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The asset leaves Rogers there, on the banks of the river that runs slow with oil and metal and bodies. Blood twisting in the ripples. Fire licking at the sky. He walks, because it is simple. It is something he knows how to do. It is something he can keep doing even as his thoughts grind against each other, splinter into ice that scrapes at the inside of his skull.
Pierce is dead. With him goes the Department.
With him goes everything the asset knows. No objectives. No place to go. No respite from thought. No cold. With him goes the last fence that kept the wolves from the asset’s mind.
The light stabs through his eyes. Smears red as the way Rogers’ blood had drenched his hand. His fingers. He limps downriver. Bone grinds in his pelvis with every step. His spine is a searing twist of agony.
He should report, but he doesn’t know where to report to, who to report to. He has no safehouses to lie low in, for the sort of failure that led to lying low was never an option.
He stops for a moment. Rests against a tree. Breathes shallowly, because his head is on fire, too small for his racing thoughts, a torment. Spits blood, then vomits. The wrench at his spine, his stomach, has him locking rigid against the tree, grinding his teeth. He would kneel. Beg for the cold.
No one will give it to him.
It’s time to run, but he was never taught how.
The agony of freedom.
-
The asset steals a sweatshirt, jeans, tennis shoes. Scavenges food from dumpsters, sleeps in forests, empty doorways. Melts into the crowds that swirl through D.C. Waits for orders that never come. Checks Department X sites and finds them stripped clean, as though even the small slivers of memory that he has kept through every frozen sleep – that they exist, he belongs to them, he is their tool, he is made by them – have melted into nothing.
His headaches grow worse. He rarely sleeps, because when he does nightmares press on him like snowdrifts. Rogers’ hand outstretched as the asset falls into a cold unknown. Blood on ice. The pinprick of needles. The sad resignation in Rogers’ voice as he told the asset that he wouldn’t fight him.
The asset hates Rogers for his certainty that there is more to the asset than silence, a naked blade, a mission.
Yet there’s something there. Something he hesitates to call memory. He knew Rogers once. He had-
He can’t remember what they were to each other. The enormity of it engulfs him.
One day, when his headache has receded, when he feels well enough to move, he goes to the Smithsonian. He walks into a room that bears his face everywhere. It tells a story that is not his story. There are vague flashes of something – scalpels, fireworks, a hand on his shoulder – but they feel as invasive as anything the Department did to him.
Standing in front of the costume exhibit, staring at the clothes that might fit him, he spots a thin slip of paper tucked into the collar. A telephone number and a name: Steve Rogers.
He takes it with him to the place he’s found beneath the bridge. Keeps it tucked in his shirt when he curls up that night to sleep, even as the motion jars his hips and spine into agony. His left arm has grown slow. It requires maintenance he was never trained to do.
In the morning, he palms a cheap cellphone and prepaid SIM card from a nearby kiosk. On his way to the dumpsters in back of a restaurant – Italian, he had liked it once, the thoughts insist – he dials the number. His throat is dry. Tongue numb.
Rogers picks up on the first ring.
“Bucky,” he says, and his voice tears at the asset’s ears. He’s supposed to know that voice, it’s supposed to mean something, the terrible affection in it.
“That’s not my name,” he says.
A pause. Rogers, breathing into the line. “All right,” he says, and he sounds resigned. “But you saw the exhibit, you saw that Bucky’s face is yours.”
“I am not him.”
“Then who are you?”
He wakes. He kills. Once in a while, through the gray haze of memories pushing into his skull, crowding out his thoughts, he would think he remembered something other than killing, but then they would hold him down and grant him the absolute peace of nothingness.
He swallows. “I am a weapon. I kill. There is nothing else.”
“You can be something else,” Rogers says, and his voice is gentle and sad, and the asset has never known a voice like it. No one has ever spoken to him like he might feel pain. Like his pain is worth something.
“What was I to you?” he asks, and grips the phone tight. It cuts into the skin of his biological fingers. There’s a sickening feeling twisting in his stomach, a cliff’s edge.
There’s steel in Rogers’ voice. “You were mine. I was your captain.”
The asset wants that. The security of order. It’s how he’s lived. It’s what he knows. But Rogers is his enemy, his target, and though he can’t make himself kill Rogers, he can’t trust him enough to give himself over. Against protocol. Against the rules the Department burned into him.
“You were my target,” he says, helpless against Rogers’ stupid, selfless persistence in believing that there is something to him besides the orders, the weapon. This is the longest conversation he’s ever had with anyone.
“I know. You might not remember being Bucky, but I remember you, and I want to know who you are now. I would like the chance to earn your trust.”
The asset slides down the rough concrete wall of the alley. Flexes his sluggish mechanical fingers. Hates the slight hitch in his voice.
“There is nothing in me worthy of you.” He crushes the phone and hurls it away from him.
Rogers will hunt him. Will never stop hunting him. Because once they may have been something to each other. Once the asset might have been someone that could be wanted by someone else.
The asset will never be James Buchanan Barnes again. He does not know how. He will never know how.
The asset will run.
-
The asset crosses America on trains and buses and in the backs of trucks and cars. Searches each Department X site he can remember, finds most of them empty and shut down decades ago. His arm’s grown stiffer with each passing day as gears grind to a halt, and it takes precious seconds to rotate his wrist, to bend his elbow. Soon he will have to put it in a sling.
Worst of all are his headaches, the blinding agony that comes with too much choice, too many options. Memories that may not be his own expanding, razor-edged, inside his head.
In a one-stoplight town in California, he sleeps on the floor of an abandoned church among bird shit and the wreckage of pews, pilfered gun and pilfered ammo at his side, a hunting knife in his good hand. The pain in his head is like someone taking a dull needle and carefully piercing his left eye, the thin bone behind, boring it into his brain. He retches, slides sideways into a doze.
The asset startles awake at the sound of a floorboard creaking. Curls fingers about the knife. Glances down the aisle of the church without moving, to find a massive shadow in the doorway, blond hair glittering from the hunter's moon, flannel shirt, worn jeans.
"Take one more step and this knife goes between your eyes," he says, voice loud in the stillness. He rises, knife balanced in his good hand, the other one hovering over his holster.
Rogers grins, rueful, and sits right down on the floor. "Nice place you've picked."
The asset bares his teeth. "Why are you following me?"
"Because I want to help you," Rogers says, like the world is just that simple. Like the asset can deserve help. He lifts a bag at his side, drops it when the asset flips the knife in his hand to throw it.
"You came alone?" No choppers in the air. Only two people breathing. No crunch or rustle of dry grass.
"Yes."
The asset leans back against the remnants of the altar, keeps his knife ready. It's a lie, all of it. He couldn't kill this man before, he will never be able to kill him, but as long as Rogers believes it, he's safe from that terrible kindness.
"How long will you follow me?"
