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“I’m pretty sure my horse is an asshole,” says Scott Lang, stretched out and already in his bedroll because he says it’s the only position that doesn’t actively hurt.
He’s not entirely wrong; Bucky’s lying out, too, though it’s more about being able to see the stars now that the campfire’s burned down to embers. He hasn’t seen this many stars in the sky in he doesn’t know how long, and God knows he doesn’t ever see this many of them in New York, so he’s going to take the chance when it comes.
“Your horse isn’t an asshole, Scott,” says Steve from next to Bucky.
“Nope, he just has one,” adds Clint cheerfully. “And it’s you.”
“Terrible, Barton,” groans Sam. “I mean, you’re stating the obvious but—”
“You know the guides can probably understand every word we’re saying,” adds Steve. “And since they’re the ones who provided your asshole horse, you should probably be nicer about it.”
“Uh,” says Scott, “you sayin’ that because you can hear them talking about me, Rogers?”
“Plotting, more like,” says Bucky lazily, putting his hands behind his head. “They also say you’re a crap rider and you’ll be lucky not to fall off your horse another half dozen times before we get there.”
“That few?” says Clint.
The ribbing continues; Bucky ignores them, still staring up at the stars.
Damn, there’s so many of them. Too many to even pick out a constellation or two. How the hell did the Greeks or whoever manage it?
Stare up into them long enough, he’s gonna start feeling unmoored. He already does; the entire mission’s unreal. What kind of asshole put a base in the middle of fucking nowhere, so remote they can’t even use a Quinjet to get in without detection, but have to take a two-day journey by horse plus rappel down a cliff before getting there?
The kind of guy who cares more about operational security than convenience, Bucky supposes. At least the scenery’s beautiful. He spent most of the day just gaping at everything, since the horses are so well trained, they don’t actually care if the people on their backs are paying attention or not.
It was… good. Bucky can’t remember the last time he was able to let his brain just… be, without all the requisite ghosts following him. And if maybe his mind wandered a little too close to a certain person still back at the Tower, undoubtedly fuming about how she’s missing out…
Well. Not his fault if wishing she was here overrules the worry he’d have about it if she were.
“—movie night,” Clint is saying. “You know, since the rest of the gang is missing out on the fun.”
“I think Tony and Natasha are having just as much fun with their part of the mission as we are,” says Steve.
“I’m not having fun,” says Scott.
“John Wayne,” says Clint, as if he’s decided. “Steve, you’d like him, he was this great big macho softie, did a ton of Westerns.”
“Don’t tell him,” says Bucky immediately, just as Steve is saying, “Stagecoach. I really liked that movie, you remember it, Buck? You walked around with a swagger for about three weeks.”
“I told you not to tell him,” sighs Bucky, but he can already hear Sam chortling to himself. “Shut up over there. Steve’s a lying asshole.”
“It’s true!” insists Steve.
“City Slickers, then,” says Clint. “That’s a good one, haven’t seen it in years.”
“Probably hasn’t aged well,” says Sam.
“Fuck you, Billy Crystal always ages well,” retorts Clint. “It’s even thematically relevant, since all you guys are city slickers anyway.”
“Hey, you, I’m a bayou slicker, thank you very much,” says Sam. “Maybe Barnes’ll do us some one-armed push-ups.”
“Day’s not over yet,” says Scott, dropping his voice, and the three of them start snorting with giggles.
“I have no idea why they’re laughing,” says Steve.
“I don’t know why I’m doing one-armed push-ups,” replies Bucky.
“Eh, we can do this all day,” says Clint, and they’re off laughing again, except this time, Steve’s chuckling too.
“All right,” says Steve. “We’ll put it on the list. But we’re watching Stagecoach too.”
“Only fair,” says Bucky, who only vaguely remembers liking it, and John Wayne, but not why. He does remember his sisters howling with laughter while he did some kind of funny walk around the living room. Probably help to see it again. And besides, if the team’s gonna educate them about modern cinema, it’s only fair they learn about the classics, too.
Not that Bucky likes thinking about his favorites as classics, but he hears Stark complain about that phenomenon enough to know it’s a universal experience.
One day, Taylor Swift is gonna be called classic rock, and she’s gonna lose her mind. Bucky can’t wait. He grins to himself just thinking about her indignation, imagines her storming around the apartment, ranting.
He kisses her quiet, in his imagination. Or tries to, she comes right back out of the kiss, still ranting. He’ll have to kiss her again, make it a good one—
“My little buttercup,” sings Scott, which is ridiculous enough that it pulls Bucky straight out of what is definitely going to be a very good daydream. “Has the sweetest smile.”
“Dear little buttercup,” sings Clint right back to him and what. The. Hell. “Won’t you stay a while?”
“Nope,” says Steve. “Don’t know it.”
“Because Randy Newman wrote it in 1986 specifically for that movie,” says Sam lazily. “How did you idiots not know that? I knew that.”
“Damn,” says Clint. “I figured it had to be the real thing.”
“Yeah, because the rest of that movie was historically accurate.”
