Work Text:
Steve hasn't used crutches in seventy-six years. He didn't miss it. His foot itches and it's sweaty and he can't get up the stairs to the bathroom and he’s been lying here on the couch watching shitty television for fourteen hours. He tells all of this to Sam over the phone in exceedingly impolite terminology.
Sam replies that maybe next time he shouldn't use his feet for manual brakes on a moving semi truck.
“What was I supposed to do, Sam?” Steve complains with the phone clamped against his shoulder, jamming a fork down the side of his cast. “Let it plow through a couple houses?”
Sam groans loud and long. “You get off on this shit, don't try to fucking play me.”
The fork isn't long enough to reach the ankle itch. Steve shoves it in farther anyway. “This hurts.”
“Isn’t that what I said?”
Before Steve can answer that, Bucky sticks his head into the living room, holding up his wallet. “Going shopping.” He eyes the way Steve is sawing the fork in and out of his cast like he's trying to start a campfire. “Want anything?”
“Naw,” Steve says, lifting his chin away from the phone. “Take the bike, though.”
“Yep.” Bucky hooks his thumb toward the phone. “That Sam?”
“Yeah.” To Sam, Steve says, “Buck says he misses you.”
Bucky flips him the bird.
“Yeah, sure,” Sam says. “Tell Skippy Killjoy to stick it where the sun don't shine.”
Steve says, “Sam says he loves you.”
Bucky rolls his eyes and backs out of the living room, wedging his wallet into his pants. Steve loses a second watching how Bucky drags his hand free of the pocket, not enough room in his skintight jeans for all five fingers, no matter how svelte the new vibranium design.
Sam is still talking in his ear. Steve checks back in to hear, “--learn Swahili while you’re sittin’ on your ass.”
“I already know Swahili,” Steve grumbles.
~*~
Bucky comes back two hours later with a cloth shopping bag in each hand. Steve is still sprawled on the couch. Very innocently. Bucky stops in the living room doorway and narrows his eyes.
“What?” says Steve.
“What’s that smell.”
Steve hesitates. “I don’t smell anything.”
“Goddamnit.” Bucky dumps the bags on the floor and shucks off his jacket. His hair is tied at the nape of his neck, frizzy and coming loose with the damp Wakandan heat, and he’s wearing a motorcycle glove over the prosthetic’s convincingly realistic skin sheath. Old habits. “Leave the fucking cast on at least until tomorrow.”
Steve sticks out his foot, still casted. “It’s on!”
“It reeks like burnt plaster in here.”
Steve groans, defeated. “The saw was too dull. It itches so bad, Buck, I want to rip my skin off.”
“Good, that means it’s healing.” Bucky smoothes both hands back over his hair, pulling the elastic out to retie it with less frizz. “There was a bone sticking out, remember?”
“Sure do.” It had nearly turned his stomach at the time, the jagged end of fibula extending white and bloody from the side of his ankle, through the torn boot. Running away from the subsequent gasoline explosion probably hadn’t helped much either.
Bucky reaches down into the nearest bag and pulls out two sweating bottles of beer. He rolls one against the side of his neck. “Hot as holy hell out there,” he mutters, tossing the other to Steve.
Steve catches by sheer reflex, because the edge of Bucky’s jaw is wet, and his throat is wet, and his collarbone is wet, and his ear-- Steve blinks. “Hey, did you…” He trails off.
Bucky slants a look sideways at him, lowering the beer. “What.”
“Your ear.” Steve pushes himself up on one hand to get a better look. “Did you just go out and get that done?”
Bucky’s mouth crooks like he’s not sure whether to smile or cringe. He turns his head to show Steve the matching pearl stud in his other earlobe too. Both ears are a little pink, which confirms the piercings are fresh. Bucky isn’t a blusher.
“Nice,” Steve says, when what he means is cute, that’s so fucking cute, oh god.
“There was a shop doing it.” Bucky shrugs, looking away, and cracks the cap off his bottle with his left hand. Steve does the same, realizing a second too late it wasn’t actually a twist-top.
“Shove over,” Bucky says, and climbs onto the couch next to him.
They watch tv for a while, finishing their beer, and eventually Bucky eases close enough that the invitation to touch is unmistakable. He nudges under Steve’s arm in that subtly pushy way he has, muscling in where words fail him. Steve puts his empty beer down and lets his hands land where they want, because Buck gets twitchy when Steve treats him like fine china.
