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1.
At this point, Steve's more or less resigned himself not really being able to hide what he feels.
It doesn't mean he doesn't try, because sometimes the very fact that he's trying to do it carries the important information, and thinking about how that works sometimes gives him a headache. But he just doesn't expect it to succeed very often. Natasha's Natasha, Clint might not be quite that eerily good but he's still pretty damn effective, Elizabeth's intuition is uncomfortably accurate and anything she knows, Bruce knows, and even Tony can be almost as as perceptive as Tasha if he's bothering to make the effort.
Which he always seems to do at the most uncomfortable moment possible, while being completely obtuse all the rest of the time.
And Bucky -
He was never very good at hiding his feelings from Bucky anyway. And that was before Bucky more or less couldn't help being painfully attuned to everything Steve does, every cue he gives off. And it is painfully, more for him than for Steve - because Bucky can't stop even when he wants to, and because of the reason. And there's a weight towards the negative, the unhappy end of the emotional range, but still: Steve might as well print his thoughts on his forehead while he thinks them, most of the time.
For a good long while, that worried him, especially when it came to anger. Took that while before it occurred to him that Bucky could tell when he was stepping on anger just as clearly as he could tell Steve was angry, and maybe by now that mattered more.
Today's problem isn't anger, anyway.
When Bucky comes out of the kitchen, it takes him all of three seconds to stop and frown, and give Steve a look that's full of an unspoken question. Steve sighs, picks up the tablet he'd put down and holds it out, like somehow if he doesn't have to answer out loud that'll make it hurt less.
Or at least, it won't hurt more than it is already.
Bucky takes it and scans the obituaries Steve'd been looking at. Astrid's the third down the page; he doesn't think Bucky'll remember the name, but the mention of the USO and Astrid's time with it are both pretty prominent. After about a half a moment, Bucky puts the tablet aside. He sits down on the folded-up futon beside Steve.
"I ever meet her?" he asks, and Steve shakes his head.
He can feel the weight of his own elbows on his knees, and he feels heavy. Like someone turned all the years he missed into rocks and then piled them on his head. It's worst with Peggy, it always is, but he's not safe from it other places either - from the way that less than half a decade ago, all these people were so damn young.
"She was really shy, everywhere but on stage," he says. "And she had a . . . bad time with the boyfriend she had, when we were touring. Bad enough he tried to track her down at one of the shows, after Annette finally got her to end it. I was surprised she stayed on to go to Europe, and she spent most of her time there hiding. Not that anybody did anything," Steve adds, "at least not as far as I know and I usually found out, but being around that many men . . ."
"You get to see her?" Bucky asks. He means since waking up. The kitten makes her way across the floor and jumps up on the futon, crawls up Bucky's left arm and starts to settle around his shoulders before he stops her and puts her on his lap instead.
"Yeah, couple times," Steve replies. "She's been sick for a while, too, tired and unhappy. She was probably ready." As if that made it any easier. For him, anyway.
A heartbeat passes, then two, and then Bucky reaches over to cradle the side of Steve's head with his right hand, pulling Steve towards him and kissing Steve's temple, resting his forehead against the side of Steve's head.
Grief gets wrapped in a thin desperate gratitude that he's here, that Steve's not sitting on some couch alone reading the damn thing - doesn't make it hurt less, not really, but having done that a couple times in the two years alone, the difference it means he doesn't feel like he's teetering uneasily over an endless chasm. That's something.
Steve's not exactly sure when he starts to talk, and he can tell its disjointed and rambling, but he just sort of . . . keeps going, anyway. Lets it unroll and then lets himself not think about it.
He hadn't known the chorus girls that long. He's honestly always caught off guard by how short their time was, because somehow it feels like it should have been years. It wasn't, barely a few months, but . . .
