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Bucky feels absolutely and utterly done half an hour in “The Unholy Masquerade”.
“What the fuck is this,” he mutters to Steve, crouching near the bar stand. “Why are we here? What fucking purpose is this thing supposed to serve?”
The last question refers to the bar stand, which is a decoration only. They’re vampires — everyone in this building is. They can’t drink alcohol.
Bucky deeply regrets it at the current moment.
“It’s a social thing. We came to speak to people. Make friends,” Steve replies with his newfound cheerfulness.
Bucky sends him a glare. He misses the human version of Steve, in moments such as this, the version that was full of rage and anger at everything. This happy face is just unnatural.
“Come on, Buck,” Steve nudges him. “Don’t be such a spoilsport.”
“I regret I turned you.”
“Nah, you’re not.”
He’s not. Steve’s good people, and Steve definitely didn’t deserve to die out of his various ailments; Bucky, no matter how the responsibility of turning haunts him sometimes, never regrets it. More so, he shudders to think of his life — death? being? whatever the vampire-accurate word is — before meeting him.
Still; just because he’s aware of how horrible it can be on his own, it doesn’t mean he’s eager to play nice with this freak show.
He gets enough respect to survive it in peace, at least.
It’s common in vampires, and the younger they are, the more prominent the pattern is, to respect the elder. Age means knowledge, and age means power. Also: age means the vampire could have gone batshit crazy in all those years. All of those lead to caution, the caution that’s obvious if you spend enough time watching the vampire society in their natural habitat. The older the vampire looks, the wider they’re given a berth by the others.
It’s a strange crowd. Groups of muttering gossiping youngsters, noticeable by their modern clothes, and lone figures, looking as if they came from a history book’s pages, lost, slow, confused. They’re told to be powerful; Bucky thinks them to be sad, mostly. Distanced too much from a life to be called living.
He knows how it feels, even though he’s barely a hundred. His displacement from time was more of an artificial kind.
That, and his grumpy aura, and the inability of the kids to correctly date a piece of clothing makes the majority of the crowd think Bucky is older than he actually is. They ignore him, and look at Steve with something akin to awe.
It’s all bullshit, all these social things. But Steve was excited, so Bucky let the kid drag him to it.
However, he reserved the right to complain all the time.
And so he does, testing Steve’s newfound vampiric patience, until a new voice stops him in his tracks.
“Oh, hey there, Vlad. How’s it going? You’re looking wonderfully dead today. Pauli! Marvelous spots of blood. Your fashion sense is crazy as always. What is this, ye olden Hot Topic?”
Bucky can’t see the newcomer, but his rich baritone is loud enough to hear from the other end of the hall. He can't help but chuckle at the man’s antics, and his voice wakes up some hidden memory in Bucky, its clear and beautiful sound making his non-existent soul long for something unknown. It’s a breath of fresh air, for every damn undead can’t bring themselves to laugh freely, and no one would taunt their young age so, no one would decide not to hide it. Just turned ones may do so, but the new guy’s voice is too confident to be that, and he knows the majority of the old guard — Vlad, Viago, others— as his continuing comments suggest.
Bucky wants to see him. Steve notices it, nudges him, and mouths go make a friend, the punk. So Bucky stands straight and looks until he sees him from the back, at first, and, to his delight, the man is in jeans and the t-shirt, easily mistaken for a human from afar. To Bucky’s other delight, his jeans are deliciously tight.
He listens, concentrating on the guy’s voice.
“So, have you seen that quantum computer research?” the guy asks a group with mismatched clothes and cold faces. “Humans are insane, I’m telling you. This could be—”
The rest of it is swallowed by a particularly chatty young girl who got in front of Bucky. No matter: Bucky’s non-beating heart pangs, for he easily can predict the reaction to that. Vampires don’t like to think of humans as anything but blood bags; vampires don’t like to talk about the progress of the human world because of how they struggle with technology. It’s hopeless to ask questions like those, and the unhidden cheer in the guy’s voice stings, for Bucky can easily imagine it seeping away until fully gone.