Up close, he smells sharply of sweat, bike exhaust, deodorant. His tank top is damp down the sides, nearly as tight as his pants. Steve slips a hand up into the crook of Bucky’s armpit, where he wants to put his face, and tickles him instead. Bucky yelps and elbows him in the nose.
Fifteen minutes later, slightly bruised and slightly breathless, they’re making out, one of Bucky’s legs swung over Steve’s lap. Both of Steve’s hands are in Bucky’s hair, making a rat’s nest of it. Steve’s hard as nails and he knows Bucky is too from the way he’s rocking against Steve’s hip and making little longing noises in his throat every time Steve sucks his tongue. It turns Steve’s spine to jelly, the needy push of Bucky’s body against his and how Bucky squeezes him too tight sometimes, hard fingers pinching.
He can feel the flush of arousal in his own face, the prickle of it down his chest and up his thighs. Sweatpants have never felt so constricting. He touches the warm length of Bucky’s neck, brushes his thumb over Bucky’s throat. Feels the pulse kick up and drops his hand lower, to where Bucky’s thigh is crooked over his.
Every nerve in Steve’s body is lit up, skin flayed raw where they’re touching, the curl of Bucky’s tongue in his mouth nearly catastrophic. He hooks his thumb gently into Bucky’s belt loop and pulls. For just a second it’s exactly right, the solidity of Bucky’s erection against his leg and Bucky’s strangled gasp smothered in his mouth: this is it, they’re finally getting somewhere with this, clothes are going to come off and-- And then Bucky lurches back, banging his teeth on Steve’s lip, and Steve sees the panicked dilation of his pupils, the snarl of his sharp teeth.
He takes his hands away immediately, holds them up open-palmed. Leans back. “It’s okay,” he says, quiet. “Just us.”
Bucky stares at him and breathes open-mouthed. A long moment ticks past, the tv murmuring away in the background. Slowly, by increments, his eyes start to refocus. His shoulders lower. His fists uncurl. Finally, he lets out a harsh breath and drops his head, presses his knuckles against his temple. His voice sounds like gravel when he says, “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Steve wants to touch the hunch of Bucky’s back, smooth the hair out of his face, but he doesn’t. “Not your fault. Sorry I pushed.”
Bucky nods. “S’okay.” He clears his throat and lifts his head, gives Steve a lopsided grimace of a smile. “Nother beer?”
Steve smiles back. “Yeah,” he says. “Sure.”
~*~
They’ve been living in Wakanda for two months, ever since Bucky came out of cryo. The new arm still needs regular calibrations, minute tinkering, the way Bucky’s medications and therapy regimens do, and Wakanda has a comfortingly rock-solid set of extradition policies that not even the most militant sections of American Homeland Security can dent. Steve checks in with Sam as often as he can get away with, but Sam’s performing his own series of covert international maneuvers and the timezones aren’t always very conducive to chit-chat.
Steve doesn’t know how long they’re going to be here, but he’s starting to like it.
He likes how T’Challa checks up on them at his convenience, how he asks Steve’s help when he needs it, how they have free run of the jungle and the cities both, and the surprising way Steve doesn’t feel hemmed in and vicious under the weight of this enormous debt.
He likes their cramped little rental house by the ocean. He likes the markets and the beaches and the food and weaving his bike through the narrow back streets at breakneck speed. He likes the tan Bucky’s gotten and the stubble he’s cultivated, the way he forgoes shirts half the time and eats oranges on the front step with a beer between his knees and a long hand-rolled cigarette between his fingers.
He likes how the house only has one bedroom.
~*~
It’s not that Bucky’s shy or even awkward about his body. He’s just… private. And Steve respects that, he does, even as it drives him to the brink of insanity looking at Bucky’s thighs in those jeans, hearing him shower alone, having him crawl into bed at night wearing boxers he put on in the bathroom.
It’s strange, the way everything is strange these days; there had never been a breath of modesty between them before. They’d taken baths together since they were kids, waltzed around their old apartment in the buff, fucked with all the lights on and all their clothes off nearly every night for years.
But Steve hasn’t seen Bucky naked since 1945, and maybe that’s why he nearly falls down the stairs and re-breaks his ankle when the bathroom door opens on a cloud of steam and Bucky cruises out with a towel over his shoulder and not a stitch of anything else.
