Chapter Text
"So like I was saying, it's the ascendance that gets me, you know? The quality's there, sure, but the rise. Mete-fucking-oric, Buck, I'm telling you."
Bucky checks his sightline, tapping his fingers against his thigh and running the specs through again. If anyone approaches, they'll be doing it from the east. Not much need to compensate for the wind today, and the ground is relatively flat. The treeline surrounding them on all sides is thick enough to give good cover, enough to make him itch, but there's enough room between where the trees end and the cleared space the cabin sits on starts to respond to an attempted ambush before they land on the literal doorstep. The intel they're working from is the definition of shaky, so it could be they're out here to watch absolutely nothing happen, but situational awareness is second nature now. And it matters, even if certain people don't appreciate the advantage silence gives anybody trying not to get shot. Bucky's trying to keep them alive, for Chrissakes.
Not that Sam cares. He's not keeping his eyes on the easiest places to stage an assault. No, he's talking about—honestly, who fucking knows. Kodak yellow? What the hell that had to do with anything, Bucky couldn't say, but Sam's been explaining whatever it is for going on an hour.
"Wild when you think about about it. Started there, now we're talking 'Yoncé level—"
"Sam." Bucky sets down his rifle and levels his best please remember I used to murder people for a living, just once look at the man... lounging next to him? Lounging. Jesus fucking Christ. "I don't care. If you don't shut up about the goddamn cameras, I'm going to throw you off this roof."
"Cameras?" Sam howls, louder than anything around for at least a half mile. "Do you listen at all?"
"No." Bucky turns back to the clearing. "I figure someday you'll take the hint and stop talking."
"Ouch," Sam says, not hurt in the slightest. "That's cold, Buck. Very cold. Could even say icy."
"Yeah, well." He's not going to smile. He's not going to play along. Sam isn't as funny as he thinks he is, they aren't friends, they're colleagues. Not even that—they're work mandated proximity associates. Encouraging him is only going to make it worse. "I had a lot of practice. Six or so decades of it."
Sam's laugh one hundred percent, no-bullshit does not feel like a reward. Bucky doesn't like it.
He doesn't.
Here's the truth: Bucky's happy for Steve. He is. Steve got what he always deserved. He got a wife and probably kids and he was happy and safe. Bucky is happy for him. Over the moon and then some. How could he not be? It'd take a real piece of work to resent Steve for finding the things he'd always wanted.
So what does it matter that Bucky always thought the end of the line would be a little bit more mutual? What does it matter if he'd never wondered what a life without Steve Rogers in it would look like and now that he's living it he doesn't know how it's supposed to work. What does it motherfucking matter if he misses that little punk more than his actual missing limb.
None of that means a thing, because Bucky's happy for Steve. He is. He's fine.
The exact measurements on how bullshit that is can be a secret between Bucky and his complete lack of god. Nobody needs to know.
Bucky doesn't see the right hook aimed straight at his head until after Sam takes the swing. He's got some song on about walking in Jerusalem. Bucky's not about to tell him so but it's nice, really. Pretty. Sounds kind of like the church music that used to waft out of Concord Baptist, back in the day. Steve always loved those songs.
"So. You miss Steve pretty bad, huh?" Like he can read Bucky's thoughts, Sam takes a swig of his beer and studies him over the bottle in a knowing way that makes Bucky want to throw the table at the wall and escape in the chaos. "Wanna talk about it, or you thinking about storming out now that I've called out the elephant in the room?"
"I'm on watch tonight." Bucky shoves his chair back with an ugly screech. "And I'm not—I don't storm out," he adds, a little too late to sound sincere. "I leave. It's different, all right?"
"Buck..."
Even Sam's mouth isn't fast enough to match a super soldier who would rather gnaw off his remaining arm at the wrist than talk about it. Just before Bucky slams the front door shut, he hears Sam say say to his empty chair, "like hell he doesn't storm outta places. You see that? Prime storming out, right there. Man's got issues."
Bucky snorts. No shit he does. That doesn't mean he has to talk about them.
