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The ceiling is a harsh, blinding white that has Steve screwing his eyes tight shut as soon as he opens them. His pillow is extremely accommodating when he tries to turn his head; so accommodating, in fact, that he feels as though is entire head is about to sink into the ground and hastily resumes his former position.
“Hah!” he hears from beside him. He turns and squints, but his eyes are determined not to cooperate and all he can make out is a faint smudge against the streaming sunlight of the window. “Barnes is going to be so mad you chose now to wake up. This proves that my bedside manner is better than his.”
Steve squints harder and makes a confused noise that is incomprehensible even to him, but one of those things must work because the man standing next to the bed comes into focus, ridiculous facial hair and all.
“Don’t bother keeping yourself or anything,” he says severely. Steve blinks at him and he sighs, put-upon. “Maybe Barnes’ll have more luck dealing with you. Well, how are you feeling, what’re you thinking? Let’s get going, you know the debrief drill –”
“Uh,” says Steve, who does not know anything of the sort. “I do?” The other man squints.
“What do you mean, uh? You should,” he says severely, tapping at a tablet in his hand. Steve frowns, trying to remember, but as soon as he does a bright flare of pain goes off in his temples, flooding sharply though his head and not letting up until he’s stopped trying to think about what he should know.
Something on the other side of his bed starts to beep, and the other man looks up from his tablet. “Hang on, then,” he says slowly. “Maybe you shouldn’t at that. Who are you?”
“Steve,” Steve says uncertainly. Now that he thinks about it, he’s not sure how he came by that knowledge. The man stares at him.
“That all?” He grimaces when Steve only shrugs. “Who am I? Where are you?” he presses, for all the good it does him: Steve just shrugs again. He can’t remember, and anytime he tries that headache starts up again.
“Ohhhhhhh boy,” the man says, flipping through some sort of metal tablet. His voice manages to traverse around four octaves in the space of that single ‘oh’. “Alright, Steve, just give me a second, please, I’m just gonna -” he says, and hustles towards the door before Steve has a chance to catch what he’s gonna.
The door bursts open before the man has the chance to leave, stopping him in his tracks and admitting – when Steve shifts his gaze to the newcomer – someone who is possibly the more attractive man on the planet.
“Goddamnit, Tony,” the newcomer grumbles. “Steve, are you okay? How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” Steve breathes. It sounds slightly pathetic, so he rallies and adds, “Thanks.”
“It’s not my fault that my bedside manner is clearly superior to yours,” Tony says, but his tone is flat, lacks the smugness that the words alone suggest. This must be the Barnes that Tony had been gloating over before, Steve deduces, and feels immensely proud of himself for doing so. He has a name for the beautiful man, now.
Barnes frowns at Tony, and it is a remarkably attractive expression. “What’s wrong?”
“Can we – did you come here straight out of the shower?” Tony asks, distracted. Barnes puts a hand up to his hair, where, if Steve squints closely, he can see traces of suds. He’d been in a hurry to come down, Steve thinks, and feels warm with the joy of it.
“JARVIS said Steve was awake,” Barnes says defensively, and then glares at Steve and adds, “you contrarian asshole.” Steve would probably be a little more upset at this if Barnes looked a little more like he meant it, or if he looked slightly less attractive while he was indignant, with his eyes glowing and his impressive array of muscles all tense and tight. “’Course you had to go and wake up the first time I left. What can I expect -?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Steve says, abruptly wounded at himself for having chosen the worst time to properly wake up. He could’ve woken up to Barnes. His brain’s a fucking idiot.
Barnes makes a move towards Steve, but is promptly intercepted by Tony, who says, “Actually, I have to talk to you first, it’s very important,” and hauls him outside before Barnes has a chance to say more than, “Tony, what -”
Steve doesn’t think his throat is up to shouting, so he settles for scowling extremely heavily at the door and hoping that the first guy feels the force of it. It seems to work, at least, because the two of them re-enter the room a few seconds and an eternity later. This time, though, Barnes is moving slower, lagging behind Tony, and his face is pale and ashen.
“Hey, Steve,” he says, far more gently than before. “How, uh - how’re you feeling?” He inches closer, but unwillingly, as though pulled on a string, or by the sheer force of Steve’s will. “Feeling okay?”
“Christ,” Tony mutters. “Rogers, you’re going to be fine, okay? Wanda’s on her way down now.”
“You’ll be fine,” Barnes says, and his voice is absolutely, pointedly gentle, as is his grip when he reaches forward to cradle Steve’s hand.
They wait mostly in silence because nobody knows what to say, and it turns out to be a relief when a young woman with long dark hair bursts into the room and makes a beeline for Steve. She introduces herself only cursorily, the better to ask him quickly whether she can have a look in his brain. He hesitates, but Barnes’s anxious gaze is too much to bear; the next thing he knows, he has a burning headache and what he’s fairly sure is an unfamiliar presence swimming around in his head.
He lets out a huff at the unexpected pain, and she yelps out an apology and – muffles it, somehow, the red streaming out of her fingers and towards Steve working regular miracles as he slumps down and closes his eyes.
~*~
When he wakes up his headache has lessened considerably. His temples are still throbbing, which is not ideal, but on the bright side he does remember the brief chain of events that had let to Wanda knocking him out cold with her magic, which is something, at least.
Barnes is sitting by his bedside, clutching one of Steve’s hands anxiously, and Steve will forever blame his grogginess on the, “Hell-lo,” he delivers upon the sight of Barnes, in a tone that is slightly – or very, but he’ll deny it – insinuating.
Barnes grins, either not noticing or kind enough to ignore it. “Hey,” he says. “Feeling okay?”
Steve shrugs, nods. Hopes that the blush he can feel heating his cheeks isn’t too obvious. Barnes and his face do strange things to him. Or they would, hypothetically, if Steve wasn’t blaming his behaviour on his tiredness.
“So you want the good news or the bad news?” Tony asks, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. Steve has only just opened his mouth before the torrent of words starts flowing again. “Good news is that you’re totally going to recover,” he says, and then considers this. “Maybe the other way around would have made more sense. The bad news is that you’ve got amnesia.”
“No shit?” Steve asks, as earnest as he can make himself. Tony frowns at him. Barnes snorts a little, but when Steve sneaks a glance at him his face is utterly straight.
“It’s very strange and selective amnesia,” Wanda says from where she’s perched cross-legged at the end of his bed. “It’s like someone put a wall between what you know about how you do things, and what you know about…um, everything else.”
“That’s what you get for being hit by magic,” Barnes says, grumpy all of a sudden, frowning at Steve like this is all his fault. And perhaps it is, but considering that Steve has no memory of his past actions he feels it’s rather unfair to be blamed for them.
“But the good news,” Tony repeats, bouncing on the balls of his feet, “is that you’re totally going to recover. The metaphorical, figurative, maybe literal wall is degrading slowly.”
“How slowly?”
“A few weeks,” Wanda says. “Maybe longer. Maybe a month. Probably not two.”
“More than you deserve, really,” Barnes grumbles. Steve kicks him.
~*~
He’s pronounced physically fine and bundled into the elevator with almost alarming haste, like the hospital is keen to be rid of him. Steve can’t imagine why this is, but when he asks Barnes all he gets is a blank stare and a long, loud laugh.
