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When Steve returns to his Brooklyn apartment as suddenly as he’d disappeared from it, all he can do is stare and blink into the middle distance for a while, his lips still tingling with the warm buzz of kissing Bucky Barnes, heat in his cheeks still blazing.
I was just in another timeline, Steve thinks to himself, as his knees give out and he sits with a plop on his bed. Or another universe? He’s still not entirely sure what the appropriate terminology is. Or maybe he hadn’t actually visited another timeline/universe and he hadn’t seen a bunch of alternate versions of himself, all of them significantly more swole than he is, even the lady version. Maybe it had all just been a really vivid dream. Or maybe he’s had a psychotic break. Maybe there’s a gas leak in the apartment. That happens, right? People think their apartment is haunted, or that they’re having visions or whatever, and it turns out to be a gas leak. Steve and his mom have been living in this place since Steve was a kid, and they’ve kept it up pretty well, but you never know.
Except he’s still holding a Jenga piece in his hand. And he’d been playing Jenga with Bucky, in that other timeline.
Of course, maybe the Jenga piece isn’t real either. Maybe it’s a gas leak hallucination too.
“Steve?” calls out his mom from the hallway.
“Yeah?” he answers, his voice croaky.
She stops in his doorway with a smile. “Oh good, I managed to catch you before you go.”
Shit, his shift—he’s supposed to be at the print shop for his shift in about half an hour—or he had been, before his surprise trip. He snatches up his phone, left behind here on his bed during his inter-dimensional travels, and sees that only a couple minutes seem to have passed in between him disappearing and reappearing here. He’d been about to leave for work, before he got zapped away to some other dimension. If he leaves now, he’ll still make it in time.
“Yeah, I was just about to leave,” says Steve, and stands on legs that are still kind of shaky.
“Would you mind dropping off a basket of tomatoes at Jeannie’s place on your way?” asks Sarah, smiling sweetly.
It would be angelic, if not for the way her eyes gleam with her frankly vicious competitive streak. Sarah has been locked in some bizarre, unspoken gardening competition with Jeannie McDowell down the block for as long as Steve can remember, despite the fact that neither Sarah nor Jeannie are particularly good gardeners. They both live in Brooklyn apartments that only have a patch of courtyard and balcony space to work with, so all they can really grow are some herbs, tomatoes, and peppers in pots. They’ve been passive aggressively exchanging the fruits of their gardens for decades now, and Sarah has only gotten more intense about it now that she has more free time; she’s teaching a couple classes at the nursing school rather than pulling grueling shifts as a nurse in the oncology ward, which gives her all the more time to devote to gardening and snooping into Steve’s life.
Steve’s more grateful than he can stand for that time, given how close he’d come to losing her to cancer a couple years ago, but he still wishes he had a bit less of his mother’s attention.
“Sure, Ma,” Steve says. As casually as he can, Steve shows Sarah the Jenga block in his hand and asks, “Hey, you recognize this?”
She leans in close to peer at it. “A…block? Did you actually clean under your bed and find some toy block from when you were a wain?”
“Must’ve, yeah,” says Steve, hopefully casually, as his whole body lights up and practically sizzles with the realization that it had all really happened.
The Jenga block is real. Steve really had been sucked into an alternate universe or timeline or whatever.
And he really had met the man who he’s pretty sure is going to be the love of his life. That is, if Bucky Barnes even exists in this universe.
“Is it alright if I drop off the tomatoes on my way back?” asks Steve. “I’m gonna be late to my shift otherwise.”
“Of course, dear. And if Jeannie asks how the peppers she gave us last time were, tell her they weren’t spicy enough.”
Steve gapes at her. “Ma, we used half of one in the stir fry and we both ended up sweating with our mouths on fire.”
To say nothing of how things went in the bathroom the next day. Steve hates to be stereotypical, but he’s an Irish-American white guy, he’s pretty sure he’s constitutionally incapable of handling that kind of spice.
Sarah huffs. “Well, Jeannie doesn’t need to know that!”
Steve shakes his head and grins. “If you say so.” He slips the Jenga block and his phone into his pocket, then steps past her in the doorway, dropping a kiss to her cheek as he goes. “See you later, Ma, love you.”
Steve’s grateful for the twenty minute walk to the print shop; it’s not nearly enough time to process what the fuck just happened to him, but it’s better than nothing.
So. He really did get whisked away to another universe, and he really did meet a bunch of alternate versions of himself, and he’d really gone on what had felt an awful lot like a date with a ridiculously handsome and kind guy with sad eyes named Bucky.
Steve isn’t a love at first sight kind of person. Lust, sure, and pure chemistry, yeah. He’d had that immediate chemistry with Peggy, even if their romance hadn’t lasted beyond his semester of studying abroad. But love after just a few hours together? Steve would’ve said it’d never happen to him. He’s too damn prickly and guarded, and he knows it. He’d spent too many of his formative years as something of a loner, too awkward and intense by turns, too out of step with his peers, never interested in the same things they were interested in and unable to hide it. You could at least try, Arnie would always say, equal parts annoyance and fondness. You might even have fun!
But Steve never had managed to fall in step with the interests of his classmates. He’d fallen between the cracks of the high school cliques: not interested enough in video games and sports for the more popular kids, not into the right kind of music for the less popular kids, not into band or theater with their automatic acceptance into a big and raucous social circle, not quite smart enough to fully mesh with the nerds like Arnie, though he was welcomed kindly enough into that circle, if only on the strength of his friendship with Arnie.
All in all, high school just hadn’t really been the place for a queer kid uncompromisingly obsessed with art and activism and history, and that hadn’t done wonders for Steve’s sociability. College had been a lot kinder to him on that front; he’d made real friends there, had learned to loosen up and trust people other than Arnie, people like Peggy and Natasha and Wanda and Peter.
His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he pulls it out to see a text from Natasha: wanna meet up for tapas tonight?
That depends, are there single people there you want to set me up with?
In the whole restaurant? Probably, I’m not the relationship police
I mean, are there other single people that you’ve specifically invited?
Ugh, STEVE. If you won’t use the apps you need to accept that the only way romance is going to happen for you is serendipity
Or an irl meet cute
Steve snorts, and can’t quite help the grin on his lips. I don’t think it’s serendipity when you’re arranging it. Also i don’t think irl meet cutes are a thing.
Natasha is a good friend—one of his best friends, even—so he means this in the most loving way possible: Natasha is afflicted with the terrible combination of a big and giving heart, and the mind of a conniving, calculating spy. As a dance teacher/personal trainer, she doesn’t have the best outlet for her more spy-like, benevolently manipulative tendencies, so her friends and loved ones get the brunt of her loving schemes to make them happier. In Steve’s case, this has worked out to his benefit plenty of times in the form of Natasha sending art commissions and design gigs his way. The attempts to set him up with people have been less successful.
Not because Natasha tries to set him up with bad people, she’d never do that. Steve just sucks at dating. There’s an artifice about it that he can never get over, and it’s even worse with the apps: a sense that it has nothing to do with love or romance or connection, but that it’s all just marketing, a purely transactional exercise. He’d made the mistake of telling Natasha this after a streak of dating failures, so really, it’s his own damn fault that she’s now dead set on solving this problem for him.
The next text from Nat arrives: EXCUSE YOU, what else would you call the way I met matt???
Okay, she has a point there. Natasha and Matt’s first meeting had been the stuff of a rom com, with Natasha having an uncharacteristically clumsy moment on the subway when she almost fell over thanks to the unlucky combination of someone’s giant bag smacking into her and the train jolting to a sudden stop, only for Matt to catch her in a showy dip as easily and gracefully as if it had been a move in a dance. It had been one of the suavest, coolest things Steve had ever seen in his life, and all the more impressive because Matt is blind.
She’d dimpled up at him—a smile that turned out to be wasted, because, again, blind—and said are you a dancer? If not, you should be, that was a better dip than a lot of dance partners I’ve had. He’d smiled back down at her and said, no, actually, I don’t know how. Wanna show me sometime?
Steve’s mouth had literally dropped open at the perfect line, and he hadn’t been the only one. Someone next to him had muttered, damn, that’s smooth as hell.
Okay, yeah, that was a great meet cute but i’ll remind you that you dumped him a few months later for being ‘way too catholic, and not in a sexy way.’
Whatever, are you coming tonight or not? Natasha texts.
Even if this is a transparent attempt to set him up with someone, Steve would’ve taken Natasha up on the invitation anyway, if not for his little inter-dimensional jaunt. He wants some alone time to process that, and he could probably use an early night, given his day is going to include more hours in it than expected. And anyway, it seems unfair to whatever perfectly nice person Natasha wants to set him up with when Steve knows he’d only spend the whole time thinking about Bucky Barnes, who may or may not exist in this universe.
Because, and he’s well aware that this is pretty pathetic, he already misses Bucky.
Nah, I’m feeling kinda tired today, gonna take it easy, he texts Natasha. Maybe next week?
He gets a torrent of emoji in response that ends with fine, next week!
Steve puts his phone away as he reaches the print shop, and greets his coworker Sophie on his way to the small break room in the back, where he clocks in and stows his stuff before heading back out to relieve Sophie of duty.
“Anything interesting today?” he asks Sophie.
“Some guy came in to print about a hundred flyers for his missing pet snake, so, like, be on the lookout for surprise snakes, I guess,” she says. “Also, there’s a couple of emails for you about design shit.”
“Got it,” he says, and watches with amusement as Sophie makes her usual whirlwind exit from the shop, her tight curls bouncing with energy and her big tote bag narrowly missing various displays and signs as she wrestles with her phone and earbuds.
This print shop gig is a pretty chill one; Steve mostly keeps it for the stable income in between commissions and other freelance gigs, and because the place has actual benefits, even for part time employees. Steve’s got too much pride to ever actively slack off at a job, but this one doesn’t generally demand much of him other than working the till, answering the phone, occasionally troubleshooting the copiers, and helping mock up simple layouts for people’s business mailers, invitations, and flyers, so he has plenty of time to doodle in his sketchbook and contemplate the new if temporary weirdness of his life.
Despite what Natasha thinks, Steve is capable of finding a romantic partner on his own. He’s dated men and women, though none of those relationships had been anything close to love at first sight. He’d fallen in love with Peggy, and he’d fallen hard for her within a matter of weeks, but things had burned hot and fast between them, a flame that fizzled out into friendship when faced with the practical realities of their lives: Peggy in London and unwilling to leave it or change her career goals, and Steve unwilling to leave Brooklyn for good.