Rogers tests the column at his back before leaning against it. "As long as it takes me to gain your trust."
The asset doesn't remember what that is, but it doesn't seem to have been the feeling he had towards the Department: the certainty that he is a tool, their words his law, his breath, his bone turned towards their will. His obedience was rewarded with darkness and cold.
"You're having headaches," Rogers says, tilting his head. Moonlight falls on his face through a gap in the wood. Lights up his deep blue eyes. There's something - grief - in his expression, something the asset doesn't remember ever being directed at him. "We - I - read the files we got from the Department. It said you were likely to start having migraines without the structure of the Department."
Rogers nods at the bag next to him. "I brought all of the pain medication Pierce’s people had formulated for you. It's a proprietary blend, I guess because of the serum and what the Department did, but it should work-" he realizes he's babbling, snaps his mouth shut.
The asset is silent. His hand wavers. The moonlight quivers until he half-closes his left eye.
"The files said," and Rogers swallows, hard, "that since they took you in the war you've spent less than three years awake in total."
"Yes." Every time they woke him it was to a world remade. New words. New technology. New fears, but for the fear of death, which remained forever. "Are you going to force me to join you?"
Rogers closes his eyes, and the asset stares. Is that what trust is, to see the asset bloody and weary and armed, and to close his eyes believing that the asset won't harm him? Is that what Rogers wants from him?
"No," Rogers says at last, the words hard as stone, unyielding. "You have had-" and his voice shudders, "-so much forced on you. I won't force you more." He opens his eyes and pins the asset in place against the altar with his gaze, the belief there that he is good, and worthy, and all his sins are nothing against the trust in Rogers' face. "I want you to come to me because you want to. Because you believe that I won't hurt you, that I won't let anyone or anything harm you. Because you trust me."
The asset manages only to voice the fear that bubbles up in his dreams, "And if I never remember you?"
"You will still be my friend,” Rogers says without missing a beat. Simplicity itself.
How wonderful and how terrible, to believe in the goodness of people.
"You could order me," he says, and he doesn't know if he wants Rogers to or not, but there's a part of him that leaps at the thought, the security it represents. "I would come with you."
Rogers' expression hardens. His voice drops, and it's all the asset can do to keep his hand steady on the knife.
"Sam and Natasha have told me that people who've been what you've been through or people who've been in the military, sometimes they need orders to help put them back together when it's over. If you come back to me, if that's what you need, well-" his eyes seem to peel the asset apart, inch by inch, stare into the wounded core of him, his voice wrapping him in rough comfort, "-we can talk about it then. But I won't order you to come back. Your head's been messed with enough." Rogers looks away, hand clenching into a fist on the piece of wood he's been turning over, splintering it into dust. "You deserve that choice."
The asset frowns. "I am a killer.”
"You haven't killed anyone yet," Rogers says.
"I've killed over a hundred people. I know how it feels to snuff a man's life out with my hands around his throat. I killed a woman who'd stolen Hydra technology by breaking every bone in her body, one by one. It took days."
Rogers pales, but he's still looking at the asset, still offering that fucking hope, and the asset wants to bite him, to smash his face into blood and bone-
His ears pound with blood, his jaw tight, because who is Rogers, who is this man who's read his files, claims to know him, has seen all his horror and cares regardless? Who is he to pronounce judgment? To act as though the asset can be saved?
"I'm not worthy of you,” he says, cold, level.
He throws the knife.
Rogers twists out of the way and springs across the room to end up upright against a collapsing wall of the church, barely out of breath. Grief in his eyes, the set of his shoulders.
"That wasn't you," he says, quiet, conviction in his every syllable. "That was the weapon they made you. You're not that man any longer."
"Get out."
"Bucky-" Rogers steps forward, hand outstretched.
"I have made a choice," the asset throws the words back in his face.
Rogers swallows. His hand falls to his side. "All right," he says, and he sounds defeated, weakened, and the asset hates himself for making Rogers sound like that, because when he'd commanded it had eased the pain, made something inside him shiver with delight. Rogers heads for the door, leaves his back wide open to the asset and a gun with a bead straight between his shoulderblades, and the asset wants to hate him for that, but he can't, he doesn't.
Rogers pauses in the doorway. "There's an untraceable cell phone Tony designed in the bag. It has my number programmed into it, if you ever want to talk. Also," he turns enough for the asset to see his face, the incongruous gentleness of his expression even as he says, "Take the pills with you. I don't want you in pain."
It’s an order.
He leaves, broad shoulders filling the slanted door with shadow. His boots crunch through the sunburned grass until the sound fades, replaced by the faint roar of a motorcycle at the edge of the asset’s hearing.
The asset leans back against the altar. His good hand's shaking, his eyes blurred, but mostly he just wants Rogers back, to tell him what to do, to tell him that...
That it's not his fault.
(But it is.)
In the morning he pulls the knife out of the pillar and stuffs the pills into his duffel bag.
(He takes the goddamn phone.)
-
The end, when it comes, is simple. An old carbon-paper copy in an abandoned facility in Kiev with the imprint of numbers the asset remembers even now, numbers he'd held tight to himself as Schmidt worked on him; a note in crabbed handwriting approving the modification of one Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes for military purposes; a faded photograph of him on a metal table, his left shoulder broken wide, blood and bone, and coming into view, the arm he bears now.
He burns it all, then climbs Andrevsky Spusk to stare out across Kiev, towards the Dnipro River, frozen, the gray and crumbling apartment blocks on the other side.
He'd thought he'd be relieved, when the final proof came. When he could finally believe what Rogers has been telling him, all these months. That he is James Buchanan Barnes. Rogers’ Bucky.
There's no relief, only the stubborn emptiness of a life yet to be lived, the life Barnes - that laughing, open young man - never got to live.
How can he make up for what Barnes lost? How can his life - pathetic and broken as it is, as he is - be worthy of the man he once was?
He reaches into his jacket pocket for the cellphone Rogers gave him.
Rogers picks up on the first ring.
"Bucky."
"Rogers," Bucky says, then at last, testing the word in his mouth, "Steve."
"Did you find what you were looking for?" Steve asks, and there's such warmth in his voice, hope for Bucky to have done so, for him to be happy, and Bucky doesn't remember anyone wanting anything for him beyond the mission.
"Yes," Bucky says, and drops his head forward onto his knees, curls about the phone, that voice, the promise there. "I. I think I could remember. Who I was. But Steve-"
A pause, and then Steve's voice, trembling, hoarse, "Yes, Bucky, anything-"
"I don't- I'm not that man anymore, Steve, I don't know how to be him, I can't be as good as him-"
"Bucky, listen," Steve says, and the command eases the panic clawing at Bucky's spine. "I don't need you to be him, I don't expect you to be him. I'm not who I was seventy years ago either, and that's okay. The only thing I need is you to be safe, and happy, and I want to do whatever I can to help you be those things. Whatever you need."