“You wanna try going back in there and lying down for a few more days?” he asks after he’s gotten over himself. Steve considers this and comes to the magnanimous realisation that he’s probably not the most tolerable of patients.
“Where are we going?” he asks instead.
“Up to you,” Barnes says. “We could go to our – I mean, the place you lived in before all this. Niceish brownstone, pretty well lived in. Or – Tony’s offered you an apartment in the Tower. Actually he pushed it pretty forcefully, and it’d be best if we need to come back to the hospital on short notice, so. Um. We think that if you go back to ou – your place, it might trigger more headaches. So there’s that to consider, as well.”
Steve stares at him, and Barnes fidgets. He tries to think about living in a sterile, unused apartment here in the tower, which – if the rest of the décor is anything to go by – will be large and white and shiny. It’s not particularly appealing, but living in the house is – well, it’s equally unappealing, and just considering the prospect makes him feel uneasy, like he’d be intruding on someone else’s private space while they were away.
And, for some reason, he gets the idea that Barnes doesn’t particularly want him to go back to his niceish brownstone. That’s what makes up his mind, in the end. “I’ll stay here,” he says finally. Barnes gives him a small smile and presses the little button on the wall that says 79.
“There’s where I’m going to live?” Steve asks.
“Where we’re going to live,” Barnes corrects him. The words make Steve freeze a little in his place.
“…We?” he asks, very very tentatively.
“Unless you have any objections,” Barnes says, and when Steve sneaks a sideways look at him he’s holding himself very still.
“No,” Steve says weakly. He clears his throat and tries again. “No objections.”
Understandably, Barnes doesn’t look terribly reassured by this pronouncement, and Steve’s mouth wants desperately to carry on talking: why would there be objections, I couldn’t object to living with you, you’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, except maybe that’s a problem –
Very sensibly, he keeps his mouth shut, and congratulations himself on his frankly superhuman restraint as the elevator doors ding open to reveal a grand, empty apartment.
“This is…nice,” he says as he steps out of the elevator and spins around to take in the pristine apartment. It makes Barnes laugh, his face creased with amusement when Steve spins around to look at him.
“You never did go for this look,” he agrees as the elevator doors close behind him. An elevator is just a box, really, but somehow the fact that it’s closed means – they’re alone, together. In the apartment they’re going to share. That they’re going to be living in together.
Steve shouldn’t be this affected by it. He barely knows the other man, right now, doesn’t know anything about him except that he’s absurdly beautiful and makes Steve’s heart do strange things in his chest.
“What did I go for, then?” he asks. Barnes slants him a sideways look, but in the end he just shrugs.
“Warmer things, warmer places,” he says with another shrug. “You liked a place that looked lived-in.”
He’d seemed like he was going to say something else. Steve swallows his disappointment and nods, makes a noncommittal noise as he begins to explore the apartment.
“I can take that bedroom,” Barnes says, just as Steve was considering asking him where he’s going to sleep. He shoots a surprised look at the other man, and Barnes looks down, looks almost like he’s blushing.
“The light in the other room is better,” he offers. When Steve investigates he finds that it very much is, and that he likes that very much.
“How’d you know?” he asks when he ventures back out into the hall. Barnes looks up from where he’s contemplating the glass table in the living room.
“What?”
“How’d you know that I’d like that room?” Steve elaborates, joining Barnes in his staring. The glass table just looks like a glass table, to him.
“Oh,” Barnes says. He’s silent for so long that Steve begins to think he won’t answer, but then he says, “You like the light.”
“Well, I know that,” Steve grumbles. But if Barnes had known that – they must have been friends. “But how did you know? Were we –” He breaks off awkwardly, unsure of whether he wants to continue. That same headache is building in his temples again, warning him off prodding his memories too much. “Were we friends?” he asks eventually.
To his credit, Barnes doesn’t react too visibly to the question. It’s only because Steve is already paying so much attention to him that he’s able to see the slight tightening of his arms, the discomfort in the line of his shoulders.
“Yeah,” Barnes says. “Yeah, we were pretty close. Friends.”
It doesn’t sound that way right now, but – it must be hard for him. To have his friend essentially replaced with a blank slate in front of his very eyes. It’s a perfectly acceptable reason, but Steve can’t help but think there’s something more to this.
“Can I – I mean –” Steve trails off again, cursing himself a little. This should have been his first question.
“What?” Barnes asks softly.
“What do I call you?” Steve blurts out. If Bucky’s tenseness had been subtle before, it was terribly obvious now. “I just mean,” Steve stumbles on, even as he’s internally screaming at himself to shut up, “Tony just called you Barnes, and even then I wasn’t completely sure he meant you, and I want – I’d just like to know your name,” he finishes quietly.
Barnes meets his eyes, and there’s a queer sort of desolation in his eyes when he says, very quietly, “My name is James Buchanan Barnes.”
“James?” Steve asks.
“My friends call me Bucky,” James – Bucky? – says, even more quietly than before.
“And I –?” Steve prompts, when it doesn’t look like James is going to elaborate.
Those piercing blue eyes are fierce when they meet Steve’s again. “Of course you can call me Bucky,” he says fervently, almost desperately. “Please. Do.”
“Alright,” Steve says, subdued. Apparently he still remembers how to read discomfort, and right now the room is full of it. He feels like he could choke on it, overwarm and uncomfortable. “Bucky. Thank you.”
Bucky nods, looks awkwardly around the room. Once again, Steve follows his gaze, and once again, he sees nothing remarkable in what Bucky is staring at.
“I’m sorry,” he blurts out eventually, because he just doesn’t know how to shut up and leave a room, apparently.
Bucky startles a little, turns towards him. “What? Why?”
“I mean, you’re clearly – I – it just must be hard for you,” Steve finally settles on. “To have to take care of a stranger in your friend’s body –”
Bucky cuts him off with a choking sort of noise, which Steve can’t identify as being a snort or a laugh or some strange and unholy combination of the two. “No, Steve,” he says gently, stepping closer. “If there’s anything I know it’s that you’re still you. I should be the one apologising –”
“What –”
“I’ve handled the situation badly,” Bucky says, and Steve knows that he should probably argue more but Bucky is looking him straight in the eyes and it’s very hard to think coherently in the face of that piercing blue gaze. “That’s on me, and I’m sorry for it.”
“But –” Steve tries, and doesn’t even get past that one word before Bucky’s glare is pinning him in place, stopping his throat from working. “Fine. Thank you. We can both be sorry,” he says mulishly.
Bucky slants him a look out of the corner of his eye. When he sees Steve looking back he smiles, a small tentative thing, and Steve can almost feel his heart melting straight out of his chest.
~*~
Living with Bucky doesn’t even need an adjustment period. For all that he doesn’t have any memories, he slides into the comfortable routine of it as though it’s only natural. They move around each other in movements so well-worn that Steve almost forgets he doesn’t remember a goddamn thing.
“Look on the bright side,” Bucky advises him after he’s grumbled about his condition one time too many. “At least you remember how to eat and sleep and take a shit.”
