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Ever since Steve moved in with Bucky, he has kept a list of things to remember about Bucky in a notebook. He used to know Bucky inside and out, know everything from how long it would take him to walk to the store for a snack to which woman in the room he was most likely to go for. He had been able to finish half of Bucky’s sentences. He intends to know this Bucky, half new, half old, just as well; it’ll just take him some time.
Most of the entries of the list consist of things not to do, things to be careful of. The first entry of the list had been the translations of Bucky’s trigger words: longing, rusted, seventeen, daybreak, furnace, nine, benign, homecoming, one, freight car. Steve had figured that since they were first uttered in Russian, they were relatively safe, and some were. Seventeen, nine, and one were numbers, and they were spoken all the time, in every language. Others, though, seemed to trip Bucky up, even in English.
At the beginning, Steve had tossed out a reference to Bucky’s fall from the freight train, talking about how wonderful it was to have Bucky back, how lucky he was. “When you fell from that freight car, I thought that was it. I thought I’d lost my best friend,” he’d said, pressing a hand to Bucky’s knee.
Bucky, once so bright-eyed, had watched Steve warily, staring down at the hand on his knee with wide, disturbed eyes. When Steve said the words freight car, he had flinched, but Steve had thought it was just a response to the terrible memory, and resolved to be careful about the topic in the future.
“Maybe you did,” Bucky had said in that low rasp, drawing his knee away. Steve had let him go.
Later, though, it began to dawn on Steve what might be unsettling Bucky so much. They had just taken a weekend away, camping alone in the woods: tent, smores, sleeping bags, the whole thing. After as many hard nights as they had both had, it felt fun and pleasantly silly to “rough it” so artificially. Everything was warm and clean, the stars blazed through the night, and the two of them lay on their backs, whispering to each other the names of constellations and reminiscing about their long-gone science teacher. Bucky had smiled, even, in the firelight. It was Bucky’s idea, that trip.
“I don’t feel right here,” he’d said, pulling back the closed curtains of the living room window just a few inches and looking out at the smooth suburban streets. “I could hurt someone.”
Steve had come up behind him, aching to touch Bucky’s shoulder, his waist, anything to feel that solid warmth, but he had since learned that unexpected touches brought out those flashing eyes, the beginnings of a snarl on Bucky’s lips, so he held back. “You’re not going to hurt anyone.”
Bucky had smiled humorlessly. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
Bucky flexed his metal hand, watching the metal plates shift against each other with a kind of revulsion, something Steve had grown used to seeing him do. He had wanted to take Bucky’s hand in his, cold and metal, and press it to his lips, to kiss the point in his shoulder where the ragged line of melted metal still stood out like scar tissue.
“I can’t be here,” Bucky had said flatly, curling his hand into a fist.
And so they went out to the woods, cooked huge meals on the campfire, and ate every crumb.
“If only little you could see the amount of food you’re eating now,” Bucky had rumbled, flipping yet another burger patty on the grill, and Steve had felt young, so young again, as he did every time Bucky mentioned the days before the army and the train and everything that followed.
They went swimming in the lake, and though Bucky insisted on a long-sleeve swimming top, cagey about his scars, they had raced each other to the other shore and back, and that boyish side of Bucky surfaced: shit-talking, heckling, grabbing at Steve’s ankles. When they’d hauled themselves ashore, sunning the cold water off of their bodies like seals, Steve had noticed Bucky watching him, his eyes tracing the lines of Steve’s water-slick body, his hands twitching at his sides in the sand, his voice going rustier than usual. Whenever Steve looked back, Bucky pulled his gaze sharply away, so Steve let it be. He hadn’t known Bucky was into men, but he had known for a while that his body was very attractive to many people, and appreciation didn’t mean love. That was alright. He didn’t feel that need to be with Bucky, like that, the way he had when he was a kid in Brooklyn; he knew the world had given him more than he could’ve ever asked for by giving him his best friend back. His heart could handle just friends. It had handled much, much worse.
