Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Steve doesn’t go outside too often these days, but he had woken up at five this morning and for the first time in almost a week there hadn't been rain lashing at the windows, and he hadn’t been able to resist pulling on his running shoes and heading out of the Tower. It’s foggy and cool, and by the time he reaches Central Park he’s gone through enough puddles that his shoes are soaked through, but there’s something so peaceful about New York at this hour that he’s content anyway. 

Things are better than they were back in January, at least. The news cycle has moved on, several times over, and the reporters that used to camp en mass outside the Tower are mostly off covering real news instead. Or different news, anyway. Steve is just glad to have them gone. Tony has yet to give up on his campaign to convince Steve that photographs of people wearing clothing with curse words on them are illegal to print because of 'obscenity laws'. Steve, who is not an idiot, is fully aware that Tony just wants the press to see him in a t-shirt that says FUCK. 

Several other joggers are apparently just as excited about the lack of rain today, because Steve isn't as alone as he usually is on the paths at this hour. But with his hat on and head down, no one looks twice at him. 

He loops around the whole park twice, taking the time to wind through the Ramble, circle around the lake three times, and pass the headless statue of Alice in Wonderland because he still finds the sight perversely amusing. By the time he starts back to the Tower, the sky is pink and the lamps in the park are dark. 

More people are out, by this point, and Steve sees several phones pointed in his direction when he's waiting for a crosswalk, but he ignores them with long practice. Back in the Tower, he veers left after coming through the main doors—avoiding the crowded hub of the lobby, his least favorite part about living here—and swipes through a side door that’s paneled with marble to blend in with the wall. 

And there, standing in front of the private elevator, is Bucky. 

Steve freezes. 

Bucky stares back at him, hands shoved into the pockets of a tattered jacket. His hair is limp and greasy, longer than before, and underneath a half-grown beard is a face that's hollow and thin. His eyes are rimmed red and there's a twitchiness to him that reminds Steve uncomfortably of a drug addict. 

He stares at Steve, and Steve stares back until a sharp pain in his hand makes him look down. 

He's crushed the swipe tag in his hand to pieces. 

"Hey," Steve eventually says, carefully even. 

"Hi," Bucky replies, with a voice like he hasn't spoken in weeks. 

Steve swallows, and the shock is quickly morphing into hope. "You're here," he says. 

Bucky nods. 

His heart is beating in his throat. "You're. You're done?" 

Bucky looks at him, and eventually replies, "I need help." 

It's not a yes. 

It's also not a no. 

"Okay," Steve says carefully. "Well. You want to come upstairs?" 

Bucky nods. 

So Steve goes to the elevator and hopefully waves the broken remains of his ID tag in front of the elevator buttons, without success. Sighing, he looks upward at the ceiling.

"JARVIS," Steve says, "can you let me in, please? I broke my ID." 

"Of course, Captain. Access code?" 

"Theta two nine sigma eight eight," Steve says. 

"Very good, sir. Shall I requisition a new ID for you?" 

"Please. Sorry." 

"It's not a problem." 

The elevator ride is silent. Steve can't stop looking at Bucky, at the bruises under his eyes, the dark stain on his sleeve, the fraying end of one shoelace... all these signs of the life Bucky’s been living without him. He wonders if Bucky has been in New York long. How many days has he been waiting around the Tower for Steve to leave? Has he been sleeping on the streets? God, in the rain?

Steve wants to scrub him clean, wrap him in blankets and feed him until the hunger in his eyes finally fades away—but Steve knows that whatever Bucky came here for, it wasn't that. 

So instead Steve suppresses every instinct in him that's screaming to take care of him and instead stands awkwardly in his own kitchen, telling himself don't touch and don't pressure and don't offer, let him ask.

Bucky shoves his hands in his pockets, eyes darting around the apartment like it’s going to attack him, and the line of tension in his shoulders is evident even through the ragged jacket. It's killing Steve to see him so scared. He watches Bucky's unshaven jaw work, and can’t help but think about how Bucky used to shave religiously, wonders if that pet peeve was burned out of him, or if razors were a luxury too grand for an assassin on the run. He’d probably feel so much better with a shave.

Bucky’s mouth opens, but then his breathing hitches and he closes it again, looking away and fixing his eyes on the floor. 

He looks like he’s waiting to be hit. 

He’s so thin. He’s so scared. 

Steve can’t help it. “You want a seat?” he asks, stepping forward. “Dry clothes? Breakfast? You can—um. I've got oranges, and I was gonna make bagels, too, but all I've got is cinnamon raisin and I know you hate—" 

"I need help," Bucky interrupts. 

Steve stops, a hand on the cupboard where the bagels are stored. Everything in him wants to keep talking about breakfast like what Bucky had actually said was I'm ready to come home. 

But he hadn't said that. 

"Okay," Steve forces himself to say instead. "Tell me what you need."

Bucky’s shoulders hunch inward. “M’rut,” he says. 

Steve feels like all the air has been sucked out of his lungs. 

“Your—” 

“My rut,” Bucky repeats, through gritted teeth. “It’s coming. I need—help.” 

Not this. 

God, anything but this. 

Steve has been back on heat suppressants since his return to America. He still has nightmares sometimes about that week he spent in Kharkiv—and even back in the war, when Steve had only been a little fucked up, even back then he hadn’t been ready to let Bucky see him like that, and now he’s older and even more fucked up and— 

But this is Bucky. He’s come all this way, and he’s clearly desperate. 

Steve owes him this. He can do this for him. 

“Okay,” he says. 

Bucky shakes his head and rocks on the balls of his feet, agitated. “HYDRA—they had something. There were so many drugs, and I don’t remember it all, but I know that—I never had ruts. But now I do. They won’t stop, they just keep—” He exhales, and a muscle in his jaw works. “I can’t find what they used to stop them. I tried the normal stuff, I tried them all, but none of them work and I can feel one coming again, and I—last time I almost got out. I can’t do it again. Whatever drugs you guys have, whatever your friends use, I need you to get them for me, all right?” 

“You... You want me to help you stop your rut?” Steve clarifies, his mind spinning. 

Relief floods his veins. 

“My ruts are—” Bucky can’t meet his eyes again. “I’m not safe. ” 

Steve doesn’t know if Bucky’s talking about the vulnerability that a rut brings, or the kind of things Bucky might do in search of relief, while rut-drunk and desperate. Maybe it’s both. He doesn’t care, he’s just glad that Bucky didn’t come here to spend his rut with Steve . 

Steve… isn’t ready for that. 

“Okay,” Steve says, again. “Okay. How long do you have?” 

“Tonight,” Bucky replies, and then scowls. “Maybe less. Last time I saw you—” 

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, remembering. 

An expression Steve doesn’t recognize flits across Bucky’s face, there and gone again, too fast to be identified.

“I think it’s the serum,” Steve says. “I have—it’s the same for me, with my heats. Normal suppressants stopped working after a while, and I had to keep upping the doses. It must be the same for you, too.”  

In fact, the more Steve thinks about it, the less hope he has. If Steve was resistant after only a few years, and Bucky has been suppressed for—God, decades? HYDRA must have had him on staggering doses of suppressants, at the end. It’s no wonder Bucky hasn’t found anything that helped. 

But Bucky is here, and he’s asking for help. They have to try. 

“Let me call a few people,” Steve says. 

Natasha knows exactly which medications the Soviets had used to suppress her own ruts. Tony has contacts in the pharmaceutical industry, and the drugs currently in development there. Bruce is the one who's taken over the dosing of Steve’s heat suppressants, and he's made a fairly decent study of supersoldier metabolism over the last few months. 

All this, and they still have no success. 

Bucky still descends into a rut before the sun sets that day. 

"He’s not a literal ball and chain, you know,” Tony says. 

Steve looks up from his spot on the floor, back propped against the wall. “I know.” 

“JARVIS says you’ve been here the whole time,” Tony says. “I didn’t believe him, because that would be crazy, but then I watched the footage, and sure enough. You are aware that it’s been three days?” 

“I know,” Steve says calmly. 

"I could post a picture of this and make a thousand ORAs cry.” 

Steve shrugs. 

“Seriously. Is this some kind of old-fashioned ritual I don’t know about? Is this what you guys did back in the thirties, instead of having actual sex?” 

“People had sex in the thirties, Tony,” Steve says wryly. 

“Gross."

Steve shrugs. 

Tony stares back, visibly annoyed, and then he huffs and drops to the floor beside Steve. 

Steve sets aside the tablet he’d been working off of, and the file folder he’d been annotating from it. 

Tony rests his forearms on his knees, and chews his lip. 

“Nope,” he says eventually. “I don’t get it. Can’t hear anything, can’t smell anything. We’re sitting under the window—which is set to be opaque anyway—and we’re staring at the wrong wall. And my butt hurts already.” 

“Well, you’ve got a bony butt,” Steve says, and grins at the noise of outrage. 

But he can’t explain it to Tony, really. 

Bucky is on the other side of this wall, in a containment chamber meant for the Hulk, riding out his rut all alone. He went in three days ago, sweating, grabbing, and just before their hands had slid free of each other Bucky had stared at him with wide, terrified blue eyes and said, “Steve,” and it had taken every last fiber of resolve Steve had to close the door on him. 

Steve has been out here ever since. 

He couldn’t have explained it in words, how he needs to be here. He’s aware that it makes no sense. Bucky doesn’t belong to him, not like he once did, and in this containment cell he’s probably the safest he’s ever been in his entire life. His rut will be painful, but he’ll get through it. But every time Steve steps away from the door to Bucky’s cell, his heart starts to pound and every cell in his body screams to go back, go back, go back.

The only time the world feels right is when he’s here, sitting here on the ground, back pressed to the wall that contains his Alpha. This is where he belongs. An army could come crashing through, and he would bare his teeth and plant his feet on the ground, and kill anyone who tried to move him. 

It’s animalistic. Primal. 

He has to be here. 

“So how long is this gonna take, anyway?” Tony asks, squirming into a new position. 

“Dunno,” Steve says, shrugging one shoulder. “It used to be four days, but the serum… enhances things. At least a week, probably.” 

Tony whistles. “Damn.” 

Steve doesn’t have a reply. 

“You know, I’m pretty sure that room over there is just storage. I can have them stick a cot in there, if you’re really determined to sit here and self-flagellate for the next four days.” 

“I’m not here to sleep,” Steve replies. 

“Just sit in the hallway for a week straight like a sad sack?” 

“It’s peaceful down here.” 

“What about a sleeping bag? A pillow? One of those little airplane neck things that people who fly coach have to use?” 

“I’m good, Tony. Really.” 

Tony heaves a sigh of great frustration. “You need so much therapy, I swear to God.” 

“Probably,” Steve agrees peaceably.

Tony is quiet for an astonishing thirty seconds, while he recrosses his legs and wiggles closer to the wall. He settles for exactly ten seconds, and then he says, "You really love this guy, huh?" 

Steve looks over at him, sarcasm at the ready, but something in Tony's expression stays his tongue. 

He really wants to know. 

So Steve stops, and tries to find a way to answer that will encompass how much he feels for Bucky. How he loved him over miles and years and a thousand days where he woke up knowing that he was dead, but now he's here, he's alive, and how some days Steve still can't believe it's real. How love feels too small a word for the enormity of what rises in his chest when he thinks of Bucky. 

But he finds himself unequal to the task of somehow voicing it aloud. Words have never really been his strong suit. 

So instead he reaches for his phone, pulls off the otterbox case, and removes the photo that's tucked inside. It's slightly battered from its travels around Eastern Europe, returned to him just before Bucky had disappeared into the containment cell, and he's been keeping it safe ever since. He's stared at it so many times over the past few years that the image is permanently imprinted in his brain, but the sight of their younger selves still makes his breath catch a little. 

He takes in a breath, and hands the photo over. 

"That was our wedding day," Steve tells him. "1937."

"That's you? " 

"Yep." 

"Holy shit, you were tiny." 

Steve breathes through that one. "Yeah. Serum gave me an extra foot and a hundred pounds. It was a rough adjustment." 

"Hang on," Tony says, squinting. "Steve. Is that a collar? " 

Oh. Right. 

So far, Tony’s the only person to have noticed. But then again, he’s never shown this photo to another Omega before, so maybe that makes sense. 

The weight of his dog tags against his chest is suddenly heavier with his next breath. 

“It was normal, back then,” Steve says. 

“Yeah, but—” Tony makes a face. “A fucking collar? I thought those died out in like, Victorian times. I can’t believe they made you wear one.” 

“They didn’t make me,” Steve protests. “It was…” 

“What, you liked it?”

“No,” Steve admits. “Not really. I felt like a dog.” 

“Yeah, no shit.” 

“But it wasn’t so bad, either. I didn’t wear it all the time—most people didn’t. Just for church, or a wedding or something like that.” 

“Right. So everyone knew you were already claimed goods.” 

“It used to mean protection. Back then, rape wasn’t… I know it’s not perfect today, but when I was growing up, rape wasn’t a crime you could really commit. Especially not with Omegas. So if you had your collar, you were safe.” He pauses. “Safer.” 

"Huh," Tony says, unconvinced. “I guess.”

