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i.
“I can’t hold a multiple-sentence conversation with a girl or run a mile without collapsing, and you think I should learn how to dance?”
“Yes,” Bucky says. His eyes are bright, more than a little wicked, just like the axis of his mouth.
Steve sighs and looks down at his feet. “Right.”
It’s dark, and raining, and they’ve been trapped in the apartment all day with nothing to do. The soft music of the radio and the sound of raindrops pelting the windows and paper-thin walls. Steve had woken up from a nap with his head on Bucky’s shoulder and turned away, flushed, when Bucky grinned down at him. In derision or amusement, Steve could not tell. He doesn’t bother to try. Bucky is never only one thing at once.
“Come on,” Bucky says. “It’s me.”
“I know,” Steve says, and bites down on his heart. “That’s the whole problem.”
Bucky holds out his hand. It’s dark in the apartment; as the gray light from the windows faded, they never got around to turning on the lights inside. Steve hates the rain, hates any foul weather and the way it makes him feel, how it gets under his skin and into his bones.
“Close your eyes if you want to, then.” Bucky advances on Steve, still holding out his hand. Steve sighs, takes it. Bucky’s fingers are warm, his palm smooth, the backs of his knuckles rough and scarred against the pads of Steve’s fingertips. “Imagine you’re with some lovely lady if you have to. With long blonde hair and red lipstick.”
“Fuck you,” Steve says, surprised by the vehemence of his own vitriol. Bucky just smirks at him and in one motion pulls Steve in close, all at once, so that Steve is drawn against his chest and suddenly can only breathe in and smell Bucky, the warmth of his skin, clean bar soap and sweat.
Steve pushes away. “Asshole.” He catches his breath. Bucky always does this; uses Steve’s small frame against him. Bucky never plays fair. And the worst part is that Steve doesn’t want him to.
“You love it,” Bucky says. His voice is pitched down, a low hum, the same purr he’s used on women before while Steve watched and wondered how the fuck he did it; how he could be so many people, all at once, and not look like an accident, or a mistake, or—anything but intentional and whole.
“Just show me what to do so you can stop bothering me,” Steve says.
“Put your hand on my shoulder.”
Steve glares at him.
“What? You want to lead? We can do that next.”
“Why do I need to learn how to be led,” Steve asks. “Who’s going to lead me in a dance? Ever?”
“The right partner,” Bucky says, and then his hand is on Steve’s waist, the dip right above his hipbone, and his other hand tightens around Steve’s fingers, and he leads Steve, slowly, into a waltz. They move to the thin music coming from the old radio; just the shadows from rain streaks on the glass shading the opposite wall and the barely-audible scrape of the violin.
Steve huffs a breath. “I hate your brilliant ideas.”
“Mm.” Bucky presses his mouth to the top of Steve’s head, and Steve doesn’t know what to do. He’s scared to look up at Bucky’s face. He doesn’t want to know if Bucky’s eyes are closed. He doesn’t want to know if they aren’t.
He steps on Bucky’s feet instead, as hard as he can.
Bucky winces. “What the fuck, Rogers?”
Steve says, mock-innocent: “Oops.”
“Asshole.” But Bucky is grinning, that smile that takes up more of his face than reason should allow, that brightness without any dark edges. “Do you wanna try a twirl?”
“You’re a prick.”
Bucky twirls Steve out anyway, so that they are both standing with their arms outstretched, touching at only one point, this small place in the universe where their hands meet, where all ends meet, and Steve lets himself be drawn back in, spins around so that his back is against Bucky’s chest, both his hands in Bucky’s. And then he elbows Bucky, as hard as he can, in the stomach.
Bucky doubles over and lets go of Steve, wheezing with laughter. “I wouldn’t try that move on any cute blondes you pick up.”
“I like brunettes better,” Steve says, and watches the way Bucky’s whole face lights up the darkness.
“Is that so,” Bucky says. He straightens up, and there’s something in the edge to his voice that Steve does not like, that terrifies him all at once, as if he spends too long listening to it he’ll go mad like Odysseus’ crew listening to the sirens. An ambulance is wailing outside. It feels, suddenly, like all of past history and the shared present is converging on this point, the walls between worlds and times thinner than they should be; later, Steve will think that he should have known: time could not pin the two of them down for long—would bend before they were parted.
