Archive of Our Own

When they first wake him up, they don’t let him shower for two days. It shouldn’t matter to him. He was a soldier. He marched through muddy forests and blown out war zones for months at a time. There wasn’t exactly running water on the front, and the drops they got were for drinking, not cleaning. But he can still see the mud on his hands and knees, feel something dirty spitting from his busted lip and cheek from right after the crash. His frozen body didn’t let his cells age, and it sure as hell didn’t let them heal his fractures and bruises and blood.

It’d been easy for people to believe he died on impact.

He survived seventeen hours after plunging into the ice, but then again, his ma always said he was a fighter.

“Have you noticed any major personality changes since waking up? Felt like something’s wrong?”

Steve taps his fingers against his thigh, five times for each tip before he folds his hands evenly and lies through his teeth. “No, nothing unusual.”

“Nothing?”

Steve repeats his answer in his head. He thinks he’s saying the right things, but it’s hard to know without knowing more about the people asking.

“Can you be more specific here? There’s been a lot going on,” he tries. That sounds good. Natural. Normal. Something someone who doesn’t need to count ceiling tiles would say.

The agent across from him clears his throat, trying to pretend he’s not talking to Captain America and he’s not dying for him to sign his comics. “Are you having any sudden, unexplainable physical trouble? Difficulty breathing at odd moments? Flashbacks?”

“Flashbacks?” Shit. They think he’s got shell shock. “1945 was last week for me, and you’re asking about flashbacks? Christ, they’re just memories.”

“But do they feel real?”

“They are real.”

A voice buzzes into the room and Steve can’t see where it’s coming from, so it makes him twitch. 

“We’re done here.”

That’s Fury’s voice. Fury has been Steve’s only constant since he woke up, and he can’t decide if it’s a good thing or not. If he’s a good man or not. But he keeps people from asking questions that make his chest tighten like his old asthma attacks, so Steve can appreciate that.

The agent across from him wants to argue but doesn’t. People don’t really argue with Fury. So the man leaves and is immediately replaced by a familiar hulking black trenchcoat.

“Where to now? The cell or the hospital?” Steve asks.

Fury’s face almost twitches into an almost smile. It’s true. Ever since Steve woke up he’s had three jobs: answer questions, get poked and prodded, and sit silently in his designated quarters. He’s told it’s because they don’t want to startle him by throwing him into a new century too quickly. He thinks it’s because they’re testing him, and he’s answering the questions wrong.

“Actually, we’re heading out,” Fury says, and that makes Steve tense, suspicious. “We’ve been thinking about getting you an apartment. Out of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s compound.”

Well, maybe Steve was passing after all.

Steve likes when things come in threes. So as much as he likes Fury, when the man interrupts his boxing session after the eighth punching bag, one short of the ideal number nine, which is three three times, he’s a little more pissed than he should be. But he doesn’t say anything, shifting back and forth on his toes as Fury talks about something that should have been dead and buried in the ocean decades ago.

At least he’s focused on something else now, something other than the things running through his head on repeat. The doctors tell him flashbacks are normal. It’s not shell shock or postconcussion syndrome nowadays, but some acronym he hasn’t bothered learning because he’s sure they’ll ban that one in a few years too when too many soldiers come down with it.

They gave him a lot of techniques for how to remind himself where he is, how to prove to himself that it’s the 21st century—like he could ever forget—and that he’s not in war anymore, but they don’t really help. He’s never lost in the violent images and memories. They just won’t fucking stop.

“Trouble sleeping?”

“I slept for seventy years, sir. I think I’ve had my fill.”

“Then you should be out, celebrating. Seeing the world.”

He’d love to see the world. He’s just a little sick of the world seeing him.

“When I went under, the world was at war. I wake up, they say we won.” He strips the wraps off his knuckles slowly, reveling a bit in the sting. “They didn’t say what we lost.”

“We’ve made some mistakes along the way,” Fury concedes, and Steve’s always preferred orders coming from people who can admit when they’ve fucked something up. “Some very recently.”

“You here with a mission, sir?”

“I am.”

“Trying to get me back in the world?”

“Trying to save it.”

Steve takes the file with apprehension, and his ears start to itch when he sees the Tesseract again. He wants to go back to the punching bags. Make his thoughts stop for a moment or two. But soldiers don’t need their heads anyway, just their ears.

“Hydra’s secret weapon.”

“Howard Stark fished it out of the ocean when he was looking for you. He thought what we think: the Tesseract could be the key to unlimited sustainable energy. That’s something the world sorely needs.”

“Who took it from you?”

“Loki. He’s not from around here.”

Join the club, Steve thinks.

“There’s a lot we need to bring you up to speed on if you’re in,” Fury says like there’s any choice for Captain America. “The world has gotten even stranger than you already know.”

“At this point, I doubt anything could surprise me.”

“Ten bucks says you’re wrong.”

Steve feels a little nauseated at the idea of betting half a month’s rent on anything, so he doesn’t respond as he picks up his things and begins to leave the gym.

“Is there anything you can tell us about the Tesseract that we ought to know?” Fury tries.

You should have left us in the ocean.

