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Steve got through the rest of the evening on autopilot. Between the messy mission and Bucky’s broken leg and Bucky knocking Steve over the head, Steve was exhausted and headachy and felt a little sick; but he made them both soup in the microwave (God bless the microwave), and took a shower, and washed the blood out of Bucky’s hair when Bucky complained that he couldn’t sleep because of the stench.
Steve was a little surprised that the smell of blood bothered Bucky. It was nice to be surprised by Bucky being a little more human than he expected, for once.
Steve poured the bowl of blood stained shampoo suds down the drain, then dropped the bowl in the basin and leaned against the sink. All the strength seemed to have leached out of him: even straightening up seemed exhausting.
He used to worry about that, right after he got the superserum: that the strength so quickly attained might leave him just as quickly. It wasn’t a rational fear, but it haunted his dreams, and sometimes he still woke up from nightmares about asthma attacks and lay in bed, breathing, amazed by his own lungs.
He could have collapsed on the kitchen’s hard linoleum floor and slept like a dog.
“And a glass of water,” Bucky called.
“Bucky,” Steve snapped.
“I can’t get it myself,” Bucky said. His voice was unusually low.
Steve could have kicked himself. For once Bucky had a good reason to be demanding: he could hardly get himself a glass of water when he had a broken leg.
“Sorry,” said Steve. “Sorry. I’ll get it. But then I’m going to bed, okay?”
Bucky didn’t reply. Steve suspected that meant he was holding a barrage of requests in reserve, and he felt so tired he could have cried; but he got out a mug and filled it and took it back over by the couch. A little bit of water sloshed over the rim as he set it down. “That’s it, okay?” Steve said, feeling a little desperate. “Bucky, I’m exhausted. You concussed me, remember?”
Bucky didn’t reply.
“Yes? I’m going to bed,” Steve said.
Bucky didn’t respond. Steve knew from bitter experience that if he wandered off without letting Bucky know, Bucky was sure to shout for Steve as soon as he noticed, so Steve crouched down by the couch to make sure Bucky was awake and listening. “Bucky,” Steve said.
Bucky covered his face. “I heard you.”
But Steve had seen his face, and stared, frozen. Bucky was crying, and by the state of his face he had been for some time.
“Go to sleep,” Bucky said.
“Are you okay?” Steve asked. It was an asinine question, but he didn’t know what else to say, and he could hardly go away. Bucky didn’t need any more confirmation that weakness was shameful.
“My leg hurts.”
“I can get you some painkillers.” Steve didn’t believe for a moment that it was really Bucky’s leg that was distressing him so much, but even in his current state of exhaustion Bucky could probably summon up a fit if Steve suggested that maybe it wasn’t physical pain that was upsetting him.
Bucky nodded. Steve got him the pill, and Bucky took it, but it didn’t seem to help: the silent crying didn’t stop.
Steve moved the couch pillow so he could sit next to Bucky. He expected Bucky to shrink down to the other end of the couch as best he could, but instead, almost defiantly, Bucky plunked his head down on Steve’s thigh.
They sat like that a long time. Steve stroked Bucky’s hair. It didn’t seem to help either, but Steve wasn’t sure what to would help. If anything would help. Maybe Bucky had just run out of cope.
Unfortunately Steve was pretty much out of cope too. Even stroking Bucky’s hair seemed exhausting, and finally Steve just rested his hand on Bucky’s head and leaned his own aching head back against the couch. Bucky’s tears slowly seeped through Steve’s jeans.
Maybe a distraction would help. “You want to watch a movie?”
Bucky used to love movies. When they were kids he found ways to sneak into all the picture shows in Brooklyn, and when they got older he always managed to rustle up two bits to get them into all the most interesting new flicks. But since returning to SHIELD Bucky usually dismissed movies as a waste of time.
Bucky shrugged. At least it wasn’t an outright rejection. “It will distract you from…from your leg,” Steve urged.
“Sure,” Bucky mumbled, and scrubbed at his face again with his sweatshirt cuff.
“Sure,” said Steve. “Sure, a movie. How about…”
Back when Steve figured Bucky’s return would involve a lot more lying quietly around the apartment, Steve and Sam had discussed a lot of possible movies to show Bucky, and rejected almost all of them on the grounds that they might be triggering. Steve wasn’t worried about that so much anymore, but most of them still didn’t seem quite right. God knew Bucky didn’t need to see anything that made violence look either heroic or hilarious.
“How about The Wizard of Oz?” Steve suggested, finally. They saw it three times in theaters, back in the day. But maybe that was just as well. It would be less stressful to watch something they both knew well.
