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Bucky used to find it offputting, used to hate the way it weighed like lead, like failure and feeling he wasn’t fucking equipped for in the pit of his stomach when he first came back, when the memories were still more void than substance: he used to hate it, to be honest, when Steve would marvel, with a telling sheen in his eyes, at what Bucky did recall. At the details that filtered back, slow but sure, until he was as whole as he was going to get, really—as full of memory as he could stand, good and bad and worse, but yeah. Whole.
With Steve.
He doesn’t, though, now: find it off-putting. He relishes, instead, in the way that Steve stares at him, in the way that Bucky’s recollections take Steve back to simpler times just as thoroughly, just as full of feeling as anything, and so when Bucky bring the pile of blankets on the couch that in his better half a bowl of soup balanced on a plate with bread baked from scratch so the whole floor smells of it, warm and welcoming and maybe there are traces of it that Steve’s poor clogged sinuses can still pick up, that his poor flared-up lungs can still breathe in and call some kind of solace—maybe.
But yes, Bucky relishes the way Steve’s eyes dance despite his ailing body, and his mouth gapes in disbelief as he looks at the soup in the bowl and says: “You ma’s.”
And Bucky nods, because yeah. His ma’s famous soup that’d seen Steve through more winters than Bucky could count, packed alongside thin sheets and warm bodies and more prayers than Bucky thinks any single tongue should know to speak: yeah.
Steve doesn’t bother with a spoon, but cups shaky hands around the curve of the bowl itself and lifts it, sips from the lip and Bucky reaches, one hand to steady Steve’s and the other to bear the weight of the bowl as Steve swallows, as Steve moans in relief at the heat on his red-worn throat and as Bucky’s heart soars and clenches all at once for it as Steve’s lashes flutter and he smiles—thin and aching but there.
Most of the broth is gone, and quick, if not the veggies and the beef, but baby steps, Bucky thinks. Small mercies.
Tiny victories are what win the war.
So Bucky sets the bowl aside and slides in next to Steve’s huddled frame, reaches out and readjusts them both so that Steve’s propped up against Bucky’s chest, warm and real and solid, and strong, even now, which is how Bucky makes the distinction, draws the line in his head between the soft rasp in Steve’s breaths now against the choking, the death rattle of decades gone by—it’s how he wraps his arms around Steve and settles them just over the sternum, and lets his own chest lift Steve’s into the touch to feel his heartbeat: elevated, but steady and powerful and not going anywhere, goddamnit.
Not going anywhere.
Steve is warm, and real, and a heavy weight versus a slightness that cut through Bucky’s soul at how fleeting it might be in this world: that presence. Steve is a monolith, now, even sniffling and swallowing thick around swollen glands and incalcitrant breaths: Steve is his. And this is now.
And if Bucky’s own heart still does the twisting is always did for any threat to Steve’s well being; if the line is clearer in Bucky’s head that it is in Bucky’s chest, well, fuck.
Ain’t nothing that can help that, in the end, now is there?
“M’gonna be alright,” Steve says, voice a rasp but still his, still Steve—still wry and full of comfort and the love that Bucky has never quite deserved but soaks up, makes himself out of and always has; doesn’t recognize himself without the pieces that are made of what Steve sees inside of him, what Steve holds dear within all that Bucky is and ever has been.
“Damn straight you are,” Bucky counters, more a grumble than anything as he presses lips to the juncture of Steve’s neck and just holds, just breathes: the skin’s too hot, but it’s not damned. It’s not hellfire: just too much heat, and that’s okay. They can live with that. They can live through that.
They’ve lived through worse, and seen the surface again.
And if Bucky presses closer to the beat of Steve’s heart, just to be sure, it’s not a sin.
“S’a common cold, for all that it matters,” Steve goes on, and yeah, for him, that’s what it ended up being, and they’re damn lucky, too—because the pathogen was unknown, and Steve’d gone in, guns-blazing, confident that the serum would save him from the unidentified bioagent their crazy-of-the-week had threatened to unleash.
Bucky doesn’t choose to dwell on the vise around his own heart in those moments when Steve had first breathed inside that cloud, had first taken that poison in his lungs: when all bets were off and Bucky’s world threatened to crumble.
Bucky chooses to dwell on Steve in his arms, now: just a sniffle too many, a cough here and there. He’ll get better.
He’s a fucking moron, but he’ll get better, and that’s what matters. That’s worth dwelling on and revisiting every time that Bucky’s mind wanders and the line wavers and his heart trips because there’s Steve, in his arms, on the couch, unwell, and he remembers so many things, now, and this.
This is a thing that he remembers all too well.
“You’re tense,” Steve comments idly, and reaches to take Bucky’s hand in his own, to press his lips to Bucky’s wrist in askance to the thrumming fear in the veins underneath.
“‘Course I am,” Bucky breathes out. “Too many close shaves in my head, Stevie, and they start just like this.”
“This ain’t like that,” Steve tries to tell him, tries to soothes, and gets caught in a coughing fit for his trouble, and Bucky’s hands know just want to do, his lips know just how to move as he tells Steve’s to breathe, as he rubs circles at either side of Steve’s chest as if he can coax those lungs into submission, into doing his will.
It’s not a long thing, not like it used to be, where the worst times Steve’s lips would go blue, or he’d lose consciousness entirely for lack of air in those wayward lungs; naw. This is just a little thing, and Steve shakes his head afterwards, and catches Bucky’s hands where they frame his chest and presses them into the skin: clammy, but the way Steve holds him there is a dear thing, so goddamn fucking dear.
“Just,” Bucky shakes his head, and pulls Steve back into him, and if Bucky can feel the hard and heavy thump of his own heart all the stronger where Steve’s spine lines up against its force, then he can feel it start to calm and soften, too, as Steve’s breath evens and the proof of it rises and rests against Bucky’s chest: undeniable.
“Just let me hold your stupid, self-sacrificing ass, okay?” Bucky asks, except it’s not a question, nor is it a thing that he begs: it is the way of the universe, and the universe will bend to the will of Bucky Barnes when it comes to Steve Rogers, goddamnit. Always.
Without exception.
“Just let me hold you,” Bucky breathes just behind Steve’s ear, and revels in way Steve sighs and goes boneless into the hug, the arms around him, not even bothering to put up the facade of a fight. “Let me, and shut up, and get well.”
And Steve doesn’t say a damn thing, just snuggles back into Bucky’s hold a little softer, a little closer, and Bucky’s heart pumps with a softer kind of relief for it, because yes. This is the way the world works, this is the way they fit.
“Dumbass,” Bucky whispers soft into Steve’s sweat-curled hair and yeah.
They’re gonna be alright.