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Bucky hated interviews more than anything in the world. As much as he did prefer a world where people smiled at him on the street or leaned in closer to give him a debrief instead of keeping their distance, he still missed the months where no one trusted him to say anything on his own accord to the press. He’d never been the one sent out to do damage control or get good press on a silly talk show. He’d never had to do any kind of charity tournament or round table discussion.
And then he passed all his psych evals and saved the world with Sam, mostly, and accidentally showed everyone he had a personality and that he remembered how to smile and that was the end of that. Suddenly he was on the press tour.
And, well, he did have a personality, which got him in trouble a lot. Apparently Steve had hyped him up too much as a loyal friend and a good guy and the kind of person you called to move a piano, metal arm withstanding. So no one was really ready for him to be a little sarcastic and kind of mean and very quick and dry.
He kind of caused fights. Especially when he was out with Sam, which he tried to make sure happened frequently. Especially on the dumbest questions possible. Like when the interviewer asked whose costume was more uncomfortable. It was a throwaway question, not even worth the effort of thought and Bucky didn’t think before saying, “Mine.”
Sam looked at him slowly, eyebrows inching up his forehead and Bucky already knew it was about to be another fight. “You think so?” he asked.
“Sure,” Bucky said and ignored how smug the interview looked as she settled into her chair. Maybe they were getting a little too well known for their on air throw downs. “Your wings do all the work for you. I’m putting my body on the line. All that kevlar you wear, you probably don’t even feel it.”
“You think… You think I can’t feel kevlar?”
“Nah, you wear, like, nine undershirts. It makes his chest look bigger,” he added to the interviewer.
“You think the jetpack strapped onto my back, torching my ass all day is more comfortable than your BDSM gear?”
“BDSM? Where do you even get these things?” Bucky asked. “I’m wearing tac-gear.”
“You’re wearing leather and chains. You have a chest harness on at all times.”
“It’s a holster!”
“You keep that dildo looking thing on your belt too.”
“It’s a rocket launcher!”
“TMI, man,” Sam laughed.
“Can he say this on air?” Bucky asked the woman.
“We’re not live. We’ll bleep it later. Keep going.”
“My arm was ripped off my body but you wanna complain about your goggles? They’re just making you look like the dorkiest kid at the pool.”
“Oh, you’re really gonna throw your arm into the mix? Who are you, Buzz Lightyear? Your arm isn’t part of the costume.”
“My arm is definitely part of the costume. Way more recognizable than whatever symbol you wear.”
“Your Manchurian Candidate arm is more recognizable than the stars and the stripes?”
Bucky almost answered, thought better of it because he’d helped design that suit, and changed tactics. “Not the Cap suit. Your dorky bird suit. You wanna talk about the Cap suit, I know that shit is comfortable. I know it’s lightweight and kinda soft.”
“You digging through my closet, Barnes?”
And again, Bucky couldn’t say what he initially wanted to say because that would give a lot away on national TV. He narrowed his eyes instead, lips coming together in a perturbed pucker.
“Alright, I’ll give you that,” Sam said. “All that starin’ and glarin’ you do probably does give you migraines. That part probably hurts more than me literally spinning through the air and breaking G-Forces you can’t even count up to.”
“You don’t break G-Force, man.”
“No, you don’t break G-Force.”
“Oh my God, you two are the best, I love my job,” the interviewer said.
“What about you?” Bucky asked.
“Yeah, which one do you think is more uncomfortable?”
“Well, I’d want to get my hands on the suits,” she said and waggled her eyebrows. Then she relented with raised hands. “I just mean, I think I could do your jobs a lot more quickly than you two since I wouldn’t have to bicker about every move and action.”
“We don’t fight on the field,” Bucky said. “Sam’s a great leader. He’s easy to listen to while people are trying to kill me.”
“Then maybe I should start inviting some of your assassin friends with us on these interviews,” Sam said.
“Not on my show,” the woman interrupted. She wrapped up the show and Sam and Bucky didn’t really talk for a week afterwards until something else tried to eat New York. Silly arguments were always more personal than the big things they could argue about and they were both very good at holding grudges.
And then it was Halloween. Which meant the Stark Foundation, or whatever it was being called now, was throwing its Halloween party, which meant Sam had to go, which meant Bucky was going. And there really wasn’t a question of who Bucky was going as.
Here’s the thing. Bucky really, really, really liked Sam. Even when Sam was the most annoying human being on the planet. Maybe even especially then. He probably even loved the other man, but that was not a word he was remotely ready to think about, since that word seemed to be cursed as soon as it came out of his mouth.
So he really liked Sam and part of really liking Sam was really enjoying tormenting him coupled with the unending need to prove himself in front of Sam. Which was how he ended up standing outside the doors to the costume party in red booty shoots and Chavez’s red punky boots with shoddily painted cardboard wings strapped around his chest and red swim goggles on his head.
Was it embarrassing for him? Maybe. Was it going to be super embarrassing for Sam? Definitely. Would Sam fall hook, line, and sinker for the skimpy outfit? Absolutely. That’d make all the rest worth it. Hell, he’d considered buzzing his hair to really drive his point home and get Sam going. Anything would be worth it.
