Work Text:
Hidden doors aren’t a new thing, obviously. Entire compounds behind a bookshelf, weapons caches disguised by a wall? Old hat.
But when the rows of knives and guns and dangerous-looking pointy implements that Bucky’s not ashamed to admit he wants to get his hands on just to try, the likes of which even he’s never seen—when all that flips around to reveal an even more extensive collection of brightly-colored liquids cased in glass bottles, some of which are bubbling, and all of which are now lined up behind the home-bar that Clint’s so proud of, to provide context: well.
That’s a stash of booze protected by an intergalactic blockade of firepower. And even for Bucky, that’s something new.
New, and fucking cool.
“Should I really be—” Bucky starts, staring skeptically at the vibrant shades of intoxicating beverages, brow quirked as Phil waves him behind the bar and into the stores, and cuts him off with the kind of long-suffering exasperation Bucky's almost grown fond of—which is probably for the best, given the frequency Phil aims it his way.
“Barnes,” Phil interrupts, tone bone-dry and heralding an eye-roll to come; "between the two of us, who’s the Director?”
“Point,” Bucky concedes; but by his count, the stash numbers past the thousands—so far—and damn well reeks of illegal contraband. Not that he disapproves, but, well. He's only recently accepted the security clearance Coulson’d offered him months ago, and he's a little twitchy about what these morons let him see, let him know. Just in case. "Still."
“Fine,” Phil sighs, waving him off as he leads them deeper through the racks. “I’m officially bumping your clearance level up to Nine. Does that make you feel better?”
“There aren’t clearance levels anymore,” Bucky scoffs, instead of giving in to the urge to choke–the numbers are superfluous, now, but Bucky knows that Steve only topped out at Eight.
“I’m reinstating them, right now.”
Bucky snorts. “Then, honestly?” He reaches idly for an oddly-shaped container, tracing the impossible spiral of the glass, watching the liquid inside shift colors at his touch as he shoots a wide grin Coulson’s way. “Level Ten would really make me feel better.”
Phil licks the inside of his lips to keep from smirking: another of his tells that Bucky’s picked up on. “Funny.”
Bucky grins, and reaches for a simple bottle filled halfway with grey.
“Not that one,” Phil says sharply. “As in, stay away from that one,” Phils eyes him, and then the bottle, warily. “Don’t even touch that one.”
“Like, touch Lola before I touch that one?”
Phil considers. “Yes, actually.”
“Damn,” Bucky drawls out with a low whistle.
“Mmm,” Phil agrees, distracted, as he searches for some unnamable item in the lines upon lines of drinks.
“Are you technically supposed to have these?” Bucky can’t help but ask. “And am I technically supposed to be browsing them like I’m at a fuckin’ liquor store? In your living room?”
Phil just scoffs at the suggestion.
“In hindsight,” he starts, a little bit self-righteous; Phil’d be proud to know that it sounds a hell of a lot like the same tone on Steve, but Bucky’s not sure it’d be to his benefit to inflate Phil’s ego, just now; “it’s probably best that these were safe here, when everything went to shit.” Phil turns, and raises a brow; hands Bucky two bottles from the collection he’s stuffed against the crook of each arm. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
Bucky glances down at the labels: indecipherable. Glyphs and dots and stick people. Fucking hell.
Fucking hell, Phil’s really going to get him alien drunk.
“And I think letting you take a bottle home to enjoy with your significantly high-strung significant other might just be the best use I’ve found for this particular stash,” Phil tacks on as he ushers them back toward the barstools; “So.”
And those had been the auspices under which he’d stopped by this particular evening: an idle comment about how Steve’d been tip-toeing again, the anniversary of Bucky’s return drawing near and the memories, the fear of backtracking rather than forging forward were weighing heavy—hell, even Bucky’s mouth on him, even Bucky’s chest beneath his ear hadn’t been enough to keep him unwound for long, hadn’t been sufficient to keep him from handling Bucky with the kind of kid-gloves that Bucky absolutely could not stand.
Not that he’d said it to Phil in so many words, of course, but the good Director’d said he might have an answer to Bucky’s conundrum.
