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The port isn't helping. In fact it's doing the exact fucking opposite of helping, along with the game, voices harder and harder to track and blurring into conversations he's not quite in, until Bucky deliberately loses two hands in a row, throws down his cards in fake disgust and says, "I'm out," to let Dugan jump in and try to win some of his cigarettes back.
One of those might help, actually, but he's still not interested in getting too tied to something that can run out so fucking easily; coffee's bad enough, if they're out of range of regular supply for one reason or another. Bucky hands the bottle off to Jim and heads out of the one intact room of the house.
The cold air helps, once he's out where there aren't enough walls to keep it away. Not enough, though.
He finds Steve in the second most intact room of the wrecked house, sitting on a battered couch that has a pile of charred books and a brick for one leg, frowning at map and compass with the same look he used to get over arithmetic homework or whatever essay was going to get him a pained talking-to about inflammatory rhetoric this time. Some things don't change, some things nobody could change.
Not even a mad scientist with a magic potion and a rich asshole with a glowing box.
There's a bit of a problem in how Steve's let himself get as engrossed as he used to, which means he doesn't notice Bucky standing there leaning on the doorframe watching him for a while, which all things considered is kinda fucking dangerous and Steve's sober so he doesn't even have an excuse. But Bucky can't bring himself to give Steve a hard time about it and, to be fair, the nearest of the enemy anyone could find are kind of a smoking hole in the ground and the nearest reinforcements can only get here before tomorrow if HYDRA's figured out instantaneous transportation while they weren't looking.
In which case everyone's fucked anyway, might as well die oblivious.
"You know," Bucky says eventually, "just because you can't get drunk doesn't mean you can't relax."
Steve looks up, blinks and then makes a wry face. "Antsy," he admits.
"Yeah, today had a tragic lack of explosions for you to jump out of," Bucky mocks, and smirks when Steve rubs his forehead.
"Yeah, shut up," is really the only reply possible, seeing as Bucky's dead right and the antsy absolutely has to come from not having anything death-defying and fucking crazy to do this time around. "You're not playing cards either."
Bucky doesn't try tossing up lost too many hands because Steve knows damn well he only loses when he wants out of a game. He might not win every hand he plays, but he doesn't lose, not badly enough to matter, hasn't since they weren't much older than twelve. Instead he opts for, "I win everything off everybody, eventually people stop playing, and I can only fake losing so many times."
Steve grins. "Someday Gabe's going to strangle you in your sleep for cigarettes," he says, and Bucky snorts.
"He can try," he retorts. "I sleep lighter than he can walk."
Doesn't say he'd have to catch me asleep first. Gabe's is not one of the watches he can convince himself to sleep through.
Other things that don't change: how everything Steve thinks shows up on his face, shows what kind of thought it is even if Bucky's not got enough of the context to know what the words are, the exact shape. Or how those feelings look, even if the bones underneath skin and around eyes got reshaped the same way everything else did, like some shots and a bit of light turn skin and bone and muscle into clay and reshape it. It's fucking creepy, honestly, and Bucky can think of so many ways it could have gone so fucking wrong, starting with the one that'd pontificated at them across fire and explosions.
He shoves that away, out into the unhelpful blur of the port: the point is, it's still Steve's face, it's still like reading a picture-book, and right now it's got the kind of twisted up, stepped on, pleased pride you get for friends when it's something that's got nothing to do with you, and so isn't really something you get to be proud of.
Fucking goof. No amount of science or magic can do anything about that, either.
Besides Bucky's pretty sure he wears that look a lot; it's one of the ones that's safe to show, doesn't end up with attention he doesn't want. And he is proud of Steve. You'd have to be an idiot not to be. And happy for him, at least so far: all the ways it might've gone wrong, it hasn't, not yet, and that means that basically whenever Agent Carter gets bored waiting for him to stop stammering (and assuming she's not going to be a problem) Steve'll have more or less everything he ever wanted.
Considering how little he's ever had of that -
It's not really a thought, not separate from action, not really. It's the itch, the way drink made the numbness under his skin worse instead of better; it's a tangle about Carter and Steve and wanting; and it's that he got more than a little drunk before he stopped, before he realized it was worse instead of better, and that means there isn't that much room between thinking something and doing it to start with.
And when all's said and done Bucky actually feels kind of sorry for Carter, as the last detached thought he bothers having for a bit: Steve really is that fucking oblivious, that fucking used to assuming nobody could want him, that it takes Bucky being half on one leg and a hand at his jaw to turn his face before Steve clues in.
There's stuff you know, when you've known someone their whole life, about how their body works, about how they feel things. Stuff like the space of skin on the side of Steve's neck, just beside his jaw, that if you touch or even breath on on - leaning over to whisper, stuff like that - he shiver-twitches away, sometimes elbowing you in the side hard for forgetting. When they were kids it was just funny; grown up, just something he'd pass along to whatever girl finally got her brain around what was right in front of everyone; now -
Bucky slides his hand back so he can stroke his thumb over that spot and Steve's breath hitches, Steve goes completely still for a second in the middle of whatever he thought he'd do next, one hand halfway to Bucky's arm. It's hard not to laugh at his startled face, blinking, darkening eyes; Bucky holds himself back to smirking and not actually stopping the brush of his thumb against Steve's neck while Steve tries to get ahold of things like how to fucking speak English enough to start with, "Bucky, what are - "
Maybe there's a part of Bucky's mind trying to tell him this is a bad idea, but it's drowned out by all the rest of him saying it's a fucking great one, completely fucking delighted with how off-balance he's caught Steve and how even though Steve's got a hand on his arm now Steve's not using it to stop him. At all.
"You know, Captain America," Bucky says, leaning in and making the words as gently mocking as he can, "if you really have to ask that it's no wonder your agent hasn't managed to get you into bed yet - " and Bucky shifts his weight so that his one knee slides in between Steve's and Steve has trouble breathing again.
"That's not what I - " Steve starts, voice a bit unsteady, but Bucky cuts him off.
"You objecting?" he asks, already knowing the answer even if Steve doesn't because Steve's hand slides up Bucky's arm to his shoulder-blade, his back, and Steve's shaking his head just a little anyway.
"No - "
"Then shut up," Bucky tells him and makes sure he does, if only because you can't kiss and talk at the same damn time.