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The beard had, at first, struck Bucky. Looking like someone had dipped a digit or two in gold paint and smeared it across Steve’s chin and cheeks, a splotch to conceal his cupid’s bow, seamless. He didn’t remember it from before, but Shuri (and later Steve) assured him that it was new. The gears in Bucky’s head churned together, grinding some, but pushing forward, and he filed the new look away under “positive.”
He’d get to know it well in the coming weeks. Something about the Wakandan landscape – equally as gold as Steve’s facial hair – held Steve’s attention despite the hell storm of chaos even Bucky could sense. Every day the make-believe peace teetered a little more, and most days Steve was there to set it right in all best ways. But as Bucky’s memory healed, as Steve sewed stitches in between the torn parts and massaged away the bruises, he came to remember more and more of Steve’s quirks.
His bottom lip twinges meant one thing (consternation, usually toward himself), his unrelenting stare at the ground another (thinly masked anger), cocked eyebrows and a crooked smile something different (he’s seeing right through you), and three fingers through his hair something personal (he’s grieving).
After a while, Bucky knew that Steve’s faraway trances weren’t a symptom of Wakanda’s healing properties. They were rooted in his own chaos that pulled toward whatever was brewing just beyond Bucky’s reach. Bucky didn’t have the right to wish him away from it, but, secretly, he did so anyway. Mostly when Steve was gone, and the night was humid and sticky and lonesome underneath stars that weren’t as bright without someone to share their light with.
“I’ll be back soon, Buck.”
“Don’t. It’s okay. I get it.”
“I mean it.”
Crooked smile. Cocked eyebrows. Bucky longed for the days when he could out-lie his best friend. Shuri said it would back come in due time.
“Just go take care of whatever you take care of these days,” Bucky assured him, the visages of Steve’s company flickering in closer against the sunny haze, those he didn’t yet know, wasn’t ready to know. “I’m always here.”
–
He hadn’t meant for it to be a lie, those last words Bucky spoke before shit went even further to shit. Fields of fair grass and the outskirts of tall, pluming green collapsed and trampled and stained red. Masses of steel and bullets and alien faces descending from nowhere good. He was always being pulled in two directions, it seemed: numbed and vicious, impervious to brutality, or so goddamned sick of it that he felt his stomach pool into his own feet. And Steve insisted the latter was best without having a clue what Bucky meant by any of it. Sticking his huge, good intentioned nose where it didn’t belong.
Once it (“it;” what the hell was “it?”) was over, the Wakandan sun cracked in half. That’s what Bucky felt when things went up in ash, his hands first, then his whole existence (apparently, he wasn’t conscious enough to see it). Very suddenly he wasn’t “always there,” but didn’t have the time to feel anymore guilty than he already felt all the time.
He was dropped into greater darkness the second time over, never having the time to think about where he’d land nor what Normandy he’d be storming. It was red skies and Martian screeches, sure-fire bullets and elemental swarms of energy threatening to burn off, electrocute, and freeze his insides and eyebrows. Earth-bound or not, he didn’t know. He dipped into that numbness a little and played pretend that this was the Hell he’d earned by shooting Germans in between the eyeballs, even though he was still pretty damn sure they deserved it.
Tony Stark didn’t deserve what he got, though. Bucky’s morals were intact enough to know that. And he watched the pyre of Steve mourn quietly, two dozen paces away, arms still at his sides, with nothing but warm familiarity. And he mourned some more lakeside, done up in a suit and tie that damn near suffocated him. Bucky watched him then, too. Eventually Bucky’s memory snapped itself shut, closed the last of its wounds amidst the bloodiest battlefield he let himself remember.
He always knew Steve was mourning because, after a while, he sent both hands through his hair, shorter now, sans beard, and he didn’t do that, didn’t show any vanity, unless there was loss to behold. Vanity was second only to nihilism, in Steve’s world, and there was a lot of the latter to behold. For the time being.
–
"Be there soon.”
“no rush”
"I mean it! There in 10 minutes.”
"get here when u can dont speed”
Texting was ugly. Bucky decided this many moons ago when a cellphone had been shoved into his hands for “convenience’s sake,” as though he had anyone else to speak to beyond Steve. He insisted – stoutly – that texting was quicker than calling, if not far less personable, but he took an age to type out a message, bothering himself too much with punctuation. It was very one hundred and nine years old of him.