Steve thinks it’s a good thing they introduce him to Romanoff and Banner first. Banner is a man just as afraid of being seen as Steve is, and he’s pretty sure Romanoff would break any mirrors in her room. His kind of people. Tony and Thor are too ready for a fight. He may be history’s greatest soldier, but the only reason he went to war was to end it. Those two are the guys calling the shots, the guys sending eighteen-year-old kids into the trenches.

There’s apparently a wing of a D.C. museum dedicated to him. Steve knows because Tony tells him, his breath smelling a bit like scotch and a bit like blueberries when he says, “Yeah, my dad was a big contributor to it.”

“Your dad was a good man,” he tries, which is the wrong thing to say based on the way Tony turns to stone after. Good men don’t always make good fathers. His ma could attest to that.

“Well, he did make you,” Stark says before turning back to his work.

After Dr. Banner and Stark run off to talk nuclear physics together, Agent Romanoff stands from the table. Steve’s got a lot of questions right now, and he may not be this team’s Captain, but Romanoff showed him a lot of decency the first day they met, so he chases after her.

“Need to know where the little boy’s room is?” she questions sarcastically without stopping her stride.

“I actually just wanted to speak with you about Agent Barton.”

He sees the way her shoulders tense. He can imagine being in her place—not even dog tags to remember him by.

“We’re going to find Barton,” he tells her. “I want you to know that.”

“I know. You’ll do anything to keep the Tesseract out of enemy hands. That’s why they called you in.”

“Can I tell you something, Agent Romanoff?” he asks quietly, and she slows down a bit at the tone of his voice, turning to face him.

“I think we’re all better off if the Tesseract’s destroyed. Doesn’t matter to me if we get it back in one piece as long as everyone’s safe. And I mean everyone.” He hesitates, and he doesn’t know what it is about her that feels a little familiar and makes him say, “We’ve lost enough good people already, don’t you think?”

Staying in the Avengers tower is strange most days, but it’s mostly just the feeling of being cramped. Not physically, maybe. The rooms are fucking massive and make Steve feel proper shame in a way he hasn’t in a long time, and Tony’s money keeps rolling in to fill any empty space with something new and shiny. But there’s not a single person around him these days who doesn’t think of him as Captain America. And that suit is really tight.

He’s not all that close with the rest of them. The team’s a family, but he thinks he might be the black sheep. Steve doesn’t like movie nights if the volume’s turned up too loud, and his room is pretty bare outside of a sketchbook he keeps in his desk and the clothes he keeps in his dresser. Most of the time outside of long-term missions he prefers to stay in the apartment S.H.I.E.L.D. rents him under an assumed name, and that’s not much like home either, but at least he can take the cowl off and hang up some pictures without feeling exposed.

“Cap,” Clint greets in a grunt, his hands wrapped around his morning coffee. The man says it’s like a nice slap in the face to get his day going, but Steve sees how many sugars and creams go into that cup, and it’s almost white by the time Clint drinks it. Steve likes his coffee black because it’s how his ma liked it.

“Hey, Clint. How’d you sleep?”

The man deadpans, “Like a baby,” before taking another drink.

It was a stupid question, but Steve’s been brushing up on small talk ever since he came back. He used to hate it, the weather and work and if the Depression would really ever end, but since waking up he’s liked having a script to go off of sometimes. He likes knowing what he’s supposed to do.

Steve turns to the coffee machine and tries to remember which buttons to push when, but he grabs the wrong mug. While he’s not looking the drink overflows, spilling all over the counter and dripping a little onto the floor, and when he looks back and sees it his whole body tenses. He can’t move, just watching the coffee drown itself.

“Woah, woah,” Clint mutters, pushing himself off the counter and turning the machine off before it can get any worse. “You okay?”

Steve doesn’t know if he can form words right now, which is stupid. A spill shouldn’t make him dumb. He’s been to war for God’s sake, and he can’t handle a fucking cleanup?

Without thinking about it he smacks his ear, where the pressure is building from his chest, and Clint doesn’t like that at all, giving him a disturbed look.

“Thought there was a bug flying by my ear. Must be more tired than I thought.”

Clint seems to buy it, just a little, but Steve doesn’t really care because now he’s thinking about a bug flying into his ear and him trying desperately to get it out but not succeeding because there’s no way he could and the bug digging into his brain and making everything worse.

He clenches both his hands simultaneously and then releases them before starting to clean up the mess. It only takes ten minutes for him to wipe the counter down so there’s no trace of the spill, but it’s another fifteen after Clint leaves and Steve can bring out the bleach.

When they aren’t all on a mission together, when Clint disappears like he regularly does and Thor flies up into space and Tony works on god knows what, Steve spends his time taking Nick Fury’s orders. He always planned to get out of the war once the fight was over, but he knows now how naive an idea that was. He may not have aged in the ice, but he damn well wised up when 70 years later everyone was fighting the same fight.

The missions keep him busy at least, and he can’t complain about that. It’s almost nice not to have time to think or let his ears start ringing with the past.

