Where the Circle Ends

by renne_archive

Chapter 2

Summary:

In which the world has gone to hell in a zombie apocalypse handbasket and, in the middle of it all, Steve finds the one person he never thought he'd see again. Cue all the feelings when Steve discovers the truth about his best friend's history.

Notes:

Also posted on LJ here.

Steve wakes to pressure on his bladder. It's not the first time he's woken, but it's the first time he's felt remotely human. He's groggy but aware, and when he pushes himself to a sitting position and then swings off the side of the bed to his feet, he feels a wash of nausea and dizziness like he's been spun like a top. He's lucky to make it two or three steps before his legs buckle beneath him and he crumples to the floor. 

Even laying down Steve's head still swims and he curls up around the tight ball of nausea in his gut, eyes closed tightly. He is not going to disgrace himself. 

The door opens.

"...Cap? Are you okay?"

"Head..." he mumbles. 

Someone helps him to his feet, and he's embarrassed when he squints through the blur and realises that it's Colonel Fury. "C'mon, soldier," Fury says and helps him back to the bed.

It's a typical hospital bed in a typical S.H.I.E.L.D. medical unit, and there's a doctor there, too, one of the typical S.H.I.E.L.D. doctors who, as scientists in the other 99% of their time, look at Steve like they'd like to dissect him down to his component parts. As soon as he's back in the bed, the doctor's testing all his vitals and he's awkwardly asking for a painkiller, a pee jug and some privacy.

She does better than expected on the first. "Now, this is just temporary until the pill kicks in," she says and he feels a jab in the arm. He's painless almost immediately, and on the second and third, she passes him a jug and ushers Fury from the room. The Colonel goes without protest.

As he relieves himself, he hears quiet conversation start up in the hallway outside the door. 

"I don't understand, sir. How can he be sick like this?"

"He might be super-human," Fury says, "but he's not invincible. Even Rogers can suffer if his body is pushed hard enough. And those imbeciles at the quarantine zone overdosing him didn't help." Steve can hear the annoyance heavy in Fury's tone over the sound of footsteps. "But enough of Rogers. Coulson, what news have we got on the patient?"

There is a rustle of paper and then Agent Coulson (the footsteps) clears his throat. "Not good news there, I'm afraid, Colonel. The patient is rejecting the vector." His tone becomes thoughtful. "The report says there's something stopping the virus from invading his blood cells, like there's something more in the patient's blood samples. If anything, these results remind me of some of the markers we found in the original tests run on Captain Rogers." 

Fury grunts and Steve wonders who on Earth they could be talking about. Someone who tests similar to him? There's no one else like him. The only other person who'd undergone the treatment even remotely successfully--and "successfully" was an entirely subjective term--was Johann Schmidt. The Red Skull.

And Steve had killed him. Steve knows he'd killed him. So who else could it be?

The headache, the spinning and the nausea are creeping up on him rapidly. It hurts now to try and concentrate on the voices out in the hall, low murmurs that even his super-human hearing has difficulty with.

"What about the arm?"

"Stark's been in and disabled everything but the most basic functions. He wanted to take it back to the workshop for further study, but I forbade it. He says it's, and I quote, 'practically prehistoric' compared to what he could build, and 'highly derivative of ancient Stark technology'. But... confirms it's definitely advanced cybernetics of Russian manufacture. He was mildly impressed by the synthetic skin, but again says he could do better."

Steve hears Fury swear softly. "It's him then. But what would he have gained by keeping Rogers alive then? Not to mention getting him to the quarantine zone... Damn it, breaking this to Rogers isn't gonna be easy."

"Harder still when Rogers doesn't remember anything that happened after he arrived back in New York," Agent Coulson murmurs. 

"Thanks for reminding me," Fury says darkly.

"My pleasure."

"You want to do this?"

"Oh no, Colonel, I wouldn't want to usurp your position."

"Just as I thought."

Steve presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose. What happened after he returned to New York? Was he still in New York now? 

He could kind of remember snatches of garbled conversations held with Colonel Fury in his delirium. He was in Boston now, but he didn't for the life of him remember getting here.

He remembered arriving in New York, and the lockdown at the mansion, but Fury had made it seem like nothing else of import had happened in Steve's trip from the Avengers mansion to the quarantine zone, and--and what? He'd never quite explained why the soldiers on the wall had followed his own directive and tranquilised Steve. There had been someone else, then. But who was it?

God, his head really hurts now. He presses the palms of his hands against his eyes, trying to will the pain away. The speed at which his body metabolised the injection should be a positive--his system is starting to perk up--but the pain-as-a-side-effect thing can really go jump off a cliff.

He's distracted from the pain for a moment when the door opens. Fury enters.

"How are you feeling now, soldier?"

Steve shrugs gingerly. "Been better."

"They tell me that once your metabolism is back up and functioning properly, you'll feel a lot better and you should remember everything you're missing," Fury says then hesitates, which is unusual in itself. "Anything you remember sooner would help. It's important, Cap."

"Remember about what?" Steve just manages to keep the exasperation out of his tone. 

"What happened when you came back to New York. You met someone there, d'you remember who?"

Steve closes his eyes. He tries to remember, he really does, but it hurts. He doesn't remember that, but he remembers... he remembers a shock to his system like nothing he'd ever experienced, and this is a system that's taken a lot of shocks in his time. 

When Steve shakes his head, Fury says, "The brains here suggested you might remember better with prompts." He leans forward and hands Steve a photograph.

Steve recognises the photo and the men instantly. The photo was taken in London, in 1943, only days after Steve and the rest of the men who'd just become the Howling Commandos returned to the city after the rescue mission in Austria. As for the men... it's him and Bucky, of course. Taken in the bar by a war photographer who'd heard Captain America and his men were there and slipped in with the hopes of getting a classic Captain America propaganda shot. 

Instead he'd captured two men, best friends, at the bar. Steve, all tidy in his uniform with his carefully combed hair and perfectly knotted tie, and Bucky, shirt and jacket open at the throat, dishevelled and still wearing the marks of his incarceration and torture at Zola's hands. Steve touches Bucky's face, then runs his finger down the soft-frayed edge of the photograph. He remembers slipping this photo into his suit right over his heart before his last mission against HYDRA, snugly in place with a photo of Peggy. His past and his future, he'd thought then. 

How wrong could one man be?

But that's not why Fury gave him the photo. Fury gave him the photo because he--

He looks at Fury, wide-eyed. "I met Bucky...?"

"Yeah. But do you remember?" There's an odd note of urgency in Fury's voice.

"I..." Steve looks down at the photo and tries to remember. There's something twigging his memory and he closes his eyes and tries to push the pain aside to give himself the best chance to remember. He focuses on Bucky's face, trying to imagine (remember) seeing him in New York again. What would he look like now? What would he have been doing?

Then Steve's eyes fly open and he blushes furiously as his memory clicks into gear--skin on skin, Bucky's hands all over him, Steve sliding down, taking Bucky's cock in his mouth, all hotslickwetskin--and then it's like a cascade of recollection from there. Fury raises a brow at the blush, but Steve ignores it when he remembers the blood, the violence, and Bucky's new strange edges. Bucky flicking him a salute and then getting overrun by zombies as Steve fought to save him. As quick as his blush had come, the blood drains from Steve's face and he struggles with the blankets. 

"Bucky! Where is he?" he says, unable to prevent the panic in his tone. It had to be Bucky they were talking about out in the hall. He remembered the tests Howard Stark and his team ran on Bucky when Steve rescued him from HYDRA: Zola had tried to recreate the super soldier serum on Bucky. He'd failed: the test results had shown some similar markers to what they found in Steve's blood, but not anything enough to make a difference.

Or so they thought.

"Hold up, Cap," Fury says, and it's embarrassing how Fury can hold him down with one hand on his chest. Steve hates being weak. He hated it when he was weak and hates it even more now as the reminder it is. "He's not going anywhere in a hurry--"

"Because he's dead? Because he's one of those things?" Steve asks bitterly, remembering blood on skin. "He was bitten. That lieutenant was going to shoot him."

"He's not dead and he hasn't turned," Fury says patiently. "Ainsley didn't shoot him, he sedated him on my orders so we could bring him here--"

"On your orders? He hadn't even been bitten yet when Lt. Ainsley called you!"

"I know." 

"Then why--"

"You questioning my orders, soldier?"

Steve's mouth snaps shut and he glares at Fury. It doesn't make sense. What could be so important about Bucky Barnes that Fury would have ordered him to be taken down like he was a bad guy? Bucky might be one of the most important people in Steve's life, but--as far as he knew--to S.H.I.E.L.D. Bucky was just a sergeant from the second world war, who'd been a Howling Commando and Steve's best friend, and fell in the battle against HYDRA.

"Give me a minute and I'll explain it to you. First, I need you to answer me this: did Barnes say anything about where he's been for the last 70-odd years? Was there anything about him that seemed different to you?"

Steve scrubs his hand over his face. "He didn't want to talk about what had happened and I didn't push him. But he did seem to be... different." He casts about for the right word to describe it. "He's still Bucky, everything--everything about him is still him, but there's... more. More edges. Something... like something is broken inside him." The admissions don't come easily. Whatever the big reveal is that Fury's leading up to, he's pretty certain he won't like it from the look on the Colonel's face, and the last thing Steve wants to do is inadvertently screw Bucky over with an offhand comment.

"So you never got any idea about where he'd been and what he was doing?"

Steve shakes his head. 

Fury nods slowly, like this is what he expected. "I know he was your best friend before the war, but we have reliable evidence that since the end of World War II, James Barnes has been operating under the auspices of the Russians. Steve, Barnes is the Winter Soldier."

"No!" And at that Steve sits bolt upright in the bed. "No, he's not the Winter Soldier. The Winter Soldier is a Soviet assassin, a stone cold killer--" He stops, thinking of the violently efficient way Bucky had killed and how Steve had noticed it even then. Was it reminiscent of what they'd seen of the Winter Soldier before he went off the grid? "It can't be him," he says weakly.

Fury looks at him with sympathy. 

"He didn't--" Steve stops, squeezes the bridge of his nose. "There was nothing showing any allegiance to the Russians. He's--he was the Bucky I remember. My friend. My best friend. If he wasn't, I would have known. And if he was the Winter Soldier he wouldn't have saved me." He thinks again of skin on skin and he can't for the life of him imagine that the Winter Soldier would have gone to those lengths. No. It had been honesty in Bucky's hands; Steve wouldn't accept anything less.