His mother used to tell him he’s got too much of a bleeding heart, bringing every hurt animal to the house, no matter how they couldn’t feed another mouth.
Bucky frowns, and wants to go on, intervene, get this strange, beautiful man to himself, but then the man turns, and Bucky sees his face.
“Steve,” he yanks his friend’s sleeve, strangled. “It’s him. It’s my angel.”
Steve goggles.
The angel may be a stupidly sappy name, but Bucky doesn’t care, for that's what the vampire who turned him was to him. His beautiful savior. He barely remembers it: half because of the torture he went through when the Nazis caught him, a fresh vampire, and made him their playing toy, half because he never saw his angel in a sober mind.
They met two times. For the first one, Bucky was drunk and as happy as he could be, on leave, clean and not hurting for the first time in months. That night his life changed; that night he met his angel. A beautiful man, loud and laughing, as if he came from another world, the world without the war, kissed him in a dark alley, like he was a dame, like they were allowed to, like they were in love; Bucky can’t forget that kiss, not even seven decades since, never will. In their second meeting, Bucky was bleeding out, terrified, half-dead already, clutching his body with bloodied fingers, and crying, crying for his meaningless death, for there was nobody else to cry for it, nobody left. Then his angel came and held him; then his angel made him alive, again.
Now is the third time Bucky sees his face, can watch it, catalog every laugh line, notices every small part: a little frown behind the eyebrows, a strangely tired look of his eyes, a wide smile that Bucky aches to fix to one more sincere.
“Buck,” Steve’s voice comes, and Bucky returns back to reality, to Steve beside him, Steve’s hand that he grips too hard. “He’s too young.”
Bucky doesn’t understand at first; doesn’t want to understand. When he does, his heart shutters.
“I’m sorry,” Steve whispers and holds his shoulder in a comforting grip.
He’s too young, so brash and young, talking about the human world, technology, everything that vampires can’t follow truly. It’s just a similarity. Maybe they’re not as alike; Bucky’s memory of his angel is hazy at best.
Meeting him, this young man, this unknown person, would only hurt. But, of course, he’s still in trouble — still trying to make small talk about the midnight programming meetup he went to, of all things — and the frown on his face is bigger with every dismissive answer. He doesn’t deserve to be left alone, Bucky thinks, even if he’s not my angel. He doesn’t deserve this, a total lack of a friendly face.
So, shrugging Steve off, Bucky braces himself and goes.
“Evening,” he says, inserting himself in the group, not looking at his angel’s doppelgänger, but feeling his presence still, his aborted movement of surprise at the interruption. “What’s this about fancy human tech?”
The others leave, glad, probably, that Bucky is here to set them free of conversation they don’t want to have, but Bucky doesn’t care, for the only thing he sees is the face of a man beside him.
He’s remarkably familiar. Warm brown eyes with long lashes — Bucky remembers how he told his angel, giggling from being drunk and free for a night, your lashes are so long they could hold a match on them — his fancy beard, even though the pattern is different, the way the expressions replace each other on his face, fast and showing the thought behind. Bucky aches, seeing it, and yet some part of him is happy, is awed.
“Hi,” the man says, stands still for a second, and then grins widely. Genuine.
Then he goes on a tangent about the new operating systems for phones — Bucky had no idea phones had any kind of systems — and while Bucky planned to fake interest to make him feel better, a few sentences in he’s invested. His companion is a perfect storyteller, full of love for what he’s talking about. It’s mesmerizing.
Until, of course, the phrase, “and they have those accessibility features build-in, for users with disabilities, holy shit, Bucky, it’s so—”
Bucky freezes and stops him with a lifted hand.
“You know my name.”
It’s a statement, calm and without emotion; only, as Bucky’s been told, his without emotion looks menacing to most people. He’s on edge, that’s true; some of that may even translate. But there’s no reason the man in front of him knows his name — nobody knows his name except Steve, because Bucky’s an unsocial gremlin, and all Steve’s acquaintances end up too soon with broken bones, the hot-headed punk is hard to make friends with: Bucky’s name shouldn’t have come up.