"But it was obviously also used to dominate and abuse Omegas, too. I think it's good, that we've gotten rid of them. Rings make a lot more sense. They’re a lot… fairer.” 

“You don’t say,” Tony says. 

Steve doesn’t reply. His eyes drift back to the photo in Tony’s hand, like a moth to a flame. He wonders if Bucky remembers this day. If this photograph is the condensation of a memory, the way it is for Steve, or if it’s something else—a visage of a life Bucky can’t remember being part of. A riddle, stared at again and again but never solved. 

"So, listen,” Tony says, nudging Steve in the side. 

Steve looks over at him. 

Tony cups his hands in the air, with a wicked look on his face. “Are we talking apple or grapefruit here?” 

Steve goes bright red. 

“Tony.” 

“Come on. Look at this guy. Nobody looks that confident unless they’ve got a Pringles can between their legs—” 

Steve chokes. 

“—so the knot’s gotta be at least proportional—” 

“Give me that.”

Tony surrenders the photo, hooting with laughter, and Steve tucks it protectively back into his phone case. 

“Come on, Rogers. Omega to Omega. Dish,” Tony cajoles. 

Steve is still blushing furiously. “It’s not a Pringles can,” he mutters, eventually.

“Once you pop, the fun don’t stop?” 

Steve is never going to be able to eat Pringles again. “Please stop.” 

Tony cackles.

On day six, Natasha appears. 

Steve blinks at her like he’s coming up from underwater. 

“Well, this is healthy,” she remarks. 

Steve waves at her halfheartedly, and the heaviness in his right leg tells him he hasn’t moved in a while. After so many days outside of Bucky’s room, he’s taken to routinely stretching himself out, or taking exercise breaks, or lately, even short naps, but mostly he sits and sinks into his own mind. Bruce has dropped by twice, and tells him that meditation is good for the soul, but perhaps better practiced in moderation. 

Steve has been without Bucky for three years, now, so in his opinion, moderation can get fucked. 

Natasha sets a white plastic bag in front of him that smells strongly of Chinese food, and Steve sits up straighter and re-crosses his legs into a new position. 

“Really,” Natasha says. “Do you know how fucked up you have to be for Tony Stark to start making calls for an intervention?” 

“Please don’t let him stage an intervention,” Steve sighs. 

Natasha smiles without humor. “Too late. Hi, I’m your intervention.” 

“Well, you know you’re pretty fucked up if they send Black Widow to stage your intervention,” Steve says drily. 

“You’re lucky it wasn’t Sam. He wanted to bring you blankets and tea and a twelve-step recovery plan.” 

“I’ll take beef and broccoli instead,” Steve replies, and starts pulling cartons out of the bag. 

Natasha doesn’t say anything after that, but takes her portion of the food, and cracks apart two pairs of chopsticks. She’s gotten all of Steve’s favorites.

She gives him a reprieve until after they eat, and after they’ve both split open their fortunes and crunched through the cookies, and after Steve has neatly stacked the empty cartons and replaced them in the bag they came in. 

“Sarajevo can only wait for so long,” Natasha says quietly. 

Steve winces at that, though he knows it’s true. “It can wait a few more days.” 

“And what if this needs more than a few more days, too?” Natasha asks, nodding at the door behind Steve. 

“Then...” Steve starts, but he doesn’t know the answer. 

Or rather, he does, and he doesn’t want to admit that Bucky would win over that, too. His selfishness knows no bounds. 

“Steve,” Natasha says, with a look on her face like she knows what he’s thinking. 

Steve ties the handles of the bag in a square knot. 

“Tell me what’s going on,” she prompts. “Really going on.” 

He looks over at her, and her perfectly blank face. 

She’s waiting, but she’s not demanding, and she’s not in a hurry. She’s not here to judge. 

Natasha is the best interrogator they have, and Steve has watched her in action enough to know that she has a host of techniques at her disposal. This is one of them. But if she had to do this, then Steve is glad that this is the approach she’s chosen. He likes to think it’s because she respects him enough to be straightforward. 

“I can’t leave him,” Steve tells her, honest in kind.

“Why not?” Natasha asks. 

Steve doesn’t have the words to answer, but Natasha doesn’t change her question. She just waits expectantly. 

“Because,” Steve says, eventually, around the glass in his throat, “when this is over, he’s going to leave me.” 

The sympathy on Natasha’s face is terrible. “Steve,” she says. 

“I know it’s stupid,” Steve says, and his voice cracks on the word ‘stupid’. 

“It’s not.” 

“Yes, it is. I’m not doing anything for him, right now. He doesn’t even know I’m here. But I think about getting up to leave, and—and I think of a million ways HYDRA could sneak in and grab him, and I’d never see him again. Or him coming out and thinking that I abandoned him, or just coming back and finding him gone . I can’t leave him, Nat, I tried and I can’t.” 

He has to close his eyes, and inhale and count to seven. 

There’s a hand on his back, and Natasha’s fingernails press into his skin. 

Steve thinks about hundreds of letters drawn there, but by different hands, a lifetime ago, and he feels like his chest is going to split in two. 

“Okay,” Natasha says softly. “Okay.” 

Bucky emerges from the cell the following night, somewhere in the wee hours of the morning. 

Steve comes out his light doze the instant he hears the locks shifting behind him, and by the time Bucky swings the door open Steve has scrambled to his feet. 

Bucky stares at him, surprised. 

“Hi,” Steve says. 

“Hi,” Bucky replies, and his eyes go to the sit pad on the ground, and its surrounding detritus—the tablet, the water bottle, the bag of gummy bears. He looks back up at Steve, and nods. “Smart.” 

Steve is confused for half a second, and then he realizes that Bucky thinks Steve was there to guard him. As an enemy. 

“No!” Steve says quickly. “No, God, Bucky I wasn’t—that wasn’t what I was doing. You’re not a prisoner.” 

Bucky looks at him skeptically. 

“I was just… worried about you,” Steve explains. The words are inadequate. “I didn’t want to leave you here alone. Everyone thought I was crazy.” 

Bucky shrugs one shoulder. 

“Yeah, okay, funny guy.”

Bucky’s mouth twitches. 

“Come on,” Steve says, bending to gather his things. “Let’s go back up to my place. You look awful. You can shower, and eat something, and in the morning, we—” He pauses. “We’ll figure it out.”  

“‘Kay,” Bucky says hoarsely. 

Steve starts off down the hall. 

“The hell’d you do?” Bucky rasps. 

“What?”  

Bucky grunts, and gestures at the leg Steve is currently limping on. 

“Oh,” Steve says, and gives him a sheepish grin. “Fell asleep. All pins and needles, now.” 

“Idiot,” Bucky says, and Steve’s heart has never been more warmed by an insult. 

Back in the apartment, Bucky goes straight for the shower. Steve throws his fluffiest towels into the dryer to heat them up, aware that he is ‘being extra’, and not giving a single, solitary shit. Bucky deserves warm, fluffy towels, so he'll have them. 

After he drops the warmed towels in the bathroom, along with the comfiest sweats he owns, Steve turns to the kitchen. He finds it unhelpfully barren, so he settles instead for one of his favorite twenty-first century inventions: grilled peanut butter and banana sandwiches. He uses up an entire loaf of bread, and by the time Bucky appears in the living room Steve’s already eaten two. 

Bucky moves like he’s expecting to step on a landmine, and it takes a lot of effort to not watch his journey from the entryway to the couch. Steve focuses on taking small, even bites of his sandwich, and eventually feels Bucky’s weight settle gingerly next to him. He smells like tea tree oil and peppermint. 

Bucky chose to sit on Steve’s right side. Does he remember, that Steve used to be deaf in his left ear? Or does he just remember that this is the side he always sits on? 

Or does he not remember at all?

They eat in silence. 

A thousand questions sit at the tip of Steve's tongue, but every single one of them is a pathway to a broken heart, and he doesn't dare ruin this. He is here, with his Alpha, and they are both healthy and safe and warm and fed. He wants to savor this as long as he can. 

He's full after five sandwiches, but eats a sixth anyway, nibble by nibble, and watches Bucky plow through the rest with a growing sense of dread as the pile gets smaller and smaller. As Bucky gets closer and closer to leaving. 

But when the last sandwich is gone, Bucky sits back, and the room is quiet. Outside, the sky is turning a watery gray with the dawn, and yellow lines of taxi cabs are beginning to flood the streets. 

It's okay, Steve tells himself. Bucky will leave, and Steve will stay here, and he’ll work through the hurt once again. He’s survived it before. He should be grateful for the time he's had. He has Sam, and Natasha, now. He won’t be alone. He’ll be fine . 

But then Bucky says, "So where'm I sleepin'?" 

So he's not leaving. 

...Not yet.

Two days later, Steve wakes up, and Bucky is gone. 

He checks every room in the apartment twice, but he’s not there. His boots and coat are gone. There’s no note.  

Steve has spent the last forty-eight hours waiting for this, but his chest still feels like it’s been cracked open. His lungs expand, but no air comes in. 

Bucky is gone. 

He’s left. He chose to leave. 

Steve sits at the kitchen table, staring at the wall, and longing for the days when he was fresh out of the ice and the grief was too all-encompassing to feel like a real emotion. 

It had been easier, when he’d thought Bucky was just dead. Steve had been alone, his mate had been dead, and he’d made his peace with that. Or started to, at least. It was the worst thing Steve had ever been through, mourning the loss of his Alpha, but it had been a simple, raw grief. Bucky had died, and Steve had not. 

But this. 

This is so much worse. 

To know that Bucky is out there, alive, but that he doesn’t need Steve the way Steve needs him—to know that Bucky remembers him but doesn’t want him—it’s a grief cut with resentment and anger and jealousy, and Steve hates himself for feeling it, but he can’t seem to stop. He tells himself that he has no right to feel angry at Bucky for how he chooses to recover from his own trauma. 

He doesn’t know how many times he can go through this. 

He hates that he isn’t enough.

What’s he going to do if Bucky comes back for another rut? 

What if Bucky doesn’t come back? 

Steve hadn’t actually helped him. Bucky had asked for medication to stop the rut, not just a prison cell to hide in. Steve had failed him. Why would he come back?

But what if HYDRA captures him again? 

God, what if HYDRA kills him?  

Steve can’t mourn him, not again, the first time had nearly killed him— 

“Steve?” 

Bucky is standing in the entry to the kitchen, holding a white plastic bag with a yellow smiley face on it. He’s looking at Steve in confusion. 

“Bucky,” Steve says. 

Bucky sets the bag on the table. “You’re breathing too fast,” he announces. 

“I thought—” Steve stops himself, as it flashes in his mind don’t give him ideas and don’t piss him off and don’t make him feel guilty if he chooses to go. “Nothing. Sorry. I’m okay. You—you got breakfast?” 

“Bagels,” Bucky says. “With no goddamn raisins.”

“Oh. Okay.” 

Bucky slides a chair out silently, and sits down with a grace that’s still strange to watch. All his movements are like that—deliberate, and fluid. Before he fell, Bucky had moved with casual expanse, dropping into chairs, slinging his arm around the back of the couch, spreading his legs wide when he sat. HYDRA trained that out of him. He sits now with silent, perfect posture as he unties the takeout bag, and removes a brown paper bag from within. 

“Breathe slower,” Bucky orders, scowling. 

Steve can’t help the little huff of laughter, half-hysterical as it is. He splays his hands flat on the table, and takes in a deep, slow breath. 

He thinks his heartbeat has slowed down a little, at least. 

A bagel is shoved in his direction, piled with lox and cream cheese and capers. Steve eats it without tasting a single bite. 

“You thought I left,” Bucky says, some time later. “That’s why you were sad. Because you thought I left.”

Steve feels abruptly nauseous. “Yes,” he says, and swallows. 

Bucky nods, and then, after a long moment, he says in a heavier voice, “You know HYDRA is still out there.” 

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. 

“I raided every base I knew about,” Bucky continues, staring at the table. “I killed every single agent I found. I—I tried. But. Every time I think it’s done, there’s something else that comes up.” 

“You’re one person, Bucky,” Steve says. “HYDRA is a global terrorist organization that entire countries have tried to destroy.” 

“There’s a bank in Saaremaa; their ledgers don’t match up,” Bucky says dully. “And there’s missing girls in Saratov who all made deposits there. There’s a physicist in Bratsk whose Omega gets a monthly payment from an account there. There’s a CEO in Oslo who opens a new safety deposit box there every six months. And he has another bank in Gothenburg, and their ledges don’t match up, either, and—God, Steve, it just keeps going.” 

“I know,” Steve tells him. “Believe me, I know.” 

Bucky exhales, and his shoulders slump. He looks up at Steve with exhausted eyes. “I don’t want to do it anymore.” 

“Then don’t,” Steve says. 

“Someone has to.” 

“There’s a lot of someones already working on it.” 

“I don’t deserve— ” 

“Yes, you do,” Steve says. 

“You don’t know that. You don’t even know who I am, anymore.” 

