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Bucky cubed the boiled potatoes in silence, but when Steve started tossing the chicken in flour, he said, “This is picnic food.”
“Yep,” said Steve. “I figure now that your leg is better, we could head out for a picnic tomorrow. Maybe visit Monticello or Mount Vernon, see some Civil War battlefields.”
Steve braced himself for an explosion, but Bucky just kept chopping potatoes. “After PT?” he said.
Steve put the chicken in the shimmering oil. “Of course.”
“Two hours.”
“One hour. Same as usual,” said Steve, and waited for an argument. Ever since Bucky’s leg had healed enough for them to start PT again, Bucky had been trying to jack the time up.
It wouldn’t have exasperated Steve so much, except that Bucky had never cared particularly before. Sometimes they trained for hours; sometimes, especially if they’d gotten banged up on a mission, they went down to half an hour or even dropped PT completely for a couple of days.
But Bucky was resting up from a job well done on those days, not serving out a suspension for bad behavior. That must have made it easier.
But after that perfunctory suggestion, Bucky didn’t start wheedling for a longer PT session. He began chopping up a red onion instead.
“We used to have picnics at Central Park,” Bucky said. “Back in the twenties, before things got so bad in the crash.”
“Yeah,” said Steve. Steve only got invited along a couple of times, but Bucky’s family went at least once a month every summer. Once Bucky brought back a lollipop the size of Steve’s head.
“I’d heard that the police would buy ice cream for kids who got lost, so I kept trying to lose track of my folks. Finally managed it when I was eight.” He lapsed into silence, scraping the diced onions and potato cubes into the bowl. “And then I couldn’t eat the damn ice cream.”
Steve turned away from the hissing chicken. “You always told us you ate yours and the other kids’ too. Vanilla and chocolate and strawberry, all in one day.”
Bucky was digging mayonnaise out of the jar over the salad. “Made a better story that way.”
He bent over the potato salad, a couple of stray strands of hair falling across his forehead. His hair was neatly pulled back: Steve had combed it out for him that morning, after Bucky made them scrambled eggs for breakfast.
He kept his head down then, too, hiding his face behind his snarled hair when Steve thanked him for the eggs. “I was hungry,” Bucky said, like that had ever made him cook anything before. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I made too much. So you might as well eat the extra.”
“Let me comb your hair,” said Steve, because Bucky had liked it the one time Steve did it, and because he hated to see Bucky looking like a vagabond with his hair tangled up in his face.
He suspected Bucky would expect to have his hair combed if he ever made breakfast again, but that was okay. Tit for tat.
The oil popped ominously. Steve turned back to the stove to flip the chicken.
Bucky was stirring the potato salad with a wooden spoon when Steve turned back. “Why don’t you ever want to talk about Brooklyn?” he asked.
“We were just talking about Brooklyn,” Steve said.
“You never bring it up, though,” Bucky said.
“The doctors said I needed to let you remember on your own time,” Steve said. “Otherwise you might get confused about what you really remembered, and what I’d just told you about. And I couldn’t tell how much you remembered…”
Either Bucky’s memories were getting clearer, or Bucky had just started talking about them more; but it had been a while since Steve doubted that Bucky actually remembered.
Bucky leaned the wooden spoon against the side of the bowl. “I remember okay,” said Bucky. “I don’t remember everything, but – other people forget things from their childhoods too.”
He sounded uncertain. “Yeah, we do,” Steve said. “I’d forgotten all about the ice cream story till you told me. Even though you must’ve told it to me fifty times that summer.”
Bucky smiled. “I drove you nuts back then, too.”
Steve removed the first batch of fried chicken from the skillet. “Do you want me to talk about Brooklyn more?” he asked.
But Bucky shook his head. “Not right now.”
The second batch of fried chicken cooked faster than the first. Bucky sat, arms folded on the table top, and watched Steve cook until Steve told him to get some Saran wrap to cover the potato salad.
Bucky fetched it. “Are we gonna get to eat any of this tonight?” Bucky asked.
“No,” said Steve. “I thought we’d order a pizza.”
“I want anchovies.”
“Two pizzas,” said Steve. “So the anchovies won’t spoil mine. And only if you’ll eat your share of the leftovers.”
