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When Bucky wakes up to see Steve standing over him, all muscles and broad shoulders, Bucky knows he is living on borrowed time, and that God has finally taken him up on his bargain. Please, God, let Steve live, take me instead.
Bucky has been saying that prayer since he was ten years old and saw Steve get his first of many bouts of pneumonia. As he sat there watching this fragile blond boy take ragged breath after ragged breath, Bucky realized how little his own life was worth, and how much it would mean to the world if Steve could keep living. C’mon, God, he would think, A life for a life, it’s fair. The truth was Bucky didn’t think he would survive watching Steve die.
“Buck, it’s me,” Steve says. “I thought you were dead.”
Bucky comes back to himself for a moment, and forces himself to look up at this new Steve. Bucky knows this is where he’s supposed to say something that will bring Steve some kind of comfort or reassurance. That’s his job after all, and he’s done it a million times before, from taking care of Steve after some back alley fight or reassuring him that no he wasn’t taking too many shifts down at the dock, he’s not made of glass, Steve. (Bucky made sure to ice the muscles in his shoulders long after Steve had gone to bed.)
“I thought you were smaller,” is what he settles for in the end.
As soon as they start trying to get out of the building, it’s immediately clear that Steve is stronger and faster now, and any wheezing in his breath is only a memory in Bucky’s fried brain.
“Did it hurt?” he asks, because he needs to know.
“A little,” Steve says tersely.
“Is it permanent?” he asks, because there’s always the chance God is fucking with him. He likes to do that, as evidenced by the three times already he’s had Bucky call the priest for last rites for Steve.
“So far,” Steve answers again in that same clipped tone.
Of course, it’s not an easy escape. There’s a wall of fire and Steve tells Bucky to go on without him, and Bucky resists the urge to tell Steve that he would rather jump into the flames then move from where he was standing.
They walk back to base and Bucky listens to Steve’s clear breathing. He thinks about how Steve’s body will never get up on him now and Bucky has gotten his wish. But Bucky knows that wishes come at a price, and he finds his hands shaking as he tries to remember what he told the Zola man.
If you get captured by those Nazi bastards boys, You give ‘em your name and your I.D. number and tell ‘em to go to hell. You can die knowing you protected your country.
Bucky doesn’t remember what he said, but he knows he said more than his name and his I.D. number. God knows what kinds of national secrets he spilled in between his screaming. Well, the few he had access to, anyway. He looks at Steve again. His face is covered in dirt and his blond hair is plastered to his face from sweat. Bucky knows Steve would never have broken like Bucky might have.
They get back to camp and Bucky, as well as the others from Azzano, get honorable discharges. Bucky stares at it for a long time wondering if it’s mocking him.
“Ready to go home, Sarge?” Dugan asks him, sitting down next to him and giving him a hearty clap on the back.
“Not sure it’s time for me to go home yet,” he says.
Dugan stares at him for a moment. “You know that Rogers fella don’t you?”
“Well yeah, he saved all our sorry asses out there,” Bucky says, the light tone he was going for not quite catching.
Dugan’s look tells him as much. “From before, you knew him from before all this, didn’t you?”
He considers telling Dugan everything. Every last fucking god forsaken forbidden detail about how he’s loved Steve since he could understand what it meant to love someone and he’s been making bargains with God and the Devil for even longer trying to keep his stupid blue-eyed face in his life.
Bucky’s Ma used to say God worked in mysterious ways, but to Bucky it seemed to be downright torture that he was allowed this beautiful, wonderful, human being in his life only to have him constantly in danger or threatened of being taken away forever. Bucky couldn’t remember a time he wasn’t afraid. Couldn’t remember a time he didn’t look forward to his own death if it meant Steve got to live.
This fucking serum was just more proof of that, one step forward and two steps back. Steve’s body wouldn’t kill him anymore, but that wouldn’t stop other people from trying to do it for him. Bucky was staring at his form because he knew he couldn’t go home. He would never want to be somewhere if it meant he couldn’t protect Steve.
“Yeah, I knew him,” is what he says to Dugan.
***
Bucky is sure the others know, or at least suspect, what Steve means to him by now. Steve, of course, remains oblivious as ever.
“I just don’t understand why you followed me back here, Buck,” Steve said to him one night, their mats rolled out neatly next to one another. “I know you miss your ma and the girls like crazy, and you don’t even have to be here, you could have gone home.”
“Someone has to protect your punk ass, Steve, and who better than the best sniper in the United States Army?” Bucky said lightly, before rolling over and feigning sleep.
Steve is oblivious, Bucky knows, because it’s completely unthinkable to him that someone could ever see him as important or worth giving a damn about. Of course, this breaks Bucky’s fucking heart but there’s not much he can do about it. He watches Steve joking with Dugan about who snores louder and he smiles in a way that makes Bucky stop believing God is a sadistic bastard for one moment. They might be in the middle of a war, but Steve smiles more here, and as much as he hates this place and the constant danger it poses, he can’t hate that it makes Steve smile like that Maybe someday there will be a way to make Steve see he’s worth it after all.
