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Tony Stark doesn’t once look them in the eye.
His flight movements are precise, like a surgical knife slicing into skin: all straight lines and clear points of entry. The moment his thrusters soar up from the ground, he is methodologically making it from point A to point B with no detours. He is blazing through the discarded carcass of the airport rubble, heaving up boulders of granite and flinging it across the sky and not bothering to check where—or even, who—it lands on.
He must’ve had a keen eye, then, for discerning friend from foe: Scott a clear, almost jarring mahogany to War Machine’s polished onyx; Vision a complete departure on any biological mark-up to Wanda’s harsh scarlet letter; and others, so many more others that could've been so much more less. All of them drawn out from the shadows because Steve was, beyond the dancing stripes of red and blue and white, a friend.
And Bucky knew, too, that Tony had been—or was, or still, or could be—exactly that: a friend.
Because they dance around each other like tombstones etched together in the grave, ghastly and eerie and weighted. There are words spoken for each unintended punch, every mistakenly pulled jab, and every fleeting glance across the span of Siberia’s never-ending airport. They were both restraining themselves, dangling on the edges of their full potential because they’d been halved, not surgically: but with so much brute force it left only paper cuts in the slips, leaking and dripping and bleeding into whatever support system they’d concocted. Rhodey with a battered leg. Clint who kept purposefully missing his shots. T’Challa and Wanda and Scott and everyone else who kept looking twice before doing anything.
Bucky doesn’t lay a hand on any of them.
Tony Stark still doesn’t look them in the eye when he all but tries to keep destruction to a minimum and only ever shows his first signs of distress when Steve accidentally lands a punch on the Spiderman kid: but still, he held. Then Bucky sees a whiff of auburn hair try to move past them, quick as silver and lithe as a cat, if only the iron suit wasn’t quicker and grabbed hold of her to drag her back. He kept doing that all throughout, keeping her in place and forcing her to stand down.
Bucky tries not to hear, and he really shouldn't have, but it is like breathing; he doesn’t know how to just unknow. When you’ve been bred and made the apex of predatorship: you don’t suddenly just become the prey. He hears strained voices across the courtyard, barely veiled frustration, and: We talked about this, Red. I got Cap, remember? You stick to the other one.
The other one, Bucky thinks, was it him?
But Natasha hasn’t laid a single finger on him. There really hadn’t been anyone else, because Sam was pointedly trying his best not to even so much as graze her way, and because he’d seen the menacing look she’d given him when he’d been pinned between her legs.
Other. He was an other. Because Steve had been theirs, and now he’d been no one’s, and so they were both others.
They break away. Bucky’s arm flexes instinctively in anticipation. He doesn’t think he’d hurt her, not really, not just because there was a small part in his mind that yelled at him that he didn’t have to do that anymore, precisely why they were doing this, so that he had the choice not to; but because: “Bucky,” Steve sees him eyeing them and nearly shoves him out of the way. “We gotta go.”
It goes both ways, Bucky decided then, in that: They had been Steve’s too.
Tony Stark doesn’t even so much as blink, when Wanda summoned a gaping hole in the middle of the airbase, threatening to swallow everyone—no matter who, then, they all deserved to drown—and a heavy pair of footsteps make their way back into the ramp. He doesn’t stare at them as they make haste in making a break for it, loud and ambitious and obvious.
Tony Stark doesn’t do anything at all but stare ahead at the abyss.
Steve was a neurotic planner, the jagged lines of militia warfare tendering under his watchful gaze and the five steps ahead branching out into five hundred: but at this, Bucky was surprised to see for the first time, him damningly unprepared.
“Natasha.”
Bucky knows who she is. Because Steve was a planner, and disjointed from the world as he was, Bucky counted the heads on the other side: five. Steve had only told them in detail about four. He doesn’t know if it was a grave misstep on his part, or if he really truly thought they’d have never come to this, or maybe both; but what he does know, if he knew absolutely anything, was: Bucky’s never seen him hit a woman before.
There is something that cracks inside him a little, then, that if he would—if he would—then maybe Bucky wasn’t the kind of person meant for elaborate escape routes or destroying a war hero’s carefully curated public goodwill at the drop of a hat.