And Phil, being Phil, probably filled in all the blanks himself, anyway.
“Not that I condone substance abuse, of course,” Phil quips, pouring them both a shot.
“Let’s call it drinking to remember, then,” Bucky says, hearkens back to that first night, that meeting in Minsk that led to everything, that led to him getting back everything; Bucky breathes in deep, and lets silver fingers curl around a liquor shining gold. “Drinking to remember where we are, how far we’ve…”
Phil doesn’t comment as Bucky trails off, as he gets caught in just how far they have come, dressed as he is in tactical black, sleek uniform tailored to fit, cut to accommodate the arm: made for him. Fit to the kinds of heroics he’d never dreamed to know.
“Pretty sure that’s got an appley profile?” is what Phil says instead as he nods down to Bucky’s glass.
“Steve’s not nearly as big a fan of apples as people like to make him out to be,” Bucky grins, and downs it in one. “But don’t tell anyone. I enjoy all the free pies and strudels and whatnot that we get basically everywhere, based on that assumption.”
Phil chuckles, moves that one to the side and pours another: neon orange, and the tangerine scent is enough to give it away the taste before they both knock it back.
“Cheers,” Phil taps their glasses together; reads Bucky’s ambivalence before placing the bottle on the shelf at his back.
“This one?” Bucky lifts a bulbous flask of something viscous, amber-thick through the glass.
“That’s an acquired taste,” Phil warns him.
Bucky extends a hand, flexes his fingers in invitation. “Let’s have it.”
He eyes the splash and takes the mouthful in one, grimacing on contact and struggling to get it down.
“What the fuck is that?” he asks, because the bitter taste was all mineral, all chalky-dry on the tongue.
“Honestly?” Phil shakes his head. “I have no idea.”
The aftertaste, though, starts to blossom slow, and Phil smiles as he watches the surprise dawn on Bucky’s features. “Caramel?”
Phil nods. “But nutty.”
And yeah. Like biting into a rock and finding a...
“Like a Baby Ruth,” Bucky says, marveling at how fucking weird his life’d become. He eyes the bottle for a second, before declaring: “Possibly.”
Phil slides it over toward the appley one, and then uncorks the clearish tonic that sparkles with jade.
“Where’s the missus tonight?” Bucky asks idly, mostly because he’d have heard Clint by now, and have seen Lucky if Barton was, in fact, at home.
He knows, even before he sees the tension, the near-spill of green as Phil’s wrist jerks; he knows it’s the wrong thing to say, almost as soon as he says it.
“With Natasha,” Phil answers, tone suddenly sharp, strained.
“Nat’s Stateside?” Bucky asks, tries to redirect the focus without making it too unbearably awkward, whatever’s gone down.
Phil tips his own shot back without pause—and, lightweight that he is, it’s not a small thing. “No.”
“They on a mission?” Bucky knows for a fact there’s nothing on record for them, per his morning brief, but Bucky’s “new” to the Team, and while it’s not Coulson’s style, he’d kiss the man’s cheek for being something less-than-a-moron if he’d kept some things from a formerly-brainwashed assassin, when it was still early days.
Phil pours himself another, downs it quick, grimacing through the burn this time. “No.”
Right. Trouble in paradise, then, and Phil’s a security-dumbass, and last Bucky’d talked to her, Natasha was in Bangladesh.
Well, shit.
Bucky brings his own drink to his lips and lets Phil guide where they go next: follow down the rabbit hole, or veer to the side.
“We,” Phil finally starts, lifts his glass to his mouth only to find it empty, only to stare at the bottom with a frown: “had words.”
Bucky sips slow at his drink—minty, with a splash of kiwi, with a touch of leafy, with a fuckload of sugar; says nothing.
Phil opens his mouth to speak, but balks; raises a brow at Bucky in askance.
"Decent," Bucky passes judgement. "Better suited to Stark, though. You know how he likes his green juice."
Phil snorts, and Bucky's glad to have prompted the injection of humor, however brief, as Phil moves the bottle to the shelf and then leans against the bar: hunched, and too resigned, because this is Phil fucking Coulson.
