Archive of Our Own ^beta

It was 7:58 a.m. on a Friday, and Bucky was surrounded by teenagers. 

Given his choice of career, this wasn’t especially noteworthy. In fact, he currently had a classroom full of them. What was somewhat noteworthy was that half a dozen of them were huddled around him, peering over his shoulders at the laptop on his desk.

“Hit refresh again, Mr. M!” urged Tyrell.

Nicole leaned even closer, close enough that her long, dark hair brushed Bucky’s shoulder, though she was considerate enough not to touch him. “Is the clock on your laptop right, Mr. Murphy? The results are supposed to be live at 8:00 a.m. Eastern time, right? Not, like, Pacific? Or if your clock is a couple minutes off—” 

“Let’s just have literally two more minutes of patience, kids,” said Bucky, though he also dutifully refreshed the Stark Industries Mathematics and Technology Challenge for Youths website. 

For the hundredth time, he wondered why the hell the acronym was SMATCHY. Where’d the “I” go? Did SMATCHY even mean anything? Bucky just knew that if he ever met Stark, it’d be the first thing he asked him. When the refreshed website yet again failed to show the results of the challenge, the kids all groaned. 

“How is it not time yet? How?!” demanded Hailey.

“A watched website never updates,” said Hunter darkly.

Bucky didn’t blame his mathletes for being so anxious. They’d worked so hard on their challenge entry, and if they placed in the top 20, they’d get a trip to the Stark Expo out of it, where they could compete in person for the prize of a fairly hefty scholarship fund, to say nothing of promised summer internships with Stark Industries. Even if they didn’t win the first place prize at the Expo, the runner-ups could get free Starkphones and enough of a cash prize to make it worth their while. For his part, Bucky figured the opportunity to talk to the various professionals and college recruiters ought to be incentive enough. And hell, at the very least, it would be a mostly-free trip to New York and the Stark Expo.

Finally, the results loaded, and Bucky spotted the name John Hay High School about a half-second before Nicole did. The very slight advance warning did nothing to spare his ears as the shrieks of teenaged joy kicked off. The whole first period calculus class joined in the celebration with a round of applause and cheers. 

Mia was the only one who wasn’t cheering. Her dark brown eyes were still fixed on the screen, her mouth slightly open, the surprise on her round face making her look even younger than she was.

“Holy shit. We did it?” she asked, as Hailey and Jen did some kind of celebratory dance behind her.

“Language,” Bucky chided, though he always felt like an enormous fucking hypocrite when he did. “And yeah, you did. Congratulations, all of you. You earned this, and I’m really proud of you.”

There were even more hugs and excited jumping up and down then, and Bucky let the kids bask in it for a minute before he asked them to settle down.

“Alright, alright, winning the contest doesn’t mean class is over. Here, I’ve got hall passes for all of you, get to your first period classes. And the rest of you, please get started with the problem on the board. Seems like a lot of you had trouble with one like it on the quiz, so let’s give it another try and then go over it together.”

“What’s the occasion for all this?” asked Steve when he got home that evening. “Shit, it isn’t date night, is it? I thought that was Friday.”

“It’s not date night,” said Bucky, and opened the last takeout box with a flourish. There was barely any space free on the kitchen table, almost the whole thing covered in a veritable feast’s worth of the finest Chinese food Cleveland had to offer. He’d gotten the fancy $12 a pint ice cream for dessert too, four pints worth. “We’re celebrating!”

“Yeah? What are we celebrating?” Steve popped a bite of orange chicken into his mouth—with his bare hands, the animal.

“There are chopsticks right there,” said Bucky with a glower, and Steve, unrepentant, bumped him with his hip in answer.

“Wait, did that tip to the Post work out? Did they publish the exposé yet? Is this a fuck HYDRA celebratory dinner?”

“There are a few steps in between tip to a journalist and exposé revealing HYDRA’s influence in one of the biggest media companies in the country, Steve, no matter how detailed that tip was. They’ve gotta do their own research too. No, this is a my mathletes qualified to go compete at SMATCHY at Stark Expo celebratory dinner.”

“Hey, congrats, that’s great news!” said Steve, and came around the table to hug Bucky and give him an orange-chicken flavored kiss. 

Steve’s kiss started out as sweet and congratulatory, but then he cupped Bucky’s jaw and gently titled his head back, a hunger in his lips and tongue that hadn’t yet abated since their first kisses. It warmed Bucky through and through as it always did, but he was literally hungry, so he pulled away with only a small regretful sigh to sit down at the kitchen table.

There was some passing around of food and napkins then, and Steve and Bucky both dug into the food with gusto. They had a brief chopstick war over the potstickers, which Bucky won because he was way better with chopsticks than Steve was, but Steve didn’t pout about it for too long because Bucky let him have all the crab rangoon.

“So what’s next?” asked Steve between mouthfuls of kung pao chicken. “For your mathletes, I mean.”

“We’re headed to the Stark Expo in a couple months, I guess. All the SMATCHY contestants have their Expo passes and the hotel for the night of the competition covered, but transportation there is on us. And if we’re gonna drive, it’ll be an eight, nine hour drive, so we’ll need to get there the night before.” Bucky winced as he mentally ran the numbers. At least four hotel rooms, three for the kids and one for him and whoever else came along to chaperone, so maybe five rooms, food, gas for the drive there and back, maybe a rental van… “The school budget is not gonna cover all that.”

The Academic Decathlon program, of which his mathletes were a part, unsurprisingly did not command much of the school’s extracurricular budget. Bucky could cover it himself—he had no compunctions about using HYDRA blood money to better his students’ lives—but that would invite questions, and probably the kids should come up with the money themselves for educational and/or character-building purposes or whatever.

“God, does Tony not have enough money to pay for these kids’ whole trip?” grumbled Steve.

And okay, Bucky was gonna cut this impending rant off at the pass. He picked up an egg roll with his chopsticks and shoved it into Steve’s mouth. Steve glared but he dutifully took a bite out of the egg roll.

“I’m guessing he’s throwing all his money at the prizes. Also, SMATCHY does give full grants for some teams to attend, but only the ones from disadvantaged high schools, and mine doesn’t count. The kids can fundraise for the trip, it’s fine.”

He could ask Jenna what the mock trial kids did to fundraise for their competition trips, maybe, and he’d seen some students selling candy, or maybe is co-coach Liesel would have some ideas…

“Another bake sale?” suggested Steve with a grin, and Bucky rolled his eyes.

“That is not economical,” Bucky chided. “And if you really want to bug Stark about something, bug him about the acronym, because seriously.”

“Yeah, I don’t know, he must not have come up with it, or maybe he was having an off day.”

They were silent for a few minutes then, applying themselves to eating their way through the massive quantity of takeout. There was a brief scramble for water when, despite Bucky’s warnings, Steve ate some of Bucky’s extra-spicy mapo tofu, but once that mini-crisis passed, Bucky could idly contemplate field trip logistics and the Stark Expo itself.  

“Wonder how much the Stark Expo has changed since we went,” said Bucky.

Bucky remembered that night, the last one before he shipped out to Europe, like it was a movie of someone else’s life. It wasn’t that it was a bad memory—it was just a distant one, so far removed from who Bucky had become during the war and after it that he could scarcely credit that it was all part of the same lifetime. He’d been terrified then, he knew that much, but he’d been young and dumb enough to be able to shove the terror aside, and focus on his date with Connie, the wonders of the Expo, Steve.

“Oh, some things are the same,” said Steve, with that familiar crooked smile of his that was equal parts wry and sad. “Stark the younger decided to make a tradition of having a whole line up of chorus girls, for one thing. And he’s kept the theme song too, believe it or not.”

“Huh,” said Bucky. He didn’t remember a theme song. Probably a normal forgetting thing and not a brain damage forgetting thing, and he assumed it was for the best. “Hey, did the flying car thing ever work out?”

“You know, I don’t know. If Howard didn’t figure it out, I’m sure Tony did. Though knowing Tony, he did make it work and then Pepper or Rhodey forbade him from letting any kind of flying car out of his garage.”

“Probably the right call,” Bucky said, then frowned. “Wait, you’ve been to the Stark Expo this century? When?”

Bucky had kept light tabs on Steve’s movements before they’d met up again in Cleveland, and he didn’t recall any trips to the Stark Expo during that time, or since they’d shacked up. So it must have been before the whole Insight mess. Steve just hummed in answer at first, and stalled by poking around in the kung pao chicken, picking through the peppers and peanuts until he found some chicken. Bucky repressed his reflexive eye roll. Who avoided the peppers and peanuts in kung pao chicken? They were the whole point! Whatever, Bucky would eat them.

“Oh, uh, the year after I came back,” Steve finally said. “Tony invited me, and I thought, you know, why not.”

Steve was still avoiding his eyes, extracting every piece of chicken with far more focus than the task required, even with Steve’s lackluster chopstick skills.  

“You moped around the Expo, didn’t you,” Bucky realized. “You literally just moped around this amazing place full of cool futuristic technology, just like the last time you went!”

Bucky could see it like he was there: Steve, his shoulders hunched up and his hands in his pockets, wandering around the Expo with a lost, hangdog kind of expression on his face, or worse still, Steve in uniform as Cap, there to be the dancing monkey again. For all that Bucky’d had an awful time that first year after escaping HYDRA, the more he learned about Steve’s first couple of years in the 21st century, the more he suspected he’d been almost as bad off as Bucky had been. Sure, Steve hadn’t had brain damage and HYDRA bullshit to contend with, but he’d been alone. Alone and lost, maybe.

“Yeah, no shit!” said Steve. “The last time I was there, it was the night before you shipped out! So I didn’t exactly have the fondest memories of the Expo.”

Bucky pulled the kung pao significantly-less-chicken towards himself and fished out the peanuts, and tried to shake off his vicarious melancholy before it could really settle in.

“And literally five minutes later, you signed yourself up for a medical experiment—“ started Bucky, working up a good head of steam about this all these years later, because seriously, Bucky had been gone for five minutes before Steve ran off to do something dumb as hell—

“It was kind of a stressful night!” said Steve, and okay, fair enough.

Bucky shrugged. “I had a good time, I think. Apart from the, you know, looming existential terror.” Steve looked simultaneously long-suffering and unimpressed, and Bucky decided to head this round of bickering off at the pass. “So? What’s the Expo like in the future?”

“You’ll love it,” said Steve, smiling now. “A lot of it is pretty, you know, corporate, advertising everywhere and all, and it’s basically a trade show during the day, but there are so many amazing exhibitions with real cutting-edge stuff. And the art’s not half-bad either. Not much traditional art, but some really creative and compelling installations in non-traditional media—“

“Only you would go to an exposition about the marvels of technology for the art,” said Bucky, fond.

“Yeah, yeah, but the art really is cool!” protested Steve with a grin. “Seriously though, your mathletes will love the Expo. Unless they’re gonna be too stressed by the competition?”

“I hope they won’t be too stressed. They don’t have to do a new project for it at least, they’re presenting what they’ve already got. They’ll just have to prepare for the quiz and improv parts of the competition.”

And okay, now it was hitting Bucky: yeah it was great that his little team of mathlete nerds made it to the Stark Expo, but now Bucky had to get them there, and try to help them do their best while doing his best to make sure they had a great, memorable experience no matter who won the SMATCHY grand prize.

Shit. This was like his nerves over his students’ AP exam scores all over again.

Steve reached across the table to take his hand and give it a reassuring squeeze. “They’ll do great, Buck. And no matter what, they’ll have an amazing time with their favorite teacher.”

“God, I hope so,” muttered Bucky.

Getting the chance to compete at the Stark Expo was all well and good, and worthy of celebration, but now it was time for logistics. For Bucky, at least. Luckily for him, he excelled at logistics. The mathletes would work on prepping for the other parts of the SMATCHY competition, and meanwhile, Bucky would crunch some budget numbers and talk to the school administration about getting all the paperwork in order, because he had no doubt that there’d be a lot of paperwork. He even had a couple of press inquiries to respond to, asking about SMATCHY and the mathletes, so there might be a couple of column inches about the mathletes in the local paper. Maybe they could get one of the local business to sponsor the team…?

In the meantime, he emailed all of the mathletes’ parents, asking if any of them were interested in serving as a chaperone for the trip. School policy was at least two adults for any school-related overnight trips, and Liesel, his fellow Academic Decathlon coach, would be busy with her own students, so Bucky would need a parent volunteer.

He hashed most of the initial logistics out with Liesel, who had all the field trip experience Bucky was lacking. She had 15 years of teaching under her belt already, and ran her classrooms with the kind of brisk competence and energy that suggested she could go on teaching for 40 more years at exactly the same power-walking pace, looking just the same the whole time, save for her blond pixie cut turning silver and her handsome face growing craggy. 

She was happy to share some of her expertise, giving him the email address of someone at the school district who might be able to release some district funds to the mathletes for the trip, and she helped him out with the paperwork too. Less helpful was the chatty recitation of all of the ways field trips she’d supervised had gone awry, along with all of the ways high school field trips could end in disaster, up to and including deadly car crashes and students getting arrested.

In the face of his slack-jawed horror, she just smiled at him. “Oh, no need to look like that, dear! Don’t you worry your pretty little head, probably none of that is going to happen on your trip. You’ll do great!”

Don’t worry?! When she’d just given him like 50 things to worry about?