"We're sure about it, Cap." Fury hands over a folder of photos. 

Dated across decades, most of the photographs are grainy, black and white or blurry, but there's enough of the man in each for Steve to put together the pieces. He lingers on the most recent: a screen capture taken from a video a half dozen years before. The man's face isn't visible, but it doesn't need to be. Steve recognises the way Bucky stands, the shadowed profile. And if that wasn't enough, the cybernetic arm is clear in the photo, without whatever synthetic skin Bucky's acquired since.

Steve looks at Fury in anguish. If Bucky was the Winter Soldier, it has to be past tense. Bucky's no good as an actor; the brittleness, the sense that there was something broken in him couldn't be feigned. "He had to be brainwashed. Bucky would never do any of what the Winter Soldier's done willingly."

"That may be," Fury concedes. "We've been able to establish that he was tortured--"

"That could have been Zola--"

"No, these are more recent. We ruled out the injuries sustained when he was in HYDRA's hands and from the fall. There were definite signs of recent, more sophisticated torture. However, healed injuries aside, there's still the fact that Lt. Ainsley confirmed Barnes had no intention of leaving the quarantine zone when you were rescued."

"If you'd been brainwashed into being the Winter Soldier and you knew it, would you throw yourself on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s mercy? I know Bucky. He wouldn't have done that. I think he wanted to stay in the quarantine zone and see if there were more people he could help. There were food and weapons caches set up for the survivors. He was behind that. He was helping people."

Fury makes a thoughtful noise. "Possibly," he concedes. "Look," and he leans forward, elbows propped on his knees, and Steve tenses. He knows when Fury is about to ask a favour. "We need two things. We need him well and we need him to confirm his identity as the Winter Soldier. But he doesn't trust us so we can't give him the cure and he's not interested in talking to S.H.I.E.L.D. in the slightest."

"You want me to talk him into taking the medication? He trusts me. Shouldn't be a problem."

"I also need you to get him to confirm he's the Winter Soldier."

Steve stared at him. "I can... well, I can try," he says dubiously. "He's cagey about his past, but I might be able to get him to open up."

"There's no might, Cap. We need this to happen and today. He'll be given the compound he needs to fight this sickness, and then a drug that'll make him more... pliable. You get him to confirm and then your job is done."

"He's not a job, Colonel," Steve objects. "This is my best friend we're talking about here." 

"And that means he's more likely to trust you. Even if he's broken the brainwashing, it'll be difficult for anyone he doesn't trust to get the information out of him."

"If I don't do it?"

Fury sighs. "Do it the easy way, Cap. It's best for everyone." 

The easy way. Steve doesn't need to have it spelled out to him. If he doesn't get the information S.H.I.E.L.D. requires out of Bucky then Bucky'll be thrown to the wolves. The hard way. Interrogated with the same kinds of techniques that were probably very similar to what he underwent in his transformation into the Winter Soldier, making S.H.I.E.L.D. no damned better than the organisation that broke him to start with.

"I want it on the record that I don't like this," Steve says, "and that I don't agree that this is the only way."

"Duly noted."

Steve throws back the blankets and reaches for the S.H.I.E.L.D. sweatshirt on the other chair by the bed. "Let's get this done," he says shortly. There are shoes by the bed too, that he shoves his feet into as he stands. There's only a moment of lightheadedness, but that passes. He rakes his hair back and avoids Fury's gaze as the Colonel comes around the bed, leading him out of the room and down the hall. 

It's a short walk to where they're keeping Bucky in the isolation and observation chambers that Steve's been lucky enough not to need in any of his S.H.I.E.L.D. medical units. They're all full, each one with a person at a different stage of the illness--or whatever it was that caused the dead to rise again, whatever it was that Bucky had--chained to the bed, hooked up and monitored. Steve is lead to the last room in the corridor, where the doctor who had administered his painkillers earlier is standing, holding a tablet and stylus. 

"How is he doing?" Fury asks.

Steve misses her answer, completely distracted as he looks through the window. "Bucky," he whispers, reaching out, hand splayed on the glass.

Bucky looks tiny in the hospital bed, the blanket not entirely hiding the restraints at wrist and ankle. Even from half a room away, Steve can see how pale he is, the sheen of sweat on his face. The wounds on his arm and chest aren't bandaged and the black line of stitching marches across Bucky's inflamed skin.

The doctor--Schroeder is the name on her tag--touches his arm to attract his attention. "He's rejecting the vector that's worked so far on the other test patients, but we have a different compound we hope will work." 

She hesitates.

Steve glances over. "And?"

"Colonel Fury may have told you we have had difficulty administering medication. He, uh... Well, Captain, he bit the last nurse who tried. She's since responded well to treatment."

"Bit?" Steve says, his eyes widening. "Treatment?"

"Yes, as with all of the infected, his saliva contains traces of the virus. A bite at this stage will put the victim as much at risk of infection as a bite from a class one or two infected. So--"

"Don't get bitten," Steve says.

"Don't get bitten," she agrees with a hint of the flirtatious kind of smile he's never become used to. Steve looks at her blankly and then away. 

Schroeder presses her hand to the palm pad next to the door and it hisses open. Steve takes a deep breath and steps through and into the isolation chamber. 

The door shuts behind him and Bucky twitches at the sound of the lock, squinting as Steve approaches the bed. 

For an instant the past overlaps the present (Bucky strapped to a table, muttering name, rank and serial number over and over) and Steve says, "It's me. Steve."

Bucky says, "Steve..." but it's not in the relieved tone Steve was hoping for. 

No, he's startled, disoriented, and his eyes widen. "Steve? Why're you here...? Did they...? They didn't, they couldn't--you can't be here, you're not here. No, they'd never get you, not you, no, you gotta be just a memory in my head they can't take away--" He jerks his arms and the cuffs rattle on the handrails. His flesh and blood wrist is a bruised, bloody mess. "You won't take him away from me, you hear?" Bucky shouts at the one-way glass by the door. "You can take everything else, but you won't take him!"

"Hey, hey," Steve says, his heart breaking at the desperation in Bucky's voice. He pulls up a chair by the bed and sits down, reaching out and touching Bucky's arm. Bucky subsides and turns feverish eyes on him. "I'm really here, Buck, I promise. And you're okay, you're not... you're not in Moscow. You're in the S.H.I.E.L.D. building in Boston. No one here wants to hurt you. I promise."

"Steve, no, no, I'm chained to a bed and they keep trying to pump me full of drugs. I don't--I don't know what they're going to do to me." A thin thread of fear winds through Bucky's tone and again he jerks on the cuffs on his wrists. Steve grips Bucky's arm harder.

"They're S.H.I.E.L.D. doctors and they're going to help you get better, that's all they want to do."

"Heard that one before." Bucky laughs bitterly. "'Just want to help'. Well they can't do it to me again, not--not now--"

Steve leans forward. "Who? What did they do to you?"

"Doesn't matter anymore. Those things bit me and I'm gonna die." He turns his arm and shifts so he can touch Steve's hand, his fingers curling around Steve's. "Promise me you'll put me down when I die, Steve, I don't wanna hurt anyone."

"Shh, you're not going to die." Steve tightens his fingers around Bucky's. He's never seen Bucky like this before, fever-sick and rambling. When they were kids, it was always the other way around; Steve ill in his bed and Bucky looking after him, soothing his delirium. There are no tissues within reach, so he carefully blots the sweat from Bucky's face with the corner of the sheet. "I won't let you. You just need to let the nurses give you the medicine. It'll help you."

Bucky shakes his head. "I bit a nurse, Steve. I didn't want to, but I did, I remember doing it like I remember--" He stops, eyes wide and tracking something that isn't there. His mouth moves a moment but nothing comes out. Then he shakes himself and continues, "I'm not gonna get better. I'm gonna end up one of those things."

"No, you're not, I promise you're not. And the nurse is okay, she's okay. You didn't do her any harm," Steve says gently. Another nurse inches in through the door with the syringes on a tray and a questioning look on her face. He gestures for her to come forward. "This nurse here is going to give you some medicine and--"

Bucky looks alarmed, pushes away from the nurse as she approaches the bed. "Steve--"

"No, no, no, she's not going to hurt you. The medicine will help. They've got something that'll fix you right up. Two shots, that's it." Steve tries not to let his guilt about the second injection bleed into his tone. He doesn't believe it's necessary to drug Bucky to make him reveal the truth about the Winter Soldier project. With a bit of time...

Except Fury won't be swayed and Steve is expected to get the information out of his best friend. 

"Hey, Buck," Steve says softly, leaning forward and resting his arm against the rail on the bed--close enough for Bucky to bite him if inclined, but Steve has the kind of stupidly heroic trust that Bucky won't do it. "Bucky, hey. Look at me. Just look at me. It's okay, you're good, this is going to help you, okay?" Bucky looks up at him; his eyes are bloodshot, the skin around his eyes heavily bruised in his bleached face. He flinches when the first needle enters his skin, but his eyes never leave Steve's for even a moment. "You're doing good," Steve says encouragingly.

As the nurse injects the second compound, Bucky shudders, his breath hissing between his teeth as his fingers tighten painfully around Steve's. The drug hits him almost immediately, his fingers going lax and his eyelids heavy. The way his head lolls against Steve's arm reminds him of those moments outside the wall in the quarantine zone, Bucky bloodstained and unconscious and Steve fearing the worst. 

Steve waits until the nurse leaves the room again before he speaks. "How do you feel?" he asks softly.

He expects Bucky to retort with 'How do you think I feel?' but instead Bucky sighs, nudges his cheek against Steve's arm and says, "So tired..." 

"You can sleep soon," Steve says and swallows back his own fear, the guilt, all of it. "I just... want to ask you something first."

"...Know I'd tell you anything you wanna know. Never any secrets 'tween us." 

There's something terrifyingly pliable about Bucky like this and okay, this drug is more than a little scary, Steve thinks. While he doesn't know how it'll work with the questions Bucky might have been programmed not to answer, he thinks he could ask Bucky just about anything else and get the honest, unbridled truth. The thought brings a hundred unwise questions to his lips but he quashes them. Now is not the time and it's definitely not the way he'd ever want answers. Bucky would never forgive him for it.