He means it, is the thing. If Bucky asked him to let him go, if Bucky wanted to melt into the crowds of Kiev and live anonymously, forgotten by the world-
Steve would do it. It would break his great heart, a heart broken so many times before, but he would do it.
Maybe it's having that freedom, knowing he can take it back, that makes Bucky ready to give it up.
He lifts his head and stares into the driving wind. The cold drives tears from his eyes, so he feels no shame when he says, low and ragged,
"I think I can try to trust you."
Steve gasps into the phone, and then says, terrible with longing and joy,
"Oh, Bucky. Thank you."
-
Bucky knocks at Steve's door a week later. He's aware of how he looks - tangled hair tied back clumsily, too thin and swimming in a surplus Soviet jacket, stubbled - and it takes all his strength to stand still. To not run from the trust Steve's placing in him, letting a half-mad assassin stand outside his door. Steve's fought for him to be here, he must have - Bucky's all-too-aware that the remnants of SHIELD would like to see him burn.
The door opens. Steve fills the doorframe and gazes at him with such naked adoration it makes him flinch.
"I don't know if I’m worth-" Bucky begins, but Steve quiets him with one motion by reaching out, fisting his hands in the back of Bucky's jacket, bringing him in-
He's caught in Steve's grip, caged by the inexorable strength of his arms wrapped about his shoulders, and he's shaking with it-
No one has touched him with kindness in as long as he can remember.
Steve's holding him, cheek to cheek, his heart hammering against Bucky's chest, and there's utter certainty in his voice when he says into Bucky's ear,
"You were always worthy, Bucky. Always."
Bucky draws in a great heaving breath, then dares to lift his arms, to coil his fingers in the back of Steve's shirt and hold on, to trust that this - this he can keep.
"I think we're scandalizing the neighbors," Steve says at last, and he pulls Bucky into his apartment, closing the door behind him. The lock clicks shut, closing off one more escape route.
Bucky glances at the lock, and Steve pauses, looking between him and the door. "Do you want it-"
"No." Bucky gnaws at his lower lip, shifts, hands curling into fists. "There are other escape routes. I don't need that one." Then, quietly, offering, "I might not need to escape you."
Steve's smile is a brilliant, burning thing, something that could overcome the ice of cryo, and Bucky's transfixed.
"Let's get you a bath," Steve says. "This is the first place you and I have ever been with proper water pressure."
He leads Bucky down the hall, and Bucky - as ever - follows into the bathroom.
Steve's fussing over the taps, and Bucky stands and watches, absorbing this foreign, formless thing, having someone care for him. His training writhes, unsettled, in his mind, whispers, 'Weak,' but Steve's choosing to maintain him, and Steve has never been weak.
At last the tub's half-full, and Steve rises from the side of the tub to turn to Bucky. "I've got some extra towels in the cabinet, so I'll leave you to it-"
"Stay," Bucky blurts, even as he can't look Steve in the face, gaze sliding aside to the water. Water, rising over his shins, his knees, swallowing him into its frigid depths-
Steve's fingertips brush his stubbled cheek, and he blinks himself awake to find Steve very close. Light glitters in the fine hairs above his upper lip. His eyes are deep blue, warmer than cryo ever could be.
"Are you sure?" Steve asks.
Bucky swallows. "Please." He wants more of this feeling, this calm attention turned to him, this whisper that maybe he can trust Steve, believe Steve's good intentions.
"All right." Easy as breathing. Steve turns away to get out toiletries, and Bucky shrugs off his dirty jacket, unwinds his scarf, steps out of his ragged jeans.
Steve turns back, and Bucky thinks he should be shy, should be covering himself, but the asset never needed that, and there's a flicker of memory -
The two of them sharing a bed in Brooklyn as snow piled against the windows-
There are storm clouds gathering in Steve’s eyes, as he looks Bucky up and down, gaze lingering on the thick gnarls of scar tissue where Bucky's left arm attaches, but he says nothing, only urges Bucky into the tub.
It's warm, and he hasn't been warm in so long. He half-fears he can't trust it, because everything good, every small measure of peace, has always been bought with the obliteration of memory. With cryo.
"Sit back," Steve says, and Bucky obeys without thinking, bends his knees in front of him and rests his chin on them. Makes himself small, unthreatening.
"Steve."
"Yes?" Steve's cupping water in his hands, letting it sluice down Bucky's back, cutting rivers through caked blood and grime. The warmth soaks his bones.
"We. We shared a bed?"
Steve glances at him, a flicker of blue eyes, surprised twitch of the mouth. "Often, yeah."
"Were we lovers?" The Smithsonian exhibit hadn't mentioned it, but then it hadn't said anything about them sleeping in one bed, either.
"We were..." Steve pauses, then strokes one hand over the back of Bucky's neck before he turns to grab for the shampoo. The protection implied in the simple touch, the claim, settles the asset, the need twitching beneath his skin.
"We were always heading that way, it seemed. But at first it was the twenties, and then the war, and I lost you-“ Steve shakes his head, rueful, as though he's picking at an old wound.
Bucky absorbs that, silent.
"I'd like to wash your hair. Head forward or back?"
Water on his face, the pressure of Steve's thumb at his temple where scars from the wipes thread silver -
Bucky tenses, coils, metal fingers cutting into the porcelain, but Steve doesn't flinch.
Only gazes at him, expression aching. "I won't hurt you. Ever."
Bucky closes his eyes so he doesn't have to see Steve's face, the grief, when he says, "How else am I to learn?" He performed or he did not. When he performed, he was given the gift of time without pain. When he failed, his handlers hurt him. Simple behaviorism.
He doesn't remember how he learned that term. A mission, maybe.
Steve is still beside him, a great wall of warmth. Then he rests one hand on Bucky's shoulder, and the contact, the remembrance that someone can touch him without intent to harm, is a revelation.
It's new, and incredible, and even as he shivers, twitching with the unfamiliarity of it, he wants to keep it, this moment.
"You don't need pain anymore," Steve says, and Bucky glances at him, brow raised. A life without pain is something he can't conceive of.
Steve’s half-smile at his expression is tinged with grief, and Bucky wonders if this was something he used to do: stare at Steve, questioning, half-challenging.
But Steve only reaches out, and he lets Steve move him, tilt his head back for the shampoo, then the rinse, hair slicking black against his face until Steve combs it back with his fingers. Blunt, thick fingers that could twist his cervical vertebrae until they splinter, yet Steve touches him as if he's valuable, fragile. Wanted.
"There you are," Steve says as he pushes the last strands of hair out of Bucky's face.
Bucky glances down. The water swirls red and black with old blood and dirt, and he can imagine the stains it'll leave, how hard they'll be to get out.
"Don't worry about it," Steve says, following his gaze. "You used to bathe me in a tub almost as bad as this one, I'm just returning the favor."