“Hey, the bad guys were Nazis, what else does Steve need?”
“They weren’t Nazis, Barton, it was set in World War One—”
And then Scott starts singing again, and this time, it sounds like something Bucky should know. Like some cowboy on a horse plodding along, singing against some grand backdrop filled with cacti and mountains and sunset.
“Blue shadows on the trail
Little cowboy, close your eyes and dream.”
“Why are they singing? Steve, why are they singing?”
“Shut up, Barnes, it’s tradition to sing around a campfire,” calls Barton. “Lang, how the hell do you know this song?”
“It’s Cassie’s lullaby,” says Scott.
“Shut up all of you and let the man sing,” says Sam.
“Thank you, Wilson.”
“Just so you all know,” says Clint, “if any desert animals start joining in, I’m never camping with you shitheads again.”
All of the doggies are in the corral
All of your work is done
Just close your eyes and dream little pal
Dream of someone.
Bucky closes his eyes again. The song’s not terrible as a lullaby – he’s heard worse – but he ignores the half-hearted, fond ribbing Sam and Clint give to Scott when he finishes. And it does sound a little like something that would have been recorded in the ‘30s or something, not that he’d ever heard much country music back then.
He wonders, briefly, what lullaby he’s gonna end up singing. And then puts that thought straight out of his head, because she’s not even three months yet and Cho’s still going through the initial batch of Springboard files. He’ll be lucky if she pulls out of this mess alive, let alone with a baby healthy enough to have lullabies sung to it at all.
He wonders what she and Cho have found. It’s been three days, and they’ve been no-contact nearly the entire time. Anything could have happened in three days. Including…
His stomach swoops with dread and worry.
No, he thinks, and focuses on the clusters of stars above him, his breathing in and out. She’s alive. She’s fine. She’s going to be fine. She wouldn’t dare be anything else.
“Hey, Buck,” says Steve softly, while the other three keep bickering good-naturedly, “some stars up there, huh?”
“Yeah,” says Bucky, glad for the distraction. “They don’t look all that far away at all, do they?”
“Could reach up and touch ‘em,” agrees Steve. “I don’t think I’ve seen this many since… shit. Poland? Austria? It was that mission with Dugan and the underwear, you remember? 1944?”
Bucky laughs. “Oh, yeah. Hell of a way to start a campfire, just to have Falsworth put it out two minutes later.”
“He didn’t even have another pair,” says Steve, and they’re both giggling like idiots now.
“Damn cold night, though,” says Bucky. “Should’ve kept the fire going for the warmth anyway. Operational security be damned, I thought I was gonna freeze my toes off.”
Steve’s quiet for a long moment. Too long a moment; Bucky’s starting to think he said something wrong.
“It was August, Bucky,” Steve says softly, a nail in the coffin.
Bucky’s stomach drops, and he rubs his face with his hand. “Ah. Shit.”
“What were you remembering?” asks Steve.
The question hangs heavily between them. Bucky frowns into his hand, trying to separate the threads in his head. It’s harder than it sounds; he can see Dugan yelping as his underwear catches the flame and burns up like a flare, while Gabe falls over laughing and Dernier shouts chort poberi!
Oh. Russian, not French. He follows the thread.
“Mongolia, I think,” he says finally. “Sixties? Wind chill kept putting out the fire. But the stars were the same, splashed across the sky and so close it felt like I could reach up and touch ‘em.”
Steve’s quiet for a moment. “Sounds like a good memory.”
“They aren’t all bad. There was this girl in India – she wasn’t part of the mission, I just got a glimpse of her as I was going by. Bride or something, she was all fancied up in red and gold, paint on her arms. Face all lit up. Saw her for maybe half a second, but the way she looked stayed in my head. All joy and hope and happiness.”
“Leave it to you to remember a pretty girl,” Steve says, chuckling.
Bucky kicks him. “Wasn’t just the girl. Had a handler in the 60s, in Vietnam. Don’t remember why, but we had to stop to eat somewhere, and I had this bowl of soup. Pho. You wouldn’t think broth and noodles could taste that good, but haven’t eaten better, before or since.”
“What else?”
“Music,” says Bucky, without even thinking. “Sometimes they’d play music, and some of it was so damn beautiful. Don’t know what it was. Can’t hum it well enough for Nat to recognize it. But yeah. There was music, sometimes.”
Steve falls quiet for a while; so does Bucky, looking up at the same stars he’s seen so many times before. The other guys are quiet too, probably asleep, Bucky thinks, given the slowness of their breathing.
Precious little good, in seventy years of torture and pain and control… but that’s what makes them so precious, Bucky thinks. The Soldier understood that, held onto those good moments so tightly that they kept coming back after every wipe, if they were ever wiped at all.
A pretty girl, a bowl of soup, a few minutes of music. He’s not sure they balance the rest of the seventy years he spent under Hydra’s thumb, but they help.
He’s sure that Steve is asleep – the others definitely are – when Steve speaks.
“I’m glad.”
Bucky turns his head to look at Steve, who’s staring up at the sky above them. “About what?”