“I know who you were, and I know what HYDRA made you do, and I know that you deserve to come home, for the same reason that you knew you had to pull me out of that river last year.” Steve feels tears rising, but he swallows them down. He curls his hands into fists under the table, fighting against the urge to take Bucky’s hands into his own. “You and me, Bucky, we’re… God, we’re in each others’ bones. All the HYDRA scientists in the world couldn’t take that out of you, and I know I don’t know you, not like I used to, but I want to. I want to learn you again. I want to love you again. Just—just stay. Please stay.” 

An eternity passes, and Bucky closes his eyes. “Okay,” he whispers. He breathes in, and breathes out, long and slow. “Okay.” 

Two days later, and Sarajevo cannot wait any longer. 

“It’s a mission,” Steve explains, over a dinner of hand-pulled noodles. “I put it off as long as I could, but I gotta go tonight or I'll miss my window.” 

Bucky doesn’t look up from where he’s slicing up the noodles into tiny, tiny bites with his fork and knife. 

“I swear I wouldn’t leave if it wasn’t important,” Steve adds miserably. 

“It’s fine,” Bucky tells his noodles.

“You’ll be safe, here,” Steve promises. “The Tower has some of the best security in the world, and if you need anything JARVIS can get it for you, or Tony, and I won’t have my cell phone but—” 

“I’m not a fucking five year old,” Bucky snaps. 

It hurts, but Steve swallows it down. “I just want you to be okay,” he says. 

Bucky laughs darkly. “You’re in for a long wait, then.” 

“That wasn’t what I meant.” 

“Go on your fucking mission,” Bucky says shortly. “I’ll survive. I lasted seventy years without you, I think I’ll make it a few more days.” 

Steve flinches, and looks down at his food. 

They finish their dinner in silence. 

Steve changes into his tactical gear, and then sits down at his desk to review the building schematics one last time. He’ll do it again once he has the quinjet on autopilot, just to be safe, but he wants to make sure he knows exactly what weapons he needs to grab from the armory before he leaves. He has no quartermaster to outfit him, just has he has no CO to report to, and no intelligence team to assemble tidy little briefings for him. Every piece of this mission belongs to Steve. 

He’s debating between a sonic and spring-loaded center punch to get through the basement window—one has more power, but the other is quieter, and Steve hasn’t been able to find the thickness of the glass in any of the schematics—when a shadow under his bedroom door catches his eye. 

Steve freezes, but there’s nothing to hear. The apartment is absolutely silent. 

The shadow stays for a long moment, and then moves away. 

In Sarajevo, Steve carries no shield, and he wears no stars. 

He pulls a man from his prison cell and steals him out into the night, and as they drive out into the countryside, the man weeps openly. “Hvala vam,” he says, over and over again, like a prayer. “Hvala vam, hvala vam, hvala vam.” 

He must not remember the face of the man who put him in prison in the first place. 

Steve wakes up, but for several seconds he’s still drowning, he can’t breathe, his lungs burn, his limbs are water-logged and ice-shocked and the world is dark, dark, dark— 

But, no. 

He’s in his bedroom. 

He’s not drowning, he’s in his bedroom, and he’s warm, and he can breathe, he just has to coordinate his muscles and pull the air in, and his lungs will open up. Yes. Okay. Again. Breathe in, and breathe out. He’s okay. There is no ice. 

Several minutes later, he can breathe, the tremors have stopped, but his mind won’t stop replaying the memory of it over and over again, so he gets up. 

It’s two in the morning, but Bucky is in the living room anyway, standing at the windows and looking out into the night. 

Steve flicks on a lamp, and collapses onto the couch with his mug of tea. 

He wonders what Bucky is looking at, and after he gets through half his mug without Bucky moving from his spot, Steve voices the question. 

“Too many high-rises,” Bucky complains. 

“You should see the thing they just finished building up on Park Avenue,” Steve says mildly. 

“There are a hundred and forty-seven spots that someone could line up a shot from and kill me right here,” Bucky says. 

“It’s Tony. The glass is bulletproof about four times over.” 

“Do you know how convenient floor-to-ceiling windows are, to a sniper?” 

Steve rolls his eyes. “So move away from the windows, genius.” 

Bucky makes a disgusted little noise, but steps back, and then yanks on the cord that sends the heavy black-out curtains sweeping across them. He looks around the room sourly for a moment, then exhales and sits down on the opposite end of the couch. 

“It’s going to be okay,” Steve tells him. 

Bucky doesn’t reply. 

“It’s just for an hour, and if you don’t like her, we’ll find someone else. Tony has probably seen at least a dozen, himself.” 

Still nothing. 

“Maybe Dr. Thompson hates modern architecture, too,” Steve offers. 

“She lives in that glass monstrosity down in Astor Place,” Bucky says darkly. “And she has a painting of the Guggenheim in her living room.” 

“Did you—Bucky, did you case your therapist?” Steve demands. 

Bucky gives him a look that says, on a very spiritual level, Obviously. 

“You can’t do that! It’s an invasion of her privacy!” 

“Maybe she should rethink those floor-to-ceiling windows.” 

“Jesus Christ, Buck.” 

Bucky is unrepentant. 

Steve really hopes this therapist is as good as Tony says she is. There’s a short list of people who have the clearance to even begin to help someone like Bucky, and probably an even shorter list of people who would pass Bucky’s scrutinization. 

But it’s been almost a month since Bucky first came to the Tower, and he has good days, and bad days, and days where he doesn’t leave his room at all. Steve knows he gets up every few hours in the night just to double-check the locks, and sometimes he tears the entire apartment apart looking for hidden cameras, and sometimes he gets overwhelmed and in a haze of panic he yanks at his hair again and again like if he could just rip it all out then maybe the brain underneath it would finally shut up. 

And more than once Steve has found him standing, staring aimlessly, and when Steve says his name Bucky replies with, “Ready to comply.” 

So, therapy it is. 

If they can find one that Bucky deems acceptable. 

Twice a week, Steve travels to the Lower East Side to Resistance, a small martial arts studio tucked between a nail salon and an Insomnia Cookies. On his way is the statue of Captain America, whose location is currently a hotly contested issue in New York City ever since it became known that said national icon was actually born and raised in Brooklyn Heights. Steve is not personally a fan of the statue, and wouldn’t mind not having to pass it every Monday and Saturday, but he also dislikes the thought of having it anywhere near where he really grew up. 

After Steve had announced to the world that he was an Omega, amidst quite a lot of hate mail and interview requests, he’d also been inundated with invitations to support a staggering number of Omega organizations and political groups—everything from joining lobbyists on Capitol Hill, to giving a commencement address at an all-Omega college in Massachusetts. 

“You can’t do them all, Steve,” Pepper had told him, after Steve spent an entire afternoon trying to figure out why Omegas in Science and O.S.T.E.M. seemed to spend so much time sabotaging each other, when they were fighting for the exact same cause. “You have to pick two or three, and the rest will have to find another famous Omega to take advantage of.” 

Resistance had made the short list. They were a small non-profit dedicated to self-defence classes for Omegas, and while they’d initially just asked for a retweet or a shout-out, what they’d gotten instead was a part-time instructor. 

When he’s not on a mission, Steve spends Monday nights and Saturday mornings running drills with Omegas on how to escape headlocks and bearhugs, how to fight with their keys as a weapon, and how to break a nose with the heel of their hand. Steve is larger than most of his students by a wide margin, and he’s happy to let every single one of them take him down again and again until they feel confident in their skills. 

Steve doesn’t really care to examine the deeper workings of why he finds this so fulfilling. He knows there are layers of trauma embedded in the self-satisfaction that he leaves every class with, and he doesn’t care. 

It’s one of the only things Steve has done in the twenty-first century that actually feels like it has meaning. 

It hadn’t been long before Bucky had tired of living off of takeout, and had summarily taken over kitchen duties. He’s a lot better at it than Steve remembers him being back before the war, but then again, in 1942, milk and butter had been splurge purchases on their meager budget, and the cuisine of the time had been predominantly… boiled. 

Tonight, they eat shrimp paella on the couch, because Steve is prepping for a deposition tomorrow, and Bucky discovered Planet Earth earlier today on Netflix and wants to get to the Jungles episode. 

Not every day is this easy, but Steve treasures the quiet domesticity of it all. He hadn’t appreciated it, back before the war. He hadn’t appreciated a lot of things before the war. 

“This is amazing,” Steve informs Bucky, two bites in. 

“You say that every night,” Bucky grumbles. 

“There’s more, right?” Steve asks, digging his spoon in again. 

“Obviously. You don’t want to know how much eight pounds of shrimp cost, either.” 

Steve has some idea. 

But Steve had spent the first twenty-seven years of his life constantly hungry, and one of the best things about this new century is that he can finally have enough. Better still, Steve is happy to see that weeks of regular meals have finally gotten rid of the dangerous cut of Bucky’s cheekbones. And if it costs him a hundred bucks in shrimp, then… well. Then that’s what it costs. 

After dinner, and after David Attenborough finishes narrating about the sociopolitical economics of a chimpanzee troop in Uganda, Steve pulls the tablet out and buries himself in old op reports. It’s a closed court tomorrow, just himself and the lawyers, and the entire case is sealed from the public eye as a matter of national security, which he’s grateful for. Trials seem to be even more of a three-ringed circus than they were back in the forties. 

He’s so intent on his review of the op timeline that when he looks up, he has no idea what’s been playing on the television for the last thirty minutes. 

The sight of icebergs in the Arctic greets him in high-definition. 

Steve freezes. 

For an instant—just an instant—he’s in the plane again, going down, foolishly thinking that it won’t hurt to die, that it’ll be quick, that the serum doesn’t stand a chance against the crush of metal and fuel into the icy waters of the Arctic. 

A hand on his arm startles him out of it, and when Steve turns to look, there’s Bucky. 

Touching him. 

Steve looks down before he thinks better of it, and it’s just in time to see Bucky’s hand pull back like he’s been burnt. 

“Sorry,” Bucky mutters. 

“No,” Steve says hastily. “No, it’s okay. I’m sorry. I was just surprised.” 

Bucky looks at him warily. “We don’t touch.” 

Steve swallows. “You can touch me, Buck. If you want.” 

“But—” Bucky frowns, and his eyes go unfocused, like he’s trying to remember something. 

“I’ll tell you, if I want you to stop,” Steve adds. 

He wants to put Bucky’s hand back. He wants Bucky’s arm around his shoulders and their bodies pressed together, and his head tipped onto Bucky’s shoulder and the scent of him everywhere—he wants it so badly it’s almost a physical ache. 

But Bucky puts his hand back in his lap, and leaves it there. He doesn’t touch Steve again. 

Steve wakes with an itch under his skin that happens, sometimes, when the bed is too soft and the air is too still. It's been three years, so by this point he knows to just roll out of bed and start doing push-ups. Exercise is mindless, and the burn of his muscles grounds him the way few other things do.

An hour later, sweaty and clear-headed, Steve wanders out into the kitchen to grab a water and a protein bar before his shower. Bucky is playing solitaire at the table, which probably means his insomnia’s been acting up again, though when he looks up his expression is peaceful, so maybe he’d just woken up with the inexplicable urge to play cards. 

“Morning,” Steve says, moving into the kitchen. 

There’s the briefest falter in his step as he passes by Bucky’s chair, when it springs into his mind that he could so easily stop and press a kiss to the top of his head—a split second decision of it would be so easy, he wouldn’t mind, but what if he hates it, don’t ruin this morning it just started—and in the end he keeps walking. 

Behind him, he hears Bucky rise out of his chair. 

Steve opens the fridge, grabs a water bottle, and as he shuts the door he looks up to see Bucky standing in front of him. 

“You want one?” Steve asks, offering the bottle. 

But Bucky’s eyes are fixed lower. On Steve’s chest. 

On his dog tags, which had spilled out during one exercise or another, and now rest on top of Steve’s t-shirt, plain to see. 

“Oh,” Steve says, and for once he doesn’t feel the flash of possessiveness that he usually does when he catches other people staring. “Yeah. You remember these?” 

He holds them out, and after a long moment, Bucky cups them in the palm of his hand. 

“I was still wearing them, when they found me,” Steve says quietly. “Never took ‘em off. Not once.” 

“I had a key,” Bucky says, eventually. 

“Yeah.” 

Bucky frowns, thumb brushing the padlock with infinite tenderness. “I lost it.” 

“You were wearing it, when you fell,” Steve says. 

“134 Henry Street, Apartment 3, Brooklyn, New York 11201,” Bucky murmurs. He looks up and meets Steve’s eyes. 

“Yeah. We used to live there.” 

Bucky stares down at the padlock again. Eventually, he says in a very soft voice, “You were wearing this when you died.” 

Steve swallows. 

“I held it in my hand,” he says gently, and he closes his hand around Bucky’s, folding it into a fist around the dog tags, and then pushing it gently until it rests against Bucky’s chest. “Just like this.”

How funny, that Steve had thought Bucky was dead, and took less than a week to chase down death himself. That he’d woken up, alone, and spent the better part of two years wishing he were dead. And now here he is, still alive, and Bucky is alive, and they’re together again despite all the odds. He’s so goddamn lucky. Steve thanks God every day that he’d survived that ice, that he’d managed to make it to 2015 alive and healthy, to be here with Bucky now. 

Part of him wonders if Bucky feels the same way. If he’s glad that he survived all of his suffering at the hands of HYDRA so that he could be here with Steve, now. 

