Chapter Text
It’s half-past one on a Friday afternoon when Bucky comes home.
The day is heavy with summer. The sky is bright, and it’s the sort of day that makes the rest of the year’s awful weather seem worth it. It isn’t so hot that people have started pulling blankets onto the fire escapes, but it’s not so cold that Steve is sleeping on the goddamn floor with his Ma’s old quilt and a pillow next to the radiator—an attempt to keep from shivering so bad that he develops pneumonia all over again.
It’s early July, and it is difficult to think of winter in early July. There are children playing in water bursting from a broken fire hydrant; there are men walking around with their sleeves rolled up against the heat; and, for the first time in two years, Steve is beginning to think that maybe things are going to be okay again.
He only knows when the troop ship is supposed to arrive thanks to some whispers he heard going around the tenement. When the name of the incoming troop ship matches up with the one that Bucky had sent him a letter about last week, Steve knows to ask for work off that Friday afternoon. His boss, an old Irish lady that only gave him the job because she liked his mother, didn’t want to give it to him.
Steve said something about Bucky coming home, and she replied something about goddam kids and let him have the afternoon off.
Now Steve is standing on the overcrowded bank of New York harbor, Lady Liberty standing proudly in the distance, facing east towards war-torn Europe. The crowd is so large that he has absolutely no idea how he is going to find Bucky amongst all the crying mothers and all the fathers pretending they aren’t tearing up. The suffocating emotion only gets worse when the troop ship comes in off the horizon. It is so full of men that Steve cannot believe the ship survived the week-long journey across the Atlantic without sinking.
The men are packed shoulder to shoulder, waving frantically at the crowd from the deck, some of them sticking their heads out of opened portholes or waving handkerchiefs and scarred hands. Steve stands on his tiptoes to see over the crowd pushing against him, and it seems as though all of New York has somebody on that ship they need to see. There is a woman beside Steve who has already started sobbing—the men haven’t even gotten off the ship yet.
It’s been two years since Steve has seen Bucky.
The first few months Steve had missed him like the stars miss the moon. He had woken up searching the bed for somebody who wasn’t there, and had gone to set a spot at the table for Bucky only to remember he wasn’t there.
There’ll be no more extra plates anymore. Now there will just be the two of them together again, the way it always was, and Bucky will come and sit at their little rickety table across from Steve and complain about corned beef when really they both know they’re lucky to be eating beef at all. They will sleep curled up against one another again, and Steve will have someone to laugh with again, someone to poke fun at him and worry over him when he gets sick or comes home bruised.
The air smells of the sea and gasoline, of piss and city smog and everything that makes New York what it is. Steve scans the soldiers on the deck as though he’ll somehow see Bucky amongst them. With his bad eyes he can’t tell any of them apart, but he waves anyway.
Two years is a long time to be without somebody, time made longer when Steve cannot remember a time that he did not know Bucky. Womb to tomb and all that. It had always been them against the world, and when Bucky first left, Steve had to learn to grow around the absence he left behind, had to remind himself how to be a person all over again without Bucky there to scrape him up off an alleyway or force him out of bed on Saturdays.
Steve had started going to church again during the war, if that says anything. He hadn’t been to church since his Ma died. He prayed for Bucky every Sunday. He would get on his knees with clasped hands pressed to his head and he would ask God to spare Bucky. Steve’s hands would tremble, his knees would ache, but the prayers were familiar on his tongue.
For once in Steve’s life, God had listened.
The Queen Mary docks. The cheers from the soldiers on board are enough to drown out all else except for the tears of the weeping woman beside him.
Steve turns to her once it’s quiet enough that his ears stop ringing. “Are you alright, ma’am?”
She blinks at him. Her handkerchief is covered in dark mascara stains, and she folds it over to dab beneath her eyes. She looks at Steve like he is the first decent person she’s ever seen, like he is giving her a wad of cash and a smile. Steve almost feels sick at the thought.
She composes herself. “I’m alright, thank you.”
She stops crying after that.
The men begin to unload, the wounded being pulled off first. They are taken from the hull of the boat in stretchers, stumbling home on crutches or wheelchairs, their eyes blinking against the bright sun. They inhale New York like a cigarette.
