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Steve Rogers learned a long time ago that life is a lot about accepting the choices you don’t get to make.
Sure, folks have free will. A fella can choose some things—the color of his shirt, whether or not to let the government shoot him full of an experimental serum and throw him into a radiation tube. But there are also a lot of choices he doesn’t get to make. Steve never chose to be born into a childhood and adolescence of barely scraping by in more ways than one. He never chose to live during a second world war as if the first hadn’t taken enough. He sure as shit never chose to leave behind everyone he ever knew and loved, to wake up 70 years later and feel like he was still dreaming.
Roll with the punches. Get up, spit the blood from your mouth, and keep fighting. That’s Steve. That’s Steve in 1942, and that’s Steve in 2012, holding his own against nightmares barreling from the sky.
But…
But.
The memories haunt him late at night when the dust has settled and the world sleeps without him. For a few weeks in France, he’d let himself fall for a couple of French Resistance fighters—a husband and wife. Marc and Marguerite. By day, he had run with them through the streets of Paris, doing his best to have their six while they sabotaged the Vichy and stole intel. By night, he had lost himself in a tangle of bodies. Sometimes sex. Sometimes just holding each other because the mission was over and they finally had time to feel again. Pain and fear and terror and loss all rolling out in tears and trembling.
It was fast, that love, like a meteor blazing across the night sky. But sometimes souls met and it didn’t feel like it was the first time they had.
“Penses-tu que tu l’abandonneras? Votre bouclier?” Marguerite had asked. Do you ever think you’ll give it up? Your shield?
He had sat with the question for so long that it felt like the night had shifted into those spaces where time no longer existed. And then, whispering low as though Steve hoped he could keep the fates from hearing, “ I hope someday I’ll feel like I can. ”
Marguerite had kissed him then, a soft press of lips on his. Marc had only hummed up at the ceiling and its cracked plaster, his fingers twined with Steve’s atop Marguerite’s soft belly.
Someday.
When he’d said it, he’d been thinking about the end of the war. Now though…
“Does war ever end?” Steve asks the memories. There’d been so much hope back then. Flying cars and serums and Judy Garland on the radio. There’d been a lot of hope over the 70 years he’d been gone too. Vaccines and food manufacturing and fights for equality and justice. Even basic regulations that would’ve made Steve’s childhood apartment illegal.
And yet…
War from the skies and war in the desert and war, war, war.
And across the years in the perfect halls of his memory, Marc’s voice. Soft English muttered in the early dawn light so many hours later that maybe it was a response to Steve or maybe it just was. “I hope, too.”
Seven decades later, in an apartment furnished for him by people who don’t even know Marc or Marguerite ever existed, Steve rolls over on a too-soft mattress with too-soft sheets, turning his back on the shield propped against the wall.
The bookshelves in his apartment are full of decorative bullshit—little carved wooden balls in a bowl, tiny vases with plastic succulents, a framed reprint of his own fucking enlistment card. Steve throws it all in a bag and drops it in the first donation bin he can find. Except for the reprint. That goes in the trash the second he turns it over and discovers it’s a goddamned Smithsonian postcard.
It takes him a minute to find a bookstore. He’s still learning the names of the big corporate chains that most people know almost inherently. At least he has internet searching down. A map search for stores near him, a scroll through the list, an additional search of each name until he finds a local place.
Pride Books is six blocks away—the awning bears an inviting fading rainbow pattern with weathered letters. The smell of coffee wafts out when he opens the door for a guy on the way out. It doesn’t occur to him until the guy gives him a flirty up-and-down glance that, right, pride and rainbows mean something now. A whole era of history Steve missed, and it’s hard not to be a little bitter even though he’s happy about it at the same time.
He steps inside onto worn carpet, his boots treading a clear path from the door into the shelves. Directly in front of him are several shelves, the books on each of them creating patterns of colors. Right in front of the door is the classic rainbow. His eyes scan for the pink, purple, blue. And then the pink, yellow, blue. He isn’t sure yet. He isn’t sure if there’s even a clear delineation between the two that everyone accepts. If a label even matters or if it only matters that he simply is.
“Hey, welcome to Pride. Do you need any help t—oh shit.”
Steve turns and meets the wide, brown eyes of an employee. Long hair, septum ring, medium brown skin, a thin mustache. A badge reads, Hello, my name is… Tag (they/them) .
“I, uh…” Steve looks around. He’d wanted to fill his shelves, but that had been an impulse, something brought on by so many feelings he doesn’t even know how to begin to untangle them. Grief. Longing. The overwhelming feeling of being goddamned overwhelmed. The need to shove Shield’s sterile apartment up their sterile ass by, what, putting fucking books in it? “I think I’m just browsing. I…”
“Of course.” Tag nods and gives Steve a small smile. Steve nods back and starts for an aisle, stopping short when Tag inhales another breath. “You should get a cup of tea. The focus blend really helps me. Might be a placebo effect or the fact that I started Adderall around the same time I started drinking it, but there is something about a cup of hot tea in your hands that is pretty fucking centering, you know?”
Steve has no idea what that means. Centering? Centered on what?
“Right.” He smiles back, rubbing at his neck. “I’ll, uh, I’ll keep that in mind.”
Tag nods again and picks up a book off a cart like they’re going to get back to work. “Can I ask you something?” Tag gets up on their toes, tipping a book onto a high shelf.
Steve inhales through his nose. “Yes, it hurt. Peggy was just a friend. The war was hell. Yes, it was weird waking up here and now. I have no idea if I’d go back if I could, but I fucking can’t, can I?”
Tag blinks at him. And fuck. This isn’t one of the reporters he has to prance in front of for Shield’s PR department. This is just a person working at a fucking bookstore, probably making whatever passes as a minimum wage in New York.
“God, I’m sorry,” Steve says. “You didn’t… Things haven’t been easy, and it’s a bit of a knee-jerk response, but that doesn’t make it okay.”
“Probably not.” Tag slaps a book into Steve’s hand and points to a high shelf. A way for Steve to make it up to them. Steve happily puts the book away.
“What were you going to ask?” Steve shelves a second book. An olive branch, he hopes.
It must work, because beside him, Tag puts on a slow, mischievous kind of smile. “Arnie Roth as cute as all the pictures? As a baby queer, I barely survived that day in history class. I wasn’t the only baby queer going through it either.”
Steve feels a laugh bubble up because, fuck, when’s the last time someone asked him about Arnie? “Is Arnie some kind of…”
“Historical gay sex symbol? Yeah.”
“He’d fucking love that.” Steve smiles. “I wish I could tell him, fuck.”
“And?”
“Oh, he was a looker for sure. All those freckles—I used to love to draw him. Great kisser too. We never could get into each other, which was unfortunate because it would’ve been convenient if we could’ve. But we did neck after a couple beers once or twice.”
Tag goes wide-eyed, bouncing on the balls of their feet. “Okay, I need to know if I can text that to the group chat right now or if I have to be discreet about you being in our queer bookstore. Like, I’d never out you against your will, obviously.”
Steve smiles and reaches over, telegraphing a grip on Tag’s shoulder so they can pull away if they want. They don’t.
“Tell everyone. If he’d lived this long, he’d do it for you.”
Tag whips out a phone so fast, Steve is surprised they don’t toss it across the bookstore due solely to the laws of physics.
“My friend has a tattoo, you know?” they say, fingers flying across the screen so fast that Steve feels exactly as old as he is chronologically.
“What?”
“In honor of Arnie. On his… Well.” Tag flips the phone around to show Steve a little square photo. A pale thigh and there right above the knee is text rendered in looping letters, surrounded by bright florals—peonies, Arnie’s favorite.
Because, dammit, I deserve my chance at happiness too.
“Did he say that?” Steve asks, noting the quotation marks.
“Oh shit. Yeah. Pretty famously. He’s a fucking legend.” Tag patiently lets Steve keep examining the photo while they talk. “Got locked up with the others at Stonewall. Then he started dating this gorgeous younger man in the 70s. Not creeper young or anything, just younger than he was. Chiseled, real Harrison Ford in his prime type. One of the local queer zines sat down with him and the guy, talked about his life, about going from the best friend of Captain America to someone America scorns. They asked why, if he’d hidden so long without any issue, he wouldn’t just, you know, stay in the fucking closet or whatever.” Tag rolls their eyes.
"'Because, dammit, I deserve my chance at happiness too.’” Steve can almost hear it. Of course, the Arnie in his head is young, fingers wrapped around a cigarette while he leans casually against the wall of Steve’s building. He and Steve had always had a way of feeding off each other, both of them passionate about certain issues, both of them agreeing with each other so aggressively that it almost felt like its own fight. Two storms merging.
“Verbatim,” Tag says. “There’s an audio recording in one of the local museums even.”
Steve smiles at the photo of the tattoo again, notes the myriad of likes beneath it. An Instagram post. He knows the layout, has had a few of the PR people at Shield try to push him onto it. Why? Why does a fucking soldier need a goddamned…
Not important. What’s important is that people know and remember Arnie. Maybe not everybody. But his people. Their people. Steve feels the laugh get dangerously close to a sob and clears his throat.
“Thank you.” Steve feels, for just a second, like the knot in his chest is a little looser. And he knew already that grief is easier when there’s someone to share it with, but that’s the thing about being unmoored in time, isn’t it? “Maybe I should start with some history. I went into the ice in an age where I had to hide a big part of myself in the dark, and now I can walk into a queer bookstore. I should probably catch up. I’m allowed to say queer, right? I didn’t get that one wrong?”
“You absolutely can. C’mon.” Tag beckons Steve with a hand of painted black fingernails, and after half an hour of laughter and regaling Tag with stories of Arnie and Marc and Marguerite and even Morita (whom Tag apparently also counts among top historical babes), Steve leaves with a tote bag of queer history. Plus an entire series of gay Captain America romances that were written about him when the world thought he was dead.
They’re pretty good. Steve tells the author that on Twitter and ignores the five voicemails he gets from Shield’s PR department.
He keeps staring at the tattoo of Arnie’s quote. It’s impossible for him to forget the name of the Instagram account. He’s got the serum-enhanced memory and he saw it, so it’s there forever. And, well, Shield did give him a login so it’s nothing to log on and go to the account in question and scroll and…
What gets him most is the feeling that he’s been given some piece of what he lost back. He’s so used to feeling adrift in reality—huge chunks of things missing, including things that people take for granted—that hearing this one little anecdote about Arnie, being able to picture it, being able to hunt down the zine and the recordings and entire fucking books about his childhood best friend—it’s a gift. A gift immortalized on the leg of a queer man who found this one person in history who managed to live long enough to come out and say, yes, there in the pages of the past is me, is you, is all of us.
The gravity of that thought hits Steve like a freight train and he finds himself on his phone, arranging a pile of queer history books in front of him, leaning atop them and looking at the camera. He puts the photo on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and everywhere he can. On Twitter where the caption won’t fit, he copies the other people he’s seen and numbers each Tweet.