Or does he wish that he’d died in that ravine? 

Steve doesn’t know for sure, but more and more, he finds himself thinking that Bucky is just as grateful to be here as Steve is. 

Steve has a general sense that Bucky remembers most of their life together, but he’s never sat down and ran through an exhaustive timeline. What’s important is that Bucky knows that he was loved, and is loved, and the rest is just details. 

There are definitely still holes that are being filled in, though. 

When Bucky decides to experiment with homemade pesto, he squints at the roasting pine nuts and says, “...Did we ever try to use your shield as a frying pan?” 

And Steve bursts out laughing at the sudden memory of seven starving Commandos crouched around a fire, cracking stolen eggs over a shield that wouldn’t heat, no matter how long they held it over the flames. 

Or when Steve reaches for a kolache and Bucky bats his hand away and snaps, “That one’s apple,” and then blinks in confusion for a few seconds until the memory of Steve’s old allergy slots into place. 

Or when Steve is buried in his tablet again, and Bucky appears in his bedroom door, wide-eyed and pale. Steve immediately sets down his work and stands up from his desk, crossing the room in three strides, and Bucky whispers, “You were pregnant, once,” and Steve almost freezes on the spot. 

“Yeah,” he says, eventually. It’s an old hurt, trivial in comparison to the other things that have happened to them since, but he still remembers being nineteen and devastated, sick with guilt. 

“I don’t remember what happened,” Bucky says, distressed. “I remember—I remember bein’ so excited about it, but I don’t remember what happened.” 

“I lost it,” Steve tells him softly. He hesitates, but Bucky looks so upset that he decides he doesn’t care, and he grabs Bucky’s hands in his and squeezes them tight, metal and flesh alike. “I was still real sick back then. I didn’t make it more than a few months.” 

“I don’t remember,” Bucky repeats. 

“It’s okay,” Steve says, squeezing his hands. “You don’t have to remember.” 

“But I want to,” Bucky says, frustrated. “Steve, I’ve got—you don’t even know how many things I wish I could fucking forget , but the one thing I actually want to remember and my fucking useless swiss cheese brain—” 

“Hey, no, don’t—” 

“—I fucking hate this, I hate it, it’s not fair—” 

“I know—” 

“It’s not—why—I—fuck, I—fuck—” 

“—Bucky, shh, it’s—”

“FUCK," Bucky yells, and yanks his hands free, reaching up to pull at his hair, swearing over and over again, “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” and Steve grabs his wrists but Bucky jerks them away and they struggle for a moment, Steve insisting, “Stop it—don’t—Bucky, stop—” and Bucky’s breathing going faster and faster, his hands fighting for freedom— 

“Bucky, please, you’re—” 

“—fuck fuck fuck—” 

“—stop it—” 

“—fuckfuck—” 

"Stop hurting yourself!” Steve screams, and with an almighty shove he pins Bucky to the wall. 

Bucky goes still. 

They stand there, panting, silent. They are pressed body to body, forehead to forehead. 

“Please,” Steve begs, holding Bucky’s wrists in a vice grip. “Please don’t hurt yourself.” 

Bucky shudders against him, and nods. 

“Okay,” Steve says softly, pressing his body against Bucky’s and feeling every tremor. “Okay, okay, okay. You’re okay.” And he keeps saying it, over and over, until Bucky goes quiet against him.  

“That was stupid,” Natasha announces. 

Steve hobbles down the ramp of the cargo plane, broken ankle protesting with every step, a flash of sharp agony that only momentarily overshadows the constant throb of his left hand, his shoulder, his hip, his head… His entire body is one giant ache. The tylenol from the paltry first aid kit Corporal Chow had offered him has not done much to help. 

“When I agreed to help you, Rogers, this was not what I meant.” 

“Nat,” Steve says tiredly. 

“Give me that,” Natasha snaps, unbuckling his tac vest efficiently. 

“Hey!” 

“Shut up,” Natasha says, neatly divesting him of his entire arsenal of weapons in a minute flat. “You’ll walk faster without it, and I get hives if I’m around the military for too long. Let’s go.” 

Steve moves maybe one tenth of a mile faster without his gear, but he knows better than to point this out. Natasha’s kindness often comes in disguise.

This is only further enforced when they emerge from the hanger, and Natasha snaps at him to wait there for her before she strides across the road in the direction of the parking lot. 

Steve all but collapses against the hanger wall, all his weight on his uninjured leg, and basks in the afternoon sun. The plane had been cold and silent, and it’s a relief to stand in the June sunshine, hear birds chirp and feel the heaviness in the air that comes from standing near a forest on a hot day. There’s no dust in the air like the deserts of Kazakhstan. 

It isn’t until he hears a horn honk that Steve realizes his eyes had closed, and he’d started to drift off. He opens them to find Natasha waiting in front of him in a red Audi that looks badly out of place against the military base backdrop. 

Steve limps over to the passenger side, and with careful movements and an occasional swear word, he eventually manages to load himself into the car. 

Natasha doesn’t speak until they’ve exited the compound. 

“You can’t do this again,” she says. 

"Can we please not do this now?" Steve asks, without much hope. 

"Maybe when you don't hare off to Europe and almost get yourself killed on a whim—" 

“It was the right thing to do,” Steve snaps. 

Natasha looks over at him. “It wasn’t your job to do it.” 

“You don’t get to make that decision.” 

“I do when you call me at midnight, half-dead and stranded in the desert for a mission that was completely unnecessary.” 

Steve takes in a deep breath, and tells himself not to lose his temper. “I had to try , Natasha. No one was going to pay that ransom for her, and her government wasn’t going to step in to save her. Not after what we did.” 

“Not after what she did.” 

“We killed her Alpha. For HYDRA. They told us that he was the enemy and we murdered him in cold blood, planted evidence that he was working with drug runners, and then flew off on his goddamn private plane and congratulated ourselves on a job well done. We didn’t even think about what it would do to his family.” 

“We didn’t know it was fake evidence,” Natasha says steadily. “SHIELD told us we were exposing the truth by leaving that flash drive there, and we had no way of knowing any different.” 

“It doesn’t matter what we thought—” 

“And what’s more,” Natasha continues, “is that even if it was our fault, what we did under bad intel, it was that girl’s choice to start making deals with those drug runners, after her Alpha died. That had nothing to do with what we did.” 

“We killed her Alpha, and then we went and destroyed his reputation. She was grieving, and she was scared. She was alone.” 

“So she had no choice but to go and fund a cartel? Steve, that’s bullshit and you know it.” 

“She made a mistake—” 

“She made a choice.” 

“So she deserved to die?” 

“Steve, you can only take responsibility for so much!” 

“You don’t understand,” Steve says, shaking his head. “You don’t get it, what it’s like to lose your mate, to lose everything like that. She was out of her mind with grief.” 

Natasha takes in a deep breath. “Look. I know you empathize with her. But you were out of your mind with grief, too, and you didn’t go and subsidize the heroin industry.” 

“No, I just joined a paramilitary organization and shot whoever they told me to without question,” Steve says bitterly. 

Natasha is silent. 

“I owed it to her,” Steve says. “She didn’t deserve to die.” 

“And yet she did. Hours before you got there,” Natasha says flatly. 

Steve flinches. 

“You can’t save everyone, Steve, and it’s not your job to. You went running halfway around the world for an Omega that you widowed two years ago, who spent two years making her own choices and settling deeper and deeper into debt with the wrong people, and you came flying in, ready to die for her.” 

“I was just trying to help,” Steve says, voice raw. “It wasn’t—I wasn’t—God. Natasha, do you know what they did to her before they killed her?” 

“And if you died out there in the desert, how do you think Barnes would feel about it?” 

Steve goes stiff. “Don’t.” 

“How do you think that would go over with him? You think it might slow down his recovery a bit? You think he might be a little sad if you died?” 

“Don’t you dare use him against me like that,” Steve breathes, furious. “Don’t you fucking dare.” 

“Well, of the two of you, he’s the only one who seems to give a shit whether you live or die.” 

And that’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair, because Steve has worked hard to get to where he is now, he’s clawed his way back from those nights when he would sit on his bed and hold his gun and wonder if he pulled the trigger how long it would take them to find his body. He’s better now. He knows what it’s like to be suicidal, and this mission wasn’t about that. 

Steve has been working for months to undo the damage that he’d done as part of SHIELD. Every mission he’d ever been involved in, one by one, methodically deconstructed for traces of HYDRA—and at least a third of them have turned up as corrupt, so far. Steve has been trying his best to right the wrongs he can, whether it involves testifying in court, or tracking down evidence of innocence, or liberating the wrongly imprisoned. 

Sometimes, the effects of his actions are too far-reaching, too complex for such simple solutions. He killed leaders and threw communities into disarray. He destabilized entire countries. How does one man fix a civil war? 

So Steve does what he can. Natasha has helped him, when she’s able, and Steve knows that in her heart she feels the guilt just as sharply as he does. The difference is that where he’s decided to backtrack and fix every mistake, she’s decided to move forward and try again. 

“How many more files are left?” Natasha asks tiredly. 

“Only a dozen,” Steve says. 

“And provided that you don’t martyr yourself on your own sword of guilt before you finish—” 

“Fuck you.” 

“—what are you going to do when this is over?” 

Steve takes in a deep breath, and lets it out again. It’s a fair question. 

“I don’t know,” he says.

“SHIELD is rebuilding. Coulson is in charge, now, and they’re—” 

“No,” Steve says immediately. 

“I said the same,” Natasha agrees. “I’m surprised he hasn’t pitched it to you, yet.” 

“He can pitch whatever he wants. I can’t—I’m not working for anyone again. Not like that.” 

“I don’t see you as the retiring type, Rogers.” 

Steve shrugs, prickling with irritation. “I still have the Avengers.” 

“Four times a year, if that. World only needs saving every few months. That enough for you?” 

“I don’t know,” Steve snaps. 

“Well, you better start figuring it out,” Natasha says unsympathetically. 

Natasha drops him off at Stark Tower by late afternoon. Steve shuffles through the main lobby, swipes through the private door, and leans against the elevator wall as he’s taken up to the seventy-eighth floor. He’s exhausted, and in pain, and Natasha’s words won’t stop bouncing around his head. 

—SHIELD is back—

—and maybe the Avengers aren’t enough for him— 

—God, is he ever going to stop fighting—

—he isn’t suicidal anymore, he’s not—

—that Omega’s body on the bed, naked and bruised, wrists still tied to the bedposts, a bullet hole in the middle of her head—

—it was worth it, she had been worth it— 

—he hadn’t been trying to die— 

God, he just wants to sleep. 

When he comes into the apartment, Bucky is on the couch reading a book. He looks up, and his expression is immediately stricken. 

“Bucky—” 

“You’re hurt,” Bucky says, dropping the book and rising to his feet. 

“I’ll be fine.” 

“You’re missing half your hair!” 

Steve winces. “There was a fire.” 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” says Bucky, prayerfully. 

Bucky helps him into the shower, cursing him out the entire time, and only disappears long enough to remove Steve’s bloodstained tac gear and return with a pile of clean clothes. 

“Fuckin’ look at you, Jesus, Jesus,” Bucky mutters, when he has to wedge himself under Steve’s shoulder so Steve can take the step over the ledge of the tub and onto the bathmat. 

Steve takes the t-shirt off the lid of the toilet, but Bucky snatches it away. 

“You couldn’t fuckin’ take your shirt off, what makes you think you’re gonna be able put this one on, huh? Sit the fuck down. Left arm out.” 

Steve collapses onto the toilet seat and lets Bucky dress him like a child, sleeve by sleeve and pantleg by pantleg. 

“Don’t move,” Bucky orders, and Steve slumps back against the toilet and obeys. Bucky reappears with an arsenal of supplies, and begins by holding out two white pills and a dixie cup of water. “Industrial strength. Swallow.” 

Steve swallows the pills dry, and then downs the water after them. He hands the cup back, and Bucky tosses it in the general direction of the trash can. 

“Fuck,” Bucky says, staring down at the box of supplies, and eventually he comes out with a roll of tape. “Give me your hand.” 

“You don’t have to—” 

“Give me your fucking hand.” 

Steve holds out his right hand. His last three fingers are the worst of it, purple and swollen, but the whole hand has been useless since it got smashed by a car door about twelve hours ago. 

Bucky hisses, but sets about taping the fingers together with the utmost care, and when that’s done he turns to taping a winding figure eight around Steve’s ankle. Then he pulls out two chemical ice packs, cracks them both, and carefully tapes them in place. 

“Okay,” Steve says. 

“Shut up,” Bucky says, and pulls out a tube of burn cream next. He slathers it over the singed half of Steve’s head, using his flesh hand, utterly gentle. “Swear to God, you look like a goddamn Batman villain right now, half your hair burnt off, what am I even gonna do with you, huh? Can’t leave you alone for a goddamn day, can I?” 

His hands move over Steve’s neck, slathering a burn with gel, and then to his forearm where another burn has turned blistered and red. 

Steve hasn’t been touched like this in… years. 

Once he’s satisfied, Bucky caps the burn cream and paws through the box until he comes up with a box of bandages. 