“Ha ha, yeah, no, definitely. Thanks for all the help,” he said weakly.

Get a grip, Barnes. Were you or were you not Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes of the 107 ^th and the Howling Commandos? You can handle six teenagers on one measly trip to New York. 

When his mathlete team filed into the classroom after school to begin planning the trip, Bucky looked at their bright and young faces, listened to their excited chatter and thought oh no. They’re children. Precious, impressionable, devious, lacking-all-common-sense teenaged babies. Sure, Hunter was nearly as tall as he was, and Jen maintained a careful air of detached amusement, and Nicole was responsible to a fault. But they were all still children, and it only took one look at Ty’s multi-colored braces or Hailey’s gangly limbs or the baby fat on Mia’s face to remember that. Not long from now, Bucky was going to be solely responsible for all six of them, for at least two days straight, probably longer.

He could not possibly be qualified for this.

“I’ll be right back,” he told them with a fixed grin. “In the meantime, how about all of you brainstorm some fundraising ideas that we can discuss together?” 

The kids assented cheerfully enough, and Bucky walked out of his classroom and straight for the supply closet, where he called Steve.

“Hey Buck, everything okay?”

“Steve. I am going to be responsible for six young and impressionable children for an overnight field trip.”

“Yeah…but, uh, you’re already responsible for what, a hundred teenagers every day?”

“In groups of 20 to 30 of them, for an hour and a half at a time! With this field trip, I’m gonna have to be responsible for six of them, twenty-four hours a day!”

Teachers were supposed to stand in loco parentis to their students, and Bucky took that responsibility seriously. Within the walls of the high school, that responsibility was fairly limited in scope, but out in the world, traveling across state lines…there was so much that could go so wrong. And not even just youthful shenanigans, but serious things, terrible things, could happen. For fuck’s sake, someone could die. 

“Okay, yeah,” said Steve, soothing. “Piece of cake, right? You got me and the Howlies through a fifty-mile escape through enemy territory while driving a tank that one time, so…a minivan road trip with some nerdy teenagers should be fine?”

The sudden sense memory vividly assaulted Bucky: the stuffy inside of the tank, the rough and rattling ride over rocky, narrow roads not meant for tanks, the stench of too many bodies too close together in too small a space. 

“Ugh, the inside of a tank smells fuckin’ rank,” said Bucky, wrinkling his nose as if he could smell it all over again. “And sure, yeah, I handled the Howlies, but a field trip is a hell of a lot different than a literal war zone!”

“A lot easier, I’m guessing,” said Steve wryly. “Seriously Buck, I understand why you’re nervous, but it’ll be fine. And you’ll have another chaperone with you too, right?”

“Right.” An actual parent chaperone, hopefully, someone who’d successfully kept their child alive for a whole fifteen to seventeen years. He took a deep breath. “You’re totally right. Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for. It’s gonna be your first time doing something like this, of course you’re a little freaked out. But you’re a good teacher, and you’re the best at keeping people safe, so this field trip is gonna be fine, Buck.”

Steve sounded so damn certain. It wasn’t quite his Captain America voice, it was just the Steve Rogers voice of Absolute Support and Faith, and it always worked on Bucky. Bucky took a deep breath and let that voice work its magic yet again.

“Okay. Yeah, you’re right. Good pep talk, thanks.”

“Any time,” said Steve, and Bucky could hear the smile in it. 

“I gotta get back to the mathletes, who knows what crazy fundraising ideas they’ve come up with.”

“Can’t be any worse than anything I had to do to sell war bonds. Salmon okay for dinner?”

Bucky squinted in the general direction of the rolls of toilet paper stacked up in the closet, which had no information on Steve’s current schedule. He could have sworn Steve had been scheduled for some Avengers-related glad-handing at NORAD for the rest of the week. 

“Aren’t you supposed to be in Colorado right now?” he asked.

“Wrapped up early and caught a flight back with Rhodey, he just dropped me and Nat off.”

Steve’s Avengers-related trips were growing shorter and shorter, it seemed. Bucky sure as hell wasn’t going to complain about it.

“Alright, see you soon. Love you.”

“Love you too, bye.”

Bucky took one more deep, bracing breath, then returned to his classroom, where chaos had not erupted, thankfully. Instead, there was a lively discussion of fundraising options, and Bucky slipped back inside quietly to observe his students with a kind of terrified fondness.

Bucky didn’t have favorites; he loved all of his students if not equally, then with the same kind of undiscriminating affection, equal parts delighted and exasperated by their boisterous youth and innocence, enamored of their potential. But he did spend more time with his mathletes than any of his other students, and so his affection for them was correspondingly just a bit deeper, informed as it was by greater knowledge. 

There was Nicole, who by sheer force of her not inconsiderable organizational will, was the de facto leader of the mathletes, and who was at this moment up at the whiteboard, writing up the list of possible fundraising activities, her brown ponytail swinging cheerfully. Jen, who was picking at the purple polish on her nails, didn’t look particularly interested in the current proceedings, her heavily made-up eyes heavy lidded, but then, she usually didn’t. She claimed she was only in the mathletes because it was the extracurricular that offered the best ratio of effort to impressiveness on a college application, thanks to her effortless skill at math, but she cared more than she let on and did more than her fair share of the work.

Hunter and Tyrell were making enthusiastic and frequent fundraising suggestions, of variable practicality. Hunter seemed to grow taller and ganglier every time Bucky saw him lately, puberty hitting him like a lightning bolt, as it sometimes did with teenage boys. The swift changes made him sometimes awkward and shy, uncertain how to hold himself and hiding behind his too-long mop of dirty blond hair, but he was a good-natured, steady kind of kid, well-liked. Tyrell was the baby of the group, just turned fifteen and still precocious, no teen angst evident in his frequent smiles and expansive enthusiasm, but plenty of teen vanity in the way he matched the bands in his braces to his clothes, and in his frequent primping of his cloud of tight, glossy black curls.

Hailey made the most practical suggestions, to Nicole’s obvious relief and approval. She had the kind of breezy confidence and cool that seemed to come naturally to young athletes, and Bucky rarely saw her outside of her athletic gear. She always seemed to be on her way to or from soccer practice, and her ruddy tan, freckles, and sun-streaked hair spoke to how much time she spent outside. Mia was the most quiet of all of the mathletes, only opening up slowly, her round and chubby-cheeked face often looking vaguely anxious until she relaxed, and then her words came out so fast she stumbled over them sometimes, flapping her hands in apology, like now as she made her own fundraising suggestion.  

Just taking them all in had Bucky smiling, and when he looked at the whiteboard’s list of fundraising options, his smile grew bigger the further down the list he got:

Bake sale again? Probably not cost effective

Candy sales? (Too tempting, we would just eat it all ourselves)

Get sponsorships from local businesses? 

Put on a math-themed musical, charge for tix (this is a BAD idea, Hunter)

Just straight up ask people for money (bold but maybe it would work!)

“Oh hey, you’ve got some ideas already, that’s great!” said Bucky. “Anyone got any potential leads for local sponsorships?”

They brainstormed some possible options for a few minutes, until Tyrell jolted in his seat suddenly enough that it made his cloud of tight curls bounce and sway, and he raised his hand. It wasn’t strictly speaking necessary, given there were only six students on the team and this wasn’t class, but Bucky appreciated the courtesy and called on him anyway.

“Yeah, Tyrell? You’ve got an idea?”

“Car wash!” he said, beaming. “We could do a car wash, that’s a fundraising thing, right? I’ve seen the track and field team do them.”

Mia gasped sharply, and Bucky looked at her in some alarm, but she was just nudging Jen who was sitting next to her, and then she leaned over to poke Hailey too. They all turned towards each other, gave each other some indecipherable look, then they stared at Nicole, whose eyes went wide. 

“Oh my gosh, what a great idea, Ty! We should totally do a car wash!” said Hailey, with a suspicious level of cheer.

“Mr. M, you’d have to be there, right? You could help us?” asked Mia, her green eyes wide and guileless.

“Yeah, of course. Car wash is a pretty good idea, not too many up front costs for that,” said Bucky, already doing some calculations in his head. 

“You should have Steve come too!” said Nicole, with a bright and entirely too-innocent smile.

“Uh huh!” chimed in Jen, nodding. “And like, if you two could maybe, like…take off your shirts, at some point?”

“Jen!” gasped Tyrell, as Hunter groaned.

“Jen, gross!”

Bucky’s face heated up to what had to be a surface-of-the-sun level temperature, with a corresponding shade of red. He should have never ditched his Flanders look. 

“Well, that doesn’t seem appropriate—“

Jen raised an unimpressed eyebrow. “Oh, do not even, Mr. M. This is strictly business. If you and Hot Boyfriend Steve show a little skin, I guarantee you it’d triple our take.”

“You guys have got to stop calling him Hot Boyfriend Steve,” muttered Bucky, still blushing furiously.

“Well, if you marry him, we’ll call him Hot Husband Steve,” said Nicole primly, then she turned back around to write car wash utilizing Mr. M and Hot Boyfriend Steve’s assets on the board. “You don’t have to be shirtless, but maybe you two could consider wearing especially tight white shirts?”

This suggestion led to another round of raucous giggles and groans.

To Bucky’s dismay and grudging amusement, car wash ended up being the winning fundraising idea, along with approaching a couple of local businesses the kids had connections to about sponsorships. Bucky wasn’t about to complain too much though, since between the money from the school district, the fundraising, and whatever the kids and their parents could chip in, the cost of the trip would probably be fully covered. Bucky almost made the mathletes ask Steve to help with the car wash themselves, it being their idea and all; but honestly, the prospect of Steve attempting to wash cars in an alluring fashion was hilarious, and if Bucky was going to do this, he was damn well going to get some laughs in at Steve’s expense too.

“Okay, car wash it is,” he told the mathletes. “But Steve and I are not going to be shirtless, because that’s inappropriate for a school-affiliated event.”

“Is it though?” said Nicole, tilting her head. “Because the boys’ water polo team competes in very small speedos and nothing else—“

“It’s definitely inappropriate,” Bucky insisted. “Fully clothed car wash only, kiddos. Also, it is March, it’s not warm enough to be running around getting wet with barely any clothes on.”

The kids booed this in a begrudging kind of way, but they were redirected to divvying up responsibilities for the car wash easily enough, and the rest of the meeting passed quickly in a flurry of planning. They’d have the car wash next weekend, weather permitting, and until then, there were signs to make and paperwork to fill out.

It was early yet, Bucky knew, and there was plenty of time yet for things to go awry. Still, he couldn’t help but feel optimistic. Maybe this whole field trip thing would go off without a hitch.

When Bucky got home, it was Sam and Natasha who greeted him rather than Steve. Despite the familiar sight of both of them at ease in his kitchen, Bucky couldn’t help the spike of alarm at Steve’s absence. Sam noticed, of course, and shot him a reassuring smile.

“Hey Bucky, Steve’s just stepped out to the store,” said Sam, and the tension that had already been gathering in Bucky swiftly dissipated. 

“What for? He said he was gonna make salmon, we already have that and stuff for side dishes,” said Bucky, mildly annoyed. “Unless you two are eating us out of house and home.”

“You know how he gets about recipes,” said Natasha, and Bucky rolled his eyes, fond despite himself. 

Steve’s cooking was much improved, but he always stuck to the recipe with single-minded stubbornness. He refused to make even the simplest of substitutions, no matter what Bucky or Sam told him about how it was absolutely fine to improvise and use, say, green beans instead of snap peas. The point is to have a green crunchy thing Steve, it doesn’t matter what it is! 

After Bucky washed up and changed out of his work clothes, he joined Sam and Natasha at the kitchen table.

“There’s still tea in the pot if you want any,” said Natasha. “Congrats, by the way, Steve said your mathletes won some competition?”

Sam, who still found it endlessly amusing that Bucky coached mathletes, snickered into his mug of tea.

“They haven’t won the whole thing, not yet anyway, but yeah, they did well enough to make it to the Stark Expo,” said Bucky as he poured himself some of the nearly over-brewed, strong black tea Natasha favored. “Now I’ve just gotta get them there. By the way, you two better be here next week when my mathletes are having a car wash for fundraising purposes, I’m gonna need you both to show up and fork over some cash for the privilege of having some teenage nerds wash your cars.”

Sam grinned at him. “Hm, that depends, am I gonna get a proper detailing job out of it?“

“You’re gonna get a marginally competent car wash while supporting the youths, along with my gratitude, is that not enough?”

“Hmm, I’m gonna need something more to sweeten the deal. Are you gonna be wearing short shorts and getting all wet?” asked Natasha, sly, and Bucky groaned. 

“Not you too. The kids want me and Steve to show up in tight white shirts, they think it’ll get more people to show up and fork over money. I’ve got no idea how I’ll convince Steve to do it, he hates that kinda shit.”

As much as Bucky loved messing with Steve, he didn’t want to make him actually unhappy, and on the drive home, he’d started to wonder if even a harmless fundraiser for a high school mathlete team would have uncomfortable similarities with the dancing monkey war bond shilling that Steve had so hated.

“Oh it’ll absolutely get more people to show up,” said Natasha with a leer and waggle of her eyebrows.

“What do you mean how will you convince Steve?” asked Sam, incredulous. “Flash those big baby blues at your man, and he will do literally anything.”

“Aww, Wilson, you like my eyes?” asked Bucky, fluttering his eyelashes at him in exaggerated fashion.