Goddamnit.
“Those words," Phil finally picks back up, unscrewing the top of a something electric blue and oddly luminescent; "came around to the suggestion that I should go,” and the air-quotes are audible as Coulson grinds out: “Spend some time with my girlfriend, since I can trust her with sensitive information like, you know," Phil flinches, expression souring on contact as he spits it out: "Resurrection.”
Bucky grimaces in sympathy. “Ouch.”
“I may have responded to that," Phil slides over Bucky’s refilled glass; "by saying that May’s in Curaçao extracting from another Terrigen event.”
Bucky masks his reaction as best we can, but Phil's already glancing up, wincing for them both. “Which yes, I realize, was not the best response.”
Bucky schools himself, makes sure to look as open as he feels, as he wants to; as he needs to, to offer a friendly ear—to be a friend, because Phil's his friend, and that's what friends do, and Bucky thinks yeah, he can do that, that's not so hard.
Friend. Yep. Practical exam on Friendship, trial run alpha.
And go.
“Things were a mess, after,” Phil’s eyes are far away, when he says it; they only briefly resettle in the now when they flicker to Bucky, touch down and ground for a breath as they both exhale: “Well. After.”
And yeah. Bucky’d been on the run, but he remembers, he’d kept tabs on the destruction he’d wrought; on the chaos machine he’d been a cog inside as it’d risen from the ashes, as it’d been cut down neck by neck by neck.
“I was a mess after,” Phil adds, voice low; “Long after.”
And it’s barely audible—a piece of himself he’s entrusting to the ether between them, Bucky thinks, probably more than Phil’s offering it to him, but that’s enough.
That’s a step.
“I didn’t know who to trust, or what to believe, and to bring him into it—”
Phil’s breath catches, and Bucky knows what he means, what he’s saying; remembers another time, and an eager face, and too sharp cheekbones against skin stretched thin and there are some things you’ll always love too much to risk. There are some things you’ll kill on the inside, just to make sure they keep breathing, just to keep yourself from breaking for the threat.
Even now, with the same cheekbones over a fuller face, and stronger lungs: even now—maybe more so now—Bucky knows.
“He doesn’t get it,” Phil’s saying, grinding out with the same frustration, the same heartache that Bucky knows, all too well. “And it doesn’t matter how many times I apologize, or how much I regret the decision I made, how much I try to explain that it wasn’t about what he didn’t mean, it was about the exact opposite and he,” Phil looks up, locks eyes with Bucky and Bucky hurts for him, really and truly.
Bucky hurts for him; that means Bucky’s human. That means he’s a friend.
Bucky likes to collect reminders, for the bad days. They don’t come often, but when they sneak up, they do come fierce.
“He says he forgives me. And then, this happens and he,” Phil runs hands through his hair, dismayed. “I mean, I wish I could have done it differently. Of course I do. But I’m not sure that choice was on the table. I should have done it differently, but I, we were, things—”
“You had an obligation,” Bucky cuts in, sees the spiral where it’s headed, same way as he recognizes it in Steve: they’re both cut from a cloth more loyal than Bucky knows how to be to anything that isn’t that blond idiot of his; Coulson’s just as much married to what it means to do right as Steve is. “A duty. You’re built that way.”
Phil glances up at Bucky, too helpless for Bucky’s liking, too desperate for a man so composed, so in control. “But so’s he.”
“Not the same,” Bucky shakes his head, because that’s where he’s like Clint, that’s where he understands Clint: they’re loyal not to ideals, or to a purpose, naw—they’re loyal to one soul amidst the billions, and to their own need to keep that soul safe.
“You’ll bend the rules, but you’re more interested in fitting the circumstances to the rules than the other way around. But Clint?” Bucky grins, a little rueful, a little too invested in how he fits this mold himself. “Clint doesn’t give a shit about bending the rules until they crack,” and Bucky laughs to himself, mirthless; “Hell, until they break.”
Bucky lets himself the lick the very-blue remnants from his glass before summing up. “Makes you both damn good agents. Just, y’know. Different kinds of good.”