He usually ends up crashing for a few hours at headquarters between missions. It’s not like he dislikes his D.C. apartment, it’s just that some S.H.I.E.L.D. accountant fucked up once and told him how much they paid a month to keep him there, and it makes him a little sick to look at now.

Natasha starts to catch on that he doesn’t go home, if he can really even call it that, but she’s got no room to talk. She’s trying to clean herself and he’s half trying to kill himself so they meet up about once a week to talk about pop culture they’d missed out on being raised where and when they were.

“You need new friends, Rogers. People who aren’t super spies and professional liars.”

He snorts and takes a drink from his beer he ordered more out of habit than anything. “Yeah, you’re one to talk.”

“I’ve got Clint.”

“You’ve got him maybe half the year. How come he’s on vacation right now but you’re not?”

She tenses, and he knows he’s crossed a line. He leans back, stepping down.

“He’s not on vacation. He has… things more important than S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“Unlike us.”

“Unlike us,” she agrees.

They clink their drinks together at that.

“You ever think about actually going in?”

Steve stands awkwardly at the edge of the VA meeting as people trickle out.

“Oh trust me,” he tells Sam, “S.H.I.E.L.D. put me through every kind of therapy there is nowadays.” His tone is bitter and tired, so he tacks on, “I’m glad there’s a place for these people to go, though.”

“Yeah, I guess it makes sense they had to run you through the works. They ever try anything for those tics of yours?”

“My what?”

Sam gives him a look that could tear through the shield. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t seem like you’d open up to a whole lotta people. I figured you might have kept some things to yourself.”

Steve shrugs, forced nonchalance, but Sam doesn’t seem like the type to pull his file.

“I said what I needed to to be kept in the field.”

“You getting any help outside of your top secret job?”

“For my…” he rolls the word around in his mind for a moment, “tics?”

“And the counting. And the word repetitions.”

“Plenty of soldiers come home with postconcussion syndrome. It’ll get better.”

“How long have you been waiting for it to get better?”

“I haven’t come home from the fight.”

“Who the hell is Bucky?”

No matter how many times he digs his hands into his ears, the words won’t stop replaying.

“When Loki took Clint… you told me we’d lost enough good people. You’d never met him. He worked for an agency of spies and soldiers who hid weapon plans from you. How’d you know he was good?”

Steve doesn’t really understand the question, sitting in the back of a HYDRA van with the face of the man he loves running over and over in his brain as he twists his wrists inside the electrified handcuffs, trying to make them even and rub the right spots. “Because you cared about him, Natasha.”

“It’s as simple as that for you? Reading people?”

“I could always tell the drafted from the volunteers.”

“I know him, Fury. It was Bucky.”

“I’m not telling you otherwise, Rogers. But you know what it’s like in the middle of a firefight. Not everyone can just recognize a man—”

“I can!” Steve explodes, standing from his chair. “I went to war with him! You think I don’t know how he’d try to kill me?”

Blood bubbling from his lip, shattered glass and burning oil surrounding him, he coughs out, “I’m not gonna fight you, sweetheart.”

Metal hits his jaw and he hears a crack so loud it almost drowns out his own scream of pain. He doesn’t have time to catch his breath between blows. The shield fell a long time ago, but Steve wouldn’t have lifted it anyway. That’s not who Bucky needs to remember.

“I’m with you ‘til the end of the line,” he promises, and it’s covered in rage and fear and bruises, but Steve thinks Bucky’s face is more beautiful than any obsessive thought he could have conjured up from his memories.

He loses consciousness as he falls from the sky.

“Moving back to New York? Just didn’t like finding out the capitol was full of Nazis or what?” Tony asks him on the jet when the six of them get together again after S.H.I.E.L.D.’s dissolvement.

He thinks about Bucky’s face again, his body drifting out of his sight after he dragged him from the water. “Maybe I’m just homesick.”

He doesn’t know why Tony’s parties always make his thing worse. After Tony drinks himself to sleep and everyone else goes back to their own highrise Manhattan penthouses, Steve sticks around and washes the glasses. He knows it’s weird, and that’s why he doesn’t tell any of the Avengers. The cleaning crew has long since gotten used to his presence, and he gets to know a lot of them well. None of them will call him Steve, no matter how many times he asks them to, even when they find him shaking over the sink and repeating words to himself.

“JARVIS said you’d be in here,” Natasha says behind him. Steve tenses, his mouth still moving around his own muttered words.

She sits on the counter next to him, trying to see his face. “Just don’t like to see a mess or what?”

“Bucky,” Steve mutters one last time and thank god, that time it comes out right and he can stop saying it. It tears him apart enough inside his own head, he doesn’t need it out in the real world too.

“I’ve seen your apartment, and it’s not exactly sparkling. What are you doing down here?”

“Washing dishes, Romanoff. What does it look like?”

“You know that’s not what I’m asking. The old man in you come out? Need to clean up after the young—”

“I’m fucking twenty-eight,” he snaps, and she falls quiet. Heat rises to his cheeks, and he scrubs the dishes harder. They may look clean, but he knows they’re not. Not really.

“Dad told us he worked with Captain America,” Lila tells him while he chops wood.

Steve forces the best smile he can muster. “He does. Your dad does a lot of good.”