Bucky makes a noncommittal noise, tries to shrug, and Steve’s attention darts to his left arm.
"How long has your arm been like this?" Steve reaches for Bucky's left arm, manipulates his fingers. They move easy, lax, their cunning machinery worn down. Bucky can barely feel the pressure of his grip, the sensors in need of maintenance.
"Two months."
"Two- goddamn it, Bucky, that's dangerous, you were half-"
"Very few things in this world are more dangerous than me, one-armed or not," Bucky cuts him off, and Steve's lips press together.
"I know you are," he says, letting go of Bucky's hand, "but it's not about you being dangerous, it's-" he flushes a bit, ears going red, "-it's that you weren't taken care of, you were suffering and no one did anything, and that's not right."
He seems upset on Bucky's behalf. Perturbed by Bucky not being 'taken care of,' as if weapons required more than basic maintenance. As if he doesn't see the essential separation between the man he knew and who Bucky is now, the vast chasm of years and horror between them.
"But that doesn't matter. You're here now," Steve finishes, and his lips twitch into something like a smile. "Let's finish cleaning you up and get some food in you, you're too skinny."
Bucky frowns at him. Says, halting, "I think... I'm supposed to say that to you."
Steve's face crumbles, those luminous blue eyes shining, and he says like it hurts,
"You did, Bucky. You did, so many times, and I-"
His voice dies, and he leans forward, uncaring of his clothes, to draw Bucky into his arms, water slopping between them.
His voice is thick. "God, Buck. God, I've missed you."
Bucky hangs stiff in his arms, but Steve's warmth seeps into his body, so cold for so long. He doesn't know what to do, how to handle this, but there is something - a fragment of who he was - that says that he can never be as safe as he is right here, right now.
He unbends. Muscle by muscle, bone by bone, allows himself to lean into Steve. This man touches him without fear, seems to want nothing more than to care for him.
It can't be so bad to let him, for a little while.
"I'm getting you all wet," he observes, and Steve laughs, wrenching and tearful, into his shoulder.
"I don't mind. Unless you do?"
Bucky tilts his head enough to let his cheek rest on Steve's. "No."
They curl together, and Bucky closes his eyes.
This could be safety.
-
Steve serves him scrambled eggs and toast and watches him eat it like it's the best thing he's ever seen.
The food is palatable. Better than the nutrition bars he ate with the Department on long missions. Maybe he liked eggs when he was Sgt. Barnes, if they're the first thing Steve makes.
"Am that I interesting?" Bucky asks, putting down his fork. The way Steve looks at him is wholly unfamiliar. Most people he remembers would scream upon seeing him, or close their eyes, giving in.
"I just can't believe you're here," Steve says. He hasn't stopped smiling since they left the bathroom. "I hoped, but I wasn't sure you'd come back to me."
Bucky drops his right hand into his lap to join his limp left arm. Glances aside towards the window, the night sky outside. Darkness that could enfold him, the same shadow he was born of, lived within.
He was not made for this warm kitchen, for Steve's hopeful eyes.
"In Kiev," he starts. Stops.
Steve is unmoving. He would wait forever, if the patience in his gaze is true.
"In Kiev, I found a Department site. Old records from 1945 that hadn't been burned. They confirmed what you told me, that I'm James Buchanan Barnes. Decorated sniper. Missing in action."
He swallows. Works up the courage to look at Steve. "I. I don't remember being him. He was a hero. He was- was good. Captain America's partner had to be good, he had to do the right thing, and I don't know if I can, what that is." He tries to smile, but it feels terrible on his face, utterly wrong, inhuman. "That man - who I was before - he's not who I am now, the asset, and- I don't know how to be both." His fingers are digging into his thigh. "I've- I've done terrible things, Steve. And it hurts, in my head, all the time, because I want to be good, I want to be who I was, but I can't-
I came back to you. Because I want to trust you." He swallows. Fumbles for the words. "Because... you said you were my captain. You said you'd hold me together, and I want that, because I'm not the Soldier anymore but I'm not James Barnes, and I don't know how to be-"
He looks away, because he's never been good at this, at feelings, and he doesn't know how to deal with the look in Steve's eyes. There's panic sloshing inside him, the melting ice of waking into a new and horrifying world, and he can't-
The faint whisper of air against his cheek, and he jolts out of the chair and back against the wall, brain howling, dumping adrenaline-
"Bucky." Steve puts down his outstretched hand. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to-"
"Nothing you did," he bites out, "just me. I can't- can't not react, and I could hurt you-"
Steve tilts his head, studies him, all that warm attention on him, fixed as sure as a sniper rifle's sight. "I won't let you hurt me, Bucky."
The certainty in his voice eases the sharp crackle in his head. This man knows as much about him as anyone does, more than Bucky does, and if he says he can stop Bucky from hurting him, then-
Then he can believe him.
"Do you want me to be your captain again?" Steve says. He's unruffled, as though Bucky's answer means nothing. As though either way, Steve will want him in his life, just the same.
Steve's always respected his choices.
"I." Bucky searches for the right words. Words have always meant so little to him. No one spoke to him except in short bursts, in orders he obeyed. His own voice a guttural rasp that only conveyed success or failure.
"You don't have to answer tonight." Steve rises, starts gathering the dishes, and Bucky's attention goes to his hands: those blunt, brutal hands that had remained lax when Bucky beat him to a pulp.
"You let me hurt you on the Helicarrier. You would have let me kill you." The accusation hangs in the air.
Steve pauses in carrying the dishes to the sink, flicks him an amused glance. "You wouldn't have killed me."
"How do you know?"
"Because I know you," Steve says, like it's that simple, and he flips on the water and starts washing the dishes, back turned to Bucky like he’s not a threat. "I know who you are, inside. Who you were, before the Winter Soldier, and who you are now - caught between two people, maybe, but still a good person. Who you'll be in the future - we can find out together."
To be known, to be believed in - he wants that, so badly it hurts. He wants Steve as his captain again, to hold him together, hold all the choices and fear at bay, and most of all he wants those hands on him again, their warmth, their strength.
Being maintained like this is an unfamiliar gift. He's used to maintenance - injections of painkillers to keep him on his feet, tasteless protein bars, flame burning between his eyes to root out weakness - but this is new and good. Steve’s gentleness implies caring, an eye to his long-term use and efficiency.
The Department had only maintained him in the context of the mission. After missions, before cryo, they would wipe him, wrench broken bones back into place, perform necessary checks on his arm, and then send him back into darkness, until someone else needed to die.
Steve seems to want him functioning optimally outside of missions.
He finds himself greedy for more maintenance: more food, more warmth, more touch. More kindness.
He is so tired of cold, and somehow he summons up the courage to step away from the wall, ghost across the kitchen towards Steve.
