Chapter Text
Sam takes the turn around the house and freezes, flinching, blinded for a split second. But then Bucky leans forward, blocking just the spot where morning sunlight refracts off the surface of the shield, propped against a tree. Bucky is balancing on the heel of his right foot, his eyes closed, fingers interlaced high behind his back. He is defying the laws of the human body and probably a couple of laws of Physics.
Bucky. Defying.
***
Ten days earlier
“Listen, maybe you can do me a favor,” Sam says to him over the phone.
“What do you need?”
“If I’m gonna do this right, I need a sparring partner. Someone who is like the perfect fighting machine but who can also pull his punches. A guy who knows all the moves in the book and moves that haven’t even been invented yet. I gotta be ready. I’ve got no superhuman strength or healing so I gotta be ready and I gotta survive in the long run, so I need a guy who can keep me on my toes, make me the best I can be.” Sam pauses, a little breathless. “Know anyone like that?”
Bucky might be breathless too because Sam doesn’t even hear him inhale before he speaks. “Yeah, I know someone like that.”
***
Sam doesn’t like to look at it as a straight line of events, ‘cause that would mean he was wrong all along taking his sweet time, but from the moment he took the goddamn shield home with him everything had started falling into place.
The boat is no longer a point of contention between him and his sister, because Sarah has seen the light and doesn’t want to sell it. Sam won’t be surprised if soon enough the two of them are arguing over who’s got dibs on taking it out but that’s the kind of quarrel he’ll gladly have every day. That they’ll even be able to is because the boat is fixed, and it all went down so smoothly he feels embarrassed for thinking of it as an enterprise of epic proportions. He even went to the bank and turned himself into a clown, ‘Hey, I’m an Avenger, man! Give my family some cash?’
Speaking of, their finances could be in better shape but things are improving on that front as well. Now that the prospect of chartered trips is real, future business looks promising. Having gotten back some of what was owed to their parents, having called in some favors, that’s helped. Аs well as Bucky. Very little expense has gone into fixing the boat with him on the literal and metaphorical board.
Bucky has kinda fallen into place, too. That the place happens to be Sam’s home is no surprise really, not in retrospect. He didn’t think about where Buck would end up but now it’s like: where else would he have ended up? The irrefutability of it amazes Sam a little but he doesn’t spend time dwelling on it. Life’s taught Sam to take his certainties gladly, without poking at them—there’s enough to doubt in the world and yourself as it is.
The thought had crossed his mind during the time he and Bucky spent working on the boat, after Bucky agreed to crash with him and then didn’t even mention catching a flight the next day. He was watching Bucky apply some varnish and cringe at the smell, the gesture so incongruous on the face of an ex-assassin – whose Wakandan nickname included the actual word ‘wolf’ – that it stopped Sam in his tracks. He was left gazing at Bucky, smiling and thinking: What is he gonna do with himself after we’re done here?
For the rest of their time together, Sam didn’t revisit the question. He was too busy coming to terms with his choice to become Captain America and on other more pressing matters. Karli, for one; or Sam’s readiness for the new role, both in his physical fitness and in the political and social curveballs the world may throw at him while he’s waiting for the shield to return to his hand. The joint effort brought both the boat and Sam to a point of readiness, and at the tail end of it, he and Bucky had a heart to heart that redirected Bucky back to his own path, too.
Sam missed him a lot. A lot a lot. There was a long stretch of time in Sam’s past when all he thought about was finding the goddamn man; it had never, not once occurred to him back then that one day he might be at such a different place in relation to Bucky, yet with one staggering similarity: Bucky’s absence, as an ever-present companion.
His mind was full of imprints: Bucky’s furrowed brow, tool in hand, the boat’s half-shadowed cavernous insides making him look flesh and blood, easy to hurt; or his lax face, eyes closed, propped against a tree trunk as the sun is setting behind, giving him the air of a mythical warrior in repose. Sam missed him by his side, drying the dishes or half a step behind, walking into town—a silent, curious presence, reflected in kind by the locals.
“Where’s your friend?” a few people asked, not so silent after all.
“We’re done with the boat so he had to go take care of his own business,” Sam replied, which inexplicably felt like only half a truth.
***
After, when Sam completes his first mission, speech and all, when Karli is dead and Sharon Carter is back, the question about Bucky’s immediate future returns in full force.
Sam is headed back home—he needs to put his head to rest in Louisiana in order to decide where his actual home will be—and the thought of parting with Bucky brings up resentment of ridiculous proportions. It’s like being young, so young, when you need an excuse to hang out with your crush and wow, when Sam’s brain makes the comparison there should be big red flashing alert signs but the calm that follows is made of pure resolve: what can be done about it?