Steve wets his lips. Might as well get this over with. "Buck... they told me you were the Winter Soldier. Is it true? Were you?"

Bucky makes a soft, disagreeable noise in the back of his throat and turns his face away from Steve. "No, not that..."

Steve knows Fury won't take anything but an admission. He kind of hates the Colonel right now for making him do this to Bucky. "I know what they did to you," Steve says softly, rubbing his thumb across the back of Bucky's hand. "You were tortured and brainwashed, Buck. They turned you into the Winter Soldier and made you do all those things, didn't they?"

It's a brief, bitter battle, but Steve can see when Bucky loses his struggle against the drug. "Never have done it if they gave me a choice. Remember mostly everything 'bout then, remember it as me. Remember it as... like I was someone else who did those things. Wanted to do those things. It wasn't me, but--but it was. Turned me into a killing machine and then it was me who did all those things. Me. Did it all with my own two hands, Steve. Remember everything from when I was the Winter Soldier like it was yesterday." Bucky shifts restlessly. "What was that medicine they gave me? Feels like I got ants under my skin."

"It's probably just the cure working," Steve says hopefully.

"No," and Bucky frowns, making a face like he's just tasted something horrible, like he's going to be sick, "no, it's something else. It's familiar..." His frown clears as his eyes widen and his expression turns to one of horror. His lethargy is completely gone. "It's... it's truth serum," he says and recoils as Steve reaches out to him, his hand brought up short as he tries to shove Steve away by the cuff around his wrist. "No. Get away from me."

Desperately, Steve tries to soothe him. "No, no, Bucky, it's okay, it's not what you think--"

"It is!" Bucky says wildly. He struggles frantically against the cuffs and the bed railings flex. "How could you do this to me? Are you even--? No. You're not... you're not even Steve, are you? Steve'dnever let 'em do this to me!" 

Something changes in his face then, something that terrifies Steve to see. Something changes and it's not Bucky there in the bed anymore, and it's not the Winter Soldier either. In an instant Steve's reminded of the feral, mindless faces of the zombies that had tried to kill them in New York. The bared teeth, the inhuman hunger, the glazed eyes--Bucky's become whatever he caught when those things bit him. Another sharp yank and the cuff around his wrist breaks. 

Steve's off balance already when Bucky grabs him around the neck, hauls him close. He only just manages to push back enough to avoid Bucky's bite even as he feels hot, wet breath on his skin, the graze of teeth but no pain and the skin doesn't break, his hands braced against the side of the bed. Steve twists out of Bucky's grip, his own hand finding Bucky's wrist and shoving it down against the mattress even as he lunges forward to pin Bucky with an arm against his throat. Bucky writhes beneath him and Steve risks looking up from what used to be his best friend to see Schroeder and Fury rush in through the door.

The doctor has a syringe in hand and she hesitates as Bucky continues to thrash about, growling and snarling like some beast. "Do it," Fury says and grabs Bucky's other wrist, holding his arm steady long enough for Schroeder to empty the syringe into his arm.

It seems to take forever for whatever the doctor injected to kick in and then Bucky subsides and goes limp beneath Steve's grasp. He holds Bucky a moment longer before he eases up his grip, and what he sees horrifies him: Bucky's no longer breathing, his mouth slack and eyes empty. "You've killed him--" 

Promise me you'll put me down when I die, I don't wanna hurt anyone. If Bucky's dead, that means... Oh god. No, no, he couldn't do it, could he? Could he kill Bucky, if what was left inside that head had nothing left of Steve's Bucky, if what was left was a monster?

"Just wait," Schroeder cautions as Steve reaches out. He glances up at her, not understanding the hopeful look in her face. Bucky was... was gone and she had the nerve to look at him like that?

Then--

--Bucky blinks, his chest spasms as he draws in a shuddering gasp of a breath. He blinks a few more times and then his disoriented gaze catches Steve's. Bucky's mouth twitches like he's trying to smile, and it's heartbreaking to watch him try to give Steve that reassuring, lopsided smirk, before his eyes sink shut and he slumps against the pillow, unconscious.

Steve sags against the broken railing in relief. 

That... that wasn't a zombie, that was Bucky. The look in his eyes was all Bucky.

After a moment the relief gives way to anger and he looks up at the Colonel. "You did this. It's your fault he nearly died, because you wouldn't let me do this my way."

For once Fury doesn't respond when one of his team blows up at him, and that's more than enough to cut through Steve's rage. If Fury isn't responding, he's accepting the accusation for what it is. Steve sighs and lets his anger go. Drops his head again. 

Looks at Bucky, who looks if not at peace then at least settled. Steve reaches out, pushes sweat-damp hair from Bucky's forehead the way he wouldn't have dared to do if Bucky were awake.

"He'll be okay," Fury says. "Here." He presses a sterile swab into Steve's hand, gestures to where Bucky nearly bit him.

Steve wipes his skin clean of any trace of Bucky's saliva. "You can't know that."

"The shot brought him back. That means it's working with the first dose. His fever will have broken when he wakes and he'll be back on his feet by the end of the week."

Steve closes his eyes. He doesn't want to think of what would have happened if the first dose hadn't helped Bucky, can't bear to think that if it hadn't then Bucky would be dead right now, and then alive again (for a given value of alive). He focuses instead on Bucky waking and back on his feet. Except...

Except.

It would be one thing if the only issue here was Bucky being bitten by zombies. But it's not. The Winter Soldier hovers like a spectre over Bucky's head and Steve knows it'll haunt Bucky forever; the spectre of everything broken in him, all the sharp edges and corners that now make sense. All Steve's joy has gone out of knowing Bucky somehow survived the fall in Switzerland, buried by the knowledge of what he's become.

And regardless of torture, of brainwashing, Bucky was the Winter Soldier and S.H.I.E.L.D. will want their pound of flesh. Steve says as much to Fury, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice.

"He will be interrogated," Fury corrects. "If what you say is true, and he's overcome the brainwashing and there are no sleeper commands planted in his head, then we'll decide what to do with him."

"Prison, I imagine?"

"That'll all depend on what we find. And given the allocation of resources at the moment, we can't get into his head 'til this whole... zombie situation is sorted. So until then, I'm releasing him into your care," Fury says, scowling darkly as he jabs his finger at Steve. "I want you to keep him under surveillance 24/7. I'd prefer 100% house arrest, but I know you, Cap, I know you'll do what you have to."

At first Steve wants to protest; Bucky probably hates him now. He's not going to want Steve around. 

But then, as Steve sees the pointed look Fury is giving him, he understands.

Fury's giving Bucky a chance by giving Steve a chance.

True to Fury's word, Bucky's fever is gone the next morning and he's weak but up and moving about within days. He leans on Steve as they take a shuffling turn around the room. "Well this is embarrassing," he mutters, tightening his arm around Steve's shoulders.

"Could be worse," Steve offers.

"How?" Bucky snaps.

"At least your gown has a back on it now...?"

The look Bucky shoots him at that is just about the sourest Steve has ever seen on him. "C'mon, no urge to bite me?" Steve tries again, because he's desperate to see Bucky smile, to know he's been forgiven. (And even with all that, he still flushes a little bit, because while he means 'bite' in the zombie kind of way, he remembers 'bite' in the set of Bucky's teeth against his collarbone, his hand slick with come.)

"No urge to bite," Bucky says through gritted teeth. "Need to sit down." Steve helps him back to the bed, and he sinks down onto the mattress with a sigh. "Why are you even here, Steve?"

The question stings, for all it's said in a tired, defeated voice. 

"Because I want to be," Steve says, trying with a hopeful smile. "You're my best fr--"

"Well, I don't want you here." 

Oh ouch. That hurts.

Steve purses his lips. As soon as Bucky was well enough to be released into custody, Fury would expect Steve to deal with every aspect of what amounted to the home detention of an ex-Soviet assassin. Joy. 

Either way, Steve knew they had to get past this sense of betrayal Bucky had that was linked to a history Steve still didn't entirely understand. It was bad enough that Bucky looked at each dose of medication with suspicion and more than a little fear; any trust he may have had in S.H.I.E.L.D. to look after him had been blown completely out of the water by Fury pushing the truth drug angle. Steve quickly found there wasn't any point in trying to talk to Bucky once he'd been given any medication; all he'd say was his name, rank and serial number like he was a prisoner of war again. 

"Tough. I'm staying with you whether you like it or not." Steve leans against the wall, folds his arms across his chest. 

When Bucky is considered fit enough to be discharged, they move into an apartment block that Tony Stark had helpfully bought and leased back to S.H.I.E.L.D. for the Avengers to live in while the New York mansion was still off limits. The penthouse suite they're staying in is exactly the kind of ridiculously overwhelming modern monstrosity Steve's come to expect from Tony.

Bucky takes one look around as Steve ushers him in the door. He sniffs, mutters, "Adequate," before stomping off to find the bedrooms. His stomp would have been infinitely more impressive, Steve thinks, had he not needed to stop and lean on his hands on the dining room table for a breather.

Steve sighs, slings his and Bucky's bags over his shoulder and enters the penthouse. 

Bucky claims the smaller second bedroom, though whether that's out of consideration or due to the fact that the room is closer to the front door, Steve doesn't want to guess. He supposes he should be more anxious about Bucky being closer to the escape route, since he's staked his reputation with Fury on being able to keep Bucky, but frankly, right now it's difficult to care; and besides, Steve knows Tony fully kitted out the building with all the bells and whistles, alarms and surveillance needed before S.H.I.E.L.D. turned the Avengers loose. 

Steve sets Bucky's bag down outside his door, knocks and says, "Bucky...? I've left your bag out here, okay?" He doesn't expect an answer (which is good, because he doesn't get one) and when he reaches the master bedroom he slumps down on the bed that's enormous even for him with an exhausted groan. 

About thirty seconds later his cell phone buzzes. It's almost too much effort to roll over and pick it up.

It's Tony.

"Tony, hey," he says. "Great to hear from you."

"Same with you, buddy. Glad you survived 'escape from New York'. How's the place? Big enough? Listen, I'll be up in a few days, I just gotta sort out a few things here first and then take Pepper to Malibu. Don't worry about moving out of the penthouse when I get there, Fury's already filled me in on your guest and, man, is he pissed at you. Fury, I mean. I think it's even possible he's more pissed at you than he's ever been at me. Anyway, it's been great to talk, see you soon."

