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In the grand scheme of Bucky’s crazy-ass life, learning that Sam can talk to birds barely even ranks on the insane scale. Bucky regularly eats pizza with a Norse god and a robot-man whose voice used to come out of his ceiling, so Sam’s occasional ‘ good morning’ to the pigeons on the sidewalk is just weirdly polite, rather than regular weird.
And then Sam goes and makes it regular weird, too.
They’re coming off a mission in the Alps and Bucky’s looking forward to maybe getting a bit of shut-eye on the floor of the quinjet on the way home, except as soon as he sits down Sam sits right behind him and the next thing he knows, Sam’s picking things out of his hair. Like, little leaves and twigs and pine needles and shit he’s picked up in the woods. Shit a shower would have gotten out just fine, but when he tells Sam that, Sam just responds that he’s almost done and goes right back to pulling pine needles out of his hair.
Steve’s pine needles are left intact, he notices but doesn’t mention, because Steve’s giving him this look that Bucky can’t decipher. This pleased-yet-confused look that he’s been giving Bucky lately whenever Sam’s around. Bucky thinks it’s probably because he’s doing such a good job of not overreacting to Sam’s weirdness.
Sam gets a new coat.
That’s not right.
Sam actually gets a succession of new coats, and Bucky asks him if he’s having trouble acclimating to the New York winter, but Sam just squints at him and says no, and goes right back to shooting aliens from the inside of his puffy purple parka. He looks like an angry gay marshmallow and Bucky tells him so. Sam frowns, like he isn’t sure what to do with that information, and the next time they go on a mission the purple jacket has been replaced by an honest-to-god yellow raincoat, like he’s Paddington Bear or something. He shows up at the team debrief and Tony chokes on his coffee and Natasha asks where he’d even found such a monstrosity.
“The robins like it,” Sam tells her, affronted, and sits in his usual seat with a crinkle of plastic.
“Well, then,” Clint says from the other end of the table, with the slightly dazed look of someone who’s having the best day of their life. “If the robins like it.”
Sam has to take the raincoat off to put his wings on, and it doesn’t make a reappearance at team dinner after the mission. He looks a little glum in comparison now, in just his usual grey jacket.
“Your boyfriend’s acting weird,” Bucky hisses at Steve over his shawarma.
“Yeah,” Steve agrees sadly. “He was really hoping you’d like the raincoat.”
Bucky stares at his plate like maybe the shredded lettuce will offer some clarity.
“He was hoping I’d like the raincoat?”
“He thought yellow would appeal to you.”
“He thought yellow would appeal to me?”
He’s talking too loud and the rest of the table has hushed to stare at him. Steve picks up his plate to go and sit next to Sam, nudging him softly with his elbow and putting a kiss in his hair when Sam leans into him.
Bucky looks back at the rest of the team as if to say, Do you see what I’m dealing with here? But they’re still looking at him like he’s the weird one.
Clint has that ecstatic expression again.
And then the rocks start showing up.
The first one is left on Bucky’s honest-to-god pillow, some weird multicoloured square looking thing. Bucky puts it in the incinerator in Tony’s lab and then has FRIDAY run fourteen back-to-back security checks to find out how a stranger got into his quarters. He spends the next three days making compulsive rounds of the compound looking for breaches while Tony interrogates him for details on what exactly the thing had looked like.
It isn’t until two weeks later that Sam entirely-too-casually asks if he’d liked the bismuth and Bucky connects the dots. He looks to Steve to back up his “blow up first ask questions later” approach to unknown items, but Steve only looks at him pitifully and tells him to apologise.
So Bucky does.
He’s rewarded two days later with a smooth piece of glass the size of his fist, shot through with what looks like hairs of gold.
Sam calls it “rutilated quartz.” He’s glad Bucky likes it.