Steve is, simply put, not a love at first sight kinda guy. He’s not even a love at first date kind of guy. And yet—Bucky Barnes. Steve has never felt anything like the immediate connection and affection he’d felt for Bucky. It’s not love at first sight, not quite—it’s something stranger and yet more certain: the absolute, rock solid knowledge that he could fall in love with Bucky Barnes. Or not even could, but would, an inevitability he has no interest in avoiding.
Too bad Steve has no idea if he even exists in this universe, or if he’s anything at all like the Bucky Steve had met in that other universe. And if he does exist here, how’s Steve supposed to find him? For all he knows, this universe’s Bucky Barnes is a fisherman in Alaska. If he’s an Alaskan fisherman, Steve could still try to strike up a friendship with him through social media and…what, try to catfish the guy into romance?
Fuck.
Be normal about this guy, Rogers, Steve tells himself sternly.
Although, the evidence suggests that most versions of him are not, in fact, normal about the guy. Steve had only briefly met his own alternate selves—apparently there were concerns about messing up their timelines—and all of them had looked absolutely horrified when Steve had said he didn’t know anyone named Bucky Barnes.
“Oh honey, I’m so sorry,” Stella had said, wide-eyed and almost pitying, her hand immediately going to her wedding ring as if to make sure it was still there. “I can’t even imagine.”
“I don’t even know who I’d be without Buck,” the old man version of Steve had murmured, clearly disquieted.
The version of Steve who’d tried to explain things to him, and who Steve had punched in enraged confusion when he’d first appeared, had just looked constipated in a pained way, and also stricken, like Steve had just shared terrible news.
Steve, being a contrary and stubborn shit, had made up his mind to dislike this Bucky Barnes guy, just on principle. So what if all his alternate selves loved the guy? What was so special about him anyway? Steve’s life was perfectly fine without him!
That resolution had lasted about thirty seconds in the face of actually meeting Bucky and being subjected to Bucky’s sincerity. And, Steve has to admit, his attractiveness. Even apart from that though, it had quickly become apparent that Bucky was so—generous, so easy with his friendship and kindness, funny and sharp, encouraging and challenging in the exact right balance. And beautiful, of course. Just, like, too beautiful to deal with almost, with those eyes and that smile and the hair and the muscles.
Steve knows Bucky can’t be perfect, knows that a few hours of hanging out with him isn’t enough basis to know much about him at all. He’d seen hints of a deep pain and sadness in Bucky’s eyes, for one thing, and a general air of exhaustion had lingered around the guy despite his friendliness. There’s no guarantee that this universe’s Bucky Barnes will be anything like the one Steve had met either. For all Steve knows, this universe’s Bucky could be an intolerable Wall Street finance bro. There’d sure as hell been a lot of variation in the alternate Steves he’d briefly met, Steve figures it’s got to be the same for the Buckys of the multiverse. Maybe Steve should just let this go, forget about it, relegate it to being something like a weird dream.
That resolution lasts about two hours into his shift. It’s a slow day, no customers other than a few people picking up their orders, so Steve figures he can get away with checking something on his phone real quick. And by something, he means looking up Bucky on social media.
Steve briefly contemplates asking Natasha for help finding Bucky—she’s scarily good at finding information about things and people online—but there’s no way he’s about to explain why he needs to find a complete stranger. Steve is way too terrible a liar to come up with a plausible missed connection style story, especially not one that could prove to be impossible if this universe’s Bucky Barnes lives in another state or country. And anyway, he’s not even sure he could explain why he needs to find Bucky. Does he really want to date the guy, just based on spending a few hours with his alternate universe counterpart? Does he want to befriend him, so that he’s no longer one of the only Steve Rogerses in the multiverse who doesn’t know Bucky Barnes? Steve has no idea, not without knowing a single thing about what Bucky is like in this universe.
So, okay, whatever. Steve’s just gonna indulge his curiosity. He can do some googling and social media searching, that’s fine, right? Not super creepy and weird? If it takes too long, or there are too many James Barneses or Bucky Barneses, then whatever, Steve will let it go. Maybe Bucky doesn’t exist in this universe, maybe he has a different name, who knows. Maybe he’s not a he at all here, maybe he’s a woman. Whatever version of Bucky exists here, Steve’s life was fine before he knew about him, and it’ll be fine after. It’s not like he believes in soulmates.
He pulls up Instagram on his phone and searches for “Bucky Barnes”: no joy. Of course the version of his name that’s most likely to be unique wouldn’t give him any results, thinks Steve wryly. That’d be too easy. But okay, fair enough, it’s a nickname. Steve has no idea if Bucky goes by that name with most people, or just his friends and family. James Barnes is definitely going to get Steve too many results, but maybe if he tries “James B. Barnes” or "James Buchanan Barnes"...?
“Holy shit,” he mutters, when one of the first results that pops up is Bucky.
Unsurprisingly, he looks different: this Bucky has shorter hair, and he looks younger and less careworn, and also somewhat less muscley. Still ludicrously beautiful, of course. Steve almost feels like he’s getting away with something, being able to just look at Bucky’s face and his smile like this, right here in the palm of his hand. Steve could paint the shit out of this guy. He scrolls down a little and finds his attention caught by a photo of Bucky with some friends at a bar, one of Bucky’s hands wrapped around a beer bottle. His left hand is visible too, resting on the bar, and it’s flesh and blood, so Bucky’s not an amputee in this universe it seems, which makes sense if he’s not a soldier.
God, how is it possible to hold a beer bottle elegantly? Steve would become a goddamn sculptor for those hands, he thinks dizzily. Bernini probably would have sold his soul to sculpt hands like that.
Steve tears his attention away from Bucky’s luminous smile and dismayingly gorgeous hands to look for actual useful information, like where he lives or what he does, and scrolls back up to Bucky’s bio: James B. Barnes, he/him. In love with my cat, books, and Brooklyn, in that order. R&D engineer at Stark Industries. There’s a rainbow flag emoji, which has Steve heaving a sigh of relief as his heartbeat flutters faster in excitement. So this Bucky is some variety of queer at least, that’s good.
Bucky has a modest number of followers and follows, about what Steve would expect for someone who’s using Instagram as a personal social network rather than as part of their job or brand. Which is good, because it means Bucky isn’t some intolerable influencer type, but bad because it’ll look weird if Steve follows him out of the blue, especially since they don’t even seem to have any friends in common. DMing him is also out of the question. Steve’s own Instagram is more about promo for his art than anything personal, so there wouldn’t be any readily apparent reason for Steve to follow him, and he really doesn’t want Bucky’s first impression of him to be that he’s some kind of creep or weirdo.
Although, considers Steve, as he scrolls down Bucky’s feed, Bucky does post a lot of photos of his adorable cat. Her name is Alpine, likely because of her copious pure white fur. Steve snorts a laugh at one of Bucky’s posts: a selfie, his handsome face long-suffering and exasperated, while Alpine is in the background sitting on a pile of black clothes. The caption is maybe I should pivot to an all white wardrobe.
Should’ve gotten a black cat, is one of the comments, from falconsam.
A solid third of Bucky’s feed appears to be photos and videos of Alpine being cute and photogenic, which could provide Steve with some cover to follow him. He could just be a fan of Alpine! That’s normal, right? Like, this is objectively a very cute and beautiful cat. But it could make things weird if they do end up meeting later on, so Steve decides to hold off on that.
The further down he scrolls in Bucky’s feed, the more apparent it becomes that Bucky must live nearby: there’s a photo from the Carroll Gardens greenmarket—Bucky is apparently a fan of plums—and another at that one restaurant with the amazing ramen, where Bucky is making a funny face at the camera with someone who looks like she might be his sister, given their matching eyes and hair and cheekbones. Bucky definitely lives in Brooklyn, and he probably lives in Carroll Gardens, so he and Steve are practically neighbors. Steve’s honestly kind of surprised he’s never seen Bucky around before, but then, there are tens of thousands of people in their respective neighborhoods. It’s not like Steve’s met or seen everyone in Red Hook.
Steve knows social media is carefully curated; people post the best of themselves, and what ends up posted on social media is far from the whole of anyone’s life. It’s a kind of bulletin board, not a diary. Even knowing that, it’s hard not to feel the nervous sinking sensation in his gut the more he scrolls through Bucky’s Instagram. Because Bucky has his shit together. He scrolls back far enough to get to Bucky’s birthday, and learns that he’s 29 years old, only a year older than Steve, and yet seemingly so much more settled: he has a well-paying, steady job with presumably amazing benefits, he has his own apartment, it looks like he has an active and fun social life…
He’s entirely out of Steve’s league.
Okay, no, because Steve doesn’t actually believe in that kind of thing. But also, yes. Because Steve is 28 and still lives with his mom, and yeah, that’s because he moved back in when she got her cancer diagnosis to help her out, and also the rent is too damn high. He’s all Sarah has, he’s glad he was able to support her through her illness, he doesn’t regret it or resent it. He doesn’t mind living with her, not really. But Steve doesn’t so much have a career as he has his art and side gigs, and his plans for the future are murky. He just wants to make his art and help make the world a better place, and that all seems…small now. Especially after having met alternate versions of himself. One of them was an astronaut, for god’s sake. Though other Bucky had said he should be grateful for his normal life—certainly whatever is going on in that other universe seems weird and stressful as hell.
He’s getting ahead of himself, probably. He hasn’t even met the guy, and he’s already assuming they could never be in a relationship. He should at least try to get to know Bucky first. Maybe the chemistry and connection he’d felt with the other version of Bucky won’t be in evidence in this universe.
A customer comes in then, so Steve has to put his phone down, and then he actually does his damn job for the rest of his shift, feeling guilty about all the time he’s spent on poring over Bucky’s social media.
His thoughts keep circling around Bucky though. If a trip to another universe was Steve’s only chance to kiss any version of Bucky Barnes, Steve’s glad he took it. That Bucky at least had seemed receptive; he’d kissed Steve back, sweet and gentle and wistful. As his lips warm with the memory, Steve remembers that Bucky’s last words to him: for what it’s worth, I don’t think it’ll be your only chance.
Steve could leave it to chance. They live in practically the same neighborhood, after all. It’s not unlikely that they’ll run into each other eventually.