“I know. Can I throw your shield? Thor left before I could ask to use his hammer. Dad says he thinks I could lift it.”

“Um…” Steve hesitates, his thoughts filled with the picture of the shield ricocheting off of something and killing Clint’s kids. “How about you just hold it? I don’t want any of your trees falling down.”

Lila shrugs. “Yeah, Dad probably wouldn’t like that. He grew up where there aren’t a lot of trees, so he really likes ours. Have you ever shot a bow and arrow? I could probably show you how. Then I can be Captain America and you can be an archer guy.”

The wood block he’s holding creaks under the pressure of his hands. Sam said that sometimes when things get real bad, the best thing you can do is throw the thought away. But it only works if you give yourself something else to think about in replacement.

“It’s better if it’s the same thing, something you know really well,” he’d said. “Helps keep your mind focused.”

His full name is James Buchannan Barnes. “I think I’ll leave the bow and arrow to you.” He was born March 10th, 1917. “Let’s ask your mom and dad first, and then we’ll grab you the shield if they say yes.”

He is alive.

He likes Wanda. A lot of the others are still skittish around her, and he doesn’t blame them. She doesn’t either, and he thinks that might be what draws him to her. She’s afraid of herself and missing half her heart, buried in a grave somewhere with the body of her counterpart. He knows what it is to be twenty-six and shattered.

“I’m hearing some things about you and Vision,” he teases her, as objects fly through the air, and she rolls her eyes while practicing.

“America’s greatest tool of propaganda in all of history and you don’t know that you can’t believe all that you hear.”

He laughs. “America’s greatest propaganda tool knows exactly what to believe when he hears it.”

One of the glass cups shatters in the air, and the rest of the objects clatter to the ground in the empty room, and Wanda turns to face him, pointing a light-hearted and accusing finger. “You broke my concentration, no? I was doing well today.”

“That’s the point,” he counters. “Your abilities, they’re different from everyone else’s. They come naturally. You don’t need training to use them, you need training to focus while you do.”

“Don’t play pretend. You just wanted to interrogate me.”

Steve smiles, raising his arms in defeat. “Okay, maybe. It’s just nice to see you happy. And you’re happy around him.”

Wanda’s face falls a little, and she turns away from him, lifting the objects again. The pieces of the glass cup float too. “If you wanted to see me happy, you should have met me before I was ten.”

Steve’s pulled from his nightmare suddenly, the sounds of soldiers drowning in their own blood still ringing in his ears. The sheets are covered in sweat and have been torn by his fists, and he still can’t relax his fingers, even as he feels his nails cut skin as they clench down.

“What is Bucky?” an accented voice asks him, and he grabs the shield next to his bed before he can recognize who’s standing above him.

“Wanda?” he pants out. “What are you doing in here?”

She stares at him, confused, and he’s tired enough that he thinks her eyes might be glowing a faint red. “I came to… talk. I was having a rough night.” She looks him up and down. “It seems I am not alone.”

He lowers the shield, coming down a bit as his breathing steadies.

“Sorry. I didn’t—”

“What is Bucky?” she asks again. “You said it while you were sleeping. You screamed it.”

“He…” Steve chokes, but something shadows Wanda’s face, and he’s reminded of what she looked like at Pietro’s grave. She sits down across from him on the bed.

“Who is Bucky?”

“Steve, I know you’ve waited years for this. I know you were ready to search for him.” Sam sighs, staring at the TV as the bomb goes off again, news station after news station showing the same images. “But are you really ready to find him?”

Before the fight starts, before he meets the closest he’s come to family since the Howlies for a death match, Wanda grabs his arm and pulls him back from the group while the rest of them talk plans.

“Steve, I need to know something, and I need you to be honest,” she says. “I have to know before we go out there.”

“What?” he demands.

“Barnes. Bucky. Is he your priority here? If the Accords were gone and there were no other soldiers, would you still be running with him?”

Steve stops, stone cold. She knows. She’s been inside his head, tore him out of nightmares, found him nursing two empty bottles of liquor hoping he’d be able to beat his body before it recreated him again. She knows.

“If it came down to me or him—”

“I’m asking you what happens when it comes down to him or the world.”

He takes a harsh breath. He looks behind him to a man with a familiar face, a man hardened and cut open and made into metal and stone. He sees the man who stood on top of him, beating him bloody, before pulling him out of the ocean and running, hoping to never be found.

“Him. Every time.”

Wanda lets go of his arm. “Good. I need to know you have everything riding on this fight.”

The Avengers die in a cold Siberian bunker. There is no funeral, no eulogy, no time for grief. They end like they began: bloody and separated.

But Steve Rogers finally gets to go home.

Things are supposed to be easy after Bucky gets better. After the world gets fixed and the two of them can finally make a life together out of a Brooklyn apartment. Steve passed on the shield because it was time. Sam can live with it, make something out of it, and Steve can stay home and focus on helping Bucky.

It works for the most part. Steve cooks and Bucky cleans, and even though he does it wrong Steve doesn’t have the heart to tell him, just rearranges things slightly between the time when Bucky goes to bed for the night and when he has his first nightmare and Steve runs in.