Steve's never been sure exactly what it was that made them decide he was safe - not just that he was going to keep his hands to himself, but that he could be trusted with secrets, trusted to share their spaces and lives and stories. They shut the other handful of men on the tour out, shut them out hard: from manager to stage-hands to anyone else, they hit a wall of perfect makeup and near-perfect solidarity, usually rooted in Annette, polished and performing and kind of bland. At most, the other guys might see the beginning of someone's tears, but even then the other girls would hustle her away into the sanctum of the dressing room.
Every new guy on the tour was told that if he tried to pull Peeping Tom into that dressing room (whichever one it happened to be), nobody else was responsible for what happened to them. Sometimes one of them thought he was special, or that it was a joke, but Gloria only ever went so far as to actually use her bat with one of them, and, well -
Steve'd had a strong intuition that that one was more than just rough around the edges. That there was something pretty evil lurking underneath. So he was happy enough to get rid of him after the guy showed up to yell about how she'd broken his arm and nobody had any sympathy.
The girls would flirt with men and dance with them, go on dates and all the rest, but there was always a way it felt clear to Steve that to them, men were unpredictable wild animals, and they treated most of them accordingly, even the ones they were dating. Sometimes even the ones they'd married.
But somewhere along the line, Annette decided Steve was okay, and he'd suddenly ended up with what felt like two dozen older sisters.
Maybe it was that he hadn't found much about their lives shocking or horrible, even the bits that Respectable Society probably would have.
The fact was, for the most part, women who had better options didn't sign up to be showgirls. You had to come from a place where the pay and the opportunities really did look like they were worth the long hours, the exhausting work, the endless demands for perfection, and (in the interests of calling a spade a spade) the outright harassment you'd probably get from all sides. When that was better, or at least on par, with what you'd get anyway.
A couple of the girls had been married, mostly to non-commissioned soldiers; many had boyfriends, occasionally more than one, though that always tended to end in a mess as far as Steve could see. Some babies or kids they left with mothers or sisters or aunts. Whether or not the ones with the kids were the also the ones who were married was a kind of fifty-fifty chance. Some had run away - from parents, from orphanages, from husbands, from lives they hadn't wanted - and changed their names and lives. Some were just hoping some man who was at least a little better than their other options would be enchanted enough to make a difference.
Some just needed the money, because you have to eat and you have to sleep somewhere, and they figured this was less likely to get them killed than the factories.
Steve and Bucky's neighbourhood had been full of the people who were just one bare rung up from that, the kind of families that were the soldiers-and-showgirls when they settled down and tried to be respectable, and desperately clung to that, as hard as they could. And it had been full of a lot of the people who couldn't keep hold of it anyway. You could slide down pretty easy, and there was a long way to go.
Sometimes you could even live more comfortably being disreputable than you could being respectable, for a while. There was more money on the other side of respectable, while you were young. But there wasn't much to catch you once that started to slide away, no one to step in to look after you when you couldn't look after yourself. That's when anyone who could tried to scrub themselves back up and sort it all out, and make up with families they'd fought with, or husbands and wives they'd met. You did that, if you could - but not everyone could.
You had to get a few blocks further before you got into the neighbourhoods that were mostly the people who couldn't hold onto anything, or never had the chance, but Steve and Bucky's was full of the people desperately trying to pretend they weren't hovering over that edge.
Hell. More often than not, Steve and his mom were some of those people. He'd never quite realized that, realized it was part of why she clung so hard to an honestly miserable job. He knew things would get worse if she lost it, or at least if she lost it and couldn't find another one, but she'd done a lot to try to keep him from realizing how bad.
So had Bucky.
And more than a few people from both sides of the line - the women, anyway - had come to Steve's mom for what help she could give them, when they were sick or hurt, because they couldn't go anywhere else. Sometimes there wasn't much his mom could do; once or twice Steve remembers her hugging him tightly and ignoring a knock at the door, pretending to be at work, because she was too tired. But most of the time, she answered. Most of the time she tried to fix what was wrong.
So Steve'd learned exactly how many things could go wrong, and what kind of things, and stuff like how a pregnancy you couldn't afford - maybe because of money, maybe because of something else - could be worse than cancer, and some of the things that happened in respectable looking homes, or behind them. Their kind of respectable, anyway.