Steve thinks they all look a little lost. Every single one of them. Some of them are crying, others are smiling, and even more just stand there like they don’t know what to make of peacetime and home.
Steve stands there craning his neck to see the men stepping out of the great big hull of the impossible ship. One man kisses the ground when he comes out, startling a laugh from the civilians and a sad sort of look from the soldiers. The ship casts a shadow over the concrete, and the wind whips off New York harbor and brings with it the sharp scent of brine and salt and pollution.
Steve does not know how long he stands there, waiting for a familiar face to emerge from the ship. His feet and back hurt. His eyes ache from straining against the sun, and his heart is heavy in his chest from looking at so many men who aren’t the one he is looking for—men who aren’t his Bucky. The crowd gradually thins, as husbands and wives walk off arm-in-arm at long last, and mothers promise their sons the best dinner of their lives, and Steve watches all of them sadly.
He is beginning to worry that he had misread Bucky’s letter or misheard the rumor making its way down the block. Face after face steps off that ship that afternoon, and, in some odd way, he is reminded of his parents, thinking back to the whimsical tale his mother had told him about as a kid of her first breath in America, her first view of Lady Liberty and the New York skyline and the way the Atlantic looks from the western side of it. The men coming off this ship look just as shocked and sea sick as immigrants, and there’s an emptiness behind their eyes. Something in Steve’s gut twists at their vacant gazes. He starts fiddling with his hands when the nerves take over.
Two years of fear and longing, or prayers and tear stained cheeks. Two years of frightening, suffocating loneliness in a place he has only ever thought of as home.
He watches thousands of men crawl their way out of the ship and onto the land. Steve thinks about baptisms, and he is so caught up in that idea that he almost doesn't see Bucky when he steps into the light.
Steve’s eyes flick past him at first, and he knows it is something he won’t ever tell Bucky, because he knows it will make him sad, sad to know that even Steve—of all goddam people—didn’t recognize him when he came home after two years. Steve’s heart leaps in his chest, and his gaze swivels back to the man he has spent the better part of his life longing for.
Bucky doesn't see him either, but Bucky at least has an excuse. Steve blends in with the lingering crowd, and he knows he should step forward like all those families and wives did, but he cannot throw himself at Bucky the way they can, he can’t start crying all over New York harbor without getting more than a handful of looks from the crowd, and so for a horrible moment he cannot move at all.
Bucky looks different than he did in 1943. His face is still clean shaven, his hair trimmed to perfect Army regulation. He doesn't fill out his uniform as well as he did when he left— he is smaller for one thing, and the world has always gravitated towards him like the earth circling the sun, but now he looks like any other soldier stepping off the boat. He’s just as hollowed-eyed as the rest of them. Even then, he’s just as handsome as he’s always been, and the sight of him knocks the breath from Steve’s tattered lungs.
Bucky is also missing his left arm.
His sleeve is rolled up and pinned in place, and he takes in a deep breath, legs unsteady on the land after a week at sea, and he looks at New York as though he’s trying to relearn it all over again.
It’s only then that Steve reminds himself to move.
He finds his way through the crowd, hands shaking and heart pounding. He’s longed for Bucky like the sea longs for the shore. He has spent the better part of two years worrying himself grey for a man across the sea in an impossible war, and some part of Steve had always worried that he would never get him back. Steve used to watch the casualty lists in the papers. They took up pages and pages, sandwiched between news stories from Europe and Japan, and Steve was always taken aback by how easy it would be to find Bucky’s name amongst all those men.
None of it matters anymore. Bucky is home.
Bucky sees him just as Steve pulls himself from the crowd, and his eyes flicker with something bright. That faraway, thousand-yard-stare is for a single, shivering moment replaced by something that could very nearly be described as hope.
Godddamit, Steve has missed him.
Bucky smiles at him, that bright, movie-star hundred-watt smile that could light up Manhattan. Steve comes to a stop just in front of him, and, even with all the differences and the new scars littering his face and hand, he is still Bucky. He is still the kid throwing rocks off the fire escape, still the kid that worried over him when Steve got sick in the winter. He is still everything Steve has ever loved, and Brooklyn has felt empty the past two years without Bucky Barnes to fill in the cavity he left behind.