Steve grabs the nearest thing and throws it at him. Bucky dodges with the ease of long practice, and Steve narrows his eyes, but as soon as he starts wondering about that long practice his head starts to throb warningly, so he has to give up that line of thought.
He’s not allowed outside – officially because it’s dangerous in his memory-less state, and unofficially for reasons that make people look away and clear their throats uncomfortably, which is infuriating enough that Bucky finally tells him that he’s a person of some import and letting people know his current state will just invite danger. It’s not an entirely satisfactory explanation but it is about as far as Bucky can go without causing Steve excruciating pain, so he accepts it with only some reluctance.
He’s given free run of the Tower, perhaps as recompense, but he finds that many of the most familiar locations cause the same headachey reaction: a warning sort of pain in his temples that is enough to tell him he has history with the location, but not enough to tell him what, or how, or when, or whether he is going to get the memory of that history back. It’s infuriating.
It’s an unfortunate accident when he discovers that some things can have the same effect: he’s down in Tony’s workplace trying to watch him tinker with a twitching lump of metal and make sense of the man’s rapid flow of technobabble when he looks around the wrong corner and sees what looks like an ornament hung up on the wall, a perfectly circular metal plate emblazoned with a star and rounded stripes, and his head promptly starts to ache with such a vengeance that he actually stumbles, tripping over himself, unsure of whether he wants to leave or get closer.
“Steven Rogers, you stop that,” Bucky says severely from where he’s perched on Tony’s workbench. He doesn’t even bother to wait and see whether the order takes: in the next moment he’s hopped off his perch and somehow made it across the room to drag Steve backwards by his scruff. “Swear to God, can’t leave you alone for a second. What did you trip on this – oh.” He tone changes as he looks past Steve at the absurd dinner plate. “Oh. C’mon, Rogers,” he repeats, but he’s much gentler as he manhandles Steve back towards the sole empty area of counter. “Tony, I thought we asked you to hide that thing.”
If Steve uses his current condition to hide his face in Bucky’s shoulder and breathe in, that’s nobody’s business but his own.
“I did hide it! It’s not easy to hide a shield that gaudy, I’ll have you know,” he hears Tony protest, but it’s not particularly emphatic, and it sounds like he even stops what he’s doing to look up at Steve. “Sorry. You okay?”
“Fine,” Steve mutters. The white heat in his head is beginning to fade into embarrassment, but he still doesn’t move his face from where it’s planted perilously close to Bucky’s neck. Bucky makes a disapproving noise, and Steve snorts. “Fine. Really. I feel better.”
“Sure,” Bucky says sarcastically, but he doesn’t sound particularly bothered about it, and his hand comes up to stroke the nape of Steve’s neck.
“I didn’t know plain things could do that,” Steve says, once he’s brought himself out of hiding. Some things – a punching bag, a saxophone – have left him with a low-level thrum through his head, but this is the first time that anything has caused him true pain. He glances at the corner he knows the shield is hidden around. He’s obviously not terribly subtle, because the next thing he knows a head is pointedly interrupting his line of sight as Bucky moves around him.
“This plain thing happens to be slightly important,” he says.
“To me?” Steve asks experimentally, even though it makes his head throb warningly again. Bucky shoots him a sharp look, but Steve is tired of being forced away from things and Bucky seems to be able to tell, because he relents.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “To you.”
Steve considers this in silence and with a vague sort of headache until Tony’s project apparently gains sentience and leaps off the table, over his shoulder, and crashes onto the ground. The clattering and the displeased shrieks that the metal promptly starts to emit shakes both Steve and Bucky out of thought.
“We’d better go,” Bucky says, holding out a hand. Steve, sorry bastard that he is, takes and holds it as he does the arduous work of pushing himself off a countertop.
“Oh, I see how it is,” Tony mutters as they leave. “Just desert me in my time of need, yeah, sure, go ahead –”
“Just leaving you to do your work in peace,” Steve says sweetly as Tony is cut off by his own machine. As the glass door closes behind them it cuts off the raucous noise from the workshop, which makes the smoking chaos of Tony’s newest project objectively that much more hilarious.
“Jesus, Rogers,” Bucky snorts as they make their way back into the elevator. “You’re a punk.” His tone is fond, and the words slide out of his mouth smoothly, like they’ve been said many times. That makes him wonder whether he’s been called a punk before, and that promptly gives him another headache, and Steve is tired of being in pain every time he tries to remember something, fuck.
“Want to go to the gym?” Bucky asks softly, somehow knowing just the right thing for Steve, and that just makes Steve wonder how he got all that knowledge, how long they’ve known each other, and the fact that they’re going to the gym and not outside, that he hasn’t been allowed outside – it’s a vicious spiral, trying to remember things, and all he gets out of it is more pain and frustration.
“Yes,” he says, in a very level tone that probably reveals as much about his emotional state as a shout. “I would.”
~*~
The one good thing about all of this is that people don’t necessarily set off the same painful reactions as things and places seem to be able to do. He’s been living with Bucky, after all, with nary a problem except for when his brain tries so desperately to go down those rabbit holes of lost information; he’s still not allowed to go outside, because apparently he’s a person of some import and it would be terribly easy to use his current amnesiac state against. So instead of going anywhere he sits in the tower with Bucky, and sometimes stands and walks through the tower with Bucky, and he’s entertained visits from several other people who have been cagily referred to as part of his ‘team’.
Outside of Bucky, he gets along best with Nat and Sam: Nat’s acerbic remarks make him laugh instead of offending and only sometimes make his head ache, and Sam is the one to help Bucky figure out what kind of work Steve can occupy himself with in his current state. Clint and Bruce advocating for video games and pizza or meditation and yoga respectively are all well and good, but it’s not long before Steve thinks he’ll burst without something productive to do.
SHIELD work is ruled out very quickly; he’d apparently worked with them before the accident, which means the acronym alone gives him a slight headache, and their official documents, with all their logos and letterheads and information, are too much for him to concentrate on. Tactical work is similarly ruled out after he spends half an hour trying to contextualise everything and nearly passes out. For a while he does data entry, which is mind-numbingly boring but at least something to do, and then one Miss Potts comes down to visit with files and folders from Stark Tech; apparently he’s done little enough work with Tony’s company that assessing potential buyers doesn’t give him a terrible headache.
“In the interest of full disclosure, your work will be cross-referenced with about three other assessments,” she says, only looking slightly apologetic for it.
“Of course,” Steve breathes, staring down at the files in his hands. He could kiss Miss Potts for this, but he refrains.
“Thank you,” Bucky says, in a whisper that’s meant to be heard. “I thought he was going to start climbing the walls if he had to keep doing data entry. First he’s mad for work and then he’s mad with it.”
“I resent that,” Steve says, but it’s a token protest, nothing more. He had been extremely impatient with data entry – because it was mind-numbingly boring, yes, but also because his brain worked so much faster than his hands that it was infuriating; it seemed to take a hundred times longer for his hands to type what his brain saw, even though Bucky had constantly been telling him to give his hands a break.
“Data entry is very taxing,” Miss Potts says, sliding a sly smile at Steve. Bucky sees it and rolls his eyes, but the motion is fond.
“Thank you again, Miss Potts,” Steve says as she stands to leave, standing automatically out of what he presumes is old habit as Bucky does the same.