“I’m leading this time,” Steve says, to break the moment, to tear himself back from it, to now, here, rain on the windowsill, streetlights flickering down below.
“What,” Bucky says, “so you can break another one of my limbs?” But he complies, all too readily; lets Steve take his hand and splay their fingers together and pull him in by the waist, the curve of his hip.
“Oh, Mr. Rogers,” Bucky says coyly, wickedly. He’s looking right at Steve. His eyes are bluer than anything Steve has ever seen.
“Bucky,” Steve says, distinctly. “Shut the hell up.”
Bucky’s mouth twists, withheld laughter, but he does, lets Steve lead him, clumsily, awkwardly, through the motions of the dance, and when the light outside the window disappears altogether, save for the faint and distant streetlamps, he leans down to put his head on Steve’s shoulder, sighing, and surely must feel the way that Steve’s throat works in response when he swallows, dry-mouthed, and turns his head.
ii.
“What do you want?” Steve asks, because he doesn’t know how to reconcile what he just heard with the person in front of him. Bucky’s head is bowed. He looks exhausted; the circles under his eyes have not lessened in the weeks and months since he left Hydra. His hair is still long, but no longer ragged, hangs into his eyes when he’s not careful, when he doesn’t want anyone to see him, which is more often than not these days. He has his own place but he’s been spending more time at Steve’s lately. Steve doesn’t know what to think of this. Doesn’t know if he should be hopeful or not. Doesn’t know if he can ever not be.
Bucky sits cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by stacks of old records that Steve has accumulated since he was thawed out from the ice. His music collection spans the decades that he missed, but there’s a few albums from his life before he went under. Before he went across the Atlantic to Europe looking for someone he thought he would never see again; before he found that person, reached out for him, and watched him fall. Before Peggy Carter kissed him. Before Erskine believed in him. Before everything changed—when it was just him, a scrawny kid from Brooklyn, and Bucky, who Steve didn’t know how to correlate.
Bucky holds one of these older albums, staring at the cover while the music plays quietly around him. “I don’t know how to dance,” he says. “I think I used to. I don’t anymore though. I guess that wasn’t important enough for them to keep.”
And so Hydra had thrown that out, then, Bucky’s grace and charm and slow, sly smiles, with all the rest of it: with Steve, with their home, with anything familiar, anything to bring Bucky comfort. Excised like a malignant tumor.
There’s still grace to Bucky’s movements now, but a lethal one, a dark-edged elegance. Steve remembers listening to Bucky talk in his sleep during the war, after he found him in Zola’s laboratory. He never told Bucky what he heard, but he can still hear it in the back of his head, like they’re still living in the past, seventy years ago, with gunfire in the distance. I don’t want this, I never wanted this, I don’t—
Steve’s the one who wanted to go to war. Bucky’s the one who went; who had the movement of his hands changed, who learned to accommodate the weight of a rifle, to sight someone down and shoot them down with precision. He didn’t like the weight of the metal or the taste of the metal or the color of the blood under his feet, and Hydra took everything else away from him except that; left him with nothing but the ability of his hands to make pain.
“You knew,” Steve says, quietly, and Bucky looks up at him. He’s so far away. Steve hasn’t been able to get any closer to him, hasn’t been able to bring him home.
“Teach me?” Bucky asks, and there’s just a flash of the way he once would have smirked, pitched his voice low and reeled you in with his eyes. Just a flash. But it’s there. Steve’s heart is so heavy in his chest that he doesn’t know how to breathe.
He holds out his hand. “Okay.”
He helps Bucky to his feet. Bucky isn’t wearing his prosthetic arm: the new one that Steve had made after Bucky told him he would tear apart the one Hydra gave him if he had to live with it a moment longer. But the new arm doesn’t work as good as the old one; Bucky doesn’t say it, but Steve can see it, the frustrated way that Bucky opens and closes his fingers, how he spends as much time not wearing it as he possibly can. Steve’s going to have a new one made—as many as it takes until Bucky is comfortable—but only if that’s what he wants. He doesn’t talk about that now, though; just reels Bucky in, slowly, as far as he thinks Bucky will let him, and then he has to gather himself when Bucky moves closer and lets Steve wrap his arm around his waist and draw him all the way in.