He’s determined to get the last drops when he feels Phil’s gaze on him; when he looks up, and refuses to be embarrassed by the fact that his tongue’s stretched out, quirked odd to trace the tacky lines of ultramarine.
Phil’s lips quirk, though in response to the licking or for the sake of something closer, something deeper, Bucky wouldn’t know.
“When’d you get so wise, Barnes?” Phil asks, a little snarky; a little solemn as he reaches for a lemonade-looking drink, all cloudy pale-yellow, and pours them both a few fingers.
“Got a couple’a years on you,” Bucky smirks, shrugs; “should probably have something to show for ‘em.”
Phil hums, half-a-laugh Bucky knows he doesn’t feel. Bucky breathes long from out his nose, steadies himself, and dives in, because he knows this.
He knows what’s wrong, here; for once, he’s not groping in the dark, he’s not the one grasping at straws; and they’ve done everything they could for him, all these months—they’ve given him all they know and all they can grasp and they’ve helped him find his way, and stand his ground, and this; this, here, Bucky knows.
And he’s going to return the goddamn favor.
“Clint’s hurting,” Bucky says; Bucky forces himself to just say, to try like hell not to feel it too deep for his own self, in his own veins. “He’s still hurting, and you being here can’t stop that. You still breathing can’t stop that. Nothing you say or do or try can stop that.”
Phil’s staring down at his drink with a ferocity that borders on unnerving; that’s how Bucky knows his words have been heard, are sinking in; that’s how he knows he can tack on the bit that cuts closest, because he can try all he wants: he will feel this.
He will always feel this.
“We love,” Bucky says softly, a little whimsical, a little bit lost in the past; “and so we hurt.”
Phil looks up, and Bucky smiles, sad; looks away for the sting in his eyes.
“You can’t have one without the other. If you’ve got one without the other, you’re kidding yourself. Or you’re calling a thing love when it’s not.”
Phil clears his throat, and asks with curiosity; not a speck of malice: “Therapy?”
Bucky chuckles, at that. “Surprisingly, no,” he quirks his head, and lets his eyes slip closed as he sees her in his mind, saying the words; thinks about the color of her eyes: “That’s Mama Barnes, right there.”
And Bucky lets himself breathe in that moment, in that memory—lets himself relish its existence in the first place, and its return in the second, and in the third, he lets himself be grateful for the way it’s helped, for the way it always did, for the way that now it can, and he thanks his mother in his mind, and in his heart, for knowing him, for loving him, and for teaching him the world enough to stand here, now, after all the hurting, and be able to find what it was for.
He opens his eyes, and steels himself to offer the rest; to do his Mama proud.
“You know Steve was always sick,” Bucky starts; “and I,” he bites his lip, because he can still feel it, he still remembers it with a clarity that transcends all reason or thought.
“One time,” he says, soft and rough; “One time I cried myself hoarse for him, I was so scared.”
And God Almighty, he had been: it was the first time he’d ever seen a body so pale, ever seen the bones of a person shake like they might well fall apart. He remembers reaching out for Stevie’s hand, thin enough for his pinky and his thumb to meet and cross; remembers feeling the moth’s wings of Steve’s heartbeat only if he pressed down, only if he damn well bruised that ghostly skin.
Scared was a word for it, but it sure as hell didn’t measure up.
“And that’s what Ma said to me,” Bucky breathes in deep, and drops into his mother’s cadence, because it matters, somehow, that he tells it right. “It hurts because you care about that boy, she told me. It hurts, because you’re scared to lose a thing that you love. You skin your knee, and it hurts, because you love your leg, she said. You want to keep your leg safe.”
Bucky dreams about the bone saw, sometimes; thinks about his arm, and the blood. The pain.
When he wakes, he feels the hurt like a phantom; he sees Steve, and he thinks about the love.
More often than not, these days, he can breathe with Steve’s breaths and shudder back into sleep.
“We cry at goodbyes, because we love so much,” Bucky quotes his Ma, breathes out her words; “and we’re afraid we’ll never see what we love again, and it hurts, that possibility. The idea of never again. We love, and so we hurt.”
