin, and Bucky’s wrap rippled as if there wasn’t any man beneath it. As if he might blow away like grains of sand.
“I do,” Steve said. It was the voice of a Brooklyn runt, broken and beaten in an alley. “Love you.”
“You shouldn’t, after everything.”
Steve let his arms hang slack. “Should” had never really been part of his vocabulary, and they both knew it.
Bucky stepped toward him, silent, no reeds bending underfoot. Then he laced his fingers through Steve’s left hand and raised their palms so they were mirroring one another. Steve looked at the skin of Bucky’s right hand linked over his own leather fingerless gloves. It wasn’t a murderer’s hand. Just a boy’s, a victim of war. Steve ached to bring those digits to his lips, taste every last one.
“The trigger words,” Bucky said. “Most of them were tied to you.”
Steve’s fingers tightened involuntarily around Bucky’s. He hadn’t expected that.
“They weaponized my memories of us. Turned the love and loyalty I felt for you into—obedience.” His voice wavered, a wrinkle Steve ached to smooth away. “That’s gone now. But what’s left behind, I . . .”
Tender, deliberate, Steve took another step toward him. He cupped Bucky’s head with his right hand, fingers lacing through soft, dark locks. Bucky closed his eyes and tipped forward until their foreheads met. Bucky’s breath was slow and sturdy against Steve’s mouth. It calmed his own erratic breath, his hummingbird, serum-sharpened pulse.
“What’s left behind?” Steve asked, their noses brushing together as he spoke.
“An echo. A fading bruise. Of my heart being so full. So in awe of this stupid, stupid man—”
Steve laughed, and then Bucky joined him, the laugh airy, fragile. Steve wanted to catch it and hold it close to his heart, feel its wings beat. But he let go.
“I’m not the man who fell from the train,” Bucky said.
Steve swallowed. “I’m not the man who watched you fall.”
“I’m not the man who nearly killed you, who didn’t want to believe.”
“I’m not the man you dragged ashore.”
Another grin, slender and bright. “I’m not the man cowering in that apartment, drowning himself in memories just out of reach.”
“I am,” Steve said. “That man. The one who would tear the world down. For all of those men you say you aren’t. For everything you are.”
Bucky released Steve’s hand and brought it to his chest. The empty patch on his uniform where the star once went. His heart. He’d ripped it off the day Bucky chose to go back under, wanted to look how he felt, he supposed, this gaping wound. Bucky’s fingers climbed up, up his stubbled neck to his beard, cupped his cheek. Darted to his temples and trailed through long, sun-darkened hair.
“This is new,” Bucky said.
Steve could only nod. He couldn’t put to words the million emotions that kept him from shaving, from cutting his hair. From eating as much as he needed to. If he could speak them, he’d say it’s what drove him to more and more reckless missions with the others, but they’d both know he’d do that anyway.
Their eyes met once more, and the frost in Bucky’s seemed to retreat. Steve would do it all again. He’d do whatever Bucky asked. He’d do anything—anything. This moment, this shared breath, this was enough. Steve had no right to wish for more.
“I like new.”
And then Bucky’s lips met his. Soft as raindrops, at first. Then more. They drew closer by fractions, each waiting for the other, but still: inevitable. Fingers tightening in Steve’s hair. Lips opening, relearning how to fit together. Tongues fleeting and then more. Steve’s hand at the small of Bucky’s back, pulling him closer.
Steve tried to remember, briefly, if they used to kiss this way. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter now.
Bucky tasted different, or Steve did; his breath hitched a way it hadn’t before. Steve’s fingers curled into Bucky’s spine and he caught Bucky’s moan in his mouth. Bucky’s teeth caught Steve’s lower lip, not aggressive, but there: reminding him. Hinting to him.
Then Steve’s cheeks were damp. His own tears.
“Sorry.” His lips drifted upward to kiss Bucky’s forehead. “Sorry.”
Bucky pushed his face against Steve’s cheek and kissed the salty trail. “Don’t be.”
They stayed like that a moment and fear trickled up Steve’s body again. Like it had been a dream, a momentary lapse. “Is this . . .”
“New memories,” Bucky said. “Not old bruises.” He gripped Steve’s chin and kissed him again.
“Yeah.” Steve blinked back another tear. Smiled. It didn’t hurt this time. It didn’t hurt to look Bucky square in the eye. The frost was gone. “Let’s make them last.”