A shard of polished onyx shows up outside his bedroom door. Bucky, bewildered as to what else to do with it, puts it with the quartz on the dresser in his room. Next to it goes the tiger’s eye that appears on top of his toothpaste. The pumice that arrives next is so light and fragile that Sam has to replace it with a larger version after Bucky accidentally crushes the first one.
The top of his dresser is starting to look very crowded.
And Bucky still doesn’t know why Sam’s doing it.
“You’ve gotta say something to him, Stevie.”
“Why me? He left it for you.” Steve looks at him meaningfully. “Maybe he’s trying to tell you something.”
Bucky levels a finger at him.
“No, he is not. Not at all.”
“It’s just a rock,” Steve tells him, deliberately obtuse. Bucky holds out the stalactite.
“This is a dildo, Steve. Look at it. It’s a dildo if I have ever seen one.”
“Have you ever seen one?” Steve asks, all crooked smile piece-of-shit glint in his eye that’s gotten Bucky into more scraps than he can count.
“That’s not the point,” Bucky hisses, and waves the green rock dildo at him. “Why isn’t Sam giving weird rocks to you? You’re the one he’s dating!”
“Maybe that’s why he’s giving them to you,” Steve says, corner of his mouth twitching up a little higher, and he reaches out to curl his hand around Bucky’s where he’s still holding the stalactite. Bucky finds himself looking at their fingers wrapped around the hard shaft of the—
“Oh!” Sam says from behind them, and Bucky leaps away from Steve.
“We were just—” he starts to explain, inexplicably flushing, and then he realises he’s still holding the dick rock and he sets it down quickly with an audible thump. Sam gives him a blazing smile.
“You like it?” he says. He’s wearing his jogging clothes. His teeth are blindingly white against the sheen of sweat on his dark skin. Bucky, who has been known to keep his focus on a target for twenty nine and a half hours straight, can’t seem to figure out where to look.
“I think it’s wonderful, Sam,” Steve says with a wide grin. He closes his laptop and rises from the table to peck a kiss on the corner of Sam’s mouth. “You should tell Bucky all about it.”
“I found it in an antique shop,” Sam says proudly. “The crows helped me pick it.”
Bucky imagines Sam holding up a catalogue of increasingly well-endowed rocks to a bunch of birds, and feels a hysterical laugh gurgle somewhere in his chest. Oh, god, he’s not cut out for this.
“Sam,” he says. Pauses. Looks down at the stalactite. Looks back up at Sam. “Listen, I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but—”
“The crows particularly liked the shape of this one,” Sam says meaningfully. Bucky tries to let the sentence float in one ear and then right out the other.
“So… The grooming,” he eventually says. “And the clothes. And now the rocks. And the rocks are cool, don’t get me wrong, but. You know. It’s, well. It’s a little weird, is all.”
Sam’s shoulders slumped.
“You don’t like them.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“The crows were sure you would like this one.”
“Sam. Why are you bringing me rocks that you think I’ll like?”
A pause.
“Isn’t the answer to that question self-contained?”
“Dammit, Sam!”
Bucky can almost see bulkhead doors slamming shut behind Sam’s eyes. He tries a softer approach.
“I mean, why me, Sam? They’re cool, but I have to get FRIDAY to identify half of them. So maybe Steve…?”
“Penguins do it,” Sam says quietly. Bucky pauses, trying to connect their current conversation to the topic of penguins.
“Uh?”
“Penguins,” Sam repeats. “They move pebbles around. There isn’t a whole lot down there, you know, just snow and ice. And rocks. So that’s what they give. They search through piles and piles of pebbles to find one ideally suited and then they give it to their—to their mate. They’ve got nothing. Nothing but pebbles, and so they give pebbles.”
“Sam, buddy, I’m totally lost here. Why are you—”
“Central Park Zoo has a small colony of penguins, and they were certain. A good pebble, that’s what they told me. Except you’ve already had so many grey and black things, and the bowerbirds were convinced that colourful pebbles would be even better, so…”
“Wait, wait. Are you telling me you’ve been taking advice from birds at the zoo?”