Helping with the cooking had revolutionized Bucky’s stance on leftovers. He sulked for a few seconds, but that was mostly for show: just to make sure Steve knew he was making a sacrifice when he said, “Okay.”
***
The next morning started out well, too. Bucky made scrambled eggs again (maybe he liked having his hair combed as much as Steve liked combing it), and he didn’t complain when the timer rang for the end of PT.
But then Steve started loading up the fried chicken and the potato salad in a cloth grocery sack. Bucky balked. “SHIELD is actually letting you go through with this shitty picnic plan?”
Then Steve realized why Bucky hadn’t put up a fight the night before. He had been absolutely certain SHIELD wouldn’t let them go. “Yeah,” Steve said.
“Have you asked for permission?” Bucky asked.
What the hell? If Bucky had a motto, it was probably it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. Not that he ever asked for forgiveness, either.
“Bucky, I don’t ask SHIELD what I’m allowed to do in my leisure time,” Steve said. “It’s really none of their business.” Bucky just stared at him. Clearly the idea that any part of Steve’s life wasn’t SHIELD business was a foreign concept. “Look,” said Steve. “If Coulson doesn’t like it, then I’ll tell him it was my idea – ”
“No!”
Shit, shit, shit. He shouldn’t have said that. “Bucky, he’s really, really not going to care,” Steve said. “Coulson’s a nice guy – ”
“They always seem nice!”
Alexander Pierce flashed into Steve’s mind. Steve had already been on his guard the one time he met Pierce (”Trust no one”. Bucky and Fury would probably get along great if they ever met), but he remembered how Pierce seemed to exude goodwill, in a way that made Steve feel stubborn and foolish and small for not trusting him. He hated feeling small.
Did Pierce bother putting on that oppressively kindly façade for the Asset?
Bucky never talked about Hydra to Steve. Even his assassination stories, back when he told them, were all from Soviet times.
Bucky had finished loading the fried chicken into the sack while Steve mused. “Let’s go,” Bucky said. He tossed the sack at Steve, a little too hard, and was out the door before Steve could say We don’t have to if you don’t want –
Which was probably just as well. The point was to push Bucky out of his comfort zone a little, because until now he’d succeeded pretty well in staying in it and it seemed like a pretty shitty place to be. He was taken care of and too valuable to be hurt lightly, and never mind if most of his interactions with people were hostile and he was pretty consistently terrified.
Still, Steve’s stomach was in knots all the time as he drove his motorcycle through DC, past the suburbs, all the way out into rural Maryland. Bucky rode behind him, not touching him at all, and Steve hoped to God that Bucky wasn’t hating every minute of it.
Finally Steve pulled into a dinky little gas station by the side of a minor highway. He didn’t take off his helmet. He preferred to ride without it, but it was less likely that people would recognize him as long as he was wearing it.
But he did flip up the visor as he swung around to look at Bucky, and one look at Bucky’s face made his anxiety evaporate. Bucky wore his most conspiratorial grin, like the time they snuck into an abandoned building that both their mothers had firmly forbidden. He poked Steve in the ribs. “Cheer up,” he said.
Steve dug a five-dollar bill out of his pocket. “Can you grab us a couple Cokes while I gas up?”
“Sure.”
Bucky hadn’t worn a helmet, and even though it was pulled back, his hair was a dusty mess. But unlike Natasha, he didn’t consider looking good part of his job description. If anything it was the opposite: when they had to interact with civilians on missions, Bucky was quiet, his shoulders rolled forward to disguise his height, his clothes a little too big and his hair a little too messy. If he added a bit of a stagger to his walk, civilians hugged the other edge of the sidewalk to avoid the drunk.
Steve had just finished refueling the motorcycle when Bucky came back, carrying two Cokes and a candy bar. “I had some extra money,” he said. “So I bought us a Twix.” He held it up. “It’s two candy bars. So we can share.”
Steve had asked Sam for help with a destination, and Sam suggested an obscure little state forest that was practically deserted when they arrived, despite the perfect early fall weather. Yellow touched a few of the trees, but most of the leaves were still green and rustling in the light breeze as they walked. It was just warm enough for the breeze to feel good.