“How I feel about them doesn’t even matter, what I’m saying is that Steve will do whatever you ask him to do. I have never seen such a besotted, whipped man.”

Bucky scoffed and said, “He wouldn’t do anything.”

Steve said no to him all the time, after all. Just last week, he’d said a resounding no to Bucky’s excellent suggestion of Steve challenging Tucker Carlson to a boxing match on live television. Listen, Bucky hoped his exposé would come to fruition soon, but in the meantime, he would derive genuine and sincere satisfaction from seeing that smug HYDRA sympathizer’s face smashed in by Steve’s patriotic fists.

“He’d do anything,” confirmed Natasha, her tone droll.

“Anything you genuinely, seriously want or need, anyway,” amended Sam.

“I very seriously need Steve to punch Tucker Carlson on live television, I have had to watch way too much of that asshole’s terrible show for research purposes, and yet, Steve will not—“

“Yeah, no, you don’t need that,” said Sam. “But helping your precious nerds get to their big nerd prom? Steve would go full Magic Mike for that if he needed to.”

“I don’t understand that reference,” Bucky said breezily, and Natasha cackled.

“Please watch Magic Mike XXL for your next date night Netflix and chill, and take pictures of Steve’s face when you do, I am begging you,” she said.

“Is it porn?” asked Bucky, suspicious now, and now Sam was cackling too.

Before Bucky could ask for clarification, or google it on his phone, Steve came rushing back into the kitchen, laden down with canvas shopping bags.

“Sorry, sorry, I didn’t realize we were out of the grainy mustard, and then I figured I might as well pick up some more things—“ he said, dropping a quick kiss on Bucky’s cheek on his way to the kitchen. Bucky got up with a sigh to put the rest of the groceries away.

“You could’ve just used the dijon, you know, how many times do I have to tell you that substitutions are okay?“

“It wouldn’t be the same! The grainy mustard is crucial!” 

Dinner prep passed with a couple rounds of easy banter and ribbing about Steve’s cooking skills, and Bucky joined in a little absent-mindedly, still thinking about what Sam had said.

It was true that Steve had mellowed a lot from the piss and vinegar spitfire he’d been when they were kids and young men in Brooklyn. Back then, Steve’d had no problem saying no to Bucky, and Bucky had always been careful not to be too indulgent of Steve, mindful that Steve was touchy about that kind of thing, too inclined to mistake tenderness for weakness or pity. The intervening decades’ hardships had knocked off and smoothed out some of those rough edges between them. They were older now, and too familiar with grief; there was no reason to deny each other any sweetness after so much bitter time apart.

That didn’t mean Steve was so smitten as to give in to Bucky’s every whim, did it? The prospect was mildly unsettling. It was true that Bucky didn’t exactly make a lot of demands, and those few things he did ask Steve for, Steve gave him eagerly. And anyway, why should Bucky ask for more? He had everything he could possibly want or need: Steve, a home, freedom from HYDRA, work he enjoyed and that he could take pride in. He didn’t like the idea of Steve thinking all of that wasn’t enough for Bucky, and he sure as hell didn’t like the idea of Steve doing things he didn’t want to do just for Bucky’s sake, not even if that thing was something as harmless as a car wash fundraiser.

Once dinner was on the table, Bucky broached the subject.

“So, the kids have decided on a car wash to fundraise for their Stark Expo trip. And uh, we—I—was wondering if you’d be willing to help out? The kids invited you, anyway.”

Steve looked way too touched by the invitation. “Really? Of course I’ll help, Buck. That’s sweet of them to ask.”

“Yeah, no, not really, they’re just being mercenary. They suggested we take off our shirts at some point to bring in more people, but I think they’ll settle for us wearing tight white t-shirts.”

Steve turned bright red and busied himself with his dinner plate. “Really? That’s, uh…flattering? I don’t know why they’d think that would help, but—”

Natasha nearly choked on her mouthful of salmon, and Sam outright guffawed. Bucky just laughed and rolled his eyes. “They literally call you Hot Boyfriend Steve,” he said.

“Seriously, Steve?” said Natasha. “You don’t know why two handsome, well-muscled men in tight wet clothes might attract some welcome attention for the cause of sending some mathletes to the Stark Expo?”

“Well, when you put it like that,” muttered Steve, eyes still on his plate.

“You don’t have to help,” said Bucky. “I know you don’t really like that kinda thing, after the USO shows and all.”

Steve knocked knees with him under the kitchen table, and looked up to shoot him a warm smile. 

“Course I’ll help. And me showing up to your mathletes’ car wash fundraiser isn’t much like being Captain America on the USO circuit. I don’t have to dance, for one thing.”

At this, Sam almost did a spit take. “Sorry,” he spluttered. “It’s not you, I swear, just—Barnes, remember what I said about Magic Mike. Y’all have got to watch it.” 

“Right,” said Steve slowly. “We’ll add it to the list. Anyway, I’m happy to help, Buck.”

Bucky sighed and smiled in relief. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

Despite Steve’s easy acquiescence to helping with the car wash, Bucky couldn’t quite let go of his lingering anxiety about asking Steve to help. He knew they’d both changed, he’d accepted it, but right now the Steve of 1939 loomed large in Bucky’s mind, for all that he’d been a lot smaller. 1939 Steve would have done an awful lot of mostly good-natured if still sharp-tongued complaining about helping Bucky with something like this. Bucky didn’t miss the kvetching per se, but its absence proved oddly disquieting.

“You’re sure you’re okay with helping with the fundraiser?” Bucky asked as they got into bed. “Because seriously, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I won’t be disappointed or mad or anything.”

“It’s fine, Buck, I wanna help. Sounds like it’ll be fun, and I like your mathletes, even if they are vicious interrogators.” 

“Aww, they’re only curious,” he said, and Steve gave him a disbelieving look before he turned off the bedside lamp. “And I just don’t want you to feel like you have to help,” fretted Bucky, and great, now Steve was frowning at him in the dark. 

“Course I don’t have to,” said Steve, and scooted forward to plant a toothpaste-fresh kiss on Bucky’s lips. “But I want to.”

That proved pleasantly distracting for a couple of minutes, exchanging lazy and minty kisses as their bed warmed up. Bucky never got over the simple miracle of touching skin to skin, their hands slow and gentle as they stroked each other’s backs, for no other reason than that they could and that they wanted to.

“You’re too good to me, sometimes,” murmured Bucky, and Steve cupped Bucky’s cheek with his broad palm. 

“No such thing, Buck,” he whispered.

When it came time for the actual fundraiser, Bucky was too caught up in helping set things up to be all that nervous about any of it, and Steve was too busy putting his captain skills to good use directing traffic and mathletes to be awkward. They’d transformed most of the school’s parking lot into an outdoor car wash for the weekend, and while it was far from professional, it at least looked competent, to Bucky’s eyes anyway. He’d had the kids practice their car washing skills on his trusty Corolla yesterday afternoon after school, and they’d done a creditable enough job.

“Alright: Hailey and Hunter, you’re on hose down duty. Tyrell and Mia, you handle the actual washing. And Nicole and Jen, you two can dry and detail,” Steve ordered, a little too close to his Captain America voice for comfort.

“Aye aye, Steve!” chorused all of the kids.

“Now, I’ve calculated the ideal time to spend on each car so as to maximize our efficiency and our profits—“ started Nicole, and Bucky shared a grin with Steve.

Bucky kept track of the money, making small talk with the folks who were having their cars washed, and while most of them were bemused by the prospect of mathletes in general, they were all warmly supportive of the kids going to the Stark Expo. A couple folks even pressed extra money into Bucky’s hand, an unexpected kindness that made him beam, and that thrilled the kids too. What thrilled them the most though was just getting a chance to tell people about their SMATCHY project.

Tyrell and Mia were happy to multitask and wash cars while delivering mini-lectures about their project.

“So we’re working with neural networks—do you know what a neural network is? It’s a computer system modeled on the human brain—anyway, we’re working with them to build a model for detecting structural damage in buildings, like in normal wear and tear, or from natural disasters—hang on, I need another rag—”

Mia took over the familiar patter from Tyrell, adding, “We don’t have access to the kind of computing power that we’d really need to deploy it, but we’ve tested it out on some miniature building models we built, and we have historical datasets to train it on. We’re hoping this can help catch structural problems early, before there’s any serious damage or injury.”

“Wow, and here all my science projects in school were just about trying to make stuff blow up in cool ways,” said one of their customers, impressed. He handed over $20. “Good luck at the Expo, kids!” 

They had a surprisingly steady stream of people showing up throughout the day. Sam swung by early after handing out flyers at his morning VA meetings, and Bucky had let his support group know about the fundraiser too, and between those two social circles, there was a creditable showing for the first couple hours of the car wash. 

Despite the mathletes’ insistence that Bucky and Steve’s, ahem, assets would prove to be a draw, Bucky didn’t notice any weird or inappropriate attention. Sure, the proportion of women seeking car washes seemed to be exponentially increasing as the afternoon stretched on, but Bucky figured that was just word spreading. And okay, yeah, he and Steve got blasted with the hose a couple times, Hailey apologizing profusely each time, and if Steve was any indication, their wet, white shirts didn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination. 

It was, Bucky could concede, a good look on Steve. Bucky caught Steve’s eye at the exact moment a stray beam of sunshine gilded Steve’s hair into a gleaming gold, and Bucky amended that assessment: it was a very good look.  

Natasha concurred, because when she showed up, she rolled her car’s windows down and wolf-whistled at them.

“Hey boys,” she called out, then peered at them from over the rim of her oversized dark sunglasses. “Aww, what happened to the short shorts?”

“The short shorts were never going to happen,” Bucky told her, and ignored the exaggerated whines of disappointment from his students. “And stop being a bad influence on my students!” 

One of said students raised her phone and snapped a few photos of Bucky and Steve. “Jen,” Bucky warned, and she gave him an innocent grin.

“Bree asked me to take pictures for the yearbook! And I thought I’d, y’know, spread the word a little about our fundraiser on social media?”

Bucky sighed and made a mental note to make sure any such photos disappeared by Monday. Natasha just laughed and pulled her car forwards to the designated car washing spot. 

On the second day of the fundraiser, word must have spread, or Jen’s social media efforts must have paid off, because even more people showed up. Some of them, Bucky noted, were repeat customers from yesterday, and he’d have been more suspicious of that if not for the fact that they’d showed up with different cars. 

“The kids just did such a good job on my car, so I thought I’d bring my husband’s car by too! And of course it’s such a good cause,” said one of the women cheerfully, as her eyes lingered on Steve over where he was helping Ty and Mia wash an especially big truck. 

Specifically, her eyes lingered on his chest, where the slightly damp fabric of his shirt clung to his pecs. The appeal of Steve’s size smediums struck again, it seemed, and Bucky suppressed a wry grin. It turned out Steve didn’t need to especially try to be alluring and sexy while washing cars, it just happened automatically.

Bucky’s grin faltered when the woman’s gaze shifted to his own chest, and okay, now he was regretting the choice to wear a v-neck t-shirt today, because the avid way she was looking at his regrettably exposed collarbones was starting to make him feel vaguely immodest.

“Thanks!” said Bucky, and took the money she offered before gesturing to her to drive on ahead to where Hailey and Hunter were waiting with the hoses.

Nicole bounced over to him with a distinctly smug tinge to her cheerful as always smile. “I’m not saying I told you so, but I’m not not saying I told you so either,” she said, and Bucky snorted.

“I’m feeling a little used here,” he joked.

“You can always grow the mustache back,” said Nicole sweetly.

By the end of the weekend, the fundraiser brought in almost enough money to cover the trip’s expenses, and that was without taking into account the grant from the district and the sponsorships from local businesses. Once those came in, they’d have more than enough to cover the trip. Bucky heaved a sigh of relief: he hadn’t fucked this up yet.

He congratulated the team, and then set about planning the trip in earnest. They had a couple of months yet to go; the Stark Expo and SMATCHY competition took place after the AP exams, thankfully, so the kids’ (and his own) attention wouldn’t be split between the competition and preparing for AP exams. He hoped the trip could be a fun capstone for their year, a reward for all their hard work, and as he ran the numbers once all the money was in, he thought he could squeeze in an extra day in New York for them.

If they drove to New York on Thursday, and went to the Expo for SMATCHY on Friday, they could spend Saturday sightseeing and take an extra night at the hotel, before returning on Sunday. Or the budget could stretch to flights to and from New York. Bucky decided to put it to the students.

“Are you kidding me?” asked Hunter. “An extra day in New York is way better than flying!”

“Yeah, and who doesn’t love road trips?!” demanded Hailey.

The person who was driving six teenagers from Cleveland to Queens in a minivan, Bucky thought wryly.

“Alright, show of hands: who wants to fly there and back?” No hands went up. “Okay, three nights in New York it is,” he said, and they all cheered.

With the money angle covered, Bucky could set about getting all the rest of the field trip’s logistics in order: he booked the hotel rooms, put in his request for the use of one of the school’s minivans, painstakingly plotted out the driving route to and from New York, and lined up a fellow chaperone for the trip. Bucky had anticipated a hard sell to get someone else to sign on, but after just one email to all of the mathletes’ parents, Hailey’s dad Tim volunteered readily and enthusiastically, eager for the chance to go to the Stark Expo.

