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Five seconds.
Bucky doesn’t understand why Bruce seems to feel the need to count.
Out loud.
And normally, for anything else, it would be nothing. Bucky could count the seconds by his pulse like an instinct, it required no thought from the moment they put a sniper rifle in his hands and taught him to shoot between breaths and blinks and the spaces where his hands could shake; it was even more rote now, less human than before and something different, not necessarily more.
He figures that depends on who you ask.
But hearing the count out loud makes it clear that his heart is not his own, cannot be contained, because it pounds and pounds with every number called out and Bucky can’t take it, he can’t take it—
But then he’s back.
“That wasn’t so hard,” Steve says, unclipping the wrist navigator and tossing it to Bruce on the fly as he strips out of the quantum suit, sighing deeply when he pulls it off with a relief that is so much more than just getting out of the bulky uniform.
He walks off the platform, laughs when Sam doesn’t settle for just the manly squeeze of a shoulder and goes in for the full hug. Bucky doesn’t mean to stay frozen in place. He doesn’t.
It’s just—
“Steve?”
He doesn’t realize until that moment, Steve stopping just in front of him, real and breathing and there: he doesn’t realize just how much he wasn’t expecting Steve to come back, not really. Not at all. I’m gonna miss you, and there was a reason the words had fallen short of a teasing note, and that was because he thought he was going to be left missing him.
And when Steve told him it was going to be okay, it felt like the same sort of lie he’d told Steve when they were young: It’ll be okay because I’ll make it okay, because it can’t be anything but okay, except the world doesn’t answer to me, and we’re both just pretending.
“When you said you were gonna miss me,” Steve smirks a little, but his eyes dance and it’s a beautiful thing to witness, an impossible thing; “I didn’t realize that five seconds was such a hardship,” he laughs a bit, and here he clasps Bucky on the shoulder, but draws him in close with it, too.
“I’m touched.”
“I didn’t,” Bucky starts, but doesn’t know what to say: I didn’t think you’d come back, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, I didn’t think I’d ever feel right-footed or right-tilted or right-anything again because you were going to be gone and I don’t know how to live like that, I never learned because I was never going to let this world make me learn and goddamn it, I didn’t, I didn’t—
“Come on,” Steve says, softly, warm and close at his ear. “We need to talk.”
Steve leads them to the water, where a bench sits on the shore, overlooking. He passes that, and settles on a nearby rock, huge and weathered flat and so much more Steve than a bench.
He pats the stone next to him and waits for Bucky to sit. They’re quiet, for longer than Bucky can say. His pulse still isn’t steady; he can’t count out the minutes.
“I’m not going to say I didn’t think about it, about staying,” Steve stares across the water, hands propped on his knees, weight leaning into it; “Because I did. For a good long while, in fact.”
Bucky studies his posture; loose, but not at ease. It’s a strange dichotomy: Steve Rogers was rarely more than one thing with fierce resolution at any given moment, while everything else just simmered in on the sidelines.
“You’d have been proud of me,” he huffs a laugh, cocking his head with it, but not making any effort to meet Bucky’s eyes, to look at him at all. “Not running into something half-cocked on the first whim I came across,” he coughs, clears his throat; swallows hard. “But this was important.”
“So, you mean, your life,” Bucky can’t hold his tongue; “like jumping out of airplanes without a chute, or breaking out of elevators, or going up against genocidal aliens with half a shield because said alien broke that shield,” he stares hard enough at Steve’s shoulders that he has to fucking feel it: “that’s not important.”
Steve’s quiet for a few moments, and his head’s tilted again like he’s got to think on it. Fucking idiot.
“Honestly?” he finally says, eyes raised to the skyline now: “Not important like this.”
Bucky doesn’t know what to do with that. Not said out loud like that: not hedged, not sheepish. Just, there.
“People think I’m selfless,” Steve says, apropos of nothing, or maybe everything. “But I think that’s because I never had a chance to stop, and think,” he laughs again, self-deprecating and leaning further in on his arms, against his thighs.
“It’s probably good that I didn’t,” he says, musing at the horizon. “I got sloppy, got distracted, anything but selfless and I needed to be selfless, before,” he nods, to himself, to heaven and earth: “The world needed that.”
“The universe needed that,” Bucky reminds him, and Steve’s smile is shy.
“I don’t know about that,” he shakes his head. “but,” and he sobers quickly, taking a deep breath in.
