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Pickup by Stark’s jet comes with a price tag: one meeting, everyone in the same room, all cards on the table. Bucky ducks away from the escort sent to take them from the tarmac to Stark’s tower. He thinks Steve and Maria notice, knows Sam does, but no one tries to stop him. He has his limits, but it’s novel for them to be respected.
A pay-by-the-week motel gives him a place of his own to crash. He rolls the comm piece between his fingers while admiring the back alley view. The jet had food, so he’s comfortable enough to go without more. Still, the challenge of ordering something in the near future spirals out ahead of him. He’s thinking of an abandoned pantry full of ingredients.
“I still need a cooking lesson.” There’s only dead air in his ear. Bucky feels foolish. No reason for Sam to still have his in, not when he’s back somewhere safe. The comms don’t have a private channel, so he had to keep it innocuous. Trying to think of something else to say, something personal, had made him freeze up anyway.
He tries gripping his metal wrist in his other hand, but it just feels like the start of an attack. His fingers feel nothing like Sam’s did. Whatever well of gentleness he found that let him touch Sam safely, it offers no help now.
A click, and ambient noise floods the channel for a second before Sam promises, “I haven’t forgotten.” Alone in a room that smells of strangers and not enough cleaning products, the sensation of belonging evaporating like another wisp of damaged memory, Bucky holds tight to that promise.
***
Bucky has a sack of energy bars and a stack of files liberated from the offices of an import company in his hands when he hears the click of the comm in his pocket activating. So he misses the first thing Sam says, but Sam is still speaking by the time Bucky gets it in his ear.
“—wings! A week’s time, Imma be doing barrel rolls over the park, you just see if you can stop me.”
Bucky wouldn’t even try. Not when Sam sounds like that, all glee and defiance. He can imagine Sam, head thrown back, neck exposed as he laughs in Bucky’s ear. The memory of him in Bucky’s arms, head tipped back with a whisper rather than a laugh, knocks the breath out of Bucky.
The memories of the past are hazy with disuse. The ones of Hydra are cracked and missing shards like a shattered mirror, the reflections they show of him distorted and untrustworthy. The newest memories stand bright and strong, like they’ve got room to grow in all that empty space. Bucky can feel Sam under his hands, against his chest, touching Bucky in return. It leaves him clutching at the bedspread, metal fingers tearing the cloth, as he tries to ground himself.
“You with me?”
“Yes,” Bucky answers. “Wings.”
“She’s making arrangements for replacement wings,” Sam repeats, breathless in his own way.
Bucky makes himself gather up the folders. He must have dropped them on the way to the bed, losing time and coordination to the longing that swamped him. “She?”
“Ms. Potts. Stark tried to say he’d build them himself, but Potts actually knows the original designer. King T’Challa.” Sam makes a noise of thrilled disbelief, a suppressed squeal. “King. T’Challa. Something about Oxford and an engineering scholarship board.”
Bucky lets himself put the files aside for later. He lies down on the uncomfortable bed, closes his eyes, and falls asleep to Sam’s voice. Bucky dreams of wings, whole and real, under his hands, and for once, his dreams are gentle enough not to break a single feather.
***
Two weeks pass. Bucky changes motels three times for security. He eats whatever he can buy that involves as little human contact as possible. He has three panic attacks, two flashbacks, and a persistent feeling of being watched no matter what his recon tells him to the contrary. Downtime doesn’t suit him well.
The comm stays in his ear more and more, replacing much of his dependence on earplugs. Sam talks him through one panic attack and rather more than one bleak night. Sometimes, Bucky can hear voices in the background, as though people are in the next room over, but Sam never cuts their talks short to return to whatever he left. Bucky, in turn, talks Sam through the aftermath of two nightmares and one desperate, sleepless night when Sam gets to see the new wings for the first time. Sam knows what it’s like for things to be complicated, the good so tangled with the bad there’s no naming them separately anymore.
Bucky, in the interest of an accurate assessment of field conditions, revises his previous statement: downtime alone doesn’t suit him well now. The words come easier with time and practice, but the conversations over comm can’t make his skin stop itching. No matter how close Sam’s voice, the room around Bucky stays just as empty and Bucky just as unmoored within it.