Bucky looked at the rolling whiteboard he’d repurposed for field trip planning. The garage ops room was now pulling double duty as Bucky’s field trip planning space too, because his classroom didn’t have the room for it, and also his students did not need to see Bucky’s extensive trip planning. Was having full blueprints of the hotel, strictly speaking, necessary? No. Did it make Bucky feel better? Yes. 

“Jesus, are you planning an op or a field trip?” asked Sam one day when he joined Bucky and Steve in the ops room. 

Sam perused the field trip planning board with wide, disbelieving eyes, before Bucky redirected him to the entire other corkboard that was for HYDRA stuff.

“Being responsible for six teenagers for three whole days, while traveling out of state, is honestly a lot more stressful than being responsible for you three dumbasses on an op,” said Bucky, and crossed out one more item on the white board’s field trip to-do list: fully stocked first aid kit.

“Not sure whether I should be offended or not,” said Sam, still eyeing the field trip planning board.

Bucky looked between Sam and the board, wondering just what it was that merited that much attention.

“What? Am I missing something that should be on there? Oh no, I’m missing something, aren’t I—”

“Yeah, no, you are not missing anything, man. This is probably the most thoroughly planned field trip in the existence of field trips.”

Sam was almost certainly poking fun at Bucky with that comment, but it still made him feel better. This was a thoroughly planned field trip. It wasn’t even micromanaged, thank you very much, because Bucky had left Saturday basically open for whatever sightseeing or exploring the kids wanted to do. Which admittedly made Bucky a little nervous, but he could go with the flow! He could improvise! Did he hope the kids would just spend all of Saturday at the Met or the Natural History Museum? Yes. Was he prepared for any number of other tourist activities? Also yes. He was 100% ready for this field trip. No, he was 200% ready for this field trip. His contingency plans had contingency plans. You’ve got this, Barnes. 

Bucky rode high on the satisfaction of a thoroughly and properly planned trip until the Tuesday before the Stark Expo, when one of the load-bearing parts of Bucky’s careful edifice of field trip preparation abruptly gave way.

“So, uh, bad news, Mr. M!” said Hailey, rushing into his classroom before the start of the school day with a harried and somewhat wild-eyed look about her.

“What is it? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, I’m great! But uh, my dad was patching the roof yesterday? And he kind of fell.”

“What? Is he gonna be okay?”

“Oh yeah, yeah, he’ll be fine. But he broke his arm? And also his leg? And, like, he’s sort of in traction right now and they’re gonna have to put a steel rod in his leg or something? So he can’t chaperone the field trip, I’m so sorry!”

Fuck. Bucky took two seconds to panic, then focused on Hailey again, because her chin was wobbling and she was wringing her hands.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay, Hailey. The important thing is that your dad’s gonna be alright, okay? Don’t you worry about the field trip. If you want to sit it out to stay with your dad—”

“No! Oh my god, no, I’m going, I’m absolutely going. Dad’s fine, really, he’s just super embarrassed. It’s just—are you gonna be able to find someone else to chaperone in time?”

In two days? It was a big ask. But Bucky was not going to have this field trip fail before it even got started, and he was gonna get his mathletes to the Stark Expo no matter what.

“Don’t you worry about that, I’ll manage,” he told her, and gave her his best reassuring smile.

Bucky had no idea how he was going to manage. He shot off a quick email to all the Academic Decathlon parents before his first period started, but unsurprisingly, no one could go out of town for three days on such short notice. He went to Liesel in a panic, but while she could get a substitute for her Thursday and Friday classes, it wasn’t enough time for her to arrange for childcare for her two kids.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and she looked it, which mollified Bucky’s panic a tiny bit, because at least Liesel understood the gravity of the situation. She brightened, snapping her fingers. “Wait, how about your boyfriend, Steve? He helped with the car wash, didn’t he?”

“Yeah…” said Bucky slowly. “But isn’t there paperwork he has to do, to be approved by the school?”

Liesel waved her hand dismissively. “We can rush that. And he’s chaperoned at school events before, hasn’t he?”

“I don’t think coming to the Winter Formal with me counts.”

“It’s fine. Get him on board, and I’ll make it happen, Jack.”

“Right,” said Bucky, and took a deep, calming breath. This was doable. The field trip was not ruined, not yet. “Okay. Thanks, Liesel.”

Bucky almost headed to the supply closet to call Steve out of sheer habit, but this was a completely legitimate, school-related call, so he called Steve from the teacher’s lounge during his free period.

“Steve, it’s an emergency,” said Bucky the moment Steve picked up.

“What? Is HYDRA there? Are you in danger? How many hostiles are there? I’ll be there in four minutes, just hang tight—”

“Not that kind of emergency! Tim broke half of his limbs, so I’m out a chaperone for the Stark Expo trip, and none of the other parents or Liesel can come either. If I can’t find someone, the whole trip is gonna get canceled!”

Steve sighed explosively and a dull clunking sound came over the phone line, the telltale sound of the shield dropping to the floor. “Oh my god, you can’t just say it’s an emergency like that—”

“This is absolutely an emergency!” hissed Bucky. “My field trip is about to fail before it can even begin! Also, we have a codeword for that other kind of emergency and it’s not it’s an emergency, Steven, god, you’re so bad at this.”

“Okay, sit down, and take a deep breath.” Ugh, how did Steve know that Bucky was pacing? Whatever. Bucky sat down and dutifully took a deep breath, because otherwise Steve wouldn’t shut up about it. “Alright. So, okay, none of the other teachers can come along with you?”

“I mean, I could ask around, but they all have their own classes and families, and I’ve got about a day and a half to find someone. I—uh. Liesel suggested I ask you? She said she could fast-track the paperwork for you.”

Bucky had asked Steve for objectively more important and emotionally significant things than this, and yet, he was nervous anyway. Not just because of the stakes for his field trip, but because maybe there would come a point where Bucky asked Steve for too much. He’d asked for a lot already, after all: he’d asked Steve to stay. Maybe this was the time when Steve would finally get annoyed by Bucky’s small and safe life and his work and the way he kept dragging Steve into it when Steve would rather spend his time fighting the good fight. 

“Geeze, Buck, why didn’t you lead with that? Of course I can do it!”

“Yeah? You sure? You don’t have any work stuff—”

Steve snorted. “Nah. Honestly I was probably just gonna mope around trying to paint while you were gone.”

“If you wanted to have a relaxing weekend though—”

“Buck, really, it’s okay. I’d love to be your fellow chaperone. This is important to your students, and it’s important to you, I’m happy to do it. Besides, it’ll be fun!”

Bucky heaved a sigh of relief and slumped down in his chair. “Thank you. Seriously,” he said, and to his horror, he was getting a little choked up. “This is above and beyond, Steve, I really appreciate it.”

“Of course,” said Steve softly. “Hey, I’ll swing by the school to do any paperwork they need from me now, alright?”

“Yeah, they’ll want a copy of your driver’s license at least, I’ll leave the paperwork with Katie in admin.” The bell rang then, signalling the end of Bucky’s free period. “Okay, I gotta get back to my classroom.”

“Alright, I’ll let you go. I’ll stop by your classroom when I finish up the paperwork.”

“See you then,” Bucky said, then ducked his head and murmured, “Love you.”

“Love you too.”

He had just enough time before his next class started to send a quick email to the mathletes and their parents, letting them know they were covered on the chaperone front, and that the parents were all welcome to meet Steve on Thursday morning before they left. God, he hoped the kids didn’t call Steve “Hot Boyfriend Steve” when they talked to their parents, it probably wasn’t the kind of thing that would make parents feel better about entrusting their precious children to someone else for three days. No one registered any complaints by the end of the day at any rate though, so Bucky considered this particular emergency resolved. Now he just had to get Steve up to speed.

“So, I’m gonna need you to familiarize yourself with our driving route, and also all of my mathletes,” said Bucky, taking Steve by the hand and leading him to the field trip whiteboard in the garage.

“Okay,” said Steve. “I know all their names already though.”

Bucky stopped in the garage doorway, and turned to Steve with narrowed eyes. “You’re gonna need to know a lot more than their names if you’re going to be 50% responsible for them for three whole days, Steve.”

“Uh. Yeah, no, of course.”

He turned back around and led Steve to the whiteboard. “Most important is that Hunter is deathly allergic to bees, so if you see a bee anywhere near him, you need to handle that. Also Jen always has to go to the bathroom like five times before any competition or presentation, so don’t worry if she’s missing just before then, and Mia gets car sick so make sure we always have ginger candy on hand for her. Now, here’s the schedule—”

“Wait, you’ve scheduled bathroom breaks for the drive?”

“I needed a firm ETA in New York, of course I scheduled them.”

“Right.” Steve snuck his arm around Bucky’s waist, pulled him close, and pressed a lingering kiss to his temple. Bucky could feel the shape of his smile, his happy sigh.

“What?” he asked suspiciously, though he leaned in against Steve too.

“Nothing. Just—I love you, is all. So come on, tell me everything I need to know.”

Bucky told Steve everything he needed to know and more besides, and thankfully, unlike mission briefings, Steve did not volunteer any wildly dangerous plans. The hardest part of their last-minute preparations was figuring out where Steve could stash his shield and uniform, but eventually they settled on shoving them in under the van’s spare tire.

With that taken care of, all that was left was packing their things.

“Any chance we’ll be visiting Brooklyn while we’re in New York?” asked Steve.

“Doubt it,” said Bucky absent-mindedly. He was trying to fit all their stuff into one small suitcase, because with six teenagers and the SMATCHY project, luggage space was going to be at a premium. Maybe if he rolled up their shirts…? “The Expo’s in Queens, and I figure the kids are gonna use their free day to sightsee in Manhattan. Why, did you wanna go?”

“Oh, no, just—have you been back to Brooklyn, since, uh—“

Wow, rolling clothes up really did save space. “Since being un-brainwashed? No, didn’t seem safe.” He paused, frowned. “I figured there was nothing for me there, anyway.”

There were memories, of course, but those ambushed Bucky anywhere and everywhere. He suspected a trip to Brooklyn would have left him drowning in them, would have had him haunting the whole borough like the unquiet ghost he’d so often felt like, after Insight. Better to stay away and keep the memories contained in the neatly-lined boundaries of his notebooks, and in the safety of the space between him and Steve. The memories, good or bad, wouldn’t find much of a foothold during a busy couple of days in Queens and Manhattan, he hoped. He’d have more than enough to worry about with the field trip as it was.

“Right, yeah, no, of course,” said Steve, his tone somehow both breezy and uncertain, and Bucky frowned. Before he could figure out what that was about, Steve continued, “Did you remember to pack our socks?”

“Fuck, no, I forgot the socks.” Bucky looked down at the neatly packed suitcase in dismay. “Whatever, hand ‘em over, I’ll just shove them in.”

Thanks to the generous cushion of time Bucky had built in for exigencies like last minute bathroom trips, fitting everyone’s luggage into the minivan, and reassuring nervous parents, Bucky managed to get them on the road by 8 am on Thursday morning.

“You run a tight ship, Mr. Murphy,” said Steve, looking faintly harried as all the kids got settled in the back, chattering all the while.

“Is that news to you?” asked Bucky, and merged onto the freeway carefully. 

“No, it’s just a little surprising to see your NCO skills applied to a half-dozen teenaged mathletes on a field trip. Let me know whenever you want to swap driving duty, by the way.”

Bucky laughed. “That’s cute. You are not driving, Steve.”

“What? I can drive! I’m a good driver,” protested Steve.

“Oh sweetheart, no. No, you’re not. Motorcycles, yeah, sure, but cars? No. You don’t even use your turn signal, Steve!” When Bucky glanced over at the passenger side, Steve was scowling. “If you wanna argue with me about it, I’ll just start listing all of the vehicles you’ve crashed.”

“Okay, but if I’m not allowed to drive, then why did you make me commit our entire route to memory?”

“That’s just proper planning.”

The drive was, thankfully, mostly quiet, at least at first. Jen and Hunter more or less immediately shoved earbuds into their ears and settled in for naps, Nicole worked on prepping for SMATCHY with Mia and Hailey, and Tyrell took advantage of sitting right behind Steve to grill him about anything and everything. 

“Have you ever been to New York, Steve?”

“Oh, uh, yeah, I lived in Brooklyn for a while.”

“Wow, really, so you could show us around?”

“Not sure we’ll have enough time for that—“

Nicole looked up from her studying. “Wait, you lived in New York? What would you recommend we see on our free day? I prepared a few possible itineraries, depending on how much time we have and the weather, and of course our funds—“

Bucky kept his eyes on the road like a responsible driver, but he could feel Steve’s amused stare on him, and he could damn near sense Steve’s thoughts running along the line of like teacher, like student. 

“Well, the Met has always been one of my favorite places in New York. I could easily spend days there. That’s definitely worth a visit,” said Steve.

“I went when I was little,” offered Hailey. “But I don’t remember much about it.”

“You’re an artist, right?” said Tyrell. “D’you think your art will ever be in the Met?”

It was already in the Smithsonian, thought Bucky with a somewhat rueful smile. Steve was always bemoaning how his silly and sloppy sketches were what ended up in a museum rather than anything he’d put real effort into.

“I’ll settle for one of my paintings being in any museum, to be honest.”