And then one night Bucky doesn’t have a nightmare. The two of them eat dinner together, sit down on the couch while Steve draws and Bucky reads—Buck’s therapists says the TV too late at night is bad for the brain, and Steve’s never gonna let Bucky have to do something alone—and then Bucky goes to bed with a pat to Steve’s shoulder, something new and unexpected that makes Steve drops his pencil.

He begins methodically washing the dishes from dinner, waiting for Bucky’s shouts. He gets through all of them without issue, only having to stop to shake his hands twice, and he even finishes bleaching the sink. Hesitantly, he checks all the locks in the apartment, only half-involved in the action while the rest of him stands guard patiently at Bucky’s door. And still, the place stays quiet. He paces the hallway nine times before finally pushing the door open gently.

The man is fast asleep, his face calm and open and achingly young and sometimes Steve forgets that the two of them may be men out of their time but they’ve never really been men at all, just kids chasing fantasies and getting war in return.

Steve grips the frame of the door tightly. He thinks he can stay here forever, watching, being a human shield for the one person in the world he’d still take on that title for without hesitation. In the end, he sits down against the wall, telling himself he’ll only stay a bit longer, just long enough that he knows Bucky won’t need him tonight.

His alarm didn’t go off. Fuck. Steve wakes with a sudden jolt, his head bumping against a wall. He’s on the floor of Bucky’s room and Bucky’s bed is empty.

He stands quickly, the grogginess of the morning dropped as a picture of Bucky tumbling down the Alps shoves its way into his mind and then transforms into Bucky falling out of their window down the building over and over and over again.

Even when he finds Bucky in the kitchen, he still can’t quite make it go away while his heart tries to even out.

“Morning, Stevie,” Bucky says as he flips the French toast he’s cooking on the stove. The nickname makes Steve calm down a little bit more, his arms losing their tension.

“Morning,” he says, and he says it wrong but Bucky would worry if Steve repeated the word until he got it right, so he grits his teeth to stop himself from saying it again.

“Slept like a baby last night. Figured you didn’t, considering I found you on my floor, so I wanted to give you a break. Cook breakfast myself.”

It’s really sweet. Steve knows that. But he thinks Bucky might have accidentally left an eggshell in the mix and then it’ll get inside of Steve and get him sick, or maybe Bucky will undercook the bread and the eggs will still be kinda raw and he and Bucky will both get sick and not be able to help each other and die.

His jaw sets tighter. He can’t even pretend and say thank you because all he really wants to say is “morning.”

Bucky gives him a small look. “Sorry if I’m stepping on your toes. I just know you worry about me. I wanted to make a fuss over you for a change.”

Don’t look at me, Steve thinks. Don’t look at me because then you’ll see me. I’m not the man you loved in Brooklyn.

He nods slowly, practiced, and smiles at Bucky. He wants to thank the man. Jesus, Mary and Joseph he just wants to stop thinking for a bit and be able to eat breakfast made by another human being and celebrate Bucky’s recovery. But instead he waits until the man looks away from him and boxes his own ears while mouthing “morning.”

Steve ushers Sam inside his and Bucky’s apartment excitedly. “Of course we don’t mind you stopping by, Sam. What are you doing in New York?”

“Well…” he trails off, glancing around.

“If it’s confidential that’s fine. I’m just glad to see you here. Bucky will be, too.”

Steve turns away from Sam and calls Bucky’s name.

“The motherfucker knows I’m here,” Sam shouts at Bucky’s door.

Bucky emerges from his room smiling in nothing but a tank top and jeans, a towel slung over his shoulders. “I was hoping Steve could tell you I wasn’t here, but I guess the new Captain America needs an audience.”

“Oh I need an audience? You’re not even in the field anymore, who are you working out for?”

“Steve likes me better when I’m sweaty,” Bucky deadpans, which is not true.

Steve grabs everyone drinks from the fridge, non-alcoholic because even though they can’t really get drunk, both his and Bucky’s doctors recommend they try not to fuck up their livers too bad. It’s not like they have a whole lot of organ donor matches for the two of them. When he comes back to the living room, Sam and Bucky are leaning in to talk to each other like old friends. They can act however they want. Steve knows they’d both take a bullet for each other.

He sets the drinks down thinking about what blood on their clothes would look like. He scratches each of his palms three times. Sam notices.

“Now that you’re out, you two getting help?”

Bucky snorts. “Therapy’s still part of the pardon.”

“Yeah, I know your ass still has to see someone. Good thing, too. Can’t imagine being inside your head.”

Sam glances at Steve.

He waves Sam off. “C’mon, we’ve been over this. War’s too different now. The VA doesn’t really know how to help me.”

“I know people outside the VA who can help with PTSD. And the other stuff.”

Bucky furrows his eyebrows, metal and flesh arm crossing to look between Steve and Sam. “What other stuff?”

“It’s nothing, Buck. Sam’s a bit of a hypochondriac, but for other people.”

“Steve—”

“Sam. I’m good. Remember? I’m home. It gets better once you’re home. You just gotta wait.”