“We saw it before,” Bucky said. He yawned. “Four times.”
“Three,” Steve corrected.
“Maybe you were sick once and didn’t come.”
“Probably,” Steve agreed.
“You found a crackerjack ring under your seat the first time.” Bucky’s voice was a little unsteady. “Remember that?”
Bucky knew – he had to know – how much Steve liked it when he remembered something. Steve wondered if Bucky saved the stories up after he remembered them, waiting to deploy them until he needed Steve to like him. “And Belinda sneaked out of the theater because she was terrified I would use it to propose. Probably the most spectacularly unsuccessful double date you ever arranged, and most of them were awful.”
“That’s not my fault,” Bucky said.
“I know,” Steve said.
“If you’d just made an effort…”
“It’s hard to make an effort when you know you’re going to fail.”
“Well then. It’s not my fault you gave up.”
Steve didn’t know what to say to that. “I’m going to go put the movie in.”
By time Dorothy arrived in Munchkinland, Bucky had relaxed, his head still in Steve’s lap. But the tears hadn’t stopped, and Steve had the unpleasant feeling that Bucky hadn’t actually calmed down, just run out of the energy to stay tense.
The munchkins began to sing about the Lollipop Guild.
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” Bucky said dully.
Steve stirred. “What do you mean?”
“This,” said Bucky. “This – ” and he gestured to encompass the couch, as if the thing Steve wanted most in the world was Bucky broken and weeping in his lap.
Steve went very still. “Bucky, no,” he said.
“You love this,” Bucky insisted. He mashed his face against Steve’s knee. Steve touched the back of Bucky’s neck and Bucky shuddered, all the way down his body. “Less – difficult.”
God, Steve wished Bucky had never heard that. “I want you to be happy,” Steve said. “I want you to feel safe.”
He had been so sure he could do it, too: make Bucky feel safe. Feel loved. Like he could make Bucky all better with enough bowls of chicken soup.
That was an old thought. But abruptly Steve’s thoughts began to fall like dominoes, each one knocking down the next. Because of course just taking care of Bucky didn’t make Bucky feel safe. It seemed normal to Bucky that Steve treated him like the center of the universe. How else would a sensible organization treat a valuable asset, after all?
Because Bucky thought SHIELD was just another organization, just like all the others. Always listening. An oppressive force that Steve and Bucky allied against.
Or that Bucky tried to protect naïve, stupid Steve from.
Or – and Steve winced at the thought – that Steve allied with against Bucky.
No wonder Bucky clubbed Steve upside the head when Steve threatened to hold him down while the doctors worked. It must have been his worst nightmare: Steve the willing henchman, helping SHIELD hurt him. How could Steve have said something so stupid?
Of course feeling loved made Bucky feel vulnerable rather than safe.
But Bucky wasn’t crying because he thought Steve loved him too much. He thought Steve didn’t like him at all.
“I love you,” Steve said. Bucky shuddered again, and Steve had to swallow before he went on. Please let this be the right thing. “Listen, Bucky. I want you to be happy, and I want you to feel safe, but all I really need is for you to be here, okay? Even if you had come back and spent the rest of your life staring catatonic at the wall – ”
“Less difficult,” Bucky repeated.
“Bucky – ”
“But they’d never have let you keep me. Waste of your time.”
Steve nearly argued with him, but he caught himself. Instead he said, “Even if you spend the rest of your life telling me those awful assassination stories. I still want you here.”
Bucky didn’t say anything. Steve sat and stroked Bucky’s hair and tried to think of anything that would stop that hopeless silent crying.
“I haven’t told you any assassination stories for ages,” Bucky mumbled.
“I know. Thank you.”
“I was sick of them anyway,” Bucky said, and his voice was low and clogged. “They’re boring. They all end the same way.”
“They do,” Steve said softly. He was trying to think what to do next. He had said what he needed to say, and now he needed to give Bucky a chance to process it; and he wanted desperately to sleep, but he couldn’t leave Bucky alone. Not yet.
In the end he didn’t say anything, just let the movie play out. Bucky fell asleep before they even reached the yellow brick road, Steve’s hand still resting on his hair. Steve drowsed off too, although unlike Bucky he kept jerking awake whenever the music swelled. His head ached. He wanted to sleep properly. In a bed. With a pillow, and sheets.
But he waited till the movie ended. He didn’t want to wake Bucky up, especially not when Bucky was being so uncharacteristically cuddly. Then he said, “Buck, I’m going to bed.”