“I had a chance, back then, putting the Stones where they belonged,” he says carefully, like he’s nervous about what that means, what it reveals, and Bucky’s heart aches at the idea that Steve’s nervous around him, for any reason at all.
“I had the chance to stop.”
Bucky nods, though he’s not sure Steve sees it.
“I got selfish.”
Bucky doubts that seriously.
“I talked to her.”
Bucky figured as much, but he doesn’t understand what it means. Not if Steve’s here, like no time has passed. And not why Steve doesn’t seem anything less than wistful for it, and not heartsick as hell.
“Steve—”
“Let me,” he cuts Bucky off, puts his hand out, pleading for Bucky to let him finish, and there: his voice is a little bit rough. Bucky’s mouth snaps shut.
“I talked to her,” Steve says again, and there’s the fondness, but oddly, not longing. Bucky doesn’t understand. “And just seeing her, hearing her voice,” he smiles: “it was beautiful, those moments.”
Steve’s beautiful, in these moments; Bucky can’t help but think it, with the sun streaming just so.
“She told me about her husband,” Steve tells him in kind. “And her nephew however-many-times removed, who they were going to adopt because his father had died. Harold. Old enough to keep an eye on himself but not old enough to be alone. They seemed excited, but apprehensive about it. Neither of them ever planned on kids.” Steve bites his lower lip, but it’s still arched up, still smiling just a little.
“Sharon Carter’s father’s name was Harold. Saw it in her file back when the Triskelion…”
He trails off, and Bucky knows. Bucky would rather not recall those days, mostly, except that they’re what saved him. They’re what gave him Steve Rogers back, and let Steve give Bucky his memory back, let Bucky learn his own heart from Steve’s hands even as he ran: because with every memory, he learned just that little bit more.
“She was all the fire and steel I remembered,” Steve continues, and there: there’s the little hint of sadness in his tone.
“But she’d grown up, forged her own way, and had a life, and it was a gorgeous life and it was going to be even better, I could tell, as the years went on it was only gonna get better, even if she hadn’t told me about it when she was…” he swallows hard, and Bucky follows the motion in his throat; when she was lucid. When she was dying.
“It was a gorgeous life,” he says again; “but I didn’t know her anymore.”
That, Bucky isn’t expecting.
“I loved her, I do love her,” Steve says, nodding to himself; “but maybe I grew up too, a little, because I never had a chance to stop and think before, about what it meant to put all of my thoughts of the future into marrying Peggy Carter, built on shared glances across a war camp and a kiss at the end of the world, a dance I never made it to,” he shakes his head and sighs, and only then does he turn; he doesn't look at Bucky exactly but his words are aimed that direction, both in space and intent:
“With you living next door,” Steve says like it’s more set in stone than the rest of it; like the rest of it was built on that foundation. “Never any further.”
Bucky doesn’t know what to make of that, save for the fact that he never thought about coming home from the war, but before it, he never planned on being any further away from Steve, either.
“Her husband, he was one of the injured we freed from that camp near Stalingrad,” Steve comments idly; “funny how things work out, right?”
Bucky can’t follow the strain of this anymore, can’t make sense of any of the pieces.
“Why are you telling me this, Steve?”
Best to be direct.
Steve sighs.
“Peggy said, when we were in the war,” he starts, shakes his head a little; “all the time, all the time she said it, when I thought maybe we’d, we could—”
He cuts himself off, and it’s then that even just seeing the periphery, it’s then that Bucky can see that his eyes get sad, along with his words. The timing, though. The timing is strange and off and there’s something in all of this that Bucky’s just not getting; something Bucky fails to grasp.
“The mission comes first, she said. Always, the mission comes first,” he chews his lip for a second, like he’s processing it with Bucky at the very same time, taking it in. “And I only went to her after my mission was completed, and then,” and finally, he turns, and he looks at Bucky, and Bucky sees those eyes straight on and they’re not sad, exactly. They’re solemn. They’re serious and they’re resolute and they’re trained on a single goal with sheer ferocity: everything else left on the sidelines.
“Then, I understood.”
Bucky doesn’t. Bucky just stares, but with Steve staring back, it doesn’t feel like a bad thing, or a lost thing. Anything but.
“The mission comes first, and then we see what comes second,” Steve tells him, never breaking eye contact, like he’s searing those words as deep into Bucky they’re seared into him. “The mission never stopped coming first for her, because that’s who she is. That’s who her husband is, too, and they fit, and they're there building S.H.I.E.L.D. That’s why the war stopped me and her from ever getting to see what we could have been,” Steve leans in again, and this time it’s toward Bucky as he speaks those words out clearly, strong:
“The mission comes first.”