Steve's drying the dishes and putting them in a dish rack, unconcerned with the beast at his back. Relaxed, loose, even as Bucky lifts a trembling right hand and presses it between his shoulderblades to feel the surety there. The certainty.
He steps a little closer. Dares to rest his chin on Steve's shoulder. Warmth, and the rise and fall of Steve breathing.
"What would you want?"
Steve picks up the dropped thread of conversation easy as breathing. "To take care of you." He reaches back, grips Bucky's limp left hand, thumb brushing across the back of his hand, the machinery there. "For you to let me take care of you."
Bucky lets himself rest his forehead on Steve's shoulder, drops his hand to rest on Steve's hip.
"All right."
To be known, to be real-
It's alien to him, but the chance to be more than a ghost, a flicker of black that drops others back into impenetrable and eternal darkness-
Steve can give him that.
"I'm going to turn around now," Steve says, and he does, and that he gives Bucky warning, gives him the chance to pull away-
He meets Steve's gaze.
Steve looks back, and there's the hint of tears at the edges of his eyes, but he's smiling. "There you are," he says, and it's nonsensical, but he reaches up, spans Bucky's jaw with his fingers.
"More," Bucky says, suddenly greedy - demanding - and he shrinks away, but Steve catches him with his other hand curved about his spine, holds him still, caught.
Trembling with the need, shaking out of his own skin with the urge to run.
"Easy," Steve says, low, rough. "Easy, Buck."
His fingers feather up Bucky's cheek, over his stubble, around to the back of his neck, curve and rest there.
"How long since someone touched you kindly?" he asks, and the warm pressure of his palm on Bucky's cervical spine gives him the strength to answer,
"Never."
There's grief in the curve of Steve's mouth. Grief to cover the taiga.
"Come on." He lets go of Bucky and leaves the kitchen, and Bucky follows him to a bedroom: spare, in blue and gray.
Steve's busy spreading out towels on the bed, getting a bottle of something from the nightstand.
"What are you doing?" Bucky hovers in the doorway.
"You seem to want me to touch you, and you're on-edge, so I thought a massage, like you used to do for me when I was sick - unless you don't want it? I don't mean to assume -"
Bucky takes a step into the bedroom. More touching, more of Steve beside him, near him: it sounds exactly like what he wants.
"Yes. How?"
Steve grins, relieved. "Just take your shirt off for now." He watches as Bucky pulls the gray T-shirt off one-handed, and then steps forward, into Bucky's space. His eyes seem to swallow the light. "Can I touch you again?"
"Yes." Bucky sways toward him, and Steve reaches for him, calms the shiver in his skin. The pressure of his grip holds him here, keeps him knit to his bones. Tells him he's real. He's known.
Steve's hands are big, blunt, warm where his callused fingertips skim over Bucky's chest. Cataloging each old hurt and scar, the silver burns at his temples, the thick gnarls of scar tissue tracing the socket of his mechanical arm. He traces the edge of the scar with a thumb, expression absorbed, intent, and this is-
Bucky struggles to understand it. He wants to believe this, trust Steve, but the old aggression boils up, and he tenses, readying for escape.
Steve leaves one hand on Bucky's chest, looks him in the face. His eyes glitter in the dim light from the streetlamp outside. He looks possessive, commanding, but his voice is soft, stealing into Bucky's limbs, leaving them lax. "Stay there, Buck. Right where I put you."
Oh. It's the easiest thing in the world to relax, because it's an order. It's what he needs. Bucky lets his fingers go loose, makes his heart slow.
"There." Steve's voice is rich with approval, and the idea that Bucky has done something worthy of praise, simply by standing here, it's strange and wonderful at once. Then he heightens it by saying, very simply, "My good man. Good soldier."
The words slam into Bucky like a bullet. That he is good, that his actions are meaningful, that someone would look at him and see something that makes choices that can be good or bad -
It makes him feel a little less a weapon.
Steve looks at him fondly, runs his hand up Bucky's neck to push his hair back from his eyes. Where he touches, he leaves fires lighting in his wake. It's like being soaked in warmth, like the absolute peace of cryo without the piercing pain.
"Lie on the towels, on your front."
Exposing his back to an unknown-
He tenses, fights the urge to take a step back.
Steve just looks at him, level, kindness with a core of steel. Says, "You can do this, Bucky."
Bucky turns toward the bed, takes one step, and then another. Anxiety roils in his stomach, but even that is a gift. When he'd been the asset, there had been no such thing as fear, or anxiety, or even want. Only the bright compass of orders etched into his mind.
He lays down as Steve asked, on his front. Leaves his back open, but he turns his head enough to keep an eye on Steve, watch his hands, his eyes for any hint of violence.
Steve smiles at him, and warmth swells in Bucky's chest. He made Steve look like that. He made this man proud of him.
Steve kneels on the covers beside him, the mattress sinking beneath his weight. The pop of a bottle uncorking, and then the smell of something warm and rich; he had smelled something like this once, in a brothel in Guangzhou, just before breaking a man's neck.
He pulls away from the memory, searches for a distraction.
"You said... I used to do this for you?"
Steve shifts on the mattress beside him. His knees just touch Bucky's ribs. "Yeah, when I got pneumonia or other colds. You'd give me a massage, then pound my back and chest within an inch of my life. Helped to loosen up the coal dust and the gunk so I could cough it up. I'm going to touch you now, okay?"
Bucky nods, manages not to jump as Steve's hands settle on his shoulders. They're warm, callused, slick with oil, and the most real thing he has ever felt.
"That sounds-" he searches for a word, because adjectives are hard, he never used them, "-unpleasant."
Steve laughs, but not unkindly. He focuses on Bucky's left shoulder and his neck, strong thumbs seeking out the knots from carrying the arm and persuading them to loosen. "It was. Worse for you, though; you were pretty disgusted by the phlegm and all, but you never showed it." The deep pressure of his hands soaks into Bucky's skin, anchors him, leaves him aware of everything: Steve's heat, his smell, the soft rasp of his jeans on Bucky's ribs, the silence in the room.
Once he had been a man who took care of others.
Bucky groans as a stubborn knot in his trapezius unwinds, digs his toes into the comforter. The shock of pain, and then the blessed absence of it - it's a revelation. A gift.
He glances up at Steve, who glances down at him, smiles. His eyes are dark. Sweat in the hairs above his lip.
Steve runs his hands over the scars surrounding the arm's socket, and Bucky sighs.
"Good?"
"Yes." The words seem to come from someone else. Not him. He could never be this, this person soaking up pleasure and touch, this person allowing himself to be vulnerable, pathetic, a useless tool-
But then Steve starts working on his spine, stroking his deadly hands over the deep valleys of muscle on either side, and Bucky relaxes. Lets go of the roaring vicious voice in his head for a while.
Steve doesn't think him useless. Steve intends to maintain him for the future.