(After all, there were people, and a lot of them, who figured coming from someplace like Brooklyn, and especially a tenement there, automatically meant you couldn't be respectable.)
So maybe that was it: maybe somehow that'd shown through. Or maybe it was something else. He doesn't know. He just knows somewhere along the line they'd decided he was alright and suddenly he knew about a whole new world.
They'd been from everywhere, they'd been Catholic and Protestant and three - Ella, Sarah and Janet - had been Jewish and kept it as quiet as they could to avoid more trouble than you got being a woman on the stage anyway, and hung on news from Europe with a kind of desperate fear. Some had been Italian, and Irish, and Polish, and everything else they could be in the segregated world of the military, all the way to Edith, who'd spent most of the tour scared of what might happen if her boyfriend in Boston found out she wasn't Italian like she claimed, if he found out her dad was black.
Edith'd explained to Steve that he'd kill her; Steve'd explained to Edith that no, he damn well wouldn't, and also that she was way too good to waste her time on that kind of guy. Edith'd given Steve a kind of fondly knowing look, and Steve hadn't pushed. She'd told him about her dad, instead, and how he'd helped her mom run away from her dad, and how he'd sing Edith lullabies even though he couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.
She'd died before Steve woke up, but he'd looked her up, the way he looked all of them up, and when he found her obituary it said she'd spent thirty years married and happy, and to a man who definitely didn't have that boyfriend's name. So there was that, at least.
She'd had lots of kids and lots of grandkids, and her son'd become a pastor and one daughter'd become a teacher. As far as the obituary showed, she'd managed to have a good life.
He hadn't bothered her family, hadn't been able to think of how to make contact in a way that wasn't . . . intrusive. But he's still glad she wasn't one of the girls who turned into the women he couldn't find. Who just . . . vanished.
They could have changed their names, the names Steve knew them by could've been made up, there could just be a gap in the records somewhere, but . . . there are a lot of ways to disappear, from where they'd been. Most of them awful. Most of them sad.
Annette had disappeared. After all those months of looking after the other girls, looking after Steve, fierce and bossy and one of the kindest people Steve's ever met - he couldn't find anything on her, after the USO troupe disbanded.
He thinks about that, looking at the table. Realizes he's found Bucky's left hand with his, and he supposes if nothing else it's not like he can hold on to it too tight.
After a while Bucky pushes him away, a little, and says, "Go order some flowers or whatever they want you to do instead of flowers, and some kinda card. I'm gonna make some coffee."
2.
Sometimes, Steve knows, even if Bucky manages to keep hold of where he is and when, it's like the skin over hot milk, thin and fragile, floating on top of a lot more underneath and easily dislodged or crumpled by what roils up underneath. And unfortunately he'd probably find way too much resonance in comparing himself to milk-scum, so Steve's never offered the comparison. Weak, thin unwanted byproduct of - Yeah.
He's not going there. He has to be careful with things like that.
And it's frustrating, he said, this time to Natasha, after they crossed paths in the Tower and went out for coffee - not that Steve's sure of how much he believes in the coincidence. On the other hand, it's not like it matters. It doesn't bother him, not anymore. It's just . . . Natasha. It's how she works, it's what comes naturally, and she actually doesn't really expect to fool you.
And she's easy to talk to, now that he knows what most of her ironies and edges mean, or cover up.
She shot him a sardonic look and said, Sometimes you should just give up and curse, Steve. Seriously. You manage to put enough invective into words like "frustrating" that the restraint's just a bit pointless. We all know you mean the "fucking" you're just not putting in front of it.
As a comment, it did what she probably meant it to, and derailed the way his thoughts turned back to the seething frustration a bit, so that he smiled briefly and turned his coffee cup.
My mother, I'll have you know, he said, always insisted cursing was the resort of the lazy and the unimaginative. And then his smile went a bit crooked as the thought kept going and he went on, At Bucky, a lot, actually. When he was over, and she was home. And he usually said something flip, like how that described him perfectly. Considering he managed to tutor me and stay at the head of the class, at the time it was pretty funny. Even Mom laughed.
