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It takes them a little over four months to find Bucky. Which is to say, they go around the world trailing behind Bucky, following the clues he deliberately leaves for them, and a little over four months into their trip Bucky decides that he's ready to stop hiding and finds them.
Bucky's a little weird, still. The four and something months of wandering around Europe, Asia, and parts of North Africa under nobody's mind control have done wonders for clearing his head, but he's still sorely lacking social skills and his emotional coping skills are nearly non-existent. To be honest, Steve and Sam have probably gone a little weird, too. They've spent an improbably long time tracking an amnesiac bionic assassin, and they haven't had to keep regular hours or hold down day jobs like functional adult humans in far too long. They decide it would be best if they all stick together while they acclimatize to acting like normal people.
The Avengers say they need Steve back. They had let him go on a very generous paid leave of absence, and now he has to come back, contribute to meetings, go on missions, and live in the Tower. Or else.
Which means Sam and Bucky have to go to New York too.
"Um, about that..." Sam says, trailing off into a never-ending pause.
He protests so rarely that Steve's eyes immediately zero in on him. "We don't have to go," he says right away. "The Avengers don't own me, and I'm sure New York isn't the only city that needs protecting."
"No, it's not like—we can go. We should go," Sam says, speech still uncharacteristically hesitant. "It's just that before we do, you should know I used to live in New York. Before DC. Before I enlisted, actually. So we might run into a few people I know if we stay there long enough."
"Well that doesn't sound so bad," Steve replies, but he's aiming a sideways look full of significance and implied meaning at Bucky.
As with many social cues these days, Bucky misses it entirely. "I'm not living in that building," he declares, even as he starts packing their bags for them. "It's creepy."
So they move to New York, and Steve moves into a floor at Avengers Tower while Sam moves into an apartment of his own nearby and Bucky moves onto Sam's couch. Sam had already bought a foldout futon because he foresaw that probability. Some days Steve wonders what he did in a past life to deserve someone like Sam.
For all that he's "moved into" Stark's flashy building, Steve spends more nights at Sam's than he does in his own place.
Steve and Bucky are sitting at Sam's dining table, silently munching on cereal, while Sam isn't even home. He's covering someone else's night shift at the veterans' office he's transferred to and Steve is acutely aware that they're all probably still a little weird because normal people don't just live in each other's pockets without at least talking about it first. But then the buzzer rings and Bucky leaps out of his chair with two guns in his hands, both cocked and ready, and Steve didn't see him draw them or even know he had them.
"It's just the doorbell," he says reassuringly, getting up.
Bucky narrows his eyes at him, then tilts his head and gestures for Steve to go answer it.
Steve opens Sam's door, walks down the stairs, and heads for the building's main door. Bucky hovers behind him soundlessly, guns still drawn.
When he opens it, there's a man who looks fairly harmless standing on the other side. He's handsome enough for Steve to notice it and smiling in a confused sort of way. "Sorry," he says, "I was looking for Sam Wilson? Maybe I hit the wrong buzzer."
"No, you got—" Steve belatedly remembers that they are all too weird for normal people to deal with and struggles to think of a plausible explanation. "This is his place. He's just out right now. I'm his neighbor. I heard the bell through the door and thought I'd see if I could take a message or something."
"Oh! Okay, well that's really nice of you. Can you tell him that Miguel dropped by? I heard he was back in town and I'd love to hear from him, maybe get together for a drink or something," the guy says, buying Steve's bullshit story hook line and sinker. "Here, just let me—" he scribbles his number onto the back of a receipt that he pulls out of his pocket and hands it to Steve. "Just give that to him and let him know he can call anytime."
Steve takes it and Miguel thanks him profusely before walking away.
Bucky's still on the stairs, putting his guns away and looking deeply skeptical.
"Well, Sam did say we might run into people he knows," Steve says.
Bucky's expression does not change.
When Sam gets back a bit past midnight, Bucky has gone to sleep in his bed while Steve sits on the futon watching a show he doesn't comprehend on mute. Sam peers into his room, shrugs, and closes the door most of the way, leaving a crack open.
Bucky doesn't sleep much these days. When the mood strikes him, both of them are too glad about it to care where he does it.