The only person who could know is—
“Right. Yes,” the man pales, now looking sad, or tired, or guilty, or something, and Bucky needs to fix it, to smooth the frown between his eyebrows. “Can we— not here?”
Bucky nods and agrees to be led away through the small door to an empty room.
“I’m sorry,” is the first thing he hears after the door’s closed, and why is it so sad, why can’t he fix it, “I shouldn’t— you don’t remember, but we’ve met before. I only thought to— we could talk, just a little, before you knew, and I’m, I’m sorry, I never wanted to leave you alone, but when I came back you were gone, and I— I didn’t know where you were, until today, fuck, I don’t make any sense—”
“Tony?” Bucky breathes, heart racing.
Tony jerks his head up, their eyes meeting, stopping his rambling.
“Yes?”
“Holy fuck, it is you,” Bucky laughs, and hugs him, and buries his face into his hair. “I thought that first, but then, you know. How the fuck do you look so young?”
“I look okay,” Tony says, his voice a mix of confusion and indignity. “You’re not mad?”
“Why would I be mad?”
Tony pulls away and looks in Bucky’s eyes, serious.
“I left you. I turned you and left you.”
Bucky traces his cheekbone with a thumb.
“You were busy. It was the war. Not your fault I got captured like a moron.”
“You were hurt. Were you—?”
“I’m good now. I’ll tell you someday,” today isn’t the day for stories of pain.
Today’s the day of happy returns.
Tony shuffles closer, his movement unsure, and Bucky holds him tighter, then kisses his forehead until Tony rolls his eyes at him and snickers, all the guilt forgotten.
They stand like this for a long time, their quiet conversation flowing.
“I can’t believe I found you here, out of all places. Geeking over the humans.”
“Humans are great, you heathen. What is the point of eternal life if you can’t enjoy its gifts? The progress, the inventions. It’s the future. We shall embrace it, not resist it, like those assholes from the hall. But points to you for knowing the word geeking, darling. Very modern of you.”
Bucky bites his ear in retaliation. Lightly. That only rewards him with giggling.
“But I don’t usually go to these shebangs, no. Pepper makes me sometimes, but it’s super boring. Not today, of course,” that last sentence he adds in the softer, more tender tone.
“Pepper?”
“Oh, yeah, one of my closest friends. I’ll introduce you sometime. You’ve probably heard of her, you know, Queen Virginia?”
These last two words Tony says mockingly as if the idea of titles seems laughable to him, but Bucky stills.
Even he, living under a rock, knows that name.
“Tony, holy shit. Of course, I know who she is. You’re friends with her? That’s insane.”
“Is it?”
“I mean, there are rumors she’s called queen because she was Queen Guinevere! As in the fucking King Arthur’s loving wife.”
Tony’s face does a series of interesting gymnastics.
“Uh, it was a political marriage, mostly,” he mutters. “She was in love with Happy — it’s Lance's current name — and I wasn’t jealous or anything, really.”
There’s a beat of silence.
“Right,” Bucky says faintly.
“Is it too much? Of course it is, I’m—”
“Don’t say you’re sorry,” Bucky interrupts. “It’s not. Just let me— let me get used to it. It’s been a long day, I’ve got my long-lost love returned to me, I need some time to grow accustomed to all of it.”
“Long-lost love?”
Bucky stops, self-conscious.
“Yes. Is that too much?”
“No,” Tony says softly.
“Then are we good?”
“Yes, yes, we are.”
Bucky buries his face again in Tony’s shoulder when Tony holds him closer.
“Alright, then. Tell me more about your nerd things,” Bucky asks.
They both settle into the conversation. It’s going to be a journey, Bucky thinks, a long journey to learn each other, learn to talk, to see, to accept every part of their long lives, every secret, every painful memory. They have a lot of them, it seems, both of them.
He wants to take this journey, Bucky thinks with absolute clarity and holds Tony closer. It’s worth it.