He can feel Bucky sigh. “Sorry.”
“Why?”
Bucky shrugs his shoulder—his left shoulder. “You fucking know why, Steve.”
It’s been weeks since Bucky started calling him that again, and it still makes Steve ache all over. “Well, don’t be,” he says. “I don’t care.”
“I do,” Bucky says, frustrated again; he gets like this, his emotions hard to keep in check, darting all over the place before settling, eventually, on anger, or derision, or disgust.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Steve says. “I’m sorry. It’s all right. I care, but not in the way that you think. It’s all right. I don’t mind. Please, just—” He doesn’t know what he wants to say. He just doesn’t want Bucky to change his mind, draw back, leave Steve standing cold and alone with empty arms. This is the closest Bucky has let himself be to Steve in God only knows how long. God only knows how much Steve has wanted to be here, right here, with his arm around Bucky’s waist, his mouth to his forehead. He shakes his head.
“Stop freaking out. I’m not going anywhere.” Bucky manages to sound calmer than Steve feels, as if he’s the one taking care of Steve. Sometimes Steve wonders if that isn’t how it is. If he’s the one who can’t take a step forward, who always falls two steps back.
There’s nothing wrong with you, Steve wants to say. You’ve never been an accident. He doesn’t.
The music is still playing at their feet. Bucky sighs again. “Are you going to teach me or are we just going to stand here?”
“Shut up,” Steve says before he can help himself; and, he thinks, Bucky nearly smiles, and Steve doesn’t think he’s ever been happier to see anything, in his life.
“Okay,” Steve says. “Follow my lead, then.”
They trace a slow circle around the living room. Steve kicks aside the mess on the floor as they pass by. Bucky looks down at his feet, his grip on Steve’s hand preternaturally tight, then loosening, then tightening once again.
“I’m shit at this,” he says, ruefully.
“No you’re not.” Steve doesn’t mean for his voice to go that low, that honest, that vulnerable. Bucky blinks, doesn’t look at him; but their movements seem to match better now, to sync more closely.
I miss you, Steve almost says; I missed you so much, I missed you more than anything else. He can’t find the way to voice that, doesn’t know if it should be said. He rubs his thumb against the back of Bucky’s, feels the roughness of his knuckles, breathes in the scent of bar soap and home.
He sighs. Leans in towards Bucky, ducks his head. Closes his eyes. He can feel Bucky breathing, imagines he can hear the pulse in Bucky’s neck. He can see time bending around them, once again; the way it always does when two objects are brought into each other’s orbit and start to spin.
Bucky opens his mouth, closes it. His jaw clenches, then relaxes. The vertebrae of his spine beneath Steve’s hand.
“Who taught you?” he asks, finally. They’ve stopped circling the room. Steve sways in place, and Bucky lets himself be swayed. “To dance. Was it—Peggy?”
The question and Peggy’s name are two separate blows, terrible enough, Steve thinks, to bruise. He swallows past the roughness in his throat. “No,” he says, hoarse. “It wasn’t Peggy.”
Bucky knows when something is wrong; he always has. His spine straightens. “Oh.”
“It was you,” Steve says, because he can’t not say it; because his heart is a living thing and it’s seventy years later and the more things change the more Steve thinks they never really will. “You did.”
Bucky pulls away. His eyes are widening, his mouth working, for a moment, soundlessly. “Me?” he asks, with reverence. There are cathedrals in his mouth.
Steve opens his left hand, splays his fingers flat against each one of Bucky’s, the pads of their fingertips touching, the matching outlines of their palms. “Yes,” he says; and, on instinct, takes Bucky’s hand in his own and brushes the back of Bucky’s knuckles against his mouth. Bucky just watches him, with faraway eyes, and Steve lets him go. “It’s only fair that I return the favor.”