Or maybe it’s the piece of metal glinting in the head of his cock. It might be that.
“Oh.” Bucky draws up short. “You’re back.”
“Uh,” Steve replies.
“I didn’t hear the car.”
No surprise, since T’Challa’s fleet of cutting-edge electric self-driving vehicles hardly make a sound even at top rev, and Bucky had clearly been occupied. His dick is fat at half-mast, visibly swollen and a little chafed post-orgasm. And there’s-- it’s got--
Steve swallows hard and forces himself to put his eyes at a decent level. Bucky’s staring straight back at him. Steve doesn’t think he’s imagining the defiant tilt to his chin, or the chip of ice in his gaze.
“Cast’s gone,” he says belatedly, lifting his foot.
“...That’s good,” Bucky says. His hair is dripping down his shoulders, and even though Steve is trying very hard to be polite and not gawk, he can see how the hair on Bucky’s chest and belly is wet too, and the hair around his cock, and the hair on his legs. He’s pink everywhere except the silver gleam in his cock, crowning the visible weight of it.
Steve spins on his newly approved heel. “I’m going now,” he says, and sprints downstairs.
~*~
They don’t talk about it.
~*~
When Bucky comes into the bedroom that night, Steve’s already engrossed in a book on the far side of the bed, reading it up close to his face out of long bad habit. He registers Bucky from the corner of his eye, but he’s just getting to a section about Ronald Reagan’s economic policies and doesn't pay much attention until Bucky kneels on the edge of the mattress.
Steve glances up, then does a double take. Bucky’s bare as the day he was born, peachy and brown in the lamp’s soft light. No boxers, no tank top, no sheath on his arm, not even a hair tie. Just his little earrings and his…
“Uh, hi,” Steve says. He lowers the book to his chest.
“Hey,” says Bucky. His eyes are big, but calm, his chin high. Steve’s gaze skates over the thickness of him, from the width of his shoulders through the breadth of his chest to the heaviness of his soft cock. He’s brutal with muscle, unbelievable in every way. It makes Steve’s breath catch, just how it always does. He opens his mouth to say something, to distract them both and keep this situation casual, but Bucky beats him to it.
“Do you like my earrings?”
Steve blinks, thrown. “Yeah, you know I do.” Because he’s spent a silly amount of time over the past couple days touching them and admiring them and kissing Bucky’s ears. They make him feel flushed, the incongruity of their delicate prettiness against Bucky’s indelicate prettiness. He’s never thought much about jewelry before, but on Bucky…
Bucky’s hand, the left one, touches his own belly briefly and slides lower. Two fingers spread around the base of his cock, lifting it. “What about this?”
Steve can’t breathe for a crippling second. His heart starts pounding. Bucky’s showing him his cock like it’s a prize he isn’t sure Steve wants, presenting it with the gleaming nakedness of his ungloved hand. And at the tip, nearly the same color as that sleek new hand, the thrilling twist of metal.
Steve’s dick lurches from interested-but-chill to very-not-chill, firming up in his shorts so fast it makes his head spin. He drops his book over the side of the bed. “Can I see it?”
Bucky nods. He moves like he’s going to come closer, but Steve is faster, throwing back the covers and going up on his own knees. The bed isn’t big and they’re only a foot apart, the sheets rumpled between them. Steve ducks to get a better view. Now that he’s looking at it straight on, not trying to be a gentleman and avert his gaze, he can see that it’s a curved barbell with a little ball at each end. It goes through the tip of Bucky’s cock and comes out half an inch lower, straight through the underside of the head. Bucky’s foreskin is snug beneath it, but Steve thinks that’s because he’s pulled it back to show off. There’s no redness or swelling, it’s healed as cleanly as Bucky’s ears.
“Buck…” Steve chokes.
“You like it?” Bucky asks again.
“I-- yeah, yeah, I like it. I like it a lot.”
Bucky’s warm right hand brushes his shoulder, cups the side of his neck. “Thanks,” he says, like Steve’s complimented a new haircut. “Do you, uh…”
“Can I touch it?”
Steve can hear the grin in Bucky’s voice when he says, “Sure you can,” and it strips away another layer of tension Steve didn’t know he was carrying. Bucky’s enjoying this, the attention and Steve’s admiration, it’s not putting him on edge the way it sometimes does. Knowing that gives Steve’s hands boldness; he slides one under Bucky’s where it’s supporting his dick, not taking over but sharing the weight, and brushes a knuckle over the piercing. It’s warm, smooth, and it moves under his touch.