"House of Cards without sound, huh?" Sam says, dropping onto the couch beside Steve, knocking their knees together. "Bet you're totally understanding what's happening."
Instead of responding, Steve reaches into his pocket and pulls out the scrap of paper from earlier. "Some guy called Miguel came looking for you," he says, handing it over.
Sam's face darkens briefly. He rips up the receipt without looking at it and crumples all the little pieces together into a loose ball, tosses it into the wastebasket across the room and mutters something about a three point shot and the crowd going wild.
Steve wants to ask who Miguel is, but before he gets the chance to Sam says, "I'm beat, shove over," and lies down with his legs stretched into Steve's lap, then falls asleep in record time.
So. That's how that begins.
*
Bucky looks up from his hundred and seventh one-armed pushup as Sam walks in the door. "You're supposed to be out running with Steve," he observes.
"Took a slight detour," Sam says, heading for the kitchen. His clothes aren't even sweaty.
Bucky finishes up to a hundred and twenty before following him. "Where's Steve?"
"Still running. He was so far ahead of me by that point that it didn't matter anyway, he won't miss me," Sam says, pouring a glass of orange juice. "You want any?"
Bucky makes a face like he'd rather die.
Sam rolls his eyes and pours him a glass of water instead.
"What made you detour?" Bucky asks, accepting the water. What he really wants to ask is why he thinks anybody anytime wouldn't miss him, especially Steve, because he's severely mistaken, but that would derail the conversation.
"Saw someone on the street I didn't want to talk to, so I ran the other way," Sam says.
"How very me of you," Bucky says flatly.
Sam snorts, something of a surprised laugh coming out of him. "Well, maybe next time I'll take another page of your playbook and just stab the fucker," he says lightly. Too lightly. Carefully lightly.
Bucky waits patiently for him to say more about just who this person is and why he deserves a stabbing, but Sam doesn't take the bait and eventually they're both just standing by the fridge with empty glasses, looking at each other in silence. "Actually, I wouldn't stab them, I'd shoot them with a long range weapon," Bucky finally says. "That way I wouldn't even have to get close to them."
Sam smiles and touches his shoulder lightly before putting his glass in the sink and heading off to take a shower.
Steve bursts in through the door in a huff while Sam is still in the shower and demands if Bucky knows where Sam is.
Bucky rises from the fight stance he'd instinctively crouched into and says, "Shower."
Steve heaves a big sigh and scrubs his hand over his face. Bucky cocks his head.
"He just ran off," Steve explains, "I thought something was wrong. And then some guy started following me and I thought something was really wrong." He stops to watch Sam emerge from the bathroom in nothing but sweat pants, shirtless and damp. "YOU," he accuses, pointing. "You disappeared and some guy named Jason stalked me for three blocks to ask if I know your number."
"Did you give it to him?" Sam asks.
"No! Obviously! I finally ran full speed to get away from him and circled around wide so I could get back here without him seeing where you live!"
"Good thinking," Sam says simply, and wanders back into his room to put a shirt on.
"Are you not even going to tell me who this Jason is and why he wants to get in touch with you so badly?"
"I don't want to talk about it," Sam calls out from the bedroom.
Steve desperately, desperately wants to pry, but Bucky is watching him like a hawk and Steve feels like he ought to be responsible and model some appropriate social behavior for him, so he stuffs the maddening urge to interrogate Sam deep, deep back down into his chest.
Bucky is not impressed by his frankly heroic display of self-restraint.
*
Steve forgets a rather crucial document at Sam's place and Natasha decides she wants it immediately, so they drop by in the middle of the day.
The apartment seems to have turned into a florist's.
"These orchids are really beautiful," Natasha says. "And I didn't even know you could get birds-of-paradise in full bloom at this time of the year."
"Um," Steve says.
Sam is at work and Bucky is nowhere to be found.
"Hey Buck?" Steve calls out anyway. "Did you buy some flowers?"
'Some' is really an understatement. Every available surface has a bouquet or basket arrangement on it, some wrapped in paper or cellophane, some in vases, some with elaborate curled ribbons and paper butterflies and whirligigs and whatnot sticking out of them. Steve walks further into the place and finds a giant bouquet of balloons bobbing gently in the kitchen as well. Some say 'happy birthday' on them.
