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Steve slept lightly these days, so he woke instantly at a sudden thump from the former guest bedroom of his apartment, the room that was now Bucky's.
Silence from the bedroom now. Steve was on his feet in nothing but a T-shirt and boxers, shield in hand, unable to even remember picking it up. He made himself set the shield down, calm himself down because he couldn't go charging into Bucky's room like a white knight off to save a princess. That sort of thing rarely ended well.
The lights in the hall, and in Bucky's room, were off, but the door to Bucky's room was half open, a signal (usually) that he didn't mind Steve coming in. On nights when he didn't want company, he left the door firmly closed, and Steve had been trying his damnedest to respect that, even when Bucky's nightmares were audible.
This seemed to be something a little different. Harsh breathing, another series of thumps. Steve tapped on the door. "Bucky?"
Then he caught sight of Bucky on the floor, between the bed and the wall, and his breath caught as he realized what the noises meant. Bucky was having a seizure. Steve had no experience with it, hadn't known it was something Bucky did, and for a moment he just stared at Bucky -- rigid and strained, head arched back.
It was over an instant later, before Steve had managed to decide what to do, how to react. Bucky slowly relaxed from his terrible, rigid posture into something more natural, and Steve dared approach him, picking his way past the tangled bedcovers that had been flung to the floor and the fragments of a supposedly shatterproof plastic water glass.
"Buck?"
Bucky's breathing came in harsh pants. Steve switched on the bedside lamp on its lowest setting. Bucky's eyes were open, unfocused. His mouth and cheek were smeared with fresh blood, making Steve's pulse jump a few notches.
Steve crouched down, trying to bring himself into Bucky's field of view in the least threatening possible way. He didn't dare touch him, having learned the hard way that, for Bucky, touch was often unwelcome, and unexpected touches were usually treated as threats.
"Bucky?"
Bucky blinked slowly. Flexed his metal hand. Looked up at the ceiling and didn't speak.
Steve settled himself with his back against the bed. Unsure what else to do, how to help, if he could help, he waited quietly. After a bit, when the silence was broken by nothing other than Bucky's breathing, he began to speak.
"It's July 19, 2015. You're in my apartment in DC. Weather's clear, we had Thai takeout for dinner -- you had phanaeng curry for the first time and you liked it. Your name --" His voice cracked a little on this. "Your name is James Buchanan Barnes --"
Bucky coughed and said, his voice a rough growl, "I know my name."
"Sorry," Steve said, trying not to let out his breath on too audible a sigh. "Just checking."
More silence, then Bucky slowly and stiffly levered himself up to sit against the wall, moving like his bones hurt. He touched his bloody face, took his hand away, looked at it. Let it fall to rest in his lap and leaned his head against the wall.
"Are you ..." Steve tested several different ways of asking the question, finally settled on, "Did you -- hurt yourself?"
He thought Bucky wasn't going to answer, until he finally said, "Bit my tongue, I think." His voice was slurred and gravelly. "Already healing."
"Back in a minute," Steve said. Bucky didn't acknowledge it. He went to the bathroom and wet a hand towel with warm water. When he came back Bucky hadn't moved, but he cracked his eyes open at Steve's footsteps. Steve put the towel in his hand, then gave him a little space, sitting on the bed.
Bucky dabbed at his face, not doing much more than smearing the blood around. He was still uncoordinated. "You can go back to bed. Sorry I woke you up." His voice was dark with a bitter current of self-loathing. Of Bucky's bleak moods, this was one of the most common, and one of those Steve hated most -- when his anger turned inward, on himself.
"I don't mind," Steve said. "Probably couldn't fall asleep anyway for a while."
"I'm not gonna ... I dunno, have an aneurysm or something." When Steve didn't move, Bucky said, "I don't need a babysitter, Rogers."
"How about a friend?"
Bucky didn't answer. Although the light wasn't bright, he kept squinting like his head hurt, so Steve reached over and snapped off the lamp. The window drapes were open, and light from the street outside illuminated the room dimly. The blood on Bucky's face looked black against his white skin. He finished cleaning himself up, then dropped the stained towel on the floor.
"Are those ... new?"
Bucky didn't pretend not to know what he was talking about. "No."
"Okay," Steve said.
Bucky sighed and let his head fall back against the wall with a clunk. "Steve, if I wanted you to know every last goddamn one of my symptoms, I'd tell you. And it's a fucking long list."
