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It isn’t until after Bucky’s sent a cow, a hospital, a ghost, a burger, a muscular arm, a hand making a Victory “V,” and a reluctant blue heart that he stops to wonder why he knows about emojis. He’s balled up high in an oak tree at the time, black sweatshirt hood pulled forward to hide his eyes and one drawstring clenched thoughtfully between his back teeth. The rain’s really picking up now, three hours into a spit-and-hiss wetness that left his skin prickling and a dull ache in his shoulder—guess which one! An acorn shakes loose from an upper branch and shoots toward his head, but he snaps his right hand into the air and catches it, palms it, rubs a thumb across the cap. Like petting a cat backward. Like tracing the thrice-broken arch of Steve’s nose.
Maybe. Did he ever? Did they touch that closely?
He holds the acorn precisely where he’d need to if he wanted to wing it dead-center at Steve’s hotel room window. A whizzbang-quick flick of his wrist. But he doesn’t loosen his grip. These days, he doesn’t let go of anything. He pockets it. His jeans are already bulging with receipts, gum wrappers, found pennies, business cards from bulletin boards, matchbooks, the crumpled instruction manual to his phone. Possibly some of Steve’s beard trimmings from the hotel bathroom trash this morning. He can neither confirm nor deny.
His telephone’s safe in its sandwich bag—snuck from a box of forty taped together shoddily in the grocery store clearance section, because what does a soul do with forty whole sandwich bags; plastic is reusable—when he pulls it out to turn up the volume. Droplets make the plastic slick but it’s safe. His grip is good. It’s safe. He turns the volume up high enough that even the shift of Steve’s body on the bed is enough to cut through the new thick sound of the rain and the howling wind.
Steve shifts. A bedspring creaks. A hitch in Steve’s breath, wet. Wet still.
He thinks he must have made Steve cry before. They were children and children were cruel and they wore their feelings like the skin of their knees, quick to bleed where everyone could see. He thinks he must have known what to say when he made Steve cry before. They were children and then they weren’t children but they still had their arms elbow-deep in each other’s chests. That didn’t happen with someone if you didn’t know how to set things right with them.
He thinks. He doesn’t have anyone to check that with.
Whatever he used to say when he’d made Steve cry and wanted to smooth it over, it must not have been, “do u like burger king? really greasy,” followed by a burger emoji, a cow emoji, and a ghost emoji. He thought the last two were funny. Maybe they were just in bad taste. But when he sent the heart, Steve’s crying had only gotten louder. Levity, he figured. Burger King. His mouth still tastes like bright yellow mustard.
Steve isn’t crying the way the heart made him cry, but Burger King does elicit from him, now, one deep, choked sob between more of that wet, uneasy breath. One winter, walking pneumonia—
SHIELD must have had a lot of time on their hands to teach their secret weapon about emojis. Maybe Pierce had needed a pen pal. Maybe if Bucky reached deep enough in his memories he could pull out a number he could use to mock Pierce’s ghost with another ghost emoji, but no burger and no cow.
It’s a better maybe than if they’d had him texting someone unsuspecting.
Gun emoji, gun emoji, gun emoji, knife emoji, smiley face, he imagines his blank-faced self texting Pierce from inside of cryo.
“Goddammit,” Steve says with his voice hoarse, and there’s another creak of bedsprings that must be him standing. His footsteps are silent on the carpet, but his silhouette appears in front of the curtain, pacing back and forth, and Bucky’s hand goes back to the acorn in his pocket. Teach Steve to stay away from the windows when a world-class assassin is listening to his bugged hotel room from a tree across the street.
His jeans are soaked all the way through, all the receipts and business cards and matchbooks no doubt useless. A couple centimeters of rain pool inside his boots. Weaker branches sway hard around him. He could fall asleep like this, but Steve is still fucking crying as he paces.
Through the sandwich bag, Bucky opens his texts back up, all to and no from, his number blocked each time. Steve is making a sound that hurts. Bucky looks at the rows of emojis.
He picks the two boys holding hands. He erases it. He picks it. He erases it.
Children hold hands when they cross the street. Brooklyn had a lot of streets. He set Steve’s nose one of those times. Two of those times. Steve’s ten-year-old nose blood-slippery and crunching under Bucky’s eleven-year-old fingers.
