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The thing most people forget about Steve is that even before the serum, he would go boxing.
Fighting Irish, and all that.
It's mostly forgotten now amongst the whole general appealing-to-the-masses-placidity trained into him. The part that lies on the floor with its belly up, restrained to faking a punch here or a planned, comedic trip there.
Now, Bucky, Bucky wasn't made of the harshness Steve had. He was too soft, too unwilling to throw a punch when he could talk his way out of it. At first. While he never lunged first, he toughened himself up. Eventually he gave up, took the more straightforward approach Steve knew like the calluses on his hands, the same way he used to know that there would be bruises on his little body formed on his skin in his sleep. But there's always a sadness to Bucky's eyes when he did it. Does it, because it's not like he stopped.
Steve's first thought has always been to throw a punch. It's how he's wired. Pretty stupid, to give a 5"4 fella an anger more suited to someone two times his height and three times his weight, but in a way, it fits.
Maybe the boxing isn't at all that surprising.
He remembers something Bucky's Ma had said once, a disapproving kiss of her teeth and hands to the air accompanying it.
"That boy has the fire of the devil in him, you know."
Bucky's Ma had never really liked him. Said he was a bad influence behind his back, and a few times to his face.
(They had a mutual tolerance for each other, and secretly and begrudgingly also held high respect for each other, too. But that had taken Bucky dragging Steve home from too many fights started to defend Buck's honour when he himself wouldn't.)
But back to Bucky. Steve thinks he can see it, even now, that sadness. It surfaces as frustration at first, as anger and a twitchiness Steve powers through purely by turning his dumb blond act up to twelve and breaking the knob.
Recently that's changed. Gone is the ferocity of frustration, which Steve took to waiting for its death with all the grace of a saint. It was like biting your tongue to see a word you've forgotten how to spell. Like waking from a dream and realising that it was a nightmare. Every so often the picture skips, blurs and compacts, and he sees...
Well.
He sees a man stranded as an island. He's pretty sure this isn't how isn't how the metaphor is meant to go.
He can tell Bucky sees it too, sees the tightness of his jaw, mind working to figure out the similarity he's seeing, trying to remember a card he flipped back over ten moves back and is trying to match up with the one teased between shaking fingers.
Steve comes home more than once to find Bucky laid on the floor, clothes and body drenched to the bone. He doesn't ask, just turns on the television and asks Bucky to find the channel to the show they've been following more faithfully than a church sermon, way back when both of them still believed.
The ghost story seems to forget he's the spirit made flesh and not simply the house something unspeakable inhabits. He kicks ice under the fridge, is spooked by the sound but does it again at the very next opportunity. He leaves knives between the couch cushions and forgets to tell Steve until he nearly splits his hand getting up.
He very resolutely does not sit in chairs.
Steve doesn't blame him. Not when he knows what they did. Not when he himself can't even open the fridge without flinching away. That he can't listen to the radio without everything he knows to be true feel like nothing but lies.
The two of them don't have people who knew them, before. Their baselines have completely changed. The extent to which they have been altered without their consent, or control, is acres wide and years deep, but no one can tell. The only one they can be real, be understood, to, is each other.
This shouldn't sting at the chest like it does.
It's a feeling of loss, a great acknowledgment of absence and echoing lack of things to fill the void. It makes the backs of his eyelids ache, psychosomatically because he can't get a fucking break. It makes Bucky pause when they hear an ambulance. Reading the newspaper is a task now, like it only was when he was green to his balls with sickness.
Bucky reads to him.
It's nice, like a bedtime story, except that they're approximately ninety-eight years old and not eight. He does it once just to annoy Steve (who couldn't decide which book to choose but was fighting help at every turn) but after it saw the two of them in sleep far quicker than anything short of knocking each other out cold, it grew on them. Like a parasite. A strange, book shaped insect that sucked bad dreams instead of blood.
But Bucky reads to him, and while he refuses to do voices he does point at random things in the day and draw hilarious parallels to the characters, completely unprompted and that-- that helps. Steve may be using this as a proverbial nightlight. Or perhaps a bear that he wants to crawl inside and build a home. Bucky's voice has changed over the years but that's ok. It still has the unchanging feeling of coming home after a long day, of pulling blankets up to the ears and feeling relaxed even though the water stain on the ceiling leaves patterns of fungi they're probably not meant to inhale.
The sadness receeds, the anger dies.
Bucky seems to have discovered that he doesn't have to throw the first punch, anymore. Being on the constant offensive is tiring to probably everyone who isn't named Steven Grant Rogers, and those who say otherwise have a gun to their head. Please help them.
Like claws in a cat he learns to retract. Less immediacy, he learns to leave emails for days, invests in a slowcooker. Learns how to make stew that tastes like warm nights and happy feelings.
They have disagreements that threaten to set them back. People who claim Steve has mellowed in his old age would be wrong.
Bucky likes it bright. But they can't leave the blinds open all day and night, it's a safety hazard. Bucky does not throw the 100-year-old equivalent of a terrible two's tantrum when they have disagreements like this.
He sulks, like a man.
They buy a lamp. It is a very good lamp. They just sit in front of it for a while in the morning, when it's still dark and Steve clearly wants to go on a run but doesn't have the heart to leave Bucky in a room without the sun by himself apparently.
For some reason it makes them both feel better.
Steve's learning. He's learning how to have restraint, give Bucky space when he needs it, but also that it's okay not to have any.
He's spent so long keeping himself in a box, keeping himself in check, only allowing himself very limited and shallow points of reprieve in which his true self is able to express wants and desires. The dangerous tendency he has in jumping from high places is fed by going to a climbing wall two and then three times a week because he can't help himself. He takes steps four at a time. Enjoys-- really enjoys, not like pressing it to the very limits because there's a war going on and the troops need a parachute more than he does-- having a body that actually fucking works.
For all he pretends to be at ease, it's hard for him to come by and let out. So he learns that it's acceptable to show it.
The two of them settle into something good. It's not perfect, and gets a couple too many sighs and eyerolls in their direction when they complain, but it gives them what they've needed for a little too long. Similar to when a starving man suddenly eats, and the full weight of his hunger drops on him at the smallest of portions given to him, they realise just what it was they were needing.
Each other. Wholly and at peace.