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“Who the hell is Bucky?” the Winter Soldier snarls, turning to face Steve.
For a Soviet assassin, he sure sounds like Steve, Sam thinks in the moment before his foot collides with the other man’s head.
*
Steve’s laughing so hard he can hardly breathe, Bucky wobbling precariously along the edge of the dock.
“I’m telling you, Stevie,” Bucky says, balancing on one foot, his eyes and cheeks bright with a combination of the late night air and one to many whiskeys, “I’m telling you, another time and we could have had it all.”
Steve rolls his eyes, and pulls him away from the water’s edge, Bucky compliant in his drunken state. He pushes him away when he stumbles into him, clinging to his shoulders in an attempt to remain vertical.
“What dame’s going to want to go steady with you when you can’t even walk straight?” Steve snipes, elbows all sharp angles as he tries to get Bucky to let go of him, and receives an arm slung over his should for his troubles.
They walk like that for a while, two men weaving their way home in the dead quiet of the Brooklyn night, in silence. Steve thinks Bucky might say something at one point, but all he catches is the tail end of a mumble that might say “What dame indeed.”
*
Natasha has been watching Steve closely since she joined him and Sam in Ukraine. She fiddles with the arrow that she still wears round her neck after all this time, and studies the slump of Steve’s shoulders, the way he holds himself perfectly still, binoculars trained on the abandoned warehouse across the street from their cheap hotel.
There’s a gunshot from a couple of streets away, and Sam stirs, but doesn’t wake. It’s enough to break Steve’s concentration though, his elbow slipping on the window sill and his back straightening; a through back to his days in the army.
“Did I ever tell you how I met Clint?” Natasha asks, her voice barely above a whisper. It’s enough to get Steve’s attention, turning to face her, eyes widened in surprise; Natasha so rarely offers up personal information that any glimpse into her life is precious, a rare raising of the gates she surrounds herself in for protection.
It’s enough time for a shadow to slip out of the warehouse unnoticed. She’s always been good at reading people, and Natasha knows that it’s not yet time for Steve to be reunited with the man who knows her as Natalia.
*
“Bucky hasn’t been the same since we rescued him from Zola,” Steve finally admits after Peggy corners him one evening. “I don’t know what to do.”
She smiles sadly. “War changes people, Steve,” she says, resting her hand on his arm. Her eyes are soft, and her voice understanding, but there’s a sharp undercurrent to it. Steve sometimes forgets just how much Peggy sees. “Does it occur to you that you’re not the same person he left in Brooklyn either?” She squeezes his arm gently before turning and heading back to the command tent.
Steve knows she’s not talking about his new body.
*
“Here,” Bucky says, pulling the other boy out of the dirt. “They’re not worth it.”
The boy gives a watery smile, and pokes at the grazes on his knees. Bucky resolves there and then not to let anyone push him around again.
*
In a now defunct HYDRA facility in Turkey, the Winter Soldier puts a bullet in the head of an agent sneaking up on the man who calls himself Captain America, but is really Steve Rogers.
He’s not sure why he does it.
*
In the summer of 1938, Steve draws portraits in the park. He makes more money than he ever has in his life before his allergies catch up with him and he’s forced back to bed. He and Bucky eat better than ever, and drink away more money than they probably should have done. They’ll regret it come winter, Steve knows, but the chance to live care-freely is too tempting.
The highlight of his summer though, are the long evenings spent lounging in their apartment, the late sun painting Bucky’s face orange as he smokes through the open window. Steve does some of his best work on these evenings, filling page after page, but he knows that no one will ever see it. He’s put too much of himself onto these pages to ever show anyone, least of all Bucky. Sometimes he catches Bucky’s eyes across the apartment, and for a second they’re so gentle and open that he thinks he might know, but the expression is gone between one heartbeat and the next.
When he sees some of the portraits again, in 2014, he writes a polite letter to the Smithsonian, asking that they please be removed from public display. A few days later, a parcel turns up at his door containing page after page of work that he thought had been lost to time.
*
The Winter Soldier spends a week in Washington gathering as much information as he can. He visits the Smithsonian exhibition and leaves with a throbbing headache that settles behind his eyes and doesn’t leave for months. He revisits the mark’s apartment. He reads everything he can find about Captain America. Nothing gives him the answers he’s looking for.