But then they had gotten back home.
“I feel so dirty in this house,” Bucky had remarked, looking down at his dusty boots and dirt-streaked T-shirt.
“Don’t shower yet,” Steve had interjected. “We gotta turn the water heater back on first. The furnace isn’t even going when we’re not here.”
Bucky had gone stock still in the doorway for a second, his eyes shooting to Steve’s face with unmistakable panic, before his expression smoothed over. When he fixed a neat little smile on his mouth afterwards, Steve saw right through it. “Yeah. One thing apartments are better for, I guess.”
Carefully, Steve had closed the door behind them. “Bucky.”
“Steve.”
“What’s wrong?”
Bucky’s mouth tightened. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“I said something. What was it?”
Bucky had stared right at him with that Winter-Soldier stare. “Nothing.” He stamped off his boots and pushed past Steve, dropping his backpack by the door with a careless swing of his arm. “I’m fine.”
Steve’s heart had squeezed tight in his chest as he watched Bucky move, all that grace and muscle, that bottled hurricane he couldn’t read. “You’re sure, Buck?”
“I’m sure.”
But a little research and a few questions to Nat, and he understood. Item #1: Longing, rusted, daybreak, furnace, benign, homecoming, freight car. He wrote them down in his notebook and said them again and again and again in his room, under his breath so Bucky couldn’t hear him through the wall until he memorized them. These were the words he would be careful not to say.
Still later, other things get added to that list.
Bucky is not a sharer, Steve has learned, so he has gathered things from simple observation. When Steve suggests they get a car and watches Bucky give each Ford in the lot a six feet radius, he learns that while Bucky can drive a Ford if he must, he doesn’t like to do it. When he wakes late before a meeting with Stark one day—coffee in the park—and blends up a smoothie to take with him, Bucky’s head shoots up from the breakfast nook, his metal hand scraping hard against the wooden table. No smoothies. Steve’s got it. When the two of them are out, Steve realizes a few things about Bucky that he adds to his list:
Item #13: Always wants to have eyes on as many windows and doors as possible; always wants to sit across from an ally.
Item #24: Always wants both feet on the ground.
Item #29: Prefers not to be strapped to anything, even seatbelts, if they can be avoided.
Steve knows that last one is not to be much of an issue: Bucky is sturdy enough and quick enough to survive most crashes, usually by launching himself out of a side window or bracing himself against whatever’s closest.
Once, he’s off on a run around the block, no more than five minutes, and when he comes back, the door’s locked. He knocks. “Buck?”
Bucky opens the door. “Hey.” His gaze is steady. “What’s your favorite candy bar?”
“Hundred grand,” Steve answers, eyeing him.
Bucky lets him in. “You didn’t lock the door when you left.”
“Sorry, I thought I’d be back soon enough.” Steve twirls his finger. “Just out for a little run.”
Bucky looks like he wants to say something; his jaw flexes in a way that Steve recognizes even from the old days, but he only says, “Oh, alright,” in a painfully manufactured tone.
Even though this type of pushing has never gotten him anywhere, Steve softens his voice and steps in close, close enough that their knuckles nearly bump even though neither of them are reaching for each other. He’s been in love with Bucky for as long as he can remember; not touching Bucky even when he wants to is the thing he has practiced the most, of all the things he’s practiced his whole life. “Everything alright?”
The thing Steve has practiced second-most: being unaffected when Bucky steps away, which he always does.
Bucky hisses through his teeth, turning quickly so that Steve can’t see his expression. “Yes,” he says, a little too fiercely. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” He pushes his metal hand through his hair, and it spills back around his face, dark and beautiful, his brown eyes solemn. “Can I—” He touches his tongue to his bottom lip. “Can I run with you sometime?”
Steve startles, smiling helplessly. “Of course you can, anytime.”
Bucky swallows and bows his head. “Thanks.”
That night, Steve adds two things to the list: Item #42: Always lock the door, and Item #43: sometimes he will want to verify your identity. Make sure you know yourself well?