Steve looks at his cell phone with bemusement, before dropping it to the mattress. That was even more manic than usual.

His stomach growls and Steve curses his stupid super-soldier metabolism, because while all he really wants to do is sleep for about a hundred years in this ridiculously comfortable bed, he knows heneeds to eat, that not maintaining himself isn't doing him any favours, particularly when he's still recovering from the neglect he recently put himself through.

He groans and pulls himself to his feet, stumbling off in search of a bacon sandwich.

The routine they settle into is uneasy at best. Steve's lucky to get about a dozen words out of Bucky on any given day and he ends up taking Bucky with him whenever he leaves, because... well, it's not because he doesn't trust Bucky to be left behind alone, it's just that Steve knows Bucky hates being stuck inside for long periods; he gets stir-crazy, and at least when they're at the S.H.I.E.L.D. office Bucky can feel useful, sharing the information he's gathered about the zombies with the agents there and doing some good.

That's until Steve finds out from Colonel Fury exactly how the information is going into the reports.

"An... 'anonymous source'? You've got to be kidding me. Colonel, Bucky is--he's doing good here, proving he hasn't got any of the Winter Soldier left in him and helping with all the information he can supply about the zombie plague and you're not letting him claim that?"

Fury folds his arms across his chest. "It doesn't prove a goddamn thing, Cap."

It takes all Steve has not to break things. He can tell Fury knows it too, by the look in his eye. He clenches his hands tightly into fists. He is going to prove Fury wrong if it kills him.

Steve's pretty sure Fury knows that too, as he lets Steve storm out of his office.

In fact, he's pretty sure Fury has him pegged on a lot of things, like Steve realising that babysitting really isn't for him but knowing he has to do it anyway, because the alternative--Bucky in a S.H.I.E.L.D. containment facility--is unthinkable. 

And he feels bad for thinking like that about Bucky (babysitting), because he thinks about Bucky a lot; thinks about what he used to be like without the shadow and the weight, thinks about how even though he was broken in New York, Steve didn't know the half of it, thinks about how he's nothing like what Steve remembers and everything like it as well.

But he doesn't want to feel like he's looking after Bucky, keeping him safe, or maybe keeping everyone safe from him. He just wants things to be normal. Or as close to normal as is possible. 

Which, okay, it's ridiculous because for them 'normal' is before the war and they are so far from that it's not even the same century. Yet there was something of it in New York and Steve would be happy with that again (more than happy, really, if it meant a chance to feel Bucky's skin on his again, and god that is such a selfish thought sometimes Steve can't even stand himself).

That's the normal he wants. 

Instead the 'normal' Steve gets is being out and about on the Boston streets. It's difficult to reconcile what he knows of the epidemic spread across the country with how it is here, but so much of Boston has miraculously escaped infection that--apart from the rations, curfews and road blocks with health checkpoints--it feels almost like the city could be going about its normal routine. 

And it feels so wrong.

Whenever he goes out with Bucky, he can tell Bucky shares the sentiment. He's tense and curter than ever until they get to the safety of a building, and then some of the tightness unwinds from his shoulders.

After a while Bucky's tension feeds back into Steve so badly that he risks a solo trip.

Of course, Steve should have known that the apartment would be empty when he returned to the building. "Bucky?" he calls, even though he knows the answer. It's their fourth day and Steve had hoped if he ducked out early enough, while Bucky was still sleeping, he could run a few errands and get back before Bucky even knew he was gone. Steve feels a sick jump in his stomach to think that he was wrong, and worse, that Bucky might have just... slipped out and vanished. The lock wouldn't have been any real impediment to him, after all. Steve's not entirely sure he wouldn't have been able to disable any of the other security measures either.

He rubs his hand over his face and sighs. What on earth is he going to tell Fury? 

There's a sudden sharp crack from somewhere above, and Steve jerks his head up. That was a gunshot. He bangs out the door and bolts for the stairwell. The apartment block's rooftop has a swimming pool and a small bar area and he slams through the door and out onto the astroturfed deck, looking around wildly.

Steve finds Bucky on the rooftop with Clint. 

They've each got a high-powered rifle in hand and they're taking pot shots at what Steve desperately hopes is one of the quarantine zones down by the river. "There you are," he says, hiding the relief in his voice. Never mind the fact they shouldn't be doing it, Steve's just glad that Bucky hasn't bolted.

Clint looks up questioningly and then half rolls onto his side to peer behind him, popping the plug out of his ear. "Oh, hey, Cap," he says and grins. 

Bucky ignores him, pulling the bolt to reload, sighting, and squeezing the trigger.

"Turns out your boy here is a real crack shot," Clint says appreciatively, slapping Bucky on the shoulder. 

"I'm not his boy," Bucky says sharply as Steve mumbles, "He's not my..."

Clint's brows quirk up. 

"I'm just going to, uh, head back downstairs," and Steve points towards the stairs, then quirks his finger at Clint, "Clint, if I could just have a word--"

"He understands," Bucky interrupts coldly, once again sighting down the rifle, "that I'm a prisoner here until S.H.I.E.L.D. decides otherwise. He'll see me home safely."

Steve bites his lip, hands curling into and out of fists--helpless--as Clint shrugs ('hey, what can I do, right?') before popping Steve two thumbs up. "Leave him with me," he says, and Steve nods once at the promise in his face. Steve mightn't have talked much with the other Avengers about his unexpected roommate and the limits on the missions he can take because of it, but they know enough. Steve has no doubt Fury filled them in on the rest.

Smartly, he turns on his heel and heads back downstairs.

(It's ridiculous, because a. they've hardly been on speaking terms since they moved in, and b. he's only on the roof, but with Bucky gone the apartment feels stupidly empty. Steve slumps down at the kitchen table and wonders how it all came to this.)

Later, Bucky returns with Clint in tow. Clint's hand rests on Bucky's shoulder as he delivers the punch line to what is undoubtedly an off-colour joke and they both laugh. 

Steve scowls. His pen punches a hole through the papers he's completing. It's a report on the New York situation, as S.H.I.E.L.D. likes to call his escape. He refuses to gloss over Bucky's role as he's been ordered to; no matter what they think Bucky's become, Steve knows better. Even the anger-filled man he currently has to put up with almost 24 hours a day is not the Winter Soldier. Steve mightn't have had to come up against him in a fight (and there's no words for how glad of that he is, because it's Bucky), but he's read the reports, heard the stories. 

No, Bucky as he is now has nothing of that. He's a man trying to piece a destroyed life back together. 

So Steve will tell the truth. He will put it down in as many official documents as he can, put his name to the words and give Bucky the credit S.H.I.E.L.D. would deny him.

He'll do everything he can for Bucky, even if Bucky doesn't want him to. 

When Tony arrives just after lunch, Steve's idly leafing through another file Fury had sent him.

It's on the virus that caused the necroplague, what they'd found out about it (in layman's terms, from one soldier to another) and Fury's speculations on the virus as a biological weapon despite the fact that none of their usual suspects have come forward to claim responsibility. Although it's an unexpectedly interesting report, Steve's currently more concerned with maintaining the illusion of busyness, while keeping an eye on Tony as he bears down on Bucky.

"You must be Bucky Barnes," Tony says grandly, sticking his hand out. "Tony Stark. I've heard an awful lot about you." He flicks a glance at Steve and continues, "'Bucky this, Bucky that'... Now I meet you, I can understand why." He looks Bucky up and down, speculatively. In Tony's defence, while the look is probably just him sizing Bucky up, Steve sees it as more and immediately prickles, scowling at Tony over Bucky's shoulder.

Tony returns it with an innocent look.

"Tony Stark," Bucky repeats, looking down at his hand, still within Tony's grip. "So... you're Iron Man. I've heard of you. You remind me of your dad."

Steve winces a little, but Tony retorts smoothly with: "So, you're the Winter Sold--"

"All right," Steve barks, shoving to his feet. "That's enough."

Tony releases Bucky's hand finally, and it's not that Steve was concerned about that because he wasn't, not really, except this is Tony and Bucky already seems entirely too warm towards him when they've only exchanged half a dozen odd words. 

And... okay yeah, look, Steve is entirely too jealous of how his friends--his modern day Avengers friends--so far have all seemed to have this easy... thing with Bucky, whereas he won't even speak to Steve at all unless he absolutely has to. Steve just wants his friend back, but Fury's truth serum has probably put paid to that forever.

Because apparently Bucky can still hold a grudge like in the old days.

Steve had just never imagined it would be against him.

"How's the arm doing?" Tony asks, blithely ignoring Steve's teeth-grinding glower of menace.

Bucky shrugs. "I'm not gonna lie, I know it's not right."

"You still have use of it, though?" Tony asks. "When Fury asked me to take a look at it, I made sure that you'd have all the normal range of movement. It's not bad work--for the Russians, anyway."

"But you could do better?"

"Of course. I, uh, technically I'm forbidden to 'do better' by S.H.I.E.L.D. at the moment, but I've got some ideas I think you'll like." Tony grins. "To make the most out of having a metal arm. And I can definitely do better than the fake skin and muscle." He pokes at it, and Bucky doesn't recoil. In fact, he snorts a wry laugh and Steve turns away, stuffing the papers from the file back into the folder. When Tony says, "In fact, I have a prototype in the car," Steve's not at all surprised and doesn't even bother to protest. 

Tony will do what Tony will do.

And Bucky...

"Really?" Bucky says with animated interest.

If Steve was going to put a stop to it, it should have been here. Because he can't see how this could go anywhere but badly, and Tony Stark is not an unstoppable force of technology no matter what he thinks of himself. 

Except Steve doesn't. 

He lets Tony run down to his car and bring up the prototype arm, lets Tony get out his toolbox and clear the dining room table and set it up like it's some kind of workshop. He lets Tony complain that this would be much easier if he could just take Bucky back to Malibu where he could do this properly, and even lets Tony chase him from the dining room to the living room, moving the files and papers from the dining table to the coffee table without disturbing a single page. 

He lets Tony, because he can see the sympathy in Tony's eyes though he'd never say it, and although Tony can be the most self-centred, self-obsessed jerk Steve has ever met, he's doing this as much for Steve as for his own ego.