Bucky draws a breath, sharp but soft. Steve looks up at him.
“It’s fine,” Bucky says.
Steve touches again, more deliberately. He nudges it so it slides deeper into the tip of Bucky’s cock and pushes out farther through the lower hole. His own dick is so hard he feels faint, and not even the abrupt visceral understanding that someone had stuck a needle through Bucky’s cock can cool it down. Instead, it jerks hard, and Steve feels his shorts get wet. Bucky must see the motion, because he makes a strangled sound and his own cock flexes in Steve’s hand.
Sometimes Bucky doesn’t get hard when they kiss or rub up on each other, and Steve has tried real hard never to take it personal. But he takes this personal now in a way that makes him nearly burst with pride. Bucky likes this touching, likes Steve’s hands and his body and the promise of it. His cock is starting to firm up in their joined hands, thickening and darkening. It makes Steve swallow a flush of wetness in his mouth. He runs his thumb over the head of Bucky’s dick, rubs it in the sensitive space between the barbell’s ends. Bucky’s hips jump forward at that, just a couple inches.
“Is it…” Steve starts, and then gets distracted by a little rush of precome from Bucky’s cock. It wells up around the barbell, slick and clear, filling the slit. Steve groans at the sight of it, gone suddenly roaring hot all the way through. “Oh, my god, Buck…”
Bucky’s right hand on his neck flexes, tightening and then just as quickly loosening, and Steve understands with sudden clarity that Bucky won’t ask for anything. He’ll make himself available and work hard to keep himself calm, but he won’t ask. He can’t, it’s too much.
Steve puts a hand on his hip, not restraining, but coaxing, and looks up through his eyelashes in what he hopes is a beguiling way. “Can I suck it?”
The breath Bucky lets out this time is shallow, filtered through his teeth. He nods, fast. Steve leans in, using Bucky’s hand on the back of his neck as the lightest guiding touch, and presses his lips to Bucky’s cock. It twitches again, lifting out of their supporting hands, fully hard, and Steve slips his mouth over the head. For a second, he just kneels there, taking in the smell and taste and feel of something he hasn’t done in years. He didn’t realize he missed it so much. And then Bucky’s cock flexes again, filling out his mouth, and Steve tastes a fresh glut of precome on his tongue. He groans and pushes in closer, until he can feel Bucky’s thighs against his shoulders, and goes all the way down.
It’s a lot easier than he recalls, sucking dick. Maybe because he can breathe properly these days, or his throat is bigger, or his endurance better. Whatever it is, it lets him stay on Bucky’s dick for long minutes, drawing up and down slowly enough to torment them both, making sure Bucky’s as hard as he can get before Steve pulls off gently and looks at the piercing again.
Bucky groans, protesting, his fingers squeezing briefly at the nape of Steve’s neck. His cock is so wet, red, the veins standing out. Steve kisses it, licks between the barbells, takes the lower ball between his teeth and tugs. Bucky’s hips jump to follow. Steve lifts one hand to touch his belly, the hard fluttering muscle of it, and then higher to the solid curves of his chest, the dampness of sweat between his ribs.
“Steve,” Bucky says, soft.
Steve draws back, looks at the way Bucky’s tight and trembling all over, bare feet hanging over the side of the mattress. “Want to lie down?” he asks.
Bucky does it quickly, obediently, as though Steve’s given him an order, dropping onto his back with his knees parted and one arm thrown behind his head. He meets Steve’s eyes a little sideways, like he’s shy. Steve leans up over him for a kiss, grateful when Bucky responds easily, mouth opening hungry and eager. They kiss for a couple minutes, deeper and wetter until their hips are pressed together, rutting into each other despite Steve’s boxers in the way. When he finally pulls back from Bucky’s mouth, he takes a second to strip them off and throw them away. They’ll need to be washed; the front is soaked.
He slides back down Bucky’s body, hooking an arm under Bucky’s hips. “Okay?” he says, waiting for Bucky to nod. And then he takes a while running his tongue along the hot silky curve of the bar, testing where it pierces Bucky’s body, dipping in to taste the tender slit at the top. It fills with precome every few seconds and Steve licks it out, greedy. He could live on this, he thinks. Nothing but the smell and feel of Bucky beneath him, the intrusion of his cock, the flavor of it. More important than food or sleep, more vital.