Neither of them say anything. There is nothing to say and everything to say, and Steve does not know how to articulate the sort of longing that has lasted a lifetime, or how to explain the stress of the past two years, unaware if Bucky would ever come home to him, if he would ever see that stupid smile or watch him smoke a cigratte in the dusty light of dawn ever again.
Bucky’s smile softens as he looks at Steve. He wraps his arm around Steve’s shoulders just like he did before he shipped out. He squeezes him a bit, and it is the closest they can get to a hug in front of all these people. The looming shape of the Queen Mary still glares down at them, the eyes of New York ever watchful. Steve breathes Bucky in, and he still smells of Lucky Strikes and sweat and the sea and something else that is so entirely Bucky that it makes Steve’s chest hurt.
“I missed you, punk.” Bucky says, shaking him slightly as they move out of the thick crowd and into the street where things are just a little quieter. It’s all Steve can do to stop from tearing up.
He laughs. “Bastard.”
“I think you’re supposed to say, ‘I missed you so much, Bucky. Don’t ever leave me again.’” He lets go of Steve, his hand lingering on the thin slope of his shoulders before he pulls away. His cap is pulled crookedly on his head, his Army bag slung over his shoulders, and he keeps looking at Steve like he doesn't know how to look away.
“I should have left you on that dock.”
“But you didn’t.” Bucky grins, rubbing the top of Steve’s head like he can’t stop touching him. Normally Steve would push him away, but it’s been two years and he is caught somewhere between wanting to push Bucky away because it makes his chest hurt, and wanting to never let him go.
“Help me light a smoke, would ya? This goddamn arm makes shit a lot more difficult.”
“Sure, Buck.”
Bucky reaches into his pocket, and Steve does him a favor and ignores the way his hands shake. They didn’t do that before the war. He hands Steve his silver zippo, and Steve wonders what kind of shit this lighter had been through. Bucky taps out a cigarette from the pack and catches it between his teeth before returning the pack to his pocket. He leans down a bit so Steve can reach the cigarette, and it takes everything Steve has to keep himself from just pulling him into a hug.
He knows better than that. He flicks his thumb until a little flame emerges from the zippo, and he holds it to the end of the Lucky Strike until it catches. Bucky pulls back with a sigh. Steve flicks the lighter closed and hands it back to him.
“I’ve been trying to do it myself the past couple' months.” Bucky explains, taking the cigarette between his fingers and breathing out, careful to keep the smoke away from Steve in case it messes with his lungs, and the gesture is so painfully familiar that Steve has to remind himself to breathe. He has gone so long without Bucky—he has spent so much time in the trench left behind in his absence that he had forgotten what it was like to live. “Could never quite get it right,” Bucky shakes his head, “can’t tie my shoes real well, either. Never realized how much shit we all take for granted.”
Steve smiles. “I know all about it.”
Bucky looks at him as though seeing Steve for the first time. “Huh. I guess we’ve got something in common now.”
“Guess so.” Steve says, and his chest tightens. Bucky had always been larger than life, had always filled up a room with his laughter and presence, and everyone gravitated towards him whether they wanted to or not. He couldn’t help it, it was just the way he wa s—movie-star handsome, blinding smile, sharp wit and the courage to match it all.
Bucky is still all that, he is still who he was before the war, but it is dulled now. Steve can see it in his face, in the way his smile isn’t like what it once was, in the way he almost walks like he is expecting a landmine to go off beneath his feet instead of like he is conquering the world.
Steve had always been the sickly one of the two, he can count the number of times his Ma had called in the priest from the church a few blocks away to deliver his last rites. Bucky isn’t about to keel over on the bank of the Lower East Side, but he also isn’t turning heads, and maybe he’s going to need Steve just as much as Steve needs him.
“Come on.” Steve eventually says, voice thick and desperately trying to hide it. Bucky is halfway through his Lucky Strike “We should get home.”
Home is a one-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a tenement in Brooklyn. It’s boiling in the summer and so cold in the winter that Steve always thinks he is going to end up losing a finger. It’s the same one that the two of them lived in before Bucky shipped out, the same one Steve has lived in since his Ma died in ‘38 and his landlord kicked him out because he couldn’t afford the rent on his own. It’s the same one that he and Bucky found together when they were both just seventeen, and it’s so shitty that even poor people sort of frown at it because it’s an old-law tenement with that odd, rail-way car style with windows separating the kitchen and living room to keep air moving through. There’s only one washroom on the entire floor and it’s the size of a closet.
