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"Alright, that's fucking it.”
“What’s ‘it’?” And Bucky has the gall to look innocent about it as he glances up from his reading: a magazine he’s only browsing so he can rib Steve for the Captain America gossip near the end, but he’s just sitting there, stretched out, sock-toed, wide-eyed. Not a care in the world, nothing out of the ordinary.
Steve’s caught between the anxious swoop in his stomach and the sheer indignation at the man’s fucking nerve.
“JARVIS,” Steve calls out, “would you mind playing back the good Sergeant’s response for our review?”
“Certainly, sir,” JARVIS replies dutifully, before Bucky’s voice comes from the ceiling, clear as day:
And well gosh darn, I thought those danged cyborg things were gonna be the end of us. Man alive, Stevie!
Bucky blinks at him. “And?”
“And?” Steve nearly sqwaks. “Man alive?” he quotes back at Bucky, incredulous. “Gosh darn?”
“I think we both heard what I said. And I think I know what I said to begin with, because, well hey, lookit there: I said it.”
Steve has to try really, really hard not to look like a fish as he gapes. He can’t tell if he succeeds, but he does make the effort.
In all likelihood, it’s wasted, but still. Effort: made.
“I guess,” Steve starts, trying to logic his way through the total anachronism that is absolutely everything Bucky’s said, post-battle. “I guess I’m missing the joke.”
“It’s not a joke,” Bucky shrugs, and looks back to the magazine.
Steve doesn’t bother to resist the urge to snatch it from Bucky’s hands.
“This ain’t the first time I’ve made comments after we fought the big bads off, Steve, I don’t see what’s got your panties in a twist—”
“Are you prepping for a mission?” Steve asks suddenly, eyes narrowing, because they have an agreement: no missions that the other doesn’t know about. If they can’t be there, it’s already bad enough—but no one’s left in the dark. Ever. “Are they sending you undercover? Some, like, hidely-ho, neighborino type thing?”
They’d Netflix’d the shit out of The Simpsons, so sue them. Bucky’d cackled, Steve’d marveled at the animation, the style choices, and yeah, laughed his fair share; but Bucky’d giggled his ass off.
And that’s the point.
Bucky sighs. “I still don’t—”
“Buck,” Steve cuts him off; “we finish a fight, you say God-fuckin-damn, that was a close one.. You say, Well shit, Rogers, try having to watch your own six for a hot fucking second and see if you’re not dying soon as we walk in the damn door..”
Bucky stares back at him, mostly expressionless, but there’s a spark in his eye. A recognition that this saintly kind of anachronistic vocabulary isn’t just in Steve’s head, that it really doesn’t fit with Bucky “My Mouth Should Have Tasted Permanently of Soap” Barnes, not then, and certainly not now.
Bucky’s quiet for a few long moment before he lets out a long breath, sits up straighter on the couch.
“You ain’t gonna let this one go, are you?”
Steve scoffs. “What do you think?”
Bucky ponders a minute—not on Steve’s response, because that’s as true as the blue in the sky and the color of the rain in Bucky’s eyes—but on his response, Steve figures, when it comes:
“You remember when I stopped getting cones when we went for ice cream? Got ice cream sodas, instead?”
That’s not the answer Steve’s expecting.
“I,” Steve starts, but then thinks back. Tries to find the memory: hazy. Fuzzy, but there. “You’d let me have the ice cream left in the glass.”
Bucky smiles, soft. “That I did.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You remember penny candy?”
“Remember you stickin’ your nose up at it, saying you were too sophisticated for it.” And Steve had held out against Bucky’s pronouncement for all of three weeks before they started jarring their change to save for better, and significantly decreasing their intake of sweets.
Now that Steve thinks on it, he might still be a little sore on that front.
Bucky nods, and then his mouth curls, just a little, before he asks: “You remember Geraldine Henry?”
Oh, god: golden hair and green eyes and the face Steve wanted to stare at and draw and touch—Geraldine was the first girl in their class to hit puberty. Everyone remembered Geraldine Henry.
Bucky snorts as he reads as much, plain as day, on Steve’s face.
“You were about this close to going steady with her,” Steve shoots back, tries for a sneer he can’t quite claim because it’s true, Bucky’d been sweet on her, but Gerri’d doe-eyed him right back, and they’d stepped out a time or two, and Steve had thought it could really be something, ‘cept suddenly she wasn’t ever mentioned, and then one night Geraldine threw her drink on Bucky at the dancehall, and when Steve’d asked what in the name of all that was good went wrong with that one, Bucky’d just shrugged and said You’re always talkin’ ‘bout the right partner, Rogers. She wasn’t it, is all.