Plus, the park had a hidden treasure: a boulder so big it was really a hill, with trees growing out of its crannies and lichen thick on the sides. Bucky brightened up when he saw it: he’d always loved to climb things, even though the only things available in Brooklyn were fire escapes. “We’re gonna eat up there?” he said.
“Yep,” said Steve.
There was a bad moment when Bucky opened up his Coke and it geysered out right in his face. Steve pressed his hands against the rock, steadying himself against the look of wild-eyed rage on Bucky’s face, because it was so much like the look Bucky had on the helicarrier and his heart was suddenly beating double time.
But he kept his voice steady. “I’ll share mine,” said Steve. “We’ll open it later so it won’t explode like that. I guess they got shaken up on the ride.”
Bucky looked at him, narrow-eyed, like he was trying to gauge whether Steve was laughing at him secretly. He wiped his face off with his sleeve, nonchalant as a cat licking itself clean after doing something foolish, and said, “You bring forks for the potato salad?”
Steve hadn’t, but they ate it all anyway, and all the fried chicken too.
Afterward Bucky lay down on the boulder, looking up at the nearly cloudless sky. Steve lay down too, his leather jacket behind his head as a pillow, and stared up at the contrails. He was remembering how they used to lie on top of Bucky’s building as kids, waiting for Bucky’s neighbor Frank-with-the-pigeons (presumably he had a real last name, but they never learned it) to come home so they could watch him feed the birds, and in the meantime making up stories about the shapes in the clouds.
He was about to bring it up, but Bucky said, “This is like after they kicked us out of the orphanage.”
“They kicked us out of the orphanage?” Steve asked. Bucky had never mentioned that before.
“Yeah.” Bucky sounded pretty chipper about it. “Or they kicked me out, ‘cause I turned sixteen, and you came along too because we figured you wouldn’t make it without me.”
Of course. Orphanage Steve could barely breathe without Bucky’s help. “And then what’d we do?”
“We jumped a train and went out west,” Bucky said. “And the first night, we were lying on one of those open train cars – no roof, barely any sides – and just looking up at the stars, because there were so many more than we ever saw with all the city lights at the orphanage.”
It was a nice story, maybe the nicest orphanage story that Bucky had ever told. He had his head tilted back against the stone, baring his throat, and his arm held up to shield his eyes from the sun, and he was smiling. “And a couple days later we got you a job as a jockey, ‘cause you were so little,” Bucky said. “And I looked after the horses.”
“And then I fell off the horse and broke every bone in my body?”
“No,” said Bucky. He rolled his head to the side to grin at Steve. “That’s a gory imagination you’ve got, Steve, you might want to get that looked at.”
Steve raised his eyebrows. Bucky’s grin widened, and then they both cracked up, lying on top of the rock beneath the bright blue sky.
Bucky sat up. “Let’s try to open your Coke,” he said. “Maybe it’s calmed down enough now we can drink it.”
***
They went for drives almost every day after that, though not to Monticello or Mount Vernon or any battlefields. The media wasn’t nearly as interested in Steve Rogers as they were in, say, Tony Stark, but he didn’t think they’d be able to resist a headline like “Captain America Visits Something Really American,” and he didn’t feel like discussing his opinions about Thomas Jefferson or Bull Run or whatever.
Or explaining about Bucky. The news media had been so preoccupied with the collapse of SHIELD that they barely noticed the Winter Soldier, and SHIELD had built up all kinds of false identities for Bucky if anyone asked. But the news might still wonder why Steve was hanging out with a guy who looked just like his dead best friend.
So they stuck to the back roads instead, driving past cornfields in Maryland and over rolling hills in Virginia, stopping at little half-forgotten state parks to hike through the woods, wading in streams and climbing the trees.
Usually they took most of their supplies along, but Steve liked to stop along the way at gas stations or produce stands, places where Bucky could chat with other people for a few minutes. It was good for Bucky to interact with more people, and Steve just didn’t have enough friends to really help with that: just Sam and Natasha and Peggy, and Peggy wasn’t an option. It hadn’t gone well the one time Steve took Bucky to see her, not long after SHIELD released Bucky into Steve’s custody.