Bucky’s missing something, he knows it, but his heart starts beating harder at the look in Steve’s eyes, like it did a lifetime ago, like it did with every memory Steve’s image, Steve’s words and voice gave back to him in those dark days of finding who he was; it feels like when Steve was giving him back himself, without even being present. It feels like his heart coming back in pieces again, when he thought it was already intact.
“And I’d completed the mission, this time,” Steve says pointedly, almost confesses; “and I saw her, and I realized...”
He stands and walks a step or two, closer to Bucky before he sits again, close enough to touch, if they wanted to.
“I realized maybe I always knew what came next,” Steve says softly, hands cupped on his knees, fingertips digging crescents into the the skin under his clothes. Bucky can feel the heaving of his breath, too fast, with him sitting so near. He almost reaches out, or maybe just speaks. He almost tries to calm—
“I’m in love with you.”
Steve’s breathing hard around saying it.
Bucky can’t seem to breathe at all.
“I remember when it started,” Steve starts talking, because he’s a nervous fucking talker, and maybe Steve hasn’t been truly nervous in years, for all he’s left unsaid in this world.
“You’d just got your job down at the docks and you’d come home, stripped your shirt off and started heating broth for me because I was sick in the middle of the fucking summer and you didn’t miss a beat, washed your hands and made sure the liver was chopped and put in at just the right time so it would give me the best of the iron with less of the taste,” Steve smiles, and it’s a different smile now, entirely different: there’s a certain joy in it, not that it was lacking in type before, but this feels present. This feels alive.
“And you were sweaty and covered in dirt but I came first, somehow,” he breathes in sharp, blinking like there’s something he needs to make clear in his own mind and his eyes can help.
“And I’d been attracted to you forever, tried to convince myself it was an artist’s eye, tried to bullshit my own mind about it, like it was just the aesthetic of you and how you were built of clean lines and a perfect fucking jaw and those thighs,” Steve shakes his head, and his smile turns a little rueful with it; “but it was in that moment when I looked at you, glassy eyed from being sick and just saw you and my chest got real tight and I,” one hand abandons clawing his knees and goes to that chest and starts massaging the space above his heart, like it’s all tight again there, now.
“I knew,” he says, his voice is a little strained, a little broken, a little too much of the heart he’s rubbing again spilling into it. “I knew, and maybe it had been like that for a while already but in that moment,” he turns his body, and Bucky must have started breaking again because it makes him nearly gasp to see the fire in those eyes when they meet his and Steve says with all that endless, singular resolution:
“I knew.”
Now it’s Bucky’s chest that feels tight; like it’ll shatter at the wrong touch, the wrong move, the wrong—
“I love you, Buck,” Steve says softly, but for every bit of sound it lacks, it makes up for tenfold in meaning. “And you’re what I want to come next,” he takes his hand from his knee, then, and tentatively lets it cover Bucky’s between them.
“You’re what I want to come first.”
Bucky tries to make it all real in his head. The words, the idea, the touch of Steve’s hand just so.
“Buck?” Steve finally asks; he must have been too quiet for too long. His heart’s beating steadily, but so fucking hard, like it’s going to be the thing that shatters the tightness in his chest, for worse of for better.
“What do you want me to say, Steve?” It comes out sharp, but he doesn’t mean for it to; it’s just all that his throat can push forth because it’s grown tight, too, and his mouth dry, and in truth he wants to know: what does Steve want from him, now, what exactly does Steve want so he can give, because he’d been about ninety-nine percent sure he was never going to see Steve again as of ten minutes ago, and then these words, these, it’s, he—
Bucky wants to know, but Steve’s eyes widen, and it’s the sharpness and not the question that lands and Bucky bites on his own tongue for it, hard until it threatens to bleed.
“I—” Steve stumbles, doesn’t try to backtrack but, Bucky thinks, tries to hide the way the shine in his eyes dims, to protect what that shine betrayed, and Steve starts rubbing his chest with greater fervor, a harshness that has to hurt but it’s like he doesn’t notice, and Bucky doesn’t want to think on what that could mean.
“I thought you were going to stay, to be with her,” Bucky says, and he doesn’t expect his own voice to sound so thin, so breathless; “I always thought—”
“Bucky,” Steve cuts in, and Bucky notices then, when Steve leans, that the hand Steve settled over his own never left. “Back then, what could we have done?”