“It’s no problem. Really, I should probably be thanking you,” Miss Potts says. She takes Steve’s slightly awkward handshake and turns it into a gentle hug. “Take your time with it.”
“He will,” Bucky promises, and both Steve and Miss Potts snort.
Once Steve’s found an acceptable form of work he allocates certain hours of each day to doing that work; it’s a system that would have worked perfectly well if it hadn’t been for the worrying of one Bucky Barnes.
“You feeling okay?” Bucky asks in hourly intervals. Every two hours, if Steve is lucky.
The infuriating thing is that Steve can’t seem to lie to him, either. When he’s fine, he’s fine, but when he’s nursing a low-level headache from a particular name or company Bucky always seems to be able to tell, no matter whether Steve replies with a yes or a no or an unrelated anecdote, which he has tried a frankly embarrassing number of times. And Bucky abuses the power this gives him often and freely; he drags Steve away from his work with impunity no matter how Steve protests that he’s perfectly able to carry on, which is what he usually ends up doing.
To be entirely fair to Bucky, a small headache can grow large in a second if he reads the wrong combination of words, the wrong illustrative image; Bucky’s seen it, and Steve can’t imagine he’s terribly eager to see it several more times. He’s certainly not terribly eager to deal with it any more times, trying to deal with a beast positively scratching and snarling to burst out of his head. And, possibly more importantly, Bucky isn’t entirely terrible company in those times that he drags Steve to the sofa.
~*~
The situation is made even more tolerable when he finally convinces Bucky to experiment gently with the shields in his head, pushing as gently as either of them know how to see where Steve’s limits are, whether they can be pushed. It’s difficult to quantify memories, but their main goal is to see whether the shields are malleable, whether they can work up to giving Steve his memory back. That’s another kind of work all on its own, and it’s something that neither of them are willing to give up on.
If Bucky tells Steve something enough times, it stops hurting him. If he tells Steve things that are adjacent to his memories before talking about the memory itself, the hurt is lessened. It works, is the thing, their gentle informal training.
Steve almost refuses to acknowledge the results at first; he doesn’t want to be let down when it turns out to be false. He’s desperately afraid that it’s not the exposure that’s helping but that something’s going wrong with his own thinking, that maybe he’s losing that internal inquisitiveness that makes him ask but who are they, how do I know this, what do I know about that?
“Stop overthinking this, Steve,” Bucky says, apparently omniscient, putting one hand on Steve’s arm. They both look the same, but he seems to constantly be running just slightly cooler in his left hand. “We can keep trying, you know –”
Apparently not quite omniscient, then. “No,” Steve says, cutting him off. “I mean – I think it worked. Maybe”
Bucky sits up straight, leans forward. “You mean that?”
“It didn’t really hurt this time,” Steve confirms, but can’t resist adding, “but that might be me. If I’ve, I dunno, stopped asking, stopped wondering, subconsciously –”
“I knew you were overthinking it,” Bucky says, leaning back again. “Don’t worry, b – Steve. Tony and Wanda think it might encourage the shields in your mind to weaken, and if it doesn’t do that then it’s not causing any harm. We can keep on trying.”
“Thanks,” Steve says quietly, and means every syllable, every letter. Bucky just smiles at him.
~*~
It’s not even a few days later before he starts to hate this memory-pushing. Not through any fault of his brain, this time, either; no, this time it’s all Bucky. And some Steve, yes, him too; Steve was the one who’d pushed for bigger memories, for things that were more intense and more personal than how Clint has a dog named Lucky who likes to eat pizza or how a man named Howard failed to make a car fly in rather spectacular fashion. Bucky had assured Steve that particular incident had been a long time ago, but he still seemed slightly bitter about it.
So they’d moved on: Steve knew a Peggy Carter, and she’d had a mean punch. Steve had taken that shield down in Tony’s workshop into fights. And now –
“I have a metal arm,” Bucky had been saying for the past few days. It’d made Steve’s head ache worse than usual, but that was what he’d wanted, after all. “It’s covered up with some of Tony’s tech right now. It’s made of a vibranium-adamantium alloy with interlocking plates…”
Steve just closes his eyes and listens, sometimes asks questions – does it hurt to cover up, does it feel sensation. It’d taken him about three days to push into painlessness for the memories of Lucky the dog and Peggy Carter punching an upstart asshole to the ground, but this takes him a full week, almost.
Finally, on the day that, “I have a metal arm,” barely registers in his mind, Steve turns to Bucky excitedly; he has his mouth open, but he doesn’t need to say a word, and shuts it again at the understanding on Bucky’s face, at the excitement that both of them are emitting.
“Ready?” Bucky asks, his hand already creeping underneath his sleeve. Steve nods, and the mask comes off slowly, like a tease; gleaming metal shows first underneath the mask and then free of it, beautiful in the light. Steve is so fascinated he almost doesn’t register his growing headache.
He can’t ignore it, though, when Bucky reaches the bottom and pulls the last of the mask off. His fingers are the most delicate works of metal that Steve has seen, but it’s one thing in particular that catches his eye, on the fourth finger of Bucky’s left hand –
Gold gleams, absurdly bright against all the silver around it.
Steve stops breathing.
All he can do is stare at the – at the ring, because it is a ring, a plain gold band, and it’s on Bucky’s ring finger and Steve doesn’t know much but he knows enough to understand what, exactly, that means, and his heart is dropping out of his chest and his stomach is churning, his headache returning a hundredfold.
He doesn’t know what Bucky sees on his face, but he folds his flesh fingers over his metal ones. Steve hears him say, as though from very far away, “Steve? Steve, are you –?”
“I’m fine,” Steve says. It’s almost a snap. He takes a breath, but it doesn’t feel like anything is going into his lungs. “I’m fine,” he repeats, and this time he can even hear himself. He doesn’t sound very convincing.
“Do you want me to hide it?” Bucky asks, and almost before the question is out Steve is snapping, “No.”
He takes a breath. “No,” he repeats. “It’s fine. You shouldn’t have to – I mean –” He dimly realises that Bucky is probably talking about his arm in general, not the – the ring. But then, it doesn’t make a difference. It shouldn’t.
“How’s your head?” Bucky asks gently, angling himself so that the metal arm is behind him, out of sight.
“Fine,” Steve says curtly.
“You don’t sound –”
“I’m just going to the gym,” Steve blurts out. Bucky’s worried gaze practically burns a hole in his back, but he ducks and runs anyway, cursing himself for a coward the whole time.
~*~
The impact of the punching bag is clean and solid under Steve’s bare knuckles. Usually it would be satisfying, cathartic, but now –
Now, he can’t stop thinking about the ring on Bucky’s finger. I’d been placed there so carefully, interlocked so perfectly with the plates around it, and it’d been so well-taken care of, and the meaning of the his having it is so clear.
He’s not – he’s not disappointed. He’s not angry about it, he’s not angry about anything. Bucky has a perfect right to be married to someone and a perfect right not to tell Steve about her or him or them. After all, they’re all operating on the assumption that Steve is going to get his memories back shortly, so it really wouldn’t – there wouldn’t be a point to telling Steve every single little thing that he’s missing.
(Even if a marriage is not quite a little thing. Even if Steve thinks that it’s horribly, dreadfully, important.)