Home is cold. Home is small. Home is a bathtub in the dining room and a bed piled with quilts and a laundry line hanging in the window. Somehow even that felt too big for Steve to live in with Bucky gone.
Steve knows it hasn’t changed much in the last two years. He hadn’t bought any new furniture except for a third kitchen chair in the off-chance that they will one day have a guest over. There are a few new drawings tacked up to the wall that Steve catches Bucky eyeing fondly. Bucky’s violin and music stand are still pushed into the corner near the window that faces the street, and there is a stack of pulp novels and comic books beside the bed that Steve doesn't touch but Bucky adores.
Steve watches the way Bucky’s throat tightens when he steps inside, the way his eyes widen and he sort of looks like he wants to cry. The green wallpaper is peeling slightly, but Steve had made an effort to try to patch it up and to put some food in the cabinets so Bucky wouldn’t go to sleep on an empty stomach.
“It hasn’t changed.” Bucky says slowly when Steve closes the door behind them, thankful that all the neighbors are at work so they won’t start asking questions about Bucky and the war and what happened to his arm. Not even Steve knows exactly what happened to his arm, but he sure as hell isn’t going to ask about it until Bucky is willing to tell him on his own.
Bucky runs a hand over the wood of the table. There’s a half-sketched landscape of a street, and underneath it is a mostly-colored advertisement for jams and jellies that Steve’s been working on. Bucky makes some sort of half-choked noise in the back of his throat, and Steve turns around to look at him. He has a hand pressed to his forehead as though trying to rub away a headache, his eyes strained shut, and all Steve can think about is that his homecoming wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be hugs and catching up, was supposed to be them trading stories from the war.
Whatever it was supposed to be, it wasn't this.
“Bucky.” Steve says slowly, his name catching in his throat.
Bucky collapses onto a chair. It’s the same one he always sat at, the one that didn’t get quite as much light from the window in the mornings so that Steve could sit in the one that did and draw before he left for work. It was the chair closest to the door so that Bucky could leave quickly after breakfast and collapse back into it when he got home from working at the docks. He holds his head in his hand while Steve is left standing by the stove with a box of tea in his hands and no idea what he is supposed to do.
“I didn’t tell my parents that I was coming home.” He admits. He isn’t looking at Steve.
Bucky is quiet, waiting for Steve to say something. There isn’t anything to say.
“I didn’t tell them I was coming home.” He repeats, voice tight. Steve slowly turns around to fill a pot with water that he puts on the old gas stove. It heats up the whole apartment so they do their best to avoid using it in the summer. “They still think I’m in Austria.”
Steve swallows the lump in his throat as he digests this information; turns it over in his head. “Why?”
Bucky shrugs. “I don’t know how to tell them about everything. They’ll want to know all of it.” He rubs his face and his gaze fixes itself on the only window they have, the one that is through the kitchen and the thin parlor, into the bedroom that looks out at the street and the laundry lines and the crisscrossing fire escapes. “I know you want to know, but Steve, you ain’t trying to pry it out of me. They don’t know how to do shit like that. They’ll start asking about my arm, about how many Nazis I killed, what sort of things I saw. I can’t do that. I don’t know how to see them again, I barely know how to see you, and you’re just the same as you were two years ago and, somehow, it’s worse than if you were all different and living in a new apartment.”
Steve wishes his Ma was here. She would know what to say, would offer up some true and tested Irish wisdom that Bucky would actually listen to. Steve has spent his life learning how to understand Bucky Barnes, but it’s been two years and there’s a war between them now and it’s left him with nothing to say.
He opens and closes his mouth. He looks away from Bucky’s hunched shoulder to the tea in his hands. He exhales.
“You don’t gotta go see ‘em right away.” Steve assures once he can speak around the lump in his throat. He keeps an eye on the pot of water and Bucky. “You can stay right here, get your legs under you again. You don’t even gotta go to work right away. I’ve been making ends meet on my own the past two years, we’ll be alright for a few weeks.”
“I ain’t gonna live off your work, Steve.”