"I get that," Steve said. "I do. It's your life. I'm not trying to pry, it's just ..." He wasn't even sure where he was going with that. After a minute, he said, "If this happens ... a lot ... you've been hiding it pretty well. I was kind of startled. That's all."
Bucky sat in silence, his face turned away. After awhile, Steve got up again and went to the kitchen.
It was Sam who'd taught him to make cocoa. He'd never really had it growing up, but he'd found that he liked it -- fat, sugar, warmth -- and Bucky seemed to like it too. He settled into the familiar routine of pouring milk into the pan, warming it, stirring in the chocolate and a little cinnamon. Poured it into two mugs. Took it back to the bedroom, picking his way around the mess on the floor. He could clean it up later.
Bucky accepted the mug with a thin smile. Steve settled on the floor again, with his back against the bed.
After a while, Bucky said, "I had a lot of 'em in the beginning. Bad ones. Not so much lately. I think I do still have them sometimes, but they're more of .... a lapse, I guess. Time slips for a minute. I think this is the first big one I've had since I moved in with you."
Steve considered his responses carefully before saying, "This is the kind of thing there might be medication for. In this time."
"No," Bucky said flatly. He'd categorically refused any sort of drugs since coming back into Steve's life, from painkillers to antidepressants to Bruce's various mood-altering concoctions.
Steve acquiesced with a nod. He wasn't done -- he'd already thought of a couple of other options, such as having Bruce run a brain scan -- but that discussion could be tabled until a time when they weren't both in their underwear, stressed and unhappy, and it wasn't 2 a.m.
So they drank their cocoa in silence. The soft radiance of streetlights through the window turned the room into a charcoal drawing, all flat shadows and sharp black lines -- hiding the signs of what would have been impossible opulence to the children they'd once been: the soft beige carpet, the furniture that was purchased new rather than scarred by generations of previous owners, the clean and unstained sheets.
And yet it was sometimes as if no time at all had passed. They could still find peace in each other's quiet company, even after Erskine's experiments and war and seventy years of torture and ice.
By the time the dregs of Steve's cocoa had cooled in the bottom of his mug, Bucky had relaxed somewhat. Now he just looked tired, slumping against the wall with his hair straggling dark around his shoulders. The mug rested on his thigh, and he didn't resist when Steve lifted it from his curled fingers.
Steve took the mugs to the kitchen and left them, unwashed, in the sink. He came back to the bedroom with his arms laden with cushions from the two overstuffed sofas in the living room. Bucky looked up with an unreadable expression when Steve dropped the armful of cushions into the space between bed and wall.
"Remember this?" Steve asked, spreading them out on the floor.
Bucky poked one of the cushions with his toe. "Back then my folks were tryin' to cram four Barnes children into two beds. Had to do this or make my sisters sleep on the floor."
"Not the only reason we did it."
"Guess not," Bucky said.
Somehow the cushions didn't seem to cover as much of the floor as they used to. Steve studied the small assemblage and wondered how they were going to fit two adults on them. Sudden movement out of the corner of his eye made him glance over at Bucky.
"If we're gonna do this, Steve, we might as well go all the way."
Bucky got up, still moving stiffly with less than his usual grace. He shook broken shards of plastic out of the tangled bedcovers, then dumped the comforter on top of Steve, and dragged over the chair from the far side of the bed. Steve helped him tent the sheets over the chair and the edge of the bed. They both crawled inside.
It was dim, though not entirely dark. As with the cushions, it seemed that blanket forts used to be larger. Somehow there seemed to be far too many elbows and knees, and way too few cushions. The edge of the sheet kept smothering Steve's face if he wasn't careful.
"This is un-fucking-believable," Bucky said as they squirmed around, trying to get comfortable on the inadequate cushions. "We're two grown men. Grown soldiers. No, check that, we're an international assassin and Captain America. In a blanket fort."
"And you thought fighting aliens was as weird as our lives could get," Steve said.
Their initial attempts to arrange themselves under the comforter involved an instinctive attempt to avoid contact as much as possible -- intentional on Steve's part, since he knew Bucky was twitchy about being touched -- but there just wasn't room, and they ended up with their shoulders pressed together, Bucky's knees jammed into Steve's thigh.