And Steve had known it was only a half truth, and thinking back on it now, Steve knows that half the truth’s all he ever got.
“I was about that close, yeah,” Bucky agrees, and waits, like he thinks he’s dropping Steve hints that should be picked up, like there are pieces here that make a puzzle spell something out, but Steve’s still lost as hell.
Bucky sighs, eyes rolling, and tries again.
“Remember when I made you get a library card?”
“Because yours had too many overdue fines we couldn’t pay from all those pulps you just had to read twice, and the librarian threatened to send you to debtor’s prison soon as you started climbing the stairs up to the door?”
“Mrs. Nettle,” Bucky grins fondly. “She loved me, though. Deep down.”
“Sure she did.”
“Remember my ma’s rhubarb pie?”
“Is that a question?” Steve can feel his eyes bulge out his head a little, because damn, but Mrs. Barnes’ rhubarb pie.
“Used to fight over the last of it, d’ya remember?”
“You let me have it, said it was my Christmas gift. Or whatever holiday it was, whatever reason she made it.”
“But I always got you something else, too,” Bucky adds, a little dreamily. “Even when we had nothing. Made sure you had something.”
It’s a punch to the gut, it’s a knife in his lungs, it’s the sky falling down because that there, those words: they hit too close. They rob the moment of its subtle humor, they steal away the edge of the unknown in the banter they’re volleying and they make it a lance that slices up and knicks Steve’s heart where it beats.
Even when I had nothing, I had—
“You remember when all that happened?”
Steve’s attention blurs with how fast it tries to change tracks; with how much feeling’s still swimming at the seams.
“Life-wise, I mean,” Bucky adds, stretches out almost desperate, now, to reach the end of the couch with his toes. “Your memory’s a heck of a lot better than mine, obviously, so I figure you can put it all in order well enough, timestamp it and whatnot. But do you remember when they happened, what else was happening between?”
It takes Steve a second, to make sense of the task, before he even tries to do it.
“Geraldine stopped hanging off of you after Valentine’s,” Steve pulls out the memory. “Figured you forgot to find her a flower or somethin’.”
Bucky smiles, soft and sad. “‘Course you remember that.”
Steve frowns around the flush in his cheeks. “You know I was gone for you as soon as I knew how to want, Buck. So yeah, I remember every time the competition dropped out.”
“Competition?”
Steve blushes deeper. “Idiots, to give you up,” Steve murmurs. “But yeah. Competition.”
“Wasn’t ever that, Stevie,” Bucky’s voice is low, and Steve can feel Bucky gaze shift from the ceiling, now, and settle on him instead.
“Wasn’t ever gonna win it, either,” Steve confesses, the part of him that’s still young, and small, and drenched in all the things he’ll never be enough to reach.
“Funny, then, that you ended up here,” Bucky deadpans. “I ain’t enough of a prize to declare you the victor?”
There’s too much of an actual question beneath all the bluster and the smirk for Steve not to saunter over, not to lean down and kiss Bucky slow, sweet, upside-down so his chin brushes the tip of Bucky’s nose until the corners of Bucky’s lips turn up when they break apart, his eyes closed like he wants to savor just that moment, just that feeling and that taste.
“You’re not a prize,” Steve whispers against those lips. “You’re a miracle,” and Steve’s throat gets tight when he says it aloud, the things they don’t put in words that Steve’s suddenly compelled to say. “You’re a blessing, and if I never thought it possible before, I still can’t believe it now, sometimes.” He nips Bucky’s lips for good measure. “Have to pinch myself, y’know? Just to be sure.”
Bucky reaches up, then, and cups Steve’s cheek, keeps him close and just studies him for a long moment, those seachange eyes all soft after some storm.
“You were sick for the whole end of January,” Bucky finally breathes out, and he’s smaller after saying it, like the truth he speaks was taking up too much space inside his chest.
“By February, it was make-or-break,” and Steve remembers, vaguely—fever. Pneumonia, too, maybe, but with what had been his laundry list of illnesses, it’s hard to recall for certain. “They were afraid that if you did come back, if the fever did break, you wouldn’t be the same, you’d be, it would have…”
Bucky trails off, and Steve’s back protests where he’s still bent over, still held in Bucky’s hands, by Bucky’s gaze: Steve doesn’t move.