The look Natasha gave him split itself between knowing, sad and ironic. And now? she asked, and he sighed.
And now, he'd said, in retrospect, it's maybe a little less funny and I think maybe sometimes some of his messed up predates HYDRA by a while.
And then Steve added, felt compelled to add, or maybe correct - Our messed up.
Oh good, Natasha told him brightly, picking up her coffee. You said it, I don't have to.
She'd smiled at him when he made a face, sipped her chai latte and then looked serious again.
You know, she said, thoughtfully, with most of the stories you've told me - I think your best friend spent a lot of time working pretty hard to be someone you wouldn't be disappointed in. It's probably why the fight over you trying to enlist again when he wasn't got so nasty.
You're probably right, he acknowledged. He could acknowledge that kind of thing with Tasha, where it could get . . . tricky, with other people. Even with Sam it could sometimes feel like having the scab ripped off something you didn't even know had one. Which is funny, because I was more or less -
- doing the same thing? Natasha finished, and this time her amusement almost seemed like it was fond. See this? This is why I keep saying you two deserve each other. It's probably a good thing neither one of you's a girl or we might actually be witness to endless exchanges of 'no I love you more'. And then I might have to kill you.
That made Steve throw a napkin at her. Watch it, he mock threatened, scowling and looking significantly at her throat and the necklace nobody, even Tony, ever so much as mentions. Or at least if Tony had ever mentioned it, it'd been in private and whatever happened convinced him never to do it around anyone else.
Even Steve wasn't actually mentioning it, and he wouldn't.
She'd looked at him with with eyes so wide and innocent he had to crack a smile. Then he leaned back in the chair and sighed. Anyway. I know it's a problem now. I just . . . don't know what else I can do, to get across that it's not a problem. To get across just how much it isn't, he'd repeated, and will never be a problem.
Nothing, Natasha said. Just more of the same. But you know that. Remember: the easy way -
- is mined, Steve'd finished. With ridiculous insane alien mines that . . . fill in the rest of the simile with something clever, I haven't had enough coffee for this.
Steve, Natasha'd said, her voice less playful and more genuine; when he looked at her, her face matched her voice. You'll get there.
To someone else, even to Sam, he might have said he knows, he will always know; here, he'd said, Yeah? because she's at least been on both sides of something like all of it before. It's . . .different, that way. Nobody else can tell him anything he can't tell himself, about this, but Tasha can.
Two months after New York, she'd said, in Russian, looking down at her cup and then back to him, Clint scared me so badly the only reason I didn't kill him was that he scared me by trying to get himself killed. It was more honesty than Steve expected. Then, with less gravity and a bit of what almost might've been wry self-consciousness, she'd gone on, I mean I did drop him and cuff him to the leg of a heavy table so he'd have to stay still while I told him off, but I didn't kill him. Or leave him there when I was done.
Steve couldn't help the smile or shaking his head a little, and she'd tipped her cup in acknowledgement. Yeah, she said. You'll get there. I know it probably gets old to hear this kind of thing, she went on in English, but it wasn't that long ago I was pretty sure you were both going to die, Steve. If we were lucky. And I don't make that kind of judgement lightly. You're doing okay.
It's something about the admission of absolute pessimism that makes the reassurance work. But she probably knew that.
Bucky's watching Korean soap operas again when Steve gets home. He watches them the way most people watch British black comedies, at least as far as Steve can tell. And "watch" is probably not really the right word: a lot of the time, like now, he's flat on his back not looking at the TV, just listening to the whole thing while Abrikoska purrs in his ear.
Korea's one of the blanks they haven't managed to fill in at all yet: apparently Bucky's Korean's flawless, at least according to the very surprised lady behind the counter at one of the convenience stores a few blocks from here, but the Korean war's too early for Bucky to've been there, he doesn't remember anything about it, and there's nothing obvious to tie the Winter Soldier to, nothing to indicate how he'd've been active - or where, North or South or both.