Bucky woke up at once. Steve gently slid Bucky’s head off his lap and stood, but before he could leave, Bucky caught his wrist. “Let’s watch another movie.”
Steve wanted to cry, he was so tired. “Tomorrow,” Steve said. But Bucky didn’t let go, and Steve said, “I want to go to sleep, Bucky.”
“You can sleep while we watch another movie,” Bucky said stubbornly, and Steve wanted to yell, because he couldn’t sleep while there was a movie playing in the background: the noise would keep him awake, and wake him up if he drifted off, and he just wanted to sleep.
“Please,” said Bucky, and that was so unusual that it woke Steve up a bit. Bucky had Steve’s cuff bunched up in his hand, and his mouth looked tight around the corners, and a thought worked through the cobwebs of exhaustion in Steve’s brain: He doesn’t want to be alone.
Well. Steve could sympathize with that.
“Let me get my blanket and pillow,” Steve said. “I can sleep on the floor.”
Steve chose a Buster Keaton movie. Bucky and Steve loved Buster Keaton when they were kids. His movies were slapstick, which probably wouldn’t do Bucky much good (as if he needed more confirmation of the hilarity of physical violence) but Steve was too tired to care about anything except the fact that it was a silent movie. There wasn’t any dialogue to miss if he muted the soundtrack.
“We got to watch a movie on the director’s birthday,” Bucky said suddenly. “And they gave us ice cream, too – or at least till they ran out. There wasn’t enough for all the orphans.”
He paused. Steve said, unhappily, “Bucky – ”
“This is a nice story,” Bucky said.
Steve sighed. “What kind of ice cream?” he asked.
“Pistachio. It was the director’s favorite. I liked it, but most of the rest of you didn’t,” Bucky said. “And he would have been furious if we didn’t all finish our bowls, when he was so generous. So I ate everyone else’s, and then I threw up.”
Steve put his arms around his pillow and pressed his face into it. Then he turned his head to the side so Bucky could hear him speak. “You said this was going to be a nice story, Buck.”
“It is a nice story,” Bucky said. “They sent me to the infirmary. I would have needed to sneak in later anyway. You were there with pneumonia, from when the director made you kneel in the courtyard in the snow. And that way I could look after you, and I didn’t need to sneak out in the morning, and we talked all night.”
“You kept me up all night when I was supposed to be recuperating from pneumonia?”
“You would’ve been awake coughing anyway,” Bucky said, offended. “At least you didn’t have to cough all alone.”
Maybe being so tired made it easier to understand, because finally Steve got it. The orphanage stories – whatever else they were – were a communication for Steve. A warning. They’re going to hurt us.
Because – that thought flicked over the last domino in Steve’s head. SHIELD was the orphanage.
Or rather, the orphanage was SHIELD and Hydra and the Soviet intelligence service and maybe even the U.S. Army: any organization that controlled Bucky’s life. All the theys were interchangeable.
A warning and a promise. They’re going to hurt you. But I’ll be there to take care of you after.
And maybe when Steve wasn’t so tired and his head didn’t hurt, he would realize that his brilliant idea actually made no sense. But okay. Go with it for now. “Thank you for looking after me,” Steve said.
Maybe it sounded a little too heartfelt, because Bucky shifted on the couch, looking at Steve. “You know it’s just a story, right?”
“I know. But thank you anyway,” Steve said. “I know you always have my back.”
There was a little silence then. Steve drifted toward sleep. The clean pillowcase smelled like a fresh air and sunlight. Like a walk in the countryside. Without any Hydra agents chasing them, even.
“I’m sorry I hit you.”
Bucky’s voice was so quiet that Steve almost thought it was a dream. But he rolled over and found that Bucky was looking at him. “It’s okay, Bucky.”
Bucky shook his head. “I broke my promise.”
It was the first promise he made to Steve, after one of their early missions, when he slapped Steve across the face for disobeying orders. He promised not to hit Steve again, and until now he hadn’t.
“You thought I was going to hurt you,” Steve said, and he felt like something cracked in his chest. “I’m so sorry I said I’d hold you down, Bucky. There had to be another way…”
Bucky was shaking his head. “No, it’s okay,” he said. “I know you had to. It’s okay.”
Steve wondered if he meant it, or if he was just saying it because he thought SHIELD was listening.
But he was too tired to think it through now. In the morning. In the morning they could start again. Steve had no idea what to do, but at least now maybe he and Bucky were on the same page.
“Good night,” Steve said.
“Night,” Bucky replied.
And Steve finally, blessedly, fell asleep.