“I don’t need those,” Steve says. 

“Yes, you do,” Bucky says. 

“I’m not even bleeding anymore.”

“Yeah, but they still hurt. Let me cover ‘em up so they don’t keep rubbing on everything while they heal, all right?” 

Steve stares at him for a long moment. 

Then he starts to cry. 

Bucky almost drops the bandages. “What the fuck.” 

Steve shakes his head, reaching up with his hand to cover his hand with his face—he hates this, but he can’t seem to help it, and he hates it—but Bucky pulls his hand down and says, “No, hey, that’s the broken one,” and Steve cries harder and he doesn’t know why. 

“Steve, what’s wrong? ” 

Steve shakes his head again. “I’m sorry,” he says, between hitching breaths. “I’m sorry.” 

“What the fuck for?” Bucky demands. 

“I love you,” Steve says helplessly. 

“Shitting Christ. What’s in those painkillers?” 

Steve continues to cry. 

“I love you too,” Bucky mutters, and briskly tapes up the gash on Steve’s arm and the long slice down his back. He hoists Steve to his feet—Steve is trembling and dizzy at this point, and he tries not to give Bucky too much of his weight but Bucky curses him out some more and then half-carries Steve to the bedroom. 

Steve’s head spins as he goes down on the bed. Bucky pulls back, and Steve reaches out blindly and snags fabric. 

“Please,” he says. The world is floating in and out like breathing, and Steve is suspended in time, and he’s so tired of being alone. “Please.” 

“Okay,” Bucky says. 

And he crawls into bed, tucks himself up real close, his limbs warm and heavy around Steve, tea tree oil and peppermint and below it, Steve’s favorite scent in the world. 

“Bucky,” Steve says, with effort. 

“What?” 

Steve smiles, and says his name again, just because he can. 

Steve wakes up, hours and hours later, to the sound of Bucky quietly humming The Battle Hymn of the Republic. His wounds ache, but not as badly as they had last night, and he can feel the edges of his burns beginning to itch as the skin heals. Bucky isn’t touching him, but Steve can feel the warmth from his body only inches away. 

Moving hurts, but the desire to see Bucky is stronger, so Steve rolls himself over anyway. 

Bucky is propped up on one elbow, and watching Steve with a soft look on his face. 

How many times did Steve wake up to this sight, and not realize what a gift it was?

“Morning,” Steve says. 

“We’re gonna have to shave the rest of your head,” Bucky replies. 

Steve closes his eyes and groans, the song abruptly making sense. “You remember that?” 

“Do I remember having to shave my head in January in Austria because we all went and got head lice? Gosh.” 

“That fucking song.” 

“I don’t really remember the words too much. I know there was a verse about your head, but I’ve just got the one about your chest.” 

“Please don’t.” 

“Mine eyes have seen the glory—” 

“Bucky.” 

“—of his chiseled, hairless chest! It is broader than the Maginot, with muscles breast to breast—” 

“I can’t believe you remember this.” 

“—Something something something something comes crusading from the West! The Captain marches ooooon.” 

Steve swats him, and Bucky laughs. 

“Pretty good for a swiss cheese brain, huh?” Bucky asks. 

Steve is just glad Bucky doesn’t remember the one about his hairy back. 

“How you feelin’?” Bucky asks, reaching out and running a gentle finger over Steve’s taped fingers. 

“Less stoned,” Steve says, sheepish. 

“You were cute.” 

Steve feels his face go red. “I’m not cute.” 

“Sure you are.” 

“What do you know, you’ve got swiss cheese brains.”

“At least I have all my hair.” 

Steve snorts with laughter, helplessly. 

“Hey,” Bucky says, fingers skating up Steve’s arm, up his shoulder, and finally resting at the angle of his jaw, cupping his face gently. 

Steve meets his gaze. “Yeah?” 

“Can I kiss you?”

“Always,” Steve says, and Bucky leans in, slow and careful, and presses the gentlest of kisses to his lips for the first time in seventy years.

A week later, Steve is at a press conference after heading off a minor alien invasion in the Canadian prairies with the rest of the Avengers. He’s wearing a baseball cap to cover up his bald, half-scabbed-over head, because the beanie he’d turned up in made him look like he was about to rob a bank (according to Tony). 

These are the questions Steve is asked:

“Captain Rogers, what’s it been like to lead the team as an Omega?”

“Can you comment on the relationship between yourself and Black Widow?” 

“How would you respond to the rumors that yourself and Howard Stark used to be romantically involved?” 

“What are your thoughts on the location of your statue? Brooklyn or Manhattan, Cap?” 

“Captain, can you address the concerns that have been put forward about the future of the Avengers, if you decide to start a family one day?” 

Tony meets his eyes from a few seats down the table, and his expression says: I told you so.

So he had

Steve wouldn’t change a thing, though. 

Steve is pressing the plunger of the syringe, gritting his teeth against the burn in his thigh as the medicine infiltrates, when he hears footsteps go past the bathroom. He hears them pause, and then backtrack, and when he looks up, Bucky is standing in the doorway. 

Steve is surprised to see him at all. Today is Tuesday, which means Bucky had spent the morning in therapy with Dr. Thompson, and on therapy days Steve rarely sees him until at least late evening, if at all. It's the only reason Steve hadn't bothered to shut the door to the bathroom in the first place. 

But here Bucky is, hollow-eyed and pale. His eyes are fixed on Steve’s hand. 

“Suppressants,” Steve explains, pulling the needle out and massaging the area a little bit. 

He really hopes that this isn’t going to trigger a flashback, or another hair-pulling episode. God only knows how many needles HYDRA had stuck Bucky with over the years, and what kind of memories this could dredge up. 

Bucky’s eyes move to the vials sitting on the counter, and then back to Steve. 

Steve reaches out to grab the second vial. “I’m good, Buck. Go back to your room, or… wherever you were going. It’s okay.” 

Bucky steps into the bathroom. 

Steve tenses just a little, watching his fluid movements as he approaches, but even though his expression is quiet, it’s not lifeless. Those eyes are Bucky’s eyes. The Soldier isn’t here right now. 

Bucky kneels before him and takes the vial out of his hands. Then he takes an alcohol swab, cracks off the top of the vial, wipes it down, and then flips the vial upside down and draws up the medication like he’s done this a hundred times before. 

He only pauses after the vial has been drained completely, to look at Steve, and then at the syringe, and then back at Steve. 

“Yeah,” Steve confirms quietly. “The whole thing.” 

Bucky nods once, and then flicks the syringe a few times to dispense the bubbles. 

Steve watches quietly as Bucky takes another alcohol swab, wipes down a patch of skin on the meat of Steve’s thigh, and then lines up the syringe. There’s only the briefest moment of hesitation before he slips the needle in. 

“Thank you,” Steve says, after it’s done. 

Bucky doesn’t reply. He flicks up the safety cap on the syringe and places it on the sink, and then sits back on his feet, staring at the floor. 

“Bucky?” Steve asks tentatively. 

“‘M sorry,” Bucky mumbles. 

“For what?” Steve asks, confused. 

Bucky shakes his head, still not looking at him. 

Steve slides off the toilet seat and onto the floor next to him. “Hey. What’s wrong?” 

Up close, Steve can hear Bucky breathing slightly too fast, and the jagged edge to each breath. His hands are twisting together in his lap, like he’s itching to start pulling at his hair again. He’s panicking. 

Steve reaches out, but Bucky jerks back immediately. 

“Bucky—” 

But Bucky is scrambling to his feet, muttering something Steve can’t understand, and Steve watches him run from the bathroom, and then listens to the sound of his feet on the carpet down the hallway, and finally winces at the slam of the bedroom door. 

Therapy days are hard. 

Steve and Bucky now sleep in the same bed, most nights. 

When they’d first mated, they had spent every night curled up around each other, taking elbows to the ribcage and knees to the groin as part and parcel. They had been young and giggling, and in love with being loved. Steve remembers waking up tangled in Bucky, arms and legs and chins, and feeling a thrill down to his very toes because he was so goddamn lucky to be here, in this bed, with the man he loved, and he wanted to wake up like this every day. 

But years of marriage had aged their love, and what had once been exciting and new instead became a steady comfort of life. They went to bed, not wrapped together, but side by side, sometimes touching, sometimes not. Steve hadn’t needed to fall asleep chest-to-back anymore to know that Bucky was there, would always be there. Little touches replaced the all-encompassing burrow—a hand through his hair, an arm over his chest, a leg pressed between his thighs. Easy. Steadfast. 

Now it’s a new century, and a lot of things are different. 

Now there are nightmares, and metal arms, and silence where there was once snoring. Now Bucky keeps reaching over for Steve in his sleep and hitting him right between the shoulderblades, because he’s reaching for a body that Steve hasn’t had for seventy-two years. 

But Steve wakes up almost every morning, with the same scent on his sheets that was there back before the war, in a bed that’s no longer cold and lonely, and he doesn’t care that they’re still working out how to fit together again. It’s enough that they’re both here, and trying. 

This morning, Steve wakes an hour earlier than he usually would on a Saturday. He slaps the alarm with verve, and flops onto his back.

After a moment, Steve hears the sounds of Bucky shifting, and eventually he rolls all the way over onto his side to face him. Bucky’s on the far end of the bed, fighting a yawn as he wakes up and slipping a hand under his pillow, just like he does every morning when he first wakes up. 

Steve knows there’s a gun there. He’s lost track of how many weapons he’s found hidden around the apartment, usually rotating positions every few weeks, but Bucky always has a gun under his pillow and a knife between the mattress and the headboard. Steve doesn’t mind. He slept with a gun under his own pillow for almost a year, for far more dangerous reasons. 

“Morning,” Steve says, watching him on a propped elbow. 

“Morning,” Bucky says, and squints at the clock. “Early.” 

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. He reaches his hand out and leaves it in the middle distance, an offer but not a demand. “I’m gonna pick up breakfast for Resistance on my way in. I owe them for missing my other class on Monday.” 

“Wasn’t like you had a choice about it,” Bucky complains. 

“Still,” Steve says. “They were relying on me. I feel bad.” 

Steve had, in fact, been tied up in court on Monday well into the evening, testifying on behalf of a man that he’d wrongly imprisoned two years ago. Missing class had been unavoidable, but it had also been the third class that he’d missed with Resistance in the past two months, and he likes teaching there. 

Bucky takes Steve’s hand, and tugs a little. “You don’t need that long to get them breakfast.” 

“I was gonna get Ladurée,” Steve says.

“What, from Lenox Hill? The fuck is wrong with Magnolia, or Breads? They all make the same overpriced bagels, anyway.” 

“Actually, Magnolia Bakery doesn’t sell bagels—” 

“Shut up,” Bucky declares, and tugs on his hand again. 

Steve tips over dramatically onto his stomach with a groan, face-planting into the pillow, and starts laughing when Bucky grumbles irritably and shoves at his shoulder. He comes up laughing still when Bucky eventually gets the leverage to flip him over, a hand on his shoulder and a knee wedged under his hip. 

And then Bucky is on top of him, heavy and warm, and Steve can’t help the grin that stretches across his face, so wide it almost hurts. 

“You’re such a brat,” Bucky says affectionately. 

Steve reaches up and tucks a stray lock of hair behind Bucky’s ear. This close, Bucky’s scent is inescapable, and the weight of him makes it hard to breathe, but Steve doesn’t mind because it’s a reminder that Bucky is no longer whipcord thin like he’d been months ago, fresh off the streets and half-starved. All the cooking Bucky has done has been good for his body. He’s heavier, and he’s healthier.

Bucky looks at him for a long, long time. 

“What?” Steve asks. 

Bucky hesitates. His eyes flick down, and one finger traces the lump of Steve’s dog tags under his t-shirt. 

Steve brings his hand back up, this time tracing down the side of Bucky’s face, over his eyebrow and the wrinkles at the corner of his eye and the rasp of his stubble, and the fine angle of his jaw. “What?” 

“Sex,” Bucky says. 

Steve goes cold, and his hand freezes in place. 

“Sex?” he repeats. 

“I want to have it,” Bucky says, and now his eyes are averted, like he’s already afraid he’s said the wrong thing. “With you. Some time.” 

Steve’s heart races with an old, old fear. “You do?” 

“Of course I do,” Bucky says, with determination. “You’re—my Omega. I love you. I want to have sex with you.” 

He sounds scared. Like he’s terrified of rejection. Like he’s been waiting to ask for this for a long, long time, and the courage it took to ask was almost too much to rally. 

“Okay,” Steve says, because what else can he say? 

So Bucky wants to have sex. That’s a normal thing to ask for. They’ve been married for seventy-eight years, they’ve had sex at least a thousand times before, they’ve been sleeping in the same bed for a month and they’ve been kissing just as long. Sex is a logical progression. 

This will be fine. 

Steve will be fine. 

That day at class, Steve lets two dozen Omegas knock him flat on his ass over and over again. 

For the first time in a while, he’s conscious of how he towers over all of them. He’s huge. He’s thick and meaty, built like a brute, built to smash and kill—nothing like the delicate, lithe little Omegas that he teaches. They all have slender wrists and soft skin and eyes too big for their faces. 

Steve used to look like that, once. 