“Some new friends made me realize how important it is to know that we’ve always been here. We didn’t have the luxury of labels when I come from so I’m still working on that. I might be bisexual. I might be pansexual. I might never quite nail that down. But I do know I can call myself queer right now. And I can tell everyone like me that whatever narrative people try to spin about folks like us, we were, we are, and we will be. Always. #Pride”
He ignores a slew of other phone calls. He goes for a run that takes him by the bookstore. He takes another moment to look between the bi and pan book displays before shrugging and trying the focus blend tea. Between sips, Tag introduces him to his coworkers Marta and Geoff, and Steve finds himself looping back to the bookstore after dark, letting the whole crew carry him to a bar a couple blocks over. People clearly recognize him, but they let him be, just one novelty amongst a sea of so much perfect difference that Steve feels something like homecoming for the first time since he woke up.
And then there are more people, friends and romantic partners both casual and serious. Marta loops her arms around two different women and gets kisses from both. Tag accepts a peck on the cheek from a massive guy covered in body hair. Geoff lets a small guy in bike shorts sit in his lap, the shorts immediately sliding up to—
“You.” Steve points at him and gets a look of playful shock.
“Me?”
“Pokerface92,” Steve says.
Wide eyes. “What the fuck?”
“Arnie. Tag showed me your tattoo. You…”
“Oh shit.” He laughs. “I was like, how the hell…?” He pulls the bike shorts up higher and there it is. Crisp and clean and perfect. “Is this like super weird for you?”
“No, it’s fantastic. You have no idea how much he’d love this. And you’re his type too, so he probably would’ve loved it even more.”
“I’m…” Pokerface92 puts a hand on his chest. “Fuck me in the ass. You mean to tell me if I, Daniel J. Hines, had lived in 19goddamned42, Arnie fucking Roth might have wrecked me like a Denny’s bathroom at 3 a.m.? Fuck, time is so unfair.”
Steve laughs, loud and free. “Tell me about it, pal.” He offers a cheers to his new friends and then throws back a shot. It won’t do a damn thing for him, but the energy of the room will. It’s a little like when he used to go out with Arnie–bars accessed by knowing the right people, full of folks being themselves for the few hours that they could mostly get away with it. This bar so many years away is also nothing like that. It’s open and vibrant and the address is right there online for anyone who wants it.
“I think the artist might be here actually,” Daniel says, sitting up in Geoff’s lap and looking around. “Somewhere. If he’s not tonight, well, he’s here a lot. He loves to dance.”
“The artist?” Right. Tattoo artist. Arnie’s words didn’t just magically appear there.
“Bucky at Pins and Needles. He was really excited to do it actually.”
Steve takes another shot he doesn’t need.
Bucky.
And just like that, without knowing what or where or if his body would even hold it, Steve wants a tattoo.
When the next person asks him to dance on his way back from the bathroom, he says yes. The rest of the night passes in a blur of loud music and hands on his body and hips gyrating against his. Steve struggles to loosen up in public the way modern dancing requires, some part of him stuck on the fact that movement like this is meant to be done in private, but his partner is an older guy with laugh lines and a graying bun who doesn’t seem to mind. He smells incredible and chuckles at Steve in a way that isn’t mocking. At the end of the night when he says he needs to split, he asks Steve for a kiss that leaves Steve feeling the closest to drunk he has in a lifetime.
Steve makes sure all his friends and their friends—many intoxicated—get home okay before going to bed with a smile, the smell of the stranger’s cologne still clinging to his skin.
In the morning, Steve looks up the tattoo artist and scrolls through his portfolio. After seeing three immaculate portrait tattoos, he knows what he wants on his skin. He knows it as sure as breathing and the recipe for his mom’s soda bread. When the clock strikes an acceptable hour, he texts Tag.
Steve: You alive?
Tag: I /guess/. Must be nice to never have a hangover.
Tag: Asshole.
Steve: :)
Steve: Don’t remember seeing them, but never hurts to ask. Pride sell art supplies?
Tag: Nah, sorry. :( Marta says go to The Funky Brush, which you can tell is a great art store because you usually get art or writing but not both and they clearly didn’t get the writing with a name like that
Steve: as;ldkfj
Tag: Oh. A keysmash. We will make a modern queer of you yet.
Steve: Ha. Thanks Tag! (And Marta)
He buys a nice sketchbook and good pencils and tries not to think about the price. It’s still hard to get over the sticker shock of 70 years of inflation. It does help having a debit card so he can pretend none of it’s real. Just swipe and go and don’t think about it. Art supplies acquired. Bank account ignored.
Back in his apartment, he stares at the blank page. If he had a photo of them, he could just take it with him. But he doesn’t. He scoured the internet a long time ago, hoping to find any kind of record of their faces, of what happened after, but…
His pencil slides across the page like a hot knife through warm butter. It draws the soft roundness of Marguerite’s cheeks, the bow of her thin lips, the thick curly waves of brown hair. Next to her, Marc comes into being, a mop of dark hair beneath a flat cap, one of his strong eyebrows split by a scar he got falling from a tree as a boy. He fills in the eyes last, and he’s never been more grateful for his memory when he manages to capture the way they both looked at him in that last week.
It’s perfect. Steve normally always finds fault with his art, but how can he possibly find a flaw in either of them? And this is how they looked. Down to the freckles splashed across Marc’s cheeks and nose. Down to the slight dip of a double chin, hidden in shadow beneath Marguerite’s jaw.
He carefully closes the sketchbook, eats a late second breakfast, and looks up the address of Pins and Needles. He expects it to be closed until nightfall, to have to waste time until it’s dark. But it’ll be open by the time Steve walks there, and so he picks up the sketchbook and heads out.
He has no idea what to expect. He probably should, given what he’s doing. But is he getting the tattoo today or is he just asking Bucky if he can do it? He has no idea.
He almost misses the shop, its little sign so small compared to the others around it. On it a hand-painted needle points to a set of stairs leading up off the street. Beneath that dangles a smaller sign with more information. “Accessible elevator located inside coffee shop next door.”
There’s a number underneath that. And then a fading sticker for, if Steve had to guess, a band. It’s unreadable anyhow. Steve takes a look at the steps up, painted black with additional signage for the shop on each step, promises of “just 4 more” near the top. Steve takes them up and steps onto a landing. The frosted glass greets him with, “You made it! Come on in.” Steve puts his face close to the letters, looking at their edges. He’s gotten used to manufactured print on everything—vinyl cutouts here and screen-printing there. But these are hand-painted like so many storefronts and windows back in pre-war Brooklyn. Whoever did the door has one hell of a steady hand.
Inside, it smells and looks so clean that Steve’s surprised. He doesn’t know why. Would he get a tattoo in some dingy shop? Well, he might if the work was good considering he can’t really get sick, but would anyone else?
“Be right with you. Just washing up. Are you Joe?”
“No, I’m…” The smell of cologne hits Steve first, bringing back the memory of bright lights and gentle laughter and capable hands. “I just wanted to questions. I have the questions. Them. To ask.”
Oh God.
He knows who it’ll be before the guy even comes out of one of the side rooms, drying his hands with clean paper towels. But sure enough, there he is. He has his brown hair up in another bun, streaks of gray catching the fluorescent lights of the shop. A tank top hangs on him, revealing tattoos all up and down his arms, on his chest, on his ribs where the arm holes hang loose and low. Beneath that are faded black skinny jeans with rips that reveal even more ink, those jeans tucked into worn black combat boots.
And tall, gray, and handsome had been a looker the previous night in a plaid button-down that barely showed any ink at all, but like this? Steve swallows audibly.
“It’s you!” A wide smile spreads across the artist’s face, bringing out the laugh lines around his blue eyes. Illegal. Steve’s pretty sure it’s illegal to look like this no matter the decade. He’d call the cops if he believed in them.
“Are you Bucky?” Steve asks. “Christ, I should probably know the answer to that already.”
“Depends who’s asking, pal,” Bucky says, and oh, Steve did not get that Brooklyn accent last night either. It sings in his soul and plays music on his bones.
“What part of Brooklyn are you from?”
Bucky smiles. “Williamsburg but I can’t even dream of affording it anymore and don't think I'd want to if I could. My folks could barely afford it and only because they’d inherited the house from a great aunt or something. Even they gave it up in the end. Were able to retire off selling the house though.” Bucky shrugs. “You were in Brooklyn Heights, right? Pretty diverse and queer even in your day?”
“Yeah.” Steve nods. “It was.”
“Miss it?”
“Miss it then. Haven’t spent much time there now.”
“Fair enough.” Bucky holds out his hand. “Sorry for not introducing myself last night considering we’ve touched lips and all, but Bucky Barnes. You looking to get something done?” He nods at the sketchbook under Steve’s arm.
“I think so. No, I know I am. I just… I’ve obviously never done this before and if you know who I am, then I guess I’m a lot less embarrassed about saying I have almost zero idea how this even works.”
“Well, how about we start with what you might want?” Bucky asks, and Steve takes a deep breath and pulls the sketchbook out from under his arm, opening up the cover and showing Bucky the drawings he did. Bucky looks at them for a long moment, long enough that Steve starts to get nervous.
“These are really good, Steve. I mean, I guess they sorta mention you drew, but I didn’t realize.”
“They’re beautiful people. Did most of the work for me.”
“Can I ask who they are to you? If you don’t want to talk about it, say no more.”
“Marc and Marguerite Vincent. I met them when the Howlies and I were helping the French Resistance. They were married, but… Sometimes love makes room even when you think…”
“You were with them.”
“I was.”
“Fuck, the eyes are so expressive here. Is this how they looked at you?”
Steve closes the sketchbook abruptly.
“I’m sorry.” Bucky puts his hands up and takes a step back to give Steve some space to breathe. “Didn’t mean to push.”
“No, it’s okay. I want to talk about them. I want people to know they existed, that they fought like hell for a cause they believed in, but that… It’s like history treats everyone who fought in the war like they and we are these living statues who did nothing but fight to get the job done. But we were, we are real people. We fought, sure, but we also played cards and told dirty jokes and fell in love and fucked and cursed the weather and wildlife all over Europe. And we were afraid to die just like everybody else. I want people to know that these two were heroes. And I want them to know they were more than that too. It’s just hard. I can’t even find out what happened to them, you know? I keep looking, but I can’t find anything and have no goddamned idea if they died together old and happy or if they—” Steve inhales a shaky breath.
Bucky gestures to a nearby couch. He takes a seat in a cushy chair beside it. “Tell me one thing about both of them. Doesn’t have to be anything big.”
Steve sinks into the faux leather, sketchbook on his lap, his fingers curled around the edges. He taps his thumbs against the cover.
“Marc… Marc loved the sound of birds in the morning. Sometimes he’d go open the window and close his eyes and just listen, sun on his face and in his hair.” Steve smiles at the memory. Marc’s hair in a million directions reflecting the early morning gold, eyelashes fanning over his freckled cheeks.
“And Marguerite?”
Steve smiles a little wider. “Loved to learn curses in other languages. Anytime she met someone who spoke another language, she’d make sure to learn at least one new swear. She used them too. I… No that’s a little graphic.”
“It’s okay. There’s no one else here and I don’t mind. But if you don’t want to share it, I get it.”