“We should have a code,” Sam says one night.
Bucky has more paper files spread out. The table under them has enough chips to show the water-warped particleboard under the faux finish top. He’s having to go farther out of the way to find anonymous locations in which to hide while Sam and the others continue their summit meeting. Sam says they’re coordinating for something big. Bucky does his own searching, because the alternative—waiting for orders to come down from a man in a suit—scares him in ways he doesn’t want to look at directly.
Bucky leans back from the table. He presses the heel of his hand to the scarred joint of his other shoulder, aching from too long holding still and hunched. “What for?”
Silence stretches out. There are no background voices this time, just the sound of an air conditioner humming away. “I was thinking about the flight over here,” Sam says at last, slow and careful. They both know anyone could be listening, but no one else would understand what Sam means by that. Knowing Sam has been remembering too sends a flash of heat up Bucky’s spine.
They haven’t been able to talk. Bucky doesn’t know what this is, what they’re doing. “I got used to sharing quarters,” Bucky answers, still largely innocuous, a little bolder than Sam. Testing. Suggesting.
“Yeah,” Sam breathes out, a word of relief and agreement. “It’s getting kinda lonely in superhero central here. Too much space to myself.”
Bucky, who remembers just enough of seventy years to know what he missed, couldn’t agree more.
***
The day when Steve’s voice comes over the comm instead of Sam’s, Bucky has a moment of terror that something has happened to Sam, agrees to meet at the coordinates Steve gives him, and removes all traces of himself from a motel room for the last time.
Maria picks him up and takes him to another rendezvous point. She’s gotten hold of a jeep, and she drives like city traffic is a combat situation. He’s now seen her drive, shoot, and patch up her assets. While he doesn’t plan to relax, he trusts her to perform well should something happen. That’s enough.
At a tiny airfield on the way to nowhere, someone has parked a troop transport plane. It dwarfs the little hobby plane next to it, while the ultra light on the other side might as well be a child’s balsa wood toy. Steve and Sam are the only ones in sight, still standing on the lowered ramp. When Maria wordlessly heads inside, Bucky begins to suspect they are trying to make this easy for him.
With a head full of phantom planes and ghostly support crews and deliberately erased mission details, Bucky knows nothing will be easy about this. He puts one foot in front of the other, though. Because his head is also full of Steve waiting for him in muddy fields and mess halls and bunker war rooms. Because his head is full of Sam’s voice saying “I miss you” in code.
True to form, Sam greets him with, “You missed out on the goody bags. Picked up an extra for you.”
Bucky catches the plastic-wrapped package Sam tosses to him. Steve turns to head inside. Bucky catches a glimpse of him approaching Natasha and a couple of men Bucky doesn’t know, before he looks down at what’s in his hands.
The ammunition and emergency supplies all look ordinary enough, just more things to squirrel away for later. In a hinged plastic box, though, there’s a small, clear object that glows faintly blue from within. When Bucky looks up, Sam turns his head and taps a finger by his ear. Bucky can just see a blue light there.
“Stark upgraded the comms. They are, and I’m quoting him here, masterpieces of technology with integrated brain-to-computer interfacing.” Sam smirks. “I’m pretty sure he built comms that can read our minds just out of spite, since I wouldn’t let him do the wings.” Sam shrugs his shoulders and Bucky notices the straps securing a slim-profile pack. The smirk becomes a grin, even better than Bucky had remembered.
Bucky replaces the old comm and starts to head inside as the plane’s engines power up. As he passes by, Sam curls his fingers around Bucky’s wrist, in the sweet spot just where the metal had been shaped to mimic the usual bones. Memory didn’t do justice to the way Bucky settles under that touch, or to the hunger he feels to return it. The gesture stays hidden between their bodies. The attempt at privacy ends up somewhat defeated by the way Sam leans into Bucky’s ear though.
“These ones have private channels. Encrypted. You’ve got my number now.”
That’s good, but right now, Bucky has something better.