He’d never been an Omega who was overly concerned with his looks—and he hadn’t had the money to be, anyway. He hadn’t dressed to emphasize his tiny waist, or worn rouge to heighten his cheekbones. But it had made him shiver, the way Bucky would look at him when he could hold both of Steve’s wrists above his head with only one hand, and jerk him off with the other. It had made feel so safe, when his head was tucked under Bucky’s chin. 

After the serum, Steve hadn’t been able to look in the mirror for months. Bucky had only been able to stand him when the artificial pheromones had worn off between doses. The thought of Bucky seeing him naked—seeing his broad chest, his thick thighs, his frankly terrifying cock—had been untenable. The possibility of rejection, of disgust, had been too high. 

And then Bucky had been dead, and Steve had been alive, and it hadn’t mattered what he’d looked like. Even after Bucky was alive again, it hadn’t mattered. Even when Bucky had come home, it hadn’t mattered. 

But now Bucky wants to have sex. 

And it’s all Steve can think about. 

Steve throws himself into the last few missions he has to sort through, from his time at SHIELD. Three of them are cut-and-dry cases that the US court system has already corrected using records from the SHIELD data dump, one is actually a legitimate mission that seems to have been untouched by any HYDRA agenda, but the last one is not quite so simple. 

In his time at SHIELD, Steve had been involved in several missions to Luhansk, a major city in the Ukraine. They had been told that the local government there was corrupt, involved in a human trafficking ring that SHIELD had been trying to deconstruct for years, and that every piece of data stolen, every target captured for interrogation, every assassination performed—it would be one step closer to ending the suffering of the hundreds and hundreds of victims being funneled into America to act as slave labor. 

Now, it’s obvious that what Steve and his team had actually done was allow HYDRA to take over the entire city. 

It’s the sort of catastrophe that Steve would usually call too complex to handle on his own, and he’d forward his research on to relevant parties, except. 

Except. 

As Steve digs deeper and deeper, trying to determine exactly how far the corruption extends, he notices that over the past four months there’s been a subtle shift away from HYDRA. Certain members have gone missing. Key funds have dwindled. Certain business fronts have closed. 

He spends three straight days buried in research, until finally at two in the morning he has a breakthrough. He has papers spread around him, photographs of key players taped above lists of information, and there are seventy-something tabs open on his browser, and he finally uncovers CCTV footage from a councilman’s house the night he’d disappeared. Several dark figures are present, unidentifiable between the grainy footage and their masked faces, but one short figure stands out amongst the rest. 

Steve would know that fighting style anywhere. 

After all, she’d spent almost a year training him. 

“Is SHIELD really running clean these days?” Steve asks. 

“I told you I turned them down,” Natasha answers, after a pause. “Did Coulson finally call you?” 

“No,” Steve says. “But I know you. You looked into them before you turned them down. What did you find on them?”

“That they’re as clean as they were last time I looked into it, seven years ago,” Natasha says. 

“What does that mean?” 

“I means I looked, and I couldn’t find anything suspicious, but I did the same thing seven years ago, and I was wrong then. I could be wrong again. What did you find?” 

Steve stares at the mess that is his living room. “I’m not sure. Remember Luhansk?” 

“Yes,” Natasha says, after a pause. “It’s under HYDRA’s control, now.” 

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “That’s what I thought. But the last two months, it looks like someone’s been chipping away at that. Maybe someone from SHIELD.” 

“...Interesting,” Natasha says. 

“Can you get me into SHIELD’s new network?” 

“Mm, now that’s a tall order.” 

“Coy doesn’t suit you, Nat.” 

“On the contrary, it suits me rather well, with people who aren’t you. I’ve met flying bricks with more subtlety.” 

“Wow. They make bricks that fly now?” 

“Shut up. Check your email—the extra one. I have a backdoor in, but it’s not an all-access pass, and it’s going to leave fingerprints, so please wear some metaphorical gloves.” 

“You’re the best,” Steve says. 

“If this leads to you on another suicide mission, I am going to shove my boot so far up your ass you’ll be tasting leather for weeks, Rogers.” 

Steve hears the sound of the oven timer being set, and then familiar footsteps into the living room. Dinner is something spicy, he can tell by the smell in the air already. 

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Bucky says, as he comes into the living room. “What’s with the stuffed cricket?” 

Steve looks over at the purple cricket plush that arrived about a week after the last Avenger’s press conference, and the corners of his mouth tug upward into a smile. “Tony,” he says. 

“Okay,” Bucky says slowly, coming to a stop in front of the cricket where it's sitting on the bookcase. He prods it, without any apparent expectation. “Because you both love insects so much?” 

“It’s a lucky cricket. From a Disney movie,” Steve explains. “We’ll have to watch it—it’s a good one, one of the last they did with normal animation.” 

“Am I gonna get another rant about the evils of modern animation techniques?” Bucky asks, long sufferingly, as he turns away from the bookcase and meanders over to where Steve is seated on the couch. 

“I didn’t say that they were evil. I just think that they don’t use their technology to its full potential, most of the time. There’s no sense of art—” 

“Steve, for the love of God—” 

“—Princess Kaguya was robbed—” 

“I know, I know, Disney is a capitalistic demon empire and Big Hero Six shouldn’t have won the Oscar. You’ve told me before. Are we gonna watch the cricket movie tonight or not?” 

Bucky sits down on the couch next to Steve, and whereas four months ago he would have sat on the complete opposite side, he now sits shoulder and shoulder and hip to hip. 

Steve’s heartbeat immediately picks up, at the close contact. 

He reminds himself that they are in the living room, and there’s an oven timer on, and Bucky is not going to suggest that they have sex right now. 

It’s a reminder Steve has to give himself several times a day, now, most recently this morning when they’d started making out in bed, and Bucky had started to become a little more aggressive, and his hands had started to wander, and just when Steve had really started to panic Bucky had broken away suddenly, and muttered something about the bathroom before scrambling out of bed. 

“Steve?” Bucky prompts. 

“Sorry,” Steve says, shaking his head a little. “Yeah. We can watch the cricket movie tonight.” 

“Luhansk?” Bucky asks, peering at the tablet. 

“Yeah,” Steve says, though he presses the power button once to lock the screen, and sets it to the side. “I had a few missions there. Looks like HYDRA’s pretty active, still.” 

Bucky doesn’t reply. 

When Steve turns to look at him, his eyes are unfocused, and his face has gone eerily blank. 

“Bucky?” Steve asks, laying a careful hand on his arm. 

“I—” Bucky blinks a little, and then pulls his hand away. “There’s a base in Luhansk.” 

Steve feels something terrible begin to pool in the pit of his stomach. “There is?” 

Bucky nods. “I was. They kept me there.” 

He says nothing more, but the look on his face is… awful. 

Steve wants to fly to Luhansk right now and rip the base apart with his bare hands. He wants to find whoever hurt Bucky in that city and wipe them off the face of the planet. 

Instead, he takes a fortifying breath, and says, “I’m sorry,” and sits in silence with Bucky until the oven timer goes off. 

And then the next day, he contacts Agent Ivy Robinson. 

They meet at a diner on the outskirts of Philadelphia—or, as Agent Robinson notes, a Waffle House, which is very different from a diner. 

“Waffle Houses are a cornerstone of American wellbeing,” Agent Robinson informs him, after they’ve both been handed laminated single-page menus. “FEMA uses the status of the local Waffle Houses to determine the impact of a disaster. Really. Look it up. It’s called the Waffle House Index.” 

“Right,” says Steve, scanning the menu and feeling very glad that he has the serum to protect his arteries from what he’s about to eat. 

After they’ve ordered (and Steve has ordered his hash browns ‘chunked’ because it was the least terrifying option of about six that the waitress had listed off), Steve wastes no time getting down to business, and luckily, Agent Robinson seems to be on the same page. Steve knew he liked her for a reason. 

“Yeah, we’ve been in Luhansk,” she tells him readily. “It’s been an ongoing thing for the past… two months, or so, I think. How do you know about it?” 

“I hear things,” Steve says, going for ‘coy’ and probably landing somewhere closer to ‘flying brick’. 

“Right,” Agent Robinson says skeptically. “Okay. Better question: why do you want to know?” 

Steve exhales. “Because I think I might volunteer to help.” 

She stares. “You’re coming back to SHIELD?” 

“Maybe,” Steve says, uneasily. “I haven’t decided yet. I wanted more information first.” 

She studies him, and then slowly sits back in her seat. “Okay. Well, that’s fair, I guess. What do you want to know?” 

“Why Luhansk?” 

“Because there’s intelligence that it’s the location of a powerful weapon. And it’s the only major area where we’ve managed to get a foothold against them.” 

“What kind of weapon?” Steve asks. 

Agent Robinson shrugs. “Don’t know. SHIELD got less corrupt, not less opaque.” 

“How close are they to retrieving it?” 

“Not very, I don’t think. It’s been slow-going. You might have... heard... that we aren’t exactly working alone.” 

“I heard,” Steve says, nodding. “But not in… as much detail as I’d like.” 

“That’s because there’s a lot of people who are unhappy that we’ve decided to partner with the bratva,” Agent Robinson says. 

Steve’s jaw drops. “You what?” 

She grins, sharply. “I thought you’d have known.” 

“No,” Steve says, floored. “The mob? ” 

“Well,” Agent Robinson says, shrugging one shoulder, “they started this whole thing. After we effectively handed their entire city off to HYDRA, they formed more or less as a response to the corruption there. They’ve been working against HYDRA ever since. SHIELD partnered with them because they decided it would be more efficient to join forces rather than fighting two enemies at once.” 

“Makes sense,” Steve agrees, still a little dumbfounded at the idea of SHIELD agreeing to collaborate with anyone, let alone foreign mobsters. 

Agent Robinson goes on to delineate a fairly thorough history of what SHIELD has accomplished so far in Luhansk, and then their current objectives, short-term and long-term. Everything she says matches what Steve has read about, and expands on it in far greater detail than he’d managed to find through his own research. By the time Steve finishes his food, he’s convinced. 

If this leads to you on another suicide mission, Natasha says in the back of his mind, but Steve remembers Bucky’s face when he’d talked about Luhansk, and it’s easy to ignore her voice. 

“Tell Coulson I’m interested,” Steve says, laying down three twenties on the table. 

Agent Robinson gives the money a startled look. 

Steve pays no attention. He enjoys tipping ludicrously. It’s one of his most favorite things about having millions in backpay. 

“I’ll let him know,” Agent Robinson says, and they shake hands on it. 

Steve and Bucky have a good day. 

It’s Thursday, so Bucky has no therapy and Steve has no classes. Bucky spends the day wandering the city. Lately, he’s taken to returning with a horde of modern treasures to experiment with—this time a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos, dry shampoo, and something called a Snuggie. Steve spends the day with the New York Public Library, helping them to curate an exhibit on Omegas during World War II. They eat steak and potatoes for dinner, with Cheetos for dessert (verdict: delicious), and they watch Pan's Labyrinth after that, at Sam's recommendation. 

It's a good day. A very good day. 

So Steve supposes that he shouldn't be surprised when Bucky decides that tonight is the night. 

They start off by kissing, and Steve thinks, okay. The heat of Bucky’s mouth is not unwelcome, the familiar push of his tongue and the scrape of barely-there stubble on his jaw, the way their noses brush together, it’s all very good. It goes on for so long that Steve honestly starts to relax a little. 

But then Bucky leverages himself up so that instead of laying next to Steve, he’s on top of him. One elbow is planted on the bed, but Bucky’s free hand starts to move lower down Steve’s body, and Bucky’s mouth follows, trailing kisses down Steve’s jaw and then finally landing at his neck and— 

Okay, Steve thinks, when Bucky bites down and pleasure sparks down his spine. It feels good. Nerve endings that haven’t lit up since before Steve went into the ice suddenly sing with pleasure, and despite himself, Steve finds himself starting to grow hard. They had done this before, during the war, just like this. Pressing, mouthing, rubbing through their clothes in the dark—this was just like that. 

And maybe Bucky remembers, because his hand trails down Steve’s t-shirt and stops at the hem. 

Don’t, Steve wants to say, but when he opens his mouth Bucky licks at his neck over the spot he’d just bitten, and what escapes instead is a helpless groan of pleasure. 

His shirt is pulled up. 

Steve is flooded with the sensation of donotwant, sudden and raging, and the way his body goes rigid makes Bucky pause. 

“Okay?” Bucky asks, tentatively. 

It’s dark, Steve reminds himself. Bucky can’t even see him. It’s not like Bucky doesn’t know how big Steve is, with his clothes on. It’s not like Bucky hasn’t seen him naked before, between wartime bird baths in the creek and all the injuries Bucky has tended to over the years. 

“I’m okay,” Steve says in a thin voice. 

He makes his body relax. He brings his arms back around Bucky, one between his shoulderblades, and one at the small of his back, and he tips his chin down to brush his lips over Bucky’s forehead. After a moment, Bucky trails a hand over Steve’s bare belly, trembling with anticipation. 

Bucky’s lips move upward again, capturing Steve’s mouth with his own, and he kisses hard and fast. 