***
Then of course, he falls.
He falls like an angel banished from paradise and it’s hard not to see the metaphor with the snow-covered mountain whipping past him as he plummets. His hand is still reaching out towards Steve and he can’t help but think that Steve is alone now, Steve will die without him. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, he thinks frantically. We were supposed to be together.
Bucky Barnes makes one more bargain with God and the Devil before he hits the ground. I don’t care how, I don’t care what hell I live in, just take me back.
***
Bucky gains some form of his old consciousness every decade or so, and when he remembers the things he’s done, the people he’s hurt, he can’t help but think he asked for this.
***
Steve finds him in the end and Bucky only remembers at the last minute as he dives out of a crashing plane to resurrect Steve from the Potomac. Steve is not supposed to die. Bucky is supposed save Steve.
***
Bucky tries to run at first, because he is dangerous and unstable and he’s supposed to keep Steve away from danger, even if the danger is him. Of course, it doesn’t work. Bucky is far too weak willed for that, and he will always come back to Steve.
Steve takes him in with open arms and forgiveness that Bucky does not deserve. Bucky isn’t worth all the trouble Steve is going to. He tells Steve just as much.
“You didn’t kill those people Buck, that wasn’t you,” Steve says.
“But I asked for it, Steve,” he says, without thinking.
Steve looks at him. “You asked for your arm to be cut off, and to be brainwashed and tortured for seventy years by underground Nazis?”
“No,” Bucky says, “No, of course not, but I--” Bucky doesn’t even know how to explain it. How do you tell someone you’ve been making bargains with both good and evil, whoever would take him up on it, for a century?
“It wasn’t your fault, Buck,” Steve says.
Bucky lets it go. Maybe if Steve can believe he’s a good person, someday he will too. It’s a nice thought at least.
***
There’s something bothering Bucky, but he can’t quite figure out what it is. It’s like an itch at the back of his head, just small enough that he can’t quite find where it is.
So he ignores it. He goes grocery shopping with Steve listening to him ramble on about everything that’s changed since the 1940s. What’s better, what’s worse, what’s miraculously stayed the same. Bucky thinks Steve might be more in his element in the 21st century than he ever was in 1940.
They get home and Steve cooks dinner like he does most nights, and Bucky sits on the couch trying to figure out what’s bothering him. Steve has already asked him about it three times, and Bucky needs to tell him soon or else he’s going to get that pinched look on his face.
Steve’s anxiousness is the closest thing Bucky’s seen to any kind of danger for Steve, well the closest thing since the Helicarrier—wait a minute.
Bucky stands up abruptly and turns to Steve, who of course notices.
“What is it, Buck?” he asks, abandoning a pot of sauce.
“Why did you try to save me?” Bucky asks.
“What?”
“Why did you try to save me, even though I was a lost cause and I was trying to kill you?” Bucky asks again.
“You were never a lost cause, Bucky, I knew that,” Steve says, coming up to Bucky and leading him towards the couch to sit down.
“But I was trying to kill you,” Bucky says.
“But it was still you,” Steve said.
“But I’m…”
“You’re what?” Steve says.
Bucky doesn’t want to say it. It’s something he’s known his whole life and he doesn’t want to say it to Steve, but he knows he has to. “I’m not someone worth saving, Steve.”
Steve doesn’t say anything for several minutes. Bucky begins counts how many breaths he takes to keep himself calm. At breath sixty-four Steve speaks.
“What makes you think I am?” he says.
Of all the things Steve could say, that’s not the response Bucky had been expecting. “What do you mean?”
“If you’re not worth saving, what makes you think that I am?” Steve repeats.
“You’re…” Bucky says, but he doesn’t know how to tell him that he is everything good about this horrible, soulless world they’re a part of. How his smiles make Bucky believe he can be different, or how his passion makes Bucky believe that there’s something good worth fighting for.
“How do you feel about me, Buck?” Steve asks.
There it is. Bucky has been avoiding this for a century and there’s no reason not to put all his cards on the table. “I love you,” he says, simply.
“Did it ever occur to you, that I think you’re worth saving because I feel the same way?” Steve asks.
And no, no Bucky had never considered that. It had never even been a possibility that crosses his mind and now it’s all he can think about. Steve thinks he’s worth it, Steve thinks he’s someone worth saving, Steve loves him.
Steve loves him.
Which doesn’t fix everything. Bucky is still a man who knows he’s sold his soul a hundred times over for the most selfish reason imaginable. He knows he’ll never quite see in himself what Steve sees in him.
But as Steve pulls Bucky closer to him than he’s ever been allowed and their kiss softly in the quietness of their rundown apartment, Bucky thinks maybe he won’t have to bargain anymore.