But Steve isn’t the kind of guy who relies on luck or chance. He’s a fighter, and he’s stubborn as hell, and anyway, he doesn’t believe in fate. Steve has always gone after those things he truly wants, even when they’re risky, even when they’re long shots, like applying for that scholarship to NYU or trying to make a living off of his art.
He can do this. He can make this happen. He can meet and befriend and hopefully romance Bucky Barnes.
The high of this resolution lasts until about halfway through his walk back home, when he realizes this is almost certainly going to involve some light stalking.
He drops off the tomatoes with Janine, and is so distracted that he can’t manage his usual graceful exit from the quicksand of her conversation, and just beats a hasty retreat with a mumbled excuse about being late for something, his mind whirring with possibilities, and with worry over how all of them feel distinctly stalkerish. What else can you call it if Steve hangs around places he’s noticed that Bucky goes to, thanks to poring over his Instagram feed? Sure, it’s all public information, it’s right there on the internet, but it’s also creepy to act on it, right?
But then, what other proactive options does Steve have? He could get back on the apps, he supposes, and see if Bucky shows up on them. Grindr is proximity based, so theoretically, Steve could use it as a bizarre Bucky homing device, and meet up with him for an honest hook up or date, just two guys looking for love. Or sex. That’s assuming Bucky is on Grindr, or any other dating app, at all. Still, it’s a place to start that feels like the least creepy of his options, compared to accosting the guy out of the blue, either online or in real life, so when Steve gets home, he downloads the apps and starts swiping.
It doesn’t go well.
Steve doggedly sticks with it for a week, even going so far as to walk around Carroll Gardens in the evenings in the hopes of getting a better proximity match, but he strikes out. There’s no sign of Bucky, not on any of the apps.
Also, swiping through people on Tinder is an exercise in frustration and deepening cynicism about the modern dating scene. So many profiles are so samey: gym selfies, guys holding fish, guys with tigers for some reason, guys who forego the cliche selfies in favor of pretentious bullshit instead, Crossfit guys…plenty of them are hot, but on an app, there’s precious little that seems real and honest about most of them. Though Steve supposes plenty of them are honest enough about being in it for the sex. Steve has certainly gotten his fair share of messages to that effect. Which is good for his self esteem, at least.
Maybe it’s a good thing that Bucky doesn’t seem to be on any of the dating apps. Steve’s reasonably sure that Bucky doesn’t have a significant other right now; there are no couple photos on Bucky’s Instagram, and no references to a girlfriend or boyfriend or partner. Bucky could be ace, in which case, Steve will still be happy to befriend the shit out of him; he figures all the other Steves in the multiverse can’t be wrong about the guy being good best friend material.
All in all though, the dating app strategy hasn’t been a success. Steve’s going to have to come up with a new one.
The older Steve gets, the more deeply he resents sitcoms. He’s aware that this is a weird, grudgey old man opinion to have, but Steve doesn’t care. Even now that most of them don’t have that godawful canned studio laughter, Steve still kind of hates them, and not even because of their inaccuracies about the kind of real estate twenty and thirty-somethings can afford in major cities like New York and Los Angeles.
No, Steve resents sitcoms for their unrealistic expectations about how often friends can hang out with each other. Friends in sitcoms seem to have copious hours in the day to just go over to each other’s places or to some charming cafe or bar where improbable shenanigans happen or whatever. Meanwhile, it can take a whole damn month for Steve’s friends to manage to settle on a date for a night out. Steve is aware that he’s part of the problem here—hell, he just turned Natasha down the other week, even if he had a pretty good reason—but is there anyone who’s living that sitcom life where they can hang out with all their friends multiple times a week? He doubts it.
The closest Steve gets is his weekly weekend brunch with Arnie, and even that ends up biweekly more often than not. It’s a routine Arnie had instituted when Steve’s mom had first gotten sick; Arnie had worried that Steve was isolating himself, that he wasn’t taking any time for himself, and he’d decided the solution was to drag Steve out to fancy, bougie brunch places to indulge in overpriced avocado toast and mimosas, Arnie’s treat. Even now that Sarah’s cancer free, Arnie still insists on the brunches, and still insists on them being bougie as hell even though Steve would be perfectly happy with a greasy diner breakfast.
He has to admit though, some of these brunch places are pretty nice. Today’s is a trendy cafe with excellent coffee, and a menu that looks both healthy and delicious. Or maybe it’s not healthy and it’s just that all the vegetables involved make it seem that way. Whatever, Steve intends to enjoy his vegetable-loaded omelet anyway.
Steve and Arnie do the usual weekly catch up while they wait for their coffees to arrive. Steve does not tell Arnie about his multiverse travel experience; he hasn’t told anyone, not even his mom, in the interests of avoiding a trip to the psych ward. This means he hasn’t got much to tell Arnie, since most of his recent free time has been devoted to his attempts to meet Bucky. Thankfully, Arnie has plenty of gossip and news to impart, and he’s on an especially entertaining tear about the latest drama at the office he works at, when Steve’s phone makes an all too distinctive noise.
Fuck, Steve should have silenced his damn phone. Arnie stops mid-sentence and stares at him.
“Was that the Grindr noise?” asks Arnie, his tone and face warring between suspicion and delight. “Thought you’d sworn off the apps ‘cause they ‘contribute to the commodification of intimacy.’”
Steve stifles a wince. God, hearing someone else say it makes Steve sound insufferable. Arnie’s face takes on a knowing and sympathetic expression.
“Or did your horniness overcome your principles?” asks Arnie. “Happens to the best of us, I fucked a Wall Street bro a couple months back because he was hot and I was horny.”
Steve hastily checks the app: not Bucky. He puts his phone down on the cafe table and raises an eyebrow at Arnie.
“It was, but no, horniness has not overcome my principles. Also ew, a Wall Street bro.” Arnie shrugs and waves Steve’s disapproval off, then manages to convey his skepticism about Steve’s principles holding up against his horniness by sipping his latte and humming. Steve’s retort is a weak, “I’m just—trying something.”
Arnie knows him too damn well for a deflection like this to fool him. Arnie’s family used to live on the floor below theirs, and he and Steve have known each other since they were toddlers; they practically grew up as brothers. Though both their moms still harbor the hope that they’ll get together, after an intensely awkward attempt in their senior year of high school, they’d concluded that it’s not happening. They wingman for each other instead, with admittedly mixed success. Maybe it’s worth a shot to see if Arnie can help him with the whole Bucky situation though.
“Is this an art thing?” asks Arnie. “Because once I thought about making a dick pic collage out of the dick pics I get—”
“No, it’s, uh, kind of a missed connection? Hey, do you know a James Barnes? His nickname is Bucky.”
“Bucky? What is he, a baseball player from the 30s?” asks Arnie, and Steve gives him a flat look. Arnie grins. “No, I don’t, why, is he your missed connection? Is he not on Instagram or anything?”
“He is, but I feel like it’s weird to slide into his DMs when we’re basically strangers.”
“I mean, is it any weirder than putting up a Craigslist missed connection ad or whatever?” Arnie frowns into the distance. “Do people even use those anymore?”
Their waitress brings their food, and says, “No, I don’t think so, it’s all just scams now, and people trying to sell furniture,” she says with a smile. Arnie points his fork at Steve and raises his eyebrows in a silent, see? “Enjoy!”
Steve and Arnie dig into their food for a couple minutes, then Arnie says, “C’mon, spill, what’s this missed connection? And why do you think you’ll find the guy on Grindr?”
“It’s hard to explain,” says Steve. “And it’s dumb, I just thought—I dunno, it’d be less weird than Instagram stalking him or sliding into his DMs or whatever, if he was on Grindr. It’s not a big deal or anything.”
Arnie shoves a forkful of french toast in his mouth, and picks up his phone, probably to look Bucky up. “James Barnes, you said? Hmm…add the middle initial…” Steve can tell when Arnie finds him by the way his eyes widen. Arnie hastily swallows his food and says, “Holy shit, Steve. Did you have a meet cute with literal, actual Prince Charming?”
It’s an odd kind of relief that Arnie thinks Bucky is improbably handsome too.
“Not exactly, and that’s kind of the problem.” Steve goes with the vaguest lie possible and says, “I mean, I saw him, but he didn’t see me, and it’s kind of dumb—”
Arnie looks up from his phone for a second, confused. “How do you know his name then?”
Steve has, at least, devoted some thought to coming up with a reasonable, non-creepy answer to this question, so he has an answer ready: “He had a work badge on, I managed to make out his name and that he works at Stark Industries.”
“Oh my god, his cat is so cute,” says Arnie, still scrolling.
“Right?”
“And I’m guessing if sliding into his DMs isn’t an option, you’re not willing to, like, lurk around Stark Tower waiting to spot him.”
“Yeah, no, absolutely not,” says Steve, aghast at the thought.
Arnie sets his phone down and returns his attention to his food, and to Steve.
“Well, he’s a queer guy in Brooklyn and he’s not closeted or anything, plus he’s basically in our neighborhood. We’ve got to know someone who knows him,” says Arnie. “I’ll ask around, figure out where he hangs out or if we’ve got any mutual friends or anything.”
Steve smiles at Arnie, relieved and kind of embarrassed that he hadn’t thought of such a straightforward solution. “Really? Thanks, Arnie.”
Arnie waves off Steve’s thanks with a showy flourish of his fork, then points it at Steve. “Yeah, yeah. You should absolutely still slide into his DMs though.”
“I’ll consider it,” lies Steve. “Just—be subtle about it, will you? Don’t go around telling people anything weird?”
“What counts as weird?” asks Arnie with a too-innocent batting of his eyelashes. “I was going to say my best friend thinks he’s found his soulmate—”
“No!”
Arnie grins. “Nah, don’t worry, I’ll be low-key about it.” He reaches across the table to offer Steve his pinky. “Pinky swear.”
Steve narrows his eyes suspiciously, but he accepts the pinky swear, and the traditional pinky wrestle after it, which almost results in them knocking over the carafe of water on their table.
Once they’ve both settled down again, Arnie fixes a keen and questioning look on Steve and asks, “What’s got you so interested in this guy anyway? Apart from how hot he is, I mean, I know you’re not that shallow.”
“Maybe I am that shallow, actually,” jokes Steve, and Arnie kicks him under the table. “Ow! Ugh, why are your shoes so pointy?”