Steve taps another cadence on the sketchbook cover, a smile teasing the corner of his lips. “Sometimes when I was in their bed, I’d be lost in her, you know? And then she’d start up. English first, for me. Then just all these swears in other languages. And then when she started to lose herself too, to the point where she couldn’t even think anymore, that’s when she’d fall into French. Until she couldn’t even do that and it was just sounds and breathing. Jesus, she’s a picture when she…” Steve clears his throat. “That’s the other thing people don’t get. I’m not remembering them across 70 years, not these two, not the Commandos or Peggy or Stark or anybody. For me, it hasn’t been long at all. Sometimes I still feel like they’re all just a long plane ride away, even the ones who are long gone.”
Bucky nods and sits quietly for several moments. “Thank you for telling me about them. If we decide to do this, I’d love to know more.” He glances at the clock on the wall—an old-fashioned thing with a pendulum swinging to and fro.
“Am I keeping you from something?” Steve asks.
“Not exactly. I have a client who was supposed to be in this morning, but he’s not here.” Bucky shrugs. “His deposit, not mine.”
“Deposit?”
“Right. The process. If you’re ready to talk shop, that is. If you need a bit, I’m good.”
“No, it’s okay. Go ahead.”
“Cool. So I usually start out with a consultation to figure out what design I need to work up and if I’m the right person to do that design. You pretty much have that so it’ll just be me prepping the stencils which won’t take much at all. I assume you want the end result to be pretty close to what you drew.”
“Please.”
“Easy and done. No problem.” Bucky nods. “From there, we figure out a date that works for you. I charge a $100 deposit to hold onto it. That comes out of the final price of the work. If you don’t show up, you forfeit that. And I will happily reschedule up to 48 hours out.”
“That makes sense.”
“And I feel awkward saying this but since you have zero knowledge and I don’t want to screw over any other artists in case you decide not to work with me, it is customary to tip.”
“No, that’s good to know. I wouldn’t want to screw you over either. Thank you.”
“Do you have any questions or concerns?”
“Ah.” Steve thumbs the edges of the sketchbook. “I’m not, well, I’m not really sure if my skin will hold ink. Serum, you know?”
“Oh shit, I hadn’t even thought of that. I don’t know. Tattoos are for life. I imagine if anything that they’d just heal fast. You might need touch-ups more often than others, but if you want, I can do something small for you today and we can see how it looks when you come in for the real appointment. I also do free touch-ups forever for the most part, and I don’t exactly have a no Captains America clause, so, happy to honor that and keep them looking fresh.”
“Thank you. A test?”
“A test. I don’t think Joe is coming and I’ve already got the equipment out, so something small on the house. In the name of science and art. If you have anything you want within reason, I’ll do it. If not, we can just hide a small dot somewhere inconspicuous. I can even make it look like a freckle.”
Steve thinks about it a minute. What would he want that could be done fast and small? It comes as easy as a breath.
“Yeah, I think I know what to do.”
“Great. Follow me.”
Later, his skin burning faintly, Steve looks down and thinks that Bucky’s capable hands look very good in black latex gloves.
Later still, he stands in the bathroom and stares at himself in the mirror, eyes on the way the fully healed script on his hip has already altered his appearance. It’s backwards in the reflection, but not when he looks down at it, forever on his skin now, no longer a secret locked in his heart or in so much ice:
Queer
Steve finally answers the phone. He doesn’t want to, but it’s Tony, and for all that Stark’s son grinds on his nerves, if he’s calling, it’s probably important.
“Rogers,” Steve answers. “There a situation?”
“Yeah, the situation is that you never write. You never call.”
“Tony.”
“The situation is aliens. Well, robots. Well, alien robots.”
Steve sighs and looks at the closet where he has the shield stashed away in a leather case, one of his suits stashed next to it. “Where?”
“Quinjet on the way.”
In the end, it’s an easy fight. No one dies. There is exactly one serious injury. But Steve still walks away feeling like he’s battered in ways that aren’t physical. After he showers, he puts the shield back into the closet.
Sprawled on his bed, letting the lacerations and puncture wounds heal, he rubs his thumb back and forth over the black ink on his hip.
Someday, he’d said once, imagining headlines about surrender. Parades and waving flags and flashbulbs and probably more babies pushed into his arms.
Maybe someday wasn’t an inevitable endpoint. Maybe it was a choice.
He leaves the suit in the bottom of the bathroom hamper and doesn’t bother getting it cleaned. At his kitchen table, he sketches more remnants of another life. His mother forms herself on the pages, and he has to erase her again and again to the point where he wants to scream.
Because he never saw her face After. His crystal clear memory bank doesn’t include her. It’s like—what was Marta talking about from her computer classes? It’s like there’s a partition in his brain, and one side is perfect and the other side is corrupted. Except there’s nothing he can do to fix the files.
He’ll keep trying though. Again and again and again. If he ever gets it right…
Steve eats two lunches before he goes to the shop. He plans to sit as long as he can stand it, and he’s been warned that long tattoo sessions are a lot. He asked Bucky if anyone has ever passed out on him. Yes. Apparently some people pass out just because they’re nervous. A few from the pain, especially in a “gnarly” spot like the back of the knee. But often it’s because they didn’t eat enough or they ate and then a long session burned it out of them.
“Morning, Steve.” Bucky smiles at him when he walks in. He’s leaning casually on the counter near the front door, arranging business cards and portfolio binders and consent forms. He looks very very good. Blue denim shorts cut off at the knees. Checked slip-on shoes. A sheer shirt covered in skulls with daisy crowns that reveals every single one of the tattoos he has beneath.
“Hey.” Steve looks him over, a little subtle about it, but not enough because Bucky catches his eyes and gives him a look that reminds him of bright lights and gyrating hips and a soft kiss. Bucky doesn’t say a word about it though, pushing a clipboard toward Steve. The same consent form he’d signed for the test piece. He fills it out on autopilot and wishes he looked good enough that he caught Bucky looking in return. He needs a new wardrobe, one with more sheer shirts and fewer high-waisted khakis.
But Bucky had asked him to dance once. And kissed him enough to make Steve feel dizzy. That had to mean he was at least filling out the khakis nicely.
“How you feeling? Get a good lunch?”
“Two lunches. I love my tattoo by the way. I know it was a quick test, but…” Steve scrubs at the back of his neck. “A lot about waking up now has been overwhelming and painful, but I never could’ve imagined a life where I can just be. The way things were then, it wasn’t even a thought that crossed my mind, you know? Folks like us did what we did behind closed doors and hoped people looked the other way or didn’t notice and that was just the way it was.”
“I’m glad you got something meaningful to you, Steve. I’m a firm believer in getting frivolous tattoos if they make you happy, but the meaningful stuff is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Getting to help people make these important parts of themselves into permanent art or statements or fuck-yous to the world. That’s my shit. Why I’m really excited to work on you today, actually.”
“I’m excited too.”
“Well, I’ve got a bed with your name on it,” Bucky says and Steve feels a slight blush flare up on his cheeks that he hopes doesn’t show. “Shall we?”
Steve follows him back through a curtain. He has to take his pants off, a thing he’d known, and yet he still neglected to buy some half-decent underwear. Instead he’s stuck with the simple white briefs Shield bought him. He supposed it could’ve been worse. At least they fit well.
“Probably would be easiest to have you on your back, so just get comfortable. Want me to leave while you strip down? I have a blanket you can put over your unmentionables for some additional discretion, if you want.”
“I mean, if you think that would be best, I’m willing. But I was rubbing my ass on you not too long ago, so I’m fine.”
Bucky laughs, eyes on his small rolling work table where he has his tools set up. Ink bottles and caps. Paper towels. A pile of ointment. A squeeze bottle full of something green. “You were. Not very well, but I admired the effort.”
“We didn’t dance like that in my day. I can move just fine in private spaces.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it. Nobody lands two gorgeous people and wins their hearts if they can’t throw down.”
This time, Steve is pretty sure the blush is definitely showing.
“You, uh, I don’t doubt it about you either. Considering how you dance.”
Bucky looks up from where he’s been arranging and rearranging, an eyebrow going up at Steve. “Thought about it a little, huh?”
Steve starts to say something flirty in return but stops short. “I’m not making you uncomfortable, am I? You’re at work. Marta hates it when she gets hit on at the store.”
“Steve, I’m the one who asked you for a dance. I find you attractive and funny and sweet. Plus there’s a little difference between some rando off the street asking you if you’re single and some guy you literally kissed a week ago flirting with you. But you’re the one in your underwear so don’t let me make you uncomfortable either.”
“You aren’t. For the record, you probably could’ve done more than kiss me.”
“Someday, I might.”
“Oh?” Steve tilts his head. “Is that so?”
“Thing is…” Bucky busies himself by pulling on one black glove and then another. “Sometimes, you meet someone, and you think, ‘I wanna take this person home and test the limits of my furniture.’ And sometimes you meet someone and you know that won’t be enough.”
“I…?”
“Just a vibe, you know.” Bucky gently reaches for Steve’s leg, shifting it atop the table, moving a flexible light closer. He meets Steve’s eyes. “So now I’m getting to know you to see if I was right and, if I was, to decide what will be. Enough, that is.”
The words hit Steve like a punch. Like a thousand aliens pouring out of the sky to collide directly with a white star. He has nothing to say to that, nothing coherent anyway, and so he watches Bucky work instead. He softly shaves away the brown hair on Steve’s thigh, and then he applies the stencil, lining out Marc and Marguerite’s faces in purple.
“How’s that look? You might wanna hop up and take a look in the mirror too, see if you like the placement with the overall picture that is you.”
Steve sits up and stares at it for several seconds, flexing his thigh, watching the way it affects the lines. Then he does what Bucky suggested, getting up and standing in front of the full-length mirror on the wall.
“I’m just gonna… for a second.” Steve fiddles with the hem of his shirt.
“Oh, yeah, go ahead.”
Steve pulls the shirt up and over his head, tossing it onto the table. And there it is. His body, nearly nude, ink on his hip and future ink on his thigh, both declaring loudly: here I am. Maybe that’s the point of a body like Bucky’s—covered in so much ink. A living scrapbook of a person’s lifetime—good, bad, and occasionally poorly drawn.
He wishes they could see it, him like this. But Bucky can once the piece is done. Bucky can and Tag and Marta and Geoff and even Romanoff and the blonde nurse down the hall can. He’s gonna buy shorts. Short ones. The kind men born in 1918 aren’t supposed to wear. He smiles at his reflection and then pulls his shirt back on and settles on the table.
The buzz of a tattoo machine starts up a few minutes later. He loses himself in the prickle and burn.
“You should tell me something else. About them. If you want.” Bucky’s hand is steady, so so steady. It traces every line with practiced grace, every mark of black so clean and sharp.
Steve lets his eyes shut, drifting on endorphins and the sound of rock music floating out from the main part of the shop. “Marc wrote poems. That was when I first noticed him, both of them really. There was a mission and it was late, and we were sharing cigarettes with the Commandos, and my hearing is real sharp after the serum. I’m taking a drag off Morita and I hear this lyrical French in a sweet, low voice. He was reciting a poem he wrote for her in her ear. And she was…” Steve laughs. “She was a hell of a picture, even after that mission, dirty and worn down.”
