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Bucky liked books. He liked books a lot, actually.
Such a simple, innocuous statement but that didn’t make it any less true. Or any less significant, for that matter.
It was a pleasant discovery when not much else was. And it was funny, maybe just a little bit, how many different things books could be. Books were learning as much as they were escaping. They were memories and secret worlds.
Books were Bucky’s anchor to this new reality. Tangible proof that he was on the other side of hell, that he wasn’t still fully immersed among the worst of men.
They were his silent companions on the too many nights when sleep was unreachable and his mind particularly unkind. They kept him company when, otherwise, only silence and his mind would be there to do so.
They were choices, however small, and one he could make for himself over and over again. Each time he faced the well-stocked shelves of whichever shop or library he wandered into, it was a choice he could make, not out of requirement or expectation, not to fulfill an order, but based solely on his own wants.
That wasn’t nothing.
There was some part, some corner of his mind that suggested books and his appreciation for them wasn’t exactly a new thing, even if it mostly felt like it.
It turned out that books could be a bridge of a different sort as well, one that he liked just as much. Possibly more, even.
There was a steady, though certainly far from heavy, weight against his side. The sound of pencil etching across paper, both newly and somehow distantly familiar, along with the words Bucky read aloud.
It was his own fault, though the result meant that he’d happily take the blame. He’d perhaps gotten a little too excited, a little too enthusiastic, about a particularly well-written story. Nudging a lean thigh on the opposite end of the couch with his toes, and rereading the descriptive paragraph aloud. It was unusual enough, for him at least, that he’d felt a brief rush of embarrassment at the display he undoubtedly made.
But Steve (Bucky thought he just might like Steve more than he liked books), hadn’t teased him, hadn’t said anything that could even be misconstrued as judgment. He smiled over the top of his own book, listening with a focus that neared on unnerving. He’d marked his page and set his book aside before twisting around the corner of the couch until he found what he was looking for. Another book of a different sort.
“Read that again?” he requested, tugging a pencil free of the book’s spiral binding.
And so Bucky did and he continued to read even the parts he hadn’t already gotten to.
When he’d reached the end of the chapter, a small foot returned the favor, nudging Bucky’s leg. Steve flipped the spiraled book–a sketchbook Bucky belatedly recognized–around, sharing the image. Mind locked in the fantasy world as it was, it took Bucky a moment to register what he was seeing, what he was being shown.
Bucky knew Steve had some level of artistic ability. Steve mentioned it in passing a handful of times throughout the tentative early days of their acquaintance-turned-something more (something-more that Bucky was only just finding the confidence to start putting a name to). Though it was only ever that, a passing mention and one that lacked the sure confidence that Bucky had, very quickly, recognized as an identifying trait.
The wary caution urged him away from asking.
Even in that moment, passing the sketchbook across the length of the couch, Bucky could spot the flush rising over Steve’s face, the discomfort in the way he shifted in his seat, and the building defensiveness in the inward curling of his shoulders.
Bucky didn’t think he had any reason to be concerned, delight was the only thing Bucky could find to feel at the scene from his book etched across the page.
It wasn’t always, it wasn’t every time. There were still a fair few days that Bucky found himself alone on the couch, tucked into a book. There were still just as many that found them on opposite ends of the couch, stacked feet the only contact between them. But sometimes, and slowly growing more common, they found themselves, leaning together, Bucky reading aloud whatever book had caught his attention while Steve lost himself in drawing the scenes and images that Bucky read.
It was a sense of peace and comfort, and more telling was that he’d gotten to a place where he was allowing himself to enjoy it, to appreciate it, without immediately questioning whether he should, whether it was safe.
Though the development was still new, still something Bucky often questioned if he really ought to indulge in, he dipped his head, lowering his voice the way he’d learned was particularly effective. He read the lines in a quiet murmur feeling the shiver run through against him, just like he knew it would.
Steve elbowed him with the hand not holding his pencil though the motion was tempered by the way he leaned his head into Bucky’s shoulder when Bucky continued reading, undeterred by the half-hearted nudge.