“Fashion,” says Arnie primly. “Now spill!”
“I just—felt a weird kind of connection to him, okay? I’ve never believed in that kind of thing before, but…I felt it with him.”
This is the truth, more or less. And maybe it had only been because that other universe’s Bucky had known Steve—a version of him anyway. But Steve wants to find out for himself.
“How Cinderella of you,” says Arnie, but his smile is soft. “Alright, Steve, I’ll help you find your Prince Charming.”
“Not sure I’m living that kind of fairy tale life,” says Steve wryly. “Does this make you my fairy godmother?”
Arnie’s eyes widen in delight and he gasps. “Yes! Which means you have to let me give you a makeover too!”
“Absolutely not,” says Steve.
While Arnie’s making his hopefully delicate inquiries into Bucky, Steve has a lucky break: according to his Instagram, Bucky is doing the Brooklyn Library’s fundraising half-marathon in a few weeks, and Steve is signed up for it too. Well, he’s signed up for the 10K. Steve has asthma, okay, he’s probably already pushing it with the 10K, a half-marathon might actually kill him. But his campaign has managed to raise about $2,000 bucks for the library, which might not be a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it’s at least enough for the library to put on one more art program for kids. Anyway, the point is, the fundraiser is an event that both Steve and Bucky will be at, and it won’t be weird or stalkery or creepy for Steve to meet Bucky there.
And yes, okay, Steve only knows Bucky’s going to be there because he checks Bucky’s Instagram multiple times a day and therefore sees the post from Bucky. Steve maintains that his own long-standing plans to participate in the event mean this is just a helpful coincidence that Steve can now prepare for and take advantage of. Somehow.
Bucky’s post about it doesn’t really give him any ideas for how to do that, though it’s a cute and funny post: it’s a photo of Bucky peeking sheepishly behind a stack of books on a table, captioned I’m running a half-marathon to pay off my late fees at the BPL, help out a good cause! Jk, i am an exemplary library patron who always returns my books on time!! Also they don’t even have late fees anymore. But still help out the Brooklyn Public Library because we live in a SOCIETY.
Steve clicks the included link to Bucky’s campaign, and his mouth drops open at the amount Bucky has raised: over $15,000, holy shit. And, okay, it looks like $10k of that is from Tony Stark himself, whose only message is “NERD. jk, run like the wind, jbb.” The other amounts are in the $25 to $200 range, with $500 from “Mom & Dad” who have left the adorable message, “So proud of our little bookworm!” and $100 from Becca Barnes, who says “EAT MY DUST, I WILL BEAT YOU.” The Barneses seem like a fun family, thinks Steve, grinning.
Steve’s overthinking this, probably. He can just amble around before and after the race, and try to meet Bucky. It’s not like small talk will be hard when they’re at the same event, and last he checked, there were fewer than a hundred runners participating. He’ll go to the event, and see how things shake out. Simple.
On the day of the fundraiser, Steve immediately realizes he should have come up with an actual plan, because he has not accounted for the fact that he’s attending the fundraiser with his mom, Arnie, Wanda, who are here to cheer him on. This somewhat complicates Steve’s plan of casually milling around in an attempt to find and run into Bucky.
“Are you looking for someone?” asks his mom, as Steve cranes his head around to see if he can spot Bucky anywhere.
“Oh, no, just looking around,” he says, because there would be absolutely nothing casual about the way his mom, Arnie, and Wanda would help him look for Bucky. “Good turnout!”
It’s a really good turnout, actually: not just the seventy or so runners, but also a couple hundred spectators and well-wishers are milling around in the early summer sunshine. The good weather might admittedly be helping the turnout: the armpit-level humidity of summer hasn’t settled in yet, and there’s even a nice breeze going. While it’s no New York Marathon, all in all it’s a pretty respectable showing for a library fundraiser. And it probably represents almost a hundred thousand dollars raised for the Brooklyn Public Library system, which is going to provide a lot of the kinds of programming that’s usually first to get the axe during budget cuts.
“And plenty of younger people, that’s lovely to see,” says Sarah, lifting the brim of her floppy straw hat to look around. “I’m glad your generation understands how important libraries are.”
“Well, they’re the Netflix of books,” says Arnie, with exaggerated earnestness.
Wanda rolls her eyes and smacks him playfully on the arm, by now well-acquainted with Arnie’s dumb hipster act.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Rogers, the wiser members of our generation understand,” says Wanda, and Arnie sticks his tongue out at her. More seriously, Wanda continues, “I don’t know what Pietro and I would have done without all the help we got at the library, when we first came to America. Steve’s fundraising campaign reminded me of that, and I was happy to contribute what I could.”
Steve beams at her, and gives her a quick side hug. “Thanks, Wanda.”
Sarah looks downright touched too, and reaches out to clasp Wanda’s hand. “Oh, that’s so lovely to hear. Have you thought of volunteering at the library? I’m sure they’d love to have someone like you who’s been through something similar to help out with the programs they run for recent immigrants.”
“You know, Pietro and I have been thinking about doing something like that—”
Steve keeps half an ear on their conversation while he keeps trying to spot Bucky among the milling crowd. What if he’s come down with something and doesn’t end up running today? What if Steve never manages to meet him at all? What if Bucky got hit by a bus on the way here and—
“Steve!” calls out a tiny, gray-haired figure, waving vigorously, before bustling over to him: Mrs. Valdez, one of the librarians at the Red Hook Library. “Oh, I’m so glad I caught you before the run starts, I have some people I want you to meet!”
She hooks her arm in his and all but drags him over to a small group of people in business casual, standing out among the runners in athletic gear and the spectators in casual clothing.
“Uh, okay, who…?”
Mrs. Valdez whispers rapidly in his ear, pulling him along at a steady clip. “They’re on the library’s Board of Trustees. You know we had an artist lined up for the murals for the library renovations, but that’s fallen through, something about a fellowship and his muse, it’s such a mess, and finding someone new could set back our reopening even more. But then I thought of you! A talented local artist! If you could take over…”
It’s a dream of an opportunity, and Steve happily lets Mrs. Valdez drag him along. She talks him up to the trustees, and Steve makes his own pitch for taking over the work on the murals, going so far as to pull up his portfolio on his phone to show it to the board members. They ask him questions about his artistic vision for the project, and Steve improvises one on the fly. He’s midway through explaining how he thinks the library’s murals should impart the ordinary joys and wonders of Brooklyn and all its people, and how art for kids doesn’t have to be entirely cartoony, when he finally spots Bucky out of the corner of his eye.
Or perhaps more accurately, when he spots Bucky’s long legs in running shorts that are gloriously short, hitting mid-thigh. In a split-second, he registers: ngh, thighs and wait holy shit that’s him, that’s Bucky and, perhaps most importantly of all, he realizes that Bucky is currently talking to Sarah.
What.
Steve falters mid-sentence, staring over one of the board member’s shoulders. Bucky is here. Bucky is talking to Steve’s mom. Steve could go over there right now, it’s the perfect opportunity for a normal not creepy introduction, Bucky doesn’t have to know that Steve was literally just lusting after his beautiful, muscular thighs, except, oh god, hopefully Sarah isn’t immediately launching into embarrassing childhood stories, Steve absolutely has to go over there, except this mural thing is an opportunity he cannot pass up—
Arnie manages to make eye contact with Steve, and widens his eyes all, it’s him! It’s Bucky! Steve hopes his answering expression is not crazed, and also that it manages to convey please don’t let my mom embarrass me and also keep Bucky talking! I will be over there ASAP!
“Steve?” prompts Mrs. Valdez, a hint of anxiety in her voice.
Steve pulls his attention away from Bucky with effort. “Sorry, just, uh. Already imagining what the mural will look like!”
“You artists,” says one of the board members with a chuckle. “Now, I agree with you about not wanting anything too cartoony in the kids’ wing, but some of the other trustees think that if it doesn’t look like Frozen, the kids will hate it—”
There’s no easy way out of the conversation. Steve can’t afford to bail on this opportunity, and he definitely can’t disappoint Mrs. Valdez. This is basically a job interview, and if he fucks it up, he’s not likely to get another shot. He’ll still have a chance to find and talk to Bucky later.
Except he doesn’t, not before the run starts. The trustees and Mrs. Valdez keep him busy until the run is about to begin, and then Steve has to say, “Uh, I’ve gotta get to the starting line, I’m doing the 10k—” and by then, Bucky’s gone, walking off towards the half-marathon’s portion of the starting line.
“Oh, of course, of course! How about you get some sketches to us in a week, and we’ll see where to go from there? I know it’s short notice, but we don’t want more of a delay—”
Steve agrees, and then he only has a couple minutes to go check in with his mom, Arnie, and Wanda.
“Hey, who was that you guys were talking to earlier?” he asks, totally casually.
“Who were we talking to, who were you talking to? What was all that about?” asks Sarah.
“Oh, uh, the original artist for the Red Hook library renovations has fallen through, Mrs. Valdez suggested I take over—”
Sarah gasps in delight, and there goes asking about Bucky. Steve manages to tell everyone the basics of his talk with the trustees and Mrs. Valdez, and then he has to go rush to the starting line. He’s briefly tempted to try to find Bucky and run beside him, but having now seen Bucky’s thighs, and just his, you know, everything, Steve is guessing Bucky is a significantly better runner than Steve’s asthmatic, skinny ass. Plus it’s probably not good running etiquette? Like, he doesn’t think marathoners have chats while running, they need to save their breath for actually running. Not that Steve’s likely to have much breath to spare anyway.
Steve’s phone buzzes in his pocket, and it keeps buzzing as he pulls it out to see a series of texts from Arnie: so, obviously, we found your missed connection prince charming, and dude is FOR REAL for real prince charming, steve. Your mom already loves him, so get to work making this man her son-in-law stat or i will.
DETAILS demands Steve. He will read his messages while he runs if he has to. That’s fine, right? That’s not against the rules? He can pretend to be taking a selfie or fiddling with his running playlist or whatever. He just has to know what they even talked about.
“Alright runners, are you ready?” calls out someone over a megaphone.
Shit. Steve hastily shoves his phone in his pocket and joins the chorus of yeahs and cheers.
“On your marks then! Three, two, one, go!”