“You know what they say, about grief.”
Steve isn’t sure he knows, but he thinks he sees where they’re going.
“And you’re here, now, ain’t ya.” It’s not a question; just a statement of fact. Almost proud, really. The only achievement Bucky cares to own and hold. “Bargaining never failed me, in the end.”
“Buck—”
“Said I’d swear off those pretty gams, if you came back, if my Stevie came back to me, real and riled and whole. Just like I said I’d swear off my favorite food, if you pulled through that cold in ‘29,” Bucky tells him, rote like a shopping list, all the things he had and lost in the gamble. “Gave up my penny candy habit ‘cause your lungs cleared in the fall of ‘31. Never wasted money on another pulp magazine and dug out my old library card because you pulled through when they said your heart shoulda gave out days before, and I said no, no, because your heart was too big, too strong where it really mattered, and Father O’Brien always said you had to give up something for Lent that was important to you, if you wanted to show that you meant it, and I figured, I,” Bucky swallows, hard, and strokes a thumb up and down Steve’s jaw.
“The thing that really mattered was you,” Bucky damn well whimpers; “and so I bargained with what little I had, with what little else meant a thing outside’a you.”
Steve only notices he’s crying when a tear splashes down on Bucky’s chin. Neither of them move to wipe it away.
“Because what’s the point of the best rhubarb pie in the world, if you can’t share it with the one person who matters the most?” Bucky tries to smile, but it’s a wan thing, stretched to breaking because the echo of old hurt, old fear is a loud, hateful sound.
“Bucky,” Steve breathes, and Bucky doesn’t let him say another word, just pulls him down, whole body against Bucky’s long, stretched frame and Steve shifts to fit against him entirely, to slip against him and know with absolute certainty how much he’s meant to be just here, how true he’s meant to fit only in this space, only with this man, only curled around this one soul in the whole of creation, in all of space and time.
And it could have stopped there, because Steve doesn’t need the details, the particulars: Steve can read between the lines and kiss between the space between those lips and know in the very heart of his heart, where Bucky lives, that he’s never been, nor will he ever be worthy of the single-minded devotion that James Buchanan Barnes reserves for him, and him alone. Steve understands enough, and Bucky could have left it.
It says a whole hell of a lot, though—about where they are, how far they’ve come, all that’s changed around them and between them and inside them both; it says a lot that Bucky doesn’t leave it; that Bucky whispers to the corner of Steve’s mouth, chest heaving:
“I promised that I’d take every moment I was given just to hold you. To kiss you, tell you I love you,” Bucky kisses him then, too, long and deep. “To make sure you knew, and never doubted, that you were the sun in the sky and the only reason a man had for keeping at breathing was because you shone so bright.”
Steve huffs into Bucky’s skin, Bucky’s mouth; it’s too much. Bucky’s love has always been so much, and it’s a testament to that fact that even now, Steve can’t quite take it all in without staggering; marveling.
Breaking in the best of ways beneath its sheer force, its magnitude of soul.
“Said I wouldn't curse,” Bucky mouths at Steve’s chin, tantalizing. “But now we just been keepin’ that to Thursdays. Because we don't have a whole lot of action on Thursdays”
Steve’s brow furrows in askance; today is, in fact, a Thursday.
“Statistically,” Bucky clarifies; pulls back a bit, eyes sparkling, dancing as he smirks.
“Asked JARVIS to mock-up a chart before squaring out the issue,” Bucky informs him. “Also you're usually in those meetings you got. With Coulson. I do the yoga thing with Bruce. It's a good day for not swearing up a storm. Made sure of it before I renegotiated the point.”
Steve wants to ask questions, then, wants to ask how many times Bucky gave in hopes that he'd get Steve in return, and Steve knew his frail body had cost him, cost them both so much, but this—
“Never kill a man who I didn't know deserved it, wasn't better off for the world for being dead,” Bucky hides his face, good humor bled dry as he nuzzles into the line of Steve’s neck, lips to Steve’s throat. “And I knew if a man made the same bargain and then met me I'd be gunned down on the spot, but I begged it. Promised I'd be a fallen Michael, some avenging demon. If only…”
And Steve’s starting to see it, now: the bigger picture. Where they took a turn from the then and started careening toward the now. Steve starts to understand even before Bucky wrenches it out, jagged and tattered and rent—blood on Steve’s hands for not reaching farther, for not looking after, for all his fault and shortcomings, for everything, for—
“When they woke me up, it was only small things, little ghosts, almost. Echoes born from echoes, so faint,” Bucky’s voice is distant, is raw in a way Steve still doesn’t know how he’s supposed to stand. “And there was a part of me that knew what was coming, but only for those moments, almost thawed out but not quite awake.”