"'You wanna talk about it'. Can you believe that shit?" he asks the sad little pine tree off to the left. "Talk about it." The tree doesn't reply, which makes it officially preferable to Sam. Too bad they didn't pair him up with the pine tree.
Sam doesn't bring Steve up again. Bucky spends all morning waiting for it; then all afternoon, evening, the morning after that, until a week's gone by and Sam still hasn't tried to talk about Steve.
He's still annoying as humanly possible (apparently it's Bodak, not Kodak. It's definitely not about cameras and it's not a fancy name for a shade of yellow paint. The second guess upsets Sam so much Bucky refuses to learn anything else about it out of pure gleeful spite) but never about anything that matters. Things are good, other than that. Sam makes pretty decent coffee and great sandwiches and doesn't make a big production out of sharing them both. The music he plays when he makes them dinner actually isn't bad, and he holds up his end on late night guard shifts even though he knows Bucky could take them all and never miss the sleep.
It's fine. It's good, as far as what he'd been expecting. If Sam would shut up once in a while, it might even edge towards great.
Hell, it's nearly fucking perfect, because this what Bucky wanted. Wants. What he wants, centered in the moment like Raynor's always yammering on about.
Talking about Steve means ripping himself open and displaying all the viscera contained inside for Sam to poke around in. Bucky knows he's drowning in the empty spaces formerly occupied by Steve Rogers. He's fine with it. He doesn't need a hand up. Not from Sam, not from anyone, because Steve is gone. Forever, as far as Bucky's concerned.
Even if he wanted to talk about it, what is there to say?
"Why haven't you asked me about Steve again?" There's a steak knife three inches to the left of his pinkie. Bucky knows from experience that if he grabbed it, stabbed himself in the thigh and gave the blade a couple decent yanks back and forth, there'd be no stitching up the femoral. Then even he'd be dead and never have to see Sam's face when that little bomb lands.
"You told me not to." Sam doesn't even do him the favor of being smug, just keeps drying the dishes and leaves Bucky to examine his back and try to pull out something he can point to and prove even asking the question is Sam's fault. The man singing over his phone's speaker is going on about sugar pies and honeybunches and not being able to help himself.
The first part's bullshit, but the second part... Bucky can relate, is all, and he wonders what Sam would do if he grabbed it and stabbed the screen a couple times instead of his thigh.
"No I didn't." The steak knife looks better and better with each stupid word leaping from his mouth. Maybe Shuri really did rattle a couple things loose in his head that needed to stay bolted down along with pulling out Hydra's commands, because instead of doing the smart thing he keeps talking. "I said I had to go on watch. I never said I didn't want to talk about Steve."
"That's fair. You never actually said it, I'll cop to that." Sam sets their last plate aside and turns to face him, hitching one hip up against the counter and still refusing to turn back into the asshole who won't stop talking about shit Bucky does not care about. He knows what to do with that guy. This guy is a whole other ballgame. "But it's what you meant, and I'm not here to force it out of you."
Could you be? Bucky recoils from his own thought and backs away, towards the open doorframe leading to the exit out back and freedom from his own terrible choices. "I—I gotta go on watch."
"Sure you do, man," Sam agrees easily. "Let me know when you decide you don't have to be on watch anymore. I'll be here."
Bucky does not run away. He strides purposefully to the door and opens it, at a natural goddamned pace. He doesn't stomp, he doesn't flee, he just walks to the door like a man who hasn't been hit in the face with a sock full of quarters.
He saves that for after the door's closed and Sam can't see him, giving the scraggly little pine a pat as he hauls ass, making a beeline for the thick press of the woods around him, quiet and peaceful with nobody around to trick him into motherfucking talking about it.
Sam adds the stupid shit that came out of Bucky's mouth the night before to the Steve-led list of things he doesn't ask Bucky about.
Bucky does some of the breathing exercises Raynor said were a condition of his semi-regular in person appointments now that Sam's forced the issue and gotten him back in the field, babysitter and all. Breathe in the positive: this is good. He's fine with it. Breathe out the negative: he's not more than a little pissed off Sam won't just bring it up himself and get it over with.