So he calls Bucky, and after a two-minute phone conversation is making plans to go and pick him up. Which is how James Buchanan Barnes a.k.a. the Winter Solider ends up sleeping half-permanently on Sam’s couch where his sweet, salt-of-the-Earth parents used to watch Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
The mind boggles but Sam ain’t gonna start contemplating the bizarre turns of events Fate has in store for some people. All he did, a long time ago now, was go for his morning jog at the same hour every day. He wasn’t even proactive, didn’t set a foot off the beaten track. Steve Rogers found him, then they found Bucky Barnes, and now Bucky keeps finding Sam, no matter where Sam goes or what he does.
Bucky is a magnificent sparring partner. The brutal truth is that he is magnificent, period. Steve never used that word but everything he said about Bucky, his Bucky, accumulated to the meaning of it. It must have taken root in Sam a long time ago; he is less than surprised by his appreciation for the man. The way he moves, his stillness, the contained force and the scope of his skill. His flesh, the ownership of his body he exudes. His grunts, his piercing eyes, the flashes of his smile, warm and predatory at once. Sam’s got the feeling he will get very, very good because he is willing to practice with Bucky for hours every day, the fruits of his labor numerous but some of them wholly unrelated to his noble pursuits.
He doesn’t shy away from touching Bucky so they are in contact all the time. But he catches himself relishing the touch of their bodies when they’re just a couple of guys, a couple of buddies maybe. It makes Bucky real in ways Sam is only now able to stop and notice. After years spent with his destiny subtly revolving around the guy, Sam gets to take him out of the pages and the rumors and Steve’s tales, dust him off, look at him for himself. So he is drawn in again and again as they’re having a beer, or taking a walk, or watching a movie on the couch, arguing half the time.
Now, Sam abhors people talking while he’s watching something, he’s shushed family members and house guests, he’s given looks and asked people to shut up or leave in the theater. But Bucky gets to him, he does. Oftentimes it’s with just a scoff, or a short, ‘That’s so cheesy,’ and Sam is off.
“Have you no respect for anything?” Sam throws his hands up one night, as the end credits for Avatar begin to roll. Bucky is slumped next to him, having just dropped his head on Sam’s shoulder, eyes closed and mouth gaping, pretending to snore. “Even if it’s not profound or hugely entertaining,” Sam continues, “it’s still a movie like no other for how it raised the bar when it came out. The special effects alone – the whole thing took years to make!”
Bucky scratches his belly with his human hand. “I’m just saying, the tails were all over the place.”
Sam rolls his eyes, stands up with a groan. “You’re all over the place.”
“Wow. That was a burn.”
“How do you know what a burn is but you don’t know ‘yolo’?”
Bucky shrugs. “It’s random. Some of it stays in, some of it doesn’t.” His eyes travel up and down Sam’s body, studious. “You sure your back’s okay? That landing was rough.”
Sam waves him off, walking towards the kitchen to get them another couple of beers. “I’m fine.”
It’s nice having someone to hang out with like that. Sam was always better as a one-on-one guy; he doesn’t mind groups but he prefers the company of one, his family an exception. Riley was the best guy to hang out with: fun but never shallow, energetic but low key. He was in tune with people’s moods like a chameleon, never as accurate with anyone else as he was with Sam. Their tastes were remarkably similar, their sense of humor and their joys in life, too, and Sam felt like a part of himself had been ripped away after Riley was gone.
Steve was a different story altogether. If Riley had turned after Sam like а sunflower, Sam was the Moon to Steve’s Sun. Steve never made him feel inferior, but since day one it had been a given that whatever they shared, it would be filtered through the golden aura surrounding Steve Rogers. They spent more time alone together than Sam has spent with anyone else and their vibe was always easy and kind of mellow, despite all the drama they went through together. Steve never, ever bugged Sam but now that Steve is gone, Sam has to wonder if with time, that kind of comfort doesn’t sometimes implode into the wrong kind of silences.
Now that Steve is gone and now that Bucky is not. Furthest from gone, it seems, lounging on Sam’s couch in the sweatpants he bought yesterday under extreme duress, glaring at them as if their very existence was offensive. He’d glared at Sam, too, just for reasonably pointing out the advantages of owning said item of clothing and suggesting Bucky save his tight jeans and his small t-shirts for tomorrow’s cookout on the dock.
Bucky isn’t glaring now. He is giving Sam a small, casual smile as he is reaching for his beer. Sam drops back down next to him and wonders, not for the first time, how it is that some people fit like pieces of a jigsaw and others don’t but still bond in ways that make them unbreakable.