"Thank you," Steve says. His fingers are careful around the knots of scar tissue on Bucky's back, the old fractures in his ribs.
“For what?” he manages.
“Letting me take care of you.” Steve presses his thumbs into the base of Bucky’s skull, works out the pain there, and he lets go once more, sinks further into the mattress, into Steve. Warmth pools in his stomach, and it’s been so long since he’s truly felt warm.
Bucky manages a noise, and then gives up speaking for a while, content to close his eyes and drift in the warmth and silence, the reality of Steve’s hands on him. He feels loose, malleable, given over to Steve to mold and remake as he pleases.
It’s freeing, letting Steve remake him, knowing that Steve will never want him to be anything other than himself. Battered and scarred and clawing his way back to life, but still wanted.
The mattress dips as Steve sits back, resting one hand on the small of Bucky’s back. There’s possessiveness in the gesture, an absentminded claim to it that satisfies the asset, leaves Bucky breathless.
"May I work on your arm?"
Yes. More maintenance.
He hands his right arm into Steve's keeping gladly. Is this trust, allowing another to touch his fingers and believe that he won't break them? Letting him curl blunt and brutal fingers about his wrist?
Steve works on him like he has no other mission. He finds each point of tension in Bucky's arm and relaxes them with steady pressure, his hands warm, the half-remembered calluses of the shield a comfort.
The confinement is relaxing in itself. All he has to do is let Steve move him as he wishes, lie still and silent, make no choices. He has made enough choices in his search for himself.
Steve is not the sort of man who would order him to kill, and so he gives over control without second thought.
"You look like a limp noodle," Steve says, and Bucky blinks open blurry eyes. "Guess I'm doing something right."
"I feel good," Bucky slurs. The idea that he can feel, that he can make statements about his current condition beyond optimal or sub-optimal in the context of the mission - it's alien and strange and unimaginable, and yet good.
Warmth coils heavy in his belly, his skin too tight, prickling, and he becomes aware in one flash of awe that he's hard, the weight of him bearing his erection against the mattress, and it's good, it's right, he doesn't remember this but he wants it nonetheless. The fabric of the sweatpants Steve gave him are wet with precome, and their slide against him when he shifts makes him shiver in luxuriant delight.
He is vulnerable and open and hard in Steve Roger's bed, enjoying his captain’s touch, and it's right.
He can have this.
"I'm glad," Steve says, and places Bucky's hand back on the mattress. "Do you want to sleep now? I have a guest bedroom; last person that used it was Fury, but I've changed all the linens."
"No." Bucky twists enough to see Steve, sitting at his side.
He is a massive shadow in the lamplight, his shirt straining about his muscled shoulders, his hair old gold in the guttering light. Steve's eyes are wide, dark, the blue a thin rim around black, and his pulse beats quick in his neck. Sweat glitters in the fine golden hair above his upper lip. A red flush has spread from his throat down into his tee-shirt. One arm is draped over his lap, the placement too casual to be real.
Steve is aroused, has become aroused by touching Bucky, by maintaining him-
He wants that, wants Steve - wants everything his captain will give him.
Bucky rolls over onto his back, though the motion seems to take forever, his muscles fluid and heavy as water. The motion pulls fabric across his cock and he sighs despite himself, sinks back into the bed and watches Steve through heavy-lidded eyes.
Steve's dark gaze drops to his mouth.
Steve's mouth is wet and red, lower lip shiny where he's licked it, and Bucky wants to kiss him, devour him, let Steve have him however he wants him, because Steve makes all things good. The air is heavy, warm, close, and Bucky would breathe nothing but Steve's smell forever.
It is far better than breathing ice.
Then Steve tenses, ears and cheeks burning, his attention on the fabric tented over Bucky's hips, the dark spot in the gray sweats. His nostrils flare, expression suddenly hard, glittering, sharp.
He doesn't move, though - doesn't touch. Only shifts his gaze up Bucky's body, over his hollow belly, his scarred chest, to Bucky's face.
"Bucky," he says, helpless. "I-"
"Please." The word tastes sweet in Bucky's mouth, because here, his words matter.
Steve listens. His dark eyes flick from Bucky's eyes, to his mouth, his chest, his cock.
"Oh, Bucky, it's too soon," and his mouth twists unhappily. He sits angled towards Bucky, straining towards him, all that strength checked ruthlessly, that overwhelming force and power held back, and Bucky hates it.
Bucky gets his arm beneath him, half-sits up. The warm relaxation is replaced by ice. "Says who?"
"You've been controlled for so long, and I might've come on too strong, and I don't want you to think that you have to want me, or that it's a condition-" Steve's shoulders hunch, but he speaks like a commander, a leader, and Bucky wants that.
Bucky bares his teeth, and Steve shuts up. "You could have ordered me to come with you in California. You could've found me at any time and forced me to join you. But you didn't." Frustration blinds him, his voice rising with urgency, because he needs Steve to get this, he wants this, and he hasn't wanted anything in so damn long. "You wanted me to be free. Hydra never gave me freedom. They wanted an asset. A weapon. I've been free for six months. I've made enough choices, and I want to make this choice. I want you to be my captain, and I-"
He trails off, the words thick in his throat, scraped raw. He doesn't speak often, is still figuring out how to not scare others with his rusty-steel voice.
"Please," he says again, hoping the word means enough, and ducks his head, hair shielding his face. Some part of him, the asset, is ashamed of saying 'please.' Weapons don't beg. Weapons don't have preferences. He closes his eyes. Forces himself to stop trembling.
A warm hand, rough with calluses, covers his. Blunt and gentle fingers persuade his to part, curl under his hand to rest on his palm.
He opens his eyes as Steve's other hand cards through his damp hair, pushes it back off his face, tucks it behind his ears with aching kindness.
Steve gazes at him, and though his expression is thoughtful, considering, his eyes are nothing but hungry. Black and blue in the lamplight, a gathering storm that threatens to overpower, to consume him, and he wants it. A muscle twitches in his jaw.
"You want this?"
Bucky swallows. "Already said I did, didn't I?"
Steve snorts a laugh, and Bucky must've said something right, then. "All right. But you have to promise me one thing."
He knows it's not normal for him to focus utterly on the promise, the concept of 'mission,' but it is who he is, who he's been made to be.
"Parameters?"
Thank Christ for Steve, for Steve's easy acceptance. There's only a flicker of grief in his eyes before he says, "If at any time you feel uncomfortable, tell me. Promise?"
The press of his hand on Bucky's, the caress of his thumb over the top of Bucky's hand, threatens to distract him entirely from the parameters, but Bucky maintains enough presence to say,
"I promise."
Steve grins, and the bone-deep satisfaction of it, Bucky making Steve smile, hums in his bones like a clean shot, a perfect mission.