It’s not fair on Bucky for him to be reacting like this. It’s not Bucky’s fault that Steve is upset, not Bucky’s fault that Steve had thought – Steve had felt –
Well, it wasn’t important now.
The punching bag bursts under his bloodied knuckles. Some sort of foam starts to stream out, and all Steve can do is stand dumbly and watch as the stuff scatters itself onto the floor, pools around his feet.
He slides to the floor and puts his head in his hands.
~*~
Sam is the one to find him, and Steve truly doesn’t know whether to be glad that it isn’t Bucky or not.
“Hey,” Sam says, sitting down quietly. The foam crackles and grumbles beneath him. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Steve says. The fact that he grunts it into his knees is of no importance, he tells himself. It’s irrelevant.
“Okay,” Sam says. “But you’re acting like a really not-fine person right now. I would even say you’re acting profoundly upset. But that’s, y’know, just me.”
“It’s nothing, really,” Steve says, finally extricating himself. “Bucky’s arm gave me a bit more of a headache than I expected. That’s all.”
Sam stares at him sceptically. “Usually when someone says ‘that’s all’, that’s not really all.”
For a moment, Steve considers blurting it out. The words are crawling up his through, on the tip of his tongue: I found out that Bucky’s married, and –
And what? And they’d lived together so harmoniously. And Bucky knows him so well. And Steve had thought he was beautiful, that first time he’d set eyes on Bucky and every time since. The words crawl up through his throat and perch at the tip of his tongue, but they are things that Steve refuses to admit even in the privacy of his own head, so he catches the words in clenched teeth as he smiles at Sam.
“It threw me off. I thought we’d prepared for it properly, but.” He shrugs. “Guess not.”
The best lies are the closest to the truth, and Sam softens at this one. “Hey, it’s okay,” he says. “It’s natural to be upset.” He pauses, and then says carefully, “This sounds like something you should be talking to your therapist about.”
Steve scowls down at his raw knuckles. Sam had been insistent on two points during his visits: that Bucky wasn’t Steve’s therapist, meaning that neither of them should start trying to take on those roles while they lived with each other, and that Steve should go to his therapist and talk about his feelings as often as he feels the need, considering his situation. Steve thinks he’s absorbed the first point quite well, but the second, well. He hasn’t done much about it so far.
For some reason, the mention of therapy fills him with an odd sort of dread. He’d confessed it to Bucky, because he confessed most things to Bucky, and the other man had snorted darkly and said that made sense given Steve’s past experience with therapists. Neither of them are particularly eager for Steve to go to therapy, so he just…hasn’t, yet.
Perhaps this will turn into the final push that gets him to go; after all, it’s not as though this is a problem he can confess to Bucky.
~*~
Bucky nearly pounces on Steve as he walks through the door. “Are you okay?” he asks urgently. “They thought it was better that I wait here – my arm –”
His arm is wrapped in that mask again, innocuous and humanlike. Looking at it doesn’t give Steve a headache; he already has one, and it’s not the arm that’s causing it.
When he looks into Bucky’s eyes, forcing himself to focus, to not get lost in the blue of them, he doesn’t see a hint of resentment towards Steve for keeping him away from his home. Just plain old concern, worry, anxiety, and it makes his chest ache to think that he is causing that in Bucky.
“I’m fine,” he says, and taps Bucky’s left arm, the one he now knows is metal underneath. “You don’t have to hide this, you know. You can unwrap it again, if you want –”
“Ohh no,” Bucky says, angling the arm away from Steve. “Oh no. You know what happened after you saw it, I’m not taking that chance again.”
Steve can’t exactly argue without revealing all his cards, so he changes the subject instead. “Buck,” he says, still staring into those beautiful eyes. “Don’t you ever wanna – I don’t know, go out? Meet up with someone else?”
He awaits the answer with bated breath, waits for Bucky to tell him that yeah, actually, he needs a break, or for him to say that he wants to give up his constant supervision duties, that Steve is ready to live alone, or anything in between.
He doesn’t expect the gentle, crooked smile that tips Bucky’s mouth upwards. He doesn’t expect the, “Nah,” that he gets. “I’ve got everything I need right here,” Bucky says, reaching out to touch Steve’s arm, just gently, and it’s awfully lovely of him to say but the shine is kind of taken off the statement now that Steve knows it to be false, knows Bucky has a wife and a home somewhere away from the tower and, fuck, maybe kids –
Steve clamps his mouth shut and nods silently. Maybe it’s selfish of him – it’s definitely selfish of him – but if Bucky is willing to stick around then Steve is not going to be the one who drives him away.
~*~
Spending time with Bucky feels almost tainted, now. Or not quite tainted, nothing could ruin the time he spends with Bucky, it’s just that – it’s just that Steve is so overwhelmingly aware that this has to end, and soon. That Bucky has another life he’s not telling Steve about.
It’s like an open wound he can’t stop picking at, can’t stop thinking about. Who is this mysterious person that Bucky married? Why haven’t they come to see him? Briefly he thinks that perhaps they don’t get on so well, and – for a moment he’s hopeful, and then shame burns through his chest. Before anything else, Bucky is a good man. Steve has no business hoping his marriage is anything but happy.
So he smiles and laughs along with Bucky, the same way that he used to, and he accepts the training they do together, physically and mentally; and he tries to look a little less, even though he feels like he notices a whole lot more now that he doesn’t want to. He averts his eyes, focuses on something else, tries anything and everything not to notice how gorgeous Bucky is wreathed in the sunbeams through the windows or after he’s flushed and sweating after they spar.
He can’t help but raise the issue a few more times, subtle jabs – “You sure you don’t got a better place to be?” drawled out when the two of them just sit in silence for a while, nevermind that Steve treasures the chance just to be near Bucky; “You gotta have better things to do,” after another exercise on his mind where they inch only incrementally towards his getting better.
Each time, though, Bucky just smiles gently at him, says something impossibly sweet: “I got everything I need right here,” is how he responds most often, and something about his gaze makes Steve duck his head, makes his cheeks redden. For some reason, he can’t bring himself to ask Bucky about that ring.
~*~
“Nat,” Steve says eventually. She looks up at him, eyes inquisitive, and Steve takes a breath. He still doesn’t think he can bear to ask Bucky, can’t hear it from Bucky’s mouth, but he just needs to know – “Is Bucky married?”
Natasha does not seem like an easily ruffled person, but at this question Steve can see the way her eyes widen, the way she jolts a little in her seat. “What gave you that idea?” she asks warily, but Steve already has all the information he needs. He shrugs.
“Eh,” he says vaguely, and when Natasha doesn’t look like she’ll be satisfied with that he says, “Can you – not tell Bucky? I don’t think he knows I – know.”
“That – I mean,” Natasha stares at him. “You really should talk to him about this, you know.”
Steve makes a noncommittal noise, avoiding Natasha’s gaze as the two of them lapse back into their silence, not quite as comfortable as before.
He thinks that’s going to be the end of it, but then before Bucky can return Tony walks out of the elevator a few hours later, um-ing and ah-ing and scratching the back of his neck uncomfortably.
“Hey, Tony,” Steve says cautiously.