“I don’t mind.” Steve shrugs, turning back to the pot of water. He breathes in the steam to clear up his lungs and moves the pot off the stove. “I’m just real glad you’re home.”
“Me too.” Bucky says, and when Steve looks over his shoulder he sees him staring at the drawings on the table again. His grey eyes are clouded over and distant, and something in Steve’s chest shatters.
Steve squares his shoulders. He pours the water over the teabags. He hopes it’s enough.
He adds a bit of milk to Bucky’s and leaves his own plain. He sits down across from him and slides the mug across the table. Bucky looks at the mug, then, at him, then back to the mug.
“Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
It’s easy. Things have always been easy with Bucky. Steve can ignore the tension, the unspoken words that clog in both their throats, and the way Bucky’s eyes never really focus on anything, as though he’s far away and thinking about things that have long past. Steve says nothing, just watches Bucky slowly sip at his tea while Steve starts finishing the jam advertisement. He’s just gotta get the colors right, gotta get them vibrant enough that it’ll stand out on the street, but not so bright that people will turn their nose up at it.
Bucky stands up. He opens the window and climbs out onto the fire escape. He goes to light a cigarette, and Steve watches as he holds the cigarette between his knees and holds the lighter up to the smoke. Steve thinks he is about to burn his knee, but the yell of pain never comes, and eventually, Bucky gets the cigarette lit and the smoke between his lips and the lighter back in his pocket.
Steve doesn't remember him smoking this much. He always made a point to do it on a day that Steve’s lungs were feeling good, and even then he always went out on the fire escape and made sure the wind was blowing away from the apartment. The gesture is so gentle that Steve has to set aside his paints for a moment and remind himself to breathe.
Bucky comes back in. He changes out of his uniform and Steve keeps his eyes on the painting he’s working on in spite of how much he wants to look over.
Bucky comes back to sit across from him. He’s wearing an old button-down that smells like dust, and a worn-out pair of slacks. He rolls up his sleeves. He keeps the window open, and the silence is so suffocating that Steve thinks it might just drive him insane.
It didn’t used to be like this. It used to be that Steve would get home from work earlier than Bucky did because Mrs. Keane didn’t like to keep the shop open late. Steve would come home early and try to make something for dinner from the scraps in their cabinet, and he would attempt to work on his commissions at the same time. Bucky would come home from the docks well past sunset, smelling of sweat and the sea, and he would talk and talk about everything and nothing while the neighbors upstairs played something on the radio a bit too loud. On a good night Bucky might even get out his violin, if it wasn’t too late.
Now there’s none of that, only horrible, stilted silence as Bucky drains the last of his tea and looks around the apartment like he can’t believe he’s really there.
Steve fills in the apricot jam with a soft yellow paint. In the painting, the sun shines through the glass like they are set out on a windowsill in the late afternoon. He’s oddly proud of it.
“I don’t know how to go about being a civilian.” Bucky admits after a while. Steve’s jaw tightens. “I don’t know how to do shit that isn’t holding a gun and yelling and trying to shave when the NCOs get on me about it. I can’t go back to working at the docks with my arm being what it is. I can’t even talk to my family, Steve.”
Steve looks up from the painting as Bucky talks, a paintbrush heavy with yellow paint between his fingers. His heart crumples in his chest, and he’s missed him so, so goddamn much that he doesn’t really know what to say. He’s just glad Bucky is home at all, especially after he failed to write to Steve for weeks after the amputation. Imprudently, It didn’t really occur to Steve that Bucky would come back different—altered.
He should have known better. Of course a war would change a man. It was selfish to think otherwise.
Steve sets down the paintbrush. “You don’t have to worry about all that right now.” He isn’t sure if this is the right thing to say, but Bucky is looking at him like it might be so he keeps going. “You’ve got all the time in the world. You can start slow. Is there anything you’ve been wanting to do these past two years?”
“I think I wanna do just about everything.” Bucky laughs, and it is dry and hollow and he shakes his head as he says it. “I want a hot dog, the fifteen cent one from Coney Island. I want to go to the Met and listen to you talk about it for hours. I want to see a Dodgers game again. I want to sleep somewhere that’s safe where I won’t have to worry about the goddamn Germans breathing down my neck. I want dry socks. Do you know this is the first time in two years that I haven’t worn a uniform? I don’t even know what I look like without it on.”