Steve makes no effort to be at the head of the pack of runners, and sets off at a steady pace that should keep him at an eleven-minute mile, or twelve minutes if he starts feeling any tightness in his chest. Nothing impressive to anyone else, but since running a mile used to leave Steve wheezing with shaky legs, he’s pretty damned proud of himself for it. He has decent asthma meds, treatment for his scoliosis, and a couple years worth of diligent training to thank for his current level of relative good health and fitness.
Both the half-marathon and 10K are starting from the Greenpoint Library, though the 10K ends at the Central Library while the half-marathon finishes at the Coney Island Library, along with an optional jump into the ocean. Steve’s original plan had been to head over to the Coney Island Library after his own run, to cheer on the other runners and for the free hot dogs and commemorative t-shirt. He’s even more committed to this plan now that he hasn’t managed to actually meet Bucky yet.
Maybe Bucky will jump into the ocean. Maybe he’ll take his shirt off and jump into the ocean, or take it off after jumping into the ocean, Steve’s not picky, he’s sure it’ll be a beautiful sight no matter what—
And okay, Steve’s getting ahead of himself here. He wants to actually meet the guy, not just ogle him from afar. He pulls out his phone to check his messages, and does his best to read the long string of texts from Arnie while running without falling flat on his face or messing up his pace.
So okay, your mom’s adorable floppy hat blew right off her head and prince charming actually leapt into the air to catch it and then brought it back to her
He was very sweet and gentlemanly about it
Your mom immediately brought you up btw so, like, you have an in maybe. I was also like oh my super talented artist friend is also participating in this event, maybe you’ll meet him. So you’re welcome
THANK YOU, Steve texts back.
Ugh, Steve can’t believe his mom has had a meet cute with Bucky before he has. But okay, this is a good start: Steve can find Bucky after the run and say something flirty or friendly referencing the way Bucky met his mom, and it’ll be fine.
Unfortunately for Steve, he’s far more focused on Bucky than he is on the 10K. Also unfortunately for Steve, the streets of Brooklyn have many potholes, which he’s written plenty of various officials about, and yet, still, there are potholes. As he’s about to become intimately aware of. He’s just reading his mom’s text about Bucky—we met the nicest young man while you were talking with the trustees, I think you should talk to him after the race! He’s single! ;)—when he runs right into a pothole and goes down hard.
To the mingled dismay and admiration of every PE teacher Steve has ever had, and to the surprise and annoyance of every asshole bully who’s tried to teach Steve a lesson, Steve always gets back up. Even when he’s wheezing and sucking on his inhaler, even when he’s bruised and bleeding, even when it would be safer to stay down, he gets back up. It’s what his mom taught him, after all.
Of course, as a nurse, his mom would also say there are some times you should stay down, or at least wait for someone to come help you back up, before driving you to the urgent care or ER.
Steve gets back up, fully intending to stagger onward through the stinging pain of the scrape on the heel of his hand and the angry pain blooming in his knees and wrist. He can run this off, right? Right.
The second he puts weight on his ankle, his vision goes white with pain, and he goes right back down.
Goddammit.
Steve does not finish the 10K. One of the event medics takes one look at his rapidly swelling right ankle and sends him to the ER.
“It’s not that bad!” he protests, and the medic gives him a look.
“Maybe, maybe not, but the urgent care’s gonna send you to the ER anyway for better imaging,” she says, and Steve sighs.
There go his hopes of arranging a meet cute with Bucky.
“Look on the bright side!” says Arnie cheerfully while they wait for Steve to get taken for x-rays at the ER. “At least Prince Charming didn’t see you get defeated by a pothole!”
“There’s no shame in being defeated by a Brooklyn pothole,” says Sarah, with a consoling rub to Steve’s shoulder. “Why, I’ve seen one of them take out a garbage truck! Practically popped the tire!”
Steve stares up at the hospital ceiling with a frown. “God, we have got to do something about the potholes,” he mutters.
“Maybe an op-ed?” suggests Wanda, a twinkle in her eye.
“I feel like you’re joking, but yeah! I am gonna write an op-ed!”
Later, when he’s back at home on the couch with his badly sprained ankle elevated and iced, Steve scrolls glumly through Bucky’s Instagram feed.
Bucky had managed to finish the half-marathon without falling victim to a pothole. Bucky had also managed to beat his sister’s time by about three seconds: there’s a photo of them sprinting to the finish line neck and neck, red-faced and sweaty, Becca’s hair in frizzy disarray and Bucky’s gone wildly fluffy rather than its usual movie star-esque coif. Bucky still looks beautiful, of course.
Also, Steve is infuriated and enraptured to see that Bucky had in fact done the post-race plunge into the ocean at Coney Island, only he hadn’t taken off his shirt for it. Bucky took a selfie afterward, and the sight of his wet running shirt plastered to his, oh god, very impressive and lean musculature—the shirt is clinging obscenely to his six-pack—is somehow sexier than him being shirtless. His sunny smile and pink cheeks and curling wet hair are intolerably endearing. This should be illegal, thinks Steve. This should be against Instagram’s terms of service.
Bucky’s caption is: every run should end with a dip in the ocean!!
Becca has commented on the post: thirst posting??? After a charity event???? FOR SHAME.
Bucky’s reply is this u? and a link to Becca’s own Instagram, showing a thirst post of her own: Becca also clearly post-race and post-ocean dip, down to just her sports bra, flexing her, goddamn, very impressive biceps and generally looking like a model. If Steve hadn’t already met an alternate universe Bucky, he’d definitely be busy embarrassing himself in Becca Barnes’ general vicinity too.
He goes back to Bucky’s feed and does not moon over the photos. No, he analyzes them for clues on how to meet Bucky in a totally chill and normal and not creepy way. Definitely.
Also, he maybe sympathizes with that artist who bailed on the library mural project because of his muse, because Steve is also feeling very inspired by Bucky’s everything. He’s more grateful than sympathetic though now that he’s gotten the job, even if it’s taking genuine effort to focus on his mural of Brooklyn’s strengths and beauties rather than Bucky post-run in a wet t-shirt.
He does do some furtive sketches though. Bucky’s an excellent reference for practicing drawing musculature, after all.
Arnie’s hopefully delicate inquiries—please god let them have been delicate and not creepy or totally unsubtle—into Bucky eventually yield some results.
“So apparently your Prince Charming likes to dance! Which explains why you haven’t run into him before, you wallflower,” says Arnie on the way to their next brunch.
“My not dancing is a matter of public safety,” says Steve, and he is not joking. Steve’s two left feet have literally caused injuries on the dance floor, and not only to his poor dance partner. Once, he’d managed to set off a chain reaction of people falling. He grimaces and continues, “Does this mean I have to go to a club to run into him? I hate clubs.”
They’re loud and crowded and overwhelming, and between the lights and the noise, Steve invariably ends up with a headache that turns into a migraine if he’s unlucky. He doesn’t often go anymore, and when he does, he usually ducks out early. Even if he does manage to run into Bucky at a club, Steve’s unlikely to manage anything other than shout-flirting at him over pounding music for a few minutes before needing to flee.
“Yeah, I figured you’d say that. Luckily for you, he also has a friend who’s a wine snob, so he goes to that nice wine bar by the fish shop a lot.” Arnie slings an arm around his shoulders. “And because I’m such a good friend, I will bravely accompany you to this wine bar for tapas and wine tastings until you manage to run into him!”
Steve heaves a sigh of relief and leans gratefully against Arnie. “Thanks, pal,” he says. “Do I even wanna know how you got all this information? Or do a bunch of people think Bucky, like, owes you money or something now?”
Arnie rolls his eyes and says, “I just gossiped with people. You’ll be happy to know that Prince Charming is a good tipper and doesn’t have a bad rep or anything.”
Steve is in fact happy to know that. At the rate he’s collecting information about Bucky though, he’s definitely going to have to figure out something to put them on an even playing field, once they’ve actually properly met. It feels weird and dishonest to know so much about him when he knows nothing about Steve.
Is it more or less creepy to go with the missed connection lie or the insane travel to an alternate universe truth? Steve wonders. He wishes he’d had the time to ask that other Bucky for his advice. Then again, that other Bucky seemed to have been living a pretty wild life, what with not seeming to be all that alarmed by multiple versions of his best friend showing up. Whatever, Steve figures he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it.
Steve doesn’t actually like wine all that much, so becoming a new regular at a wine bar isn’t ideal. But it’s a reasonably straightforward way to try to run into Bucky, and on those nights he goes alone because Arnie can’t make it, it’s actually nice to sit at the far end of the bar and do some sketching. He’s not even the only one quietly sipping at a glass of wine alone while doing something else: there’s usually at least a couple other people who are there alone too, reading a book or typing away on a laptop. The place has a pleasant level of hustle and bustle, and is less loud than a lot of bars, with a relaxed and almost cafe-like vibe. The bartenders are nice and not snobby, and seem to enjoy helping Steve develop a palate for wine. All in all, it’s not a trial to hang out here, alone or with Arnie.
It takes almost a couple months though before one of Steve’s visits match up with one of Bucky’s, mostly because Steve sticks to Fridays and weekends, but apparently Bucky’s regular night here is on Thursdays.
“Steve, he’s here!” hisses Arnie, his eyes wide as he looks over Steve’s shoulder towards the entrance. “And okay, Prince Charming has a tall, dark, and handsome friend, because I guess Prince Charmings travel in packs?”
Steve grins and kicks Arnie under the table, then risks a quick glance over at Bucky’s table. He recognizes Bucky’s friend as Sam Wilson, who Steve had also briefly met in that other timeline. He’d been kind and sympathetic, joking reassuringly about the insane situation Steve had found himself in. It’s nice to know Bucky’s friends with him in this timeline, he’d seemed like a good guy.
“Sure, and so do mouthy, scrawny Brooklyn artists,” Steve tells Arnie, but then his stomach lurches as a thought occurs to him. “Shit, do you think he’s on a date with S—the other guy?”
Arnie takes an ostentatiously big sip of his wine, letting the glass cover most of his face, presumably to make it harder to tell he’s staring at Bucky and his friend.
“Nah,” says Arnie after a moment, lowering his wine glass. “I think that’s the wine snob friend, they’ve got bro body language going on.” He waggles his eyebrows at Steve. “So, you gonna go buy him a drink?”
Steve blanches. “No! I’m gonna…” So, okay, Steve hasn’t thought this part through in a lot of detail. He’d mostly planned on winging it. “...go talk to him? With you? Since you’ve actually met him and all.”