“Yes! They have so much experience finding life partners, and—” he pauses. “Well, all of them except the ducks.” He looks down at his body, and the slight bulge of his crotch beneath the fabric of his sweats. “I can’t do the thing that ducks do, so their advice wasn’t very helpful.”
Bucky misses the look on Sam’s face because his brain is doing some complicated mathematics. He keeps trying to add ‘Sam giving him gifts’ with ‘Sam looking for a life partner’, but the two halves of the equation refuse to match up. He feels like he’s missing something.
“Sam,” he says slowly.
And then the mission alarm goes off.
They don’t get back for days, and by then Bucky’s too tired to deal with whatever relationship crisis Sam seems to be having.
The stalactite ends up on the kitchen windowsill, and no one mentions it at breakfast the next morning. Or the morning after that.
It’s not until the next week that Bucky and Sam are alone again. It’s not that Bucky’s been avoiding him, it’s just that… no, well, yes, okay. He has been avoiding Sam. He just doesn’t know what to do with the idea of Sam copying bird courtship rituals. He doesn’t know what to do with the idea of Sam copying bird courtship rituals at him.
And then he arrives at the compound gym in his favourite pre-sunrise slot, and Sam’s already there.
“Bucky!” he says, and then he makes finger guns at the ceiling and FRIDAY starts playing a song. It’s a lovely, crooning song with a steady beat that Bucky feels in his toes.
And Sam…
Sam begins to dance.
“I—” Bucky says, and his sentence screeches to a halt because Sam is doing some kind of mid-air pirouette that ends in a flying kick to one of the punching bags, and Bucky doesn’t know what to do.
Sixteen twirls, two cartwheels, and a single hip-thrust later and Sam ends with a head-over-ass midair twist that lands him directly in front of Bucky, light on his toes like a baller-fucking-rina. Sam bows a little, glowing with exertion.
“Um,” Bucky says.
“Did you like it?”
“Er.” He blinks, looks around at the gym like the treadmill will offer direction. “Yes?”
Sam beams at him, only slightly out of breath. The song fades out, and the one that comes on next is deep and throbbing. Bucky feels it in his ribs. Sam looks at him expectantly and Bucky fidgets with his water bottle, certain he’s missing some kind of cue.
“I gotta—” he eventually says, waving vaguely in the direction of the cardio machines.
“Of course,” Sam says, and leans in. For a moment Bucky thinks they’re about to hug, but instead Sam’s lips touch the corner of his mouth, just briefly, and then Sam’s walking away and it’s just Bucky and the thumping bassline from the speakers.
Sam saunters out of the room and Bucky’s so distracted he forgets to set the treadmill to enhanced mode, and accidentally sends it through a wall.
For the next three weeks, stones keep showing up on Bucky’s pillow. He’s developing quite the collection.
Every time a new one shows up he shows it to FRIDAY and together they figure out what the hell it is, and then he writes the name on a little notecard and puts the stone on the dresser under his machete. Snowflake obsidian, Apache tears, a trilobite, rose quartz, white marble laced with gold, petrified wood. A tiny fish skeleton on a plate of shale. Thunder eggs.
And, every second week or so, Sam’s waiting for Bucky in the gym at sunrise to show him his newest dance.
The dances are getting steamier.
The last one had twerking in it. Bucky’s going to have Sam’s ass tattooed on the inside of his eyelids before this is over.
“Did you guys break up?” he asks Steve one day.
“Why would you ask that?”
Bucky blushes furiously and tries to hide it behind his orange juice. “I think your boyfriend is trying to court me.”
“He wouldn’t need to break up with me to do that.”
Bucky boggles at him. “He what?”
“He’s already got me,” Steve tells him easily, then gives Bucky another one of those shit-stirring grins. “You have to know you’ve got me, too,” he adds.