It’s a lot of wants. Steve wants to give him all of them.
“Well,” Bucky looks up at him when he speaks and Steve isn’t really sure what to do with all his attention. Two years of missing him and he finally has him back and he doesn't know how to act. “I thought you looked very nice in your uniform.”
Bucky blinks at him. Steve thinks he said the wrong thing, and he’s already opening his jaw to explain himself when Bucky interrupts him, “I fucking missed you, you punk.”
Steve meant it. Bucky did look nice in his uniform. He looks even better sitting at their kitchen table. Steve missed him too.
Later that night Steve asks him if he wants to go dancing. Steve doesn't really want to go dancing, he hasn't since Bucky left, but he knows how much he loves it, so he offers. Bucky says he doesn't have the energy, not after the week at sea and the years at war. The Bucky he knew before the war would call that a perfect time to go dancing.
War changes people.
Instead of dancing they go out looking for a hotdog. Neither of them want to go all the way to Coney Island for a hotdog, and Steve is pretty sure they can’t afford the train fare anyways. Steve pulls out a couple quarters from the savings jar stashed beneath the floorboards, the one they only add to when someone in their lives was feeling generous or the price of food had dropped a bit. They had opened it once a few years ago, the winter after his Ma died, when Steve got real sick. It freaked Bucky out and not having Sarah there to help made it worse. He had smashed open the jar and admitted Steve to a hospital. Steve had been too delirious to say anything about it.
He thinks that getting Bucky a Coke is a good enough cause to open the jar.
That night New York is more alive than Steve had seen it in two years, with the exception of V-E Day. Maybe it is the muggy heat of summer, or the fresh influx of returning servicemen, or the good news that’s coming from the Pacific, or maybe, it’s just Steve because he’s finally got Bucky beside him again so everything seems a little better.
Bucky walks with his one hand shoved into his pocket, his shirt tucked into his slacks. He’s all long legs and broad shoulders, and the place where his sleeve is pinned up to his shoulder gets more than a few glances as they walk up the street. Bucky still doesn't walk the way Steve is used to, but he seems a bit more lively now that the sun has set. He looks at everything like he’ll never see it again, and Steve supposes that for a long, long time it had probably seemed that way.
The thought makes him want to vomit.
Steve lets Bucky choose where they’re going, and he chooses the cheapest hotdog stand in all of Brooklyn. It’s peddled by this old Polish man Bucky knows. Steve never bothered to ask when the two got so close. He always peddles down the same four or five blocks, so it isn’t real hard to find him. Steve doesn't know how he does it all day at his age, but he is smiling when he spots the two of them coming up the street. He gets off the bike and claps Bucky on the shoulder.
“I thought the Germans got you.” Mr. Wolanski says, looking at Bucky like he is a ghost.
“Nah, they only got off with the arm.” Bucky jokes, and Steve’s breath catches in his throat at the jab, but then Mr. Wolanski laughs with that big, hearty laugh that fills up the room and makes other people want to laugh along with him, and soon all three of them are laughing at something that really isn’t all that funny.
It feels good to laugh. It feels normal, as though if Steve were to concentrate hard enough he could almost imagine it’s 1941 and nothing is wrong.
Then Mr. Wolanski turns to Steve and smiles at him too, and he pats Steve on the back hard enough that it sends him into a coughing fit that just makes Mr. Wolanksi start laughing again.
“I was worried you had gone, too! I know this winter was not good.”
Bucky glares at him. Steve pretends he doesn't notice.
“I got by okay.” Steve says once his coughing fit fades and he can breathe.
“That’s good.” Mr. Wolanski nods. “I worry about you. You come to me if you need anything.”
Steve smiles. Sometimes he forgets how much the people around here love him. “We will.”
Mr. Wolanski makes four hotdogs and tries to sell them for the price of two. Steve starts trying to heckle the price back up because he has an extra quarter in his pocket and he knows the man needs it just as much as they do, if not more. Eventually they compromise on the standard price for four hotdogs if Mr. Wolanski throws in two free Cokes.
“Do you want to go back to the apartment?” Steve asks Bucky when they leave, trying to ignore the way Mr. Wolanski is watching them.
