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Steve thought he was dreaming when he woke up in the hospital bed in the Avengers Compound. It wasn’t because he was in the med bay. Despite his accelerated healing, he still spent more time in the medical ward than he cared to admit. And it wasn’t because someone had kindly dimmed the lights and left only a small lamp on to give the feeling of a cozy, dreamlike place.
It was because he couldn’t believe what he saw in that dim lighting.
Steve couldn’t tell what prompted him to say it. Maybe because drugs were still working their way through his system or maybe because it all still felt like make believe, but he opened his stupid mouth anyway.
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all-“
The corner of Bucky’s lip quirked up just slightly and Steve lost his breath. The man he’d been hunting for two years sat two feet away in a hospital chair that he had clearly pulled closer. Bucky looked almost embarrassed at having been caught, but Steve could tell he had been very deliberately waiting for him to wake up.
Steve turned his head and gave the best smile he could under the circumstances. Maybe Bucky just needed a little encouragement. They hadn’t had a real conversation since 1945.
“How you doin’, Buck?”
Bucky took a deep breath and resituated himself before he answered.
“Better than you.”
Steve shook his head. “I’ll be fine. Banner and Tony didn’t try to put me in their machine, did they?”
Bucky smirked again, but shook his head.
“If someone is going in that machine, it’s gonna be me.” He waved a few metal fingers.
“Do they know you’re here?”
“Two of them do, the two that pay attention.”
“Barton and Natasha,” Steve informed even though he was sure Bucky knew their names.
“Everyone else wouldn’t know if I were in their rooms while they were there.” Bucky looked unimpressed. “And security could use a serious upgrade. I considered making you food, confident no one would even know.”
Steve ignored the complaining, but loved the mental image of Bucky doing something as domestic as making something to eat.
“You wanna stay?” he offered.
Bucky scoffed.
“You could lurk around if you prefer.” Steve motioned just barely. “That seems your style these days.”
Bucky shook his head and changed the topic. “So you got hit?”
“Right through the lung,” Steve said with a nod. “But I’m breathing better.”
“Well, they had you on a machine when you got here.”
“You were here for that?”
Bucky shrugged with one shoulder. “You heal fast?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty fast. A day or two and I’m back up on my feet,” Steve said, looking at the IV giving him fluids. “Do you heal like that?”
Bucky inhaled and blew the air out of one side of his mouth.
“I got the knock off of what you’ve got,” he responded. “I get scars that don’t heal. It’s fast healing, but it’s not perfect.”
Steve sent him a reassuring smile.
“I’m still glad it’s working. You don’t know how good it feels just to see you here.”
“Don’t be a sap.”
“I’ve missed you, Buck.”
“Okay, that’s it. I’m leaving.” Bucky stood up from the chair where he’d been waiting.
Steve grinned and reached out the best that he could.
“Sit down, jerk. You’re not going anywhere. You’re here to see about your friend. Now sit and see about me.”
“I’ll stay till you go back to sleep.”
“You know that means I’m not sleeping, right?”
Bucky gave a soft smile.
“I’ll come back.”
“You promise?” Steve asked.
“Will it get you off my back?”
“You know, that’s not really my thing. I have a hard time pretending I don’t give a damn about people I care about.”
Bucky swallowed. “I’ll come back,” he said again.
And so not much later, Steve let the drugs win and he went back to sleep.
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
Two days later, he moved back into his own room. He carefully showered and put on a button up shirt, trying to move as little as possible so he wouldn’t pull too much on the healing wound. The new skin was still delicate and the scar on either side of his chest was raised and pink and tender. It would disappear over time and he thought about Bucky saying that his remained.
He walked over to the window, glanced out and around, and unlocked it.
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
The next day, Steve walked into his room to discover a pad of light grey paper and several charcoal pencils. He hesitated. No one knew today was Steve’s birthday except Natasha and she had been sworn to secrecy. Steve had kind of enjoyed just bundling his birthday with the Fourth of July and letting that be the end of it. But September 28th? He knew who knew that date.
He flipped open the pad to see the inside of the cover scribbled on in a handwriting that made Steve’s heart skip a beat. He hadn’t seen that handwriting in so long and seeing it now brought a lump into his throat.
“Happy birthday” was all it said, but Steve ached to hold that handwriting closer. He didn’t. Too risky to smudge it.
Instead he walked over to the window again and glanced around. There was no sign of Bucky. He didn’t know what he expected.
But then he glanced at the window itself and frowned. The window was locked.