They go for a walk around the neighborhood, Bucky in long sleeves and leather gloves, and Steve with a baseball cap pulled low over his face. They get protien bars at the corner store, where Steve learns Bucky doesn’t like peanut butter anymore, and then they head back and Steve lets Bucky enter their house first because Bucky seems to prefer to enter every doorway first, even though Steve can take care of himself.
After a few days, the walk becomes an unspoken routine of theirs: up along the curving road, past where the sidewalk cracks up over the crawling tree root, crossing the street to avoid the house with the huge dog that loves to launch itself at the window (Item #7: No large violent dogs), and stopping by the corner store for snacks. Steve introduces Bucky to all the little foods he has fallen in love with in the present day, foods too mundane for anyone else to be excited by. They both love the corner store.
“I’m never gonna get used to this,” Bucky says one day, watching a microwave burrito turn in its microwave safe packaging. His freshly washed hair (Item #12: Bucky prefers baths to showers and morning baths to night baths) falls about his shoulders, the tips feathery.
Steve leans against the counter and watches Bucky watch the microwave. “Pretty great stuff, huh?”
Bucky gives him a look. “Don’t tell me you’re used to it.”
Steve smiles and lifts his shoulders. “I didn’t think I’d get used to all this, when I first came out of the ice. But it’s easy to get used to comfort.”
“Is it?” Bucky looks at him with those unwavering eyes, his metal fingers curling. “I don’t know that I’ll ever get used to comfort.”
The microwave beeps and Steve hands Bucky a plate. “You seem to be doing pretty well.” He means it. Bucky seems terrified that he will somehow go crazy and kill everyone, but there hasn’t been a single incident since he moved in a month ago. Not even a close call. All Bucky does is sleep, eat his meals, go for walks, study the present day on the internet like Steve once did, and go to places Steve wants to show him—parks, art galleries, favorite cafés.
For some reason, though, Bucky just gives him a grim smile and dumps the burrito onto his plate. He eats.
Steve takes the seat across from him and watches Bucky’s posture relax just slightly. “Is there something I can do to help you adjust?”
“No.”
“If you need something…”
“I don’t need anything, Steve,” Bucky cuts in. “God, all those years, I thought I was gonna be the one taking care of you.”
Steve wants to squeeze his hand, but he settles for laying his hand out on the table between them lamely. “I—I don’t mind it this way.”
“Hmm.” Bucky continues eating.
Steve touches the seams of the wood of the table. He watches Bucky’s still expression, notes the way he always tries to get at least one piece of sausage in every bite he takes. “Sometimes, things upset you,” he says very carefully.
Bucky freezes, his eyes burrowing into Steve. “Like what?”
“Like…” Steve swallows. He probably should not have started in on this line of conversation, but he keeps noticing things, little things, that seem to make Bucky trip up for reasons he couldn’t possibly have forseen, and after a month, he feels that he’s no closer to giving his friend the care he deserves. “Like—you don’t like dogs. Big, loud ones.”
Bucky resumes eating, but again, it seems that he’s pretending not to care: his movements are too deliberate, too studied, and he’s no longer paying attention to the sausage pieces. “Everyone’s afraid of big, loud dogs.”
“You’re not everyone.”
Bucky’s grip on the burrito tightens; two pieces of scrambled egg fall out. “I’m well aware of that.”
Oh. “That’s not what I’m trying—that’s not what I meant,” Steve hurries to say. “I—look, it doesn’t matter how other people feel. I just meant that there are things that bother you, and if I knew what they were, I wouldn’t do them.”
“Is that why you always cross the street before the Murphys’ place?” Bucky realizes.
“Yes,” Steve says, even more carefully now. “I just want to make things… nice for you.” It’s such an understatement, it feels like a lie. He doesn’t know how to say it better. He doesn’t want to make things nice for Bucky; he wants to change the world for Bucky, he wants to give Bucky the most beautiful things and make him breakfast in the morning and sing him the love songs that come up on the radio, and he wants to wrap his arms around Bucky and hold him until the end of time, listening to all the things Bucky worries about and telling him it’ll all be okay until at last, that tension drains out of his frame and he can once again see Bucky drop his head back and laugh like a kid. Make things nice for you. Christ. This is why he never became a poet.