(Or rather, it went all right at first. But then Peggy had one of her attacks and forgot that she’d seen them before, and Bucky was out the door so fast that Peggy got confused all over again, and it was hard for Steve to calm her down when he was so upset himself.
By the time he went after Bucky, Steve was afraid he’d have to search all over the facility. But Bucky was sitting against the wall not far from Peggy’s room, his knees drawn up to his chest. Steve said his name about a hundred times, but Bucky was somewhere else entirely in his head and never even blinked, and Steve hadn’t realized yet that he could bring Bucky back by saying soldat.
So Steve sat down next to Bucky and put an arm around him. He half-expected that to bring Bucky back, and maybe to make Bucky hit him. But Bucky just sat there, staring at his knees, and Steve sat there with him for so long that he went into a sort of fugue state, too, and didn’t notice at first when Bucky leaned his head on Steve’s shoulder. When he finally realized, he knew that Bucky had been there for a while.
He squeezed Bucky’s shoulders, very gently. It was the first time he touched Bucky more than incidentally since he came in from the cold. “Come on, Buck,” he said. “Let’s go home.”)
Sam and Natasha both helped, though. Sam knew the area better than Steve, and he drove them to sites Steve never would have found otherwise. “You’re not gonna rip the door off my car this time, are you?” he asked Bucky the first time, and Bucky laughed and laughed. Steve never could have joked with Bucky about that.
He took them to an old reservoir, which Bucky didn’t much like, and an old fire tower, which Bucky loved. He begged Steve to let him rip the bars out of the window so he could climb on the roof. “The view will be so much better,” he said.
“You can’t vandalize government property for the view,” Steve replied.
“This wouldn’t be a problem if Sam brought along his wings,” Bucky said. “Then he could just fly us to the top.”
Natasha took them out once too. She rented a convertible and endeared herself to Bucky forever by letting him drive all the way up the eastern seaboard to a ridiculously exclusive restaurant where she had, somehow, nabbed them a back corner booth.
In Steve’s day, the fashionable restaurants had piano players and chandeliers – or at least, they did in the movies. Steve had never eaten at a place like that, although Bucky got a job as a fancy-pants waiter one summer. He had looked ravishing in his tux.
This place was all exposed ductwork and purposefully scuffed floors, and none of the waiters looked like they’d ever even seen a tux. The crowd was wearing the twenty-first century equivalent of fancy dress, carefully casual rather than sharp. Natasha had talked Bucky into exchanging his sweatshirt for one of Steve’s leather jackets. He kept tugging at the left sleeve, like he wanted to pull it down over the knuckles of his glove, the way he wore his sweatshirts.
“What are we going to do if someone recognizes me?” Steve asked.
“We’ll tell them I’m your hot new girlfriend,” Natasha said, and fluttered her fake eyelashes. She was wearing a wig, too, long blonde curls that fell in her face so she looked like Veronica Lake. “Cappie-poo,” Natasha cooed, in the most un-Natasha of voices.
Bucky and Steve both snorted. “If I let a girl call me Cappie-poo,” Steve said, “that’s probably a sign that she’s got me under mind-control.”
“So who am I, then?” Bucky asked. He was leaning back in the banquette, his right arm draped over the back of the booth. “You bring along a third wheel just in case you get tired of him?”
Natasha didn’t even pause to think. “No. Steve brought us in one on each arm, like Tony Stark.”
She was smiling, joking, but Steve and Bucky were both struck dumb, and suddenly the moment was awkward. Bucky’s arm slid off the back of the booth, back down into his lap. “Captain America doesn’t do that kind of thing,” Bucky said. He was tugging on his glove, pulling it tight over his hand. “Haven’t you heard? He’s an all-American hero.”
Steve flushed, because Bucky knew perfectly well that he did do those kinds of things – or at least, he’d done them for Bucky. Natasha was looking between them, and Steve hoped to God she wasn’t seeing anything – as if Natasha wasn’t trained to see everything.
(As if she needed to be a superspy to notice Steve’s crush. Peggy had seen it too, but then she was English. She knew all about the crushes boys got on each other, and she didn’t see Steve’s as anything unusual or wrong or any reason why he couldn’t love her too. He’d loved that about her, along with everything else: that she knew everything and loved him anyway.)