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
It was a month before Sharon slipped up beside him at a bodega one day and slid a folded piece of paper onto a shelf before leaving.
Steve glanced around. Then he picked up the paper and pocketed it into his jacket.
When he was alone and able to read it, he didn’t like a word of what it had to say.
Agents had fired upon the Winter Soldier outside a Hydra base in Vardø and they knew he was injured, but no one had captured him.
He scanned the paper numerous times. Nothing of any value to him except one thing.
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
“You could knock,” Natasha greeted when Steve walked right through her open door.
“I’m sorry. I have a favor to ask.”
Natasha didn’t even reply. She just motioned for him to go ahead.
“Bucky was injured somewhere called Vardø and I need to try to find him.” When she didn’t immediately say anything, he held out the paper to her. “I have the coordinates.”
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
Ice was crunching beneath his boots as he surveyed the building where Hydra had apparently been. It was a husk of a building now with nothing but a bit of burnt structure left to even show it had been there.
Vardø was a smaller place than Steve had suspected. Any kind of conflict between SHIELD and Hydra must have really rocked the place. But a small town this far north was a good place to hide any misdeeds so it wasn’t surprising that Hydra had a base there really.
“Come on,” Natasha said after they had surveyed the damage.
Steve followed her. He didn’t know what he had expected to find once he got here. The fight was three days ago. He didn’t think Bucky would still be there sitting in the snow.
Natasha walked the only road leading from the building toward the docks. She was doing work Steve didn’t even the ability to help her do, but he trusted her process.
At some point, she tried a door to the basement of a building and Steve was surprised when it opened. It was little more than a glorified tool shed for someone’s dock and boat repair business. And yet Natasha found the bandages and antiseptic on the top of the garbage.
“He got hit pretty good,” she assessed. She reached with two fingers into the waste. Asked and withdrew a snipped end of plastic fishing line. “And he did a little surgery.”
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
The trip ended up being a bust. All it did was confirm Bucky had been injured and was on the run. Steve tried to keep in mind what was said about his healing. He healed quickly. If he had gotten to medical supplies-
“He’s lying low till he heals. We both know that,” Natasha told him. “He’s still alive out there.”
Steve went back to the compound defeated.
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
“Can whoever keeps ransacking my workshop control themselves?” Tony asked two days later as he walked into the shared living space. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could always hand your project over to the experts.” He held a hand out as if taking new jobs on the spot, but nobody paid him much more attention.
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
Two days after that, Tony came back into the living quarters to announce that he was concerned there was someone they couldn’t trust in the building.
“I thought it was one of you getting into my lab. But it keeps happening and I have to start wondering if SHIELD is truly vetting the guys they put here.”
“You saying you think someone’s collecting intel?” Clint asked.
“I’m saying maybe we’ve been compromised.” Tony pointed toward his workshop. “Whoever is getting in there is leaving evidence they were there, but not evidence of how they got in. I can’t find a breech anywhere.”
Steve froze at first, but then tried to act normal. He subtly made eye contact with Natasha who looked much more natural than he felt. And she didn’t even stick around to talk to him when they all went their separate ways.
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
Steve didn’t have a lot of food in his own kitchen. All of the main cooking was done in the community space. But he pulled out a few eggs and made two omelettes, leaving them in the microwave with a sticky note on the door.
You ok?
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
Steve woke up to Bucky sitting by his bed.
He didn’t have a chair by his bed, but Bucky was perched in the windowsill with more balance than a man of his size should have had on such a narrow ledge.
Steve sat up quickly. Bucky had a fork in his hand and he almost silently stepped down and approached the bed with a step or two.
“All signs point to you being pretty badly injured,” Steve said, looking Bucky up and down.
Bucky nodded.
“Yeah, your friends got me good.”
“SHIELD aren’t my friends.”
“You work for them.”
“I work for the Avengers. We govern ourselves.”
Bucky looked away for a second.
“Omelettes heat up okay?”
Bucky nodded once.
“I need your help.” He wasn’t looking at Steve. He was looking at the floor between them.
“This have to do with whatever you’ve been doing in Tony’s lab every night?”
“Your not-friends hit me with something I hadn’t seen before. I can’t get my arm to reset. It’s just dead weight.”
Steve reached out for it as if he were going to magically fix it. Then he dropped his hands and shook his head.
“I think that’s something we have to actually talk to Tony about.”
“He’s locked his lab so tight, but he’s only locking doors and windows.”