"Thank you." Steve's gaze drops to where his hand is curled with Bucky's, his thumb sweeping softly over the scarred thin skin covering the metacarpal bones. The intent in his eyes raises the hairs on Bucky's neck, has him suddenly, achingly aware of the fact that he has hundreds of square inches of skin that aren't being touched by Steve right now.
Steve lifts Bucky's hand to his mouth, turns it, and kisses Bucky's palm. Softly at first, close-mouthed, but then he opens his mouth, rasps teeth against skin, and Bucky hisses between his teeth, tangles his left hand into the covers. Steve's breath sighs out in a heated wave across the back of Bucky's hand, and Bucky's toes curl into the sheets as Steve holds his gaze.
"All right?" Steve says, low, voice a gravel rumble that makes Bucky shiver.
"Yes."
"Good." Steve half-turns on the bed until he has one leg up, folded beneath him, as though he's ready to lunge. "May I kiss you?"
"Yes," Bucky says, and stares, dry-mouthed, as Steve places his hand back onto the bed - like Bucky is fragile, like he is worth carefulness - and rises onto one knee, bends towards him. There's a weight to his movement, power held back, a rising tide, and then he's there, blocking out the lamplight-
Steve touches him with surety, no hesitation now, and Bucky could weep he's so goddamn grateful for it. Steve touches his collarbones, slides his hands upward, his dark eyes riveted to the path his hands travel. Thumbs dip into the hollow of Bucky's throat, but he isn't afraid, and then his callused warm fingers spread to cradle Bucky's stubbled jaw, and Steve holds still in the air above him and just looks.
He stares at Bucky like a starving man, like he can see all of Bucky's scars and sins beneath his skin, and his eyes are black pools and his mouth shines slick pink in the lamplight-
"Still," Steve whispers into the space between them, and Bucky realizes now that he's been shivering, trembling with the immensity of it all.
He stills. Curls his fingers into the sheets and holds. But he can't stop himself from blurting,
"I need you to touch me."
Steve’s expression is a bare shadow of a grin, and his eyes are warm when he says, "I know, Bucky. I'll give you what you need, I promise."
It seems impossible for anyone to fill the need gnawing in Bucky's chest. Still, it's beginning to seem like he can trust Steve's promise.
Steve slips one hand down Bucky's shoulder, traces a line across his collarbones to where the metal arm joins flesh. Goosebumps rise in his wake, and then he brushes his fingertips, light as a feather, across the ugly scars and seams.
Bucky sucks in a deep breath, and Steve's gaze flicks from his fingers up to Bucky's face.
"Not good?"
"No." Bucky frowns, because it's not that it hurts, but he doesn't want Steve looking at it, these ugly slashes in his skin where foreign metal has been seared into him, proof of who they made him. "It doesn't hurt. But your Bucky, he didn't-" and then he shuts up, because Steve stoops in one swift motion and kisses the place where the arm ends and Bucky begins, lips soft, cutting in their tenderness.
Steve laces his fingers through Bucky's metal ones, and they curl, sluggish, against his hand.
"You are my Bucky," Steve says, as though the world is simple. As though Bucky hasn't been stolen and twisted and returned broken. "And I will never find any bit of you ugly."
"I've done terrible things."
Steve's expression twists. "Because they made you. You didn't choose to do those things, and I'd give anything for you to not have suffered, anything-"
Bucky swallows. "If I hadn’t suffered, I wouldn't be here with you."
"Yeah. I know." Steve looks away, and he's a million miles away, turned inward as though he's still seeing ice, a long fall, a sudden stop.
Was all Bucky's suffering worth this: another chance with someone he loved? Would the man he had been thought this moment worth this grief?
He hadn't had to ask such questions as the asset. Part of him misses that clarity.
He reaches up instead, curls his flesh hand about Steve's neck, sweat and heat against his palm. Steve's pulse thuds heavy against his skin, slow and inexorable as Siberian winter.
Steve shakes himself, tilts his head back against Bucky's hand, his smile achingly sweet. "What do you want, Buck?"
"Kiss me like you said," Bucky says, and he's aware of the mulish jut of his jaw, but Steve only smiles, shakes his head.
"Pushy," but then his hands are back on Bucky's jaw, thumbs caressing the hollows of his cheeks, fingers feathering along his jawline, and he bends like a storm coming ashore.
Bucky relaxes into Steve's hands, gives over, and Steve kisses him. He's gentle, as he always is, but relentless and deep as sea - persuades Bucky's mouth open, and Bucky's eyes slip closed, his hand dropping to Steve's shoulder to feel the gathering tension in his muscles-
Steve owns him, in the whisper of his harsh breaths against Bucky's cheeks, the trembling of his fingers on Bucky's skin, his teeth tugging at Bucky’s lip, his heat, his smell-
Bucky pulls away, gasps for breath. His heart roars, a wolf uncaged, and he digs his fingers into Steve's shoulder, an anchor in a spinning world. His cock juts heavy and wet and neglected between his legs, and as he dares a glance at Steve, the other man's no better.
"Good?" Steve whispers, voice a low rumble.
"Yes." The ice is thawing, the river welling through the cracks - there's a yawning torrent of need and want underneath it, and he's greedy, he's aching for it, and Steve will give him everything he needs.
Steve lets go of his jaw, drags his hands down Bucky's scarred and too-thin chest, a trail of warmth, dips his fingertips beneath the waistband of Bucky's sweats. He pauses there, meets Bucky's gaze. His cheeks are flushed, his eyes glittering, his mouth red, kiss-swollen.
"Don't stop," he dares, and Steve looks at him. Eyes dark blue, flushed all the way to his chest, tense, possessive, predatory.
"You're sure."
He swallows. Nods.
"Hips up," Steve says, and Bucky obeys, allowing Steve to pull his sweats and underwear off in one smooth motion and toss them into the corner. His cock smacks against his belly, rises back into the air.
He blinks, another memory flashing across his mind.
"Your mother would whack you across the knuckles if she saw you being such a slob, Steve," he says, mouth running away with him, and Steve laughs and winces all at once.
"She would, and please don't ever bring her up again in the bedroom, God rest her soul."
"All right," Bucky says, and the memory's gone, all his attention turned to Steve.
Steve's gaze is ravenous, enraptured, riveted to where Bucky's cock has left a trail of shining fluid across his belly. "God, you're beautiful," Steve says, hushed, like a prayer, his hands trembling where they rest on the crests of Bucky's hipbones. "May I-?"
"Yes."
Steve reaches for the nightstand and pulls out a tube, squirts lubricant into his hand.
Another memory - Bucky curled into himself in their tenement, thrusting into his hand, slick with petroleum jelly, the other hand stuffed in his mouth to keep Steve, asleep on the couch, from hearing-
Steve trails his fingers up the bottom of Bucky's cock, and it's like a live wire sparks in his brain. He shudders, hips lifting, a half-gasp breaking free.
