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Sometimes, Bucky sends him postcards.
Steve doesn’t know what that means. Bucky doesn’t sign them — doesn’t write anything except Steve’s address, neatly printed. It turns out, Bucky’s handwriting’s still the same.
Steve gets a map, big enough that he can’t touch both coasts at once. He puts it up on his living room wall, pins Bucky’s postcards to the cities they came from. Here are the tall buildings of Chicago; here are snow-capped mountains from Denver. It’s—
Well. It’s better than nothing. On nights he can’t sleep, he stretches out on the sofa and looks up at all the places Bucky’s been. Wonders how Bucky’s doing.
———
“I did that once,” Natasha says. “Second year with SHIELD. I think Fury thought I’d— snap, or something.”
“Oh,” Steve says blankly. “What’d you do?”
“A lot of things,” she shrugs. “Rode Greyhounds all the way out. Saw a lot of shitty motel rooms.” A faint smile. “Visited the world’s largest ball of string. Hey, ask Barnes if he’s done that.”
“The world’s largest—” Steve says, baffled. “Why?”
Natasha pauses. “It seemed like something a person might do.”
Steve imagines Natasha — small, hands tucked into her pockets — walking across America, looking for something she’s not sure she can find. About Bucky doing the same.
“Did it help?” he says carefully.
Natasha laughs. “Hell if I know.”
Out the window, the sky’s turning a deep orange. Steve thinks, with a rush of affection, that Natasha is one of the bravest people he knows.
“Hey,” Natasha’s saying. “C’mon, don’t look so sad. We can order pizza. Watch some Netflix.”
Steve cracks a smile. “You just want to put weird things on it and tell me that’s how pizza is now.”
“I’m telling you,” Natasha insists, straight-faced; like this is what they’ve been talking about all along; like she’s never had to worry about something more serious than this. “Pineapple’s great, I don’t know what you have against pineapple.”
———
So: postcards.
Sometimes, Steve wonders what Bucky gets out of it, this carefully orchestrated trail of breadcrumbs. Maybe Bucky’s trying to say something. Maybe there’s a message for him in all these blank spaces, if only Steve could figure out how to read it.
Or maybe it’s even simpler than that: maybe, after all these years, Bucky’s grown tired of being a ghost.
———
The color’s bled out of Steve’s map over the months; sometimes Steve brushes his fingers over the postcards and sees a flash of green underneath, or the blue of lakes and rivers.
Steve is, idly, thinking about getting a dog.
“Do you even want a dog?” Sam asks after a training session.
Steve’s “I don’t know” gets muffled in his towel. He shakes his head, looks for a fresh shirt.
“I grew up with a dog,” Sam offers, a little wistfully. “Loyal as they come. Dumber than a box of bricks.”
“Still around?”
“Naw,” Sam says. “Got old.”
“Sorry,” Steve mumbles.
“Yeah.” Sam’s quiet for a moment. “Look, man,” he says, “Dogs are great. I don’t wanna tell you not to get a dog.”
“But,” Steve says.
“But,” Sam agrees. “You gotta want the dog, you know? Dog’s not gonna fix whatever’s wrong with you. You’re just gonna have whatever problems you’ve got, and a dog.”
“I don’t—” Steve says, “that’s not—” He stops. Rubs a hand over his face.
Sam digs his own shirt out of his locker, and waits.
“I don’t know what I want,” Steve says finally.
Sam says, “Maybe you could get a plant.”
Steve laughs, a bright, fleeting sound. “What happened to ‘you gotta want the plant’?”
“Well,” Sam says. “Not like, a cactus. Nobody wants a cactus.”
———
Some time later, Steve reaches into his mailbox and frowns at what he finds. It’s not a postcard.
It’s a photo.
Bucky must have— taken it. Steve thinks about that: Bucky setting up a camera. Bucky picking it up to write Steve’s address, slightly smudged, onto the back.
Bucky’s in the picture.
Steve sits down, very suddenly, on the floor of his apartment lobby. It’s not— Bucky’s face is out of view, but there he is, leaning across a countertop, an arm braced at the edge. He doesn’t have on a shirt; Steve can see the shadow of old bruises scattered down his side. Behind him, an open window slants light across Bucky’s back.
Steve hasn’t seen Bucky in over a year. He breathes slowly, evenly, the way his mother had taught him, until the urge to cry passes.
