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It was all Steve could do not to fling the shield at the nearest wall and scream in frustration. He didn’t always understand this shiny new world he’d found himself in. Frequently, when he did understand it, he didn’t like what he understood.
He knew what the Internet was, mostly. He even understood how some congressman, making a point about aggregate search functions could skew the parameters and end up with it looking very much like Google thought the president was an idiot. Google, Steve thought, was not wrong about that, skewed parameters or not.
Okay, so Steve could understand it because Tony took him aside and very carefully explained it, in that way of Tony’s when he was sharing something wonderful, and it was so much like Howard had been that Steve had managed to piss Tony off again… what the hell had happened to Howard after Steve went in the ice? The man used to be great. Now he was just a contentious memory between Steve and Tony.
“Welcome home, doll,” Bucky called out as Steve dropped the shield with a resounding thunk on the floor. He couldn’t slam the door; all the doors in the Avenger’s Tower were sliding, automated things.
There were too many things Steve couldn’t do anymore. Sam said he could relate; that there wasn’t anything satisfying about hanging up a cellphone, either. Steve didn’t quite get that reference, really. He would admit that telephones were a thing, when he was a boy, but they hadn’t had one. Like everyone else in the building, they shared the one, cracked and dented device. You didn’t slam that down. If you broke the only phone in the building, there were gonna be a lot of people sore at you.
Tony had gone off, when Bucky first came to the Tower about how Depression Era boys didn’t need to cram up together in the same suite, and that’s what he had all the space for, and Bucky had finally shut that up by saying, in that drawl of his, “But Stark, if we got different houses, I gotta cross the hall in order t’ get laid.”
Tony had stared for a moment, then calmly reached into his wallet, pulled out a few hundred dollar bills, and handed them to Natasha before walking away without saying a word.
Steve hadn’t known that Tony knew how to shut up, so he was properly astonished.
“Hey, Buck,” Steve managed. He stripped off his gloves and threw them on the coffee table. He was mostly down to the under-armor before Bucky came around the side from the kitchen, spoon in one hand.
“I’d ask how your day went,” Bucky said, “but it was on the news.”
“Was it?”
“Well, you know JARVIS can customize the news for you, right? Give you just the stuff you might want to watch?”
“So you get JARVIS to spy on me?”
“Hey, I thought you threatening to punch a US Congressman was hilarious,” Bucky said. “I can’t wait t’ hear the fallout meeting report tomorrow.”
“Asshole,” Steve told him.
“Yeah, well, for that, you might not get any dinner.”
“What are you cooking?”
“Rotten gold eggs on toast,” Bucky told him.
All at once, Steve’s tension melted away. “Really?”
“Come on, Stevie, we’re living in the twenty-first century. We can get eggs and toast and butter and milk. Hell, the damn meal’s eight times as expensive as it oughtta be, but most people don’t raise chickens anymore.”
“I’ve seen some backyard coops from time to time on balconies and stuff, if you really wanted a few layers,” Steve offered, following his nose into the kitchen.
The real name of the dish was goldenrod eggs on toast, and it had been one of the things Sarah Rogers made regularly for Sunday dinner. Nothing but a few hardboiled eggs with a white sauce, Bucky had learned to make it after Sarah had died. The first time Bucky made it for him, after Sarah’s funeral, Steve had cried.
He hadn’t wept at the funeral.
Later, Bucky’s bratty sister had complained about eating them, called them rotten gold eggs, because she hated them. Said they were slimy.
Bucky had looked horrified, like Steve was going to cry again, but Steve had just laughed and laughed.
It was the first time he’d laughed since the funeral.
“You think my day was that bad that you gotta serve me depression era food so I know how good I have it now?”
“Baby doll, you got me, you have it so good, you can’t even--”
“Yeah, Buck. Yeah, I do,” Steve said, and he pulled his boyfriend into a hug. “Thanks.”