"So, what would it look like if I did want to talk about Steve?" Sam's got his back to Bucky, busy making dinner when Bucky finds out he can't take it anymore. "I'm not saying I want to. I'm just asking, since you wanted to talk about him."
"Well, I'm gonna guess you don't want me to explain how making conversation works in general, so I'll save that little lecture for later." Sam reaches for the salt and shakes more in, humming critically. "Man, Sarah's just better at this. I gotta ask her what the hell she's been slipping in she's not telling me about, because trust me. Not the same."
"Sam."
"You gotta have more respect for good food, man. It's an experience. Now that I got the gennie up and running, I can do it right." Bucky's about to ask him what in the hell that means when Sam socks him right in the gut. "It'd look like however you need it to look, Bucky. I get the feeling the only thing here stronger than how much you don't want to talk about him is how much you need to."
Something hot stings Bucky's eyes. "Yeah, well. You're wrong." He blinks the grit away. "He's gone. There's nothing else to say."
"Could be," Sam nods, then tests whatever it is he's cooking. "Still not it. Goddamn, Sarah, why you gotta keep trying to play me like this? Look, Buck, it's gotta be your call. Talk about him, don't talk about him, I'm gonna be here either way."
"This is a mission," Bucky pushes back, not sure why it feels like he needs to. "You can't leave."
"That's what I said, man."
No it's not, Bucky wants to say, but the kind of instincts that let him know a sniper is lining up a scope on him screams that's exactly what Sam wants him to do. "Whatever," he mutters instead. "Is dinner ready yet?"
"You don't have to take a guard shift?" Sam's not laughing at him, as far as Bucky can tell, but he gives his back the fisheye for good measure.
"I just said I want dinner. I can do another circuit later."
"Sure, Buck." Sam sets down his plate. "Whatever you feel like."
"I'm hungry," he insists, and he's not about to tell Sam but if his sister's version of this is actually better than Sam's, he might not able to survive it.
"You like it?" Sam tucks into his own dish. "Nope. Didn't get it this time, either. Sorry man, I tried, but she's holding back on us."
"It's fine." To his horror, by the time Sam's a third of the way through his meal Bucky's polished off every last scrap of his own. He eyes the food stubbornly clinging to his plate, then resolutely looks away. He's not going to lick it clean. That's humiliating. Maybe if he was alone—what's one humiliation on the pile. Licking a plate's nothing compared to what Hydra made him do, but Sam would never let him forget it. "Is there any more?"
"Plenty. Help yourself to as much as you like."
Bucky ends up eating the rest of the skillet's worth of stew himself. Sam doesn't say anything about it other than 'you're gonna crush the leftovers dilemma real easy for me, aren't you?' like he's done something worth celebrating, and Bucky entirely hates how he only halfway hates it.
"What if I wanted to talk about him and then I didn't want to anymore, what about that?" Bucky juts out his chin combatively, daring Sam to say it's not an option. There's no need to tell Sam who 'he' is. It feels like Steve's practically still in the room sometimes, he weighs so heavily on everything.
"Then we don't talk about him anymore." Sam looks up from fiddling around with the ancient microwave, parts arrayed on the kitchen table in an order Bucky can't figure out for the life of him but Sam seems to understand perfectly. "You're making this more complicated than it needs to be, man, and it's already pretty fucking complicated."
Bucky can't argue with that. Instead, he watches the way Sam's hands move over the ugly hunks of metal and the hulled out shell of what used to be something with purpose. He's good at it. He hadn't thought about that—what Sam was good at. What Sam did just because he felt like it, not because he pretty fucking clearly felt like he'd inherited more than the shield.
"It's just a question," he says finally. "I'm not saying I want to talk about him."
"Yeah, believe me. I got that, loud and clear." Scooting back a little to rest on his heels, Sam studies the microwave casing. "Wanna help me with this? I need to get at the bottom, and I can't hold it up and use a screwdriver at the same time."