“You good crawling around in the ducts with only your one arm?”
“This one isn’t weak,” Bucky replied, slightly lifting the arm holding the fork. “It’s just not gonna-“ He went to move it and then seemed to remember. “Hang limp at my side. Do you think Stark is someone to be trusted?”
Steve thought for a minute. “I don’t know,” he finally said, “But I have an idea.”
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
“Hey Jarvis, I know you tell Tony everything, but can you keep a secret from him if it’s very personal and important?”
“I will temporarily turn myself off, Captain,” the AI replied.
“Well, no, I don’t really need to you to do that either. I need your guidance.”
“I can use discretion.”
Steve smiled. “I would greatly appreciate it. And can you turn off the security to the lab as well?”
“Don’t do anything that will make Mr. Stark reprogram me.”
“It shouldn’t be anything that drastic,” Steve promised. “As long as you’ll help us find the items we need and run diagnostics.”
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
Steve nearly dropped the detached arm when the fingers started to move.
“Stop, stop,” Bucky said with a laugh in his voice. “It’s- My brain is mapped and connected to the arm.”
“Could you make this thing strangle me right now?”
“I won’t,” Bucky promised. “But if we get it fixed, I will show you how to make a better omelette.”
“That bad?” Steve asked.
“Your ma wouldn’t be impressed,” Bucky replied. “I ate it anyway, but someone needs to teach you how to cook eggs. That’s Cooking 101.”
“Oh my god. Open the next panel on this thing.”
Bucky took the arm back and began to open the next panel while Steve watched.
“You know, in occupational therapy, when you get a prosthetic, one of the things they teach you to do is to cook eggs. You gotta know the right amount of pressure to pick it up, but not crack it. And then how to crack it on the pan and drop the egg in without smashing it to pieces. Eggs are good training tools.”
“Did Hydra use eggs to teach you to control this?”
Bucky slid the arm back and Steve got to work replacing wires and connections in that open panel.
“Yeah, actually they did, but only after they consulted an actual occupational therapist. First thing I did with it was choke the doctor who put it on me. And threw his assistant across the room.”
Steve didn’t look at Bucky or ask him how much was on purpose or lack of control.
“Never got disciplined for that.”
Steve assumed that was as close to an answer as he would get.
“So you’re a master egg chef now?”
Bucky shrugged with his other shoulder. “I can make a lot of egg dishes, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Bucky watched Steve’s hands work. “Your hands are used to more delicate work,” he had said when asking Steve to take over the rewiring.
“So you gonna teach me to cook?” Steve asked. “Really?”
Bucky was quiet for several minutes as he watched Steve work. Steve, for his part, just let the question hang in the air till finally Bucky sucked in a breath and asked, “Did you mean it?”
Steve looked up confused. “Not sure what you’re referring to, but you know I rarely say anything I don’t mean.”
“You offered for me to stay, said you missed me, all that.”
“Yeah, of course,” Steve tried to say without screaming. “We used to be inseparable. I guess a part of me still wants that and I think you probably only ever make that kind of connection once.”
“I’ll think about it,” Bucky replied and it was amazing Steve could focus the rest of the evening.
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
“The offer to stay isn’t going anywhere,” Steve said as Bucky stood by the window with two working arms later that evening.
“Move back to Brooklyn.”
Steve met Bucky’s eye even though he knew he wasn’t concealing the hope he felt at that statement. “You know, I’ve still got a place in Brooklyn.”
“Sure,” Bucky said with a frown. “But you never use it.”
“You wanna use it?” Steve actually straightened up to ask.
“You mean with permission this time?” Bucky smirked at his own joke.
“Please stay there any time you want, Buck. I’ll even give you the key.”
Bucky looked unimpressed and scoffed a little at the idea.
“You need it more than I do.”
“I’ll use it when I need it,” Bucky agreed. “That acceptable?”
“Like when you get shot and you need somewhere to lay low?”
“Maybe,” Bucky said with a shrug. “Or when I teach you took cook some damn eggs.” He actually laughed a little and the sound made Steve’s whole world spark to life.
“Just let me know when,” Steve told him.
Bucky nodded, made a point of jokingly saluting Steve with his now working arm, and unlocked the window.
“That’s the wrong arm and you know it,” Steve threatened playfully.
“What are you gonna do about it?” Bucky asked. Then he slung open the window and leapt out onto the ledge and was gone.
Steve stood there, looking at the open window with a smirk on his face. Honestly, he couldn’t wait to do something about it.