“So Nat tells me you think Bucky’s married to someone,” Tony says.
“Goddamnit, Nat,” Steve mutters. He should have known she wasn’t going to let it go so easily. And he hadn’t made her promise not to tell Tony, after all.
“Yeah,” Tony says uncomfortably. “But, uh, it made me think – I mean, I’m already kind of uncomfortable having these, you know, it just feels kind of weird and gross when it’s yours – but we didn’t steal them! You always take them off before you go, uh – go to work, because they might get damaged, and – honestly, I don’t know whether this is such a good idea, this is an item that might well be more personal than that shield, but Buckaroo tells me you guys have been working on that and this seems like it might help –”
“What is it?” Steve asks, utterly confused. Tony’s hand darts forward, quick as a flash, and Steve reflexively catches what he drops. “What –”
Tony’s already put both hands behind his back when Steve realises what’s in his hand and sputters loudly. “What? Tony, what is this?”
“It’s a ring,” Tony says. “Obviously.”
“…A ring? That’s…mine?” Steve asks weakly, staring down at the flash of silver in his palm. His head is throbbing slightly. Or perhaps more than slightly; Steve is so dumbfounded that for once he thnks his brain could be throwing a party with jackhammers and he wouldn’t notice. Tony nods, still watching Steve anxiously. His hands flutter out from their position as though he expects he’ll have to catch Steve from a swoon at any second.
“It’s yours, alright,” he confirms weakly, and shoots Steve a tremulous thumbs-up like he knows how earth-shaking that small metal circle is. “You got it, now?”
“I…guess so,” Steve says, because what else is there to say? “I, uh. Thanks?”
“You’re welcome,” Tony says, looking much more relieved. It makes one of them who’s relieved about something, at least, because Steve has been thrown into turmoil. The elevator doors close behind Tony, who is sufficiently confident now to give a jaunty wave to Steve as he slides out of sight.
For a moment all Steve can do is sit and stare at the ring in the palm of his hand, astonishingly small for all that fits on his ring finger. He doesn’t – he can’t quite –
He’s married?
The ring is light in his hands, and when he lifts it he can see an inscription on the inside, tiny, gold: ’til the end of the line. When he slides it onto his finger it fits perfectly, and that old familiar ache starts in his head again.
He tears it off almost immediately, because he can’t bear the feeling: not the headache, he’s used to that, but wearing a ring when he doesn’t remember who gave it to him, when he doesn’t feel anything about it. He can’t bear how much like an imposter he feels when he puts it on, and – deep down, although he will never admit it – he can’t bear the low burst of disappointment he feels that he’s married to someone who isn’t Bucky.
He’s married. He is married.
He doesn’t know how long he just sits there staring, twisting the ring through his fingertips, watching the way the light flashes off it, distantly keeping track of the pain in his head: it’d been mild at first, probably because he’d been so focused on being surprised, but as he’d come to expect, the more he tries to think about this ring, about what it means to him, the more his head aches, deep and painful and utterly unhelpful.
The elevator opens again, and Steve stuffs the ring in his pocket, stands up to greet Bucky.
“Hi – hi, Buck,” he says a little weakly. Bucky gives him a slightly weird look, but nods and returns the greeting. Doesn’t push, and Steve doesn’t know whether to be grateful or resentful for that.
~*~
It’s awful, knowing he’s married. It’s nearly as awful as knowing Bucky’s married. Which – he shouldn’t be thinking that. He should be trying to remember his, his partner, he should be trying to find them. And all he’s doing instead is – is realising how very caught up in Bucky he is, how comfortable they are together. He is constantly reminding himself to stop staring, now.
He wishes Tony hadn’t told him. But then, he has to be glad that he did; it’d be a little horrifying if he regained his memories and had to contend with – with whatever this is.
It’s not long before he realises that these memories are here to stay. As in, he’s going to remember how much he presumably likes this mysterious partner of his, but that’s not going to magically and conveniently also stop him from liking Bucky.
“Nat,” he asks anxiously in the wake of his revelation, “was I married, too?”
Natasha stares at him with slightly wide eyes, which Steve has come to learn is the equivalent of a shout of surprise to her. “Um,” she says, even more uncharacteristic.
“What were they like?” he asks, as though this will fix everything; as though Natasha will be able to pin down one trait that his partner as and Bucky does not, and Steve’s affections will return to their rightful place and everything will be fine again.
“Um,” Natasha says again. There is a long pause as she mulls over what to say. “I really. Think you should talk to Bucky about that,” she ends up saying finally, and flees. It is disguised as casual walking, but Steve does not have to be a genius to see the skip in her step, the forceful push of her heel that means she’s hurrying towards her escape.
“Why –?” Steve tries to ask, but she is already gone. He sighs and slumps back against the sofa. Bucky is the last person he wants to talk to about this.
Of course, because that is how it goes, Bucky is the one to enter the room some minutes later. He stops still at the sight of Steve.
“Steve, really,” he says, voice soft, footsteps quiet as he approaches. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” Steve sighs. Bucky narrows his eyes, and Steve looks up to meet his eyes. “Don’t say it,” he warns, just as Bucky’s mouth begins to shape the you don’t look alright that Steve knows he wants to say. “I just – need some quiet time.”
“Care for some company with your quiet time?” Bucky asks, and sits down so carefully that the couch barely rustles under him.
Steve should say no, or just flee to his room, he knows that. But Bucky’s body is warm as it presses into his, and his measured, even breaths are an absurd comfort as his shoulder presses into Steve’s.
Steve should get up and leave, and instead he leans closer, puts his head on Bucky’s shoulder and closes his eyes. He promises himself, even, that that is it, that nothing more will come of this, and then Bucky’s hand lands gently on the back of Steve’s neck, stroking absently, and Steve wants to cry out against the impossibility of denying himself this.
~*~
“Sam,” he tries next as they finish their run. “Was I – am I – married?” Sam does a double take, stares at him. “Who was it?” Steve asks with what immediately feels like entirely too much urgency. He leans back, trials to dial down his desperation.
“That’s really – um,” Sam says, extremely unhelpfully. Steve had planned to ask the question at the end of their run so that Sam would be out of breath and have to answer concisely and hopefully without gloating or repetition of what Nat has already said, but that tactic looks to have backfired on Steve. “Um.”
“Where are they, if I’m married to them?” Steve snaps, and forces himself to calm down again. He’s had some time to think about this, which is probably unfortunate because he has marinated enough in his pity and self-blame that it has coalesced into anger at this mysterious absent person who had, apparently, liked him enough to give him a ring but not enough to check in on him after he’d suffered what turned out to be a brain-damaging injury. He thinks, he is fairly sure that, he is allowed some kind of anger in this situation.
Or not. Maybe he would have been allowed to be angry, but he’s fairly sure he'd given up that right as soon as he'd – well. He wouldn't be half as angry, even, if he hadn’t taken this thing, this absence, and run with it, so far and so fast that he’d ended up next to some entirely different person.
He’s in love with Bucky, maybe. Slightly. It doesn’t change anything.
(It changes everything, maybe. Slightly.)
“Um!” Sam says again, and Steve would probably be angry at the amusement in Sam’s eyes if he wasn’t already busy being angry at himself.