Sam gives up and leaves it at that. Bucky doesn’t.

So that’s how they end up sharing a bed regularly, arms wrapped around each other. Steve folds his clothes before laying down, but Bucky does too. It’s a military thing, Steve reminds himself. Plenty of soldiers do it. So when they lay down and Steve can relax into Bucky without incident, he thinks this will be fine. It really does get better once you’re home. And this is home.

But then Bucky wants to cook more of the meals. He says he likes making things for Steve, likes the act of building with his hands. Steve can’t take that away from him, he just can’t. So what if it means he has to turn the bathroom light on and off sixteen times before he can go to sleep?

He takes too long one night and Bucky passes out on Steve’s side of the bed, and Steve can’t sleep on Bucky’s side of the bed. It’s not Steve’s side of the bed. So he sleeps on the couch since they converted his old room into an odd painting studio and gym combo and dreams about the color blue.

He wakes up to Bucky laying on the floor next to the couch, chin tucked into a pillow while he reads his latest book on Watergate. He recently began reading up on historical scandals he wasn’t involved in—Bucky can’t explain why he likes them so much, but Steve gets it the way he gets everything about Bucky. Unquestionably.

“Hey babydoll.” Bucky grins while Steve begins to stretch. “You wanna go get coffee?”

“What you drink isn’t coffee,” Steve murmurs sleepily.

“Well, what you drink isn’t good. But I take you anyway.”

Steve leans forward and realizes where he is, and more importantly, where Bucky is.

“You didn’t have to—”

Bucky holds up his hand gently, stopping Steve. “I don’t know what’s going on or why you won’t tell me,” he says, sitting up and leaning against their coffee table, “but I’ve been noticing some things. I brushed off a lot of it in the beginning, you know? The memories were fuzzy, the nightmares were bad, I didn’t know what was normal and what wasn’t. But the lights, that’s new, right? And the talking to yourself. And the ear thing.”

“Christ Buck, how long you been watching me?”

“Since we were nine, Stevie.”

Steve wants to roll over and cover himself, but he doesn’t want to turn his back to the front door. 

“How many times did I kick you awake while I was having a fit?” Bucky asks.

“That doesn’t matter. You know that. I’m here for all of it.”

“Well, I’m here for it too. And if you want to sleep on the couch, sleep on the couch. I’ll sleep right here next to you.”

They get coffee—actually, Steve gets coffee and Bucky gets a mocha mocha with extra chocolate, whipped cream and sprinkles—and find themselves a quiet booth in the corner. Steve doodles aimlessly on a napkin, watching as Bucky licks the whipped cream from above his lips.

“I don’t know if I can explain it,” Steve admits. “I don’t even know if there are words for it.”

“People have words for the stupidest shit now. And I’ve always been able to understand you.”

Steve flips the napkin over and begins drawing straight lines parallel to each other. “I just like when things feel right.”

Bucky nods, waiting.

“But a lot of things feel wrong.”

“Like what?”

Steve sighs, frustrated, and draws his lines a little harder. “Sometimes I don’t do things right the first time. So I have to do them again.”

“Like turning the lights off.”

“Yeah. Or when… or when I have to sleep on the wrong side of the bed. I like when things are in order. I like when things are set.”

He takes a drink from his coffee, unable to meet Bucky’s eyes. “I know I’m not the punk you met in Brooklyn, Buck. I know I’ve changed.”

That makes Bucky honest to god laugh, which lets Steve look up and memorize his face all over again.

“Between the two of us, do you think there’s anything that’s stayed the same since we were kids?”

Steve smiles a bit. “A few things.”

“I think I could count them on my one flesh and blood hand.”

“You and I are always gonna stay the same, I think,” Steve says quietly. “At the core.”

Bucky takes his hand across the table, and it gives Steve the will to keep going.

“When Wanda first attacked the team, back when she was still fighting for Ultron… she used her powers on me. On all of us. It really messed everyone up. Nat didn’t speak until we got to Clint’s place. I mean, Banner took out a fucking city. But Tony said… he told me that I didn’t seem affected. Honestly, I just wasn’t changed.”

He stares out the coffee shop’s window, not wanting to meet Bucky’s eyes for the next part. “If I see a fucking drink spill I want to shut down and kill myself.” He taps his temple. “Not much Wanda could do to make it any worse in here.”

Bucky’s hand on his tightens.

“I didn’t tell any of the S.H.I.E.L.D. psychs about it. Didn’t want to get carted off like a basket case. I’m bullshitting my new therapist most of the time.”

“I have it on good authority that lying to your doc doesn’t do much good.”

“Bucky, it’s taking everything in me to tell you this.”

He starts making circles on the back of Steve’s hand. “I know.”

“And I’m not even telling you most of it. You know what it’s like, when you wake up from a nightmare that’s just too bad to say. I couldn’t ever say it all out loud. How’s a shrink supposed to help me?”

“It’s not all about talking about the bad stuff. I don’t talk about HYDRA with Rainer. I talk about how to help myself.”

Steve takes a drink. Bucky’s making sense, but Steve’s just too fucking scared.

