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The first time Sam sees Bucky walk into the Laurel Raptor Center, he wants to say a flat no, turn on his heel, and walk dramatically away. Unfortunately he's got Mr. Hoots perched on his arm, and Mr. Hoots is not only a heavy-ass bird but also one who hates sudden movement, so the best he can settle for is saying "No" and then fixing Bucky with his flintiest fuck-off glare.
Bucky smiles a lopsided little tired half grin at him. Sam's sure it's the kind of thing that got all the ladies swooning in 1940-whatever.
"Absolutely not," he insists.
"Oh come on," Bucky says, stopping about five steps away from him. It's close enough that they can talk without raising their voices and attracting the attention of any of the children and parents on their way out after the last program of the day, or the attention of—heaven forbid—Sam's coworkers. But he doesn't come any closer, and keeps one wary eye on the owl. Sam's never been more grateful for how intimidating Mr. Hoots' talons look.
"You don't get to just show up unannounced at my work, that's what stalkers do."
"Well it would be announced, but you never reply to my texts," Bucky argues back. "You don't call, you don't write, you're turning me into a parody of my ma here. Steve wouldn't—"
"Don't," Sam hisses, with real heat in his voice now.
It shuts Bucky up. It also makes Mr. Hoots shuffle his wing feathers around a little, which keeps Bucky shut up. Both go some small way toward mollifying Sam, slightly.
It's just. It's not fair. Whatever Bucky's here to try to make him do by guilting him with the memories of Steve that hold them together, it isn't fair. Sam had made it official that he was out, hung up his wings and the shield and traded them for unfucking the world in other ways. The inner city kids, the inmates, the adults with learning disabilities—they deserve his efforts just as much as the rest of the world. The birds with the broken wings, too, the ones they rescued from illegal exotic pet dealers and the ones they took in from over-crowded sanctuaries, they need help just as much as those stupid superheroes and their stupid world governments ever did.
He's been working at the raptor centre for a little over a year and he's doing good here, found a master falconer to apprentice under and everything, is on the first few steps of the long journey to becoming a master falconer himself. He's happy here. He doesn't want to go back to being—whatever he was when he lay sleepless on the cold rocky ground next to Bucky on missions to former Soviet states, close enough to touch but never touching. Not happy.
"I ain't going back, there's no point trying to convince me."
"I'm not trying to convince you of anything," Bucky says, taking a half step forward, and another full one when Mr. Hoots doesn't react. His tone is a lot gentler than the fight that Sam's been expecting them to have. "Jesus, Sam. I just wanted to come say hi. You don't return my calls or emails except to say everything's fine. Sue me for wanting to see if things are actually fine."
Sam narrows his eyes at him. He knows him too well to believe that's the only thing, but Bucky holds both his hands up in a gesture of harmless surrender.
"I'm still at work," Sam grumbles. He can already feel himself relenting. Bucky is anything but harmless. "There are mews that need mucking out. You're here, you might as well make yourself useful." If he isn't here to fight with Sam about him coming back, then he can shovel bird shit to prove it.
Bucky makes an exaggerated face of disgust but falls right into step behind Sam when he starts walking.
* * *
The thing is, Bucky keeps coming around.
He always comes after the end of whatever demonstration or activity Sam's leading for the day, so that Sam isn't distracted by interacting with the public or his students and can give Bucky more of his attention than his dumb ass deserves. His full attention.
He helps out sometimes, if Sam asks him to. He's wary around the bigger birds and they're wary around him, but he's willing to clean out cages even when he complains about it the whole entire time.
Sam putters around and completes his tasks as normal, feeding and training and free flying the ones who need exercise. He doesn't assign Bucky any particularly complicated chore, firstly because it's funny to watch the Winter Soldier wrinkle his nose about bird shit but secondly because he can't start getting used to Bucky being there to do anything actually important. He comes around more than Sam would've expected, but irregularly.
Still, it's often enough for him to start learning the names of all the avian residents at the sanctuary.
"Did you seriously name this one Redwing? After your little robot?"
"Don't be a bag of dicks, asshole," Sam mutters, refilling Redwing's water.
