Chapter Text
“This is ridiculous,” Bucky says, pulling his cap down over his eyes.
Steve sighs, nods. “Okay. You know we don’t have to, if you don’t want.”
It hadn’t been a great morning. Nothing dramatic—no locked doors or knives or screaming—but Bucky refused to eat breakfast, insisted on wearing a jacket though it was eighty degrees outside, chewed on his fingernails until they bled and asked Steve six times when he’d be ready to go. Steve might’ve called the whole thing off, if not for the determined set of Bucky’s shoulders as he stalked to the front door, the half-manic glint in his eyes as he asked, “You coming or what?”
“It’s bullshit,” Bucky murmurs. “$9 for one ride. They’re robbing us blind.”
“It’s nothing, Buck. We have the money.”
Bucky swipes his hat off, tugs at his hair. “Yeah, I know we do.”
“Like I said, we don’t have to—”
“I want to,” Bucky says through clenched teeth. “Been talking about this for months. You’ve waited long enough.”
“Not like we can’t wait another day. We’ve got all the time in the world.”
Bucky shakes his head. “I want a hot dog. Now.”
Steve smiles. “C’mon, then.”
They walk side-by-side down the boardwalk, close enough that Steve can bump Bucky’s hip whenever a screaming kid or the brush of an unfamiliar arm makes him flinch. They stop to play a horse racing game, which Bucky wins by a landslide, giving an unrestrained little whoop as his plastic horse bobs over the finish line. They move down the line, try their hand at breaking plates with baseballs. Steve breaks three, wins a medium stuffed animal; Bucky breaks everything, including the structure supporting the plates—it topples with a mighty crash.
“Holy shit, dude,” the teenager manning the booth says, gaping at Bucky as he fidgets and slinks away, out of Steve’s sight. “Pick literally anything you want, oh my god. Does he wanna go again? We can set it back up and he can go again.”
“Thanks anyway,” Steve says, grabbing a small stuffed giraffe and taking off after Bucky.
He finds Bucky a few minutes later, sitting on a bench beside two hot dogs and two sodas, slumped over with his arms on his knees, eyes closed, breathing deeply. Steve puts a hand on his heaving back and grabs one of the sodas, takes a drink—Mountain Dew. Bucky’s something of a fiend. “Like a shot of sugar straight to the brain,” he likes to say, smirking around his straw.
Bucky lets out a heavy breath, peeks one eye open. “What, I don’t get anything bigger than that?”
Steve laughs. “I can take it back.”
“Gimme the damn thing. I earned it.”
Bucky stands and snatches the giraffe from Steve, steels himself and heads over to a little girl a few yards away. She’s hitching with sobs, staring mournfully at the popped balloon sagging from her wrist, her mother struggling to comfort her. Bucky takes a knee beside them. Steve doesn’t hear what he says, but the girl wipes her eyes and giggles, and Bucky smiles back, offers her the giraffe with his metal hand. She reaches out without fear, takes the toy from him gently; her mother watches Bucky with shining, grateful eyes, and Steve’s heart feels close to bursting.
Bucky shoves his hands in his pockets and returns to Steve. He ducks his head, briefly bashful, before squinting out at the old wooden roller coaster in the distance. “Good to see some things haven’t changed.”
“There’d be one hell of an uproar, if they ever tore her down.” Steve finishes his hot dog, tosses his soda, wipes his hands on his shirt. “Wanna go?”
“You gonna hurl on me again?”
Steve shrugs. “Only one way to find out.”
Bucky grins at him, bright and easy, and they stroll off together towards the Cyclone.