"I didn't buy them," Bucky replies after a while, voice floating out to them from a hiding place too well chosen for them to spot. "Why is Natalia here?"
"Just to get a file," she says, but she isn't paying much attention to the hiding Bucky because she's busy reading all of the little cards tucked into the bouquets. "These are all for Sam," she notes with amusement. "Is it his birthday?"
"I guess so."
It's rare for Natasha to be genuinely surprised, but she's doing a very good job of appearing like she is right now. "Seriously? You don't know his birthday?"
"The only time we talked about it, he just kept stressing how much he hates celebrating it. It seemed rude to then immediately ask when it is. I think he prefers people not making a fuss over it."
Natasha raises a single perfect eyebrow. "Looks like about half of New York made a fuss over it." She pauses to flick through more cards. "You know what's interesting? All of these are from men. There isn't a single female name amongst them."
"I have a sinking feeling you're going to tell me what that means."
"The last time I received this many flowers from men, I had accidentally given nine different gentlemen the impression that they were dating me."
"Right, 'accidentally,'" Steve says.
Bucky comes slinking out of the shadows in a way that doesn't make it any clearer where he's been hiding this whole time. "These men aren't dating Sam, though," he says flatly.
The ghost of a smirk flickers across Natasha's face so briefly that it might not have been there at all. "Oh, are you jealous?"
It's Steve who responds by blushing and muttering and scuffing his toe on the ground. Bucky looks back at her steadily and shrugs. "The therapist that you people force me to go to says I don't need to be able to articulate or even understand what my feelings are all the time."
"Does she also say you should be so smug about it?" Natasha asks, rolling her eyes.
"Yes. It's very healing."
She throws one of the birthday cards at him the way one throws a shuriken, as though intending to bury a sharp corner into his flesh. Bucky snatches it out of the air without even appearing to look and crushes it in his metal hand.
Steve makes the executive decision that things have gotten slightly too tense in the room and picks up the file they meant to come get all along. "Alright!" he says in an overly bright tone, waving the file at Natasha. "We've actually got a lot of work to do, so we should get back to it. Let's pick this conversation back up later, or never!"
Natasha turns to leave without further protest. Steve casts one last look at Bucky before he goes, but Bucky is too busy glaring at the crumpled card in his hand to meet his eyes.
*
One night, they hear Sam's keys jingle at the front door, but he doesn't come in for long minutes. Steve and Bucky have a vigorous silent conversation with their eyebrows that clearly expresses Bucky's staunch insistence on Steve checking out what's going on and Steve's strong opinion that they should mind their own business and respect Sam's space. Bucky's eyebrows defeat Steve's. He sighs and tiptoes down the stairs, distinctly feeling like he's intruding where he shouldn't.
That feeling is amplified when he sees that Sam is having a heated argument with someone on the front step.
Steve draws back, intending to go back upstairs and give Sam his privacy, but his supersoldier hearing lets him overhear snippets of the conversation and he can't help but linger. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, and all that.
The other guy is slightly taller than Sam, slightly wider, white, with dirty blond hair, and...well, frankly, he bears a passing resemblance to Steve. His tone flips from plaintive to aggressive rapidly, alternately wheedling and begging one moment and then yelling the next.
Sam rebuffs him, clearly saying "absolutely not" at one point, and when Sam's had enough he turns to reach for the building door. The guy catches him by the wrist and pulls his hand back, not letting him go inside. Sam sharply tells him to let go but the guy refuses to relinquish his grip.
Before Steve is even consciously aware of making any decision to act, he's shoving out of the door, loudly saying "Is there a problem here?" He shoulder checks the guy only veeeeery lightly. He'd like to take his head clean off, but he settles for drawing himself up to full height and glaring down menacingly.
The guy backs down, but before he leaves his eyes flit between Sam and Steve, back and forth quickly. "Seriously, Wilson?" he scoffs.
Steve growls like an actual angry beast of the night. Sam lays a hand on his chest to hold him back. The guy hightails it out of there.
Bucky is hovering by the open apartment door when they go up, not even bothering to pretend he wasn't eavesdropping.