The language's just this thing without context. Bucky never said so but Steve's pretty sure he started with the Korean shows hoping something'd shake some kind of memory loose, give him a clue, but it never has. Now he just watches them because apparently they're pretty entertaining, at least to the frame of mind he watches them in.
His hips are on the sheepskin and his shoulders aren't, which means something's twisted and unhappy - unhappier than usual - in his back. Steve keeps thinking he needs more than what he can get from self-directed study, for that kind of thing, but the thoughts tend to stall out around there, because classes, prerequisites and programs tend to be a bit more than he's got the mental wherewithal to figure out just now.
And because Steve's been standing there looking for a minute, Bucky's eyes slit open. Steve shakes his head. Goes to lie down, make it clear there wasn't anything important.
"Why are they all crying in a circle at a wedding?" he asks, as he settles with a couple of the pillows propping him up, mostly on his front and a little bit on Bucky, with his arm around and tucked under the back of Bucky's waist.
Feels some tension let go almost from the second he settles. Watches Bucky's eyes settle closed again, too.
"One of the guys just told the bride and groom they can't get married because they're actually all brothers and sister," Bucky says, idly. "And now they have to go avenge their parents. Long story."
His right hand rests on Steve's forearm. After a minute, he's tracing the line of the veins under Steve's skin, in the absent way that's starting to happen a little more often. Not much, but a little.
Like he doesn't have to work himself up, convince himself it's okay, first.
"That's insane," Steve tells him.
"The acting's pretty bad, too," Bucky replies. "Almost like real life."
Steve snorts, all things considered he kinda has to give him the point.
3.
The night of his parents' funeral, Bucky got very, very drunk. Steve remembers it now with the wincing filter of perfect hindsight - he'd probably been solidly on his way to risking his life. He was definitely halfway drunk already when he told his aunt he didn't care if he never saw a single other member of his family again, and then started the shouting match and eventual scuffle that ended with him punching his uncle hard enough to knock the man down.
The whole thing ended in their kitchen, Bucky sitting on the floor then mostly because staying on a chair honestly called for more balance than he had left at that point. And after railing at his mom's family, and his dad's family, and how the car that killed his parents had been a stupid waste of money in the first place and more about his mom being pretentious and house-proud than any kind of sense, Bucky stopped for a while. Steve reached over, and after a brief half-argument, pulled the bottle out of Bucky's hand and put it on the table.
Bucky leaned his head against the wall and squinted, frowned at Steve for a minute. He said, Your mom was better than my mom. No shuddup, and he held up a wavering finger because Steve was gonna interrupt, shuddup I'm talking, she was, she was a better mom an' a better person but my mom was my mom. N'she tucked me back in when I had nightmares and cleaned up when I wet the bed'n'cut my hair an' stuff. An' she was . . . Bucky waved his hand and looked away. She was shallow'n'she was mean t'people sometimes an' petty an' cared way too fucking much about if we had better curtains'n'other people but she was my mom.
Pretty soon after that he spent about an hour puking his guts out, off and on, and then Steve poured him into bed.
It wasn't exactly the most coherent and detailed expression of emotional dynamics ever, and Steve hadn't actually got it at the time and considering Bucky probably hadn't even really understood what he was saying, but now he gets the point. And the point's mostly about the thousand little things that happen in a day, that you do, that you take on, and don't count cost. And what they mean.
Bucky spent a lot of time hiding at Steve's place, when they were kids - and now Steve can recognize it as hiding. Hiding from his parents fighting, or silently not fighting but hating each other, or his dad not coming home until late and smelling of whatever someone'd distilled that week, or his mom and his aunts' endless games of oneupmanship (oneupwomanship?) over how well they managed to make it look like they had money they didn't really have. And he loved Steve's mom a lot.
But some things do matter. Day in and day out. What happens over and over and over every day . . .matters.