“Did you understand the poem?”
“Yeah. It was about the way his fingers sink into her skin, how he worships every freckle and scar and stretch mark. How he loves her laugh. How he loves her soul and spirit.”
“Did she say anything back?”
Steve laughs almost immediately. “She sure as hell did.”
“I know it’s good with a laugh like that. What’d she say?”
“She leaned into him, looking all loving and sweet, and then she quietly, like it was nothing, just said, ‘I’m gonna finger fuck your asshole later.’ Rough translation, obviously.”
“Oh wow. And here I thought women were all chaste and pure in the 1940s,” Bucky says, but the way he says it makes it clear he doesn’t actually believe it. It’s just an opening for more conversation. Steve takes it.
“I always knew I liked women and fellas both. More than that even. I think even in those days, we had folks who didn’t feel quite right in either box without really having a way to put that feeling into words. But anyhow, the one-two punch of a beautiful man lovingly reciting poetry and a beautiful woman casually answering him with a mouth like that… I figured I’d have to live with it forever, and then she looked up at me, caught me looking at her, caught me sweating. ‘I think the Captain can hear us. He should nod if he can.’”
“And you nodded.”
“How could I not?”
“And?”
“’I’ll fuck yours too if you want, Captain.’”
The buzz stops. Bucky looks up at him. “Oh my God.”
“Right?”
“Did… no never mind, you don’t have to answer that.”
“Did I let her? Buddy, you’re doing the tattoo. I got fucked six ways ‘til Sunday that night.”
“Marguerite Vincent, you fucking hero. Someday, when I feel like we’re on the level that it’s acceptable for you to tell me, I want that whole story.” Bucky looks back down at the tattoo, the buzzing starting again. “That, and I don’t want you to have a situation on my table.”
“Good call.” Steve lets his eyes fall shut again. Time passes by in the hum of machinery and more guitar riffs.
“Did you ever get a poem?” Bucky asks.
“I did. A few. Including the night before I had to leave.”
“What did he say about you?”
“That he thought he’d given his heart away but found more in his chest. That he thought when he met her, he’d given up any kind of future involving men, that he was okay with it because she owned so much of his soul. But that he was so glad he was wrong when he felt me inside of him, when he felt himself inside of me.”
“Ah, that kind of poem.”
“It sounds a lot less filthy in French. If you don’t speak French.”
Bucky laughs softly and cuts off the machine. “Easy on being funny, Steve. I’m holding a handful of mechanized needles here.”
“Right. I’ll try to be more of a bore.”
“I don’t think you could be if you tried. I’m glad you had love like that. Dad was really into World War 2, so I’ve seen a lot of documentaries and films, and I know what I think I know doesn’t even scratch the surface of how hard it was. And that’s not even getting into all the eugenicist bullshit you probably heard stateside growing up like you did, and you being queer on top of it all. You deserved every bit of happiness you grabbed onto. You deserve to remember it always. And, most importantly, you deserve to be happy again.”
The machine still off, Steve finds himself reaching for Bucky’s forearm, wrapping his fingers around it. Bucky looks up from where he’s been studying his work so far and meets Steve’s eyes.
“Thank you,” Steve says. “And I hope you know you deserve it too. We shouldn’t have to meet some threshold for misery to justify getting something better. Assuming you haven’t suffered as much as we did, and I can’t really know that. Just because it wasn’t on a global scale doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.”
Bucky smiles at him warmly. “I suffered plenty, I guess, even though it’s still hard sometimes not to internalize shit and blame myself and feel like I have no right to say such a thing. Undiagnosed ADHD. Couldn’t figure out why certain things seemed so easy for everyone else and here I couldn’t seem to get even the most basic shit together. I used to compare it to being buried alive, how it felt like I could never seem to keep any shoe on long enough to take a real step forward.
“But that was a long time and a lot of meds and coping mechanisms ago. I have a life now and my own shop and sometimes it’s still hard and frustrating and I feel like I’m doing everything a normal person is supposed to do and things still go so wrong. And other times I’m so happy compared to then I feel like I’m committing a crime. And I think that’s the real proof that things are better. That I can have ups and downs instead of feeling stuck in the shit of it all like some ancient mosquito encased in tree sap.” Bucky exhales and looks back down at his work. “Basically everyone deserves the tools and the right to try to be happy--not Christmas morning, cheeks-hurting, wedding day happy every single moment because we find meaning and appreciation in the contrast of emotions. But happy in the sense of being content in your existence. Somedays it’s harder to feel it than others, but at least I’m in the position to fucking try, you know? And I get there a hell of a lot more often than I used to.”
Bucky clears his throat and laughs. “Shit. Sorry, I kinda went off there.”
Steve shakes his head. “Don’t apologize. I’ve never exactly had a reputation for being succinct or unopinionated.”
Bucky smiles softly, just enough to bring out his laugh lines. “Never would’ve guessed.”
Silence falls again. On Steve’s leg, Marc’s angular jawline takes shape stroke by stroke.
“I think I’m gonna have to quit,” Steve finally says, after a long time.
“Oh.” The machine stops. “Too much? We can schedule another session or just take a break for a minute. Your call.”
“No, I’m fine there.” Steve stares down at the tattoo, enthralled by the black ink slowly overtaking purple lines. “I think I’m gonna have to quit being Captain America. Otherwise I’ll never be anything else.”
“Oh,” Bucky says again, much softer this time. “Steve.”
It’s kind, the way Bucky says his name. Not pitying. Just sympathetic. Empathetic? Steve never really quite got the difference down.
“I used to think there’d be a time for it. A natural stopping point. War’s over. Go home, soldier. But…” Steve shakes his head. “Naive I guess, to think I’d ever just get to walk away. Maybe I never expected to get the chance.”
Bucky looks thoughtfully at the piece again and inks a few more lines, a frown creasing his face. “I don’t think you were naive. You signed up for the war. All the other soldiers who made it through got to go home. Why would you think you’d be any different?”
Bucky swipes a paper towel over Steve’s skin to remove some of the ink seeping back out. “And honestly, calling yourself naive implies you were supposed to predict what would happen, that you’d go into the ice and wake up here and be thrown right back into a bunch of fights you didn’t sign up for. Hell, did they even ask?” The buzzing pauses and so does Bucky. “Shit, fuck, sorry, I didn’t mean to talk about your life like you didn’t live it. Anyway, my point is that you signed up for something that meant something to you even if the how of it was messy, and now you’re Captain America in 20fuckteen. And I won’t pretend America hasn’t always been a shitshow but it’s…”
“A big military-industrial capitalist circle jerk that is steadily dropping any pretense of being anything else?”
Bucky snorts softly. “Christ, I can’t believe any of the right wing news outlets used to use, ‘What would Steve Rogers think about this?’ as some kind of gotcha argument.”
Steve smiles down at Bucky even though he’s too focused on his work to see it. “You’re right,” Steve says. “All of it. No one asked. They just assumed ‘the greatest soldier in history’ would take up arms again and deliver. Or the guy who couldn’t stay out of a fight would want to keep fighting. And the thing is I do want to keep fighting. But I want to fight for queer rights and for people to be able to express their gender however the fuck they want, whether their assigned one doesn’t fit or they just want to wear skirts as a cis guy because they like a breeze or how their legs look. I want to fight for healthcare and, hell, for the goddamned wars to goddamned stop.” Steve laughs bitterly. “Christ, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that the work me and the boys and the SSR were doing would eventually spell the end of all war. Like they weren’t telling my father the same thing a couple decades earlier. What a crock of shit.”
Bucky hums thoughtfully. It takes him a few seconds to respond. “So, assuming you’re discussing this with me because you need to talk it through, what do you think is keeping you from retiring? What are you hung up on?”
Steve inhales deep, exhales, inhales again. “I guess I’m a bit afraid that on some level, it’s the wrong thing to do, especially when we’ve got aliens falling from the sky.” Steve sighs. “But I think mostly I just don’t know who I am in this time and place and it’s…”
“Something familiar.”
“Yes.”
Bucky hums again. “I think,” he says, “that you aren’t giving yourself enough credit. You know exactly who you are. You had me ink the word ‘queer’ on your hip, and you’re having me put a man and woman you were involved with simultaneously on your thigh without a trace of shame. And on top of that, you just told me. You’re a fighter. You just aren’t a soldier anymore.”
Steve laughs softly. “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier.”
Bucky blows out a quiet snort through his nose. “Okay, who introduced you to The Killers?”
“Geoff. He works at the bookstore. His friend, maybe his boyfriend—I haven’t figured that out yet—is the one you did the Arnie Roth quote on.”
He shakes his head. “Unbelievable. You’ve befriended the entire queer bookstore staff and everyone they’re dating or fucking, but you don’t think you have a place here and now.” Bucky playfully nudges Steve’s calf. “Do you like the song?”
“Is there a wrong answer?” Steve asks.
“Not at all.”
“I do like it. And the other song, Mr. Brightside.”
Bucky nods. “They’re good songs. What other mystical musical knowledge are you hiding there, Steve?”
“Well, Geoff likes stuff like that and My Chemical Romance. I know Gaga because I was told if I’m going to be queer in this era, then I have to. And that I needed to know at least one classic Madonna song while I was at it. And Beyonce. That was Tag’s doing.”
“Bowie?” Bucky asks.
“Huh?”
“Oh my God, you have to hang out with some queer people who aren’t freshly-hatched, Steve. Hold on.”
Bucky kills the machine, wipes Steve clean, and then tosses the black gloves in the garbage before pushing his way through the curtain. Steve takes the opportunity to stare at the forming tattoo. It doesn’t look like them yet as incomplete line work, but it will.
Out in the shop, the music cuts off and then starts again. It gets louder too, increasing in volume until Bucky comes back through the curtain with a small speaker in his hand, setting it down on a shelf.
“This,” Bucky says, “is David Bowie. I’m playing a very eclectic educational mix here, so we’re just gonna go with it.”
“Sure. Happy to learn from my queer elders.”
Bucky’s head whips his way, a look of amused shock on his face. “Christ, you are an absolute shit. Queer elders. You were born in like… 19… Okay, I got a C in American History because I sat behind Diana Macenko AND Jason Blair and I was sort of going through a bi crisis when you were up. A bisis. You were born. Once.”
“Oh fuck. You got me.” Steve puts a hand on his chest like he’s been shot.
“I’m gonna tattoo a dick on your face.”
“Bucky, if you wanna put a dick on my face, I can think of better ways.”
“Jesus, you’re unbelievable. Lie back, shut the fuck up, and listen to David Bowie.”
“As you wish.” Steve pillows his head on his arms.
“Was… Did you just quote…” Bucky shakes his head. “No, we can go down that road later.” And with a fresh pair of gloves on, he gets back to work. David Bowie speaks to ground control.
They talk some more. Bucky has sisters. Bucky used to want to be an engineer before he failed out of college. He still does math for fun.
“For fun?”
“For fun. I know realistically if trained mathematicians can’t work out some of these equations, then I’m probably not going to, but hey, it’s relaxing to sit with a white board after work and see where it goes. What about you? What’s fun for Steve Rogers in the twentyteens?”