“Never thought I’d see you preaching about the benefits of psychiatry,” Steve jokes, but it falls flat.

“You deserve to get better, Steve.”

“I am better, Buck. Look at me, I can’t get pneumonia or the flu anymore, and I got you home. That’s better than it’s been in a long time.”

 Bucky gives him a sad, lonely smile that he must have learned in those 70 years of hell and says, “You deserve to be happy.”

Once Bucky knows, it gets harder to hide. And anyway, there are only so many people who would be able to sleep through their boyfriend screaming himself awake in the same bed, throwing up on his way to the bathroom, and showering in water hot enough that it gives him minor burns. He just has to get it off of his hands. He has to get the dust off of his hands.

The end of the world was actually very quiet. Just a little messy.

Bucky is waiting for him with a towel when he steps out of the shower. Steve can’t even look at him.

“What was it about?” he asks quietly, and Steve’s ears ache, the whole world resting on the back of his throat.

“I don’t remember,” he lies. “I don’t want to remember.”

He sits down on the tile, and Bucky slides down with him, towel still in hand. Steve curls into a ball, his fingers laced together to stop his palms from itching. He trembles uncontrollably and ends up wrapped in Bucky’s arms.

“Putting up the shield, coming home… it was supposed to make it better.”

“It doesn’t get better unless you force it to.”

Steve sighs, feeling like a scrawny kid trapped in bed with no will to stand or breathe. “I’m sick of forcing things. I’m sick of digging through the mud.”

The two of them sit there until Steve has the energy to stand up and go to their bed—his side, of course. Bucky curls up next to him and holds out his hand, and Steve takes it gratefully.

“I don’t know how to get better.”

Bucky takes his other hand and runs it through Steve’s hair. “Well, first you have to want to.”

Steve decides he needs a fresh start, so he finds a new therapist. The first session is fucking awful. It’s supposed to cover his basic history and goals for himself and his life and what he wants to use therapy to achieve, and it takes two hours for him to get halfway through explaining himself and his body. He doesn’t say why he’s here. He hates himself for needing to come.

Bucky picks him up and asks how it was and Steve just shrugs. He wants to get better, he really does. But he can’t stop feeling like he’s gonna slip up and make the therapist realize he should be locked away from everything good and normal. Bucky would understand, but Steve’s too tired to talk, and the two of them walk back to their apartment in silence.

Steve washes all of the dishes and can barely make himself eat dinner, knowing it’ll just dirty another plate.

“Barnes says you’re in therapy,” Natasha says over beers. 

“Christ, is Bucky announcing it to everyone?”

“No. But we talk. We’ve got a thing or two in common.”

“Me being one of them?”

Natasha raises an eyebrow, and he gives up.

“Romanoff, do you remember the day we found him? ”

“Hard to forget.”

Steve smooths the label on his beer. The corner on the edge is lifting up, and it’s driving him crazier than the noise in the bar.

“You remember the safe house, the… things I did?”

“The pacing and counting and mumbling and incredibly worrying religious repetition of his name?”

Steve flushes. “Yeah. That.” He looks into the distance, avoiding her eyes while he watches the news on a TV in the corner. “They’ve got a word for everything nowadays.”

“The suicidal thoughts, are they comforting, Steve?” his therapist Dr. Ashton, who insists he call her Rebecca, asks.

“Jesus, of course not.”

She makes a note. “How frequent are they?”

He hesitates, and she looks up at him, waiting. Eventually she asks, “Are they difficult to talk about?”

“They ain’t exactly fun.”

“How often do they happen?”

He shrugs, biting his lip. He sees her eyes flick down to his hands, which have begun a steady tapping against his thigh. “I don’t know.”

“That’s okay, Steve. Could you tell me how many times you’ve thought about it today?”

He ducks his head down. “They don’t ever really stop.”

Steve comes home with a test. He doesn’t know what the right answers are.

“I don’t know what to put down on this,” he sighs, tossing the test onto the table. Bucky pointedly doesn’t look at it.

“You’re great at filling out forms. How many Steve Rogers tried to enlist?”

Steve ignores him. “I don’t think I wash my hands excessively.”

“You stop washing dishes so you can wash your hands,” Bucky says without looking up from his newspaper.

“Because the dishes are dirty, Buck. And fucking gross.”

“Sweetheart, does the amount of time you wash your hands stop you from doing other things? Do your intrusive thoughts get worse when you don’t wash your hands after you’ve decided you need to?”

Steve narrows his eyes. “Put the goddamn paper down, you’re not being as subtle as you think you are.”

“Okay, maybe I did some research.” Bucky leans forward, offering his hand across the table. “Sue me. How many sleepless nights did you spend reading about PTSD and night terrors?”

“You don’t even know what I have.”

Bucky averts his eyes briefly. “Sam might have mentioned what he thinks it is.”

“If I had known this was what was going to happen I never would have tried to make you two friends.”

“I was perfectly happy only talking to you and Romanoff and Dr. Rainer, but you pushed it.”

Steve looks down at the sheet asking him to rank on a scale of 0-5 how distressed or bothered he’s been by his habits in the past month. He should be able to do this. He loves counting. He’s great at counting. He’s fucking compulsive at counting.