Phil’s eying him with something heavy, something almost profound; Bucky swallows around the tightness in his throat, and forges on, because he’s a Barnes.
He’s a Barnes, and a Barnes does not go halves where it counts.
That, he remembers.
“I’ve loved him,” Bucky breathes out, the only truth that’s never dared to die. “I’ve loved him since I knew what it meant to love. I mean,” Bucky shakes his head, feels the tug at the center of his chest: familiar. Essential to all that Bucky is. “I learned what love was, because of him.”
Bucky breathes in sharp, deep; spreads a steel palm across his sternum to quell, to calm where the tug sees fit to twist, to wrench hard.
“I remembered what love is,” Bucky murmurs; “because of him.”
And he can’t look at Phil, not yet, even if he feels his stare; he can’t, just now, so Bucky grabs for his drink and tastes the yellow concoction—pineapple. Sunshine.
Steve would love it.
The sob that lodges in his chest makes it hard to get it down, but he does. It’s sweet, and it tastes like Steve somehow, for no reason at all, so Bucky can. Bucky does.
He takes another drink, leaves one more swallow as a safety net before he exhales long; stays his course.
“We love ‘em more than life, that’s not a question. We’d give everything for them. But they can’t know what it is to be there, to feel what we’ve felt,” Bucky says, stares through his glass and sees those blue eyes that ground him, that bring him home.
“Steve’ll never know what took me to that bar, that day,” Bucky says, and thinks that even he isn’t sure, doesn’t know. “Steve’ll never understand exactly what it was in what you said that shook me loose and brought me home. And Clint?” Now Bucky braves it, braces himself and looks up, meets Phil’s eyes with a passionate resolve, with the light of honest truth he hopes will pierce the veil.
“Clint won’t ever understand what coming back was like for you, what dying was like in the first place,” Bucky doesn’t falter when Phil’s breath catches; forges on. “He’ll never understand what went through your head, what you questioned, what you couldn’t grasp or control.”
Phil’s going to bite straight through his lip if he isn’t careful, and the red rim around his eyes is still dry, but it won’t be for long. So Bucky grabs for the last untested bottle, unscrews, and pours as he speaks:
“Just like you’ll never know what it felt like with Loki, or what he felt like, not being there when you went down, waking up to find out you were gone,” and Bucky makes the conscious decision to pour from the left before he speaks, because he turns the tables in his mind; can’t help it. Thinks about waking to find Steve dead. Thinks about all the times, the flashes he can call to mind now when he’d fought, when the wipes hadn’t taken, when the programming was off and they’d taunted him, tormented him, tortured him with the fact that Steve was gone, that his Captain was in ice, never found, no body, no soul, never coming, lost—
Bucky keeps the bottle steady, and fills their glasses liberally; he pours from the left.
He shakes on the right, at just the thought.
“You’ll never know his past how he felt it,” Bucky pushes Phil his drink, and watches out the corner of his eye as Phil tips it back: deep burgundy, thick and lush.
“You’ll never know why he thinks you should have made different calls,” Bucky tells him, straight and plain. “You’ll never know what calls he’d have made himself, in your shoes. Just like, with Steve? I’ll never know what that machine did to him, how he was remade in a whole different way,” though not for lack of imagining, not for lack of nightmares about that idiot move, that death-wish realized and only barely escaped in the end.
Fucking dumbass punk.
But anyway.
“I’ll never know what it was like to wonder, as a kid, if my lungs were gonna give out, if my heart was gonna stop,” Bucky’s voice cracks, because he remembers how it felt to watch, and has always wondered what was worse; “not just because I needed him, and it was almost like his breathing was mine too. But for real, in the flesh. I’ll never know what it did to him. Even if I’d had the same shit to deal with, I’d still never know.”
Bucky finds himself out of breath, at that, just then; finds himself panting and hurting and winded, exhausted and cold at the tips of his fingers, the ends of his toes; he grabs for his own drink and gulps, and it does the trick: cherries.
“This one,” Bucky hums into the curve of the glass. “This one, for sure.”
Stevie loves cherries.