Mostly though, Steve lets Tony do this because Tony, like this, reminds Steve of Howard. And it isn't until now, until right this moment, when Steve understands how much of his life he lost by not being around to grow old with the ones he loved most. Howard. Peggy. The Howling Commandos. 

Steve's sure if he'd had the time with these people he would have been able to grieve properly for Bucky when he fell at the second-last hurdle, the way he thought that any grief, when given enough time, should be able to heal. For the first time Steve finds himself helplessly wondering if this--having Bucky like this--is worth it. It's not a worthy thought, and he feels ashamed it even crossed his mind, but...

No, he tells himself. Stop.

He picks up the file again, this time with the intention of actually reading the thing. This is information he needs to know, and there's no point dwelling on things he can't change. It's a suitable distraction, and between the murmur of Tony and Bucky's voices in constant low conversation and the file, time passes quickly.

He glances up when he hears Bucky complain noisily.

"It's not my fault all the connections are backwards! Jesus, this whole thing's a mess. I'm going to have to build you a whole new connection at this rate."

"Happy for you, pal. But I'm still gonna need an arm 'til you do that."

"Oh for crying--I'm not going to leave you without an arm, Barnes. Let me just fix... This would be so much easier if I had all my tools." 

"Lots of things would be so much easier if--"

"Don't you finish that, Barnes," Steve hears a familiar warning tone in Tony's voice and smiles. As long as he doesn't think about his own relationship with Bucky, there's something stupidly heart-warming about listening to the bickering in the dining room and the rare lightness in Bucky's tone.

The lightness carries through right until Tony declares that the prototype arm is satisfactorily attached and fine-tuned to normal working order (even Tony wouldn't risk Colonel Fury's wrath at this point by giving the arm abilities a normal person wouldn't have). 

Once Tony's left though, Bucky once more becomes taciturn, retreating out onto the balcony with the day's newspaper and one of the notebooks he'd brought back with him on their last visit to S.H.I.E.L.D.

Steve leaves him be for a few hours, still working through the information Fury gave him, before he eventually realises he's spending more time glancing out the window at Bucky and less time working. He drifts towards the balcony.

Bucky's not reading the paper, though it sits on the table next to him, an empty cup of coffee defence against an errant breeze. Peeking out from under the edge of the newspaper is the notebook, pages full of cramped script. Bucky stares out into the distance and Steve takes the opportunity to do some staring of his own. While slow to regain his full stamina, the physical rehabilitation work Bucky's been doing between S.H.I.E.L.D. and the building's gym is doing wonders for his physique; the plain white t-shirt he's wearing pulls nicely across his shoulders, his jeans skim the line of his thighs in ways Steve deeply appreciates.

But all the rehab is doing is healing Bucky's body. There's been no healing of their friendship and Steve hates this estrangement more than anything. They were too long apart; Steve wants the familiar camaraderie that they'd had back in New York again. That easy echo of their former lives.

Eventually Steve sighs, steels himself and knocks on the glass door. Bucky glances up. "Oh," he says and, "hey." He rubs absently at the healing bite scar on his arm, metal fingers against flesh. 

"Do you mind if..." and Steve gestures to the empty seat next to Bucky. 

"Uh... yeah, sure. Fine."

Steve drops into the chair, propping his feet up on the edge of the handrail. Even though, really, he's not that big, he feels like he's dwarfing Bucky in a way that reminds him of when Bucky first knew him as this, as Captain America. Like he's a giant filling all the empty spaces in a room, a conspicuous lump with a neon arrow above his head. He puts his feet back down.

Bucky looks at him, one brow raised. It's about as much emotion as Steve's gotten out of him for days.

"So. Um." Steve fidgets and picks at an invisible thread on his own jeans. "They've started sending the military into the quarantine zones nationwide with the cure," he blurts, for lack of anything better to say. "It's too late for those who are already dead, but they've got a plan to round up the survivors and evacuate them."

"Mm." Bucky leans forward, elbows resting on his thighs. "I guess I'm proof it works," he eventually, reluctantly says, like he's realised he should be part of the conversation. "What are they doing about the dead ones? The zombies, I mean."

Heartened that Bucky made the effort to reply, Steve says, "Same problem as when I asked you back in New York why they hadn't done anything. Politicians claim killing the creatures is murder. They think that if there's a cure for the bitten, there should be a cure for the dead. But... they're dead, right, and rotting. So I don't know what these people think would be left if they could cure them."

"Maybe they just want a humane solution?" Bucky suggests. Steve's about to point out that sniping from the rooftop is hardly a humane solution, when he notices for the first time in what feels like approximately forever, that Bucky's almost smiling at the bitter joke. Almost. 

Steve almost smiles back.

"But what if they want to round 'em up, gas 'em like it's humane, like they're cattle? You know who else thought gassing was more humane?" Bucky's not almost smiling anymore. His gaze is 70-odd years distant, back in a past of blood and dirt and misery, before the Howling Commandos and Captain America changed his war. "You know the first thing I did when I finally got my mind back? I tried to find out what happened back then, in the war, not the--not what we were doing. Not how that ended. I figured that with no HYDRA ruling the world, it had to be good, right? But the war... he killed himself. Hitler, I mean." He shakes his head. "Shot himself and a handful of days later the war was all over. Would you believe it?"

"That's what I heard, too," Steve says quietly. It's not a good conversation, but it's something. It's Bucky talking without Steve feeling like he needs to crowbar the words out of him. 

"What a fuckin' waste. All those lives." Bucky rubs at the bridge of his nose. "Not gonna lie, kinda glad I wasn't around for the end." He stares at his hands for a long moment and Steve can't help staring at him, at the way the sunset flushes colour into his skin, filling the dark hollows under his eyes until Steve could almost imagine that this is the Bucky he's always known. Always loved. 

"There's something I gotta ask."

Unconsciously, Steve straightens. "Mm?"

"I know this thing with--with getting rid of the zombies is important, but why'm I here with you? Why haven't I been locked up in a S.H.I.E.L.D. max-security jail somewhere? After all the things I've done--"

"It wasn't you."

"You think that'll cut it? 'It wasn't me'?"

"You were brainwashed, Buck. It's not your fault."

"Not my fault. Yeah, and I bet it'd never have happened to you. Not Captain America." Bucky's mouth sets in a harsh line, the anger in his expression unmistakeable. But Bucky's not mad at him. No, he's mad at himself.

Steve forces himself not to repeat 'It's not your fault', because he knows they're empty words, a mindless platitude. He knows it's not Bucky's fault, but Steve also knows Bucky. He'll blame himself (though he'll never, ever say it), blame some flaw in his character that made him the one they could exploit to such ends. Wonder what the weakness in him is, that meant he could be broken down so completely, down to his atoms and rebuilt into whatever monster the Russians wanted. 

And if they could do that to Bucky, one of the strongest people Steve knows... no one could have stood a chance.

"You're not in prison because I vouched to Fury I would look after you. And that you weren't a threat. I couldn't see them send you off for things you--James Barnes--never did. Once this walking dead business is done, S.H.I.E.L.D. will still want to interrogate you, but--"

"Good."

"Good?" Steve says incredulously.

"Your S.H.I.E.L.D. buddies need to get into my head and find out if I'm actually free," Bucky says. "I went rogue once back in the 70s, y'know. And I don't remember how I ended up like--like this, this time, so how do I know the switch isn't going to flip back again?" He suddenly looks haunted and shoves to his feet. 

Steve straightens, reaching out. "Bucky--"

But he's gone, notebook in hand, the newspaper fluttering to the floor. Steve bends and picks it up, looking after Bucky. And he'd thought he'd had it difficult, trying to adjust to all the changes in the world between what he knew and what was now. At least he's only ever been the one man, looking for the right body to reflect how he felt inside. He can't even imagine what it must be like to know that not only did a cold-hearted killer live inside your head, but you were always there along for the ride, too.

Jesus, Bucky.

When Steve heads back in, dropping the paper on the coffee table, the door to Bucky's room is shut. He taps on the door. "Buck...?" he asks tentatively. 

"Leave me alone, Steve," he hears Bucky say in a tired voice after a long pause. 

Steve presses his hand to the timber, rests his forehead next to his hand and closes his eyes. He's never felt so helpless, so useless before in his life. "Okay..." he says. "Okay. If you need anything, I'm here for you."

Silence is his only reply. He sighs, steps away from the door, not looking forward to filling yet another evening with worry, with all the uselessly circling thoughts and fears he can't do anything about. Eventually he gives up and goes to bed, with the thought that sleep has to be better than this. 

Though he doesn't know what it was that woke him, Steve's out of his bed in a flash, strung out and alert. He can almost feel the sudden burst of adrenaline coursing through his veins as he listens intently. He pads softly to the bedroom door, slipping through it and out into the living room. 

What on Earth had it been?

Then:

He hears it again, a low, agonised cry this time followed by a heavy crash. It comes from Bucky's room, and that's all Steve needs to know, nearly kicking the door down in his rush to get in. 

He expects... well, he doesn't know what he expects. 

Whatever it is, it isn't the room half trashed, the bed sheets spilling to the floor. Light pours out of the bathroom door and Steve hears the sound of retching. "Bucky?" he says, picking his way around the mess on the floor towards the bathroom.

He doesn't miss the bottle of whisky on its side on the table by the bed, only a finger remaining, drops spilt around the neck.

Bucky's on the floor of the bathroom, hugging the toilet. 

"Oh, Buck," Steve sighs, and steps forward, crouching down. He reaches out, but he's barely even touched Bucky before Bucky is flinching away from him with a hiss and a glare. If the look in his eyes wasn't of a man thousands of miles and decades away from this moment, Steve might feel hurt. 

"Get away from me," Bucky snarls and Steve does, he goes. Not far, just to the bedroom, where he flicks on the light and straightens up the bedding, picking up the weird abstract painting Bucky had knocked off the wall and standing it safely behind the door. He straightens the dresser, which now wears a great gouge and crack in the top, no doubt from Bucky's new cybernetic arm. It mightn't have any more power behind it than Bucky's normal strength, but Steve knows how strong Bucky is, and it's still made of metal. Steve's not entirely sure how long it would take him to get back up if Bucky decided to seriously rearrange his face.