God knows Steve knows that. After all, he did spend enough time scrambling for words to explain more or less that, rehearsing arguments in his head that never turned out to happen in real life. It's the kind of thing that can stand against someone being petty and prideful and vain, and then when there isn't any of that anyway, when it's just on top of . . . being a good person, a great person, that just means it matters even more.
Steve thinks about that, all at once, in half a second after he wakes up.
Steve wakes up because Bucky's awake, because he's been sitting on the bed with his arms wrapped around his knees, and not touching Steve at all, for more than about ten minutes. And when he's finished the first beat of waking, just when he's really and truly awake, that whole thought, all of it, flashes through Steve's head.
It's a kind of prelude to seeing nights stretching out behind them, a lot of them, a lot of nights sort of like this, and (thank God) the endless sketched possibility of more, stretching the other way, out in front. Day in day out, road stretched out past the horizon in front of them as well as behind.
It's kind of a heavy thought for the middle of the night and just being woke up, but sometimes thoughts do that. Steve rubs his eyes and braces his arms behind him, leaning on his forearms. He frowns at Bucky through the half-light: Bucky only hasn't been touching him for a bit, but he has been watching Steve for a while. Or at least, that's what it looks like. There a set to his body that Steve's learned to associate with that kind of a thing.
And Steve doesn't really understand the look he's got, but that's not because he's not familiar with it. He's been waking up to something sort of like it for, Jesus, a long time - since the first time he woke up out of a fever and it was Bucky sitting beside the bed instead of his mom. He can interpret some of it. There's deep thought in there, and there's a question, for example. But the rest of it's still as opaque to him now as it was when he was small, and Bucky never explains.
Steve's not sure Bucky actually knows what it is either, to be honest.
He clears his throat a bit and says, "You okay?"
Bucky nods instead of answering out loud, just barely. Looks at Steve for another long minute before he says, quietly, "You're an idiot. You know that, right?"
It's kind of a non-sequitur. Once, Steve'd probably have tried really hard to figure out what Bucky's talking about. Now, there's a kind of checklist in his head, list of things that might mean he really does need to wake the rest of the way up and pay attention - kinds of tension in Bucky's body, weird notes in his voice, that kind of thing.
And since Steve's not seeing them, he figures that A, Bucky's been having a long internal argument (okay maybe a conversation, but probably an argument) either with himself or with a mental projection of Steve, which he hasn't won yet, and B, whatever it is, it can wait until morning and they should both go back to sleep.
So instead he asks, "That remark meant to be about anything in particular, or just a kind of general observation?"
There's enough light to see the shadow of a smile. "General observation," Bucky says.
"Okay," Steve says, yawning, "then I'd like to point out that I'm not the one sitting hunched up and probably getting cold right now."
"I never said I wasn't an idiot," Bucky replies, dryly, but he's already unfolding, feet and legs sliding back under the comforter as he moves to lie own.
"Uh huh," Steve says, moving over closer so he can curl around Bucky as he settles, "okay so we match."
After a minute or two, as Bucky starts to actually relax, Steve asks, "Are you okay?"
Bucky's "Shut up and go to sleep, Steve," isn't actually an answer, but it sounds drowsy enough that Steve can credit Bucky'll at least rest for a few more hours and doze, even if he doesn't manage full sleep, and Steve can feel the rest of him going lax enough to mean that whatever woke him up, it's dissipated by now.
"You shut up and go to sleep," he says, because there are certain things you just have to do, when you're them. But one of the responses Bucky's got to choose from to that involves Patient Silence, and that's what he goes for.
At some point Bucky stopped giving him a hard time about what he'd sometimes called Steve's being an octopus or something, about how Steve did wrap around him when they slept. Maybe worried Steve would actually start believing it was a complaint. Which Steve never would. Complaints that Bucky meant had a completely different shape - these days, it's a different different shape than it used to be, back when, but still: it's not that one.
Thankfully.
Steve thinks I missed you, but he's actually too far towards falling back to sleep for it to make its way out in words, so he rests his cheek on the back of Bucky's shoulder instead.