They'd sprawled on each other like puppies when they were kids. Steve remembered lazy mornings waking up at the Barnes apartment with Bucky drooling on his shoulder, or Bucky's head jammed sweat-damp against his ribs. They'd always been up much too late the night before, giggling under a draped sheet, trying to stay quiet because Bucky's dad would backhand them both if they woke up the adults. Regardless of the parental threat, Bucky'd had no compunctions about trying to make Steve shriek by tickling him every time Steve thought he was about to fall asleep ...
Just as this thought crossed Steve's mind, he felt fingers -- cold metal fingers -- ghost across his flank, just under his ribs where the T-shirt was pushed up to expose skin.
Steve nearly jumped off the cushions.
Bucky snickered.
Any physical contact with Bucky needed to be telegraphed well in advance. Which meant 99% of the time Steve wouldn't do what he was about to do -- wouldn't be able to do it. However, he could tell by the angle of Bucky's knees that Bucky was facing in his direction, and Steve could almost feel the waiting tension radiating off him. When they were kids, retaliation had always followed whenever Bucky had pulled that sort of shit, even though it usually resulted in Steve being pinned, breathless and gasping, by Bucky's much longer arms.
Steve rolled over and attacked.
There was a brief, explosive struggle that collapsed the blanket fort on them. Steve's foot clipped the chair and knocked the legs off it, and Bucky put an accidental fist through the wall in an attempt to get a headlock on Steve. Then they both rolled into the legs of the bed and collapsed the bed frame on top of them, effectively putting an end to the roughhousing.
There was a silence as they lay half under the collapsed bedframe and mattress. Steve's hand was resting on Bucky's stomach; he could feel Bucky's fast breathing, his abdomen rising and falling in the dark. Then Bucky said, "No one is ever going to believe we trashed an entire room of your apartment having a tickle fight. I don't think I believe it."
"I hope Tony never finds out about this," Steve said.
"No reason he would," Bucky said. "Unless someone bugged the place."
"They better not have."
"Steve, we know at least half a dozen people who would bug your apartment -- Stark being one of them, actually -- not to mention at least one who actually has."
Steve still had a hand on Bucky's stomach, which meant Bucky knew where Steve's hand was and he could probably get away with what he was about to do without startling him too much. He shifted his grip and poked him in the ribs. Hard.
Bucky swatted him with the metal hand. Also hard. Very hard. Steve thought he felt a knuckle pop.
And one of the couch cushions was digging into his spine. Steve squirmed around to pull it out. "This may have worked great when we were kids, but I think the floor's actually more comfortable. Which isn't saying a whole lot."
"You know, they have a technological solution for this problem in the future, Rogers," Bucky said dryly. He leaned over Steve and pulled the mattress down off the bed. It came half down on top of them. There was no room for it between the bedframe and the wall, so Bucky gave the bed a hard shove with his metal arm, sliding it out of the way. It skidded across the floor and, with a tremendous crash, collided with the bedside table, knocking it over along with the lamp that (from the tinkling aftermath of glass going everywhere) would never be a lamp again.
Brief silence. Then Bucky said, "Kinda forgot that was there."
"Kinda figured."
Steve threw the couch cushions across the room -- it wasn't like it made any difference at this point -- to make an empty space for the mattress. The sheets were a tangled mess that he was too tired to untangle, but he draped the comforter across the two of them. One pillow could be found -- Bucky normally had two, but there was no telling where the other one had gotten off to -- and Steve retrieved one of the couch cushions for himself. He came back to find that Bucky, true to the style of his blanket-hogging childhood, had neatly and tidily rolled himself up in the comforter, burrito style, leaving none for Steve.
"Asshole," Steve muttered. He got a two-fisted grip on the edge of it, and yanked. What he'd imagined -- Bucky suddenly bereft of comforter, spinning around like a cartoon character -- wasn't what happened; instead, the comforter pulled apart like a wet paper towel, and Steve was left holding a long strip that was his height but only about two feet wide.
Bucky rolled over and stared at him; Steve caught the flash of his eyes in the dark. "You still forget how strong you are, don't you?"
"No," Steve said, pulling the strip of comforter over himself, or at least over the parts of himself that it covered, which was part of his shoulder and some of his thigh. "I meant to do that."
"Sure you did." Bucky propped himself up on his elbow and, for a long moment, surveyed the wreckage of the room. Not a single piece of furniture was left intact. His eyes came eventually to rest on Steve, with the strip of comforter resting atop him like a doily, not managing to cover more than a fraction of his bulk. "I think this is the most amazing thing we've ever done."
"Go to sleep," Steve told him, and pulled what was left of the comforter over his head.