Steve tries to get on board, does his best to ignore the cool night air on his stomach, and with every kiss it gets easier. 

Okay , he thinks. Okay, okay, this is okay. I want this. I want to do this, this is okay. 

Bucky shifts a little, and between kisses Steve hears him take in a shuddering, jagged breath. The hand on his belly trails lower, toys with the band of his boxers, and when Bucky kisses him hot and desperate, Steve feels a flash of desire race down his spine again, at odds with the simmering panic. He grips Bucky tighter, tells himself, you can do this, this feels good, you like this, and with the next kiss Steve feels something low and heady clench with need, and he thrusts upward, seeking friction— 

It takes him a moment to realize. 

He falls back onto the mattress, cold nausea sweeping over him, eyes snapping open to stare at the dark ceiling, and Bucky is still trying to kiss him. 

“Stop,” Steve says weakly, and he tries to coordinate his hands but they’re numb with shock. They push at Bucky feebly. “Stop, stop, stop, Bucky, stop.” 

Bucky stops. 

Steve scrambles up the mattress, away from him, reaches out blindly and manages to flick the lamp on. Bucky flinches at the sudden brightness, pulling away from Steve. He’s staring, eyes wide, and the light is on, so he can see. 

Steve’s knees coming up to his chest on pure instinct. He wants to be small. He doesn’t want to be naked, exposed like this, he wants to hide and never be seen again. He’s never hated this body more, because Bucky clearly hates it too, because— 

Because Bucky hadn’t been hard.

Not at all.

Not even a little bit. 

Bucky brings a trembling hand up, and pulls it over his face. “Fuck,” he says, raggedly. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” 

“It’s okay,” Steve says numbly. “It’s not your fault.” 

“I can try again,” Bucky says, looking up at Steve with desperation. “I can—Steve, I can do this.” 

Steve feels nauseous. “No.” 

“I want to,” Bucky insists. Almost pleads. 

“It’s okay,” Steve says. His arms are wrapped around himself, and he knows he’s breathing too fast. “It’s okay. I know I don’t—” He chokes on it, for a moment. “I know I don’t look like—like I used to.” 

“It doesn’t have anything to do with how you look,” Bucky snaps. 

“You don’t have to lie!” 

“I’m not lying, I—” 

“There’s no fake Alpha pheromones this time, Bucky, there’s no excuses,” Steve says bitterly, closing his eyes against the tidal wave of self-loathing. He can feel his throat tightening, and a hot stinging behind his eyes. 

“I’m sorry, Steve,” Bucky says desperately. “I tried.” 

“It’s not your fault,” Steve says, against tears. 

“It’s gonna come. One day, I swear, Steve—” 

“Stop.” 

“—I’m getting better—” 

“Bucky, please—” 

“—every day, I promise, I’m working on it—” 

“But it’s not going to get better!” Steve bellows. 

There is silence, and when he forces his eyes open, Bucky is staring at him, expression raw. 

“This isn’t going to change,” Steve hisses furiously, gesturing at himself with one disgusted hand. “This is how I am now, and you’re not attracted to it, you never have been, I’m not an idiot. I know I’m—I’m too big. I’m ugly. No Alpha would ever want someone like me .” 

“What,” Bucky says. 

Steve sets his jaw, makes himself meet Bucky’s eyes. “It’s true. It’s always been true.” 

Bucky gapes at him. “You. What? No, that is not true.” 

“I think it’s pretty fucking obvious that it is,” Steve retorts, with a sharp gesture at Bucky’s crotch. 

"You’re gorgeous, Steve. I’m the one who—” 

“Who just isn’t attracted to Alphas, it’s fine—” 

“I’m not attracted to anyone!” 

Steve, mouth open to fire back, stops short. 

Bucky folds in on himself a little, dropping his gaze, but his face is resolute. “I can’t. Ever since HYDRA, unless I’m in a rut, I can’t. I don’t know what they did to me, how they fucked me up, but I can’t even jerk off without having a goddamn panic attack.” 

“But,” Steve says, staring at him. “But you said you wanted to have sex. You asked.” 

“Because I was tired of you sacrificing everything for me!” Bucky explodes. 

Steve stares. “You thought I was sacrificing… sex?” 

“You’re taking heat suppressants, aren’t you?” 

Steve shakes his head. “I was—Bucky, I’ve always been on those. It has nothing to do with you.” 

“That’s not true,” Bucky accuses, frustrated. “Don’t lie to me, Steve, that’s not true. In Russia, last year. You were about to go into heat. I could smell it. You weren’t taking suppressants then, you only started after I came back, and I know it wasn’t a fucking coincidence.” 

“I—no,” Steve protests. 

Bucky stares at him unflinchingly. 

“No,” Steve says again, more strongly. “I—Bucky. Yes, I stopped taking them while I was looking for you. I stopped taking everything—my Pseuds, my suppressants, all of it. I was so… tired of being on drugs. I just wanted to be normal for a while. Than I had two heats, over in Europe, and… they were both horrible.” 

“You used to love your heats,” Bucky says, unconvinced. 

“Well that was before they lasted for nine days, and I spent them alone,” Steve snaps. 

Bucky flinches. 

Shit.

“No,” Steve says immediately. “Bucky, no, I—even if you wanted to, even if you were better, and you wanted to spend a heat with me—” 

“Steve, it’s okay—” 

“I don’t want to have heats,” Steve insists. 

Bucky brings a hand up to his face again, pressing his thumb and his index finger into his closed eyes. “Fine. Okay.” 

Steve swallows. 

But he wants Bucky to believe him, dammit. 

“Something… happened, okay?” he says, reluctantly. “Over in Russia. After the fight in the house, when my heat was coming on.” 

Bucky’s eyes snap open, and he goes very, very still. 

Steve forces himself to continue. “I was still injured, from the fight, and it was the middle of the night, and I was halfway into heat and trying to get to a safehouse, but I had to stop for gas. And. And I was stupid, I wasn’t paying attention. There were two drunks, there. Alphas.” 

“Whatever they did to you—” Bucky snarls. 

“They didn’t,” Steve says quickly. “I almost—they tried, but they didn’t. I got away.” 

There’s a creaking noise that Steve belatedly realizes is the sound of Bucky’s metal fist grinding against itself, clenched too tightly. Bucky’s chest is heaving with deep, carefully measured breaths, and there’s a fetal glint in his eye. He’s ready for murder. 

“Nothing happened,” Steve insists. “But. It, uh. It scared me pretty good. Wasn’t too interested in heats, after that.” 

Bucky’s expression remains unchanged. 

Steve uncurls enough to reach out, and lay a careful hand on his thigh. “Really. Honestly, nothing happened. It didn’t get that far.” 

“It never should have happened in the first place,” Bucky growls. 

“No,” Steve agrees. 

“I should never have left you at that house,” Bucky says furiously. “I shouldn't have left you alone when I knew you were going into heat, I should have stayed .” 

“What, so I could have been there when you went into your rut, and we both could have lost our minds and spent a week fucking in a shot-out HYDRA house in the back end of Russia?” Steve demands. “Look at us after trying to have normal sex, we're a fucking mess. I’m sure sharing a cycle together without any ability to consent would have gone great.” 

Bucky’s scowl deepens. 

“Look,” Steve continues, rubbing little circles on the meat of Bucky’s thigh with his thumb, attempting to soothe. “I didn’t bring it up just to, I don’t know, make you feel bad for me. I just wanted to make it clear that I’m not taking suppressants because of you. I have… I have my own reasons." 

Bucky takes in a deep breath, and as he lets it out his shoulders visibly relax. 

“Okay?” Steve asks. 

Bucky nods. 

“You really… asked to have sex, even though you didn’t want to, just because you thought I wanted to?” Steve asks, hesitantly, thumb pressing gently into Bucky's warm skin. 

Bucky glares. “You said yes just because you thought I wanted to have sex, even though you didn’t want to.” 

It’s... a fair point. 

The thing is,, Steve had always thought that there was nothing he wouldn’t do for Bucky. He’s loved him endlessly, helplessly, over nearly a century and through wars and across continents. Bucky is so loyal, and kind, and funny,  and—he’s the best thing that ever happened to Steve, and he doesn’t deserve any of what’s happened to him since he fell from that train. And Steve has always known, I would do anything for him. Laws mean nothing where Bucky is concerned. Steve would give up the shield in a heartbeat, would die for him without a second thought. 

So of course, when Bucky had asked to have sex, there had been no question that Steve would agree even though fundamentally, down to his very bones , the thought of having sex had terrified him. 

Anything for Bucky. 

And look what had happened. 

Maybe, Steve realizes, sometimes it’s not healthy to love like that. Maybe there needs to be some limits. 

He thinks about the look on Bucky’s face when Steve had pushed him away, and the desperation in his voice when he’d tried to apologize over and over for not being able to get hard. He thinks further back, to the tremble of Bucky’s hand when he’d slipped it beneath the band of Steve’s boxers, and realizes with a surge of nausea that it hadn’t been a tremble of anticipation, but of terror. 

If Steve had just been honest, they could have avoided this entire clusterfuck. 

Maybe… maybe Steve needs to start putting himself first, just a little bit. 

“Hey,” Bucky says softly, hand coming to rest over Steve’s. 

Steve looks up at him. 

“You really think you’re… ugly?” Bucky asks, tentative. 

Steve’s stomach squirms, and he looks away. “No,” he says. “Not… not ugly.” 

“You think I don’t like how you look,” Bucky rephrases. 

Steve shrugs. 

“You know what I see, when I look at you?” 

"I know I’m not ugly,” Steve says, staring at the sheets, heart racing. “I know that I’m attractive, I know—” 

“Shut up,” Bucky says. “I see the guy who stormed a factory of Nazis with absolutely no training, in the middle of the night, by himself, just to save my sorry butt. I see a guy who’s strong enough to hold me down when the Soldier starts to take over, and I see a guy who’s strong enough to keep me from hurting myself. Do you know how safe I feel, when you pin me down?”

“That’s... unhealthy,” Steve says. 

Bucky shrugs, unconcerned. “We left ‘healthy’ behind in 1943, Stevie. I like the way you look now. You’ve got these long legs that chased me over half of fuckin’ Europe, and these hands—” Bucky grabs Steve’s hands, holding them between his own, thumbs rubbing over his knuckles. “God, how many times have these big ol’ hands saved my life, huh?” 

Steve shakes his head. 

“And you know what else I love? When I put my head on your chest, I can’t hear the goddamn mucus rattling in your lungs anymore. You used to sound like a fuckin’ haunted house. It was disgusting.” 

Despite himself, Steve laughs. 

Bucky moves one hand away from Steve’s hands to his chest, right over his heart. “And this doesn’t skip beats anymore, and make you faint durin’ the summer—” 

“I never fainted.” 

“—and you can hear outta both ears, now, which means you can’t pull that ‘Oh, you must’ve said it while you were on my left side Bucky,’ bullshit anymore when you forget to grab something at the grocery store—” 

"It was never bullshit!” 

“—and this is still the same stupid brain that fell in love with me when you were just a punk teenager, and hasn’t left me alone ever since,” Bucky says, running a hand through Steve’s hair and coming to a stop at the base of Steve’s neck, resting there, cupping the back of his head. 

Steve’s breath catches in his throat. 

“I don’t remember a lotta things, Steve, so maybe I never told you during the war, I don’t know. But I love you, no matter what you look like—and I like how you look, like this. I like it a lot. Okay?” 

“Okay,” Steve whispers, overwhelmed. 

“Good,” Bucky says, hand falling from the back of Steve’s neck and coming back to grasp Steve’s own hands, and he squeezes them gently. 

“I don’t—I still need time,” Steve says tentatively. “Maybe therapy. I don’t know. I’ve been feelin’ like this for… a long time.” 

“Well, dollface, it’s not like my dick’s up for a party right now, anyway,” Bucky says amiably. “Pretty sure I can wait.” 

Steve laughs. “It might be a while.” 

“Yeah, well, we’ve got time,” Bucky says. 

And they do. 

They really, really do. 

Steve has never been to the rebuilt SHIELD facility before. It’s nice. There are more lights, taller ceilings, and even some tasteful artwork on the walls. 

“Same shit in the canteen, though,” Agent Robinson tells him with a sharp grin, when Steve comments. 

She leads him to Coulson’s office, but when Steve is escorted inside, she doesn’t follow. 

“Big shots only,” she says, waggling her eyebrows. “But come find me afterwards. I’ve got a group of trainees who could use a good ass-kicking.” 

Steve laughs. 

Inside, Coulson and a man Steve hasn’t met before are waiting for him. 

“Director,” Steve says, as he shakes hands with Coulson. 

“Captain,” Coulson replies, and then he nods to the other man. “This is our lead agent on the Luhansk taskforce, Phipps. Phipps, this is Captain Rogers.” 

Steve shakes his hand, and ignores the once-over he receives as he does. 

“Sit, sit,” Coulson directs, taking a seat himself. “Captain, I understand that Agent Robinson has already provided you with a rather extensive briefing on the situation in Luhansk, and you’re interested in rejoining SHIELD to help?” 

“Rejoining, just for this mission,” Steve says carefully. “Nothing else, after this.” 

“The paperwork is the same,” Coulson replies, with a bland smile. 