Of course, Bucky was lying. He was sweating in his jacket and jeans outside their apartment building, just as had been requested of him. One thing Steve gained from texting was that it made him even more slippery. He was already eager to meander out of your reach, but now he could string together schemes with as little warning as possible.
That morning, for example, as Bucky had been asleep, wrapped haphazardly in sheets on their mattress which still sat on the floor, surrounded by the very last moving boxes and sundry, his phone chimed beside his ear. It tore him from a dream full of New York smog and crosshairs that obscured his vision, and through his grog checked the notification.
“Left to run a few errands. Pack up the curtains for me? Be back around 10:30. Wait for me outside. – Steve”
Bucky didn’t have the heart to tell Steve it was pointless to sign his messages; it reminded him too much of the letters he used to receive a month after they’d been mailed and the handwriting he loved, the words he’d memorized, kneeling in war-torn dugouts and nursing bleeding, aching wounds. Bucky also didn’t have the heart to tell Steve no and became a willing (but belligerent) cog in his latest game.
In the quiet, however, he found his memory wandering and placed himself back behind the security of Wakanda. Somehow that was five years ago; no matter how many times Steve went over it, no matter how Dr. Banner explained how their big sci-fi time machine box worked, Bucky didn’t get it. He didn’t really care, either, since Steve had come back safely from returning the stones and promptly made his biggest decision since becoming the nation’s favorite boy in red, white, and blue.
They’d settled on Arizona, in the end, with the help of Sam, who was astounded that neither party had witnessed the Grand Canyon in over one hundred years of life. Steve reminded him how tragically and hilariously poor they’d been and the chunk of time they’d both spent “in ice” until Bucky agreed, said it sounded nice. And once Sam assured Steve that the burden of the shield – the bastion of red, white, blue, and then some – was secure, was wanted, was appreciated, they were off.
Arizona had the heat of Wakanda but lacked the scenery, at least the parts they’d seen so far. Lounging against the front stoop with sun in his eyes, peeking even beneath the lip of his hat, Bucky longed for the gold streaks, the artist’s touch that had colored Wakandan landscapes so beautifully. They reminded him of pause, of renewal, of Steve’s beard (which he refused to grow back).
“Why don’t we find somewhere new, then?” Steve suggested one evening, pencil in one hand, sketchpad sat against his legs.
“Where’s ‘new’?”
Bucky had asked because there was a gleam in Steve’s eye like he had something to reveal, not consider.
“A farm. Out east.”
Six weeks later they were just about at “new,” aside from the curtains and the boxes of books still left to be transported out of town and toward the farm. They were to grow oranges, apparently. Bought the place up from a couple with feeble bones and a need to get a move on to easier living. Bucky thought that was funny. Struggle is painfully relative.
He could see the crest of a distant mountain range across the street and some fifty miles west if he squinted. Above the gas station, above the power lines, above the shopping center billboards. He held his thumb out against the distant jagged ridge, pinned into the sky like the edge of a crater, at the bottom of which Bucky sat, waiting to be lifted.
“How did I do on time?”
Bucky’s lift had arrived. But as he turned to Steve with the start of a joke on his tongue, he choked on the humor. In fact, his throat damn well closed up at the sight.
“Steve…what the hell –”
“This was my errand.”
Like a sunflower sprouting too tall, Steve’s head stuck out from the front seat of a 1943 Jaguar (E-type, Bucky noticed). Black exterior, freshly buffed, with taupe leather seats untarnished. Straight out of the newspaper ads, straight out of Steve’s old sketchbook from a lifetime ago. Bucky dropped the box with the curtains and books.
“You motherfucker…” he sighed as Steve shut the door and walked around the car’s front.
“You used to talk about this one all the time. Remember the pictures you’d cut out of the paper?”
Bucky’s adoration for cars was almost immediately snuffed out by the war draft, but he did remember. After a while he saved the cutouts solely so Steve had new subjects to draw, but still pinned them to their fridge, wondering where they would go if he could leave, doubting they would ever have the chance.