There's a glint of metal on the floor and Steve stoops, picking it up. The chain slips through his fingers and his eyes widen because he recognises it from a lifetime ago. His hand shakes as he palms the dog tags, tight 'til he feels the edges bite into his skin. He doesn't even know how Bucky could still have them; Steve would have thought that any link to that past would have been destroyed.

He stands the bottle of whisky up and reluctantly lets the chain slip through his fingers, puddling on the tabletop next to the bottle. He carefully sets the dog tags down on top, aligned, fingertips lingering against the ridge of Bucky's serial number. He knows the numbers as well as his own.

The toilet flushes and he turns just as Bucky comes out of the bathroom.

He stops, looking warily at Steve.

"Are you... are you okay?" Steve asks.

"Yeah," Bucky grunts. "It was just a nightmare." His gaze flicks to the dog tags and Steve sees the faint spasm that crosses his face. "You need to go." The cold look is all Bucky now, but still Steve's not upset. He goes, like he's asked, reaching out and touching Bucky's shoulder as he passes. 

It's something that Bucky doesn't jerk away.

The next morning when he returns from S.H.I.E.L.D. (without a mission, Steve finds Fury seems to take great pleasure in picking his brains and making him sit in on governmental meetings on the zombie crisis) the apartment is once again empty. This time there's no sound of gun shots, but Steve doesn't think Bucky's fled either. He acts instead on his hunch, and heads for the stairs. He's not wrong; Bucky and Clint are up there again, but this time they're not taking shots at poor creatures from the rooftop. Instead they're...

Steve stops.

His mind goes blank and it takes him a heartbeat too long to decipher exactly what they're doing, half-naked on that mat they've spread out on the astroturf. Then Bucky flips Clint and has him face first on the mat, arm twisted up at a painful angle. 

"Haha ow," Clint says. "Okay, okay, Buck, I get the picture." 

Bucky releases him and Clint rolls over and pushes himself to his feet. He touches a spot of blood on his lip. "I still think I could take you," he says. "I was holding back. You're still, y'know, weak--weakened. From the whole zombie thing. And your arm is... new."

At that Bucky snorts, stretches his arms and loosens his shoulders. He doesn't look worse for wear from the previous night's whisky offensive. "No holds barred, then?" he offers with a smirk that Steve knows well. If Clint says yes, he's going to end up in a world of pain. Steve's trained with Clint--he's good at hand-to-hand, but Bucky...? Bucky's better.

"Sure," Clint says, bouncing on his toes.

To say Bucky systematically takes Clint to pieces would be a slight understatement. In less than two minutes Clint is on his back on the mat, out cold. Steve swallows, lets his breath out slowly, because that was stupidly hot and just. No. He shouldn't be thinking about that at all, because no.

And yet...

Bucky straightens, nudging Clint with his toe. Then he turns, looks at Steve, and of course he's known Steve's been there the whole time. "You wanna go, too?" he asks, but the play has gone out of his tone in favour of challenge, bordering on something dark and ugly.

Steve steps forward, out of the shadow of the stairwell and shrugs out of his jacket. "Yeah," he says, knowing the answer before he even says it, "yeah, I do." He's pulling off his boots when Clint comes to, groaning as he rolls over. 

"You're rough, man."

"Just how you like it." And that smirk is back on Bucky's face as he bends, lending a helping hand to pull Clint to his feet.

Clint sways a little then squints at Steve. "Oh, hey, Cap," he says, rubbing his head. His eyes widen when he realises Steve's stripped down for business. He looks between them--Steve's bulk, Bucky's wiry strength--and whistles. Steve knows on the surface it looks like anything but a fair fight. On the surface.

"You ready?" Bucky asks. 

"Yeah."

While Steve doesn't expect Bucky to pull his punches, he's a little surprised by exactly how vicious Bucky is, even compared with how he'd fought Clint. 

He can see clearly all the changes between his best friend and the man the Russians gave back to him (let go, escaped, whatever happened), and he shouldn't be surprised because all this was foreshadowed in New York, but he is and it saddens him. It's not sparring like the old days; Bucky swings his metal fist with intent and Steve has to work to avoid taking a serious hit. He grabs Bucky's wrist on the follow-through, but Bucky uses his own momentum, hooking his ankle behind Steve's and they go down. 

Steve twists, throws Bucky off and he's back on his feet in a flash. They exchange a few blows, and Steve's glad Bucky doesn't naturally lead with his left otherwise Steve would be in for all the hurt. Not that there isn't enough power for some fairly significant pain as is, of course. He sways back from Bucky's swing, follows it up with a jab of his own that Bucky ducks under, launching himself at Steve. For the second time they hit the mat, this time Steve flat on his back and Bucky on top, pummelling him with his fists.

It's difficult for Steve to avoid, and he takes three hits as he realises that he's stupidly using the same moves he used to use when they trained together; Bucky would know them like Steve knows them, it's body memory now, even after all these years. So he tries a move he learned only recently and... Bucky counters it, but he counters it the way Steve has to counter a lot of Bucky's moves in return: with thought and training, not instinct. 

Steve has the edge he needs.

Rather like Bucky had been with Clint when Steve had arrived on the rooftop, it ends with Bucky face down on the mat, his metal arm twisted hard up behind his back. Steve has his other arm pinned with his free hand and a knee digging right into Bucky's kidneys. Unlike Clint, Bucky still struggles for a moment until there's a decidedly unhealthy sounding crack from his cybernetic arm. He makes an astonished noise of pain and Steve releases him immediately. "Sorry, I--"

I'm an idiot. It's not what he was going to say, but it's what he should have said, because Bucky does this... this thing and suddenly even though his arm is almost useless, he has Steve pinned, one knee jammed hard against Steve's throat, foot pressed down on one wrist, hand on the other, and when Steve tries to twist his body to throw him off, the move just increases the weight on his throat til his vision fuzzes around the edges. He gives it one herculean effort, gets his arm free from under Bucky's foot and punches Bucky hard, harder than he ever meant to.

Bucky falls back against the mat, groaning as he pushes himself up onto his one good elbow. He grins humourlessly at Steve, licking the blood off his teeth. "Not bad."

Steve's voice is rough in his throat. "Yeah."

Clint, who has been watching in silence the whole time, says uneasily, "You guys are messed up."

"You don't even know the half of it, pal," Bucky says and pushes himself to his feet, supporting his cybernetic arm. For a moment--like it's for old time's sake, that shared nostalgia of the same words said to Dum Dum or Morita--he flicks a glance at Steve and almost smiles, before he looks away. He snags up his shoes, picks up his t-shirt and limps for the stairs.

"I'm glad he's on our side now," Clint says, watching Bucky leave. "Need a hand up?"

Steve lets Clint pull him to his feet. "Hey, you mind if I ask--" Clint starts.

"Don't."

"Just wanted to ask about New York. Y'know. This century." Steve looks at Clint and Clint spreads his hands. "I want to know what it's like on the ground in there. Fury hasn't really had any reason to send us in, what with the fact that the standard pesky supervillain isn't going stop and wait for us to clean up a zombie plague."

Steve swallows. How do you explain that these... these creatures were once people? Living, breathing people, just like him, just like Clint, who once had their own lives and stories and now they're things, decaying in their facsimile of life. Things that just want to kill and eat. "Be glad of it," Steve says. "It's an absolute nightmare. You can't reason with these things. They just want to kill you and eat you, Clint, and they were people. Those creatures you were shooting down by the river? They were people once."

Clint looks fascinated and disgusted and a little ashamed. "And Bucky was bitten by one of those things?"

"Several, actually."

"Fuck."

"Yeah." Steve takes the shirt Clint hands him and shrugs back into it. "Where are you off to now?" he asks, picking up his boots. They head for the stairs.

"I've got training with Tasha at S.H.I.E.L.D."

"Ah," and Steve grins, "going to let the Black Widow wipe the floor with you, too?" 

Steve doesn't miss the blush that crawls across Clint's face. "I can hold my own against her," he says defensively.

"Uh-huh." Steve grins. 

"I can!" Then Clint looks thoughtful a moment. "You know, Bucky fights a bit like her."

Steve's grin fades. "Russian training, probably," he says, unable to avoid the flatness in his tone. He pushes open the door out into the foyer.

"Oh. Yeah. Anyway, uh, I should go. You know how Tasha hates to be kept waiting." Clint punches Steve lightly on the shoulder and jogs to the elevator.

"Give her my best," Steve calls after Clint.

When Steve re-enters the apartment, Bucky's sitting on the dining room table, talking on the phone. There's something about him sitting there, barefoot still and feet propped up on the chairs, the easy looseness of his limbs despite the rough sling he's made, that causes a hitch in Steve's step. He completely ignores the various aches and pains and, just for a moment, despite everything that has just happened, allows himself a few indulgent seconds to imagine what things could have been like. 

Imagines he could step into the loose 'v' of Bucky's thighs, pluck the phone from Bucky's hand ("Thanks Tony, but no thanks--no, I don't care what you're selling," because it's Tony that Bucky's talking to, about his busted arm) and toss it away. Haul Bucky in and kiss him thoroughly. Maybe Bucky would hook his ankles behind Steve's legs and pull him closer-- 

Bucky laughs, and that's what takes Steve out of his silly little daydream, Bucky's laugh from across the room and not right in his ear and Steve shakes himself, padding over to the sofa. He doesn't castigate himself for daydreaming things like this and not even from the occasional thought that when he wins Bucky back over--because he will, that's the one thing he can't imagine not happening, a future where they are never friends--they might have a chance. 

About two-point-four seconds after Bucky hangs up the landline, Steve's cell phone buzzes.

"Jesus, Rogers," Tony screams at him, his rage tinny through the phone line. "Do you have any idea how much time I spent getting that arm calibrated just right for him?"

"Yeah, well," Steve says, in no mood for Tony's histrionics, "you want to build an arm for him, you build something that won't break with a bit of rough and tumble--"

"Rough and tumble? Hawkeye said it looked like the two of you were going to kill each other!"

"You spoke with Clint?" Steve watches Bucky pass through the living room, thoroughly ignoring him. The bedroom door shuts softly behind him.

"He sent me a text! He was worried he was gonna have to try and break the two of you up and was warning me I might need to come in, in the armour! I told him to stay out of it! Look, I know you've got your issues with Bucky at the moment--"

Steve nearly chokes on a laugh. 