"...sure." It feels like a trap, but Bucky can't find a single excuse why he can't stand there and hold a fucking microwave without sounding the kind of insane he's not already numb to. "What are you making?"
"Not making," Sam says, grunting with effort as he does something below Bucky's chin and Bucky throws every ounce of the effort in his body to thinking about absolutely nothing but the finer points of appliance vivisections. "Fixing. This piece of shit keeps burning my popcorn. Give me another couple hours, I'm gonna have some un-burned also piece of shit bagged popcorn ready for us. You're gonna love it, trust me. Fake butter for miles, and your mouth'll sting like hell after for some reason."
"That sounds fucking terrible." Trap, his training shrieks, but what's he going to do, drop the damn thing on Sam's head? "But yeah, fine. I guess I could eat popcorn."
"There was this one cat at the docks—feral, nobody's pet, but he never really left there either. I'm telling you: cats and fish guts, man. Peanut butter and jelly’s got nothing on cats and fish guts." Sam's tone is idle and he shoves another fistful of popcorn in his mouth instead of saying anything else, but Bucky stills immediately, the hair on the back of his neck standing up. He knew it. Knew it. The popcorn was a trap.
"Yeah, and?" He asks, eyeing the window over Sam's shoulder. "What does that have to do with anything? Was the cat's name Bodak, too?"
"You better put some respect on Cardi's name." Sam shakes his finger warningly. "She could take you, Buck. She's little, but that woman can scrap."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Bucky finally says, wishing he'd taken another couple laps around the cabin and kept doing it until Sam fell asleep or got tired of the sound of his own voice. Whichever came first. "Almost ever, but especially now."
"Cats. You telling me you don't know what cats are? I know you know what fish guts are. I've been to Russia, I've seen some shit."
Bucky hopes Sam can read how much shit he has not seen into his glare. "That's not what you just said—look. Forget the other thing. Why are you telling me about cats."
"If you'd let me finish, I could get to the point. Only one of us interrupted the other one a second ago, Buck, and it wasn't the guy who can appreciate true musical genius."
"Fine," Bucky says hastily, before Sam can get going about Marvin Gaye again. "Tell me a story about cats."
"Don't think I don't hear that tone, yeah? I heard it."
"Are you going to tell the damn cat story or can I go?"
"Okay, all right. Hold your horses, man. So: there were a whole fucking lot of cats around, but this one... goddamn, he was mean. We are talking grade-a vicious here. You tried to feed him, he'd bite you. He'd get caught in a net and you tried to help him out, he'd claw you to shit for it. He always got himself out anyway, though." Sam laughs, and Bucky watches the memory play across his face with a hunger that sneaks up behind him and takes a sledgehammer to his knees. "Took a couple hours, but that thing was fucking determined. He wanted a fish, he wanted out of a net, he was getting that shit done. Anyway, I decided I was gonna make that stubborn son of a bitch like me if it was the last thing he did."
Anger floods in, then shame, and then anger again: this time at Sam for being this kind of full of shit after all, and not himself for buying it. "You should have given the cat three legs, Sam. Look, I get it. You made friends with the cat, I'm the cat, just... give it a rest. All of it. The food, the music, everything. I fucking knew..." Anger thickens his tongue and chokes out the rest of his words. Sam was his babysitter. Sam felt like he owed Steve. Sam liked the challenge a fucked up, mean old cat presented. Bucky makes to stand, but Sam grabs his wrist. The metal one, and it takes everything Bucky has to wait a full five seconds before yanking away. "What."
"Would you sit the fuck down, you jumpy asshole? Jesus Christ, you try to take a man on a journey." Sam's grumbling does nothing to help Bucky ignore the concern in his eyes. "The cat's real and it definitely had four fucking legs. I still have the scars to prove it. And it was ugly as sin, so other than both being mean sons of bitches you're not the goddamned cat."
"I'm not the cat?" Bucky narrows his eyes. "You swear?"