"No, it's cute," Bucky says, his inflection on the word 'cute' clearly indicating that he thinks it's hilarious.
"It's a clever reference and a fitting tribute to my old life," Sam corrects him. "He was my first falcon. I picked his name to be like a bridge between the past and the future."
"You tamed him?" Bucky looks at the young raptor with interest. Redwing looks back at him with keen eyes, unblinking.
"Falconry isn't really about taming a wild thing. It's more like letting it be itself and convincing it that you can work together. It's like negotiating a partnership where you help each other."
Bucky breaks his gaze to glance at Sam with eyes just this side of too soft.
"Oh hell nah, that's not what I meant," Sam says. "It's not a metaphor. You're not the wild thing. I was literally just trying to teach you something about birds, man, get the fuck outta here."
Bucky laughs at him, and in retaliation Sam makes him carry five bags of pea gravel in from their delivery. It's not much of a punishment as far as retaliation goes, considering his stupid cyborg arm, but Sam is grasping at straws to keep Bucky from looking at him like that again.
A few weeks later, Bucky shows up again and laughs at him again, when he finds out that there's another falcon named James.
"That bird already had a name when I got here, don't get any ideas," Sam says to James Buchanan Barnes in his sternest imitation of the Captain America voice.
It does nothing to quash Bucky's complete and utter delight. "Do you feed James from your hand? Do you scratch his head? Do you give him little kisses on the beak?"
"I hope you choke when you eat dinner tonight," Sam mutters darkly.
Sam buys him that dinner, later. It's been three and a half weeks since the last time he saw Bucky and he feels like treating him. It's nothing special, just sandwiches that they eat sitting out at a picnic table. They're both in a mood to just shoot the shit and enjoy each other's company for a while, since Bucky's only back stateside for a couple of days before he has to disappear for an indefinite period again.
That's what Bucky does, disappears for varying lengths of time on missions that he respects Sam enough to not tell him anything about. Sam tries not to watch the news for signs of his involvement whenever he's away. Tries, and fails.
* * *
Sam can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but it's impossible to deny that Bucky is how somewhat of a fixture at the raptor sanctuary. Sam's colleagues, students, and even some of the visitors are no longer surprised to see the actual Winter Soldier hanging around the premises. A few of the kids from the after-school program know him by name, and Sam has seen them five-on-one arm wrestle his metal arm on more than one occasion.
Most galling of all, his nephews know Bucky by name. As far as Sam can remember, they've only met twice before. His family's visits to the Laurel Centre are as sporadic as Bucky's, so they cross paths irregularly. But Bucky has put serious work into weaselling his way into their hearts, putting on his most flirtatious face and telling Sarah he could watch the boys while she ran back to her car to get something for Sam.
Now she greets him with a friendly wave and says 'hey' loudly across the parking lot like she expected to see him, and the boys run over to give him hugs.
Sam is 90% sure Bucky's done this just to annoy him.
Sam tells him firmly to behave while he takes the kids around back to see Mr. Hoots, hopes to contain any damage Bucky might do by putting him back on mucking duty. By the time he finishes wrapping everything up for the night and brings the boys back out to their mother, Bucky's done as well and chatting with Sarah by the door.
"There they are!" Sarah says, turning away from whatever Bucky had been saying to make her swat his shoulder while laughing. "Did you guys have fun?"
His nephews chorus yes and run over to her to chatter about the new birds they met and what the differences between a kestrel and a falcon are. She smiles fondly and bids Sam and Bucky a good evening while herding the boys towards their car.
"You have a good night too, Sarah," Bucky says in a weirdly suave voice that Sam has never heard him use before, and he swears he winks at her while waving goodbye.
"Knock it off," Sam hisses, annoyed. And by annoyed he means he's annoyed at himself, because he knows that Bucky is not actually trying to hook up with his sister but it's still getting a reaction out of him.
He doesn't want to admit to himself, or anyone, that it made him jealous. Jealousy would mean he's attracted to Bucky—still attracted to Bucky, his brain helpfully supplies—and he's been viciously trying to ignore that feeling since the first time Bucky showed up here.