“Don’t tell me to talk to Bucky,” he grumbles. “Nat already said that. Come up with new advice.”
“Oh, so all advice has to be new, now?” Sam asks. “Alright, here’s some new advice for you: I think you should do what Nat says.” Steve flips Sam off, but Sam just cackles unrepentantly. Then he goes and says, “No, seriously, talk to Bucky,” to top off his pile of already-bad advice.
“Sure,” Steve mutters. “Thanks.”
“No, seriously,” Sam says, and then pauses to take a long drink of water. “Seriously,” he repeats, once he’s come up for air. “Why don’t you want to talk to him?”
Steve considers, for a second, asking who? just to buy himself some time, but Sam would only get suspicious at that, so Steve opts for something as close to the truth as he can make it. “I just don’t want things to be awkward between us,” he says. “If I have someone else, and – well, we’re living together –”
“Take my word for it,” Sam says. “Ask Bucky.”
~*~
Steve does not ask Bucky.
As far as he’s concerned, he’s never going to ask Bucky. Or anybody else, for that matter, since everyone seems hell-bent on getting him to tell Bucky, which – no matter what anyone else says – is definitely the worst path to choose, in this case.
So he’s prepared to deal with this, is the thing. He’s fully prepared to stay silent for the rest of his life about this, to keep this bundle of inconvenient emotion tucked in tight-close to his chest until it or he dies. Quite frankly, he’s fairly sure that the second will happen before the first, but he’s prepared to deal with that as well.
He’s got everything settled with himself, and then Bucky has to go and ruin it all.
“So,” he says as the two of them are curled up on the sofa watching Cary Grant run away from a crop duster. Steve had found himself wanting to watch older movies but getting a headache from following through on that desire, which meant that tonight’s compromise was Cary Grant with grey hair, something neither of them have seen before. “I heard a funny thing.” He looks at Steve, clearly expecting a reaction.
“Oh did you,” Steve mutters, eyes narrowing.
Bucky sighs, and there’s a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “Steve,” he says. “Who do you think you’re married to?”
If Steve had been expecting anything, it wasn’t that. “Who told you?” he rasps out. Everything else has gone very quiet. His eyes are wide and his back is straight, but he doesn’t remember doing either of those things.
“Oh, some people had some interesting things to say,” Bucky says cagily. “I’m more interested in what you think.”
“You would be,” Steve mutters; it doesn’t entirely make sense, but he’s trapped, and he has to say something before letting what he has with Bucky crash and burn.
“Sure,” Bucky says agreeably. “But you haven’t answered my question yet, you know.”
“I know!” Steve snaps, and then he deflates. “Sorry. I mean. I don’t know. Someone, I guess.”
“Someone, you guess,” Bucky says.
“Stop grinning, jerk,” Steve grumbles. He wishes he could be sore, but there’s something about Bucky that just makes it impossible.
“Tony said he gave you back your ring,” Bucky says. Slowly, he peels the skin-covering off his left hand to show gleaming silver metal with that one all-important interruption of gold. “I didn’t realise you must have seen mine until – until later.” He takes his ring off with slow, deliberate movements, and offers it to Steve. “It’ll probably give you a headache,” he warns. “But I thought you should see it. If you want to.”
Steve looks at him sideways. Bucky looks positively nervous, even as the outstretched hand offering the ring stays steady. Steve takes the ring even more slowly than Bucky had taken it off: every moment seems to stretch out into infinity as he reaches out and then brings his hand back in.
“Look at it,” Bucky says, and the nervousness is clear in his voice now. Steve looks.
’til the end of the line shines up at him in silver.
Steve coughs, nearly drops the ring. Bucky’s hand darts out and then pulls itself back, fluttery and indecisive as Steve stares and stares and stares.
“What – I – what –”
“Steve?” Bucky asks tentatively, and Steve realises with a jolt that he’s gone stock-still, isn’t making any noise. “Steve, are you –?”
Gentle hands turn his chin and Steve finds himself looking into Bucky’s blue, blue eyes. He tries to say Bucky but his voice won’t work, stubbornly uncooperative as his mouth shapes the word.
Bucky tries to take the ring away but Steve snatches it back, runs back to his bedroom to grab his. By the time Bucky catches up with him he’s standing by his dresser with one ring in each hand, with undeniably the same inscription on each, the same font, the same size.
“I,” he says, looking up at Bucky, who leans against the doorway with practiced ease, through the mirror. “We?”
“Yeah,” Bucky says softly. He nods towards the rings in Steve’s hand. “Mine’s made from your ma’s ring. Yours’s made from the ring here –” he gestures at his finger, at the empty space of it. “The original piece of metal from here.”
“And these?” Steve asks, running his fingers over the inscriptions. Bucky smiles faintly.
“Just something we used to say to each other, I guess,” he says. “Tony moaned for ages about making them different colours, but he did it.”
Steve looks up at Bucky, mouth agape. “I’m married to you?” he breathes. All he feels is fucking wonder, awe that he could be this lucky, but something different must come through in his voice because Bucky’s face changes a little, his shoulders slumping.
“That bad, huh?” he asks, turning a little so that his hair hangs over his face. “I guess I have been a bit of a nag –”
“Oh my god, shut up,” Steve says. The room is large, but he crosses it in three strides to get to Bucky. “Do you have any idea how fucking upset I was when I thought you were married to someone else?” Bucky looks up at him wide-eyed, so surprised it shouldn’t be allowed. Steve wants to kick himself for putting that disbelief on Bucky’s face, in his mind. “Or when I thought I was married to someone else?” he continues, a little softer, more heartfelt. “It was – I didn’t want to be married to someone else. Bucky, I felt so bad about it –”
“Oh, fuck,” Bucky says, pressing a hand to his mouth. His eyes are shining. “Fuck, Rogers, you idiot –”
“Yeah,” Steve says, partly because it’s true but also partly because he’s inclined to agree blindly with anything Bucky says right now, as Bucky reaches up with his free hand to clutch at Steve’s shoulder, his collar, the nape of his neck. The two of them draw closer like they’re being pulled until their foreheads are resting together, their breath mingling between them. Bucky has his eyes closed, but Steve is almost scared to do the same; some scared and paranoid part of him is convinced that if he closes his eyes this will disappear, or he’ll wake up, and he can’t risk that, can’t bring himself to. He looks his fill at Bucky instead, at the relieved set of his mouth, the thin skin of his eyelids, the dip of his shirt below his collarbones that feels almost scandalous, given their proximity.
“Idiots,” Bucky mutters again. “Both of us.”
“More me than you, really,” Steve reasons. Bucky shakes his head, drags Steve into the motion by virtue of their pressed-together foreheads.
“Should’ve known you’d see the ring,” he says. “Should’ve told you what it was, right away. I didn’t even realise –” he cuts himself off with a laugh, a choked-off thing, and finally opens his eyes to look up at Steve. “I’m so used to wearing it. You’re the one who takes it off when we – work. Didn’t even occur to me to take mine off.”
“Listen,” Steve says as they finally pull slightly away from each other. Bucky’s hand still rests at the back of his neck, but it’s no longer a weight; he’s carding his fingers through the short hair he finds. “I’ve been living with you and it didn’t cross my mind that I might be the one you’re married to. I really think I’m a cinch for biggest idiot, here.”