The baseball emoji. He writes, “we’ll see a game, O.K.?” Sends it. Waits.
*
A bird smacked into Bucky’s bedroom window once. He and Steve were sitting on his bed, a page of the funnies between them, giggling but not about the cartoons. Steve hissed with his thin chest shaking, “But then we’ll have to set the whole thing on fire because the seats are probably covered in diamonds and too painful to sit in,” and Bucky said, “Why would we set a car full of diamonds on fire, stupid? We’d sell the diamonds,” and the bird went smack.
It left a little smear of blood on the glass. Bucky made them go outside to wrap the body in the newspaper, and Steve curled an arm around his shoulders and then the other arm around him and Bucky said, “It’s just a bird,” and he didn’t mean that it was just a bird so it wasn’t worth getting sad about it, but that it was just a bird and it had no ill will inside of it and should have been allowed to keep flying.
Bucky’s always been sensitive in a way Steve can’t afford to be. Enough stuff hurts in Steve’s body without bringing heartache into it, he figures. Like right now. His broken nose feels like a fistful of hot daggers being stabbed into the middle of his face.
It hurts even worse than that with each of Bucky’s jarring strides as he runs down the street with Steve on his back, Steve’s newly long fingers clutching at Bucky’s shirtfront and suspenders alternately, trying to get sufficient purchase, and Bucky’s hands tensed against the backs of Steve’s knees. Steve bites his lip so hard it could have started bleeding too, though it’s hard to tell with how much blood is already dripping into his mouth from his nose.
“Bucky,” he whines, and then says, “Never mind,” irritated at himself for whining. Bucky stops soon enough anyway, looking over his shoulder to make sure they’re clear before letting go so Steve can jump to the ground. They’re outside Steve’s building, and Steve’s ma is upstairs asleep; she’s working the late shift tonight. She would know what to do with his nose, but he doesn’t want to wake her up. He’s ten. He’s a man. It’s his blood. It’s his problem.
When Bucky takes Steve’s jaw in his hand and tilts his head up so he can get a better look, Steve gets a better look at Bucky in turn, and Bucky’s eyes are damp and red and he sounds wrong when he says, “I can’t even see you under there, Steve, geeze.”
Steve’s eyes flit down to Bucky’s collar, which he sees now is covered in blood, and they should go inside if just to rinse it before the stain sets, but then Bucky’s letting go of Steve’s jaw and unbuttoning his shirt and using it to clean the blood off Steve’s face instead.
“Bucky, don’t ruin a whole shirt!” His voice is double-muffled by the injury and the shirt, so it’s soft and squelching and not at all like a voice is supposed to sound.
“Steve, don’t ruin a whole damn nose!” Bucky pulls the shirt away and his lips are pressed tight, his brows drawn together. The effect of his evaluating gaze is dampened a little by the tears, which are now finally rolling down his face.
“Bucky—”
“Shut up. Does this hurt?” He presses a knuckle to the bridge of Steve’s knows and Steve yelps, then squares his shoulders like that’ll undo it. “Because you don’t have bad enough breathing already, right? We need someone to set this.”
“My ma…”
“But I know, you don’t want to bother her, right?”
Steve shrugs.
“That was the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, you know that?”
“Sure, real stupid, helping an innocent dame who’s getting hassled.”
Bucky presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, but he sighs like he knows he can’t argue. Steve would run into traffic to stop a cat from getting hit, and Bucky likes that about him, because he’s the one who would mourn over the cat’s body if Steve didn’t. But Steve’s small body, shaking in front of Bucky with adrenaline and breathlessness and the vestiges of righteous anger, that’s not worth crying over.
“Steve. Christ. I’ll do it, okay?” Bucky pulls his hands from his eyes and he’s still crying anyway. Bucky likes to do things that aren’t worth doing, like polishing his shoes every morning.
“You don’t know how to set a nose,” Steve tells him.
“You don’t know how to throw a punch, but miracles happen every day, don’t they?” He sniffs loudly, takes a deep breath, exhales. “Should probably be sitting for this.” His hands are steady, at least, and when he puts them on Steve’s nose, Steve keeps his eyes open, watching the concentration on Bucky’s damp face, where his mouth quirks down to one side. “Tell me if I break something worse.”
Steve won’t if he does, but he nods.