He picks up his pen.

Sam calls him out of the blue to say he’s proud of him for taking the next steps. Steve asks him if he’s still going to groups.

Sam’s silent on the other end for a moment before saying, “I get it, you know. Why you couldn’t until you put the shield down.”

Steve sits down heavily on his couch. “I didn’t want you to carry all that, Sam.”

“Of course not. It’s not about wanting me to carry it. It’s about knowing I could.”

There’s a loud crash in the background. “I gotta go, Steve.”

The line goes dead.

“Clint’s coming to New York next month,” Steve tells Bucky as they stand in the kitchen waiting for the rugelach to finish baking.

“He bringing Laura and the kids?”

“Just the kids from what I know.” Bucky raises an eyebrow and Steve laughs. “I don’t think it’s marital problems. The city’s just not for everyone.”

“I guess not. It’d be nice to meet her, though.”

“We can always visit their farm sometime. Lila likes me. Or she did when she could play with my shield. Maybe she won’t think I’m cool anymore.”

Bucky laughs and wraps his arms loosely around Steve’s waist. “I think you’re cool.” He nuzzles softly against Steve’s jaw, and Steve relaxes exponentially. “What’s he coming to town for so close to Christmas for?”

“The fucking musical,” Steve sighs. “They gave him free tickets, too.”

Bucky grins. “Their seats better be right next to ours.”

“It doesn’t matter where they sit because we’ll be sitting on our couch. I’m not gonna go see a buncha people spend two hours singing about my life.” He shrugs. “They never get any of it right, anyway.”

“At least they’re calling it Rogers and not,” Bucky does mocking jazz hands, “Cap!”

“That’s even worse,” Steve mutters. “Steve Rogers isn’t a character.”

Bucky nods, leaning back to meet his partner’s eyes. “No, you’re not.”

The oven timer dings and Bucky opens it. Chocolate and vanilla fill the kitchen. Bucky pulls the pan out with his metal hand, setting it on the stove to cool, and Steve thinks, No one is watching.

“Is there a way to medicate the OCD?” he asks suddenly, interrupting Rebecca’s question about his time in the Depression.

She’s taken aback briefly before composing herself. “Absolutely. If it’s something you want to look into, we can.”

“I was just thinking… the meds they gave me when I first came back, they helped me get out of bed. And they helped with some of the night terrors too. So it might be worth a try if it might stop all of my… stuff.”

“What specifically do you want to target?”

Steve sighs and wrings his hands together. “I just want to not hate being inside my head.”

Steve tucks the medication away in their cabinet, next to Bucky’s long line of pill bottles, while Bucky stands patiently in the doorframe to the bathroom, a glass of water in each hand.

“She said that it’s kinda like the stuff I was taking before.”

“The SSRIs?” Buck asks.

“Yeah, those. But for OCD it’s got to be a crazy high dose. Even higher than it normally has to be for our metabolisms. So I’ve gotta go up on it slowly.”

“Alright. Sounds good to me.” Bucky hands one of the waters to Steve. “We’ll take our meds together, yeah? Make it a little easier.”

He rolls the pill around in his hand, rounded at the edges and multicolored. It looks too big, like he could choke on it. Like it could kill him before it even tried to make him better. Like he could swallow a handful of them, if he really wanted to, and choke before they even hit his liver.

Steve swallows the pill in one go.

“The Statue of Liberty,” Sam sighs, collapsing onto their couch, still in uniform. “I mean, what the hell? Who decided that?”

Steve’s not sure what to feel about the shield being put up on a national monument. He knows he hates it, really fucking hates it, but he keeps trying to think about what his ma would have felt if she came over from Ireland to the sight of it. Is it good? Is it bad? Does it mean something to someone, and does that mean anything either?

“I don’t know,” Steve says. “I heard the President endorsed it.”

“Yeah, well. No one fucking asked me.”

Spandex and war posters and cheap songs while he lifted motorcycles the crowds all thought were fake.

“You’re gonna have to get used to that,” Bucky tells him.

His problem with PTSD lies with the phrase “post.” As if it only happens once you’re out of the firefight. Sometimes it sits on your shoulders like the whole world even when you’re still getting shot at. And even if it does come after, there’s no real after. Sometimes it’s just hit after hit.

Steve watches Sam leave and thinks that getting to put down the shield might make him the luckiest son of a gun to ever walk to earth.

It’s a week after he gets up to “medicinal” aka “could kill a fucking horse” dose of his meds when he lays down with Bucky to go to sleep. He stays on his side of the bed and Bucky curls around him, a hand tucked under his shirt, and then he realizes it.

“Buck,” he murmurs. “I didn’t check the locks.”

Bucky starts to shift. “Alright, sweetheart—”

“No, no, Bucky.” Steve turns to face the man, shocked and completely at ease in his own skin for the first time since he woke up in this century. “I didn’t have to check them. I forgot to check them.”

The next morning Bucky cleans while Steve goes for a run, and Steve doesn’t mind one bit that some things are out of place. Before he heads to the shower, Bucky kisses his cheek and says, “Welcome, home.”