He even visits the care home that the mark regularly attends, not expecting to find anything. He identifies the patient he visits and settles to watch her through the window. There’s nothing special about her. His patience is waning, he’s tired and hungry, and has never been so long without a mission. These are the reasons he’ll give for slipping on the damp roof, but when he looks up and finds the old lady smiling gently at him, all sense flies out of his mind. For a moment he sees a shadow of the woman she must once have been.
Later, as he pours over every file he could find on Peggy Carter, an image of her in a red dress with matching lipstick springs unbidden to his mind. The image is laced through with pain. He closes the file.
*
It’s freezing in Italy in the winter; so cold that Bucky is sure that he’ll never be able to get up again. But the fire is a comforting light if not warmth, and the whiskey they pass round warms his throat. The commandos are trading wild stories about dames they’ve known back home, and he’s sure that most are more fiction than fact, but their laughter is a comfort in the night.
Bucky leans into Steve as he passes him the flask, the rasp of his pencil a reminder of balmy summers back in Brooklyn. His hand curves around Steve’s ankle, a single point of contact in a world of distance, as he watches him trace the curve of Dugan’s grin.
He leaves his hand on Steve’s ankle.
*
Bucky is filled with a quiet, violent rage that he hasn’t felt since those lost weeks after he pulled Steve out of the Potomac, when he finds out that Steve has been shot. He loses himself to a blinding white anger that is all the Winter Soldier, willing to lose himself to the cold rather than be without Steve again.
The cold recedes a little when he hefts the shield.
*
Bucky’s trail goes cold in Normandy. They debate about whether it’s a trap, but Sam thinks it’s a clue, and that they should head to England. It’s clutching at straws, but it’s all they have left. They make preparations to leave in the morning.
They find a photo of the Mona Lisa torn from a textbook taped to Steve’s shield in the morning.
They go to Paris.
*
They fuck before they make love. Desperate, greedy hands pulling at one another. One too many double dates gone wrong, too much unsaid between them. Unrest is growing in Europe, and they both know that war is coming, that they’re living on borrowed time. So they fuck, in the dead of night; bitten off moans, sweat clinging to their bodies. Greedy mouths and greedy hands, no time for sweet nothings in war. Dragging one another closer and closer, never close enough, not until they’ve crawled so deeply into one another that you can’t tell where one begins and the other end. It’s rough, and primal, and despite what anyone says it’s the most honest thing in their lives.
They never say anything about it, terrified that this thing between them will consume them whole. They’re just two men living on someone else’s time and they know it.
*
Steve hasn’t been to Paris since the war, still hasn’t seen the Mona Lisa. He takes the hint and visits the Louvre.
Bucky finds him on the Pont Des Arts. His hair is longer, but it’s been pulled back and he’s clearly shaved recently. A baseball cap is pulled down low over his eyes. He doesn’t look like the charming ladies’ man of the 1930’s Brooklyn, but he’s more Bucky than the Winter Soldier right now.
“Bucky,” Steve whispers, his name a benediction, a prayer. He’s spent so long looking for him, longer perhaps than he even realises. He steps forwards.
Bucky steps back. “I don’t know if I’m him anymore.”
“You are,” Steve says. “You are because you ask that.”
*
The crew chatter excitedly around him as Agent Delta 3 drums his fingers against the desktop as he scans the mission files one last time. He knows without checking that everything is in order, but it’s something to do whilst they wait for his final crew member to arrive. A last minute turn of events left them down an engineer, and the emergency transfer, fresh from training, is running late.
He sighs as he turns away from the screens; his crew are heading out for rotation in the space station in quadrant 107, and they’ve already had to delay their shuttle twice. Punctuality is important in missions that require such close coordination.
“Sorry, sorry!” someone announces. “I know I’m late, but I got caught up in…” The flurry of limbs and hair tapers off as he catches the look on Agent Delta 3’s face. “Sorry,” he mutters again.
“Agent Rho 9?”
“Yessir!” the man replies, straightening.
“We don’t tend to stand by formalities in this unit,” Agent Delta 3 says, offering his hand. “I’m Steve.”
The other man takes his hand. “Bucky.”
“Bucky,” Steve repeats. The name rolls of his tongue and feels oddly at home in his mouth. “Welcome to S.H.I.E.L.D.”