Now, as the emblem of hopes long extinguished sat before him, with his other half jangling the keys like a boon scooped out of Hell, Bucky felt something beyond his memory snap back into place.
“’Course I remember. Where the hell did you find this thing?”
He finally approached and ran his hand down the body, hot to the touch but thrilling all the same.
“Just a stroke of funny luck. There was a seller a few miles from here who said he got it in an auction years ago,” Steve explained; Bucky felt his eyes on him as he scanned the insides. “He drove it to the farm and just made me swear we’d get her on the road ASAP. Did the deal just an hour ago.”
“You son of a bitch, that’s incredible,” Bucky said, having circled back to him in time to shove him off the curb. “This is incredible.”
“Figured it would be more fun than another U-Haul.”
That wasn’t all he figured, not even close. Steve looked to Bucky with warmth deeper than the dry Arizona sun could give him. His cheeks were already burned by the rays, but a greater heart surged forth, something old and new all at once. They were both fulfilling a lifetime-old pipe dream, after all.
“Motorcycle down at the farm?” Bucky asked as he took up the box once more.
“In the garage. Safe and sound.”
“Does that mean I’m driving this baby? I mean, you’ve already got your wheels.”
Steve took the box in his hands with a fake frown, but Bucky saw that he was already digging into the pocket of his jeans.
“We can share. But if you’re gonna drive, take off that jacket. You’re making me sweat just looking at you.”
Sometimes, Steve was still too easy, even when Bucky was floating a few inches from the ground with the immensity of him. He chewed his lip and leaned into the box some.
“S’not like that’s unusual, you know…”
And Steve snatched the cardboard away from Bucky with a second layer of pink from his ears to his nose.
“I mean sweat in the bad way, jack ass. Now no driving until you bring down the rest of the boxes with me.”
Bucky slid off his jacket by the time they reached their apartment door, and slid his hand into Steve’s when they crossed their used-to-be living room, and slid Steve toward where the windows couldn’t really see, and slid their lips in close, with hands through Steve’s gold hair, painting the hills and sky and sun and fields as he went.
–
Bucky had his last night terror three months ago. Full of Jim Morita’s cracked skull, needles, faces draped in medical masks, and severed limbs. Steve coaxed him out of it without a sound. It was a ritual they performed when necessary, plunging into the roles of distressed or soother, never missing a beat. Bucky got better sleep than he could ever remember.
Arizona’s heat was dry and dense, as though you could puff out your cheeks and blow it away from you, and it smelled like citrus. Steve kept the windows open for the orange tree scent while Bucky kept them open to garner even the slightest bit of a breeze, sleeping now in boxer shorts and little else. Even his dog tags were slick with his sweat.
Even still, they lay together each and every night, forgoing the sheets when the temperature was too much, but they’d both take the searing heat over the icy chokehold of Brooklyn in January. Steve’s sweat meant he was full, healthy, full of vitality, the stuff he’d once had so little of. Steve’s sweat smelled of strength and a day hard worked. Steve’s sweat tasted like salt and an enigmatic, omnipotent tugging to which Bucky was helpless. Bucky’s sweat reminded him that he was alive.
After what Bucky had seen, after what he’d done, and after what he’d lost, he needed those grounding moments. When things got too good, he needed something solid on which to center himself. Steve was his first and favorite sticking point. He offered whispers and firm muscles to graze, to grip, to yield to. He provided hands to hold and hands by which Bucky was molded. He lent a head of hair for fingers to get lost in. He gave two lips, always red, small, tasked with running their course from Bucky’s mouth to his thighs, inside and out. He used his lean hips to make Bucky crazy, and smiled in pride when it worked.
Bucky had his entire self to give, and Steve always took it in full. He’d never done anything less. He touched where he should, spoke when he could, and loved all the time. In Wakanda, in Siberia, in New York, in the trenches, Bucky never thought he’d be enough. Steve was always out of reach, but, in Arizona, Steve was committed to proving otherwise. As many times as Steve had left, Bucky had done the same, but there was no guilt to run between them. Only lost time to make up.
The sun raised in shades of gold every morning. It left sparkles in Steve’s hair. He let his beard grow back in. Bucky knew it was good. He had nothing left to forget anymore.