But Steve won’t.
He’d never, not even when small snippets of his memory lended him: a pudgy fifty something landlord swearing profanities down his mother for another late rent due; a cruel hospital nurse who didn’t sign off on funeral papers because of a staggering amount of balance left; or even when the neighborhood bookclub wives snickered past his skinny frame and chided none too loudly well no wonder she died, giving birth to a son like that.
The Steve he remembers stayed his hand.
But something about her, he could tell, made him itching to rare and go. Steve stood frozen in place, but drowning; so lucidly, so vividly, that Bucky thinks maybe it’ll be better to just uproot him altogether. It hurt to see him so tormented, because Bucky knows that’s a familiar look, and hadn’t they grown seventy years past this? Steve had been unflinchingly empathetic in the face of moral disarray, but never so paralyzed because of it.
Ah, Bucky thinks as he notes the tremor in her hand holding the gun and Steve shaking with the effort to hold up the shield, This must be the other, to the other.
Because there are layers to any good game plan worth its weight in gold, and Steve was nothing but a brilliant tactician who peeled away at every option and mined every possible side strategy and—
“Nat. Please.”
There are always two sides of the same coin, a person and persona, a flesh beneath a face.
“You can’t ask me to do this, Steve.”
But then there are those souls lined up on the same path, their vines tangled and sung into harmony: that they didn’t—couldn’t—tune themselves any other way. It is harsh notes jumbling together, an angry orchestra of divide and conquer and not caring altogether whether any of it mattered or translated well into song so long as they played themselves on the musical sheets. As long as it had been them pulling on the strings and making music.
It is harmony and not that at the same time. Something else. Other.
For a moment it felt like the graveyard, that maybe they carried the same agonized restraint Tony had when he knew what they were up to and did nothing. He thinks that maybe it’s like when Wanda cries in the middle of the night and Clint both angers and alleviates her. Or maybe even when Sam catches him looking at Steve sometimes, and he inches closer a little to his side almost protectively. It is a peculiar feeling, trust, and Bucky wishes he could do this one thing for Steve: shelve him off the burden of choice and make it for him, because he knows he wouldn’t mind, because in his head it’s just Bucky looking out for him.
But even he can tell this is different.
With Tony it was a violent and raw kind of clash, so palpably thick with the tension of it all it was both a wonder and why they’d never collided before. It felt like a long time coming, an accidental fire no one expected to implode on itself. It was spear to spear, helmet to helmet. Steve strained to ignore the debris of the fallout, and probably could, because Tony had been doing just the same: but that was a matter of mending the mind, and he had offered everything up to it already: both logic and rationale. This one, however, was a matter of the heart.
It’s not mistrust, Bucky thinks on it more, because: “You know I’d never do that to you,” Steve finally says. “You think I’d hurt you?”
Natasha smiles slightly, and for a moment, her eyes looked like coming home. But then: “You already are, Rogers.”
Steve winces, and Bucky is so sure then that that’s what’s gonna break him, this outright admission that this – what they’d been doing, were doing, will probably still keep doing – marred itself on the bones of their destructive wake.
They talk, Bucky observes, the way others do: in quiet passing of glances, a laser-like projection of sorrow and sorry, each other imprinting on the other their own version of justice and begging to see reason. It’s a little disorienting, watching them struggle to right their own path and find that balance again. But this isn’t like breathing, easy and primal, but like drowning in a pool of your own blood: choking, gasping, scrambling to take purchase on an anchor that’s not there to support you anymore. It's an invisible thing, the depth of what they give and take from each other; but it's deafening all the same, louder than the sound of guns going off in the background or the pounding on his own head.
Steve is the first to lower his shield. Natasha doesn’t, and something tugs inside Bucky knowing he caused that, but she backs up slowly. Very slowly into the background of the shadows, until she’s become one herself.
Bucky’s never seen Steve lay a hand on a woman before, but he walks away feeling like he’d just seen him bruise her down to her soul without ever needing to. And so they go on: wicking their longing into thread, sewing it into each other’s skin, embroidering their letters into each other one stitch at a time; until maybe, just maybe, they’d meet full circle again.
Two sides of the same coin. One soul, two branches.