“I’m not going to go Winter Soldier,” Bucky says darkly, looking down.
“I know.” Again, Steve resists reaching for him. “That’s not why I want to do it. You’re my friend, Buck. Friends take care of each other. It just so happens that for me, the things that I can do to take care of you are less… self-evident, and I wish you’d tell me what you need. That’s all.”
“I don’t need anything,” Bucky repeats, baring his teeth. He visibly forces his body to relax, setting down his burrito and lifting his eyebrows from their scowl. “I’m not fucked up.”
Steve thinks Bucky is a little fucked up. Steve is also a little fucked up. They’ve been through things no one else in the world has, and the things Bucky has been through are worse, probably, than Steve can even imagine. It’s okay for them to be fucked up, for them to need weird things, for them to not yet have recovered from everything they’ve experienced and may yet experience, given the Earth’s penchant for catastrophes. But he doesn’t know how to say this. He suspects that if he tries to express any of this, Bucky will only hear that yes, Steve Rogers, his best friend, does think he’s fucked up.
So he says okay. He stops asking, but he still crosses the street when they get to the Murphy’s house, and Bucky lets him.
And he still keeps the list:
Item #51: No bananas.
Item #64: Do not use ringtone “Milky Way.”
Item #77: Bucky prefers doors that swing out, not in. Steve finds time to address this when Bucky’s summoned by Tony for some meeting or other—the two have made a tentative peace, and Tony is playing nice “for your sake only, Cap, so you better not get on my naughty list.” Steve takes down the front and back doors, switches the hinges, and cleans up before Bucky gets home.
He’s half nervous Bucky will notice, even though his aversion to doors that open in seems to largely be subconscious, but when Bucky returns, Steve immediately has bigger things to worry about: Bucky seems seriously shaken.
“Hey,” Steve says, coming around the couch when he notices Bucky standing there, as unmoving as if carved from marble, with his dark, glimmering eyes unfocused. “What happened?”
Instead of answering, Bucky just steps into him, picks up Steve’s arm, and curls it around his body, tucking his face into the crook of Steve’s neck. His short beard brushes against Steve’s skin, his breath running warm against him, and the shape of him familiar and new at once. He smells fresh, like laundry detergent and winter sunshine, and he’s here, touching Steve willingly, hugging him, even, with his beautiful hair falling over Steve’s own shoulder.
“Oh, hey Buck,” Steve whispers, running his palm flat along Bucky’s back in long, soothing strokes. He closes his eyes, wishing, as he has so often wished, that he could draw the pain out of people by touch, by willpower alone.
“Steve,” Bucky chokes out, his voice shaking and low. His chest pushes up against Steve’s erratically, his breath coming in and out, in-in, out, out, in, like a fuzzy radio.
Steve holds him and holds him until the breathing evens out and Bucky pulls away, only an inch or two, close enough that their noses nearly brush. Steve can’t even see both of Bucky’s eyes at once. He watches one of Bucky’s eyes dance between Steve’s, feels Bucky’s breath over his mouth. Please, he wants to say, do it.
“Steve,” Bucky murmurs again, his eyes now drifting down, towards Steve’s mouth.
Oh, God, Steve thinks, Oh God, please, please. Suddenly, he’s not sure he ever made peace with the fact that he is destined to be Bucky’s best friend and nothing more. It all seems like a stupid lie he’s run through his mind a million times, that he doesn’t need anything more, that he’s been lucky enough already. He’s not sure he even cares that it’s probably because he turned hot, or because he’s practically the only person Bucky talks to on a regular basis or that he’s a kind of relic from everything Bucky must miss from the years before the train and the ice and the war, and to Bucky, he probably carries the weight of all that nostalgia. If Bucky kisses him now, he will pretend it is about him, Steve Rogers, the little twig from Brooklyn who he still feels like, in his weak man’s heart.