“Hmm,” says Arnie, narrowing his eyes. “I better get some heroic wingmanning from you at some point in the future.”
“You’ve got it,” promises Steve. “No guarantees that I’ll be any good at it though.”
“Also, this guy better be your true love for all the effort we’re putting into this.”
“I hope so, yeah.”
“Okay, finish your drink so I can go get us fresh glasses. Then I’ll spot Prince Charming on my way back here and go talk to him. You come over when I wave you over to introduce you.”
Plans like this are why Arnie is Steve’s emotional support extrovert. “Yeah, okay,” says Steve, as Arnie drains the dregs of his wine, while Steve attempts to rapidly finish his half a glass.
“C’mon, hurry it up!” says Arnie.
“Wine isn’t exactly easy to chug!” protests Steve. A few big gulps do the job though, and the influx of wine sloshes uneasily in Steve’s stomach. He probably shouldn’t finish the next glass, not unless they get some food to soak up the booze. “There,” he says, and hands the glass to Arnie.
Things are kind of busy over by the bar, so Arnie ends up needing to wait his turn. Steve figures it’s as good an opportunity as any to catch a better glimpse of Bucky and Sam. He looks around the room, hopefully conveying casual interest, nothing to see here, just a guy waiting for his drink and his friend. When he sees Bucky, his stomach does a weird flopping thing and his heart immediately speeds up. If he didn’t know what an actual arrhythmia feels like, he’d say it skipped a beat at the sight of Bucky, who looks as ludicrously handsome as always, even in business casual, his rich brown hair gleaming in the warm lighting of the bar.
It’s not only that he’s handsome, Steve thinks, he’s not that shallow. Guys who look too good are often paradoxically unattractive to Steve, at least at first glance. Looking too perfect is boring to Steve’s artistic eye, and conventional good looks start to all look pretty samey. Bucky looks pretty damn perfect, and in a classically movie star handsome kind of way at that, but with him, it’s his expressiveness that has Steve rapt.
In the other Bucky, most of that expressiveness had lived in his eyes, as clear and legible as the sky’s moods, with just as many shifting shades of blue and gray. Life had taught that Bucky caution or pain, Steve thought, and it had shown in the solemn lines of his face. In this Bucky, his face is alight with life and feeling, his every expression as eloquent as a conversation. Steve’s pretty sure he could draw Bucky forever and never get bored.
Steve looks away from Bucky with effort, and lets his attention wander until it snags on the other two-top table just to the left of his and Arnie’s, where a woman and a man are sitting. If it’s a date, it’s not going well judging by the woman’s body language: she’s holding herself rigidly, and her eyes are darting around, as if in search of an exit. Steve frowns when he sees that the guy keeps trying to reach across the table to take her hand or touch her, and she keeps finding some reason to keep her hands away by fiddling with her wine glass or her necklace or her hair.
“Um, thanks for the wine, but I have to get going—” she says, and stands to leave, but the guy lunges across the table to grab her wrist.
“Hey, we just got here, let’s finish the bottle at least—”
The guy’s words and tone are casual, but Steve can see the tightness of his grip on the woman’s wrist and the sudden fear in her widening eyes. Steve’s up and out of his seat before he can even really think about it.
“Hey, she said she has to get going,” he says, and it surprises the guy enough to loosen his hold on her wrist.
She yanks her wrist free, grabs her purse, and goes, tossing Steve a grateful look as she does.
“What the—did that bitch just leave?” says the guy, his face contorting into an ugly expression of rage. The rage quickly gets directed Steve’s way. “What the fuck, you little shit, you need to mind your own business! We were having a good time!”
“Sure doesn’t look like it, the way she ran out of here,” retorts Steve. “I suggest you lose her number, because I doubt she’s gonna answer your texts.”
When the asshole tries to shove past Steve, as if to try to follow the woman, Steve plants his feet and refuses to be moved. This place is too classy to have a bouncer, but maybe if the bartender comes by, the asshole will calm down—
Too late. The guy’s apparently a mean and angry drunk. He takes a swing at Steve, and Steve manages to dodge, though his only recently healed ankle gives a sharp warning twinge. Long experience of schoolyard fights has taught Steve that it’s not always—or even usually—the guy who takes the first swing who gets in trouble; it’s the guy whose punch lands first, even if it was in self-defense. Now that Steve’s a grown-ass man, he knows the consequences of a fight could be an arrest, rather than a suspension or detention, and anyway, he doesn’t particularly want to punch this asshole. He’s already succeeded in his goal of making sure the woman got away. So he braces himself to block the next punch, and by then, a murmur of alarm is rising in the bar.
“Hey!” he hears someone say, just before the asshole’s next punch lands. Steve’s nose takes the brunt of it, the pain immediate and as explosive as the stars bursting into his vision. Blood starts gushing out of his nose, but Steve ignores it to take a swing of his own now—and he manages to pop him in the jaw just before the guy is bodily dragged away from Steve by someone.
“That’s enough!” says—shit, Bucky, it’s Bucky.
This is not the meet cute Steve wanted to have! A bar fight is not a good way to meet the love of your life! Thankfully, most of Bucky’s attention is on the asshole right now, so presumably he doesn’t think Steve started this fight, and the asshole goes on to prove it.
“That little shit made my date leave!”
Steve is covering most of his face with his hands, to stem the flow of blood, but he can still see Bucky stop the asshole’s lunge towards Steve. Bucky shoves him back and steps between Steve and the asshole.
“She was trying to get away from you!” says Steve, then, urgently, “Don’t let him follow his date.” The words come out muffled and thick from behind his hands and rapidly swelling nose.
Bucky glances back at him quickly, then returns his attention to the asshole and says, “Don’t think your date could have been going all that well if she literally fled. Let it go and walk it off, man.”
This timeline’s Bucky might not be as imposing as the other’s, but he is taller than the asshole, and his broad shoulders and ready stance are apparently enough to make the asshole think twice about taking a swing at him. That hesitation lasts long enough for one of the bar employees to reach them, a dark look on her face and a bat and a phone in her hands. Unsurprisingly, she threatens to call the cops and tells them to leave, and then Steve and the asshole are both unceremoniously thrown out of the bar.
“He was being an asshole to his date!” Steve protests, and this at least nets him a sympathetic look and a bar towel thrown his way.
“Zero tolerance for fights,” says the employee. “We’re not a bar fights kind of establishment, so neither of you will be welcome here in the future. Please leave quietly or I really will call the cops.”
The asshole curses out the blameless employee, but Steve doesn’t try to argue his case. He just grimaces and puts the towel over his face to staunch the still-flowing blood, and then braces himself for getting a full on beating from the asshole who caused all this now that they’re outside. Steve could just make a run for it at this point, since a quick scan of the block shows that the asshole’s date is nowhere in sight. Staying in one piece is probably more important than his pride. Thankfully, he doesn’t have to make an undignified run for it, because Arnie comes out then and shouts at the asshole about how he’s going to call the cops if he doesn’t get out of here and leave Steve alone. Other people on the street are starting to pay attention now, and apparently this is too much for the asshole, because he shouts some more curses and finally slinks away.
To Steve’s mortification, Sam comes out of the bar then, calling out, “Hey man, you okay?”
“Just a busted nose,” says Steve through the towel covering the lower half of his face.
Now that the adrenaline is fading, the pain is making itself known with angry throbs. No nausea or double vision though, so he’s probably been spared a concussion. His nose seems to have taken the brunt of the blow; he hopes it’s not broken, but suspects it is.
“You mind if I take a look? I’m Sam Wilson, I’m a paramedic,” he says. “Me and my friend were just talking to your friend Arnie here, we saw what went down in there. What an asshole that guy was, right? Musta been an angry drunk.”
“Yeah,” says Steve, and he figures saying no to letting Sam take a look will cause more of a fuss than just letting him, so he adds, “Sure, you can take a look, but I don’t think it’s that bad,” and lifts the towel so Sam can see.
Sam asks the usual post-head injury questions, and Steve assures him that he’s not feeling any concussion symptoms. As he suspected, Sam declares his nose broken.
“You probably wanna get that set at the ER, and get checked out just to be safe,” he says. “Don’t play around with head injuries, I could tell you some real horror stories.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll take him,” says Arnie. “Thanks, Sam.”
Then Bucky comes jogging out of the bar with something in his hands, and Steve quickly covers his probably horrific looking nose and lower face with the towel again. This cannot be how he meets Bucky, it cannot. He widens his eyes frantically at Arnie to convey this, and Arnie makes a what’re you gonna do kind of grimace and shrug at him.
“Hey! Steve, right? You okay? I managed to charm the bartender out of some ice for your face,” he says, and oh my god, Bucky is so nice. Why is Bucky so nice. “She thinks that asshole had it coming, by the way, she was just about to come over and help that woman before you stepped in.”
Bucky hands over the ice, which is bundled up in another towel, earnest concern written all across his face.
“Thanks,” mumbles Steve.
Maybe there are people who could be smooth and charming and cool in a situation like this—Natasha’s ex Matt could probably manage it—but Steve is not one of those people. His face hurts, he can barely breathe through his swelling nose, and Bucky is too handsome and nice to deal with right now. Because Arnie is a genius and a miracle worker, and also an excellent wingman even when things have gone so awry, he comes to Steve’s rescue to get him out of this before he can embarrass himself.
“There’s our Uber!” he says. “C’mon, let’s go make sure you’re not hemorrhaging into your brain or whatever.”
“My mom can probably set my nose,” Steve protests, without much conviction. She certainly can, but she’ll definitely send him to the ER anyway, because Steve knows she agrees with Sam about not messing around with head injuries. Arnie gives him a look that says more or less the same thing, and Steve sighs and says, “Yeah, alright.”
He waves an awkward goodbye to Bucky and Sam, and gets in the Uber, trying not to drip any melting ice or blood anywhere. The driver takes one look at him and heaves an annoyed sigh, but doesn’t kick them out.
“I know, I know,” says Arnie, apologetic, before promising, “I will give you an extra big tip.”
“And I’ll, uh, try not to bleed on you seats,” says Steve.
“Yeah, yeah,” says the driver, and starts to pull away from the curb. Steve can’t bring himself to look over at Bucky to see his expression.
“So that went terribly,” says Steve. His eyes sting with tears, and he blames it on the increasing pain in his nose and face.