Phil huffs; smiles, and it’s small, but Bucky thinks it looks less forced, less strained. Like it could be downhill from here. If they’re lucky.
“And maybe we shouldn’t blame them,” Bucky shrugs, enjoys the sweet heat of the liquor down his throat; a feeling he can still nab from regular spirits, but this settles hot in his stomach, too, and oh: that, he’d missed.
“Probably, we shouldn’t blame them, even when they blame us,” Bucky concedes, warmed from the inside and generous; though he’d forgive, wouldn’t blame, either way.
“Even when some of them’ve got a hero complex the size of the sun and they blame themselves,” Bucky tilts his head, leans in as if he’s sharing a big fucking secret about the moronical love of his life, and Phil chuckles, so Bucky smiles: a win.
“But on the other side of that coin,” Bucky sobers up, at least at the face of things; the soft heat’s starting to spread through him and it’s real nice, gives everything a haze he’s comfortable with, that he feels safe enough, here, to allow. “On the other hand, we sure as hell don’t deserve to blame ourselves, either.”
Phil looks at him, in that moment, in the wake of those words like he’s offered revelation. In truth, though, all Bucky’s offered in the here and now is what keeps him from crumbling; what lets him have what he’s always wanted, and that makes it gold and diamonds; that makes it the only thing he cares to give any weight.
“We had our reasons,” Bucky says, and yeah: therapy’s helped him say that with conviction, but so has Steve. So has the world. So has every member of the team, and Phil himself, and it’s true. Bucky knows that it’s true, for each one of them. Bucky knows it’s true without exception.
“Good reasons, bad reasons, reasons we couldn’t help,” Bucky shrugs again; “but they were ours.”
And for Bucky, these days: that can’t be underestimated. The importance of that cannot be said enough.
“And in this world, the way you,” Bucky swallows, sees the widening of Phil’s eyes and course-corrects before the other man can scold him later; “The way we live, and the things at stake,” Bucky shakes his head, still aghast, sometimes, at the breadth of it all.
“Sometimes we have to sacrifice,” he says simply; “sometimes we make a play that’s not good, exactly, but it’s necessary. Maybe there’s not enough time, or there’s too much at stake, or we’re pushed too far, and we can’t look for all the angles, even if we could see them, and we’ve just got to,” Bucky fishes for the word, for the idea; “We’ve just got to jump, you know? Make the call, and roll with what comes. Sometimes, that’s all we’ve got,” he grins, small and private, almost, down at the dregs of his drink. “It’s all anyone’s got, really.”
Phil’s tipping more of that cherry-awesome into his glass, and he lifts his grin, at that; shares it. Lets it grow.
“And sometimes we play cards close to the chest not because we want to, but because we’re too afraid of what happens if we don’t,” Bucky says, and he says it straight to Phil, then—gives it straight to Phil because he needs to hear it, to understand it most. “Because that fear is more than the wanting. That fear is because of the wanting.”
Phil’s lips part, his jaw drops just a little, like the idea hits home as it should, and that’s good, Bucky thinks. That’s real good.
“So I think there’s some weight to the idea,” Bucky murmurs, ponders through a sip at his drink; “that we hurt, because we love.”
“Yeah,” Phil breathes out, and tops himself off, too. “Yeah, maybe there is.”
And Bucky thinks that he’s aced the practical, probably; thinks he can leave it there and still have managed well, considering. He could leave it there.
He doesn’t want to, though. He wants to reach farther. He wants to give.
He’s human. This is his friend.
“He asks, sometimes,” Bucky says, and his tone’s lower, now; he can tell that Phil knows this is between them. This isn’t advice.
This is an offering.
“In words, or in the words he doesn’t say,” Bucky scoffs, thinks of the face he loves, of Steve’s forehead creased in worry, in regret; that heart breaking where Bucky can’t hold it safe.
“He tears himself up over what kept me away, after,” Bucky swallows through the crack in his voice; “After everything. Why I felt like I had to keep my distance, why I ran when he was looking for me, why I didn’t feel like I could always come to him, no matter what.”
