Work Text:
Bucky asked Steve to marry him in a barn that was falling apart at the seams.
The lot of them risked climbing to the hayloft to make beds in the scratchy blankets left behind. No one was willing to spend the night in the farmhouse. Over turned kitchen table, plates shattered on the floor, food congealed into a mess. Steve tried to pass off the red stains as food too, but from the set mouths of the Commandos no one was in the mood to humour him.
So they settled on the barn.
They had been away from base for two weeks, following a lead from a stack of papers on the last factory head’s desk. Steve figured they had another week before pick up at the checkpoint.
Dum Dum risked lighting a small candle and the group of them huddled around it.
Bucky fingers itched for a smoke. Cursing the rain that had soaked through and sullied his last three sticks, cursed his stupidity for leaving the package in his pants pocket. He wanted to ask Steve, but he didn’t. Morita caught his eye, silent question behind his closed lips, but Bucky shook his head and retreated further into his jacket.
Morita shrugged, stretching his legs as he hid a yawn.
Steve was speaking with Dernier, working on idioms. Bucky never had the ear for French, despite his affinity for Hebrew, but he had to admit that Steve made it sound alright. Dernier laughed good naturedly at Jones’ college grammar but the Frog was more than happy to teach the lot of them enough swears to last until Judgement Day.
Steve shifted on Bucky’s left side; put a bracing hand on his ankle. “You alright?”
Bucky nodded.
Steve huffed, raising his hand to cup Bucky’s jaw. “Buck-“
Bucky closed his eyes, but he didn’t move, didn’t lean into Steve’s palm like he wanted to. More than anything, he wanted Steve to wrap around him. Listening to the rain come in through the broken roof reminded him on how their old apartment windows would leak and spread small rivers onto the floor. How Bucky’s socks would soak through when he got up in the night to get Steve a drink. He hated the cold then, but it was even worse now. The constant thrum of anxiety waiting for a bout of coughs that he now knows will never hurt Steve again, watching Steve’s concave chest for the near silent hitch of breath when his lungs just didn’t want to work correctly.
Steve had given him the abridged history of the Serum as they sat in the med tent together after walking into camp like a God damned parade, with tanks and glowing blue weapons instead of ticker tape and flowers. Blisters up his calves and a headache to rival the feeling of a back alley wrassle with the O’Laney twins, a bruise on his ribs from knocking into the railing after the tightrope walk over the pit of actual fire that had singed the soles of his boots. Bucky hurt. He still hurt.
But there was Steve, tall and muscled and looking like a man right of the painting on a Greek mural. Golden hair haloed by the rising sun as he opened the tent flaps and gave Bucky that same smile he’d known since they were babes in their prams. Side by side, as Winifred and Sarah sipped tea and ate black bread. Even then, Steve had curled his little fists into Bucky’s sleep shirt, the white of Steve’s lace bonnet making his fair skin look even paler than usual as Mrs. Rogers swept a blond curl away from his closed eyes.
“Like peas in a pod,” Mrs. Barnes said. “Think of the trouble these two will get up to, Sarah.”
And Sarah would nod and laugh, agree with her friend even as the exhaustion from a night of colic fueled cries had kept her up until the wee hours, made her want to cry herself as she mourned the husband she barely had time to get to know.
Steve moved his hand down to Bucky’s neck, feeling the knots of tension from the day’s work. Three hours perched with the sniper rifle against his shoulder. Three hours of blinking rain from his eyes. Three seconds to pull the trigger and land the bullet in the target’s forehead.
“You should sleep, Buck.”
He opened his eyes.
The rest of the Howling Commandos had moved towards the back of the loft, huddled together like puppies under damp blankets and warm hay. Morita was already snoring.
The candle was burnt low, flickering flame sending shadows along Steve’s face. Darkness over his brow, making his cheeks look hollow, his eyes sunken, like his last time with the flu that had turned into pneumonia, turned into the old lady next door asking if Bucky wanted her to call the Priest because a good boy like him can go so quickly and wouldn’t it be a crying shame if his fragile little soul got stuck in Purgatory. Bucky had slammed the door in her face.
Bucky felt Steve shift closer, hovering just above him.
Bucky moved forward, pulled Steve by the strap of his pack to bridge the distance. Steve went willingly, he always did, and their mouth met in a puff of warm air tongue.
He didn’t care that Dum Dum watched them for five heartbeats before he rolled over and Jones tucked his face back into his chest. There was some things war brought out in men. Sometimes it was the knowledge that pulling the trigger got easier each time, sometimes it was the fact that having a warm body close by helped with the nightmares, sometimes it was realizing that life is too fucking short to just lay around and dream about the After and the Maybes and the What Ifs.
Bucky was so tired of waiting.
He hadn’t kissed Steve since that night before he shipped out. A soft kiss in the darkness of their room as Bucky dressed in his uniform, slicked back his hair, and placed his cap at the appropriate jaunty angle. Another as Steve passed him a sketch, charcoal on butcher paper, of the view from the fire escape of their building. Once more as Bucky tucked an apple into his pocket for the boat.
Bucky hated himself for waiting so long.
Steve’s hands were on Bucky’s face, framing on either side, holding him together. Ten pinpricks of heat over his cheeks, drawing out the fire that sat just beneath Bucky’s ribs. He pushed Steve, his back pressing into the uneven wood, like how Steve’s spine used to be crooked with knobby bones under his thin skin, skin that used to blush so pretty when they spread each other out on that bed so far away back in Brooklyn.
Bucky wanted to know if Steve still blushed.
Steve reached under Bucky’s shirt, skirted the dark bruises that were already fading in a way they shouldn’t be. His hands were large and warm, so warm, fever warm as he wraps around Bucky. Legs together as they lay against one another and kiss and touch.
“Marry me.”
The words were spoken before Bucky can bite them off, hide them behind his teeth like he does with everything else he wants to say to Steve. They hovered in the air between their mouths as Steve stopped and found Bucky’s eyes in the dark. When he kissed him again, Steve was smiling.
“Going to make an honest man out of me, Barnes?”
“Somebody has to.”
“Steve Barnes,” Steve chuckled. “Bucky Rogers doesn’t have quite the same ring does it?”
Bucky doesn’t ask about Peggy, can’t bear to think about that night in the bar with her red dress and her red lipstick and her red nail varnish and how Steve spoke to her like he knew what he was doing and how Bucky was nothing but a spectre fueled by English alcohol and jealousy burning a hole in his gut.
He’d done enough stupid things tonight.
He seemed to do a lot of stupid things around Steve.
“Love makes people do stupid things,” he said instead.
Steve laughed again.
They slept together, piled together with their comrades as they waited for morning. Steve’s head was nestled against Bucky’s collarbone as he snored in that way Bucky remembered hearing all his life.