“I don’t think even Tony could get away with that,” said Steve. “Girl on one arm, fellow on the other?”
“He’d love the attention,” said Natasha. “We should suggest it to him next time we need to distract the media.”
Bucky took one of the curly breadsticks from the goblet in the center of the table and used it to shovel up some hummus. “Is Clint gonna be happy seeing you macking on Captain America on the front page?”
“These things happen on missions,” Natasha responded airily.
Steve raised his eyebrows. “Missions?”
“Hardest one I’ve had all year,” said Natasha. “Showing you how to have a good time.”
That made Steve laugh, and he thought the awkward moment passed. But Bucky got quiet afterwards, and halfway through the entrées – well, halfway through Steve’s entrée; Bucky could inhale his food when he wanted – Bucky left the table.
Steve almost went after him, but Natasha said, “Let him go. Maybe he needs some time alone.”
Probably he did. He and Steve had been living in each other’s pockets for too long. “Maybe half the problem is that he’s been spending too much time with me,” Steve said. “I should’ve gotten him out of the house a long time ago. Let him spend more time with other people.”
Natasha looked up from her gnocchi. “Steve, when I met him a year ago, he wasn’t playing well with the other children. I think you were the only person he really talked to – outside of giving orders or strategizing for missions.”
“He talked to Sam,” Steve objected. (Always about Sam’s wings. Maybe that counted as mission-related.) “He talked to you.”
“But that’s my superpower,” Natasha said. Her gnocchi oozed gorgonzola on her plate as she sliced it in half. “People talk to me.”
But mostly it was Steve and Bucky on Steve’s motorcycle. Once they made it all the way to Appalachia and drove back home in the dark, and Bucky fell asleep behind Steve on the bike, his flesh arm around Steve’s waist and his head propped against Steve’s helmet.
Steve pulled to a stop at one of the scenic outlooks, which looked even more scenic in the moonlight. Bucky roused and started to pull away. “I fell asleep,” he said.
“It’s okay,” said Steve, and touched his hand over Bucky’s to keep him where he was. “I’m just gonna…” He took off his helmet, stowed it, and started down the mountainside again. Bucky dropped his face against Steve’s shoulder, his hair soft against Steve’s neck.
It was around mid-September that they stopped at a peach stand. It was late season fruit, so ripe that Steve could smell it even as he parked the motorcycle under a tree about a hundred yards away. The stand owner sat in a folding chair reading a magazine, but she tossed it in the bed of her pick-up truck when she saw them coming.
“Well hello, boys,” she called. She leaned on her elbows on the stand. “Y’all look like you could use a couple bushels.”
“Don’t know how we’d carry them on the motorcycle,” Steve said.
“Guess you’d just have to sit down and eat them right here, then,” she replied. She grinned at Steve, but her eyes flickered over to Bucky.
“I don’t know that we could inconvenience you like that, ma’am,” Bucky said, a touch of her southern accent in his voice. Bucky did that back in Brooklyn too, not out of mockery, just fitting himself in with his company. There’d always been a little chameleon about him.
Steve let himself fade into the background while they chatted. They would have called the peach lady a dame, back in Brooklyn: tall, curvy, maybe in her late thirties, with a smile that said she knew what she liked and a southern accent that got stronger the longer she chatted with Bucky, probably because she noticed that he liked it. He was smiling down at the ground, a little shy, the way he got only with the girls he liked best.
“So you’re tellin’ me that Virginia peaches are just as good as Georgian?”
“Honey, if that’s what you think I haven’t done my job. I’m tellin’ you Virginia peaches beat Georgian peaches hollow,” she said, and she leaned across the stand to touch his upper arm to make her point.
The left arm. The metal arm, and Steve could see the surprise in her face when she felt the hard metal below his sleeve. The world seemed to go in black and white for a moment, like a freeze frame from an old movie, and Steve thought, Oh God, no.
But Bucky didn’t make any move to hurt her. He stood statue still. All the flirtation had drained out of his face, and he looked like he might throw up.