He nodded at the concierge with a grin and stepped through the doors to the party. Almost immediately, he found Sam in the crowd and almost turned to walk back out because Sam looked even better than him. Which, maybe he should’ve expected. Sam always looked good. It’s just that Bucky wasn’t expecting Sam to also be dressed way, way down. He also wasn’t expecting Sam to make the same joke as him.
Sam was wearing obscenely tight leather pants that had some complicated corset fixture in the front, black sky-high platform combat boots, and only a fucking chest harness above the waist. He’d wrapped some kind of silver material around his arm, foil maybe or possibly one half of a pair of leggings. He also had on a terrible $10 costume wig that reached far further and was far messier than Bucky ever wore his hair.
Possibly, Bucky thought, he’d lost this costume contest without realizing he’d been competing.
“You’re both idiots,” Barton said as he walked by.
“Super hot idiots,” his tag-along added.
“Hey, that’s my territory,” Barton said.
The young girl threw her arm over his shoulders, patted his bicep, and said, “Sure it is.”
They wandered away and Bucky looked back over at Sam. His fingers came up to a scar above his hip, prodding at it just to make sure this was all real. He was warm to the touch--and probably would only get hotter the longer the night went on--and he could feel himself breathing and the blood moving under his skin. He was fine. This was fine. What was a little altercation with the consequences of his own actions?
He crossed the room over to Sam, who was unsurprisingly the center of attention at the moment. Even without being Captain America, anyone looking that good would be the center of attention. Bucky wasn’t surprised to find the topic of conversation had veered to something akin to official business. Talking about Kree relations and the recent ‘unfounded’ attacks from faction groups.
“This is such bullshit,” Bucky had said one night while Sam poured over reports of fights and transcripts of audio. “We fight humans all the time. That doesn’t mean that we’re not still friends with other humans.” Sam had hummed without looking up. “We only do this all-or-nothing bullshit with aliens and monsters and shit.”
“You think?” Sam asked.
“Identify your enemies, identify your friends. Easy.”
“Not so easy when the enemies can masquerade as friends. Y’know, literally wear their face and all?”
“Right, ‘cause we ain’t never been double crossed by humans before.”
“Mmm, you're right. I shouldn't be doing this where you can hear and see it at all.”
Bucky had thrown a pillow at Sam. “You know what I mean. Everyone’s making something out of nothing.”
“Oh, Sergeant Barnes, we were just--” Someone dressed as a Roman faltered as they took in Bucky’s outfit. Sam’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead, like they seemed keen to do around Bucky. “Did you two plan this?”
“No,” Sam said levelly until a grin broke out on his face. “Would you excuse us?” he asked. Bucky dragged him away by the chest harness before they got an answer.
He pulled Sam into a kiss a few steps later and Sam hesitated for a split second before his hands came to rest on either side of Bucky’s bare hips.
“We’re in public,” he warned as Bucky adjusted his hold on the harness.
“Don’t care,” Bucky breathed back, biting at Sam’s bottom lip. “Not when you look like this.”
“You really are a narcissist.”
“Fuck off, it’s not the Winter Soldier get up getting to me.” It was all the miles of dark skin and all that muscle and the fucking leather wrapping it all together. “God, you look so good,” he breathed. Sam kissed him again, so Bucky assumed they weren’t actually trying to stop.
He roved his hands down Sam’s back, over the smooth scars from the countless friction burns the jetpack had worn into his skin. Proof enough that Sam really did have the more uncomfortable suit when all was said and done. But Sam’s fingers were skirting the edges of the scars on Bucky’s shoulder on their way down his side, so maybe it was half dozen of one, six of another.
“Where did you even find shorts this small?” Sam asked as his hand transgressed down to Bucky’s ass for the briefest of seconds. Definitely not long enough. Bucky needed to find somewhere more secluded.
“They’re normal shorts, I’ve just got a good ass.”
“Sure you do,” Sam snorted, but it got his hands back on that ass, so Bucky let it slide. “Thought you were trying to pass yourself off as an angel at first,” he added.
“I am,” Bucky teased. Sam pinched his thigh and then pulled Bucky back to his chest when Bucky squirmed away. “My hair never looked anything like that.”
“Yes it did.”
“No it didn’t.”
“HYDRA wasn’t brushing your hair. You looked like a Wild Man the first time I saw you.”
“Well, I was ripping the steering wheel out of your car from the roof, so that had nothing to do with my hair. We were also going 60 down a highway and I was outside the car.”
“That’s your own fault.”
Bucky reached up to scratch his nails just under the wig, along Sam’s natural hairline on his neck. Sam shuddered into it. “But it itches like crazy, so I can take it off whenever you want,” he said.
“Oh, when I want, huh?” Bucky asked.
“Well, I think everyone gets the joke now. Had an avid defender of yours inform me you’d cut your hair ages ago and that this joke wasn’t funny anymore.”
“Torres told me the wings were ridiculously inaccurate,” Bucky said.
“They are, you didn’t even draw the slats and plates facing the right way. And these are black, not red--”
Bucky pulled Sam into another kiss. Sam kissed him back.
The next morning, they used a paparazzi picture of them tangled together from the party and posted it next to the video of the interview with the caption ‘ We’ll call it a draw. ’