Bucky let the conversation flow around him, chiming in with the occasional contribution, while he mostly focused on driving. When it came time for their first scheduled bathroom break/rest stop, he was feeling pretty good about the road trip. Really, he didn’t know what Liesel had been going on about with her warnings; the kids were kind of chatty, sure, but Bucky was used to that he didn’t mind it, and apart from that, it was a normal drive. He supposed it was early yet though.

“Alright everyone, you’ve got 15 minutes! Use the bathroom if you need to, stretch, whatever, just be back at the van in 15!”

He didn’t need to use the bathroom himself, so he stayed by the parked van and did some stretches while the kids headed into the small gas station/convenience store, Steve following after them.

“I’ll keep an eye on them,” he assured Bucky. 

Not that there was much trouble they could get into, given that Bucky’s quick visual sweep of the gas station revealed nothing other than bright, late morning sunshine and a sparse smattering of commuters and truckers, all occupied with filling up their tanks. 

Maybe Bucky should have amended that assessment to there not being much danger, because when his mathletes returned to the van, they were laden down with a truly ridiculous number and variety of snacks, and that could well spell trouble after another few hours cooped up in a van.

“What’s all this?” Bucky asked. “It’s only a couple hours until we stop for lunch!”

“I didn’t have breakfast!” said Hunter defensively, clutching a small plastic bag full to the brim with Flaming Hot Cheetos and candy bars.

“None of that is breakfast food,” said Bucky.

“It’s tradition!” said Mia, with her own armful of drinks and snacks: Moonpies and sodas and gummy worms, it looked like. Christ, even Bucky’s super soldier constitution quailed at the thought of downing all of that in quick succession. “If you’re on a road trip, you’ve gotta get unhealthy and delicious snacks from gas stations!”

Steve had apparently given into the siren call of junk food too, because he had his own bag of snacks, mostly snack cakes and pastries. 

“I, uh, got you some chocolate?” Steve said, and smiled winningly. 

“Oh, did you? Because I mostly just see a lot of mini donuts that’ll make a mess of crumbs in the van,” said Bucky. He narrowed his eyes and let Steve hang for a few long seconds, before his eye caught on a telltale shade of orange. “Hand it over,” he said, and stuck his hand out, pleased when Steve gave him one of the peanut butter chocolate bars he had a terrible weakness for. 

“Good choice, Mr. M,” said Tyrell with a sage nod. “Some people think Snickers are the best, but the Fast Break is really where it’s at.”

“Yeah, yeah, enjoy all your junk food, kids. But no more snacks at any of our other stops! Just lunch and water from here on out, alright?”

The kids acquiesced readily enough, and piled back into the van, the small space quickly filling up with the sound of their chatter and crackling junk food wrappers. When he glanced over at the passenger seat, Steve was already shoving a mini donut into his mouth with the faintly guilty look of a man who knew he was not making the best food choice ever.

“What happened to ‘mass-produced baked goods are all terrible and way too sweet’?” Bucky asked as he pulled out of the gas station parking lot.

“Well, uh, they’re still terrible, but in a really delicious way,” said Steve through a mouthful of donut. “Do you want one?”

“No thanks,” said Bucky.

Which meant that 45 minutes later, Bucky was the only damn person in the van who wasn’t riding a sugar high. The kids went from chatty to boisterous, and that was kind of a lot to deal with in the small, enclosed space of the van, especially for someone with super hearing. Still better than being stuffed in a Panzer with the Howlies though. The smell alone…

In the hopes of redirecting some of the chaotic teenaged energy that was reaching an ever-higher pitch, Bucky let Nicole hook her phone into the van’s stereo, and soon his mathletes were serenading him and Steve with a singalong. 

“Alexa, play Despacito!” called out Hailey.

“Ugh, I have an iPhone, it’s Siri play Despacito!” retorted Nicole, and her phone obliged her. “Wait, I didn’t mean—!”

“Too late!” crowed Mia.

“So, is this better or worse than the tunes Dum Dum would sing on marches?” asked Steve, only just audible through the din.

“Their Spanish is certainly better than Dum Dum’s French, that’s for sure,” said Bucky.

“Wait for it!” said Hailey, her arms raised like a conductor, and when she waved her hands, a not particularly harmonious chorus of “Des-pa-ci-to!” rung out.

“Mr. M, aren’t you gonna sing along?” asked Hunter, and Bucky sighed, but he grinned too.

“Oh trust me, kids, you don’t want to hear him sing,” said Steve.

Well just for that, Bucky was gonna belt it out along with the kids.

The singalong continued unabated until they stopped for lunch, so Steve and Bucky got to listen to a curated medley of 21^st century pop music as interpreted by Bucky’s students. Singing, unfortunately, did not number among his students’ many talents. Thankfully, they were easily distracted by lunch, and since Bucky had anticipated the inevitable arguing over what to eat, he’d chosen a truck stop for their lunch break, one with a variety of restaurants to cover everyone’s preferences. After everyone split up to acquire their preferred lunch, they reconvened to eat together at the truck stop’s outdoor picnic tables. Here too, they avoided any of Liesel’s alarming potential disasters. There were no allergic reactions, no students getting lost, no food fights—just a perfectly pleasant, quick lunch at a bustling, sunny truck stop before they got back on the road again.

Once the post-lunch, food coma lull passed, his students remembered just what they were heading to New York for, and got back to prepping for SMATCHY, so the rest of the drive passed with considerably less chaos and clamor until they arrived in New York. 

Their route took them through the Bronx, not Brooklyn, to Bucky’s quiet relief. He wasn’t sure how—or if—he wanted to return to Brooklyn, but he knew he didn’t want to do it like this, driving through it on the expressway, all its once-beloved and familiar geography rendered strange and anonymous. Bucky’s Brooklyn was the one he’d roamed on foot and by streetcar, and part of him wanted to preserve it like that, wanted to spare himself the knowledge of how it had changed. 

The Bronx, at least, held no particular memories, had no real pull on his heart. Still, even from the vantage point of the expressway, it was recognizably New York, dense and crowded and diverse. This urban landscape would always be Bucky’s natural habitat, he suspected. Steve’s too, maybe, though when Bucky glanced over at him, he was staring out the van window with a somewhat troubled pensiveness.

The Stark Expo itself was in Queens, which meant their hotel was too, despite the kids’ efforts to finagle a stay in a fancier Manhattan hotel. That, he’d told them firmly, was very much not in the budget. And sure, staying at a big and bland hotel near the airport wasn’t exactly the ideal New York tourist experience, but SI had booked the whole place for students and other Expo goers, and the rooms were available at reduced rates. 

Getting his students and all their stuff unloaded from the van was somehow far more difficult and chaotic than getting them into it in the first place: they all seemed to spill out of the van accompanied by a veritable deluge of discarded snack wrappers and drink bottles, and there was a lot of wait, where’s my phone? and I can’t find my earbuds! and Mr. M, I need to use the restroom! Like, now! With judicious use of his best sergeant voice, he managed to herd everyone and their bags into the hotel lobby while Steve parked the van in the hotel lot.

The whole process of checking in and getting everyone up to their hotel rooms had Bucky wondering how on earth parents managed this process with younger kids. At least he was spared any arguments about who would be in what room, since the kids all divided themselves up peaceably enough, and Bucky got a few blissful moments of almost-silence and rest as they all got themselves settled into their rooms. 

Bucky had just finished giving the room a perfunctory sweep for any bugs—unlikely, but better safe than sorry—when Steve’s distinctive knock sounded on the hotel door, and Bucky heaved himself up off the bed to let him in.

“So, pizza for dinner?” asked Steve, juggling their own bags and a to-go cup of steaming hot coffee. To Bucky’s immense gratitude, he handed the coffee to Bucky. Steve grinned at the way he immediately drank the coffee, heedless of the heat, and continued, “I’m guessing you don’t want to wrangle that group into another outing for dinner. I can order us pizza for delivery.”

“You’re a true hero, Steve,” Bucky told him, and pulled him down for a coffee-flavored kiss that was at least 80% preemptive apology for the impending logic puzzle of ordering pizzas that would fit everyone’s topping preferences.

Liesel’s most dire warnings and earnest advice for the field trip had been reserved for this point: having half a dozen teenagers spend the night in a hotel together, she had assured him, was a recipe for chaos and shenanigans, and possibly even, she’d said in downright scandalized tones, debauchery. Privately, Bucky thought his mathletes weren’t up for much in the way of debauchery, but he conceded that chaos and shenanigans were possible.

Once they all ate their dinner though, no chaos ensued; they just continued their preparations for SMATCHY, and Bucky left them to it with admonitions not to stay up too late and to return to their own rooms to sleep.

“We’ve got an early start tomorrow morning if we’re gonna be at the Expo by 9,” he told them. “Fair warning, if you’re late, we’re skipping the free breakfast downstairs, so get a decent night’s sleep and be ready to go at 7:45, alright?”

He still had to enforce a 10 PM curfew, when he chivvied everyone to the appropriate rooms and asked them to please stay there and at least try to get a good night’s sleep. Liesel had suggested he put a piece of tape over their doors so that he’d know if they left their rooms, which was a bit of almost-spycraft that seemed frankly excessive to Bucky.

Steve seemed to think it was funny though, because he laughed when Bucky related this particular bit of advice, then he looked thoughtful. “So, are you gonna do it?”

“No! I trust my students,” he said, then added, “Also I have super-hearing.”

The night passed with no obvious chaos, shenanigans, or debauchery from any of his students, though there was plenty of chaos involved in getting six teenagers out of their hotel rooms before 8 a.m. Only the promise of food and caffeine got them moving faster, and the less said about the raucous hotel breakfast, the better. A high school cafeteria was bad enough, but a hotel’s breakfast area and hastily repurposed conference rooms all overflowing with high school students from across the country? That was an awful lot like a plague of locusts, with the equivalent impact on the breakfast buffet spread.

Bucky managed to get his mini-plague of teenaged locusts out the door and into the van by 9 am though, so he considered the morning a success. He even successfully herded them through the Expo itself, albeit slowly as they gawked at all the sights. 

In the bright light of morning, the glitz and glamor of Bucky’s Stark Expo memories wasn’t much in evidence, at least not yet. There was a big stage that currently had people scurrying around and on it, setting things up for later in the day, and most of the exhibitions that filled the fairgrounds were sparsely attended. The whole thing had an unavoidably corporate air, and either Bucky had been too young and easily dazzled to notice that kind of thing back in the 40s, or it was a 21st century feature. 

Despite the fact that he’d gotten fair warning from Steve that the modern Stark Expo was more or less a trade show during the day, Bucky couldn’t help but be a little disappointed by the Expo’s slick, corporate aesthetic. The big robots on display throughout the Expo were sure as hell impressive though, as was the enormous arc reactor that served as the center of the Expo fairgrounds, and Bucky got the sense that there’d be a hell of a light show once it was dark. Maybe the Expo would look more familiar then, and have more of the Coney Island atmosphere he remembered. For now, with the Expo still filling up, the whole thing was vaguely reminiscent of the corporate equivalent of a county fair, albeit without any delicious food to recommend it. 

“It’s a lot more fun later in the day,” said Steve, a commiserating and apologetic tilt to his eyebrows.

“You’ve been before, Steve?” asked Nicole.

“For a work thing, yeah. During the day, it’s more of a trade show for the engineers and business people, most of the cool stuff happens at night.”

This qualifier didn’t seem to impede his students’ excitement.

“Is this what Coachella is like?” asked Mia, spinning around as she walked so she could look at everything. “Oh my god, this is what Coachella is like, isn’t it. It’s so cool!”

“No this is not what Coachella is like, you nerd, oh my god,” said Jen, rolling her eyes.

“Excuse you, you are right here on this mathlete team with me, nerd!” retorted Mia. “Oh wow, is that the VR prototypes booth? Mr. M, we have to stop there—“

Hunter, who was carrying the team’s presentation for their project, seemed significantly less thrilled. The presentation wasn’t heavy, since it was just cardboard and foam board, but it was big and unwieldy. 

“Uh, no we do not, we have to get to Pavilion A so I can put this presentation down—“

“Ugh, Hunter, it’ll be super quick, like, a couple minutes—“

“No way! You’re not the one carrying this thing—“

“It’s mostly cardboard!”

At this, Tyrell added his own objections, because he was carrying one of the miniature building models made out of balsa wood and plywood, along with the bag that held the team’s laptop.

“This model is way more than cardboard! And the laptop is kinda heavy too—”

“And Mr. M is carrying the box full of the rest of the equipment, he has to be getting tired by now. C’mon Mia, we’ll come back after all the SMATCHY stuff, okay?” said Nicole.

Shit, was this box heavy enough that a non-enhanced human would have trouble carrying it for a while? Bucky had no idea. It felt light to him, but he had a robot arm and also he was a supersoldier who at this point had no memory of what was even a reasonable weight for him to comfortably hold without attracting suspicion. Maybe he should have carried the box together with Steve? Oh well, too late now. All the more reason to get to the actual SMATCHY competition faster.

“Alright, c’mon, we’ve gotta get to Pavilion A. Nicole’s right, we’ll have plenty of time to look around all the exhibitions this afternoon,” said Bucky.

Once they got to Pavilion A and their assigned table, Bucky helped the kids set up everything for their project display, then stepped back and let them handle the rest. This part of the SMATCHY competition was more or less like a standard science fair, where students set up an informational display demonstrating their projects and talked to everyone who came by to look at it, SMATCHY judges included. Bucky was mostly just there to supervise and beam with pride, and occasionally make small talk with other teachers who came by their table. In the meantime, Steve took the opportunity for an amble around the pavilion.