The woman didn’t snatch her hand away at once. She was still too for a moment, and then she moved away. As soon as she wasn’t touching him, he took a few steps back. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, her voice gentle, and Steve thought the gentleness was more on account of Bucky’s discomfort than the prosthetic.
“I – Afghanistan,” Bucky choked.
“I lost a cousin over there,” the woman said. “Glad you made it out alive.”
Bucky’s face crunched up. Steve could see him trying to get a hold of himself and failing. “I’ll go wait by the bike,” he said, and he didn’t even try to be polite about it, just turned around and left.
Steve almost went after him, but he stopped. Bucky would want a little time to compose himself, and anyway, he didn’t want to be rude to the peach lady.
She was looking after Bucky, wistful and a little sad. “He’s had a real rough time, your friend?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Seems like he’s not used to people being nice to him,” she said, and Steve had to look at the ground at that, because that was his fault. She touched his hand. “Will he be offended if I give y’all a basket of peaches?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him offended by free food, ma’am,” Steve said. “But I’d be happy to pay.”
She gave another big grin. “Well,” she said. “I do have to earn a living. What do you say to half price?”
Bucky was already sitting on the motorcycle when Steve got there. “Let’s go,” Bucky said, and when Steve took a little too long to stow the peaches, he repeated it: “Let’s go.”
Steve kicked the motorcycle into gear and peeled out. He took the first turn that they came to, shooting down a gravel road and leaving a cloud of dust behind.
“Faster,” Bucky called, but Steve didn’t want to go faster, not when Bucky was so tense. If they hit a rut or something Bucky might go flying; he wasn’t moving with the motorcycle at all.
He pulled to a stop as soon as he found an ample shoulder. “Let’s go,” said Bucky, and he kicked the motorcycle tire.
“You seem upset,” Steve said, and he reached for Bucky. He meant to put a hand on Bucky’s shoulder, but his hand must have gotten too close to Bucky’s face, because Bucky shied away. Not long after he returned, SHIELD brought in a dentist to see him, and Bucky was so twitchy that SHIELD offered (it occurred to Steve, now, that Bucky probably thought threatened) to have him sedated.
“I’ll be still,” Bucky told them, and he was very, very still after that. Steve hadn’t realized then that it meant he was afraid.
He was very still now, too. His breathing was steady and his gaze calm, but Steve could see his heartbeat pounding in his throat as fast as a hummingbird’s.
“Maybe,” Steve said, and he was trying not to sound careful, because Bucky hated that. “We should go back – ”
Home, Steve was going to say, but he never got there, because Bucky thrust two of his metal fingers through the back tire on the motorcycle. “She bought the Afghanistan thing, it’s all taken care of!”
“Bucky – ”
“And it’s just going to cause more problems to go back and shoot her – ”
“Bucky – ”
“Because people will ask questions, bodies always cause questions – ”
“Bucky, Bucky, Bucky – ” Steve was almost chanting his name, but it was like Bucky didn’t hear him: he was looking right in Steve’s face, but not seeing him either.
“And so do disappearances, so it’s really better to just leave it like it is. I handled it. She didn’t even see anything, it’s all still a secret, and maybe it won’t be if people start digging, which they will if there’s a body – ”
“Bucky!” said Steve, and he put his hands on Bucky’s shoulders: not painfully but firmly, and Bucky’s gaze focused on him. “We’re not going to go back and shoot her. I would never order you to kill a civilian. No one in SHIELD would ever order you to kill a civilian. Never. Okay?”
Bucky’s mouth opened, just a little. His eyes fell away from Steve’s, just for a moment. But Steve didn’t have time to read his expression before Bucky lifted his head again, glaring into Steve’s eyes, and said, “I know. I’m not stupid, Steve, you’ve told me five hundred times.”
Steve was thinking of a lot of things. Bucky’s insistence that his armor needed to have two sleeves. The way he always wore a sweatshirt, even in summer. How he was always fiddling with his cuff and glove to make sure his metal arm was covered. He took off his metal arm when Steve insisted he should wear a t-shirt, even though he’d kept it a secret that his arm could detach at all until then.
“You don’t like killing civilians, do you?” Steve said, and he tried not to sound too happy. But it was such a relief that Bucky had qualms about killing anyone that some of it crept into his voice.