He reaches blindly for Steve’s hand, and Steve is waiting. Steve is willing. Steve would give his hand and his heart held out in it, wholly and without reservation or want in return, save that Bucky was here and was whole and was safe. He’d give anything. Everything.
He holds that hand like the last thing on Earth.
“I’d remember you.”
Steve thought heartbreak was an old friend by now, thought he knew it well.
This is something new. Something else.
“Just fragments, figments, I’d,” Bucky stammers, shakes his head. “But in those moments, where I’d feel them start my heart back up, I knew that you were it. You were there. You were, are,” and Bucky’s voice catches, Bucky’s voice cracks and his hand in Steve’s hand clenches harder.
“The things I’d ask to trade just to keep you, somewhere, anywhere that I could find you again the next time, where you’d survive even if I didn’t, couldn’t,” Bucky exhales low:
“Oh Stevie. The things I said I’d give, said I’d do just to keep you.”
Steve is gonna come undone. He will, this time, he’s sure of it.
“Every dollar I had would go to others,” Bucky says it, nods in affirmation. “I’d live more a pauper than we'd ever tried, but I'd give the shirt off my back to whoever was caught without.” He glances at Steve, a little rueful. “Now, the fact that I ended up living off a bagillionaire's weird way of showing he cares? I call that a stroke of luck that I'll sure as heck take.”
“That hurt you, didn't it? ‘Heck’.” Steve grasps at it, the possibility of humor, of joy where it all feels too much, and Bucky smirks, and gives Steve just a little bit of life in the doing.
“I'm true to my word.”
He sobers quick, though, and Steve deflates along with it.
“But you know I don’t touch that backpay I’ve got, not for myself. Not once.”
Bucky’s looking at him like he’s seeking acknowledgement, confirmation of that fact, but god: Steve doesn’t know what to do with it. Hadn’t known, hadn’t thought—
“Said I'd appreciate every moment. Every tiny thing, and I'd be grateful. Wouldn't take a single solitary thing for granted, like I used to. I promised, I’d keep every moment like a diamond, even though I didn’t think I knew what a diamond was. Precious. Promised I’d take the thing I love most,” and Bucky reaches for Steve’s face again, and strokes slow and soft there, knowing. “That I’d take how I felt about him and I’d make that glow touch everything else with how grateful I was, if I could keep the thought of you. The feel. Right here.”
He leads Steve’s hand to his chest and just holds it there. Breathes.
God.
“I'd never let a person go cold when I was warm,” Bucky keeps talking, keeps listing; his heart beats it out with measured fortitude, an amount of knowing that Steve can’t believe he ever missed. “‘Cause I learned the cold. And I can take it.
“I'd never steal again,” Bucky adds, and Steve knows how much Bucky had to, back when, and hated it; had to so they could eat, so Steve could have his medicine, so Steve would survive, and Steve wasn’t worth those little devilries then, but this, this—
“No lying,” Bucky continues; “so I was quiet at first, when I let you find me. I was quiet, ‘til I knew what to say. How to say it, knew you wouldn't…”
Bucky shifts, and there’s a skip in the heart under Steve’s hand when Bucky breathes out:
“Wouldn’t judge me. Hate me,” Bucky shivers as his voice breaks again: “Leave me.”
Steve holds his hand, presses down against his heart all the harder: his own promise.
“They're bargains I keep, Stevie. That's all,” Bucky tilts his head and kisses the curve of Steve’s chin. “We got an understanding, see, whether there's a God somewhere, or a universe who knows its own balance. We got ourselves a vow.”
And Steve can only look at him; look at him, and not quite believe his eyes that this is real, that Steve gets to have this—that they’re here, and maybe it was always in Bucky’s hands, and for all that Steve had fought for them, maybe it was Bucky who ultimately brought them both home.
“So you understand. You understand.”
And Steve thinks he understands it, now, yeah. He understands.
Doesn’t make it any goddamn easier to swallow the weight of it, though. The sacrifice.