"You know, I could've handled that myself just fine," Sam begins.
Steve growls again.
Something like intense interest registers on Bucky's face.
Sam mutters something that sounds like "y'all are animals" before he says, louder, "I was really hoping to avoid this conversation when we moved here." He rubs a hand over his close-shorn hair before continuing. "Long story short, I dated a lot of guys in this city and apparently my type is 'persistent.' So. Sorry about that."
Steve and Bucky exchange a few looks.
"No, we get it," Bucky says. "Letting you get away must be very traumatizing. It's enough to drive a person crazy."
"Oh, shut the fuck up." But there's no heat in Sam's voice. He flops onto the couch, currently converted into Bucky's bed, and turns on the late night news. All of his bodily signals indicate that it's fine for Steve and Bucky to join him and just not talk about anything else for the rest of the evening, so they do.
For a broken shell of a man warped by torture, with a sense of propriety fallen into disrepair from horrendous lack of use, Bucky sometimes knows exactly what to say.
*
A warm summer afternoon. Sam out running errands. Steve with the Avengers. Bucky sits on the balcony, hands itching for something wholesome to do, like clean his guns or wire a bomb. Instead he's knitting. His therapist has suggested it as a kind of occupational therapy to keep his hands—especially that metal one, that one's trouble—busy. Idle hands, devil's workshop, he's heard this saying before, way before, in his first life before.
A man passes by on the street below. Bucky has heard his footsteps coming from blocks away. He pauses directly beneath their balcony.
"Hey!" he yells up, tone friendly and casual. Bucky's fingers pause in their knitting.
Despite Bucky's failure to say 'hey' back, the guy continues, undeterred. "Hey, I heard that Sam Wilson's back in town. Is he—"
Movements too fast for the unaided human eye to track, Bucky drops down at him from the balcony like a bat out of hell. He lands directly in front of the man and snarls, "He isn't. Fuck off."
The stranger fucks off.
Later, when Sam is home and Steve has called to say he's coming over with pizza, Bucky does not mention the incident.
"How was your day?" Sam asks. "Do anything interesting?"
Bucky wordlessly holds up the single mitten he has knit.
*
It's nearing one in the morning and Sam is just way, way, way too old for this shit.
Sam and Bucky stumble out of the car that Stark was kind enough to order for them, supporting Steve between them. Steve thinks about insisting that he doesn’t actually need their support—not anymore, at least. His advanced healing factor has taken care of the injuries on the ride home. But judging from Sam's desperate grip on his arm, he's guessing they need to help hold him up more than he needs them to do it, and so he keeps his mouth shut.
Sam is thinking about how much it sucks to get an unexpected phone call from Maria Hill in the middle of the afternoon and then charge into a field of explosions far too late to prevent Captain America from getting the shit beaten out of him by giant robots, while also trying to guess how much damage Bucky's progress will suffer from going back into the field much too early. He is in no frame of mind to deal with DeAngelo sitting on his front stoop like they're twenty-fucking-one years old again.
They come to a halt and Bucky shifts into a subtler variation of a fight stance. Steve calls out "Good evening!" in an aggressively friendly tone. Sam runs his hand over his face and thinks about how nice it must be to be a bird. They can just fly away whenever they want. They don't have to talk to people, ever.
DeAngelo stands up slowly and says, "So the rumors are true."
"I'll meet you guys inside," Sam says to Bucky and Steve. They look positively mutinous, but if Sam has to do this then he absolutely cannot do it with an audience, especially not this audience. That would be the last straw. "Please," he says, voice raw.
They go inside but they don't look happy about it. Sam maneuvers so that DeAngelo has to sort of move closer to a lamppost in order to talk to him. Sam knows the sightlines from his apartment and this way, the post will block most of D's center mass should Bucky get it into his head to pull a sniper rifle.
"What do you want?"
"What, a guy's not allowed to see how his best friend's doing?"
"Don't—that's not—" It's what D told his grandma they were, all those times she almost caught them at it. But they were never just friends. They'd been all up in each other right from the start, too heated to stay together and too intense to stay apart. On and off, love and hate, for years until Sam finally figured out how to make a breakup stick.
"And now you got yourself shacked up with two real American heroes and you too good to say hi?"