When he returned, he was slightly wide-eyed. “Wow, these kids sure are something,” he told Bucky. “I barely understand half of what they’re talking about, but it looks like they’re working on some pretty complex stuff that could make a real difference.”

“Yeah, this is definitely a few steps up from the make a volcano science fair projects, it’s really amazing.”

“So, how’s it going so far?” asked Steve, looking over Bucky’s mathletes and Bucky himself as if searching for the answer to his question.

“Pretty good, I think,” said Bucky.

“You seem pretty relaxed,” Steve ventured.

“I am, actually. This is the part that’s up to them, you know? And we’ve all done our best, so whatever happens from here on out, it’s out of our hands.”

Steve smiled and bumped shoulders with him. “Hmm, remember that when it comes time for your students’ AP exam results, Mr. Murphy,” he teased, and Bucky grinned sheepishly at him.

“Yeah, okay, fair enough,” he said, then he caught sight of a small group of suited people heading for their table. “Alright, look alive, judges incoming.” 

Luckily for their covers, Tony Stark himself wasn’t one of the judges for the SMATCHY entries today. That honor went to Stark Industries CEO Pepper Potts, and while her eyes had a knowing sort of twinkle as she greeted Bucky and Steve, she thankfully gave no other indication that she knew who they really were. Based on things Steve had told him, Stark would’ve been dropping double entendres and terrible jokes all over the place. Ms. Potts just asked Bucky’s students attentive, tough questions, and looked carefully at every part of their display with interest, not even a hint of condescension or patronizing talking down in any of it. The whole damn SMATCHY experience was worth it for the way his students lit up at the attention, each of them rising to the occasion with enthusiasm and intelligence. This, he hoped, would be the moment they’d remember, no matter how they placed in the competition.

Once she was out of questions, Ms. Potts graced them with a kind smile.

“This is impressive, laudable work, all of you. Thank you so much for sharing it with us,” she said, and to Bucky’s amusement, about half of his students’ faces turned bright red. 

He didn’t blame them; Ms. Potts was beautiful and kind, her attention focused and genuine, and something in her bearing suggested a spine of steel. As she walked away with a sharp clack of her impressively high heels, a collective sigh rippled through his students.

“She’s so amazing,” said Nicole dreamily.

“I can’t tell if I have a crush on her or if I wanna be her,” said Hailey.

“It’s definitely a crush for me,” said Tyrell.

After the judging of all the SMATCHY projects was finished, it was lunch time, thankfully provided free of charge by the Stark Expo. Sure the boxed sandwich lunches were nothing to write home about, but Bucky was just glad he didn’t have to corral six teenagers into yet another meal. Then it was time to pack up their displays, and head to the outdoor auditorium, where the quiz and improv portions of the competition would take place.

This part had some actual razzle dazzle, with a master of ceremonies and a whole gameshow-like set up that had the kids starry-eyed and laughing, and so despite the fact that teachers and chaperones were sent off to the audience section where they could do nothing but cheer their students on from afar, Bucky relaxed. Win or lose, his students were clearly going to have fun, so he resolved to do the same.

“Okay, I’d been thinking maybe SMATCHY was mostly Pepper’s baby, but all this is definitely Tony’s idea,” said Steve as he looked around at the bright lights and carnivalesque atmosphere with a kind of fond dismay.

The quiz portion went fast, by necessity since it needed to be done in five groups of four teams each, and after a round of lightning-fast questions on various science and engineering topics, his mathletes advanced to the final improvisational round, where the top ten teams would have to solve a real-world problem with only the tools provided to them.

“It’s like the Great British Bake Off, only with tiny robots instead of delicious baked goods!” the emcee declared cheerfully.  

“Honestly, why isn’t that a show already?” wondered Bucky, and then he cheered wildly when his team of mathletes made the obviously excellent choice to grab the big bucket of Legos as their robot-building medium of choice.  

“You can build a robot out of Legos?” said Steve.

“Yeah, their robot kits come with little engines and servos and stuff, and then you just have to write a program to run it.” He pointed out Mia, who was whipping out a laptop and already typing at a pace so fast her fingers were almost blurring. “See, Mia’s working on the code on the laptop already.”

Once the allotted hour was up, they had a brightly-colored Lego robot that could trundle along, more or less, to test the ground in front of it for any instability and search for any signs of life, the kind of thing that could come in handy in search and rescue efforts after a natural disaster. It was clever and perfect, and the Lego robot was even downright adorable. God, Bucky loved his students so much.

“Bu—Jack, are you crying?” demanded Steve.

Bucky glared at Steve for the near-miss and sniffled. “No!” he lied, and wiped his eyes. “I’m just really proud of my students, okay? Look at that robot!”

Steve slung an arm around his shoulders and kissed his temple. “Yeah, it’s a pretty amazing robot.”

Between his mathletes’ scores on their project and the quiz portions of the competition, it was enough to win Bucky’s mathletes the third place prize of $5,000 scholarships and Starkphones for each of them.

Fuck yeah, field trip success, thought Bucky, with equal parts pride for his students and giddy relief that the trip and the competition were going so well. Given the way the kids were celebrating, you could be forgiven for thinking they’d won first place; there wasn’t even a hint of disappointment in any of them as they jumped up and down and shrieked with joy, and their happiness was contagious. Bucky couldn’t stop smiling, and when he glanced at Steve, he saw that Steve was absolutely beaming too. Once the joyful shouting died down a bit, Bucky congratulated his thrilled students, and even managed to give each of them a celebratory hug. 

“I’m so proud of all of you, you did an amazing job,” Bucky told them.

“We couldn’t have done it without you, Mr. M!”

“Yeah, thanks Mr. Murphy!”

There was a brief award ceremony where Ms. Potts handed out trophies and medals and mounted certificates, along with the promised Starkphones, while Steve took photo after photo, looking downright misty-eyed—so suck it Steve, Bucky wasn’t the only one emotionally affected here—until eventually, they all spilled out of the auditorium, giggling and whooping.

Bucky was ready to relax at this point; he figured he’d have to keep a sharp eye on the kids so they didn’t get up to any serious mischief while high on their triumph, but surely it’d be all downhill from here, effort-wise, right? They’d roam around the Expo until dinner time, then eat and roam around some more, until Bucky rounded them up to return to the hotel, and in the meantime he wouldn’t need to worry too much because security at the Expo was pretty good.

Yeah, no. Bucky definitely should’ve worried. Because that night, Dr. Doom’s Doombots made an appearance.

After turning his students loose into the Expo for a few hours, they all met back up again for dinner at the Expo’s picnic area near the food trucks. To Bucky’s relief, they were all perfectly safe and happy after their unsupervised romp through the Expo, still bouncing merrily along on the high of their third-place victory and now eating their way through a truly ridiculous quantity and variety of food truck food.

“So what should we check out next?” asked Nicole. “I was thinking of going to Reed Richards’ presentation at 8, if anyone wants to come with me?”

Mia wrinkled her nose. “What, the thing about starships? Why does he call them that anyway, the word spaceship is right there.”

“Something something solar-wind power, I think,” said Nicole, with a vague wave of her ice-cream laden spoon. For such a small girl, she could really pack the food away fast, and she was already on dessert while the rest of them were still eating their dinners. “Maybe he’ll explain it at his presentation.”

“I’m surprised Tony Stark let him present at the Expo at all, aren’t they, like, mortal enemies or something?” said Hailey.

“They’re more academic rivals than mortal enemies, I think,” said Steve.

They went back and forth on what to do next—apparently there was a very cool but crowded exhibition on hover skates, which sounded both very fun and also like a disaster waiting to happen—but eventually his students settled on Richards’ starship presentation, and Steve and Bucky figured they might as well tag along.

Everyone was clearing up their dinner trash when Bucky heard it: an odd mechanical hum that was out of step with the ambient noise of the Expo. He tilted his head and tried to triangulate it—it was coming from the sky, maybe. A distant helicopter? A couple of them had flown over the Expo’s fairgrounds already, probably local news crews getting aerial shots. But no, there was no thrum to the noise. Bucky looked up, and at first, he didn’t see anything out of place in the soft blues and purples of encroaching dusk.

“You hear that?” he asked Steve.

Steve frowned and tilted his own head to listen. “Sounds a little like the Iron Man armor. Maybe Tony’s—uh, Stark’s doing a flyby.”

Now the kids were peering up at the sky too, and Tyrell pointed over Bucky’s shoulder. “If it’s Iron Man, it’s a lot of Iron Mans. Iron Men? Whatever.”

Bucky and Steve turned to look, and while it was hard to see in the encroaching dimness of night, Ty was right: there was a formation of something flying in the sky, heading rapidly for the Expo, and too low in the sky to be jets.

“Oooh, do you think they’re Iron Man drones? Are they gonna do, like, a show or something?” asked Mia, all wide-eyed eagerness.

“Maybe it’s part of Reed Richards’ presentation!” suggested Hunter.

The kids were excited and unafraid, not at all alarmed by the sight of mysterious flying objects heading their way, but Steve and Bucky couldn’t be nearly as sanguine. Bucky exchanged a grim look with Steve, who gave a very slight, sharp shake of his head. It wasn’t Stark. And if it wasn’t Stark…After a few seconds of wordless eye contact, Bucky knew he and Steve were in agreement about a tentative plan, their old battlefield near-telepathy kicking back in with ease.

“Maybe!” said Steve. He put a hand on Bucky’s shoulder and squeezed, and the gesture steadied the suddenly frenzied pounding of Bucky’s heart. “I’m just gonna go to the bathroom real quick, I’ll meet up with you at Richards’ presentation.”

As Steve jogged away, Bucky could just make out the distinctive harsh ringtone of his phone’s Avengers Assemble alert, so there went any hope of this being a false alarm. Fuck, he hoped it wasn’t HYDRA. Bucky wasn’t armed with anything other than his, well, arm, and a ceramic knife in an ankle holster, the only things he’d felt comfortable sneaking past the Expo’s thorough security check.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was precious little cover to speak of. Apart from some big tents and awnings, the food trucks, and a couple of buildings, the Expo was largely outdoors. Maybe they’d have to make do with the picnic tables. Or he could try to get the kids out of here, book it for the parking lot, grab the first vehicle that would fit them all and drive away, but in a few minutes, the whole Expo was almost certainly going to descend into chaos, and being trampled or separated would be a real risk.

On the plus side, Steve had gone off to fetch the shield and his uniform, stowed safely away in the van, and probably more of the Avengers would show up soon. So maybe the best option was to hunker down as best they could until the Avengers handled whatever disaster this was about to turn into.

And hell, Bucky could concede that maybe he and Steve were overreacting, Avengers Assemble alert or not, maybe this was going to be nothing but a flashy marketing stunt or a quickly contained situation. They’d find out soon enough. 

The armored drones or robots or whatever they were flew closer, now close enough that their silver glint was visible. There were a couple dozen of them, maybe, with no readily apparent weapons, not that Bucky thought that meant they didn’t have them.

“Uh, I don’t think those are Iron Men,” said Nicole, frowning. “Mr. Stark is pretty committed to his, like, Gryffindor color scheme, and those look kinda Slytherin to me…?”

Hailey and Hunter had their new Starkphones out and were already filming, the seemingly natural reflex of anyone under 25 nowadays. Even in the growing darkness, Bucky could see that Nicole was right: the robots or drones were silver-colored, rather than the red and gold of Iron Man, with green...capes? What the fuck.

“Oh, we’re gonna be late to Reed Richards’ presentation! I bet we’ll see what these things are for then! C’mon, you guys, let’s go!” urged Mia, about to rush away before Bucky put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Let’s hang back a sec, huh?” said Bucky. “None of these presentations ever start on time anyway.”

“What? Is something wrong, Mr. M?” asked Nicole. 

He thought he’d kept his voice even and calm, but Nicole had clearly picked up on something, because she was looking at him with wide, worried eyes. He was about to reassure her when a deep voice blasted through the air, amplified and multi-layered as if coming from multiple sources at once. 

“REED RICHARDS! HOW DARE YOU PEDDLE YOUR TERRIBLE, ILL-ADVISED SCIENCE AT THIS MONUMENT TO CORPORATE EXCESS AND EGO! YOUR SO-CALLED STARSHIP CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO ENDANGER THE PLANET! FACE DR. DOOM IMMEDIATELY, OR SEE YOUR DELUDED, ADORING MASSES DESTROYED!”

“Uh, excuse you, who are you calling deluded and adoring?” demanded Jen, squinting up at the sky.

“Yeah, what the hell, we’re just here to learn stuff!” added Hunter.

A restive and worried murmur was rising throughout the Expo as people looked up and tried to figure out what was going on. Panic wasn’t spreading yet, with too many people uncertain whether this was some kind of gimmick, which seemed frankly dumb as hell to Bucky. Hadn’t a lot of these folks already lived through a goddamn alien invasion? But the less people panicked, the better, so long as they got the hell out of here too. And so long as they stopped staring at the probably-dangerous robots hovering a couple dozen feet above them like they were part of the show too.