"Well, you're kind of the cat," Sam allows, and finishes in a hurry when Bucky looks pointedly at the door. "But the point isn't that you're the cat, okay? Just fucking... give me a second. I was trying to build to something, and now you killed the momentum."
"Fine." Bucky sits down again, but stays at the edge of the chair. "Take me on a journey."
"Oh no. No journey for you, not anymore. You ruined the journey, now you get the destination without the padding to help it go down easy." Sam leans forward, catching his eyes and refusing to look away. "That cat died mean as ever and fucking hating me, okay? This isn't a touching story of cat redemption. He lived mean and he died mean and absolutely nothing I did changed that."
Fuck. The hurt that surges and builds in his chest is entirely unexpected. The hell does that mean? Bucky does his best to shake off the urge to throw something breakable at the wall over Sam's head. "So, what. I'm gonna die mean and hating you?"
"I already said you aren't the cat, would you just—" Sam inhales deeply and Bucky feels a surge of petty satisfaction. Not so calm and all-knowing now, asshole. "Maybe you will. I don't fucking know, but the point is that it didn't matter with the fuzzball from hell, and it doesn't matter with you. You've got me in your life whether you want me there or not, and if this is all we do? The back and forth thing? Cool. I'm having fun with it. But it's like I told you, Buck." Sam pats his knee. "I'm here. You're an ornery, stubborn idiot, but I don't mind it. All that being said, I'm gonna go text Sarah about what an infuriating shithead you are and how much I'd like to kick your ass right now or I might try and do it for real, so how about I leave you here to process." He gives Bucky's knee a little shake and lets go. "Good talk, man. See you at dinner? I trekked into town, got us some steak. Gonna do this thing caveman style."
"You're not supposed to go into town," Bucky says numbly, unable to move a muscle like he's been strapped to the chair again. "It's not safe."
"Yeah, yeah." Sam waves him off. "We're gonna have steak tonight and nobody died, so how about you take the win. Have a good brood, all right? Really dig into that scary-ass cyborg brain of yours, do some marinating."
"Yeah," Bucky mutters, and stares at his knees.
Two hours later, the trance breaks. Shaking himself, Bucky stares at Sam's empty chair in accusation. "The fuck are you doing to me."
"I'm not the cat," he tells Sam, inspecting the firepit he's made for the steaks critically. "There's no way you're going to get a good burn going in that thing."
"Oh really? What are you, an expert in cooking meat over an open flame?" Sam ignores the cat part, folding his arms over his chest and raising an eyebrow. "Is this some sort of super assassin wilderness survival thing, knowing international firepit standards?"
"Yes." Bucky gives Sam a flat look. "And yours is for shit."
"Have at it, then. Not like I went through SERE or anything, nah. Sam's cookfire isn't good enough. Go ahead, build your obsessive old man firepit. Have fun with it. I gotta email Sarah anyway," Sam says, and stands back to let Bucky fix it while he makes odd choked noises and hits his phone's screen with more force than necessary in response to everything she sends back to whatever he's telling her. He's got his eyes on the woods, though, and Bucky relaxes enough to concentrate on the fire with only a few dozen check-ins every three-point-five minutes to be sure Sam's still keeping watch. Forty five minutes later, he jerks his head back up when Sam clears his throat. "Uh, Buck?"
Dusting his hands off on his shirt, Bucky stands back to admire his work. Fuck. Nothing like a good fire. "Yeah?"
"I did mention I wanted a cookfire, right?" Sam gestures at the roaring fire between them. From this angle flame reflects and bounces off the high points of his cheekbones and settles on his eyeslashes like snow. "Not to be seen from space?"
"What, it's... huh." Bucky shakes off his strange pinpoint awareness of what Sam looks like standing there, smile wide and honest, and studies the fruits of his labor. The blaze might be a little big, now that Sam mentions it. "I can make another one."