They hadn't spoken in years, since before the last time Sam got deployed. He never called when he came back stateside. Too much had happened, and he was too different. How can you make a piece of your childhood understand your life as a man? He's been touched by war, by death, by corruption and injustice and too many epiphanies about the government that sends kids off to rot in the sand. The memory of hushed, sweaty nights in the secrecy of DeAngelo's basement feel like a dream someone else once had.
But then D reaches out and touches him, just his hand on Sam's shoulder but high enough for his fingers to brush the bare skin of Sam's neck. Something about his touch catapults him back to those nights, back to exactly how it felt to be that young and that unsure, that reckless and that in love. He's over D now, he has been for a long time, but D will always have that power over the part of him that he molded.
"I'm sorry I didn't call," Sam says, and DeAngelo's fingers sweep up higher, stroking his neck. Sam swallows, steels himself for what he has to say next. "But it's over. I didn't come back here for you. And I'm not going to call, ever again."
Instead of yelling, like Sam expected, DeAngelo laughs in his face. "You know, it fucking figures. Uppity Sammy Wilson, plowing his way through the whole damn borough, always thinking he's too good for anyone, and now he's with Captain America. Is that where it ends, or is that white boy not going to be enough for you? Who's next after that, the president?"
Sam remembers this too. They never pulled any punches when they fought. They knew each other's soft spots too intimately. He's about to go off and lay into him when the front door to his apartment building swings open so violently that the hinges break and it flaps uselessly against the side of the wall, glass cracked into spider-web patterns.
"That's enough," Steve says, and he's using his citizens-of-the-world-heed-my-command voice. His drop-and-give-me-twenty-soldier voice. His don't-fuck-with-me voice. "It's late and you're disturbing the neighbors. Time for you to go."
Most men fold instinctively at the sound of that voice, but to his credit DeAngelo stands his ground. DeAngelo doesn't know it, but he's probably about to get his head blown off with a hollowpoint.
Sam grabs him by the hand and leads him down the steps, pushes him gently in the direction of where he assumes he parked his car. He feels like he should say something other than goodbye. "I hope...I hope you find happiness." Which is completely lame and Sam's pretty sure he's going to be embarrassed by it someday, when he can look back on this moment without wanting to cry.
He walks back up the sidewalk to his building and knows from watching Steve's eyes that D is leaving.
They're definitely going to have to pay for a new door.
Steve's nice enough to let him go all the way up the stairs and into his apartment in silence, but once the door is closed behind him, the air is tense with expectation.
Sam doesn't know what to say other than an awkward apology. "Sorry about that. That you had to see that. I guess the word's out about where I live. I don't even know why they all talk to each other. That can't be normal, right? For all your exes to share recon about you?" He laughs to take the edge off, but it comes out sounding just this side of hysterical.
Bucky steps away from the window and says, "You know what? I think I feel like living in Avengers Tower after all."
"Shut up," Sam says. "You don't have to do that. This is my mess and I'll deal with it. It's not like they're super spies. They can't keep tracking me if I move a few times."
"No, you shut up," Steve says, which is not how Sam expects him to talk but he has had a pretty rough day, what with the near-death robot battle and then the tightness around his eyes when he puts a hand on the small of Sam's back and Sam finally stops shaking.
Bucky cocks his head slowly, the way an owl might. "It's okay," he says.
"No, it's not. It's my problem and it shouldn't—"
Bucky cradles his elbow in his hand, and he touches people so rarely with that metal hand that it makes Sam's impending rant screech to a halt. "It's okay," he repeats. "It's okay to think you're too good for anyone because you're right, you are. It's okay to think you deserve Captain America or even someone better, because you do."
"Hey!" Steve says behind Sam, and it's enough to finally ground Sam. He stops feeling like he's halfway back in time and starts feeling fully present again.
"Just what are you implying, someone better," Steve continues to grouse, hamming it up. "Do you mean you?"
"Obviously," Bucky replies, totally deadpan.
So Sam laughs, and they move into Avengers Tower, and they're all still a little bit too weird but at least now they live thirty-seven floors above the street where half of New York City can't just knock on their door to ask Sam to marry them and no one can see them being weird.