“Hey, no, not entirely! You were heroic, and Prince Charming saw it!” says Arnie in an encouraging tone.
It’s a good effort. “And then he had to step in so I didn’t get my ass kicked,” says Steve. “Also, you know he has a name, right? You’ve literally met him now, you can’t keep calling him Prince Charming.”
“I mean, there are worse foundations for a relationship!” says Arnie, because he’s always committed to the bright side.
Steve, in contrast, is his own personal storm cloud. “I didn’t get his number or anything.”
“…oh,” says Arnie, the hopeful expression sliding off his face.
“And now I’m banned from that bar,” adds Steve.
Arnie grimaces. His mouth opens and closes a couple times before settling on, “Ah.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there’s always sliding into his DMs!” says Arnie, terminally optimistic. Steve just sighs.
He’ll leave that as a last resort.
Steve’s nose is broken, it turns out, though not too badly. They set it in the ER and put a dressing on it, and tell him to ice it and come back if the swelling gets worse or doesn’t improve. His ma fusses over him until he looks less bruised, and she seems to think his moping and moroseness are due to his busted nose.
“What’s all this misery about? Why, you’d think you’d never broken your nose before!” she says, confused but also sympathetic as she brings him some ice cream when he’s vegetating on the couch one night, apathetically watching some Netflix reality show.
“I’m not miserable,” says Steve, though he doesn’t move his eyes from their fixed gaze on the TV screen as he takes the ice cream.
You’d think they’d run out of hobbies and artistic skills to turn into competition shows, and yet, there’s now a whole eight-episode season of an embroidery competition. It’s kind of hypnotic, honestly.
“You even look rather dashing with a slightly crooked nose!” continues Sarah, and if he lets her keep going in this vein, it’s going to be a fifteen-minute ramble about the appeal of crooked noses and the various attractive, famous people with crooked noses, and possibly what Old Nan in the Old Country had to say about them. Steve used to take these Old Nan tales as family gospel, but now he’s pretty sure Sarah is just making shit up.
So Steve admits, “It’s not my nose.”
Sarah hums dubiously, giving him a narrow-eyed look as if she can divine his secrets with her mom powers. Which, honestly, she might. He’s generally pretty honest with her, and it feels strange to keep this secret, but, well. There’s no way to say “I traveled to an alternate universe where I met the maybe love of my life or soulmate or whatever, and a bunch of other versions of me who are either best friends with him or married to him” and still sound sane. Not in this universe, anyway.
“Then what’s wrong?” she asks, and plops down beside him. “Are you regretting the fight?”
“Don’t think it was really much of a fight,” says Steve wryly. “And I don’t regret helping that woman at the bar and standing up to that asshole. It’s just—there was a guy there, and I really liked him, and then I went and caused a violent scene—practically a bar fight—and, well, he’s just not that kinda guy.”
Put-together, handsome Bucky with a good job who does charity marathons for the Brooklyn Library in his spare time and dotes on his adorable cat does not seem like the kind of guy to delight in Steve’s particular brand of righteous belligerence. Bucky is probably too sensible for bar fights, Bucky demonstrably breaks bar fights up rather than joining in. And sure, Steve doesn’t go around meaning to start bar fights, but, well. That one wasn’t his first and it might not be his last.
Although, hadn’t the other universe’s Bucky said he met his Steve when he punched some kid trying to steal his Steve’s lunch money…? Steve dismisses the thought. Playground fights don’t exactly translate to adult life.
Sarah frowns. “And he doesn’t want to see you again?”
“I barely got a chance to talk to him. We didn’t even exchange numbers or anything.”
And Arnie had only really gotten as far as introducing himself, mentioning Steve, and making some small talk before Steve interrupted things by getting punched, so no joy there either.
“That seems like the sort of situation that social media is for. Can you not find him on the Instatwitter or the Book of Faces or what have you?”
“Ma, I know you know those aren’t their names, you’re not that old,” says Steve, exasperated, and she just waves her hand. “You have a Facebook, for god’s sake.”
“That’s not answering my question,” she says, singsong.
There goes distracting her. A week out from the not-at-all meet cute, Steve’s window of time for contacting Bucky online is rapidly closing. If he waits much longer, there’s every chance Bucky won’t even remember him, or be creeped out by the contact. It’s really not how Steve wants to initiate a friendship, let alone a relationship.
“I can find him, yeah, but talking to him there…I’m not really good at that kind of thing,” says Steve vaguely. He does not say that it just doesn’t feel right, given the impression he got of the other Steves and their Buckys in that alternate universe. He’s just hoping his mom won’t push him on this, when his attention is caught by something on the embroidery show. “Holy shit, did that person just embroider an accurate recreation of the moon?”
They both get distracted then, the embroidery show and the ice cream proving to be far more interesting than Steve’s romantic woes.
He’s still feeling pretty glum about it though when he meets Arnie and Natasha for their bimonthly session of putting together care packages for people in domestic violence shelters. Natasha’s a genius at collecting and organizing donations for the care packages, and there’s always a huge amount of stuff that needs to be sorted through and put together into packages the shelter can use: personal hygiene packets, packets for little kids that group together the right size clothes and age-appropriate toys, school supplies, clothes for the adults, etc. Once she amasses enough stuff, they all go to her place to put it together while they watch bad movies or TV shows, drink beer, and eat takeout. It’s honestly a lot of fun.
At least, it usually is. Tonight, Steve’s not feeling it. He’d have begged off, but he’s dodging too many of Natasha’s invitations in an effort to avoid getting set up with someone, and if he keeps putting her off, she’s going to be genuinely hurt if she isn’t already. Just as bad as her being suspicious though, she’s worried. She greets him with a tight hug, and a long, penetrating stare.
“You’ve been scarce lately, is everything okay?”
“Yeah, no, just busy with work and that mural I’m doing at the Red Hook library,” he tells her, which is true, mostly.
“And your mom’s okay?” presses Natasha as she steps aside to let him into her apartment.
“She’s fine, she’s great. She says hi, by the way,” says Steve. He lifts up the tote bag he brought. “And I brought the Ziplocs as requested,” he adds, and Natasha hums in acknowledgment.
“It’s just you’ve seemed kind of depressed lately,” she says, taking the bag.
“Yeah, he’s bummed because he fumbled a meet cute with his Prince Charming,” says Arnie, bustling in after them with a box full of supplies. He sets them down on Natasha’s dining table with a grunt.
“That’s—no—! And you’ve got to stop calling him Prince Charming, he has a name, and also I’m not Cinderella—”
Arnie scoffs and pulls out his phone. Steve groans, knowing what’s coming, and yup, there Arnie goes showing Natasha a picture of Bucky.
“Okay, but look at this and tell me this is not a Prince Charming lookalike,” says Arnie. “Steve had, like, a whole missed connection thing with him and he’s been trying to make something happen with this guy for forever. I keep telling him, just slide into his DMs, it’s fine—”
Natasha takes one look at the photo and her eyes widen before she stares flatly at Steve. “Oh my—Steve this is James.”
“Yeah, James Barnes, that’s his name, Arnie just never uses it—”
“No, I mean—I know him!” says Natasha, exasperated. “I’ve been trying to set you two up together for months!”
“What?” says Steve, gaping at her.
“You two are the only people I know who absolutely refuse to enter the 21st century dating world, and you’re exactly each other’s type. I’ve been trying to get you two to meet and hang out for months, but you keep bailing, and James is always busy, so scheduling it is a nightmare,” she says.
“But—how do you even know him?”
More like, how has the solution to Steve’s meet-Bucky conundrum been so close this entire time?
“His little sisters were in a couple of my dance classes a while back, and I met him and his family at a recital. Then we ended up taking some of the same classes at the yoga studio, and I got to be friends with his sister Becca too. They’re good people, you’d love the whole family.” She gives him an amused and exasperated side-eye as she hands Arnie’s phone back to him. “Clearly, you like him, so I was right about you two being compatible.”
“You were,” he admits, and makes pleading eyes at her. “Now that I know it’s him you've been trying to set me up with, I am absolutely willing to be set up on a date by you, Nat. Please, I’m begging you, help me not seem creepy and pathetic with him.”
Natasha rolls her eyes, but she pulls out her phone and smiles at him too. “Mission accepted,” she says.
To give Natasha credit, she’s generally pretty elegant and subtle in her matchmaking attempts, and she doesn’t mind when they don’t work out. She just invites disparate friends and friends of friends to meals or get togethers or events, makes the introductions, and lets a friendship or romance take its course from there. She managed to successfully set her ex Matt’s best friend up with someone, introduced her neighbor Jessica to her now-husband Luke, and says she also “facilitated” Bucky’s friend Sam meeting his current girlfriend Misty. “Facilitate” is admittedly a somewhat concerning way to put it, but whatever, if she gets results, Steve’s in no position to question it.
So when Natasha tells him to be at a whiskey bar in Carroll Gardens a couple weeks later, he shows up.
It is, thankfully, a quiet place, and early enough that it’s not too packed. The theme for the decor seems to be “gentleman’s library on a fancy British estate”, and Steve’s glad he dressed up a bit for this; he’d have felt wildly out of place amid the posh aesthetic here in his usual shirt and jeans. There are tables and booths scattered throughout the space, everything plush velvet or gleaming leather, each table and booth lit in rich, golden hues, with the rest of the bar in a relative dimness whose shadows seem almost inviting and cozy. The clink of glass, the murmur of conversation, and muted, jazzy music all make for pleasant background noise. It’s not Steve’s usual scene—too sophisticated—but it’s nice. Best of all, it’s a good place to actually talk to someone.
Hopefully Steve won’t get into any fights here.
Natasha waves him over to a booth in the corner, where she’s sitting with Bucky, his sister Becca, and Wanda. She makes the introductions, and Bucky smiles at him, warm and sincere.
“We’ve already met, kinda,” he says. “I was kicking myself for not getting your number after that asshole punched you, I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
It’s not like Steve didn’t know that Bucky is kind and generous, but it makes his insides go all warm and floppy anyway.
“I’m fine,” Steve tells him with a smile. “Busted my nose, but it’s healed alright, not too crooked.”
There’s a slight, lingering bump that Steve has resigned himself to as fate; he’d noticed the same thing on all the other Steves during his inter-dimensional trip.
“Badge of honor,” declares Bucky, his face solemn but his eyes sparkling.
