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The bruise was spreading purple-green across Steve’s ribs, like an angry cabbage-flower. He shoulda seen, shoulda known... Bucky had been kicking himself in the ass, mentally, for the last ten minutes, since he’d gotten into Steve’s space, teasing him about some dame who said he was a cutie. Steve had bumped backwards into the wall, swinging away from Bucky, and the grimace that crossed his face meant something was wrong, more than the usual aches he got when winter set in.
“Steve, lemme see.”
“No. I’m fine. It’s just on the surface, it’ll be healed in a few...”
“-Weeks!” Bucky cut in.
“Days!” Steve replied, a sullen pout setting his lips.
Bucky sighed and began to undo the buttons of Steve’s shirt, ignoring the slight fraying along the edges of the fabric. Someone had punched him good. Maybe kicked him if the shape was what Bucky thought it was.
“What was it, this time?” he asked as he turned away to find the bandage-bindings he’d started buying after Steve came home bruised the first time right after they could finally afford their own apartment.
“There was a girl, maybe ten years old, and some boys were taunting her,” Steve’s voice is as tight as the fabric Bucky weaves around his chest, “She had an accent, it was a funny one, I don’t know what it was, thick, maybe Hungarian or something. One of them pulled her scarf off, tossed it in a patch of mud and ice. Called her something foul.”
“Course they did. She get home safe?” Bucky knew the answer before he asked.
“Yup.” Steve’s one-word reply contrasted with the pain he was clearly ignoring as Bucky tucked in the end of the bandage.
“Want a drink?” he asked, looking Steve over with the minimal amount of worry he could let himself show as the smaller man finished buttoning and tucking in the worn shirt.
Steve shook his head. “Nah, I’ve got some stuff to look over. For class. We’re working on studying the Baroque now, and I’ve never /seen/ so many curlicues.” His wan smile tugged, ached, pulled on Bucky’s heart, but he nodded.
“Well you know what they say - if it ain’t Baroque...” Bucky started, but paused as Steve winced. “You’re having that drink, and one of those pain pills, and /then/ you can work on your curlicues.” He turned away quick to keep him from seeing any dismissal. The whiskey was hardly the best, but it’d burn good and maybe warm him up. Steve had been almost frozen to the touch and it had taken every bit of restraint Bucky had to not just hold his hands there against Steve’s cold skin. He poured out two small cracked-cups-full and handed one to Steve.
“To you not dying of frost-bite ‘cause you got knocked out in the snow.” Bucky’s smile was impudent, forced but clearly joshing.
“To you letting a guy get beat up without fussin’ at him like a granny for once,” Steve replied, smile fond, if stretched.
They drank together: heat pouring in a slow rush from heads to toes. Steve sighed deeply, his eyes fluttering closed at the unraveling of his muscles. He opened them, looking at his glass studiously for a moment before sinking down onto the piece of furniture that functioned as a sofa.
“Thanks. I needed that.” He popped the pills past his lips and followed them down with a gulp of the bitter-smoke liquid after Bucky refilled his glass to the top.
Bucky just nodded, I-told-you-sos unneeded at the moment. He went into the next room, with its two rickety beds, and hunted around in Steve’s corner for his bag. Finding it, he returned and put it on the table next to his friend. “Can you just stay there, on the couch, for a bit? Warm up? Let the pills work?”
“I suppose.” Steve was back to teasing him, so he couldn’t be that bad off. Bucky breathed a quiet sigh of relief and then flopped down gracefully next to him. He tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling. There were no curlicues or colorful murals there, just cracked and chipped plaster. He thought for the thousandth time that Steve deserved so much better, but even if he could offer it to him... he was Steve. He’d see anything as a handout, charity, pity, when it was none of those things that motivated Bucky towards giving Steve the moon.
There was a quiet hum and Bucky let his eyes trail down the equally dingy wallpaper to where Steve sat, peering at a painting on the page. It was of a winged boy, nude, clutching a handful of arrows and grinning gleefully as he stamped on armor, sheet music and musical instruments, a crown, and various other items. Above it the words “Amor Vincit Omnia,” were written, with the translation below stating, “Love Conquers All.” Did it, now. Bucky hadn’t exactly found that to be true. He smiled to himself wryly.
“Cheeky little guy,” Bucky stated, leaning closer as he scanned the page.
Steve ahemed under his breath. “It’s a Caravaggio, Bucky. It’s Cupid.”
Bucky looked up to state, indignant, that yeah, he’d figured that out, what with the naked cherub and the arrows and all, when he noticed Steve blushing. Bucky loved it when Steve blushed; seeing red soak across his often too-pale cheeks made something constrict tight in his chest. But normally when that happened it was cause they ran into some less than high-class dames while taking a short cut, or when Bucky praised Steve for doing something good, since the shorter man always felt he didn’t deserve praise for doing what was right. But here was Steve blushing over art, and Bucky hadn’t seen that before. Not like there weren’t other nudes in his books, Bucky had flipped through them when Steve had left them open. So, curious as the many-lived cat that always seemed to be returning from some awful brawl to the apartment below, Bucky wanted to know why.