Steve's smile is a slow, secret thing, raw and hungry.
Steve doesn't do anything else: just keeps up that faint brush of fingertips along the vein on the bottom, seeming content to watch Bucky twist, ruck the sheets up in his fists. Heat coils at the bottom of his spine, an anticipatory tingle setting up along his skin. He can't look away from Steve's hand - huge, callused, the golden hairs on his fingers glowing in the lamplight - and how carefully he's touching him, like Bucky's fragile, like he's valuable.
"More?" Steve glances up at Bucky's face through his lashes, his hand pausing, and Bucky bites down the frustrated moan.
"Already said yes," he starts to snap, cringing even as he does it, because weapons don't get testy.
Steve wraps his hand around his cock and Bucky nearly jackknifes off the bed, a moan punched out of him, because so much heat and pressure and it's so good, and he'd never thought anyone would give him this.
"There's the mouth I remember," Steve says, grin fond and wolfish all at once. The pad of his thumb swipes over Bucky's slit, gathers the fluid there, spreads it around, and then he repeats it until Bucky's thighs are trembling, his heels dug into the sheets as tension strings him tight. "Wish I'd known I could quiet you down with my hands on you," and Steve tightens his fingers and strokes him long and hard and slow, and Bucky's helpless, swept up in this rising wave.
"Steve, Steve-" his face is burning, his skin's on fire, he can't quite get his breath, and he's probably just torn a hole in the sheets, but Steve doesn't look like he minds - his attention's all on Bucky, mouth half-open, tongue flicking out to wet his lips, and then he rises onto his knees and shuffles closer.
His hand stills on Bucky's cock, and even as Bucky lets out a frustrated whine his other hand slips up Bucky's body, curls in his hair - too long - and pulls, steady, implacable, and yes.
Bucky closes his eyes and lets his head be pulled back, because he can trust Steve, and the dull blossom of pain in his scalp anchors him here. He bares his throat, and shivers with the glory of it: that he can be vulnerable, that he can surrender this, and Steve, alone of everyone in the world, takes that surrender and treats him kindly, maintains him well.
"So good for me," Steve whispers against his mouth, half-formed thoughts, praises, every one a benediction. "I knew you would be, you're so sweet- just look at you - god, your neck-" and he bites a trail from Bucky's mouth down his jaw, his throat- each kiss longer and harder than the one before, so Bucky will wear his marks, and they'll be better and more beautiful than anything Hydra ever gave him.
Bucky writhes just to feel the solidity of Steve's hand in his hair, the slick wet heat of his mouth, because he's real, he's here, and he won't ever have to forget Steve, not again. Gasps for breath, little huffs of air that make his chest jerk, and he can't stop shivering, trembling with the need that's burning in his bones.
Steve kisses back up the side of his face, breathes hot against his ear, his voice the smoke and whiskey of a dance hall. "What do you want?"
Bucky grabs at the back of Steve's shirt, swallows. He doesn't want these choices, he gave them up gladly, and Steve keeps asking-
"Whatever you want," he says, and then, low, raw, "Please."
Steve groans, low and long, pulls back to stare Bucky full in the face. His eyes are twin halogen flames, bright as sunlight on ice, and he says as though he can hardly believe it, "Oh, Bucky, you're so good."
Bucky moans, tightens his hand in Steve's shirt. He doesn't know what it is to be good, what it is to be real, but he likes Steve's hands on him, likes the surety of knowing Steve will take care of him, and he gives himself over gladly. Chooses to, and he's never gotten to choose surrender before.
Steve swallows the sound, kisses him hard, deep, devouring. His face is inches away, and he stares at Bucky, into him, as he starts to stroke Bucky again, pulling him tight, winding him tighter and tighter.
He will snap. He'll break, and he's been broken, and he wants this and fears it in equal measure.
He can't stop shaking, his breathing a loud rasp, Steve's breathing hot against his mouth, and they're so close, sharing the same air, the air hot and wet. He doesn't know what to do with this closeness - how does anyone handle it?
There's an earthquake starting in his bones. It will shatter him. Too much goodness, too much kindness - he was not built for such things, his fragments can't process it.
"Steve," he manages.
"Go on, Bucky," Steve says. His voice brims with adoration. "It's okay."
"I can't," he says, and he hates it, the helplessness of it, because failure was never an option, failure led to termination, to fire and cryo. He's failing his captain, he's failing his orders, and he's no good, was never any good.
Steve pulls him down to the bed by his hair, lets go of him with both hands, and fuck, no, Bucky moans in protest, but then Steve's on top of him, rough jeans and hot skin, all pressure, weight, warmth, safety, this man who would have died for him.
"Hands up," Steve says, voice jagged, hoarse, and runs one hand up the bottom of Bucky's flesh arm, wraps his fingers about both of Bucky's wrists and presses them to the mattress.
It doesn't mean anything, because Bucky could break the hold easily, could destroy Steve in moments, but Steve believes he won't. Believes he isn't that lost, that unsalvageable. Believes in what remains of Bucky Barnes, and so Bucky relaxes into the hold. It quiets the asset's programming screaming in his mind that he doesn't get this, he is not meant for this.
"Here." Steve plants one knee between Bucky's thighs, rests his forearm beside Bucky's head. "I've got you. I'm not letting you go. You're safe. You're mine." He licks his lips. Sweat slicks the hair at his temples, turns it bronze. "Now come for me."
He's held together, held safe, and so Bucky drops his head back into the pillows and lets his hips rise into Steve's thigh, the denim rubbing against him, and he sobs, it's so fucking good, the unyielding pressure of it. The implacable grip of Steve's hand on his wrists, the searching fire of his gaze.
"There you go, that's it, my good soldier-" Steve's rambling, his breathing harsh and hoarse, "-so beautiful, so good-"
Bucky grinds against his thigh, strains his wrists against Steve's grip, and fire licks at his blood, in his bones, and he just needs one last thing.
"Steve," he half-sobs, and Steve makes a shattered noise and kisses him hard, pulling away just enough to say, firm and kind enough to break him,
"Come now, that's an order."
The blizzard wipes him clean.
He rises back to himself in a long slow journey, nothing like the harsh jerk out of cryo. Finds himself under the sheets, tucked against Steve, whose face is buried in the back of his shoulder, his arm draped over Bucky's hip. His thumb draws abstract designs over Bucky's scars.
Everything Bucky is, all his scars and sins remembered, Steve takes and repairs and makes better, makes well.
"What about you?" he says, or thinks he says, because his brain is slow and fuzzy and it is entirely possible he is speaking in Russian.
Steve huffs a laugh against the back of his neck, his arm tightening. There's tears in the sound, and joy, and enough gladness for the world. "Next time, Buck."
Next time. Days and nights to come. Years, stolen from the grip of time and death, years and years where they will have each other, and this.
It is a gift.
It is a gift.