And then Bucky steps away. As he always, always steps away. “It was a Hydra officer. One of my handlers.”
“What?” Steve says blankly.
“The meeting, with Stark. He wanted me to go talk to this guy, see what the guy knows about the schematics for my arm.” Bucky isn’t looking at him. He’s staring at a spot on the floor like his eyes might drill right through the wood and crack the building’s foundations under him and swallow him into the earth.
Steve hears in his own voice the hard, dangerous edge: “Tony asked you to talk to one of your handlers to learn about your arm?”
“Stark doesn’t like me,” Bucky mutters, shoulders slumped. “Can’t say I blame him.”
“I like you,” Steve sighs, “and I blame him plenty.”
He gets Bucky a glass of water and, when Bucky doesn’t object, runs his fingers through Bucky’s hair as they put on a Disney movie: Aladin. (Item #49: Bucky seems uncomfortable about watching Frozen.) When Bucky seems alright again, his eyes clear and his mouth twitching when items topple onto characters’ heads with loud bonk noises, Steve squeezes his hand—how magical it feels, to be able to squeeze Bucky’s hand—and drives off to Stark tower.
He finds Tony on the twenthieth floor, fiddling with some hologram, and punches him in the face.
Tony tumbles to the floor and lies there, looking up at Steve, with a kind of calm down, drama queen expression on his face. He cups his hand over the bridge of his nose, wincing. “Yep. I could’ve seen that one coming. In fact, I did. On that security camera.” He points to a hologrpahic video feed of the hallway leading into the room they are now standing in, which is littered with weird devices Steve couldn’t begin to guess the purpose of, and a pair of bananas lying on what looks like a broken tablet. “But I let you get your lick in, didn’t I?” Tony stands and dusts himself off. “Shows I’m very sorry. Very contrite.”
“You don’t seem very contrite.”
“Yeah, well. I’m sorry I pissed off your friend. I’m less sorry about the very valuable information I’ve gathered about that nifty little gimmick of his, you know, the limb. You know the one I’m talking about.”
Steve manages to refrain from punching him again, just barely. It feels wrong to punch a guy who’s unarmed, currently bleeding from the nose, and looks as brittle-boned as Tony does, although he’s very aware that Tony is deliberately presenting himself this way to appeal to just this element of Steve’s sensibilities. “Are those bananas?” he finds himself asking.
“Um. Yes.” Tony holds up a hand. “Tissue please.” Some little drone thing the size of a human fist drops a single tissue into Tony’s hand, and he swipes at the blood running from his nose, then picks up a banana and holds it out. “Want one? Or one for Barnes? Consider it an olive branch.”
“Bucky doesn’t like bananas,” Steve says, which is Item #51 on his list.
“Ah.” Tony tosses the banana up, spinning it, then catches it carelessly. “Maybe that explains why he went berserk and broke all of my belongings.”
Steve’s stomach drops. “He—?”
“He didn’t—he didn’t—” Tony seems alarmed by whatever expression Steve’s making. “I’m sorry, that was very dramatic. He just broke that.” He points to the tablet under the remaining banana, with the cracked screen. “Don’t you go losing your cool, Capsicle.”
Jesus. That’s enough of this. Steve steps in closer. “You know why he reacted the way he did. It wasn’t the bananas. Hasn’t he been through enough, Tony—”
“One could say he went bananas,” Tony mutters, with that little giggle in his voice that means he’s saying something he knows he shouldn’t and he can’t quite help himself.
Steve slams his fist down on the table beside Tony’s hand, and Tony looks up at him with wide eyes. “You leave him the hell alone, do you understand?”
Tony looks at him for a moment, then slips out from between him and the table. “Or what, you’ll make me put on the suit and we’ll ‘go a few rounds’?” he asks lightly. “Look, I’m sorry he’s suffering. I am. I mean it. But there were things I wanted to know. You don’t think there are things this guy knows that you might want to find out about?” He gives Steve a significant look.