Bucky laughs, a proper laugh this time, wrinkles forming around his eyes and mouth. “Always a competition with you,” he says. “How about letting us both be idiots, huh?”
“Sure,” Steve says. “S’long as I get to be your idiot.”
Bucky raises one eyebrow. “That was smooth, Rogers.”
“How about it?” Steve asks, putting on his best earnest expression, the one that he’s found makes Bucky laugh nine times out of ten because he can always tell how patently false it is. This time is no exception, winning him a smile and a slight tug of the hair he’s got a hold of.
“You’ve always been my idiot,” Bucky says fondly. Before Steve realises what’s happening Bucky has leaned up and pressed a chaste, closed-mouth kiss to his lips, and started to walk away.
“Hey, wait,” Steve objects, pulling an unprotesting Bucky back by his wrist.
“Hey yourself.”
“Give me your hand,” Steve says. When Bucky looks up at him, inquiring, he waves the ring around, and it’s almost funny, how fast Bucky has his hand in front of Steve.
He doesn’t remember doing this for the first time, doesn’t remember ever doing this before, but it feels right to slide the ring on Bucky’s finger. Satisfaction curls in Steve’s chest at the quiet click of the ring slotting into place amongst the other plates of Bucky’s hand, so strong that he doesn’t even care about the slight headache threatening his temples.
Bucky slants a subtle glance at the other ring that Steve is still holding, the one that belongs to him, but he doesn’t push, doesn’t say anything except for an impressively neutral, “Want me to keep that for you? I noticed you haven’t been wearing it.”
“It felt strange,” Steve confesses. “Like I was wearing someone else’s ring. But –” He pulls his hand back, slightly, as Bucky reaches for the ring. “I – could we try? Again?”
Bucky pulls back to look Steve in the eye, gaze flitting anxiously across Steve’s face. “You don’t have to,” he says. “I can keep it for a bit, don’t push yourself – oh, shit, how’s your head –?”
“No, it’s fine,” Steve says to all the questions, curling his fingers a little more protectively around the ring. “I feel fine. I want to wear it. Will you –?”
“If you’re sure,” Bucky says, and it turns out that when it’s Bucky sliding that ring on his finger, gaze soft and lips softer as he leans down to kiss over the metal, well – Steve doesn’t feel even a trace of anything but soft and swelling happiness.
The ring looks right on his hand, and Steve is quite sure he has never felt this incandescently happy in the entire space of several weeks he can remember.
The ring is a turning point: he still doesn’t remember anything before the hospital, but his headaches have disappeared almost completely, and sometimes he could swear that he has words crawling up his throat, trying to jump off the tip of his tongue. Ordinarily it would be even more immensely frustrating than before, this maddening edge of anticipation with nothing following through, but after so many days and weeks of headaches this is a blessed improvement. Steve is so happy with this state of affairs, in fact, that he nearly forgets to put in his requisite self-reproach; he had, after all, been frankly impressive in his obtuseness, and delayed getting to this stage for a matter of – days, maybe. Long and endless days where he could have been pressed close to Bucky instead of trying to stop looking at him, where he could have been brushing his fingers along any part of Bucky he could, where he could have been kissed so gently –
He’s been an idiot, is all. He can admit that, and occasionally does so with great force, no matter how Bucky groans and tries to tell him to go easy on himself. This tactic fails miserably, so Bucky resorts to distracting Steve, which is incredibly and unfairly effective. Steve swears that there is something magical about Bucky’s lips.
~*~
The sensation of memories falling back into place is indescribable. Steve had worried, had thought that the sudden recalling of years and years of a life lived would be rough, even painful, but it’s not like that at all. It’s just like tumblers clicking in a lock, things falling into their right places again, everything in perfect order. It feels right, like this had always been inevitable.
“Bucky,” he says suddenly, turning, reaching, suddenly feeling blind even though he can see the room right in front of him.
Bucky looks up at him, his eyes searching Steve’s face, and then the worried wrinkle clears from his forehead, his lips stretching into a grin.
“Hey, Steve,” he says, cool and collected for all of a second before he throws himself forward. The two of them collide in a mess of limbs and bones with so much force that they tumble off the sofa entirely, and Steve doesn’t even care. He just clutches Bucky tight, like he can drag the two of them into each other through sheer willpower, like he can keep Bucky cradled so deep in his heart that he couldn’t forget him again if he tried.
When he pulls away, Bucky has already started laughing, and Steve knows exactly what he’s laughing about, groans, puts a hand over his face in a failed attempt to shut him up.
“They’re different coloured rings, you asshole,” he moans. “You couldn’t have explained any of it to me –”
“I’m living with you,” Bucky chokes out between gasping breaths. “What did you think – Steve, I love you, but if I was married to someone else I wouldn’t love you that much.”
“I thought there was something funny about that,” Steve mutters, and doesn’t mention how he’d chalked it up to Bucky simply being a terribly good person. Bucky was, in all honesty, a little shit, and Steve could say that now because he had proof to back himself up.
“S’good to have you back,” Bucky murmurs into Steve’s chest. “I mean, you were still you, but –”
“I know,” Steve says simply, and he does. Bucky knows it, too, and smiles up at him, doesn’t try to clarify himself further. Really, if there was anyone who would know what Bucky meant it would be Steve; those long days and months of Bucky’s own recovery from amnesia had been some of the most anxious of his life.
~*~
“So, wait,” Tony says suddenly when they inform him of this happy development, and Wanda has cleared Steve of all amnesia and given him a hug to boot. “What caused this?”
Steve breaks off, turns to look at Bucky, who is likewise turned towards him with a thoughtful frown on his face. They must both come to the same conclusion at the same time, because Bucky makes a noise that is terrifyingly close to a squeak and Steve feels a slightly demonic smile spread across his face.
“What?” Tony asks, slightly wary but still pushing because he doesn’t know what’s good for him.
“Well,” Steve says, as Bucky covers his face and groans into his hands, “Bucky here came out of the shower in nothing but his boxers –”
“Shut up,” Bucky moans.
“So…his hot bod saved your soupy brain?” Tony asks sceptically.
“No,” Steve says smugly, and Bucky groans even more expressively, mutters something incoherent. “That’d be the boxers with phallic cacti all over them, with pain in your ass written just –”
“Oh-kay,” Tony says swiftly, finally realising that perhaps this is information he doesn’t want to be party to. “Well. Good to, uh. Good to have your brain in working order,” he says, shuffling them unsubtly towards the door.
“I got them for him last Christmas,” Steve says smugly, and predictably enough this elicits a squawk from Tony as he hurries them out of his workshop even more urgently.
“It was not Christmas, you just like to use that as an excuse, you asshole –”
“Sure,” Steve says, with all the self-confidence of a man who knows his own memories with absolute clarity, and knows that Bucky won’t protest. “But I’m your asshole.”
Bucky tries to scowl at him and, to his credit, somewhat succeeds. Then he yanks Steve into another kiss, which Steve goes along with eagerly as Tony shouts obscenities at them from inside the lab.
Really, Steve thinks smugly as he pulls Bucky closer, it’s Tony’s own fault for having a glass door.