Bucky jerked back his head. “I don’t care,” he said, and God, he was a good liar. Steve almost believed him, and damn the evidence.
Almost. “Then why puncture my tire?”
“I – ” Bucky’s eyes fell again, and this time Steve had plenty of time to read the look on his face, because he didn’t snap back in control again. He looked sick and – not quite ashamed –
Hunted. Run to ground, too tired from the chase to think of an out, and furious with himself for letting Steve corner him like that.
A pick-up truck rattled past, covering them in a cloud of dust. Bucky lifted his head to watch it go by, and when it was gone he looked at Steve again, with the look on his face that made it look like there was nothing behind his eyes.
It had been a long time since Steve had seen that look, though Bucky wore it a lot for the first few months after his return. Back then, Steve worried that maybe there really was nothing there behind that blankness – never mind he’d watched parts of Bucky’s SHIELD interrogation, when he explained Hydra tactics and drew pictures of operatives he had worked with or technicians he’d seen. Bucky had noticed everything, remembered it all.
But when he put on that automaton act was hard to believe there was anything but emptiness in his skull – even if only minutes before Bucky had been demonstrating just how much stuff he’d crammed in there.
“Let’s see if we can find a gas station and get a new tire,” said Steve. “And maybe stop for lunch along the way?”
He knew Bucky heard him, because he looked in Steve’s face and blinked. But he didn’t say anything.
“You’d better get off the motorcycle,” Steve said. “It’ll blow our cover if I carry you both around.”
Blink. Blink. Blink. Then, fluidly as a cat, Bucky slipped off the motorcycle. Steve took it by the handlebars and pushed it along the road.
Bucky wasn’t coming. Of course he wasn’t. That was part of the automaton persona: he didn’t do anything if he wasn’t told to. “Come on,” Steve called, and Bucky fell in step beside him, walking on the weeds.
They found a pond a couple of miles on. A gaggle of Canada geese swam at the far end, and Steve elected to stop for lunch. Bucky liked animals. He’d probably enjoy watching the geese, though it was hard to tell how he felt about anything when his eyes were blank like that.
Bucky was out of practice at playing automaton. He started eating his hero sandwich as soon as Steve dug it out of the saddlebag, rather than waiting for orders, and when he’d finished most of it he started picking bits off the heel and tossing them into the water, like he hoped the geese would come over.
Steve was relieved. He never knew how to deal with the automaton. Presumably that was the point.
“Bucky,” Steve said, and Bucky glanced over at him. Yes, definitely back. “Bucky. Not wanting to kill civilians, that’s actually a good thing, you know that? No one at SHIELD is going to be mad at you for it. They’ll probably be over the moon to hear it.”
“They’ll just think it’s more of your wishful thinking,” Bucky shot back. “They know you’re stupid about me.”
Okay. Point. “I’m still right, though. Aren’t I?”
Bucky hurled a breadcrumb at the water. “Fuck, Steve, I swear Sasha had a border collie with more imagination than you.”
That wasn’t the response Steve expected. “What do you mean?”
One of the geese was drifting closer. Bucky tore a few more crumbs off his bread, tossing them into the pond. “So SHIELD would be happy about it right now,” he said finally. “So what?”
Steve was still baffled. “I don’t follow,” he said. “I thought you wanted to make SHIELD happy.”
He didn’t mean it as an accusation, but the hunted look came back into Bucky’s face. “Of course I do,” he said. “I didn’t mean – of course that’s important, that’s the most important thing to me.”
Steve wished he could take his own last sentence and stuff it back in his mouth. Bucky looked half-panicked. “I know,” he said. “SHIELD knows how valuable you are, Buck.”
Bucky calmed down. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” But Steve wished he hadn’t said it. He was supposed to be getting Bucky out of his comfort zone, and no one’s going to hurt me because I’m too valuable was smack in the middle of it.
“I don’t want them to think it would compromise my effectiveness…”
“Do you think not wanting to kill civilians has compromised mine?”
Bucky took the last couple of inches of Steve’s hero out of his hand and started tearing off pieces to toss to the goose. A second goose was drifting over, too. “Steve, don’t tell SHIELD – ”
He seemed to abandon the sentence in midair.