They don't eat the steaks until after dark, but they taste amazing. Sam made something he says aren't potatoes, and Bucky finds himself eating the whole thing. They taste like potatoes and Bucky was too busy enjoying them to listen to what they are, so he makes a mental note to ask Sam for the potatoes that aren't potatoes and then just as quickly scrawls it out. Sam can make food if he wants. Bucky will eat it, he's not stupid enough to turn down endless free meals. Asking Sam to make something special, just for him... that feels different.
Bucky's still trying to puzzle out why potatoes matter at all when Sam drags two chairs outside and brings Bucky a beer without asking him which one he wants, already open and ready to drink. It's the right one, so Bucky doesn't bother to complain.
"Good?" Sam asks, taking a sip of his own.
"Yeah, thanks." They clink bottles and eat in companionable silence. Sam's music is quiet tonight, a little more like what he's used to than the Marvin was.
"I'm still not the fucking cat," Bucky yawns when his third steak is gone, wiping grease from the side of his mouth.
"Buck," Sam says, taking his plate before Bucky can complain he's not a child and he can clear his own shit, Wilson. "I'm begging you. Believe me when I say in that story, I was me and the cat was the fucking cat. Let it go."
Bucky grins. "Gets at you when I say that, huh?"
"You—nah. No. You're not getting to me at all with that, because I'm not five."
"If you say so, Sam." It feels so good to be the one setting Sam off his game he doesn't even dodge the gentle cuff Sam aims at his shoulder on the way back into the house. "Still not the cat."
"Still not the point!" Sam calls over his shoulder. "Now shut up and help me with the dishes."
Bucky reminds Sam he's not some feral dockside cat a couple times a day just to watch the twitch he's developing. He hasn't even mentioned the Staple Sisters in days. It's pretty great, but the new fun can't paper over how they're still not talking about Steve.
Sometimes Bucky thinks he can see Steve in his peripheral vision, shaking his head sadly and telling Bucky to just let Sam help. No goddamn way. No way. Steve never did know what was good for himself when it came to anything but being a stubborn little shit, anyway. Bucky's not about to start taking his advice on this kind of thing now.
He's not even there. Not really. Doesn't matter what Steve would or wouldn't have thought, he's not here.
"Steve would have liked that stupid cat," Bucky says over the sound of a woman singing about setting somebody's flag on fire.
"Whoa. Okay, hang on." Sam pauses the music. "This isn't a talking over the music kind of thing. Okay, all right. Steve would have liked the cat... why?"
"Because he didn't know when to let anything fucking alone," Bucky says, vaguely startled at the vehemence he has ready and waiting right at hand for Steve and a cat he's still not entirely sure ever existed outside Sam's taste for tortured metaphors. It's a stupid fucking cat and it doesn't matter so it's got to be Sam's fault he cares, Sam's fault that acid burns the back of his throat and spills off his tongue. "He would have tried to give the goddamn thing a hug."
"He would have, wouldn't he?" Sam smiles, wistful and a little far off. Bucky gets it. Steve was always a little bit more than anybody else he ever met. A little bit brighter, a little bit better. Losing him hasn't changed that any. "Never met anybody like him, you know. One of a kind, was Steve Rogers."
"I still don't want to talk about him," Bucky insists. "Just... he would have liked the cat, is all."
"I know, Buck. I know." Sam's mouth twists and he gnaws on the inside of his lip like he's working the words out in real-time. "So. Steve would have liked the cat because he was the kind of guy who never gave up hope on the things he loved."
I didn't say he loved the cat. The words stick in Bucky's throat and close it up, forming a solid lump with a million other things he's not about to give voice to. "That was all I had to say. I was just... I don't know."
"I gotcha. You wanna go shake a couple trees, see if there are any bad guys waiting in them?" Sam's keen-eyed sympathy is somehow worse than his stupid fucking cat metaphors. Bucky nods anyway, grateful and sick to his stomach over that, too. "It's good, man. Go walk it off."
The trees still don't have anything to say when he reaches the edge of the clearing and sets off into them at a run. He tries to appreciate the silence, tries to feel relief, but it refuses to come.
Being alone doesn't feel like escape anymore and Bucky knows somehow, it's all Sam's fault.