———
Steve goes running. Sometimes he spends nights in the gym. He’s restless, like he’s too big for his skin; he curls his fingers against his palm just to feel something.
Steve is waiting for—
He’s waiting for—
———
Bucky sends him another picture.
———
“What is this, the dark ages?” Tony says. “I can’t believe this. It’s like a Kodak ad from the fifties. What, was the store out of daguerreotype?”
“Can you give me a location,” Steve says.
“Hey, relax,” Tony says. “He’s given you dates. JARVIS, scan these, do a weather analysis. Clouds, that’s nice. Continental United States, let’s say. Unless he’s crossed the border. Cap, he send you any maple leaves?”
Steve doesn’t have it in him to smile. “Tony,” he says. “Please.”
———
“Earth to Cap,” Tony says, poking at Steve’s ribs, and that’s when Steve finds he’d fallen asleep.
“Jesus,” he says, startling badly, and only just manages to check the reflexive throw of his fist. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “Don’t— don’t do that.”
“I did advise sir against that particular course of action,” JARVIS says over the speakers. “There’s a rather nice proverb about sleeping lions, or perhaps eagles in this case.”
“JARVIS likes to think he’s clever,” Tony grumbles. “Well. He is clever, it’s true. Your boy’s in Arizona. No idea why, I hear the weather’s hell this time of year. You want me to book you a plane ticket? I can book you a ticket.”
“No,” Steve yelps, panicked, half-rising to his feet.
Tony puts his tablet down and looks at him speculatively. “Okay,” he says. “Is this one of your things that you do, where you want something but you’re contractually obligated to feed your guilt complex, so you don’t and then you mope about it?”
Steve looks away and says, low, “It’s not about what I want.”
Tony honest to god laughs. “Let’s get this straight,” he says. “Your boy toy’s sending you shirtless pictures but you don’t know what he wants. Did they not have sexting in the forties?”
Steve resists the urge to press his face into his hands. “It’s not like that,” he says. He doesn’t know who he’s trying to convince.
———
Steve doesn’t go to Arizona. He doesn’t pin the pictures on his map. He doesn’t get a dog.
He doesn’t, in fact, do much of anything.
———
The Avengers get called in for a disturbance in New Jersey. Fifteen minutes into the fight a building blows up on top of Steve.
He wakes up in the hospital.
“Watch it,” Natasha says, disapproving, when Steve tries to get up. “You had a foot-long steel bar embedded in your liver, might wanna take it easy for a while.”
Steve lets his head hit the pillow. “Everyone else all right?” he rasps.
“Well, the rest of us aren’t dumb enough to fight a building,” she says. “So yeah, we’re good.” She peers at him more closely. “What about you?”
Steve’s ribs protest every time he tries to draw a breath. “Fine,” he says instead, and pulls up the hem of his shirt to take a look at his midriff.
There’s ugly bruising down his left side and all across his stomach, interrupted halfway by a mass of white bandaging. He presses a finger to one dark patch and hisses at the resulting pain.
“Don’t know what you expected,” Natasha says, unsympathetic.
“Thought it would’ve healed faster.”
“An entire building,” she reminds him. “The doctors think your body’s prioritizing. I guess bruises aren’t high on the list.”
Steve’s still looking down at the mottled pattern on his skin. He thinks about the pictures Bucky had sent him. Bucky healed fast, too.
Why shirtless?
Steve presses again at his ribs and then says, blandly, “Don’t you have better things to do today?”
“Why?” Natasha says. “You planning on blowing this popsicle stand?” And then, after a beat: “Have you lost it, Rogers?”
“I'm going to Arizona,” Steve says. “Could use your help.”
“You can’t even walk.”
In response, Steve swings his legs off the side of the bed. It takes him a while to get to his feet.
“This is pathetic,” Natasha says eventually, and rounds the bed to steady him against her shoulder. “That same building that crushed you must’ve hit me in the head.”
“I’ll owe you,” he says, looking around for his shoes.
“You already owe me,” she says. “If you die while flying over Kansas, I’m going to kill you.”
———
Steve spends most of the flight sleeping and wakes up as the plane lands heavily on the runway. He thinks it’s getting easier to breathe, and he’s not so wobbly on his feet anymore.