“You never said a damn thing—”
“And risk losing you?” Steve asks, recoiling from the mere notion, and Bucky wonders if, where Steve’s hand rests against his own, Steve can feel the way his pulse skips, and then starts to gain a fire in it, a resolve like Steve’s maybe, if it’s ever come close. “God, Buck, I couldn’t—”
“I set my clock by the fact that you were breathing, Steve Rogers,” Bucky hisses because he doesn’t know how else to say it, because it’s a fundamental truth that shouldn’t need saying and so it never learned how to fit into words at all. “Fuck the sun in the sky telling me the time, you were how I knew there was still a world to live in,” Bucky shakes his head back and forth: “without you—”
His voice fails him, and his heart is what cracks the tension in his chest because there’s something explosive in the way he asks, demands:
“How could you even think there was anything you could say to me that would make me leave your side?”
“You had a future,” Steve answers immediately, and it kills something small but essential in Bucky to hear it come so fast, to hear it said so quick, betrayed as having always been there, having always been the answer Steve guarded close. “Such a future, Buck, and while I wanted you in mine more than I could ever say, I couldn’t ask you to be held back by—”
“You say you want me to be what’s next?” That sense of resolve, that sense of purpose, with everything else sliding into the periphery: Bucky gets it now. He gets what Steve meant when it got rid of the distractions but he doesn’t know what he meant in saying that it made him selfless.
Fuck that.
“You were always what was next,” Bucky tells him, rips it open from his veins and lets it bleed, all the truths he’s ever known: “every fight, every job, every paycheck, every night huddled against you so you were warm, every hand on your chest to make sure it kept moving, that heart kept beating,” his voice is going to crack and so he stops himself, takes a breath, before clinging to the rest:
“Every shot I took to keep you safe in the field, every time I wanted to give up before they broke me, every time I wanted to end it after, trying to figure out who I was, every…”
He sucks in air and shakes his head and he doesn’t realize he’s trembling, just a little, because Steve’s hand has got firmer against his own where it covers his knuckles, and Bucky laughs hollowly, or maybe filled with the whole goddamn world.
“Christ, Steve,” he asks, breathless like he’s never felt before; “how could you not know?”
Steve’s breath stutters, and Bucky’s still, and he realizes that he can feel Steve’s pulse where his hand touches his own if he’s very careful, if he pays close attention and Bucky is good at that, was good at that before he was moulded to be good at that, even, and its serves him well now, to feel Steve’s pounding heart beating strong, rather than defeated.
“Could ask you the same thing,” Steve says, and it sounds forced out, it sounds like a sob or a gasp would sound, except that it’s happy, no. No, it’s not happy.
It’s fucking joyous.
“I love you,” Steve tells him, and turns his hand to press his palm to Bucky’s; takes his other from massaging his chest like a way to keep himself sane and reaches slowly, almost terrified before he threads his fingers in Bucky’s hair and just touches, just feels, just stays.
“You’re a fucking moron,” Bucky says, and he doesn’t know the tone it comes out in: it could be fond or frustrated, marvelling and maddening; he can’t quite tell over the rush of his own blood in his ears because those are words he never thought he’d hear and hearing them twice now, that means that they were purposeful. Hearing them twice means Steve meant it, and those are the words of fucking fantasies and dreams; they don’t enter the real world. They’re not allowed there, they don’t fit.
Except apparently they are. Apparently they can.
Apparently, they do.
Steve laughs, but there’s tension in his brow, and the laugh is still a little bit guarded, and Bucky would give the goddamn heart in his chest right now to take both those things away and make Steve feel as fucking free and alive as he feels in this moment. Because Steve’s saying he loves him. Steve’s saying he chose him. Steve’s saying he will choose him until, until—
“You could say it back, you know,” Steve finally hedges, almost timid, and Bucky laughs and takes both his hands and frames Steve’s face and kisses him so fucking hard, full on the mouth, sucking his lips and tracing his teeth and licking his fill of the taste of him, until Steve moans and Bucky gets to taste that too, and it is everything.
It is everything.
They break apart only to press against each other, Bucky’s hands on Steve’s biceps and Steve’s on Bucky’s face now, lips swollen as he looks at Bucky like he never wants to see anything else in the world again. And Bucky laughs, once more, and says with all the fiercest resolution he can stand to hold in his bones, but now also alongside everything else in him, too:
“Of course I love you, you fucking moron.”
And if Steve brings Bucky’s lips to his this time, it’s only because that’s what was always going to come next.