Sam waltzes in then, like he knew Bucky was five seconds from an aneurysm. He walks into Steve’s arms to get a morning kiss, then steals Steve’s poptart as it comes out of the toaster and goes to join Bucky at the counter, scooching his chair right over so they’re touching from shoulder to knee. Bucky can’t even pay attention to the conversation when Sam’s touching him like this, his leg hot against his own. Sam is idly filing his fingers through Bucky’s hair, pulling softly at the knots while he eats Steve’s poptart with his other hand and discusses some podcast with his mouth full.
Bucky tries not to hyperventilate into his cereal. Steve is standing right there. Steve is—
Steve is standing right there and watching , is what Steve is doing. Watching with a soft, fond smile on his lips.
Sam finishes the poptart and pecks a sugary kiss to Bucky’s cheek, then goes to take a shower.
Steve’s smile goes even fonder.
Bucky sits on his bed and looks at his collection of fossils and gems and stones for a long time.
The fingers of the metal arm are made for death and destruction, not fine manipulation, but Bucky figures he’ll make it work okay.
Two feet of copper wire and three hours of twisting and cursing later, and Bucky has a falcon. Kind of. It looks kind of like a falcon if you check it from the right angle and aren’t looking for a particularly attractive falcon. It has two legs, two wings, and a beak, and when Sam sees it he’s going realise once and for all what a talentless fuckup he’s courting, and he will almost certainly give up trying.
Bucky thinks it’s probably worth the risk. He doesn’t have anything cool to give Sam. Everything he owns is either a knife or a gun. Or a gun with knives attached. So. Shitty twisted-wire falcon it is.
He leaves the godawful thing on Sam’s pillow and waits. Like Sam is some kind of weird geologically-inclined tooth fairy.
Sam takes the falcon and leaves a tiny little cactus in a tiny little pot.
Bucky puts the itty bitty cactus on the kitchen windowsill next to the malachite stalactite.
A week later Bucky’s pulling his pyjamas on when he gets a soft knock at the door. He opens it and there’s Steve, head ducked like he thinks he’ll fool Bucky into thinking he’s the demure little catholic that all the tabloids see, even though Bucky recognises that crooked fucking half-smile Steve’s failing to hide behind his bangs.
“Stevie,” he warns. But Steve just takes his elbow and steers him out of his room and down the hallway to Steve’s room.
Bucky pushes the bedroom door open and there’s Sam Goddamn Wilson, perched shirtless in the middle of Steve’s bed with piles of blankets and rubbish strewn around him, gazing at Bucky with the biggest fucking eyes like some kind of demented owl.
There’s a noise from the side table, and Bucky realises Steve’s laptop is nestled haphazardly among a pile of colourful pillows, and on the screen is a…
“Are you facetiming a bird?” Bucky asks.
“Bucky, Blue-Song,” Sam introduces. “Blue-Song, Bucky.”
Bucky waves at the monitor. Like an idiot. Blue-Song tweets a bit, and Bucky can’t help but feel that he’s being assessed.
By a bird.
Blue-Song chirps again and Sam shuffles the rubbish at his feet a bit more. “Better?” he asks, and Blue-Song gives an affirmative tweet.
Bucky looks closer at the piles of rubbish and realises they’re not rubbish. They’re bits of artwork, Bucky’s favourite books, pretty fabrics, a dvd of The Hobbit…
“Is this…” he starts. He looks at Steve for guidance but Steve is watching the whole interaction from the doorway like he has no intention of interceding.
“Is this a nest?” Bucky finally asks.
“A bower,” Sam corrects, while Blue-Song tweets disparagingly at Bucky. “Do you like it?”
“Sam…”
Sam’s whole face drops. “You don’t like it,” he says. He starts rearranging the books like maybe putting A Song of Ice and Fire on top of Priory of the Orange Tree will help. Blue-Song offers frantic advice from the laptop.
“I like it!” Bucky protests.
“I knew I should’ve included the guns,” Sam hisses to himself, not listening.