"What? What?"

"I'm--I'm not the one with the issues," Steve says, and he suddenly can't seem to stop laughing for some reason, which... this is not funny, it's really not funny, but it's Tony Stark yelling at him over the phone for being irresponsible and Steve just can't help himself.

"Well, whoever has issues--stop laughing, Rogers," and Tony growls in irritation and snaps, "Fine! Call me when you've grown up a little!" It's the ridiculousness of that which sets Steve off again.

Steve drops the cell phone onto the sofa beside him, buries his face in his hands and laughs and laughs. He stops when he realises he sounds a little hysterical and the tears in his eyes aren't entirely from laughter. 

His cell phone beeps. The message is from Tony:

«Take him to SHIELD. They'll run a scan and tell me what YOU broke.»

Steve doesn't bother replying, but he knocks on Bucky's door. "Buck? Tony wants me to take you to S.H.I.E.L.D. so we can get your arm fixed."

It turns out that it's not a major problem. One of the bearings was faulty which, despite knowing better, Steve is going to lord over Tony for as long as he can because, as the tech at S.H.I.E.L.D. said, it could have caused a major problem if the bearing housing cracked while Bucky was actually doing something important. 

Steve chooses not to point out that what they were doing that broke the arm in the first place was important in its own way. He doubts the tech would understand. He's not entirely sure he understands it himself. 

Thunder echoes around the bedroom as Steve tries to sleep.

That one was close, he thinks, shifting restlessly. The weather had changed as evening came on and now the air is heavy, sultry with the humidity and promise of rain. A sluggish breeze stirs the curtain and Steve finds his gaze arrested a moment by the billow of material; then another flash of lightning lights up the room, Steve catches a glimpse of movement--a grim figure at the end of the bed, gun raised and trained on Steve, death in his eyes and the lightning a brilliant reflection on his metal arm--and then he's shouting with alarm, falling from the bed, the sharp crack of thunder like a shot ringing in his ears. Another flash and the figure has vanished.

"Steve?" 

The figure might be gone but Bucky's there, in the doorway with his 9mm in hand, up and ready. Another flash of lightning flickers across the room and Steve starts back involuntarily as it reflects off Bucky's arm.

The Winter Soldier. That's who Steve saw.

Bucky lowers the gun when he sees the room is empty. He comes forward, sets the gun down on the table by the bed and hauls Steve to his feet with a hand under his arm. "You okay?" he asks curtly.

"Yeah," Steve says and he lets Bucky help him up. He's embarrassed; he wasn't even asleep, and he's imagining things like... like the Winter Soldier at the foot of his bed ready to kill him. Steve's only in shorts, but Bucky's still dressed, jeans, black t-shirt. Clearly Steve hasn't woken him. 

Dragging the sheet back up with him, Steve sits on the bed. "Sorry," he says, "think I must have had a--" Nightmare? Could he even call it that? 

"Just shut up, Steve." Bucky's fingers press against his shoulder and Steve goes with it, letting himself fall back, drawing his legs back up onto the mattress to lay flat. "Go back to sleep." He tries to imagine that Bucky's fingers linger on his skin, but they don't.

Then Bucky's gone again.

Strangely, it doesn't take Steve long to fall asleep after that and for the first time since New York he doesn't dream. The next morning he wakes feeling rested; the weather's broken, he slept through the rest of the storm, the heavy rain that still wets the window. He yawns, stretches and rolls onto his side. 

He blinks when he sees a gun on the table by the bed, then remembers. Bucky. The Winter Soldier. Lightning on metal. Bucky's fingers on his skin.

God, he wishes Tony hadn't upgraded Bucky's arm yet. Wishes he'd been able to wait just a little longer to get his hands on that Russian technology. 

Steve pushes himself up and reaches for the gun, turning it over it his hands. It's loaded, but the safety is on, and Steve recognises it as the same side-arm Bucky had carried in their escape from New York. How he got it back, Steve has no idea (though he finds out later that it had been included with his own personal gear when it was delivered to the apartment). He brings it with him from the bedroom, sets it on the table for Bucky when he rises. 

It's not a long wait until he does, but Steve doesn't turn when he hears Bucky come into the dining room, doesn't look up from the crossword he's mostly failing at in the paper as he catches the sight of Bucky setting down a coffee cup from the corner of his eye, or when he sees Bucky's fingers linger on the gun. 

Then:

"Here," Bucky says, and sets a stack of notebooks down on the table by Steve's hand. Steve looks up. 

"This is everything I can remember about when I was the Winter Soldier. Training, missions, when they put me in cold storage and when they took me out. This one," he splays his fingers on the top notebook for half a second, before jerking his hand away, "is everything I remember about when they rescued me from the ice, the torture, the... the brainwashing."

He pushes the stack closer to Steve. "It's all in there."

Steve stares at the notebooks, disarmed. That's... not what he expected. But he looks up at Bucky and nods. "Thank you," he says solemnly. "I'll make sure these get put directly into Colonel Fury's hands."

Bucky closes his eyes a moment, lets out a breath and his shoulders sag, like a weight has finally been lifted.

And that's the point when Steve realises that the way Bucky has been acting wasn't about him, and probably hasn't been since not long after they first left the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility. Bucky's been caught up in his past, in forcing himself to remember every detail of what he'd been put through to become the Winter Soldier. No wonder every night had been punctuated with nightmares.

Steve feels like a total heel for ever doubting Bucky and for being so self-centred. It was never about him.

"How do you feel?" Steve asks.

"Fried," Bucky admits, sinking down into the chair at right angles to Steve. He can't quite look at the stack of ink stained notebooks with their soft-thumbed pages. "Tell Fury I'll let him know if there's anything I missed."

Steve nods. "I'll do that." He looks at Bucky's hands, carefully folded on the table, stains of ink on his fingers. He tries to think of those hands belonging to the Winter Soldier, but all he can remember is the feel of them gliding over his skin. He coughs softly, and looks away. While now is seriously not the time, Steve still finds it reassuring that even after last night, even after all the reports he's read, he can't imagine Bucky as the Winter Soldier.

"You know... if you wanna read 'em, you can. So you know." 

"Do you want me to read them?" 

Bucky doesn't answer, and when Steve looks back he's got his elbows propped on the table and his face in his hands. 

Steve scoots his chair closer to the corner of the table (closer to Bucky) and takes a chance reaching out, curving his hand around Bucky's shoulder. "Hey," he says softly. "Hey, it's going to be okay." 

"I'm just so tired," eventually Bucky murmurs, voice muffled against his palms. "I just... I want a night's sleep, but even that's too much." He leans into Steve's touch, turning his face so his cheek touches the back of Steve's fingers and Steve is warmed to his very core by the simplest movement. 

"Did you want me to see if S.H.I.E.L.D. has anything that can--?"

"No." Bucky shakes his head sharply. "No drugs. I can't--I just can't."

Steve nods. "I understand." He's tired too, wrung out from worry, from Bucky's nightmares keeping him awake--though he'd never, ever tell Bucky--and from his own nightmares, a cruel blend of the oldest (Bucky falling, over and over, Steve clinging to the door, his serum-enhanced arms still not long enough to reach his best friend as the rail gave way and sometimes he is Bucky, watching himself reach uselessly out as he fell) and the nightmare in between (Bucky going down under the hands of those creatures, blood on his skin, the inhuman look in his eyes as he tried to bite Steve, desperate for his flesh) and the newest. The Winter Soldier. 

"So, what now? Where is there to go from here?" Steve asks. Where does this leave us, he wants to ask.

He's not sure if Bucky misunderstands the question when he says, "There's nowhere left to go. I don't have anything here in this time, Steve, not like you. No home, no friends. I'm an ex-Soviet assassin, a confirmed criminal, an enemy of the State. Maybe I do deserve to be locked away in some S.H.I.E.L.D. containment facility for the rest of my life."

"No." Steve won't have that at all. "You don't deserve it. And you're not alone. You have me. I know Clint thinks you're pretty much amazing. Stark's particularly fond of anyone he can make into a project. You're not alone, Buck. I don't know anyone who can win people over the way you do. Half the staff from the S.H.I.E.L.D. office think you're the bees knees already. You are definitely still you."

It hurts to see the way Bucky's mouth thins, the tightness in his jaw, like he doesn't believe a word Steve is saying. Steve finishes in a soft tone, "Anyway, you always have a home with me. I need you to know that. All this," and he gestures around the apartment, "Avengers business is important, yeah, but nothing is more important to me than you."

Bucky laughs once, bitterly, and shakes his head. "You're unbelievable, Steve," he says, but without rancour. "If news got out that you even knew me it'd hurt you. You're Captain America and Captain America can't afford a friend like me." 

"I don't care."

"Steve--"

"I don't care." Steve slaps his hand down on the table. "Don't you get it? That you went through all you did at the hands of the Russians, that they made you do those terrible things... that's not you, and I won't let anyone tell me otherwise. Bucky, I know you. I know what kind of man you are, and you are not the man who would do those things. And I'll do everything I can to make sure S.H.I.E.L.D. knows it, too."

Bucky bites his lip. "You're not gonna change your mind about this, are you?"

Steve shakes his head.

"I could run," Bucky warns.

"Yeah? Just you try it."

With a noise of disgust, Bucky slumps back in his chair. "You haven't changed a bit. You're still the most impossible, infuriating man I know."

"Thank you," Steve says and grins.

"It wasn't a compliment."

"I know."

Bucky shakes his head, rolls his eyes, but then... then he's smiling, really smiling and it takes Steve's breath away. He glances up, meets Steve's gaze and Steve can't help beaming at him like an idiot, feeling like a bridge has been mended, like they are going to be okay. Bucky reaches out and knocks his knuckles against Steve's hand and says, "I'm bad for you, just so you know that," but he's still smiling.

"Haven't you always been?" Steve asks. 

Bucky reaches out, slides the paper from under Steve's hands, picks up his pen and starts working on the crossword Steve had been massacring. It's such a familiar scene, Steve feels his heart clench. He couldn't count the number of mornings they'd sat at the tiny table in their tiny apartment in Brooklyn about a million years ago as Bucky finished the crossword Steve had started.