“That there was something good to carry you through, when you didn’t have anything else. A girl, a song, a good bowl of soup. You never needed much else, not even me.”
Bucky’s throat is tight. “Pal,” he says, because he’s not sure he can even say Steve’s name, his chest hurts so bad.
“I know you’ve had a hard time the last couple of months. It can’t have been easy, everything that happened between you two, especially considering—”
“Don’t,” says Bucky quickly. “You know you’re more to me than a damn bowl of soup, Steve.”
“I know. And she’s more than a pretty girl you only glimpsed on a mission.”
Bucky sighs and rubs his face. “Don’t read into it, Steve. She and I agreed. Friends. That’s all we are, that’s all we’re ever gonna be. That’s all I get, and I accept that. Why can’t you?”
Steve doesn’t say anything. Bucky listens to the beat of his heart, the shuffling of the horses, the snap and crack of the campfire.
Steve clears his throat. “Do you know when I realized she should be on the team?”
Bucky breathes out. “You said, San Diego.”
“No, that’s when I decided. But I’d realized she should be on the team at MIT.”
Bucky turns to look at him. “You didn’t even know her then.”
“I didn’t know you, either, when you stepped into that alley in Brooklyn. But I decided to use the trash can lid to bash Kevin O’Connor’s head instead of running like you told me to.”
“Idiot,” says Bucky, because he does remember that part, if not all of what came before or after. “Why didn’t you run?”
“Yeah, you said that at the time, too,” says Steve, and Bucky knows he’s smiling. “MIT’s campus overflowing with Doombots, the building on fire, and there she is, a civilian with a bleeding forehead. I told her to run. You know what she did?”
Bucky has a feeling he knows. “Don’t tell me.”
“Picked up broom and used it like a bat on a Doombot aiming straight for my head,” says Steve. He actually sounds dreamy about it, too, the asshole.
“She’s mine, pal,” Bucky growls, and Steve folds his hands under his head and grins up at the stars.
“Friends, huh.”
“Shut up,” snaps Bucky, and he rolls to his side, facing away from Steve.
The stupid thing is, he can picture it – the labs in shambles, Steve ready to face off with a Doombot… and her, coming out of nowhere, a broomstick in her hand ready to hit a home run, right over the Green Monster clear across the Charles River.
He can’t help himself. “How far she hit it?”
“Right back out the building, almost took Iron Man’s head off.”
“Atta girl,” chuckles Bucky. “That’s my—”
He breaks off.
It’s quiet for a few moments, and then Bucky slowly rolls to his back again, staring up at the sea of stars above.
“I didn’t find her for you, Buck,” says Steve quietly. “But I’m glad you found each other.”
“Yeah, well,” says Bucky. “Not so sure we’ve done that yet.”
“Only because you haven’t kissed her yet.”
“Steve.”
“Bucky,” mimics Steve. “Look, I know you’ve been worked up about it more and more the last couple of weeks. The last time I saw you this agitated about a girl was when you were trying to get up the nerve to kiss Penny Carpenter in 8th grade.”
“Enlighten me, pal, how’d that turn out?”
“Kiss her first, then I’ll tell you.”
“Are you bribing me to kiss one girl with a story about me kissing another? I don’t even know what that is, Rogers, but depraved comes to mind.”
“Just tell her, Buck. How you feel, what you want. Tomorrow night, soon as we’re back. Pull her in the stairwell and if neither of you come back, I’ll cover for you.”
Bucky sighs. “Steve…”
“She took a broomstick to a Doombot,” says Steve through a yawn. “Felt like I was you, watching me in the alley behind the movie theater. Feels like I’m you now, watching me with Peggy.”
“I don’t remember you kissing Peggy, pal,” challenges Bucky.
Steve doesn’t answer; he just settles himself and looks up at the stars.
“Yeah, well,” says Steve, sounding smug, like he knows something Bucky doesn’t. “Pretty sure you can figure out what to do without my help.”
“Punk,” mutters Bucky.
“Yup,” agrees Steve, with that damn pleased tone that says he knows he’s getting everything he wants, whether everyone else agrees or not.
And in this case, Bucky’s pretty sure Steve’s aiming for no less than Bucky’s complete and total happiness. The jerk.
Bucky stares so hard at the millions of stars above him, he could be floating in space. No anchor, no ghosts, no second thoughts holding him down.
He can picture it. Pulling her into the stairwell, her back against the blue-painted wall. Her eyes wide, her lips parted as she says, Yes, please, right before he leans in and kisses her, before she wraps her hands around the back of his neck to pull herself up into him, to pull him back down to earth to her.
God, he wants that.
“Maybe I will,” he says. It’s barely more than breath leaving his lips, but he knows Steve hears it, by the way Steve shifts next to him.
All cards on the table. All the stars in the sky. If she can be brave enough to continue this damn fool pregnancy – even when every piece of evidence says she shouldn’t – then he can be brave enough to tell her he doesn’t want to be just friends anymore.
Tomorrow, as soon as they’re back in the Tower. He’ll tell her.