“No guns in bed,” Steve pipes up from the doorway, with the long-suffering voice of someone who has had this argument before.
“I do like it!” Bucky insists, and he takes two steps to the edge of the bed and wraps Sam in an awkward hug, leaning over the mattress into the bower-nest and feeling like an idiot.
Blue-Song makes an odd crooning noise and then pointedly flies away. The laptop screen goes blank and then it’s just Bucky, Sam, Steve, and the fucking bower-nest that Sam apparently made for Bucky.
“He likes it!” Sam sings at Steve over Bucky’s shoulder, and then does a funny face-nuzzle thing into Bucky’s cheeks. His stubble rasps gently on Bucky’s skin.
“You don’t have to do this for me,” Bucky eventually tells him, when it’s clear Sam has no intention of letting him out of the hug any time soon.
Sam tugs on him until Bucky has no choice but to tip awkwardly onto the mattress, landing in a pile of plastic bottles that he realises are his hair care products. He pulls his shampoo out from under his ass and puts it on the side table.
“Seriously, Sam. The rocks and the dances and everything… you don’t have to do any of that.”
“But I want to do it properly,” Sam says into his neck. “I want to romance you.”
“Yes,” Bucky says drily. “I got that.”
He eyes Steve over Sam’s shoulder and raises an eyebrow.
“You already have me,” Steve says with a shrug. “But Sam wanted to… make it special.”
“Special, huh?”
“You deserve special,” Sam says, his hands coming up to wind through Bucky’s hair. He rearranges himself until he’s practically in Bucky’s lap, legs curled around Bucky’s waist, ankles digging into the small of Bucky’s back.
“I’m no one special,” Bucky insists gently.
“You are to me.”
“Sam,” he says, “if that ain’t the sappiest shit…”
Sam hums into Bucky’s neck and pushes Bucky flat onto the bedspread. There’s something lumpy under Bucky’s spine which he has the sneaking suspicion is his favourite pair of socks.
Sam stretches out along Bucky’s right side, and Steve crawls up to lay on Bucky’s left, carefully avoiding the jars of chilli sauce in his way.
“Blue-Song has been teaching Sam how to make a bower big enough for three,” Steve tells Bucky, looking up at him from under his lashes. His mouth is practically touching the shoulder of Bucky’s metal arm.
“Is that so.”
“It’s very robust,” Sam promises. “We stress-tested it.”
Bucky has a pretty good idea of how Sam and Steve would have stress tested anything in this bedroom.
He looks around at it, at all of it. The treasures of his life, including the two human treasures in the middle of it. Steve’s big dumb face and his hand resting wide just below Bucky’s ribs. Sam’s smile pressed into the crook of his neck.
“Alright,” he says after a moment, mostly to himself. Then, louder, “So are you going to show me how you stress-tested it, or what?”
“Is that how birds do it?” Bucky asks some time later, kissing the closest body part, which turns out to be Steve’s elbow.
Sam hums. “Some of them,” he says lazily, fingers tickling the sensitive skin on the inside of Bucky’s thighs like he’s thinking of going again. “I didn’t even get to try all their courtship strategies, though. The parrots have a particularly good technique.”
Bucky smiles into the pillow, eyes drifting shut, cradled between his lovers. “What do parrots do?”
Sam rolls on top of him a little more, breath ghosting warmly through Bucky’s hair. Goosebumps waterfall down Bucky’s neck as Sam’s lips touch his cheekbone, the shell of his ear.
Sam takes a big breath which is all the warning Bucky gets before Sam is shouting directly into Bucky’s fucking brain.
“HEY SEXY,” he yells, “SEXY SEXY, PRETTY BABY, WANNA SEXY SEXY WITH ME? SHOW ME YOUR—”
Steve tosses them both onto the floor, where Sam continues to shout into Bucky’s ear while Bucky tries to burrito him into a blanket, pelting him with pillows as he does.
Parrots don’t know shit about courtship, he decides.
Besides, he already has a favourite bird.