Although there'd been no gun and no stack of notebooks filled with a bloodstained history then. Steve resolutely doesn't look at either, just watches as Bucky corrects his mistakes, and then goes about systematically answering everything Steve couldn't.

Eventually Bucky hums with satisfaction and pushes the newspaper away, settling back in his seat. Then: "Steve...?" 

"Mm?" Steve freezes in the act of reaching for the paper again. 

"Back... back in New York, you said something." 

"I said a lot of things," Steve says cautiously. 

"No," Bucky says, "you said a specific thing. A very specific thing. You said you... you said how you felt about me. That you were--were in love with me." He crinkles his nose, looking awkward as he pulls his 'I don't want to talk about feelings, but you like talking about feelings which you know I hate but you know I'm going along with it because it's you' face.

Steve swallows. "I did," he says slowly. His heart thumps a sharp triple time in his chest. Why would Bucky bring this up? 

"That was before," Bucky says. He doesn't look at Steve as he speaks, just looks at the pen he's toying with, like it's the most interesting thing in the world. Flips it over and over in his fingers. "Before you knew the truth about me. Who I really am."

"Was," Steve corrects. 

"...Was. Either way."

"Well... yeah, that's true."

Bucky wets his lips and frowns fiercely at the pen. "I wanna know--need to know--if... if you've changed your mind now that you know the truth, because..." The pen suddenly flicks out of his fingers, skittering across the table top. Bucky swears, reaches for it again, but Steve can't bear to watch the nervous jitters anymore and pins Bucky's hand to the tabletop. 

It seems the more agitated Bucky becomes, the calmer Steve is in response. "Because why, Buck?"

Bucky flicks Steve an unreadable glance as his words come out in a rush. "Because... because I think I'm--I think I might be... the same... with you, and I need to know if you still want me--this...? us...?--because I think I'm gonna do something stupid and I'd prefer to know beforehand than find out you're not--that you don't, y'know, anymore because... well... my history."

"Oh. Uh." Steve sits back in his chair, blinking. It takes him a moment to process what Bucky's said, and then when he does he says, "Oh!" in a useless, shocked tone. 

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said anything," Bucky says and he's flushed pink across his cheeks, endearingly so because it's so rare, but then he shoots to his feet and tries to flee, which... no. Steve can't have him running out now. Won't have it. He gets up too, grabs Bucky by the arm and tugs him back around, cups his face and kisses him hard. Bucky goes rigid at first, before relaxing, his hands coming up to grip at Steve's shirt. He leans into the kiss and Steve sighs when he feels the touch of Bucky's tongue to his lips and parts them. Bucky licks into his mouth and then reaches up, curling his arm around Steve's neck the way Steve remembers. 

When Steve shifts his hands, sliding them down Bucky's back to his hips, Bucky presses against him, making a soft, pleased noise into Steve's mouth.

"What if I did something stupid first?" Steve finally asks, when they part, his heart thundering in his chest.

Bucky's eyes are dark with desire when he looks up at Steve. "That'd work, too," he says. 

He kisses Steve again then, other arm wrapped around Steve's body, fingers digging into Steve's back. This time when they part Bucky speaks first, asking, "Too soon to move this to the bedroom?"

Steve swallows and, not trusting his voice in the slightest, shakes his head. Then, just in case Bucky might have misinterpreted his head shake, he manhandles Bucky through the apartment to the master bedroom. 

With a smirk at Steve's eagerness, Bucky breaks away to strip off his t-shirt, slowly unbuttoning his jeans and peeling them off. Like before, he doesn't waste time wearing underwear and it's still one of the hottest things Steve's ever considered. And then Steve's out of his own clothes in less time than he would have thought possible, pushing Bucky down on the bed and slithering over him. 

Steve wants to make Bucky completely lose control this time. He curls his fingers around Bucky's cock and Bucky arches up into his hand, a soft whine torn from his lips. "You like that?"

"Fuck you, you know I do," Bucky gasps. 

"What do you want?" 

Bucky looks up at Steve from heavy-lidded eyes. He licks his lips, slow and deliberate and waits for Steve's gaze to meet his again before he speaks. "Want you inside me. Want you to fuck me."

"I--" Steve stops, swallows then lets out his breath slowly. Not what he expected. God, he wants it though, he's even dreamt about it, waking up sweat-slick and messy in the sheets at the thought.

He pulls away a moment and reaches for the drawer by the bed. There's lube there, he found it the first night when investigating (not because Tony Stark is an asshole who thought Steve was going to fuck his best friend, but because Tony Stark is an asshole who would have prepared this place for his own debauchery, long before leasing the place back to S.H.I.E.L.D.).

Steve rolls them, sliding his hand from Bucky's cock to his thigh, catching Bucky's leg with his fingers and hauling him even closer, flicking the cap off the lube with his other hand. The rock of Bucky's hips, the slide of his cock against Steve's skin distracts Steve a moment and he presses his mouth to Bucky's throat, then against his jaw, then kisses him deeply. Bucky's fingers tangle in his hair as he arches up; God, he's so responsive, it's beautiful. He's beautiful. 

Eventually Steve manages to slop some lube on his fingers, coating his cock. He reaches down to slick Bucky then hesitates. "I've never--" he says, suddenly mortified. 

But Bucky just smiles. "It's okay." He guides Steve's hand down, presses Steve's fingertips against him, into him, and Steve... oh, well Steve has it from there, fucking Bucky with his fingers; but there's something so hot about the feel of Bucky's hand around his as Steve does it, the way Bucky fucks himself onto Steve's fingers even as he fucks himself with them.

"Now," Bucky says roughly, "I want you."

Once Steve replaces his fingers with the fullness of his cock (slowly pushing into Bucky, feeling the resistance a moment then--oh god) he holds still, breathing slowly. Bucky tightens his thighs around Steve a moment and smirks when Steve inhales sharply. Ducking his head, Steve thoroughly kisses the smirk right off his face. When Steve starts to thrust, Bucky lets out a hum of pleasure. "You like that?" Steve murmurs.

"Like it more if you'd fuck me harder," Bucky says giving Steve that familiar, challenging look. It's so ridiculously hot right now that Steve's not sure he'll ever be able to see it again without thinking ofthis.

Shaking his head, Steve nips at Bucky's bottom lip. "We go at my pace, Buck," he says, and his pace is the slowest, most leisurely fuck he's ever had. It's not easy for him, either, but the way it drives Bucky mad is worth every single moment of the flipside need to fuck Bucky hard.

"Come on, Steve," Bucky groans, trying to rock up against Steve, "need you to fuck me."

"How much?" Steve whispers, right in his ear. "Tell me how much."

Bucky lets out a string of expletives, finishing with, "Like nothing else, you little punk."

And that's when Steve fucks him hard like he wants, losing himself in the movement of his cock in Bucky's body, the slick of wet skin on wet skin, the wordless noises Bucky makes. Bucky's fingers digging into Steve's shoulders as he mindlessly seeks out Steve's mouth and they kiss messily around the gasps and the moans. Steve's orgasm hits him like a freight train, hips jerking as he empties himself into Bucky, bowed over him with wet, open mouthed gasps. He's barely finished coming before he's fumbling for Bucky's cock with his still slippery hand, because all he can think about is how much he wants Bucky to come while still inside him.

"Oh fuck Steve, that's so hot, I don't..." Bucky says and that's when Steve realises he's said it aloud. 

He repeats the words raggedly, says, "Come on, Buck, come while I'm in you," and that's all it takes before Bucky comes apart at the seams, his come spilling wet all over Steve's fingers and belly. He slumps back against the mattress, still panting, then reaches up and touches Steve's face with no finesse. Steve smiles against Bucky's palm.

Eventually they have to separate and Steve lets out a soft, involuntary noise of loss as he slides out of Bucky's body. "S'okay," Bucky says, curling on his side, reaching out and trailing his fingers through the sticky wetness on Steve's belly. He unselfconsciously licks his finger clean and Steve exhales heavily, because that is unexpectedly hot. "Give me a coupla moments to recover, then we can go for round two."

Even though Steve's super-soldier body gives him a stupidly short refractory period, even he's not quite ready yet. Though if Bucky keeps licking his fingers like that... He closes his eyes a moment and force-redirects his thoughts because there's something else just a little more pressing he needs to know.

"So, you... love me?" he asks, a little hesitantly, because even though they've just fucked, it's still possible that he could've misheard, could've misinterpreted Bucky's garbled words. It's not like he explicitly said it, after all. Steve could, horribly, be wrong.

Except. 

Bucky runs his hand lightly down Steve's spine and Steve closes his eyes a moment, breathing slowly, letting himself enjoy the simple touch. He could get very used to this, very quickly. Then Bucky presses his mouth to Steve's shoulder. "Yeah," Bucky says and Steve can feel Bucky's smile against his skin. "God knows why, but I do."

-

"We need you to go back to New York on a stealth mission," Fury says. "It'll just be the pair of you."

The call to come in to S.H.I.E.L.D. had come sometime after midnight, not long after Steve had fallen asleep, Bucky warm up against his back, arm hooked limply around Steve's waist. 

Steve looks at Bucky, but Bucky's eyes don't shift from Fury's face at all. "Why me? You don't trust me."

Fury's mouth thins for a moment. "No, I don't. But you're all I've got at the moment, and I'm gonna use what I've got. Besides, I've... read these," he places a hand on the notebooks Steve had managed to drag himself away from Bucky for long enough to deliver earlier in the day, "and you've both got experience within a quarantine zone that the rest of the team doesn't have." He turns his gaze to Steve. "You say he's reliable, Cap? Well, this is his chance to prove it."

Straightening his shoulders, Steve raises his chin. "I will stake my reputation on it," he says in his best pompous Captain America voice and hears Bucky huff a soft laugh. Steve flicks a glare at him. 

"Of course you will," Fury says mildly, but there's a twinkle of almost malicious humour in his eyes. "Gentlemen, I've heard all kinds of stories about how Captain America and Bucky used to fight together during the war. I look forward to seeing how Captain America and the Winter Soldier fight together now." 

Steve inhales sharply and looks at Bucky. The humour is gone now; Bucky closes his eyes a moment, his jaw tight. The Winter Soldier.

Then he opens his eyes and smiles. "All right," he says, "let's do this."

END.

Notes:

Timestamp!fic (six months later): Epicentre.