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“I gotta stop looking at your pecs.”
Steve’s surprised guffaw was the only thing stopping Bucky from slamming his head against the kitchen counter for how stupid that had sounded.
“What I mean is,” he tried to explain through gritted teeth to stop the corner of his mouth from ticking upwards, “I turn to talk to you and they’re always the first thing in my goddamn line of sight.”
He was still sorting through the things he could remember, slowly putting bits and pieces together to form a complete narrative of Bucky Barnes’s—his—life. His before.
In those memories, Steve was a constant. Though that had come with unfortunate side effects in the present. Such as his brain thinking he needed to look down if he wanted to talk to his face, expecting to be met with a pair of sharp eyes, but being greeted with a view of the ideal pectoral muscle instead.
At least he was wearing a shirt this time. Not that it hid anything.
Steve was still grinning once he stopped laughing. “Are you sure your eyes aren’t just naturally drawn to people’s chest areas?” he asked. “Didn’t one of the girls you took on a date in the 30s complain about that?”
“Oh my God.”
“Do I need to start wearing shirts that tell you ‘My eyes are up here?’”
Bucky grabbed and forced open Steve’s jaw to stuff a bread roll into his mouth. It shut the punk up, but the glee in his eyes was unmistakable. The price was worth it.
Newly added to the list of things in the 21st century that Bucky didn’t know how to handle was Steve Rogers giving him Looks every time he caught him turn his head to start a conversation with his pecs, before managing to find his eyes.
It was the kind of look that said, I know you like what you see, and it made Bucky’s skin crawl.
Not in a bad way.
He just didn’t know how to handle it.
He didn’t get any better at it.
If anything, the amount of his chest area related social faux pas when it came to Steve only grew.
More and more often, Bucky would be standing next to him, the desire to throw an arm over Steve’s shoulders would grow too big to ignore in his own chest, and so he did what anyone would do if they sought the physical closeness of a friend. He acted on it.
The first time it happened, he got lucky and Steve’s arm had been at his side.
He ended up giving it a few awkward pets, trying to play it off as if this was exactly what he had been going for in the first place. Steve’s raised eyebrow and the amused quirk to his lips told him, he didn’t really succeed.
The second time around, Bucky’s hand landed squarely on Steve’s right breast.
There was a moment of blissful calm, in which Bucky hadn’t yet realized what he had done. Then, Steve’s whole body started to shake from suppressed laughter.
Bucky immediately let go and took a step back.
“So, you were trying to feel me up the first time,” Steve teased him. The glint in his eyes meant he was fully aware that was not what Bucky had been trying to do.
He sputtered anyway, hoping the heat on his face wasn’t visible.
“Dude.”
Sam was there, too.
Sometimes—usually when he was lying alone in his bed at night, the streets a little quieter, but his mind a little louder—he thought about the Steve he saw in his memories.
Everything about him, in terms of his body, was so much smaller. So much frailer. So much more vulnerable.
He remembered Steve’s body covered in bruises, small scrapes, or even still bleeding cuts. He had collected them as if they had been badges of honor. Bucky had tried his best to find a way to treat them with the things they had.
The coughs that had teared through Steve’s lungs from time to time still echoed in Bucky’s ears. The shortness of breath and the asthma. Part of him had never stopped paying special attention to the rise and fall of Steve’s chest.
Fevers had been the worst. When illness struck, Steve had looked the worst. Bedridden and unable to keep his eyes open for long. Bucky, sitting at his side, all day and night whenever he could, had never known a greater fear.
(Until the war. Until HYDRA. But he liked to stop his train of thought before that.)
Considering these memories, he was thankful for Steve’s changes—for what the serum did for him.
Trying to get the fight out of him would never have worked, so the less prone to injury he was, the better. The amount of air his lungs could hold now, how his stamina seemed to never truly be depleted, brought with it a certain peace of mind. No sudden illness would ever get the better of him.
Bucky was glad.
And at the same time, he felt as if he was in mourning.
Steve was still here. They both were still here, in this new century, this new world, through an unbelievable sequence of events. Yet, they both had left so much of themselves behind.
“Did you put the rosemary on the top shelf?” Steve asked and Bucky immediately dropped the book he had been reading on the sofa to head to their kitchen within four quick strides.
“I got it,” he said, reaching up with ease. He turned to hand the small container over to Steve, angling his head down to give him a smile, to tease him about his shorter reach, and—
“Oh.”
Pecs.
Right.
He stared. This was the most wrong-footed he had ever felt whenever this happened.
When he looked up, Steve was looking at him. He didn’t laugh like he usually did. He didn’t tease like he usually did. He didn’t make a comment about Bucky’s chest-seeking gaze like he usually did.
There was something in his eyes Bucky couldn’t identify.