It’s no secret that Steve has been trying to reconfigure the world to become Bucky’s personal paradise, and that Steve has resorted to decoding Bucky’s tiniest tells to fix things Bucky doesn’t want to talk about. Steve opens his mouth to say no, and then closes it.
Tony raises his eyebrows and points down. “B-17. Friday should let you in. Elevator is—”
“I know where the elevator is.”
Steve goes down.
Something must show on Steve’s face when Steve gets home, because Bucky—now on Tangled—immediately switches off the TV and gets to his feet.
“You saw him.” It’s not a question. Neither of them have to say any names.
“You’ll never have to speak to that bastard again,” Steve says, letting out a heavy breath. “I can promise you that.”
Bucky’s eyes dart over Steve as if he’s a new threat, taking in his body, his hands, focusing on reading his expression. Steve doesn’t abruptly come to a halt, but he slows his movements, laying his hands lightly on the back of the couch where both of them are visible, empty, and limp, in a way he hopes is casual. “What—you beat him up?”
“No. I told them to take him away.” Steve flexes his right hand. “I did punch Tony, though. Just once.”
“You—” Bucky closes his mouth. He swallows. “You punched Stark? I thought you were friends again.”
“You’re my friend, Buck. Tony’s my friend, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care when he’s being an asshole.”
Finally, Bucky stops looking at Steve like he’s trying to catalogue a threat. He comes around the sofa and picks up a can from the dining table, tossing it. “Coke?”
“Did you just toss a can of soda?”
The two of them sit across from each other, looking at the can uncertainly, the sunset from behind Bucky setting flyaway strands of his hair aglow, so he seems almost like a god against the sun. Steve traces the metal rim, the little tab. Bucky watches him.
“So.” Bucky sounds like a man ready for his execution. “What did he tell you?”
Steve is quiet for a long moment. “He told me some of the things they did to you. Some of the things they made you do.”
Bucky purses his lips, nods once, slowly.
“The freezing, the missions….” Steve tracks Bucky’s expression to see if he should stop, but Bucky just sits there, listening. “He told me about methods, you know—poison, fake suicides, aliases. Told me about hurting you.”
“Mm.” Bucky seems to wait. He pops his own can of Coke. “Go on.”
Steve doesn’t want to say the things that man said, things about blood and screams and how long they would go without stopping. It’s nothing Bucky doesn’t already know about himself. “I didn’t stay long,” he says, truthfully. He had gone in with his phone, ready to record so he could add things to the list in his notebook. And there are things he could add to that list, things like never put sugar in Bucky’s tea, though Bucky was never much of a tea drinker anyway, or never, never, never put a single index finger to the back of Bucky’s neck. But after only about five minutes, he had gotten up and left.
“Had enough, had you?” Bucky says.
Steve tries and fails not to sound burning with fury. “Yeah, I’d had enough.”
“Pop it.”
“What?”
Bucky gives the can Steve has been holding for the past few minutes a nod. “It must’ve calmed down by now.” He waits until Steve has popped the can, and then a few more seconds while they see if the thing’s gonna make a mess on their table. When nothing comes out, he goes on, “Guess you know what a nutcase I am now, huh?”
“What?” Steve says again, sitting up straight. “No. You’re not a nutcase.”
Now Bucky’s eyes go dark, his snarl emerging. Steve hasn’t seen that snarl in a long time. Perhaps it’s the second time today it’s come out. “At least you could respect me enough not to lie.” He pulls out a very familiar notebook and pushes it towards Steve across the tabletop hard enough that it nearly falls off the edge.
Steve catches it, turns it over in his hands. God, he’s so stupid. “That’s…. that’s not what this is about, Bucky.”
Bucky sighs. “Same Steve Rogers I always knew,” he says, but he doesn’t sound nostalgic anymore. “Never could tell when he’s already lost.”
“Bucky,” Steve says again, pushing his Coke gently aside. “What do you think these are?” he holds the notebook up.