Bucky shrugs. “Nah, we’ll just go sit on the curb or something.”
Steve wrinkles his nose. “We aren’t heathens.”
“Sure we are.”
They sit on a curb.
It’s in front of some new-law tenement, one that’s a lot nicer than their own. Bucky figures that the most they’ll have to worry about then is some angry landlord, but nobody says anything as they sit down and open the Coke bottles using Bucky’s bottle opener.
They’re both quiet as they eat, the two of them practically half-starved. Bucky eats the hotdogs like he’s never had one in his life, hands messy with sauerkraut and mustard. Steve knows he can’t look much better. It reminds him of easier times, of late nights as a kid spent exploring the city when his Ma had a late shift at the hospital and Bucky’s parents thought he was just staying over at Steve’s for the night. They used to find Mr. Wolanski all the time back then because it was the only food they could afford to eat that wasn’t straight from their cabinet.
A few cars rush past, but it's a quiet street. It is mostly tenements and apartment buildings, and the nearest bar is another block down the street. The night is muggy and thick with summer, the heat sticking to everything. Steve feels like butter on warm toast, and he starts to think that everything is going to be okay again. The war isn’t over, but, for them, it is. Bucky is home, Steve isn’t sick with worry and spending half his time at church praying for Bucky’s safe return, and it all feels so good that Steve thinks he could cry from it.
“I wanted to be home by your birthday.” Bucky says when the hotdogs are long gone and they’re both nursing their Cokes. Steve holds the drink between his hands because it's cold where everything else is too hot.
“I’m just glad you got here.” He’s been too honest today, too upfront. He isn’t hiding everything behind a quip the way he should. The war has strung him out and watered him down like paint, and it's the most he can do to keep himself from telling Bucky right then and there that he loves him.
“Shit, me too.” Bucky laughs. “But I really did want to be back by your birthday when the whole city lights up all those fireworks just for you.”
Steve snorts and shakes his head. Maybe that thousand-yard stare is just Bucky being tired and everything is going to be okay. They’ve already gotten through the war. “Those aren’t for me.”
“Sure they are.”
Bucky has said that every year since he first met Steve and found out that his birthday was July fourth. Steve still laughs at it every year.
“I haven’t had food that good in two years.” Bucky admits quietly. A group of girls passes behind them on the sidewalk and Steve frowns when Bucky doesn't even look over at them. “It was all rations and dehydrated shit, maybe soup if we were real lucky. Nothing ever this good. I missed it.” He takes a sip from the Coke and sighs. “I missed New York.”
Steve nods, looking down between his bent knees at the street below. The carbonation of the Coke burns his tongue. His shirt sticks to his back and he can’t look away from Bucky for long, keeps having to remind himself that he’s really there.
“I’m sure New York was glad not to have Bucky Barnes roughing it up.”
“Nah, New York missed me too. Europe couldn’t keep up with me.” He smiles at Steve, and Steve pushes at his shoulder and shakes his head.
“Europe wanted you gone.”
“Probably.” Bucky agrees and drinks his Coke. “I wish this was beer.”
“You have money.” Steve nods his head towards where he knows there’s a liquor store nearby. “You’ve got feet, you can go get a beer.”
Bucky groans. “I hate walking in this heat.”
“Even for a cold beer?”
That gets Bucky to hesitate, and Steve can see the way he’s thinking it over, rolling around the thought like a stone in a river. Steve tries to keep from smiling when Bucky sighs and admits defeat. “When I was in Austria they had this shit from Hitler’s personal wine collection.”
Steve’s eyes widen. “Seriously?”
Bucky nods. He’s looking out across the street. Steve is looking at him. “Seriously. We weren’t the guys who liberated it, it was some paratrooper unit, but somehow a bottle found its way to us. My pal Dum Dum somehow gleaned a bottle from the officers and passed it around.”
“Huh.” Steve says, and does his best to ignore the brief spark of jealousy that sits in his gut. He’s gotten over the 4F. He’s learned to live with it, but he hated sitting at home and doing nothing but drawing propaganda posters while there were men laying down their lives. “Was it good wine?”
“Shit.” Bucky laughs, dry and hollow. “It was the best damn wine I’ve ever had.”