The address Tony had given him is a small town outside Flagstaff. Steve rents a motorcycle outside the airport and starts down the road. He thinks a little about Bucky, and the tapestry of bruises on his skin, but mostly he keeps his thoughts straight ahead.
There’s one bar in town, its sign lit up and flickering. Steve parks outside and walks in, holding himself carefully, a little pained. He orders a drink.
The bartender looks him over as he passes over the glass. “Haven’t seen you around before,” he says conversationally. “You from out of town?”
“Passing through,” Steve says. “I’m looking for something.”
“What would that be?” the man says, disinterested.
Steve says, very carefully, “How might a guy get himself into some trouble?”
———
The warehouse is lit brightly. Steve shrugs off his shirt before heading into the ring. The bruises have faded by now but the skin’s still tender to the touch.
Someone hands him a towel. “Knock out or tap out,” he advises. “Try not to get yourself killed.”
Steve flashes a grim smile, and steps forward.
———
Steve’s pulling his punches; his opponents don’t. Bruises bloom delicately across his torso like they’d never gone. Once, a blow to his kidney sends him to his knees, and he gasps through the pain, half-blind with it.
After half a dozen rounds he’s soaked with sweat. He blinks wetness out of his eyes, can taste blood in the back of his throat. He doesn’t want to win, doesn’t care about any of it. He wonders, in a thought half-formed, what it’d be like to stop. Stop fighting, stop thinking, stop—
You always—
Steve gets back up.
———
Steve’s world narrows: the fragility of his body, the awareness of pain. There’s nothing else.
———
And then, suddenly, there is.
Bucky looks — good. Steady. He makes the space where his left arm should be almost natural.
He looks at Steve evenly. He doesn’t say anything.
And then he hits him.
He’s holding himself back; Steve’s felt the full strength of his blows before. It knocks the wind out of him anyway. He sways, trying to stay on his feet, and grins at Bucky when he manages.
Bucky says, almost too quiet to hear, “Why.”
Steve breathes out. “You know why,” he says.
Bucky hits him again.
———
The rhythm of Bucky’s fist on his skin feels like something he’s known all his life.
———
The next time Steve goes down, Bucky pins him by a shoulder, his knees bracketing Steve’s hips. “Steve,” he says. “Please.”
Steve tries to speak. “I don’t—” he says desperately, “I can’t—”
“Okay,” Bucky says, and reaches for Steve’s fist. “Can I—”
Very gently, Bucky raps Steve’s knuckles three times against the floor. Steve shakes, and closes his eyes, and lets his fingers uncurl.
“Yeah,” Bucky says softly. “Yeah, I know.” He brushes damp hair from Steve’s forehead. “Let me take you home.”
———
Bucky takes Steve up to a small apartment and settles him on the edge of his bathtub. Steve, looking around, recognizes the room.
“You sent me—” Steve says, “it was here.”
Bucky’s fished out a first-aid kit from the cabinet. “Stupid,” he mutters. “Shouldn’t have done it.”
“Well,” Steve says. “You did.”
Bucky sighs and presses his hand against Steve’s ribcage, watching Steve wince reflexively. “What did you do to your ribs?” he demands. “I didn’t break them.”
“They might’ve been already,” Steve admits.
Bucky looks like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and settles for gently cuffing Steve over the head. “You kill me,” he says. “You’re killing me. Look at you.”
Steve does look. He’s bruised and battered in more places than one, and it’s not all written on his skin. But it’s all he’s got to offer.
“I don’t know,” he says, “what you want.”
Bucky pulls Steve in by the shoulders, touches his forehead to Steve’s. “Yeah, you do,” he says, and kisses him.
———
Bucky’s bed is warm, and just big enough for the two of them. In the morning Steve wakes up to find Bucky watching him.
“I’ve got you,” Bucky says quietly. “I’ve got you,”
“You do,” Steve agrees. “Can’t get rid of me.”
Bucky makes a thoughtful sound. “You know, I was planning on getting a dog,” he says. “Easier to take care of.”
Steve starts laughing, can’t stop until his ribs start aching. Bucky looks at him, worry on his face.
“We don’t have to—” Bucky says. “If you don’t want.”
“No, it’s—” Steve shakes his head. There’s something like happiness bubbling up his chest, making him dizzy. “Yeah, Buck,” he says. “Let’s get a dog.”