Bucky scoffs. “Is this a trick question? This is all the ways I’m a fuckin’ freak. All the ways I’m not the guy you lost in the war, the one from Brooklyn. You’re scared I’m gonna go off.”
Steve draws in a shaky breath, even though his chest feels so tight, his eyes so hot and prickly. “No,” he gets out. “You’re scared you’re going to go off. I told you: you’re my friend. I do it to take care of you. This—” He waves the notebook. “This is a list of ways I can do my best to take care of you. Look, pal, I know you’re scared you’re going to do something you’ll regret—”
“That’s one way to say it.”
“But just because that’s how you see yourself doesn’t mean that’s how I see you.”
“Oh, no, all you see is your best friend from childhood, exactly the same, except for one-hundred and fifty-two items,” Bucky snaps.
“I don’t care!” Steve shouts, and he’s not supposed to be shouting, but he’s shouting, and standing up, and Bucky is standing up with him, coming around the side of the table. “Bucky, I don’t give a damn if you’re never going to hurt a fly for the rest of your life; I still want to make your life better. It isn’t about them!” He flings his arm out towards the general suburbs surrounding them. “I don’t care if you used to like peanut butter and now you don’t. I wouldn’t care if I had to personally check every window and every door for hostiles before escorting you into the room.” Slowly, his voice softens. “I loved you before the war, and I loved you when I thought you were dead, and I love you now.”
Now that Bucky has come to a stop in front of him, his hair falling across his eyes like some kind of beautiful angel, he wants to put his hand on Bucky’s elbow. He doesn’t. He wants to know what’s going on in Bucky’s head, behind that perfectly unmoving expression. He can’t read anything, except that Bucky’s hand is curling so tightly around the back of one of their wooden chairs that the wood looks like it’s about to split.
“And I want to make your days brighter, and your life happier, and I want you to feel safe.” Steve swallows. “Because that’s what I do for the people I love. But I kept asking. And you wouldn’t tell me what was wrong.”
Bucky’s voice comes out like dry logs scraping against each other. “I didn’t want you to think my head was fucked up. I didn’t want you to send me away.”
“Bucky,” Steve says hopelessly, feeling a tear break free and begin to trickle down his cheek, “You know how much I love you. I couldn’t—I’m not sending you anywhere.”
“Jesus,” Bucky says, that familiar smile finally poking through, “Don’t be so dramatic. What a scene.” He looks down and away, his cheeks flushed. “I love you too, pal.”
Oh, hell. Steve’s already asked for the moon. Why not ask for the stars? “That’s not the way I mean it,” he says quietly.
Bucky’s eyes run over his face. “How do you mean it?”
Steve breathes a laugh. “As far as I know, there’s only one other way to mean it, Buck.”
Bucky makes some sort of noise. “Steve.”
“You don’t have to say it back,” Steve says. “And it doesn’t have to be weird. I’ve done very well at keeping my distance. I think.”
The back of the chair Bucky has his hands around clatters into pieces. “And here I thought you wouldn’t touch me because you were afraid I’d rip your arm off.”
Steve frowns. “I thought you didn’t like it.”
“Of course that’s what you thought.” Bucky shakes his head. “You’re an idiot, Rogers.”
Then he takes Steve’s face in his hands, one warm and one cold, and kisses him. He kisses him and kisses him and kisses him, and Steve thinks, no, of course it was never going to be okay when they were just friends. How could he have ever thought he could live without this? Bucky puts him on the edge of the table and they hear the rattle and hiss of the Coke spilling and still they go on kissing.
“I’ve been in love with you since you were a five foot stick, you punk,” Bucky says against his lips, pulling him up off the table right before the Coke trickles up to the edge of it. “‘Course I’m gonna say it back.”
“Ah,” says Steve. “And here I thought it was the new body doing it for you.”
“No. Are you kidding? I love you,” Bucky says, tapping Steve’s chest with one finger. “That sap who would write up a hundred and fifty-two ways to love someone.”