Steve smiles. “Seems I dance with cute guys at bars and get tattoos.”
“I reiterate that you know exactly who you are. Or at least have some idea.”
Steve smiles warmly up at the ceiling.
“This is Queen, by the way. Freddie Mercury. An icon gone too soon.”
“Oh! I’ve heard this song,” Steve says. “A few times.”
“I’d be surprised if you hadn’t. Do you like it?”
“Yes.”
“Everyone does. It might be one of the only songs ever written that no one dislikes. Incredible really.”
There are more songs. More Bowie. Queen, Cher, Melissa Etheridge, Prince, Kesha, Rihanna, Halsey. Artists who are queer and artists who Steve is just very likely to see performed in full drag.
By the end of the day, he has a whole list of new music to find online. He has a clearer picture of how he wants to live his life, even clearer than the one he’s already been working on.
And, most importantly, he has…
“Mostly done,” Bucky says. “Would’ve finished given how your body works and how easy you’re sitting, but my hand is killing me.”
“Absolutely. You need those gorgeous hands.” Steve stands in front of the mirror, staring at his leg. Even unfinished, it’s undeniably Marc and Marguerite. He feels a little more of the grief he holds in his chest settle. Not gone, never gone. But easier to hold.
“Gorgeous, huh? I’ll file that comment away to tease you with later.” Bucky smirks. “Anyway, if you wanna hang out a few minutes, I don’t think I need to bandage you. Some of the stuff I did near the beginning is already well past that point.”
“Cool.”
Bucky nods. “So yeah, chill here and I’ll give you another wipe down, and you’re probably free to just use lotion for a couple days. I guess we’re both learning here.”
Steve nods and hops back up on the table, swinging his legs over the side. Next to him, Bucky works on cleaning up his equipment.
Steve chews on his lip. “I think the other problem is that I have no idea what I’d do instead of being Cap. I’ve heard them talk about the job market at the bookstore. Entry level jobs with five years of experience. I don’t exactly have a resume or a LinkedIn or a college degree.”
“I mean, you do have a very wide social network that most people don’t have. I’m sure you could post that you wanna try something new on Twitter and get at least a few offers. I imagine some people would love to have you as a historical consultant for film or whatever too.”
“Oh.” Steve hadn’t even thought of that.
“But there’s always options until there aren’t, Steve. Hell, you could do what I do considering how well you draw.”
Steve glances over at Bucky, then looks around the room at the deep red walls and the framed posters of various artwork and flash pieces. Do what Bucky does. Go from being a soldier out of time to just another artist in a city with a tattoo machine and a body covered in ink.
Reclaim a body that never fully felt like his own. Cover other people in memories and…
“How long have you been doing this by the way?” Steve asks.
Bucky slides the metal table back against the wall, its surface clear. He massages his left hand with the right. “Going on almost 20 years. Could’ve probably gone back to the real world after I realized the ADHD of it all. Thought about it. Might have been easier. Good pay and better insurance. It also might have been a hell of a lot harder. Doesn’t matter because by then, I’d fallen in love with it. I like that every day is different. I like tattooing people’s mother’s favorite flowers and portraits of lost loves and funky little aliens. I preserve and make memories. I help people learn to love their bodies or help them fall in love with them all over again.” Bucky sprays Steve’s leg down one more time and wipes it clean. “I’m not trying to be one of those guys who acts like everyone in a suit and tie is some corporate sheep with no soul or anything, because that’s not true, and some people don’t need to love their job. And some people don’t have a choice but to take what they can get. But I couldn’t personally get what I need in some office somewhere. I don’t think I would’ve been nearly as fulfilled. And I did have a choice, so I made one.”
He tosses the paper towel covered in watery black ink into the trash. He looks up at Steve with a faint smile, one that just curves the corner of his mouth and shines dimly in his blue-gray eyes. Steve looks back, and it feels a lot like…
French floats through the back of his mind, lyrical and poetic, filthy and sweet.
“You wanna grab a drink?” Steve asks. One corner of Bucky’s lip twitches a little higher still, eyes shining brighter with it.
“Sure. Go left out of the shop and around the corner. Little bar there named KJ’s. My gorgeous hands and I will meet you there after I close up.”
Steve hops off the table.
“Oh,” Bucky says, stopping him in his tracks, “and if you’re hungry after the session, get the potato pancakes.”
Steve dresses and heads to the aforementioned bar, pushing his way in through the front doors. It’s quiet. Not like the place the bookstore crew took him to. The music plays low enough to allow for conversation at normal volume. There’s no glitter. There are no drag queens either. But it’s still an undeniably queer space. A long strand of different triangle-shaped pride flags hangs on the mirror behind the bar. The bartender is an Asian woman with ripped jeans and a leather jacket over a white tee emblazoned in bold black letters with the word, “dyke.” Period included. In the corner, two guys share a low conversation over drinks, holding hands on top of the table. Steve feels his soul settle before he even makes it to the bar, where he orders a cider and the potato pancakes before getting a table to wait for Bucky.
While he waits, a group of friends slip in, one of them getting a round of beers while the rest sprawl out on a table with various textbooks and laptops. One of them spots Steve across the room and clearly recognizes him, but they don’t come over. Instead, they just level an ear-splitting grin at him. He smiles back.
Bucky’s there before the pancakes are, grabbing a beer of his own and sliding into the booth seat across from Steve.
“To great tattoos,” Steve says, raising his glass. Bucky shakes his head but butts his glass against Steve’s and takes a drink.
“Th—”
“Hot potato pancakes incoming.” The bartender slides a massive plate in front of Steve, stacked golden brown, bits of white visible in every bite.
“What are…?” Steve asks, already tearing into the stack.
“Oh, they’re laced with bleu cheese. It works. Trust me.”
It does work. It works very very well. Steve eats the first few bites in blissful silence, and Bucky seems happy enough to let him, sprawled across the booth seat in front of him with his arms on either side. The sheer shirt has ridden up in the process, revealing a strip of bare inked-up creamy skin that Steve is very very actively failing to ignore.
“If I did wanna,” Steve says, finally remembering that he wanted to have a conversation about this, that he asked Bucky for a drink for a reason, “how would I start?”
“Wanna what?”
“Do what you do.”
Bucky’s face does something funny for a moment, but then he sits up straight. The strip of bare skin disappears. “Serious?”
“Yeah. I think I might be.”
“I’ve seen your art, Steve. I’d take you on tomorrow,” Bucky says. “As an apprentice, I mean.”
Steve chews on it via a bite of potato pancake. It feels like he should take time to think about it, like he should actually talk to Shield and his teammates and make sure it’s what he really wants.
But he already knows, doesn’t he? He knew on some level before he ever even saw that tattoo at the bar, before he met Bucky, before everything.
“When do I start?”
Across the table, Bucky smiles at him warmly. His hand finds Steve’s on the worn, scarred wood and squeezes it. Steve squeezes back.
The tattoo machine buzzes and Steve closes his eyes, relaxing into the feel of a shading needle making passes on his thigh, filling in Marguerite’s hair, and bringing it to life.
It’s been two weeks since his last session, and he’s laid out on Bucky’s table in butter-soft boxer briefs. By the end of the day, the piece should be finished, and he already feels the warm pool of anticipation to see them complete.
It took a lifetime for someone to make sure they’d be remembered and honored, but they will be now. For as long as anyone bothers to remember Steve Rogers, they’ll have to remember them too.
“I’ve been looking into apprenticeships,” Steve says.
“Oh good, so you have some idea.”
Steve hums. “I saw some places charge? Almost like tuition.”
“Ah.” Bucky lets up off the machine for a moment, the room going temporarily quiet. “Some do. I won’t. It’s bad enough that you’ll be doing a lot of grunt work without pay. It’s kind of a shitty system and I wish we had a better way, but tattooing isn’t exactly lucrative despite what people think.”
“It’s okay,” Steve says. “Though I might look into starting a scholarship or grant program for other artists who can’t afford a few years without working. Or who can’t afford the rigors of two full-time jobs when one doesn’t really have an income.”
“That would be a really cool thing, Steve.” Bucky inks a few more patches of shading. “Do you have any other questions?”
“I assume I can hold off on getting my own equipment?”
“Yeah, you won’t actually tattoo for a while. You’ll probably start sooner than some since you do seem to be so artistically proficient, and I’m guessing your hands are pretty steady.”
“Yeah.”
“Still, you never start on real people, and it’s customary to lend you equipment while you’re learning. I mean, wouldn’t want you to spend hundreds of dollars on a setup and the first time you turn on a machine, you actually hate it and never want to do it again.” Bucky laughs softly.
“Point.” Steve smiles down at Bucky, his eyes intensely focused on his work, machine moving between crisp lines to add dimension. Marguerite is almost fully finished, her face staring up at Steve in perfect grayscale.
“Any other questions?”
Steve watches Bucky work for a moment more before licking his lips to speak. He does have a concern, a big one really. “If…” Steve falters, his stomach fluttering with so many dancing nerves. Bucky stops the machine and looks up at him, gray-blue eyes giving Steve his full attention. Steve swallows. “If we start this new thing, would it make any other kind of relationship between us inappropriate?”
Farther down the table, Bucky’s gaze goes soft.
“It’s just…” Steve moves up onto his elbows to look at him more directly. “I could apprentice with someone else. I’m sure you could recommend someone even. If you think… I’d rather see how…”
And it’s a ridiculous feeling, to care more about a potential relationship than a potential career—and Christ he really does want both from Bucky, but he could let go of one thing for the other.
Bucky’s gaze goes softer still. He looks at Steve for several long moments before speaking. “If you were someone else and it felt exploitative, maybe.” He puts down the machine and carefully wipes at Steve’s thigh. “But you don’t really need me to live and work, and you could easily leave me behind if you needed to. Plus I like to think we’re both mature enough that if the relationship went sour, we could still figure out a way forward that worked for both of us.”
“Okay.” Steve shares a faint smile with Bucky before settling back onto the table. “Good. Then I think that’s all I need to know. Just tell me when to show up and what coffee to fetch.”
Bucky huffs a laugh through his nose and turns his machine back on. “My week starts on Tuesdays at 10 a.m. I’ll see you then.”
“You got it,” Steve says, and then he lets his eyes close again, losing himself in waves of pain and good brain chemicals until Bucky finally turns the machine off one last time and declares that he’s done.
“They really are gorgeous, Steve. Both in form and in the way you’ve rendered them with your art.”
Steve sits up and spends a long time looking. It still hurts that he’ll never see them again, at least not in this life. He’d hoped once that when the war was over, he might go back to France, that he might find they both survived it as well. Sometimes he’d even dreamed that with his duty done, he might disappear into a life of poetry and soft skin and deep soul-quaking pleasure.
But it was a gift that he ever had them at all. A gift that he has the memories he does. A gift that…
He looks up and finds Bucky cleaning up his supplies, clad today in a pair of mid-thigh shorts, boots, and a tank top—all black. He has his hair back in a customary bun, a single braid leading from his forehead back into the knot. Strands of brown and gray stick out from it in an artful mess that Steve wants to twirl around his fingers.
“You think there’s a limit on how much good the universe sends us?” Steve asks, and Bucky stops what he’s doing to turn back toward him.