“I don’t have to if you don’t want me to,” said Steve. “But they really would be happy, Buck.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” He hurled the last quarter inch of bread into the water. The two geese flapped at each other, fighting over it. “I want to tell you – ”
He stopped again. “Spit it out,” Steve said.
And maybe for once he’d said the right thing, because the words came out in a stream. “It’s not always going to be right now. Coulson will be gone long before we are: he’s old and he’s not well. There’ll be a replacement, and who knows what he’ll be like. And that’s assuming SHIELD’s still around – ”
“Of course SHIELD will still be around.” Steve already tried to kill the damn thing once, and it just wouldn’t die.
“Like the Soviet Union? Lenin zhil, Lenin zhiv, Lenin budyit zhit!” Bucky’s face twisted up. “And now all his busts are smashed up in dumpsters. And we’re so valuable, we’ll always be fighting for someone. Of course we’d try to die in SHIELD’s last stand. If they have one, I mean. But if we don’t, probably the next people won’t be so – ”
Steve was almost positive Bucky intended to say stupid, but even here, far from the possibility of listening ears, Bucky couldn’t bring himself to do it. “So you don’t want it on file that you have any weaknesses,” Bucky said. “Because they’ll be looking for that.”
“Oh,” said Steve.
“And I want SHIELD to be around, of course I do, but it’s so weak – please don’t tell them I said that. But for fuck’s sake, Steve, they’re so understaffed they haven’t even dared to put us back in cryo.”
“What?” said Steve. That at least he could say something about. “SHIELD’s not going to put us in cryo.”
“Well, yeah. Like I said. They’re understaffed – ”
“No, because they don’t,” said Steve. “SHIELD doesn’t put its agents in cryo.”
“No?” Bucky sounded pissed. “You expect me to believe they just happened to pull you out of the ocean right before they needed you to fight an alien invasion?”
“Yes,” said Steve. “Because that’s how it happened.”
Bucky inspected Steve’s face like he was thinking about dissecting it. “Well,” he said grudgingly. “You think you’re telling the truth, anyway.”
Steve felt a moment of paralyzing fear. Oh God, what if –
But if he started letting Bucky’s paranoia get to him, they were both sunk.
And if they’d learned anything from Bucky’s experience with the chair, it was that it didn’t erase memories nearly as effectively as Hydra had liked to believe. If Steve had been going on missions for the last fifty years or so, something would have jogged his memory by now.
“It was two years between the Chitauri invasion and when I met you,” Steve said. “I had barely any missions for most of it, and SHIELD was enormous and strong then. If they wanted to put me in cryo, wouldn’t they have done it then?”
“Maybe they thought they were so strong they could afford to throw away your time.”
“SHIELD doesn’t put its agents in cryo as a matter of principle,” Steve said. “They’re not going to change their mind.”
Bucky tugged up some of the grass off the bank. The Canada geese had floated away. “It’s such a waste,” said Bucky.
“It’s my time to waste,” said Steve. “And yours.”
Bucky tossed away a handful of grass. He drew his knees up to his chest and leaned his chin against them, thinking. Steve leaned back on his elbows. The geese drifted on their side of the pond, honking occasionally. Steve wished for his sketchbook. He’d gotten out of the habit of drawing. He ought to take it up again.
Bucky didn’t say anything else. Steve decided it was time to ease off into something a little less heavy. “You want some dessert?” he asked, and dug a couple peaches out of his saddlebag. They were a little bruised from bouncing around on the motorcycle, but they smelled ambrosial. “The lady at the stand gave us some peaches.”
Bucky lifted his arm to cover his face. “Oh, fuck.”
“I think she liked you,” Steve teased gently.
“Till she realized I was a fucking wreck.”
“She still liked you after that,” Steve said. He offered the peach to Bucky. “You didn’t see her handing us free peaches before, did you?”
Bucky took the peach. The skin gave a little under his fingers, releasing its scent, and Bucky took a bite. The juice dribbled down his chin. “Oh God,” he said. “This is fucking amazing.”
Steve had the sudden stupid desire to kiss him, lick the peach juice off his chin. He took a bite of his own peach instead. “Yeah,” said Steve. “It pretty much is.”