“Here, I ordered an old fashioned for you already,” says Natasha, and slides the drink over to him.
“This place has the best old fashioneds in the whole city,” promises Becca, and after Steve takes a sip, he agrees with her.
Natasha deftly manages the flow of conversation from there, and Bucky is encouragingly friendly with Steve, always making sure to include him in the conversation and make eye contact. Steve tries not to be flustered by it or by Bucky’s undeniable good looks: the stubble on his cheeks and the artful disarray of his hair give him a relaxed air, and Steve tries hard not to read into how it all has a come-hither, flirty effect. This is just what Bucky’s face looks like, Steve tells himself. Bucky can’t help that his lips are naturally kind of pouty or that his eyelashes seem designed for coy looks.
“Nat mentioned you did the murals for the renovation at the Red Hook library,” says Bucky. “They’re amazing, you really get at the best of Brooklyn in them, and they’re so—so loving.”
Bucky’s cheeks go faintly pink, and he takes a quick drink. Steve, already smitten, is even more smitten. Bucky likes his art. Bucky is adorable.
Those other Steves were so right, thinks Steve somewhat wildly. Steve does need a Bucky in his life.
“Thanks,” he says. “I, uh, I did put a lot of love in them. I think that’s, uh, especially important in a library, you know? They’re such an important part of the community, so they should really take pride in the community, and reflect that back to the community,” he says and Bucky nods.
“Yeah, for sure. Uh, maybe I’m totally off-base here, but there’s something about the murals that reminds me of—” he cuts himself off with a scrunch of his nose and tucks a stray piece of hair back from his forehead, “god, I’m probably gonna sound pretentious or dumb, but—they reminded me of, like, the frescoes in churches? Like how they’re supposed to tell the important stories without words—”
Steve is going to marry this man, he decides, and beams at him. Bucky ducks his head, the fan of his lashes so dark and lovely against his cheeks. Steve leans in, heedless of his cocktail, and the drink sloshes over the table.
“Yes! Yes, that’s absolutely what I was—! I didn’t pitch it that way to the board, but you get it, you absolutely get it, it’s, you know, a secular, civic version of a church fresco, like, elevating that to something almost holy—”
Steve is vaguely aware that Natasha has drawn Becca and Wanda into a discussion about their mutual interest in doing volunteer work with helping get refugees settled in the city, but he’s wholly engrossed in his conversation with Bucky. After a while, she touches Steve on the shoulder and gives Steve and Bucky a wholly believable, natural smile of apology.
“Sorry, we’re getting in the weeds here. How about us girls move to one of the free tables and let you two talk about…libraries and art?”
Before either Steve or Bucky can say anything, she breezes away with Wanda and Becca, Becca looking over her shoulder and waggling her eyebrows at her brother on the way. It leaves a lull in his and Bucky’s conversation, and they both take sips of their neglected drinks.
“So, uh, I think you met my mom, by the way,” says Steve. “At the library fundraiser half-marathon? I was doing the 10k, and Arnie said you caught her hat for her.”
Bucky narrows his eyes and looks into the distance for a moment before snapping his fingers. “Sarah, right? With your friend Arnie.”
“Yeah. She was gushing about what a gentleman you were for a while,” says Steve, and Bucky shrugs.
“It was nothing. I didn’t see you at the thing after the run though?”
Steve’s face goes hot. “Uh, yeah, no, I—” He laughs and shakes his head, says, “Got taken out by a pothole, if you can believe it. Went down hard, sprained my ankle.”
Bucky looks gratifyingly outraged on his behalf. “Those goddamn potholes! I nearly wiped out on my bike because of one the other day! I wrote a letter to, like, every government agency involved and everything. On paper, even.” He looks faintly abashed for a moment. “Becca always says I’m such an old man, so does Natasha.”
“Me too!” says Steve. “I mean, Natasha tells me that all the time too!”
“Just because I hate using dating apps! As if you can even get a real sense of someone there, it’s just a different kind of advertising—”
“Exactly!”
To Steve’s relief, the more they talk, the more clear it is that the other universe’s Bucky wasn’t a fluke, or an outlier: Steve likes this Bucky too. He likes him a lot. This Bucky is as generous and earnest and wry as his counterpart, but without the sorrow and evident hardship that had seemed to weigh that other Bucky down. He’s passionate about his job working on clean energy initiatives, and about his hobbies and interests like running and sci fi and Lord of the Rings and dancing. He adores Brooklyn as much as Steve does, and gives back to the community by volunteering in STEM mentorship programs and community gardens. They both love baseball too, and share a deep disdain for the Yankees, bemoaning Brooklyn’s lack of a major league team.
“I keep telling Tony he oughta buy the Dodgers and move ‘em back to Brooklyn,” says Bucky, and it doesn’t even come across as a braggy name drop.
“At least we’ve still got the Cyclones,” says Steve with a sigh.
Mindful of his head start of knowing more about Bucky than Bucky does about him, Steve shares a lot about himself too, maybe even too much. Though Bucky doesn’t seem to mind, listening intently, that expressive face of his a joy to watch. Before Steve knows it, Natasha, Wanda and Becca have said their goodbyes and it’s just Steve and Bucky.
“Hey, wanna go grab a bite to eat?” suggests Steve, and Bucky agrees enthusiastically.
They go to a nearby diner when Bucky confesses that he’s craving pancakes for dinner, and Steve laughs and agrees, charmed. He supposes he’s charmed by everything about Bucky. They linger over dinner—or brinner, in Bucky’s case—taking their time with pie and coffee.
“I’m really glad Natasha set this up,” confesses Bucky with a shy smile. “I, uh—that night at the wine bar? I was planning to come over and talk to you, actually.”
“Really?” says Steve, surprised, and Bucky nods.
“It—god, it sounds like a line, I know, but, uh, there was just something about you, Steve.”
Steve’s sure the smile on his face must be embarrassingly big. “Yeah, I, uh—it’s like that for me too, Bucky.”
Bucky tilts his head, his brow furrowing in confusion. “How do you know about my nickname? Only my sisters call me Bucky.”
Shit. Fuck . Natasha had introduced him as James . His Instagram doesn’t mention the nickname either. Steve would know, he’s spent enough time scrolling through it. Steve could lie and say he overheard Becca call him that, or that Natasha had mentioned it at some point, but then he doesn’t know if Natasha knows the nickname either. There is, in short, no non-creepy, non-obvious lie Steve can offer here, and the truth is insane.
Fuck it. He has to tell the truth. It’ll eat at him forever if he doesn’t.
“Sorry,” says Steve. “I didn’t even—we’ve met before, kinda.”
“Yeah? I don’t remember you,” says Bucky, frowning and uncertain. “Shit, did we meet at some club? I, uh, had some wild times back in undergrad, I mighta been too drunk to—”
Well, that would be a good cover story, wouldn’t it. Unfortunately, it’s well beyond Steve’s improvisational lying skills. So he takes a deep breath and goes for it.
“So, uh, this is gonna sound totally insane. I’ve got no proof it happened other than a Jenga block, and the fact that I know you even though we’d never met before this thing happened. But around three months ago, I got zapped to another universe…”
It’s not a particularly long story, and Bucky listens intently the whole time, his expression focused and otherwise inscrutable. When Steve’s finished, Bucky is silent for a long moment.
Eventually, Bucky says, “Well, if you were gonna lie, you’d’ve picked a lie that’s a hell of a lot more believable than that one.”
“Yeah. I wish the story didn’t sound so insane, but, uh, it does. And I didn’t want to lie to you. To start this—whatever it ends up being—with a lie.”
“And you tried to find me here because of your alternate universe selves,” says Bucky slowly.
“More like because of the alternate universe you,” says Steve. “We, uh. We had a really nice time. I really liked him.”
“Do you like me as much?” asks Bucky, looking amused now.
“More,” Steve admits.
“And you kissed him.”
“Uh, yeah. I just figured, if it was my only shot—”
“Hmm, then I gotta say, I’m hoping for a first date kiss too.”
Steve gapes at Bucky. “You believe me?” he asks, and Bucky raises an eyebrow.
“The many worlds hypothesis has a lot of compelling evidence in its favor, there just hasn’t been a way to empirically test it,” he says, thoughtful.
Steve keeps staring at Bucky. Of all the things he’d expected Bucky to say…Bucky meets his stare evenly, a small smile on his lips.
“Okay, but I could just be insane,” Steve feels compelled to point out. “I would’ve thought I was insane, if not for the dumb Jenga block.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Steve, I just believe you,” says Bucky with a shrug. “And I like you. This is the best date I’ve had in years.”
“Buck, I really feel like you should have more questions or concerns,” says Steve with an exasperated huff. He can’t stop smiling though, and elation is rising in his chest, making him feel light and giddy.
“Buck…I like that,” says Bucky, matching Steve’s smile. “How about we go by your place and you show me this multiverse-traveling Jenga block and then I’ll decide.”
“Oh, that’s smooth,” says Steve, admiring. “Yeah, okay.”
Steve does show Bucky the Jenga block. He’s kept it on his bedside table, as a kind of proof of what happened. Which seems to be its own kind of proof of Steve’s honesty to Bucky.
“You keep it there?” asks Bucky, an odd look on his face as he looks down at the block Steve has placed in his hand.
They’re sitting close together on Steve’s bed, their thighs and knees touching. The nearness of Bucky is doing things to Steve, igniting a bone-deep need and hunger for the warmth of his skin and the comfort of his touch.
“Yeah. To, uh, remind myself,” says Steve.
“And you’ve been trying to meet me this whole time,” says Bucky.
“Yeah.”
“Because all those other versions of us, they’re—”
“Best friends or in love, as far as I could tell. Or both.”
Bucky’s still staring at the Jenga block when he takes a deep breath, then he looks up at Steve, his eyes gleaming with wonder and what Steve can only describe as a fuck it, why not kind of joy.
“Then let’s not be the outliers,” says Bucky in a low voice, and then he leans in and kisses Steve.
Within seconds, Steve knows: this is his last first kiss. There’s a simultaneous finality and endless possibility in it, an irrevocable new beginning in the way their lips learn each other’s, in the give and take, in the breath they share. Steve gets it now, why fairy tales so often end with a kiss and a happily ever after. This is exactly what happily ever after means.
A couple years later, at their wedding, they have mini-Jenga sets as wedding favors, engraved with the date of their wedding and SGR & JBB, not the outliers.