“Not to sound like some kitschy poster in a gift shop, but,” Bucky runs his hand back through his hair, pushing some of the escaped pieces temporarily back into place, “I think the well of love at the center of the universe is limitless, Steve.”
Steve sits up and hangs his legs off the side of the table where Bucky gives the tattoo a good look before putting on fresh gloves and wiping down the piece.
“Christ, your body is incredible.” Bucky looks up at him, wide-eyed. “I mean…”
Steve laughs softly. “I know what you meant.”
“Good,” Bucky says, wheeling himself back from Steve’s bare thighs. Steve should get dressed, but he doesn’t move just yet, instead watching Bucky go back to the task of cleaning up.
“I want to see you before Tuesday,” Steve says, the words bubbling up inside of him. Bucky drops a few things into the trash. Steve’s ears pick up on the sound that is Bucky’s breathing getting just a little heavier. Steve opens his mouth again. “I want to take you out.”
“I’m free tomorrow night,” Bucky says, turning around to face him. “After closing.”
“At eight?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll pick you up. Wear something, uh, nice but not…”
“Not Oscar’s or charity gala nice.”
“Right.”
“Regular impressing-a-date nice.”
Steve grins and picks up his joggers, carefully pulling them back on over the tattoo. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Bucky.”
He ignores no less than twenty calls from Shield throughout the course of the day. He ignores calls from Tony and Romanoff too. He has to push down a heavy amount of guilt, but if the world was truly all-hands-on-deck ending, they’d come to him.
Steve’s doing it. For better or for worse, he’s choosing to leave the war.
In the mirror, he checks himself out. Tight dark wash jeans lead down to shiny black boots. He went out and looked for a shirt kind of like that one of Bucky’s—sheer and black and covered in embroidered peonies. Through it, Steve can just make out the “queer” tattoo on his hip. Absently, he reaches for his thigh and thinks of what sits beneath the denim.
“I finally look like someone who isn’t him,” Steve says to his reflection, letting out a deep, cleansing breath at the same time. No one would’ve had this guy selling war bonds. No one would put this guy’s face on a recruitment poster. No one would give this guy a history lesson on what he missed for seven decades and get visibly nervous when they have to talk about the civil and gay rights movements.
In the bathroom, Steve works on his hair, fingering product through it until he’s achieved something that blends together both of his times. A little retro, a little modern, the blond long and pushed back with pomade, the sides short. He turns his head and looks at his scalp through the short crop and imagines putting a tattoo there—a glimpse of sharp black or bold color that he could show or hide as it suited him.
Maybe, maybe not. But that’s the thing about choosing a new future. It becomes open. Limitless.
At the tattoo shop, he patiently waits for Bucky, leaning against the brick facade of the darkened coffee shop until Bucky comes down the stairs, slipping a set of keys into a leather satchel.
“Come here often?” Bucky asks, throwing the words in Steve’s direction, and Steve peels himself from the wall.
“Now and then. You look good.” Steve gives Bucky an appreciative look-over. Black jeans into black boots, a dangerously tight plaid button-up with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. He has the gray-streaked hair pulled back again, a thin braid looped around its base.
“You don’t look so bad yourself,” Bucky says, eyeing Steve up, his gaze falling on the splash of black ink on Steve’s skin, his lips twitching when he sees it. “So, where are you taking me?”
Without saying anything, Steve offers Bucky his arm and walks him down the sidewalk, the two of them taking in the night, commenting on passersby, on the feel of the night air this time of year, on restaurants and coffee shops that Steve absolutely has to try next time he’s near them. Four blocks sees them at a quiet little Italian place Steve found when he first moved back to Brooklyn. He’d paused at first because of the mural on the side of the building. After so many decades, no one would even know what it was anymore. But Steve knows. Steve knows because he’d helped Mr. Fitz paint it as a teenager, perching quietly on ladders and scaffolding while Fitz gave him pointers on how to make his lines straighter and how to blend the colors to make the perfect hues called for by the ads.
“That used to be an advertisement,” Steve tells Bucky, pointing at the worn paint on the bricks outside. “There was a pharmacy inside, and this big mural out here let everyone know they sold candy and soda, had prescription drugs, and maybe most importantly, ice-cold Coca-Cola.”
“I notice a lot of these old ghost signs. Sometimes I wonder what they looked like in their day.”
“I like to think this one looked pretty good since I helped paint it.”
Bucky’s eyebrow goes up in surprise and then he breaks away from Steve, stepping toward the old brick where he touches a patch of worn paint just above eye level. Steve remembers mixing the red paint up. They couldn’t use the red they had because it wasn’t just right for the Coca-Cola color.
“We had to mix together three different red paints to get the color right.”
“You think you would’ve been an artist if you hadn’t gone to war?” Bucky asks.
“Yes. That’s what I’d been doing already. Odd jobs when I could take them. I never got ahead, but I’d save up when I could and scrape by when I couldn’t. That’s how it went until the war. Did everything from advertisements to porn.”
Bucky nods and steps back to admire the whole mural—still a mess of old paint impossible to discern. “Thank you for sharing that. Seems like art is actually a really intrinsic part of who you are. I’m glad you’re finding a way to bring it back into your life.”
“Yeah,” Steve says, “me too.”
He takes Bucky’s hand, pulling him away from the past and into the restaurant, where the host finds his name on the list and leads them to a small table in the back. The staff are familiar enough with Steve by now to bring out two baskets of bread without asking. On either side of the table, he and Bucky both get dishes of olive oil mixed with balsamic vinegar and fresh garlic and herbs.
“What’s good here?” Bucky asks.
“Honestly? Everything. I usually get the gnocchi and then, uh, add chicken parm. But I have to eat a lot.”
“Right. That body of yours.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s gorgeous, pal. I gotta confess though,” Bucky says, tearing up a piece of bread to dip it into his oil. “When I was a teenager, I had a huge crush on you from before the serum. There were pictures in the history books, you know? I remember thinking you had kind eyes, that you looked like a good kisser.”
Steve playfully nudges his foot under the table. “You yanking my chain?”
Bucky laughs. “I’m not. Of course, I was fifteen, so a week later I’d moved on to Kiera Knightly in Pirates of the Caribbean, but I did think you were adorable. Who knows? Maybe if we’d both been born around the same time, you would’ve been my high school sweetheart. I could’ve taken you to junior prom.”
“Wow. Not senior prom, huh?”
“No, I dump you by senior prom, but only because I’m an idiot. It’s the beginning of our romance movie where we stop being friends and don’t talk anymore after graduation until I go back to our hometown many years later as a miserable but highly successful corporate lawyer who hates Christmas because my Ma was way too into it when I was a kid.” Bucky laughs and shakes his head. “Fuck, have you even seen enough of those movies to get this reference?”
“I have Hallmark and Netflix, Buck. Hard to watch it between playing chess at the park and hitting up the bingo halls, but...” Steve grins. “Now is better. We skip all those years of me pining for your memory while I continually tell any friend who tries to set me up with anyone that romance is dead. Instead, I can have you now, gorgeous salt and pepper hair, inked up body, hands that know exactly where to sit on a pair of hips.”
“Yeah? You wanna go dancing after this? I’ll get you a corsage to make up for what I did.”
Steve shrugs. “I could keep trying to learn how you kids do it now.”
Dinner passes in a haze of easy conversation. Bucky orders the gnocchi sans the added chicken. Steve cleans his plate and consumes more bread than anyone should legally be allowed to eat. As always, he offers to pay extra. As always, the owner refuses.
“You come here at least once a week, eat a shit ton of food, and now you’re bringin’ friends. Eat all the bread you fuckin’ want, buddy.”
Steve laughs and shakes his head, paying his and Bucky’s bill before leaving a massive tip on the table.
“Same bar as before?” Steve asks, and Bucky shakes his head.
“No, it’s Thirsty Thursday which means we need to be at Stilettos.”
“Lead the way.”
They take a train, leaning on each other until they get off and walk a couple more blocks. Steve can hear the thump of the music before he ever sees the bright lights of the bar entrance. They join a short queue filled with everyone from folks in jeans and tees to people in sparkling outfits that leave very little to the imagination. There are velvet suit jackets, cargo shorts, and enough Doc Martens to start a secondhand shop.
“Bucky!” The drag queen at the door pulls Bucky into a tight hug. “Ooh. And who are we hopefully wearing at the end of the night?” She eyes Steve up. Bucky throws his head back and barks a one-note laugh up at the night sky.
“Megan, this is Steve. Steve, this is Megan Thee Fox.”
“In the flesh.” She offers Steve a hand, and he takes her cue to lift it and kiss her on the knuckles, chuckling appropriately when she pretends to swoon on her high heels, forcing Bucky to catch her. “James Buchanan, you always did have taste.”
“I do my best, ma’am.”
“That’ll be a five-dollar cover, darlings,” Megan says, and Steve produces ten from his wallet, which Megan takes and tucks into her glittering cleavage. “Paying for you too. What a gentleman.”
“Thanks, Meg.”
“Have fun.”
Inside, Bucky gets their drinks, taking charge of that because he knows the bar and the bartenders. Steve still insists on paying though, handing Bucky a twenty every time he heads to the bar with instructions to drop the extra in the tip jar.
“Is that enough?” he asks the first time. “Some of the drinks get high, I know.”
“It is for what we’re ordering. Just right.”
“Good.”
It takes exactly one drink for Bucky to pull him toward the dance floor, where bodies move in a blur of lights and sound. It’s a mix of every possible queer combination—couples of every gender combination, groups of friends and poly partners, people who maybe just met and have maybe been together for years. The joy and acceptance of it all seem to permeate the very air, and it's that feeling Steve lets sink into his bones when he wraps his arms around Bucky’s waist from behind, letting go of the world and giving into the feel of Bucky moving against him.
Relax. All he has to do is relax into Bucky’s body. Relax into how he’d move with him if there was no one there to see it. He lets his hips roll, lets his body seek out the warmth and affection he’s been missing. Bucky turns around in his arms, leans up to brush his lips against Steve’s ear.
“I think you’re getting it.”
A quick peck on Steve’s cheek and a suggestive wrap of his lips around his beer bottle and he turns back around, pulling Steve’s arms tight around him.
“Steve!”
Steve turns his head, finds Tag in the crowd dancing with someone in fishnet stockings and a silver dress. Tag points at Bucky who hasn’t seemed to notice them nearby and then gives Steve a look of approval and a thumbs up. Steve points at the person in the silver dress and copies the gesture, earning him a wink in return.
He loses his friend in the growing crowd, but it doesn’t matter. Not when Bucky’s so close and so warm. Not when the desire to pull Bucky from the bar and drag him to his apartment increases every second. Not when…
Bucky turns in his arms again, his hair coming loose, a few strands stuck to his forehead with sweat. Steve’s about to ask if he’s okay or if he needs something when Bucky’s eyes go soft with longing, falling to Steve’s mouth. And oh, in what universe would Steve deny him?