“I promised that if I ever got the chance, I'd bare whatever threads of me were left, I’d hold nothing back, no matter how badly they were torn or bruised or burned beyond repair and that I’d trust you to make of them, of me, what you would,” Bucky’s eyes are big, stretched with the whole of his soul at their centres.
“And Steve, Stevie,” Bucky smiles, wet, as he reaches for Steve’s cheek and cups it close, dear. “Steve, you stitched me up, heart to skin and you took pieces of yourself to bridge the gaps and I'm whole because you made me as much. You took me and made me new,” his voice drops, almost inaudible: choked up harsh: “Made me worth anything at all.”
Steve wants to protest, wants to swear it was the other way around, and that if there was anything in Steve that could have saved Bucky from the dark it was a thing that Bucky himself helped make sure never died, or put there with his own hands; Steve wants to, but Bucky’s gathering up his hands and holding them close, now: holding to them fierce and full so Steve can feel the calluses, the small lines where scars weren’t allowed to heal, the echoing beat of his own heart, slowly gaining ground toward pounding.
“I promised,” Bucky tells him, and there’s meaning in it that Steve can’t read, but can sound for its depths. “If I could keep this one light, this one shred of good and nothin’ else, if it could come back, and live through, and survive in me no matter what, I promised I wouldn't be selfish, or stupid, or a coward. Wouldn't keep it for myself, not if you wanted it,” Bucky eyes flicker toward Steve’s, hesitant, still, but hopeful: “Any of it.”
“All of it,” Steve says with all the force of will he has; Steve holds those hands until he can feel both their hearts in the pressure held between. “All of you, forever and for always, Buck.” Steve swallows, hard, around the emotion that rises to fill up the word: “Everything.”
And Bucky: Bucky’s just quiet, and still, seemingly content to take it in, to soak it up, all of Steve’s affection in the way that it’s meant—soul-mending. Heartfelt not just in the word but in the means, borne out from the blood and through.
“It's funny,” Bucky says suddenly, breathes deeper as he moves. “To make a vow, ‘bout making a vow.”
Steve’s heart trips, when the implications hit him, not long before Bucky produces a ring: tarnished, but not for lack of love—for lack of wanting to make it anything other than what it is, instead; for lack of wanting to call them anything less than what they are.
“This was your Dad’s,” Steve recognizes the circlet—heavy and ornate—from memories long collecting dust for lack of Bucky in them, for all that they were background noise; furniture.
“It was his dad’s,” Bucky tells him, and Bucky never knew his grandad, but the man’s legacy was legend in that family, in that household. “He told me, day I turned sixteen,” Bucky closes his eyes, playing the scene behind the lids.
“He looked me dead in the eyes and said, ‘Soon as your heart’s not yours anymore, you don’t hesitate. You follow where it leads’.”
Bucky’s own eyes snap open, then, and fix on Steve with the kind of sincerity that’d make the strongest man, the strongest heart, go weak.
“I didn’t, not with everything,” Bucky confesses it, like a mortal sin. “I held back. I waited a good long time, Stevie, but on those tables, in that tube, in that chair: I promised I wouldn’t wait. I promised, if I was given the chance, if I got myself a miracle to live through all that to now, to this, to you, that I’d—”
Bucky cuts off, goes quiet just to look at Steve, to strip Steve just as bare and beautiful and wrecked and whole as Bucky is offering himself up to be, and Steve gasps for it, Steve aches with it, and Bucky’s got them pressed chest to chest so that it’s almost hard to breathe and Steve wouldn’t trade it, wouldn’t give this moment for the universe, for the present or the past.
He wouldn’t, because this moment is all future: is all promise. He can feel it.
“Steven Grant Rogers,” Bucky breathes, and Steve can taste the nerves of the exhalation, but he can also taste the joy. “You know the question I’m gonna ask. If you don’t want me to ask it—”
“Yes,” Steve stops that foolish notion before it gains any foothold, because it’s not a question, it was never a question, it was truth and light and them and this and—
“God, Bucky, I,” and Steve frames Bucky’s face, and it’s only the necessity of the shape and fold of his limbs in the holding that distances them, that puts any space between them as Steve kisses Bucky, long and hard so that his pulse rings through it as he whimpers, as he whispers, as he laughs and cries and sings for it, because: “Yes. Yes, fucking…”
Bucky licks into Steve’s mouth, desperate, and it’s a bargain Steve will always make; maybe made years ago. Maybe was born inside of, next to: laced into his being.
“Yes.”
It’s a vow, though, now; and he does understand.
He’s never gonna break it.