“Somethin’ the matter?” he asked, voice clearly closer to his ear than Steve had expected, because he spun sideways, twitched from the pain, and furrowed his brow.
“No, just... it’s all so... decadent, ya know? That era, and the art, and how they lived and all.”
Bucky didn’t know, he hadn’t really spent much time pondering the apparently wild lives of Baroque painters. But Steve clearly had.
“So the fella painted Cupid without clothes, aren’t most Cupids kind of on the naked side?”
Steve reached up and bopped Bucky on the shoulder before flashing several more such pictures at him. “See what I mean? And I’m supposed to get someone to model for me so I can draw something ‘in Caravaggio’s style,’ since he’s the artist I got assigned. I’m not good enough to pull off that sorta realism, and all the examples are so...”
“Decadent.” Bucky finished for him, grinning a little. He pointed to the wings on the impish boy. “I’m not wearing nothin’ but wings, you know. Maybe this guy though...” His finger rested on the olive-leaf draped curls of the Bacchus on the opposing page. Bucky held up his whiskey glass, which was empty, and then refilled his and Steve’s before proclaiming, making a pose like a statue of George Washington. “See! I’ve even got the right prop. That and my sheet and you can draw away. Clearly,” he paused for dramatic effect, “I am your muse.”
Steve flushed a color that was somewhere between eggplant and tomato. “I... it’s... just supposed to be in... his style... not... you know... an exact copy or likeness.”
Bucky nodded and began stripping his shirt. “You can call it, ‘Brooklyn Bacchus,” he’s the wine fella, right? I figure whiskey’ll do as well.”
“Bucky!” Steve grumbled, rolling his eyes. “Alright, alright, but no sheets. The draping’s hard to draw.” He pondered for a minute, his normally-quick mind slowed by the alcohol. “O.K., so... if you drag the chair into the bedroom, I can draw you better, because out here... there’s no light.”
‘And my name’s Howard Stark’, Bucky thought with a tiny grin. “Sure, sure, whatever the great Artist needs.” He stood, helping Steve to his feet, and picked up one of their two chairs easily, carrying it into the bedroom and standing there until Steve walked in. “Where do you want this?”
“Over there, so the light hits right.” Steve waited until Bucky had placed the chair and plopped down on it, harder than he’d meant to, from the twitch as he settled. “Alright... just... sort of place yourself on the bed, relaxed.”
Stretching out over his bed, which he hadn’t made that morning, Bucky clasped the cup in one hand and the bottle in the other, raising one eyebrow and giving Steve his most roguish grin. “How’s this?”
Steve sighed. “No, not the whiskey glass, just the bottle. Tip it a little - like that, there we go.” He nodded as Bucky rotated the bottle to where he wanted it. The light, which would dim fast if Steve didn’t get to work soon, lit up Bucky’s handsome features and especially highlighted the rough denim of his jean pants. Steve flushed a little, pencil hovering over the blank page. “Yeah, good. A little less smiling though?” Making a face at Steve, Bucky complied, setting his lips into a more serious look that hinted at a smile, and possibly more.
Thirty minutes later, Steve had the outlines of the sketch done enough that he could fill it in on his own the following day; the light had faded and soon they’d need to turn the lamp on if he wanted to continue, besides, his head was feeling sort of heavy and the pillows and soft downy blanket that he’d been drawing had never looked so appealing. He tucked his pencils and eraser back into their proper places in his bag and stood a little uneasily, handing the pad of paper to Bucky.
“Wow. Steve. I... I hope you muss me up a little before you turn this in to your professor, or they’ll think you hired some Hollywood hero for your model.” Bucky’s words were teasing, but his eyes, rapidly taking in the beauty of Steve’s skill, belied his light tone.
“You look like that, jerk. That’s why you make the rest of us look so bad!” Steve took the paper from him and placed it on top of his bag before he found himself being tugged onto Bucky’s bed. That was alright, he thought, Bucky’s bed was closer and he really just wanted to lie down. And lying down with Bucky was not unprecedented. He just didn’t usually find himself slightly cuddled against Bucky, except that one time the heating was off and it was somewhere around 20 below zero out. That had been really, really cold, whereas this was really warm. Bucky was leaning up on his elbow, like he had been while posing, and was looking down at Steve, who was wriggling to get comfortable.
“You can’t really see me that way... do you, Steve?” Bucky tipped his head, looking so much like a confused but hopeful puppy that Steve reached up a hand and brushed some of the hair flopping into his eyes away.
“It’s just how you are.” Steve’s eyes crinkled with his smile, and then closed when Bucky, who seemed suddenly so much closer than he had a few seconds before, bent and pressed warm, soft lips to his. The kiss was slow but light, as if Bucky was just waiting for Steve to pull away, to slap him, to do anything but return it, as he did, with hesitant and unpracticed lips, but ones that were so, so sweet.
When Bucky pulled back it was with a fond sigh. “Better let you sleep now, huh?”
Steve nodded, flushing brightly to the roots of his dusty-golden hair. “Yeah... suppose so. I’ve got school tomorrow, so...”
Bucky leaned in and kissed him, gentle and quick. “You decadent punk, you.”