Steve’s thumb finds Bucky’s chin dimple, drawing Bucky’s eyes back to his for a moment. Around them, the song changes, the first notes leading to a roar of cheers from the dance floor. Bucky doesn’t cheer though. Neither does Steve, leaning in slowly to close the gap between them, giving Bucky time to turn away if he doesn’t actually want…
Bucky lunges at him with hunger, colliding with Steve, lips crashing against his like so many bodies clashing to a beat. He tastes like the mixed drinks Bucky’s been drinking since they arrived. Like a new idea for a future. Like a new identity and an old identity finally mended together and made whole again.
Someone manages to wolf whistle loud enough to be heard over the music, and Bucky pulls away, resting his forehead against Steve’s and looking down with a chuckle of mild embarrassment. Still though, he comes back in for seconds. And thirds, both of them swaying to the beat even while they make out on the floor.
Finally, when Steve can’t take it anymore, he leans into Bucky’s neck. “You wanna get out of here?”
Bucky answers him by pulling him toward the exit, the two of them weaving through the crowd to spill out into the cool night.
“Come on,” Bucky says, taking Steve’s hand and pulling him in a half-jog away from the bar. “You should see something.”
Steve follows willingly, weaving through Brooklyn streets until they come to a stop on a corner that’s very nearly empty at the late hour.
“What—“
Bucky points up at the building itself. There’s an advertisement there, done up to look vintage, but it’s not a vintage ad. In the ad, two men—one white, one Black—stand side-by-side, a small child between them, each of them with a hand on that child’s shoulders. Around the edge of the mural is an oval of rainbow lines. A looping font spells out Brooklyn Proud in the background.
Breathing heavily from the light run, Bucky clasps Steve’s hand, weaving their fingers together, pulling Steve against his side.
“They do Pride in the park down there,” Bucky says, pointing down the street. “A few years back, they commissioned some local artists to paint a few murals in the area. A lot of them got painted over because of various reasons that are pretty much all bullshit, but this one survived.”
“You gonna tell me you painted this?”
“That would be a super poetic way to end the evening, but no. I just knew you’d want to see it and I’m probably a little drunk right now, so…”
“You’re right. I do want to see it.” Steve takes out his phone and snaps a photo, glad there are spotlights on the mural that make it show up at least half-decent in the dark. For good measure, he turns the phone away from the wall and finds Bucky with the lens, Bucky laughing when he realizes he’s in the frame, allowing Steve to perfectly capture the way the lines around his eyes get deeper when he’s amused.
“If that’s a horrible photo, it better live on your phone forever.”
“It’s a wonderful photo,” Steve says. “I think we should get a cab.”
“Oh, I’ve got it.” Bucky pulls out his phone and taps on it a few times. “Oh, that’s lucky,” he says, and he turns his head in time to watch a car peel away from a space down the street, headlights coming right for them. The window goes down.
“James?”
“Yep.” Bucky pulls open the back door and climbs in, Steve behind him. Steve supposes they’re going to Bucky’s place then, which is fine by him, his hand finding Bucky’s on top of the seat while the two of them ride quietly through the night.
Ten minutes later, they both climb out of the car, Steve handing the driver cash because he hasn’t really dipped his toes into the pool of rideshares yet. It seems to be an okay enough thing to do though, the driver thanking him before pulling away.
“Do you, uh, want me to come with you or should I walk home?” Steve asks.
“Come up.”
Thank fuck.
He follows Bucky inside and up four flights of stairs, patiently keeping his hands to himself while Bucky unlocks the door to let them into his apartment. It’s a small studio, but he’s used the space well, lofting his bed high to make way for a couch and coffee table beneath it.
“Aerial acts, huh?” Steve asks, joining Bucky in kicking off his shoes by the door, but Bucky pulls him onto the sofa, his lips finding Steve’s, his hands untucking Steve’s shirt and slipping up beneath the mesh to rest warmly against his skin. At that, Steve feels the overwhelming need to touch Bucky’s skin too, undoing a few buttons on his shirt to run fingers over so many lines of ink. “You should tell me a story,” Steve says softly, mouthing at Bucky’s jawline. “One of your tattoos. Any of them.”
Bucky pulls away, undoing the rest of his shirt buttons and sliding it off his shoulders. He looks down at his chest and arms, thinking over the assignment before pointing to a UFO, a little corgi caught in its beam.
“My sister and I had this corgi. Actually a rescue. Runt of the litter some breeder assholes abandoned somewhere, but the dog was weird as hell. Always staring into space like it saw things beyond our comprehension. So we started joking Maybell was an alien. When weird things happened around the house, we blamed Maybell’s people. Running joke, you know. But I loved that damn dog.”
Steve smiles and looks at the tattoo again, reaching out to brush over the lines. “Your work or someone else’s?”
“Someone else’s. Kylie. Met her at a convention about fifteen years ago. We dated for a few months. Did a few pieces on each other. Still talk occasionally or catch up when we run into each other.”
Steve nods. “What about one you did?”
“Yeah, okay.” Bucky stands up and starts on the button of his jeans. Steve’s breath sticks in his throat, his bottom lip hanging open. The entirety of space and time seems to narrow down to Bucky shimmying his skinny jeans down his hips and thighs and calves, pulling them off his ankles, and tossing them toward a laundry hamper in the corner.
“Fuck, look at you.” Steve had glimpsed Bucky’s legs before through rips in his other clothes, but it’s something else to see them bare, covered in tattoos and dark brown hair. They’re thick and muscular, perfect for squeezing with a full hand, perfect for pushing open to get a mouth on one body part or another.
Bucky sits back down on the sofa in just his underwear, reaching for Steve’s hand and forcing him to extend a single finger before using it to trace the lines of a tattoo on his right thigh. It’s a man in ancient armor done in shades of black and bronze.
“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that every LGBTQ plus person who loves tattoos has to have at least one gay as hell tattoo. Meet Achilles.”
Steve keeps tracing the lines, circling Bucky’s skin over and over even after Bucky lets go. “That’s a really nice tattoo.”
“I’ve been told I’m a pretty okay tattoo artist.”
“Acceptable enough.”
Bucky’s eyes flit down to Steve’s legs, still clad in denim. “Can I see how yours healed up?”
“Sure, sure. I’ll pretend you aren’t just trying to get me naked.” Steve reaches for the button on his own jeans. Beside him, Bucky gives him a wink, leaning back on the arm to watch Steve undress with open interest. Steve goes ahead and liberates himself from the mesh shirt too, not at all trying to hide his body’s reaction to Bucky licking his lips.
“Looks great.” Bucky sits back up, his hand finding the tattoo on Steve’s hip first, tracing the lines. “You switch then?”
“What?”
“You mentioned something about being inside of him but also having him inside of you. You like it both ways?”
“Oh. Yeah. I do.” Steve clears his throat and recovers, trying to think of what he’s read since he rejoined the living. “I think I’m more dominant though no matter. Topping from the bottom? That’s a thing?”
“It’s a thing.”
“Yeah. I never imagined so many words for things I just used to do. We just did it. I mean, we had slang for acts, but not so much for…”
“It’s okay. It’s okay to just like what you like and not define every little thing.”
“I mostly like being in charge, but, hell really I think it depends on the gender of my partner too. I love it when women boss me around. But with fellas, I…”
“Usually like to do the bossing?”
“Yes.”
“That’s okay, Steve. You’re more than welcome tell me what to do. Go on and pull my hair while you’re at it.”
Steve sinks back onto the couch, taking Bucky’s face in his hands. “I’ve been dying to get my hands in that hair of yours for a while now. But right now, Buck, I want you to kiss me.”
Bucky follows orders beautifully, kissing Steve for what feels like hours, both of their hands wandering over miles of skin. They only break apart when Bucky yawns.
“You okay?”
“No, it’s, I want…” Bucky yawns again and looks down at his lap with a frown. “I’ll make coffee.” He starts to get up, yawning for a third time when Steve gently grasps his wrist.
“I’ll still want to make time with you tomorrow, Buck. And the day after that. And as many times as you’ll let me.”
“Stay then? Stay then and have me in the morning.”
“You bossing me around now?” Steve teases, but he runs his fingers through the loose pieces of Bucky’s hair and kisses his forehead. “You want me in your bed or down here?”
“Bed,” Bucky says, reaching back to let his hair down, and wow, what a sight that is—all loose waves of brown and gray. “Please, in my bed.”
And so together they ascend the little wooden staircase leading to Bucky’s mattress, crawling under the covers and curling up tight together, Steve planting a kiss on the nape of his neck before drifting off to sleep.
Morning comes at 5 a.m. with Steve waking up to movement in the bed. Bucky’s awake, lazily rocking his hips back into Steve. Like their dance at the club but slower and less rhythmic.
“You trying to get my attention?” Steve asks, voice hoarse with sleep.
“Want.”
“Yeah?” Steve asks. “God, I remember waking up in the middle of the night next to a gorgeous fella. Something about that feeling in the middle of the night, like you just wanna rock into each other. A slow, lazy kind of fuck, right? That what you need, Buck? Need me to take care of you?”
Bucky groans softly in response.
“I’ve got you. Gonna suck you. That okay?”
“Steve.” And fuck, he’s never once heard Bucky sound so needy in their entire time knowing each other. It’s a sound that will live in Steve’s head forever. He wishes he could somehow get it tattooed, but the crystal clear memory will be enough.
It takes some maneuvering to crawl down Bucky’s body on the small bed, but he manages it, even getting in a few open-mouthed kisses on the way—on his neck, on his ribcage, on one of his hips. He doesn’t move Bucky’s underwear far, but he moves them enough, grateful for the city light filtering in that lets him see Bucky’s cock, hard between his legs. It’s not a porn star cock. Average, maybe a little smaller. But Steve’s not greedy, and it’ll be plenty to get off on anytime Bucky puts it in him.
“You’re fucking perfect,” Steve says before opening his mouth and letting Bucky slip between his lips. No teasing, not like this. But he does match the vibe of the late-night, early morning. He sucks Bucky lazily like he has all the time in the world. Beneath him, Bucky fills the air with quiet groans and heavy breaths and occasional whispers of, “Steve.”
In his own underwear, Steve wraps his hand around his own cock and strokes it in time.
“Don’t,” Bucky sighs.
“Hmm?”
“Don’t come. Just. Just hold me again. Inside. I mean….Fuck.”
“Shh. It’s okay, Buck. I know what you’re asking. Lube?”
“Mmm.” Bucky lazily points at the shelf next to the bed where he has a phone stand and little wooden jewelry box covered in hand-painted classic tattoo designs. Inside, Steve finds a small bottle.
“Gonna roll onto your side again for me, sweet boy?”
With a soft moan of approval, Bucky turns toward the wall. Steve plants a kiss on the apex of his spine, slipping a glistening finger between the cleft of his ass, earning him a gentle sigh of relief from the man beside him.
“I’ve got you. I’ll always have you as long as you’ll have me.”
Bucky doesn’t say anything, and Steve doesn’t need him to. Not right now. Steve hasn’t been able to enjoy the half-asleep feeling of a middle-of-the-night jerk or fuck in a long time. The serum doesn’t give him half-asleep, not unless he’s days into a fight with no sleep, and even then it’s usually more of a bone-deep weariness than anything less than completely asleep or utterly alert.