Slowly, the look melted away and Steve smiled at him—a tiny smile. It seemed somehow intimate, and warm. Private. Familiar. Bucky’s skin was buzzing.
Steve put his hand over the rosemary, but instead of taking it, he simply let his hand rest over it and Bucky’s own. He looked down, his whole face moving with him, so all Bucky could see was the crown of his head.
“Thanks, Buck.”
“You’re welcome,” Bucky responded automatically and leaned forward.
He pressed a kiss on top of Steve’s head, eyes closed, lips lingering. He didn’t need to lean down as much as he used to, but the action still felt familiar.
Steve didn’t tell him to stop.
The thing was, Steve had a nice chest. Objectively speaking.
He had been wrong when he had said that Bucky’s eyes were naturally drawn to people’s chest areas, but there was a tiny kernel of truth to it now. At least, when it came to Steve.
Bucky’s skin was crawling in a bad way now.
Not because he was appreciating the chest of another man—he had been scared, once, but even if the world hadn’t changed, he was long past that fear—but because part of him just couldn’t get used to it.
He knew he had liked Steve long before either of them had been changed.
They had never done anything that went beyond a short kiss—on the cheek, the forehead, on closed lips—no matter how much Bucky had wanted to (and Steve as well, if Bucky allowed himself to dream a little), but he still knew Steve’s body from all the times he had to patch him up after another fight in another alleyway, the times he had to make sure air was getting into Steve’s lungs, and the times he helped him through the worst of a sickness.
Steve had always been handsome, attractive.
Not a lot of people had seen it back then, and it had made him angry.
A lot of people could see it now, and it made him even angrier.
He didn’t like being one of these people.
“Steve…?”
Bucky’s voice was rough from sleep, yet he still woke up the moment he felt a dip on the mattress. He opened his eyes, but it was too dark to see anything and he didn’t care to be awake right now if it wasn’t an emergency, so he closed them.
“Shh,” Steve’s voice reached his ears. “It’s okay, pal, go back to sleep.”
There was a hand on his cheek and something warm and solid against his forehead, and Bucky felt himself start to drift off again. Then, the hand and warmth moved, down the slope of his jaw, his neck.
He realized the warm thing had been Steve’s head and he was partially leaning against Bucky’s chest now. Did he want to use him as a pillow?
Bucky started to shift, intending to lie down on his back, but Steve’s hand on his shoulder kept him firmly in place. Something tickled his nose. It was Steve’s hair.
It clicked.
Snaking his arms around Steve’s torso, Bucky kept him in place for the rest of the night.
The sun was setting on a day in late summer when Bucky decided to broach the subject.
He had his eyes closed as he was lying on their sofa, catching the last rays of sunshine on his face. Steve was sitting next to him, sketching, drawing—Bucky didn’t know the difference.
He asked, “Do you miss being smaller?”
Steve’s pencil stopped.
Bucky didn’t move.
“I don’t miss the complications,” Steve said, eventually. “I’ll take the enhanced metabolism over those any day.”
Bucky waited for him to continue.
“Being smaller would definitely make stealth missions easier.” The weight on the sofa shifted. “It would be a lot easier to disappear in crowds, too…”
“What about the attention?” Bucky asked. “Do you like it?”
He heard Steve deeply breathe in and out. Once, twice. “I did, a little, I think. Used to.”
Bucky supposed he couldn’t blame him.
“It was different after I— After the ice.” He was searching for the right words. “They changed me. They already did, once, but they did it again while I wasn’t there. Made me into a symbol. Some ideal. Something for which only results matter, not where it came from.”
Bucky thought of white lab coats, the whirring of metal, a tiny window beginning to frost over, words in Russian he would never truly be able to forget, the weight of a gun, the swiftness of a knife, and the command Mission Report.
He understood.
“Do you hate it now?” he asked.
Steve was silent. Then, a whisper, “Not when it’s you.”
Bucky sat up.
He gently took Steve’s art supplies from him to place them on their little coffee table before pulling his legs up to kneel on the sofa while Steve was still sitting in place.
He was watching Bucky, anticipation clear in his eyes. Bucky cupped his face in his mismatched hands to look at them. Even like this, the height wasn’t quite right. But he could still see it—the blue of Steve’s eyes, the bit of green in them. Bucky was looking down at them.
They were the same eyes he had always looked into.
Bucky kissed Steve, the way he had always wanted to, and Steve kissed him back.
Bucky never wanted to forget that he had once needed to look down in order to see into Steve’s eyes.
“Maybe I should start wearing heels.”
Steve’s laugh shook through both their bodies, his breath dancing over Bucky’s bare chest.
Bucky’s smile made his cheeks hurt.
He felt Steve shift against him, but not to break free of his hold. He looked down to see what he was up to, only to find Steve looking up.
Their eyes met.