Steve makes a note to read his hiring paperwork very, very carefully this time around. 

“Regardless, we’d be happy to have you on board,” Coulson continues pleasantly. “It’s unusual, but in this situation, I do believe the benefits outweigh the—ah, administrative work-arounds needed to make it happen. Phipps, why don’t you read him in?” 

Phipps nods, and turns to face Steve. “We’ve been operating in twelve person teams, taking two week stints over at our base camp. So far we’ve been working with two teams, but we’re looking to expand to a third, as the extent of HYDRA’s influence was… unexpected. This may be on-going for quite some time. With your experience, I’d be happy to put you in place as the leader of the third team, Captain.” 

Steve swallows, and nods. 

Two weeks isn’t so long. He’s certainly done longer. 

“I’m sure that Agent Robinson has told you about the work we’ve been doing to untangle HYDRA from the local government, in coordination with some… local organized crime elements. It’s mainly what our missions have focused around, thus far. But, I’ll be honest with you, the real concern is the weapon that HYDRA has stored somewhere in the city.” 

Steve nods. 

“We don’t know what it is, but all our intelligence points to it being very dangerous. We also have good reason to believe that our liaisons over in Luhansk know quite a bit more about it than they’re saying.” 

“So you’re working with them… until you’re working against them,” Steve says. 

Phipps shrugs. “We’re hoping that with enough trust built between all these milk-run exercises, they eventually won’t need any convincing. So far, our rapport has been very promising.” 

It doesn’t sit entirely right with Steve, especially since he’s getting the feeling that once SHIELD obtains this weapon, they’re going to abandon all interest in whatever remains of HYDRA in Luhansk. And what will SHIELD do with the weapon, once they’ve recovered it? 

He’s being paranoid, of course.

SHIELD is clean, now. It’s being led by good people. Steve can trust them. 

“Mission coordination is still a joint effort, mostly led by the locals, but with time, they’ve been slowly allowing us more say,” Phipps continues. “And unfortunately, for the time being, we’re running by their rules, which is to say—they’ll only work with Alphas.” 

Steve pauses, frowning. “Oh,” he says. 

Phipps waves a hand. “Ridiculous, obviously. Like we’re just going to send them every last Alpha agent we’ve got, just because they’re out of date with the resf of the world. We’ve just got all our Betas over there on Psueds and they’ve passed without an issue—shouldn’t be a problem to hook you up with some, too, Cap.” 

Pseuds. 

They want Steve to go back on Pseuds. 

“But—" Steve's chest feels tight all of a sudden, and he fights to keep calm. "—but they’ll know me. They’ll know I’m an Omega."

Phipps shakes his head. “Nah. Sure, they’d recognize you if you showed up in the red white and blue, Cap, but if we stick you in a tac vest and give you a hat, they won’t know you from Adam. Now, currently, we’ve been focusing on—”

They want Steve to pretend to be an Alpha again. 

Steve knows, intellectually, that the idea shouldn’t fill him with so much panic. It’s just for a mission. It’s just pretend. He'd done it for years, and it hadn’t been so bad, why is his heart racing? Why are his hands sweating at the very idea?

He can do that. He can take Psueds again. 

He can go back to living a lie, and smelling wrong, have his glands dry up again, deal with the headaches and the dizziness and the constipation. He can walk down the street and get appreciative looks from other Omegas. 

It’s just one extra injection. 

One extra lie. 

For a mission that will take him an ocean away from Bucky, fighting in a battle already filled with ulterior motives, to retrieve a weapon from one organization and hand it to another, to maybe die in a back alley in the Ukraine, nameless, misgendered, just to right a wrong that Steve hadn’t even known he was committing two years ago. 

What is he even doing here?

Fuck this. 

Fuck this. 

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, interrupting whatever Phipps was saying. 

Phipps and Coulson both give him startled looks. 

“I’m sorry,” Steve says again. “I—apologize for taking up your time, but. I don’t think I’m going to be able to help, after all.” 

Coulson is the first to recover. 

“Captain,” he says, “if you have any reservations, I’m happy to expand on—” 

“No,” Steve says. “I’m sorry. You’re both doing great work—it all sounds great, and I wish you the best of luck with it, but I can’t—I’m sorry. I can’t do it.” 

He rises from his chair. 

“Captain Rogers,” Coulson says, with placating hands up in the air. 

“I’ll see myself out,” Steve says, and heads for the door, ignoring the calls behind him. 

This isn’t where he needs to be right now. 

He’s more than made up for his mistakes with SHIELD, he’s done his best to correct every other corrupted mission he’s led before, and this one—this one is already well in hand with Coulson and Phipps. Steve isn’t going to live a lie for them. He isn’t going to die for them. 

He’s going to go back to New York City, and go to a Duane Reade with Bucky and buy entirely too many expensive hair products, and then go home and eat homemade enchiladas and then curl up together on the couch and watch the next Lord of the Rings movie.  

He’s going to go home, and he’s going to stay there. 

“Fuck, it’s freezing up here,” Bucky announces, as he smoothly pulls himself up off the iron ladder and onto the platform.  “I don’t remember it being this freezing.” 

Steve rolls his eyes, from where he’s been picking the padlock on the door that leads them to the outside. “That’s what the blankets are for.”

“Are you still not through, yet?” 

“It’s rusted!” 

Bucky reaches around Steve, takes the padlock in his metal hand, and summarily crushes it. 

“Bucky!” 

“Exactly how many times a year do you think NYC Park Rangers go into a locked-up monument and climb up a hundred and forty feet on a rickety old ladder, just to check that this lock is still in place?” 

“The Society of Old Brooklynites leads a yearly tour—” Steve begins, but Bucky sighs, and shoulders past him to open the door and step out onto the platform. 

The cold October wind cuts much more sharply than it had on the ground, but this time around Steve doesn’t weigh ninety pounds, his clothing isn’t threadbare and made of cheap cotton, and he’s got a super serum running through his veins. 

And, they’ve brought better booze. 

Bucky sets the backpack on the ground and starts walking around the platform, but Steve stays where he is, completely arrested by the view. 

It’s changed a lot, since 1935. The buildings are taller, the lights are brighter, and there are a whole lot more headlights crossing the bridges over the East River. Steve finds Stark Tower easily, tucked just behind the Chrysler Building, and thinks, not for the first time, that it’s really time for him and Bucky to work on finding their own place again, in a normal apartment building. 

“Steve!” Bucky calls, from further down the platform. “It’s still here.” 

“You’re kidding,” Steve says. 

Bucky waves him over to where he’s knelt on the platform, using his cell phone as a flashlight to illuminate the lower half of the granite wall. 

There’s some graffiti dispersed around the walls, most of it modern in appearance, colorful and air-brushed, but sure enough, underneath it all, still barely visible: 

B B  NES
  R  ERS,    GA AT        OF  HE WO  D  0/1 /35

Steve’s hit with a wave of emotion so strong that he doesn’t know what to do other than reach out and grab Bucky’s hand and squeeze as tight as he can. 

Bucky squeezes back. “Crazy, huh?” 

“Yeah,” Steve says, thickly. 

“You owe me a bottle of gin, Rogers.” 

“Lucky me, I happen to have one right in my backpack.” 

“Whose backpack?” 

“Mine.” 

“Who carried it up a hundred and forty feet?” 

“Who bought the gin that’s inside of it?” 

“Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest tactician of our generation,” Bucky says, and then he presses a kiss to the side of Steve’s head before moving in search of liquor. 

Steve turns around so that he can sit on the cold granite floor, and watches a subway train move across the Williamsburg Bridge. Steve would have to move around the platform to see the other two bridges, and he knows that if he kept moving he would eventually be able to see Prospect Park—the final resting home for his Captain America statue, after much debate—and beyond that, Green-Wood Cemetery where Becca and Jack are buried. Steve asked Bucky a few weeks ago if he wanted to visit, but Bucky had said he wasn't ready yet. 

Maybe for Christmas.

Bucky sets the backpack down next to Steve, and then joins him on the floor. 

Steve pulls the zipper, and removes the first two Snuggies. Tony has seen them, and makes fun of them relentlessly, but Steve personally thinks that it’s one of the best inventions of the twenty-first century, and Tony can keep his regular blankets and suffer with cold arms. 

After the Snuggies comes the bottle of Plymouth, which Bucky immediately snags and cracks open. 

Steve gets covered, pulls the gin away long enough to shove a Snuggie over Bucky’s head, and then enjoys a swig of the stolen gin for himself. Then they settle back against the cold granite wall, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip, and pass it back and forth in silence for a long time. 

It’s been almost seven months since Bucky came home. 

From the moment Steve woken up in the ICU and found our who had dragged him out of the Potomac, Steve had always known that Bucky was going to get better. There had been no other outcome, in Steve’s mind, not when he was chasing him all over Europe, and not when Bucky finally came home and had days when he forgot English, would rip out chunks of his own hair, or wouldn't eat anything for days on end. Bucky would get better, because Steve would not allow anything else. 

What’s more surprising to him, is that he’s gotten better, too.

Last year, Steve had been sure that not being actively suicidal was the same thing as being fine. That there had been nothing better to hope for. 

These days, more often than not, he’s actually happy. 

Some of it is Bucky. Some of it is being able to live as an Omega again. And some of it is probably the therapy that he’d finally agreed to, back in August. He’s started drawing again, and he’s working with Resistance to open his own studio so he can teach self-defense lessons full-time. He has an Instagram. Sam moved up from DC last month, and they jog together every morning, and he comes over for dinner once a week. Last week, he’d dragged Natasha to the Lasker Rink for toddler hockey practice, because Steve thinks babies on ice skates are adorable, and Natasha finds it hilarious when they fall. 

Bucky hasn’t had a rut since the first one in April, and Steve hasn’t had a heat since last December. They haven’t tried anything more than kissing since that disastrous night in August, but Steve doesn’t mind, and Bucky doesn’t seem to either. There are smaller victories to be had—like the first time Steve went to bed without a shirt on, or the first time that Steve woke up with an arm slung around him that wasn’t made of flesh. They have time. There’s no rush. 

“Hey,” Bucky says, making a grabby motion with his hand. “Gimmie the backpack.” 

Steve hands it over, and Bucky plunges a hand inside. 

“So I did some lookin’,” he says. “Mighta had some help, in the end. But. Check it out.” 

He pulls out a piece of paper, and hands it to Steve, who immediately sees that it’s a copy of some old, official-looking document. At the top, it says:

STATE OF NEW YORK
CERTIFICATE AND RECORD OF MARRIAGE

Steve’s breath catches as he sees the familiar signatures at the bottom. 

“But they—they destroyed this," Steve says, staring. "Back in forty-three, they got rid of our entire marriage. I handed them our certificate myself."

Bucky holds up a finger. “Ah—almost. They wiped James and Steven Barnes’ marriage license, for good. That's gone. What they didn’t think to look for was—” 

Steve starts to laugh, helplessly. “Bucky.” 

“—the marriage license of Mr. and Mrs. Bumes.” 

And sure enough, printed at the top are STEVEN BUMES and JAMES B BUMES. 

"I can't believe you remembered,” Steve says, still laughing. "Oh my God. Bucky, we should frame this."

They can put it next to the photo of their wedding, battered from its travels around Eastern Europe but still lovingly framed and on display in the living room. 

“Actually,” Bucky says, “I was thinkin’ maybe we should fix it.” 

Steve looks over at him, his smile fading. “What do you mean?” 

“I mean, maybe we should go down to city hall and file for a new one. An’ maybe I’ll get a new key for that lock of yours, and I can wear it on my neck, same as you. What do you say?” 

“I think that sounds—real nice,” Steve says thickly, swallowing hard. 

“‘Real nice’, he says. You don’t have a romantic bone in your body, do you?” 

Steve elbows him. “Shut up. Of course I want to marry you again, you idiot.” 

“One condition, though.” 

“What?” 

“You gotta convert, this time. We already did it the Catholic way, and it didn't stick too good. This time we’re doing it Protestant.” 

“Technically, I’ve been a Protestant since 1943,” Steve says. 

“No, Steven Grant Rogers was a Protestant. Steve Barnes is a Catholic, through and through. Nice try.” 

Unbidden, Steve grabs Bucky’s collar and kisses him, fierce and hard.

“Not that I’m complaining,” Bucky says, when they break free, “but I kinda thought that would come, you know. After the proposal. Not after I went and called you Catholic.” 

“I love you,” Steve says, and gives him a watery smile. “Mr. Bumes.” 

“I love you too, Mrs. Bumes.” 

“That’s Mrs. Captain Bumes to you.” 

Bucky wraps his arm around Steve’s shoulders. "Yes, sir, Mrs. Captain."

Eighty years ago, he’d fit under Bucky’s arm so neatly that his head could rest against Bucky’s shoulder, and his whole body was protected from the wind, dwarfed by Bucky even as teenagers. Now they’re the same size, and Steve can’t be tucked away, can’t fit his whole body under one arm anymore. He’s too big for that. 

Instead, Bucky’s hand curls around his shoulder, and their arms press together, and they tip their heads toward each other and rest against each other in the middle distance. 

It’s not the same. 

But it’s still good.