“Really don’t think that’s the pertinent part there, Jen,” said Bucky. He took a quick moment to check his phone, where a message from Steve read: hostile = Dr. Von Doom of Latveria, no HYDRA ties, avengers to engage his robots. “C’mon, we’re getting out of here. Everyone, hold hands, I don’t want any of you getting lost. Who wants to be head of the line? Nicole? Okay, you grab my hand,” he ordered, offering his right hand. “Let’s go, sound out if you need me to slow down or if we’ve lost anyone.”

“Wait, what about Steve?” asked Ty.

“He just texted me, he said he’ll meet us at the parking lot, he’ll be fine. Alright, let’s go.”

“This is just a stunt, right? Like, a viral marketing thing, or—“ said Mia, her voice reaching a higher and higher pitch with every word.

“Maybe,” said Bucky. “But let’s not take any risks, alright?”

He did a quick headcount of his students, relieved to see all six of them holding hands as ordered. They managed to make decent progress through the confused crowds milling around before the shit really hit the fan.

“RICHARDS. FACE ME! FACE ME, OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES!”

“What is this guy’s deal anyway?” demanded Nicole. “Who does this kind of thing?”

“Mad scientists,” Bucky told her, still plowing forward through the crowds.

“BEHOLD: CONSEQUENCES!” announced Doom. 

And then things started exploding. The darkening sky lit up with blasts and lasers, a potentially deadly light show, and in the distance, towards the center of the Expo, the big Stark Industries logo sculpture began to topple.

That was everyone’s official cue to start panicking. The Expo erupted into screams and shouts, Bucky’s students included, as Expo security began pouring into the fairgrounds in force, disciplined and reassuringly competent. An evacuation message came over the loudspeakers, providing instructions to remain calm that maybe a third of the panicked crowds listened to, a third kept milling around while filming on their phones, and another third began following the evacuation instructions of Stark’s security to get to safety.

 Except, with an enemy that was airborne, there was no safety, not when there was so little cover. Bucky stopped, suddenly enough that Nicole ran into his back with a squeak. A couple of the flying robots flew over them, towards the evacuation route they were heading for right now, likely cutting off any access to an exit. Fuck. Bucky consulted his mental map of the Expo for an alternate exit route.

“Mr. Murphy?” said Nicole, her voice shaking.

Bucky would have no doubts about what to do if he was on his own, or hell, if he was here with just Steve. But with six teenagers under his care? Literally no option seemed safe enough right now.

“We can’t go that way,” he said. “C’mon.”

He led them out of the flow of people heading for the almost certainly blocked evacuation route, and headed for one of the authorized access only sections of the Expo that was restricted to Expo employees and contractors. At the very least, this area would probably be less crowded, empty as it was of the panicked masses out in the Expo’s main drag. Maybe he’d get lucky and find a van or something to borrow to get them the hell out of here.

“Uh, I don’t think we’re supposed to go in there, Mr. Murphy,” said Mia.

“Yeah, that’s kind of the point,” said Bucky absently.

The area was fenced off with the kind of temporary crowd control fencing that had very little actual utility as a security measure, which seemed kind of lax for an outfit like Stark Industries. There was a small guard booth, sure, so probably most of the security was meant to be in the form of guards, but the booth was abandoned, its occupants likely helping with evacuation efforts. Or maybe it wasn’t guarded by only guards, thought Bucky, because once they got close to the fencing, he could make out a faint, electrical hum, like the kind power lines made.

“Access to this area is restricted to Stark Expo personnel only,” said a pleasant male voice with a plummy British accent that reminded him of Peggy. The voice came from nowhere in particular, and it had the slightly stilted quality of an automated message as it continued, “Security measures are in place to prevent unauthorized access. Please return to the Expo.”

“What security measures?” demanded Hunter. “It’s a fence! Let’s jump it and get the hell out of here!”

To Bucky’s surprise, the voice he had assumed was automated responded, “That would be ill-advised,” it—he?—said. “Any breach of the perimeter will cause the containment field to be deployed.”

“Containment—do you mean a force field?” said Nicole.

“Listen, in case you haven’t noticed, the flying robots attacking the Expo are kind of more of a security threat than me and half a dozen teenagers. I’m trying to get these kids to safety, can you please let us pass?”

The clamor and chaos of the Expo rose in pitch behind them, and there were a couple more explosions, too damn close to them, that had them all ducking reflexively.

“One moment, please,” said the maybe-robot. “You are Jack Murphy, here with the students from John Hay High School?”

“Yeah, that’s us,” Bucky told it.

He risked a quick look up at the sky, almost fully dark now, and saw flashes of light that briefly illuminated what looked to be a pitched battle between Doom’s robots and Iron Man, or maybe War Machine. Bucky could only hope the battle would distract Doom enough to keep him away from civilians.

The fencing’s electrical humming noise reduced in pitch to a nearly subsonic hum. “I have been authorized to let you through. Please proceed.”

“Thank you,” said Bucky, and led his students past the gate. “Are you, uh, authorized to let us know what the hell is going on? And who are you, anyway?”

“I am JARVIS, Mr. Stark’s AI assistant. The Avengers are currently doing battle with the Doombots, and have disabled 10 out of 24 of them, with no casualties to the Avengers.” The specificity of this status update was a relief, and made him suspect that Steve had a hand in it, and in the sudden authorization to let them pass. The kids didn’t seem to notice anything amiss though as JARVIS continued, “If you make your way to the east, in approximately one quarter of a mile, there is a loading area where two vans are parked. They will be unlocked and ready for your use. There is an access road that will take you out of the Expo, I can provide further directions in the van’s navigation system.”

“Got it. Thanks, JARVIS. Is the route to the vans clear?”

“Yes, at present,” said JARVIS. “However—“

“CEASE YOUR ATTACKS UPON THE PERFECT CREATIONS OF DR. DOOM, IRON MAN!” roared Doom, too damn close. “MY QUARREL IS WITH RICHARDS, PRODUCE HIM AT ONCE!”

“You may wish to hurry,” finished JARVIS.

“Yeah, no shit,” said Bucky. “Alright kids, we’re gonna make a run for it. We’re almost there, okay?”

“I think the robots are getting closer,” yelled Hunter, from where he was bringing up the rear.

The back of Bucky’s neck prickled with the unease of exposure—fuck, what he wouldn’t give for some goddamn cover right about now—and he picked up the pace, the loading area now in view. There were a couple of cargo vans, as promised, and a truck that had clearly been abandoned mid-unloading, with wooden crates left stacked on the ground. It wasn’t great cover, but it would do until they could get into one of the vans. 

“Wait, how are we gonna get in the vans? We don’t have the keys!” said Hailey, panic creeping into her tone.

“JARVIS said they’d be open. Get behind the crates,” he told them. “I’ll tell you when you can come out and get into the van, okay?”

Just as he was testing one of the van’s doors—unlocked, just as JARVIS had said, and since it was one of the modern no-key ignitions, already starting up too, probably courtesy of JARVIS—something crashed into the ground a few yards away, and his students screamed.

“Mr. Murphy, look out!”

“Stay down!” he told them, and came around the van to put himself between whatever had just fallen from the sky and his students.

He cast about for a weapon, as the—what was it JARVIS had called them, Doombots?—Doombot staggered back to its feet from the mini-crater its crash had created. Bucky grabbed a crowbar that was leaning up against one of the crates, the best and pretty much only weapon available, and sized up his opponent.

The Doombot was pretty big, maybe eight feet tall, and made of some kind of dull gray metal. If Iron Man was the sleek fighter jet of flying robots, this thing was more akin to a tank. Its proportions seemed designed more to impress and intimidate than for actual utility, its barrel chest and squat-domed head suggesting a lack of agility when on the ground. Good, thought Bucky. He could take advantage of that. Bucky scanned it rapidly for any other potential weaknesses; it didn’t have much of a neck to speak of, but there was a crack or seam where the dome of the head met the shoulders. It would have to do. 

“Jen, you have your driver’s license, right?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the Doombot. 

“Yeah,” said Jen. Her voice was shaking and she sounded terrified, none of her usual cool in evidence, and Bucky hated to ask this of her, but it was their best shot at escape.

“Okay, good. I’m going to need you to drive yourself and your teammates out of here while I handle this Doombot, okay? The van is running, JARVIS will tell you where to go.”

“Mr. M, we can’t leave you!” protested Nicole.

“Yeah, you can, and you have to. I’ll be fine. I just need you all to get to safety, alright?”

“WHILE I REGRET THE NECESSITY, I’M AFRAID I CANNOT ALLOW THAT,” said the Doombot, its green eyes glowing an eerie, poisonous green, almost the same shade as its now-tattered cloak. “I REQUIRE HOSTAGES TO EXCHANGE FOR RICHARDS. IF YOU SURRENDER YOURSELVES AT ONCE, I WILL CAUSE YOU NO HARM.”

“Yeah, we’re not risking that, pass on the whole being hostages thing,” said Bucky, then turned back to this students “Go!” he ordered them, and then he rushed forward and took a swing at the Doombot with the crowbar.

He hit what passed for the robot’s neck with an almighty clang, but it didn’t seem to do much damage. That was fine by Bucky, he only needed to distract the damn thing long enough for his students to get away.

Which they were not doing, what the hell. They had the back doors of the van open, and while they’d all piled inside it, they weren’t driving away yet, and were instead waving and gesturing frantically.

“Mr. M, get in! We’re not leaving without you!” shouted Hunter.

Of course they were idiotically brave, of course. 

“I said, go!” shouted Bucky.

“VERY SWEET,” said the Doombot. “BUT CEASE YOUR ESCAPE ATTEMPTS AT ONCE, OR I SHALL BE FORCED TO INTERVENE IN VIOLENT FASHION.”

Ugh, this guy. Bucky shifted the crowbar to his right hand, telegraphing the motion clearly as he swung it towards the Doombot, and when it predictably grabbed the crowbar, Bucky followed up with a haymaker with his left arm, putting enough supersoldier force behind it to send the robot reeling to the ground. The kids cheered like this was a damn boxing match and not a potentially life-threatening situation, and he was about to yell at them to get the hell out, now, when he heard something hum and whoosh overhead, followed by a heavy thump. 

If this was more goddamn robots, Bucky was going to be pissed, but no: a familiar sharp whistle cut through the air, and Bucky’s muscle memory took over, as easy as if that whistle was the opening chord of a song he’d been dancing to his whole life. He turned just in time to catch the shield Steve had thrown his way, then he used the momentum to spin back towards the Doombot as he brought the shield down on its neck. 

When Steve did this move, he did it with a flashy little leap and brought the shield down in a wide, sweeping arc, because he was a dramatic asshole. Bucky kept it fast and vicious, one brutal motion with all his strength and momentum behind it as he aimed at the weak spot where the robot’s head met its shoulders. 

Whatever Doom’s robot was made of, it didn’t hold up against the vibranium shield and a supersoldier’s strength. The shield sheared through the robot’s neck with the hair-raising screech of metal on metal, effectively beheading it.

“Holy shit!” said Tyrell, so that was great, he had witnesses, Bucky was going to have to explain this to his students in a way that wouldn’t break his cover. 

He threw the shield back to Steve—or rather, Captain America, because he was in full uniform.

“Thanks,” Bucky said, and then, seeing the worry that had every line of Steve taut with tension, he added, “I’m okay, we’re all okay.”

Steve just nodded, most of his tension easing, but he didn’t come any closer. Which was for the best because the cowl didn’t cover his obvious beard, and this whole tableau was already precarious enough for both of their covers. If Steve came any closer and Bucky’s students solved the not exactly difficult equation of Cap + beard + Steve Rogers = Hot Boyfriend Steve...

“Good work,” said Steve in his brisk and resonant Cap voice. “We’ve handled most of the Doombots, your evac route should be clear, sir.” He nodded over at the van full of Bucky’s students, almost all of them leaning half out of it, gawking. “You can get those kids to safety now.”

“Wait, Captain America—!” the students clamored, as if now was the time or the place.

Bucky jogged towards the van and shooed his kids back inside of it. “Nope, no questions for Cap, he’s busy, and you all should’ve gotten out when I told you to! Everyone okay, no one’s hurt?”

“We’re fine!” reported Nicole.

“I think Hailey broke my hand with how hard she was squeezing it—” complained Hunter.

“I did not, don’t be a wimp!”

Bucky gave them all a thorough onceover: they looked a little wild-eyed, and a couple of them were all but vibrating with adrenaline, but yeah, they were all fine. 

“Okay, well, tell me if anything hurts. Jen, scoot over, I’ll drive. I know there are no seats back there, but hang onto whatever you can, I’ll try not to knock you around too much.”

“Wait wait wait, are we not gonna talk about what just went down with you taking out a robot? And Cap’s shield! Mr. Murphy, holy shit!”

“Language!” chided Bucky.

“Mr. Murphy, holy crap!” amended Hunter. “That was amazing! You kicked that robot’s butt!”

“Did you hurt your hand when you punched that robot? Are you sure you’re okay?” asked Nicole.

“How did you do that move with Cap’s shield?” asked Mia.

“Wait, did anyone see Spiderman? Mr. M, is Spiderman out there too?”

“I’ll ice my hand later,“ he said. Not that his metal hand needed it, but he had to keep up appearances. “I’m fine, and uh, I did track and field in school. The shield’s just like one big discus, pretty much? And Spiderman? What? That’s an actual superhero?”

The questions continued to come hard and fast during the short and blessedly uneventful drive out of the Expo and to the safe zone of the parking lot, until Bucky said, “Can we please just focus on getting to safety for now?” which earned him a brief reprieve. 