And the first time’d Steve cried for it, the first time Steve had sobbed and Bucky’d held him and watched: it was the first time in this new world that Bucky remembered, wholeheartedly, what it felt like when Steve couldn’t breathe, when his heart didn’t want to cooperate with the program of living—Bucky remembered helplessness at the center of his chest, where it’d lived in his limbs in the cold for decades. Bucky remembered how it hurt in the soul to watch the pain of loving, and be unable to stop it, or even to soothe.
“And no matter how many times I tell him that’s not it at all, no matter how much I love him, and show him that I love him,” Bucky struggles with the words, because it still hits hard, hits home—it’s still a part of their lives in the now; it’s not something that goes away and never again gains purchase: it’s who they are, now.
It’s what they have.
And Bucky wouldn’t trade it for a goddamn thing in the universe. Not ever.
“It’s not,” Bucky tries to articulate it, tries to make it make sense in the words. “He,” Bucky sucks his lower lip, tries to parse it out sensibly past just the feeling between his lungs.
“He loves, y’know? He loves me. And he hurts, because he lost what he loved, and thinking about it still kills him. He hurts, because he’s afraid of it happening again.”
And it won’t happen again. It won’t.
They both know the world’s cruel, sometimes.
Yet Bucky can’t go down that road. Bucky won’t go down that road again.
“Clint loves you,” Bucky tells Phil: not that it needs his observation, or his recognition; but it does need saying. Because it matters that Phil connects this, and doesn’t forget. “It’s the same thing, really. Can’t change it. Just gotta,” Bucky shrugs, grins crookedly: “Just gotta keep at it, I guess? ‘Cause,” and Bucky swallows; swallows hard and steadies himself before he nods sharp, steadfast.
“‘Cause loving is better,” he says with conviction, without a shred of doubt or question. “It’s better.
Phil laughs, a little shakily; but then he nods, too.
“You an insightful drunk, Barnes?” he asks, playful but grateful, too, once his voice is strong enough to hold it.
Bucky snorts. “Apparently.” Because yeah, drunk. He’s more than starting to feel it.
Phil smiles, and it’s a soft thing, really, when he says: “Good to know.”
He sticks the red and the yellow bottles into a bag, and then the Baby Ruth thingy that tastes like rock, first—for good measure, apparently. Then he sneaks in the appley one, presumably just for Bucky.
Bucky grins wide, at that.
“I’ll call a car,” Phil says—eyes unfocused, Bucky notes: lightweight. “And. Take the week,” Phil grins, texting Happy for the ride; “Both you and your boy.”
If Bucky’s grin was wide, at first? It’s a threat to the structure of his face, after that.
“Yessir,” he salutes sloppily; “gladly.”
_________________________________
Phil’s headache is gone by noon the next day, at which point he can look at the screen of his phone and actually make out the letters. Which is nice.
He’s only got one message—it’s a weekend, and Hill’s technically in charge—and while it’s not from the person he was hoping it’d be from, Phil Coulson isn’t ever going to be disappointed to find a text from Captain America—it’d go against the very fiber of his being.
He thinks maybe he’s more hungover than he thought, at first; it takes a moment, to realize it’s not his drinking that’s distorted the text:
Colsn ur awesnm fr tge alchole iz reil gud thkx
Phil snorts to himself; looks like the booze did its job. That had been the goal, of course, but after last night? He’d more than owed Barnes the favor.
Which: well.
Phil grabs with one hand for the bottled water Bucky’d reminded him to bring with him to bed, and scrolls through his VIP contacts with the other.
Lands on his Speed Dial Number One.
Bites the goddamned bullet.
May and I were never a thing, you know.
It takes a few minutes—chest tight and breaths shallow—before a response lights up the screen.
I know.
And Phil doesn’t know what to say, really; doesn’t know where to start. Just that he has to. Just that he’s going to, and always was. So.
Come home.
There’s another break, another silence that stretches before it’s broken: this time, by knocking. The door.
And then, Phil’s phone:
Forgot my key.
Phil grins, and hears Lucky scratching at the doorframe. He gets to his feet and heads for the stairs.
Time to keep at it.