Bucky just laughs at him, waggling his eyebrows suggestively, and Sam mutters threats to turn Bucky into meat for the birds but he still give him a ride home because he's a complex man with many diverse traits and apparently stupidity is one of them.
* * *
It hasn't been a great day for Sam, and his temper is already running hot and short when he sees Bucky approach.
It had started with being recognized as The Falcon on his way to work in the morning. He always tries to be nice when well-meaning people come up to him, but the guys that morning had just been a little too into the paramilitary vigilantism of it all, and politely extracting himself from that interaction caused him to run late.
Then, they had a veterans' group come in for some animal therapy, and while he found that extremely rewarding it always put him in a bit of a weird headspace. But he doesn't get any time to recover from that by the time the afternoon rolls around, because two kids from the after school program who have both been dealing with issues at home suddenly decide to take the stress of their respective situations out on each other, and Sam has to physically jump in to stop them from beating the shit out of each other.
The commotion keeps him on the emotional knife's edge he's been teetering on since morning, and when Bucky shows up five minutes after Sam has accidentally upended a bucket of water all over the place, he's had about enough.
He hates to admit it, but Bucky's surprise appearances usually brighten his day. He can tell from the way Bucky is carrying himself, though, that it isn't going to go like that today.
Bucky looks cranky and pretty damn tired himself, physically and also tired of the world. Sam can guess that something went wrong on a mission, and he squares up his shoulders and tries to steel himself to be a good enough friend to listen to him complain about it, when all he wants to do is be done here so he can go sleep for twelve hours.
The first words out of Bucky's mouth are about how irritating he found the people he had to work with this time, and how much he wishes he had a regular partner he could rely on, and nope. Call him a bad friend but Sam can't do this, not today.
"Please," he interrupts, and he's embarrassed to find that his voice cracks at the end of the word. It's like the universe is determined to make this the worst possible day and isn't done with him yet, it still has a few small humiliations to pile on to really put the finishing touches on this masterpiece of a clusterfuck.
Bucky cuts himself off immediately, cocking his head, eyes zeroing in on Sam's face with something that on a less apex predator might come across as concern.
"I can't," Sam says, trying to elaborate and doing a bad job of it. His voice is still wobbly and he's mad about it. "I need you to stop trying to guilt me into coming back."
"Oh, sweetheart—"
"Fuck off."
"I wasn't trying to be a smartass."
"Fuck off anyway."
"Will you just let me talk?"
"No."
Bucky's nostrils flare in a huff before he talks regardless. "I haven't been trying to guilt you back. I've been trying to work up the nerve to ask you out."
Sam takes a few seconds to parse that, and then does a double take.
Bucky is sheepish now, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. He might even be blushing. "I thought it was obvious that we've been dancing around that?"
"I thought it was obvious to me," Sam says. "I didn't know it was obvious to you. I thought you just missed Steve and wanted me to come back."
"I do. Both of those things." Before Sam can yell at him about how he had just said he's not trying to guilt him back, he quickly bulldozes onwards: "But I would rather you be happy here than come back and be miserable. And it would be cruel to take you away from the birds, they love you. I have a soft spot for James, I want him to get the best care, you know, since he's named after me."
Sam rolls his eyes and assures Bucky that he's most definitely not named after him.
Bucky chuckles, but it's tinged with a nervousness that doesn't come naturally to him. "So. That's where I'm coming from. I might have been slightly hoping to convince you to join back up the first time I came, but after seeing you in your element, I just wanted you to keep being happy. And I'm rusty at this, I was waiting for you to make a move, but you haven't so I'm finally stepping up and doing it."
"Doing what?"
"Sam Wilson, would you like to step out with me?"
Sam wants to tell him to shut the hell up with his stupid charming olden days slang, and he still kind of wants to cry from all the stress of the whole day, but mostly he just wants to say yes, so he does. Say yes. And he lets Bucky sneak a quick kiss before he makes Bucky clean up all the water he spilled just before he showed up, and he's probably going to take Bucky home with him tonight so they can come back here together tomorrow and Sam can finally teach him how to hold some of the birds.