He dropped off the van with the first Stark Expo security guy he saw, and herded his students through the packed parking lot back to their actual van. The lot was full of Expo goers milling around looking for their cars, along with a sizable minority of folks who seemed like they were just waiting to be let back into the Expo. The crowd’s energy was less that of people who’d narrowly escaped disaster, and more like people who were leaving the theater after an unexpectedly terrifying movie that they’d nevertheless enjoyed. Bucky wondered just how many of them still thought this was all some scripted stunt. Too damn many, he suspected. 

Bucky was honestly pretty relieved by his students’ irrepressible curiosity though, because it meant their fear had dissipated about as rapidly as the smoke from a thoroughly quenched flame. They were more excited than scared now, and if there was a slightly frantic edge to their loud chatter, well, that was only to be expected. They’d nearly reached the van when Nicole abruptly stopped, gasping. 

“Oh my god, Mr. Murphy! We forgot about Steve!” she said.

Thankfully, before Bucky had to come up with an excuse or act appropriately worried about his “missing” partner, he spotted Steve jogging over to them. His hair had a distinctly flattened and disheveled post-cowl look, and his clothes were looking pretty mussed, like he’d taken them off and put them back on in a hurry, but he looked otherwise fine and, perhaps just as importantly, not much like Captain America.

Of course, then he promptly almost blew their cover with the first word out of his mouth. 

Bucky could see it happening, as if in slow motion: Steve’s lips forming the shape of a word starting with B rather than J, very obviously about to call him Bucky, which would almost certainly lead to a series of cascading, cover-busting revelations among Bucky’s very bright students, but to Steve’s credit, or maybe just thanks to the power of Bucky’s furious glare, he course-corrected at the last possible microsecond.

“Babe! I’m so glad you’re okay!” he said, before striding forward to envelop Bucky in a tight hug, thereby reducing the likelihood of either of them blowing their covers with an inappropriate expression of are-you-fucking-kidding-me rage (Bucky) or frantic apology (Steve). 

“Babe?!” hissed Bucky as he squeezed Steve just this side of punishingly tight, ostensibly as revenge for calling him babe, in public, in front of his students. But when Steve squeezed him back just as tightly, the stress of the ridiculous robot attack and trying to keep his students safe hit him all at once, and he started shaking, just a little.

“Hey, everyone’s okay,” murmured Steve, steady and sure as he held Bucky up. “Your students are okay, and I’m okay, and the worst casualty of this whole thing was a couple folks who got a little banged up in the rush to evacuate. Doom was really just here for Richards, his Doombots didn’t hurt anybody.”

They held onto each other for the space of a few slow and deep breaths in and out, synced together so that for a moment, Bucky almost felt like they were one person. In Steve’s hold, the part of Bucky that was always alert and that never felt wholly safe didn’t disappear—it would never, ever disappear, Bucky suspected—but it did grow small and quiet, soothed by the undeniable safety of Steve’s arms. Then the reality of his tittering and cooing students broke in, and he stepped out of Steve’s comfortingly strong hold. Steve didn’t let him go without a lingering kiss to his forehead, gratitude and relief in the shaky breath he let out along with it, which definitely did not help reduce the amount of teasing awwwws from his students.

Bucky couldn’t quite bring himself to care.

 Back at the hotel, the kids all called their parents to check in and reassure them of their safety, and to Bucky’s surprise, he was not inundated with panicked parents’ frantic requests to bring their children home immediately. Instead, his careful and calm explanation that yes, the students had been briefly confronted with a dangerous, armed robot before being safely evacuated, but they were fine, everyone was fine, proved to be entirely unnecessary, because apparently no one thought the Doombots had been all that dangerous at all. 

Plus, from what he could hear of his students’ conversations with their parents, the whole robot attack ordeal was barely a footnote in comparison to winning third place at SMATCHY and all the other wonders of the Expo. If they did mention the Doombots, it was to breezily say they hadn’t been scared at all and it had all happened so fast, and Mr. Murphy was a total badass and got us out quickly, it was fine, and they were so excited to spend Saturday at the Met.

Bucky kind of suspected the kids had settled on a relatively sedate day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in deference to his own still jangling nerves, but he wasn’t going to complain. Because yes, he did need a relaxing day at a museum after the whole Doombots thing, and also, Bucky remembered loving the Met.

He couldn’t quite remember the last time he’d gone to the Met. Not for amnesia reasons, for once; no, the specific occasion was just lost to the normal haze of old memories muddled together by time’s kindnesses. It wasn’t as if he’d gone there regularly, but the occasions still blended together. Had it been the time he’d taken Becca to Manhattan for her birthday? Or had he gone with Steve, ostensibly for educational purposes when they were taking that art class together? He wasn’t sure, and the lack of certainty was almost a comfort, because it was so damn normal.    

The Met itself was a comfort too: it was young in the grand scheme of things—most things were in America, as Dernier and Monty had liked to point out whenever the American Howlies had marveled over some old European monument or another—but it had seemed ancient to Bucky when he’d been a child, and the agelessness of its grand Neoclassical facade rendered it a blessedly steady, still point in the otherwise shifting temporal geology of his New York. 

It was an illusion, of course. That lovely white marble facade with its graceful arches and columns wasn’t much older than Bucky himself was, completed not long after the turn of the 20th century, and the museum itself had been a work in progress, still growing and changing all throughout Bucky’s childhood and youth, and during his long decades on ice. But the Fifth Avenue entrance was stately and unchanged save for the new banners out front, and the same thrill of excitement shivered down his spine looking up at it now as it had back then.

It was nice to see his students feeling that same thrill, and he and Steve happily took their photos as they posed in front of the steps and the museum facade. Seeing them smiling now, in the bright sunshine of a perfect late spring day in New York, the terror of yesterday night felt very far away, and Bucky let their carefree joy soothe the jagged edges of his own lingering anxiety.

“I can’t decide what to see first!” gushed Nicole, and his students chattered excitedly all the way up the steps and into the museum.

“Have you been here before, Mr. M?” asked Mia. “Any exhibits you think we absolutely have to see?”

“All the ancient Egypt stuff, duh,” said Tyrell, and Bucky grinned.

“Yeah, that’s definitely on the list. But I haven’t been in years, so I don’t remember much,” he added. “Steve’s my tour guide for the day, he’s been here way more times than I have.”

“And he’s an artist!” said Hailey. “You brought your art stuff, what are you gonna sketch?”

“Not sure yet,” said Steve, taking Bucky’s hand as they walked into the great hall. “We’ll see where inspiration strikes.”

After they all got their tickets, Bucky cut the kids loose, with firm instructions to meet up again for lunch at one of the cafes at 12:30.

Because he wasn’t above guilting his students into good behavior, he said, “Please spare my poor nerves after saving you all from dangerous robots yesterday, behave yourselves, and be on time for lunch!”

“Yes Mr. Murphy,” they chorused, like little angels who would almost certainly still be at least five minutes late.

“You think that’s gonna work?” asked Steve as his students all disappeared into the bowels of the museum.

“Oh, they’re still gonna be late for lunch, but now they’ll be slightly less late,” said Bucky, and followed them into the museum at a more sedate pace. “C’mon, show me what’s changed since the last time we were here.”

“A lot,” said Steve, squeezing Bucky’s hand in excitement. “They’ve added whole new wings, new collections, new exhibits…”

“Show me your favorite new one,” Bucky said, and smiled when Steve lit up and pulled him onward, talking all the way. 

Yeah, this was why Bucky loved the Met. 

Steve took him to the Egyptian wing first, because it was “the newest, oldest thing, pretty much.” 

“Newest oldest thing?” teased Bucky, and Steve knocked against his shoulder.

“You know what I mean,” he said, and Bucky did, charmed and delighted by the accuracy of the oxymoron. 

Steve had apparently taken one of the audio tours of this wing at some point, because he was a veritable font of information, rattling off facts with ease. 

“Maybe your real calling is museum docent, Steve,” said Bucky, and he wasn’t entirely joking, because hell, it would combine some of Steve’s greatest strengths: art and speechifying.

“Nah,” said Steve. “I’m still thinking community college art teacher or something.”

He said it so easily, like it was a future in easy reach, like he wanted it, and not just for Bucky’s sake or for the sake of their life together, but for himself. Like he was ready to set the shield aside and leave the fight behind, and every time he said something like it, Bucky found it easier and easier to believe, wanted it more and more. 

They wandered through wing after wing of the museum, walking past treasure after priceless treasure. They didn’t linger over the portraits, because good technique and historical significance or not, they both found them boring. Instead, Steve took him to see the Van Goghs, and there, they lingered. Bucky didn’t mind; Van Gogh was worth some lingering, and Steve’s latest museum tour guide-worthy lecture had been genuinely interesting.

“Did you want to get some sketching in?” asked Bucky, and Steve shook his head. 

So they sat on the bench and looked at Cypresses together, and let its vivid brushstrokes work their magic. The painting reminded Bucky of Italy, though thanks to Steve’s mini-lecture he knew it had been painted in France. And yet something about the way the painting conveyed the quality of the light and air brought Italy to mind; not the battlefields and foxholes and long marches, but the countryside in rare moments of sun-drenched peace. It was the quality of the brushstrokes, maybe, that recalled the way heat hung in the air, the buzz of insects, the almost tangible weight of sunshine.

“I spent a lot of time here, after I woke up,” said Steve, after a long moment of silence.

Bucky shook himself out of the increasingly vivid sense memory of Italy. “Yeah? I don’t blame you. Figure you could spend a whole month here and still not see everything.”

He tore his eyes away from the Van Gogh and looked at Steve, whose face was caught in some odd middle ground between hope and hurt. Bucky pressed in closer against him, winding an arm around his waist.

“Hey, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Just—you said you haven’t been back to Brooklyn, since—since everything. And I’m kinda glad you haven’t, because it’s so different. When I first woke up, all I could see was everything that had changed, everything I’d lost. I felt out of place everywhere. Hell, I felt like a ghost.”

“Yeah, me too,” murmured Bucky.

“But then one day I was talking to Pepper, and she mentioned something about a new exhibit at the Met, and I thought, why the hell haven’t I visited the Met yet? And it was just this—this incredible relief. Because the Met had changed, sure, but in good ways. There was all this new art, and I didn’t feel like I’d missed out on any of it, I felt like I was exploring it. Walking through all the new exhibits here, it was the first time I really felt something close to happy in the 21^st century.”

“I’m really glad you had that, Steve.”

“Me too, and I’m really happy I can share it with you, I am. But part of me still wants to go back to Brooklyn with you instead, you know? Even though I know—I know it’s not gonna be the same, that it’s just gonna hurt. It’s not—it’s not the home we remember it being.”

Bucky leaned his head on Steve’s shoulder, and tightened his grip on Steve’s waist.

“I went back to Brooklyn once too,” Bucky admitted. “Not after Insight, but—before.”

This, maybe, was the memory he’d wanted to avoid resurrecting the most, for fear that it would overtake all of the others. 

“What? When?”

“Sometime in the 70s. I don’t actually remember it, not really. It was—it was in the files. I, uh, escaped once then. Slipped my handlers for a couple of weeks, roamed around Brooklyn. They—caught me, and wiped me after, obviously. They were real thorough about it, I suppose, but the file about it—they said it was like I was looking for something. For someone.”

“Buck,” whispered Steve, stricken, and Bucky shook his head.

“Anyway, I—I’m telling you this because I want you to know that I get it, I guess. I was kinda glad this trip wasn’t long enough to give us a chance to go back to Brooklyn, because—I didn’t wanna risk it feeling like we were haunting the damn place, you know? And I guess I didn’t want to remind you of everything we’ve lost, either.”

“Maybe we’re just not ready to go back,” said Steve.

“Maybe,” agreed Bucky, and fumbled to find the right words. “But this is a good start, right? We came back together and started with the good stuff, the happy stuff. New memories, instead of old ones.”

“Yeah, Buck. This is a good start,” Steve said, then he turned to face Bucky, and with perfect gentleness, he took Bucky’s face in his hands and kissed him.

And here was another good, new thing, a welcome change: they could kiss here, out in the open, without fear or reservation. For everything they had lost, they had gained this, the sweetness of a simple kiss in front of a masterpiece, soft and easy and intimate. Bucky sighed against Steve’s lips, and Steve answered with a humming little sound of pleasure, his thumbs sweeping across Bucky’s cheekbones so tenderly that Bucky shivered.

Which was, naturally, when a bunch of his mathletes showed up.

“I think that’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” declared Hailey.

“Van Gogh isn’t Romantic, Hailey, he’s a post-impressionist, it says so right on the plaque—“

“Oh my god, Nic, not—I meant Mr. M and Hot Boyfriend Steve!”

Bucky groaned and hid his face in Steve’s shoulder while Steve burst into laughter.

“Sorry for interrupting your date!” said Jen, stifled laughter audible in her voice. “We’ll, just, uh, check out Gauguin or whatever, see you at lunch, bye!”

“So, this is definitely not one of my winning date nights and/or days,” Bucky muttered into Steve’s shoulder, and Steve just laughed again, and kissed the top of his head.

“Yeah, maybe not,” said Steve. Bucky could hear the smile in his words, and when he lifted his head, he saw it too, fond and shining, more beautiful to him than all the priceless art in the museum. “But I don’t mind.”