But Bucky can still enjoy it and Steve can live vicariously, can remember how it felt to have someone inside of you or around you, to drift through time and space with nothing anchoring you except the feeling of that space where bodies meet. When he finally slicks Bucky up enough to start the slow dip inside, Steve lets himself drift all the same—falling into those memories instead of the space where sleep and consciousness meet. Bucky is simultaneously his past, present, and future. He’s Arthur, the fella who always invited him to the Hotel St. George and paid for their room for the night. He’s Steve’s first gal, sneaking him into her room at a boarding house to have him on the floor in the moonlight. He’s a bunch of names lost behind that partition where memories get fuzzy and worn. He’s Marc and Marguerite. And best of all, he’s Bucky. The here, the now, the tomorrow Steve refuses to give up.
It’s during that thought that Bucky’s blunt nails dig into Steve’s forearm, his sleep-drunk sighs and moans getting more frantic, his body coming alive beside Steve’s on the bed, rocking and rolling into Steve with more and more fervor.
“You waking up on me?”
“Harder. More.”
“Whatever you want, whenever you want it.” Steve holds Bucky tighter against him, pushing his hips harder, both of them writhing on the sheets. He feels one corner come loose from the mattress with a quiet pop. A pillow falls to the floor below—an acceptable casualty. It’s not enough.
“No, fuck, why?” Bucky protests when Steve pulls out.
“Don’t worry. I won’t make you wait long.” He rolls Bucky onto his back and crawls between his thighs—his perfect, juicy, hairy fucking thighs—and pulls them up around his hips, finding him wet and open, pushing back inside with hunger.
Now. Now he can give Bucky what he needs, hips pumping, cock slipping in and out with a steady rhythm. Of course, the position has other advantages. He can see Bucky’s face in the glow from the windows, sweaty hair fanned around it like a halo. He can see the pleasure written on his skin like so much ink. He can see Bucky’s cock full and heavy in its bed of dark curls.
“Need me to jerk you too?”
“Please, fuck.” Steve wraps a hand around him and does just that, jerking and fucking Bucky until he lets out the loudest groan of the early morning, cursing and swearing with every drop of come Steve wrings out of him.
“Did you…?” Bucky looks down when Steve pulls out. “I can...”
“You can lie there and look pretty. I’m close.” It doesn’t take longer than thirty seconds for Steve to finish himself off, coming on Bucky’s thighs and belly with a deep groan. From there, it’s just a matter of running his tongue over Bucky’s skin, enjoying the taste of them mingled together, sharing that taste with Bucky.
When they’re done kissing, Steve makes the climb down to the main floor to get a cool washcloth. Bucky’s fallen back asleep by the time he gets to the bed. He quietly wipes the come and sweat from Bucky’s skin anyway before cleaning himself up and slotting their bodies again once more.
Around 9 a.m., Bucky wakes him up again with a single sentence, “Want my dick in your ass?”
By the time they crawl down the stairs out of Bucky’s bed, Steve knows he was right. Bucky’s cock is more than plenty, especially when he’s so good at following orders.
A toast and eggs breakfast is good. Making out in Bucky’s kitchenette is better.
And then it’s an unfortunate goodbye, Bucky off to work and Steve off to fill his day.
“I don’t want to cling,” Bucky says. “But…”
“What time should I bring dinner over?”
The crinkle of those laugh lines when Bucky smiles will never get old. Not now, not when there are a hundred more wrinkles beside them.
“I’ll text you when I start closing up the shop.”
Later, after the plates have been cleared, after he and Bucky have fucked each other sweet and slow and loving atop clean sheets that will definitely need to be washed again tomorrow, Steve asks.
“Do you know yet?”
“Hmm?”
“What will be enough with me.”
Fingers twine with his, bringing his hand to Bucky’s lips where he kisses the back of Steve’s knuckles. “I’m starting to.”
The next two months pass by in a sea of bliss that laps against the shores of apprenticeship toiling. Sometimes, it’s annoying and Steve longs for the day he actually gets to start working on skin, but he gets it at the same time. He’s learning the ins and outs of a shop—how it runs, what it means for something to be clean in a way that keeps everyone safe. He’s also learning how to translate his art skills to things that will work on a body. It’s all stuff that’ll be useful whether he chooses to work at Pins and Needles indefinitely or whether he chooses a different path.
On the bright side, he always knows when Bucky has a cancellation, an inside loop that means Steve already has five more tattoos. There’s a peony on his right calf, a set of WW1 era dog tags on one of his shoulders with his father’s name, a stack of books in the colors of the queer flag, a little plate of gnocchi and chicken parm, and an artist’s palette and sketchbook—a very cool piece combining grayscale with bright splashes of colors.
There are other things he wants. He knows he wants something for his Ma, but he wants what he decides on to feel perfect and right and he hasn’t gotten there yet. So for now, he waits, secure in the knowledge that when he figures it out, he’ll be in the best possible hands.
“I think you should get a peach emoji,” Bucky says, “right. Here.” His hand playfully slaps Steve’s ass, leading to a few minutes of them making out against the shop counter. They’re alone, the other artists either in their respective rooms with clients or gone for the day.
Kiss complete enough for Steve’s brain to start coming back online, he’s about to think of a retort when the shop bell jingles, forcing him to at least put a professional amount of distance between him and Bucky. Steve turns toward the potential client, ready to do his duty as a good apprentice, a smile on his face. But the smile falters at the sight of the woman just inside the door.
Red hair, tight faux leather leggings, a black tank top, and a red leather jacket. Large sunglasses hide half her face, but Steve would know it anywhere.
“Wow. Nice digs, Rogers.” She gives him a faint smile. “Digging the beard too.”
Steve’s hand goes to his face, to the mass of dark blond hair on his chin. Bucky likes it too, and it was the way he’d practically jumped Steve’s bones the first time Steve missed a few days shaving that led to Steve growing it out even longer.
“I’m not coming back,” Steve says, defensive of both his new life and this place. “I chose something else.”
Romanoff puts her hands up. “Relax, I’m not here to fetch you.”
“Then why are you here?”
With a sigh, Romanoff removes the sunglasses, tucking them into her back pocket. “Maybe I want a tattoo.”
“Do you want a tattoo?”
Romanoff looks down at her feet and pops a piece of gum Steve hadn’t even realized she had. “Maybe some other time.” With a blank look on her face, Romanoff takes a couple of steps and puts a folder down on the shop counter before turning to leave. At the door, she hesitates.
“You know, I never felt like I belonged here and now either. I think maybe if you’d stuck around, we might have been something like friends. Maybe we still can be.”
Steve waits until he doesn’t hear her heels on the stairs anymore before he reaches for the folder. He expects a mission or some other tactic by Shield to try and get him back. But…
“Oh.”
A myriad of things falls out of the folder—newspaper clippings, copies of legal documents and pages from books, a photo, and a single note on white card stock.
Saw the post you made about your tattoo. Had some time to dig. -🕷
Bucky finds Steve sobbing a few moments later, poring over the contents of the folder with profound and bittersweet joy.
“Stevie, sweetheart, you okay?”
“She found them,” Steve says. “Fuck, she…”
He pushes the papers toward Bucky as he finishes reading them. Some, he has to translate aloud. The overall picture though is…
“They survived the war and died old almost back to back,” Bucky says, picking up the photo and smiling. “You really did capture them perfectly, wow. Look at your sweethearts. What a pair.”
“They were asked about working with me and the Howlies in an interview for a local newspaper,” Steve says, staring at a photocopied clipping. “They were in their eighties here.”
“What’s it say?”
“'The time we spent on a mission with the Captain and his Commandos was some of the most challenging and terrifying of the war.' That’s Marguerite. Then Marc. 'But knowing Steve Rogers, we would not trade a single, wonderful moment. We loved him and still miss him terribly, now and always.'"
Bucky finds Steve’s shoulder and squeezes it. “You wanna take lunch early? If you need to take the rest of the day too, that’s—”
Steve shakes his head. “No, I’ll always miss them, but I already processed losing them and all the dreams they represented the best that I can. Getting to know they got their happy ending, that’s… That’s a gift, Buck, one I didn’t expect. It’s the closure I didn’t think I’d ever…” Steve clears his throat.
Bucky nods and wraps his arms around Steve’s waist, squeezing tight. “I’m glad you got it. And now you’ve got their story and you can tell the world even more about them. I mean, they were activists until they died. Marguerite got arrested at eighty-five for punching a Neo-Nazi in the face.”
“She was incredible. They both were.”
Bucky reaches out and thumbs the photo of them again, the two of them slightly older than Steve knew them, posing together in the small garden outside a country home. “I can’t say I don’t hope our story ends similarly. You can still have that dream, you know? Maybe not the way you expected, but you can.”
Steve reaches out to tuck a stray hair behind Bucky’s ear. “A lifetime of happiness, huh? Ups and downs—the good, bad, and ugly of it all—together?”
Bucky shrugs. “Happiness and trying our best to leave the world a little better than we found it? I can think of worse lives to lead.”
“Hasn’t been that long,” Steve says. “You really think we have what it takes to make it that far?”
“You and me, Stevie? I think we can ride all the way. End of the line.”
On the stairs leading to the shop, Steve hears footsteps again. Later, he’ll call Romanoff and thank her and see if she meant what she said about being friends outside of work. She’ll meet him for lunch and convince him to finally get in touch with Fury to resign formally, and Steve will realize that maybe he hadn’t given Fury and Shield a fair shake when Fury outright says, “My best friend is a superpowered lesbian who lives in outer space, and I’ve been with my husband for almost forty years. You really think you didn’t have Shield’s full support if you wanted it, Rogers? Why do you think we called you so many goddamn times? Anyway, if you want to keep the shield, let me know so I can make sure it looks like it disappeared. And let Coulson know when you start tattooing. You know he’ll be first in line.”
Later still, Steve’ll write up Marc and Marguerite’s story and make sure it gets told. It will, and there will be books and PBS specials that honor the legacy they deserved to have. He’ll make sure the Howlies who are gone are properly remembered too, that people know queer history includes some of them as well. He’ll also start scholarship programs for apprentices and pay tuition and student loans for anyone who works at Pride books currently or in the future. He’ll get a bigger apartment, and it’ll become a crash pad for anyone who gets kicked out of their home, for anyone who needs to leave a war—literal or metaphorical.
He’ll invite Bucky to live there too, and he’ll say yes. Nat will find a photo of Sarah Rogers buried in the basement of a library, and Bucky will spend hours making sure it’s exactly right, down to every single strand of blonde hair. It’s Bucky too who will eventually tattoo a line of black around Steve’s ring finger before letting Steve give him the same tattoo in return. And their lives won’t always be bliss. There will be fights and loss and pain along the way, but it’ll be like Bucky said once about his own life. They’ll be content. They’ll be able to keep living, to keep trying. And they’ll be able to do it together.
But that’s later.
For now, Steve allows himself a few indulgent moments of staring at Bucky, at soaking up this second chance at soul-consuming love the universe has granted him.
Feeling warm and whole deep in his bones, Steve leans forward and gives Bucky one more kiss. Then he turns a smile toward the shop entrance and gets back to work.