Bucky starts shaking after a few minutes, a sharp tremor under Steve’s hands like a horse shooing flies. His thighs get more and more tense, but Steve is pretty sure it’s in a good way. His eyes are shut tight, his flesh hand pressed flat to the wall and his metal one wound in the sheets, the new plating shifting and readjusting silently over his knuckles. Steve reaches for it, eases it free of the sheets and brings it to his head. “I don’t mind,” he says, when Bucky pops an eye open to look at him. “You can hold me down.”
Bucky groans, a helpless cracked noise. He pets the top of Steve’s head for a second, so careful, and then Steve sucks the head of his cock again and Bucky’s fingers clench. It hurts, Steve’s scalp lighting up, a cascade of goosebumps rushing down his back, along his spine straight to his ass and his throbbing dick. He echoes Bucky’s groan and grinds himself against the bed. They’ll have to change the sheets too.
Bucky does hold him down, firmer than Steve thought he would. Firm enough that Steve has to gasp for air a couple times, breathe hard through his nose and swallow around the pressure of Bucky’s cock in his throat. It doesn’t have quite the same adrenalized quality of black spots behind the eyes and numbness in the limbs that it used to, before the war, but it’s a lot better than anything else he’s gotten recently. Every time he goes down, the bar clacks his teeth, scrapes his tongue, bruises the tender back of his mouth. He squirms against the bed, against Bucky’s legs, caught and forced and used. The rhythm of his pelvis humping the mattress echoes the pressure of Bucky’s hand on him, becoming pushier and more frantic the closer they both get to orgasm.
“Steve--” Bucky says after a couple minutes. “I-- I’m--”
Steve doubles down, relaxes his throat so Bucky can get deeper, fuck him there where it’s tight and wet and receptive. He swallows, and moans without meaning to, and that does it. Bucky comes silently except for his panicked breathing, his cock jabbing solid and mean into Steve. He hardly tastes it at first, it’s so deep, but as soon as Bucky’s hand loosens he slides up and takes the last shot on his tongue, feels it blurt out around the smooth weight of the bar--
And he’s done. He’s gone. He comes into the bed without a touch, body locking with it, spasming. He knows not to bite, he’s good. He’s very good, and Bucky’s hand is gentle on him, soothing, and when Steve is finished coming and can start to breathe again, it coaxes him up to be kissed desperately like sharing air under an ocean.
~*~
In the morning, they do it all over again. Usually when they wake up they head straight out the door for a run, get in a dozen miles before the sun rises and turns the whole bay into an oven, but today Steve wakes to an erection fit to pound nails and Bucky cuddled tight to his back. Most of the time he ignores his morning wood, or detours to the bathroom to take care of it quietly, but today there’s an answering hardness against his ass, and when he presses back on it, Bucky smothers a moan into the nape of his neck. Besides, Steve shouldn’t run on his newly healed ankle quite yet. It’s just common sense.
“Hey,” Steve says, rough with sleep. “Mornin’.”
Bucky grunts and rolls his hips. Nature takes its course from there.
This time, Steve’s the one who ends up flat on his back with Bucky overtop of him. They just rub on each other for about a decade, or that’s how it feels anyhow. Steve’s about to claw out of his own skin he’s so turned on, one hand on the small of Bucky’s back and the other between them, playing with the slick barbell and the slide of Bucky’s foreskin. Only once does Bucky tense up and recoil, and he comes back within a minute to kiss Steve some more and make apologetic murmurs that Steve soothes away with some judiciously-applied groping.
Eventually he gets both their cocks together in his hand and rubs them off at the same time. Bucky goes a little wild toward the end, bracing himself on the wall over Steve’s head and working his hips like a bull rider, head thrown back and chest heaving. Steve wants to die just looking at him, can barely keep it together long enough to make them both come, and when they’re done and their bellies are stuck together with a gallon of jizz, he wraps both his arms around Bucky’s trembling shoulders and takes a while to kiss every part of him and say all kinds of sweet embarrassing nothings.
Bucky takes it graciously, burrowing his face into Steve’s neck and letting Steve babytalk him until they’re calm again. He sits up after a bit, still straddling Steve’s thighs, and runs a hand through his damp hair, shaking it out. “Good job, slugger,” he says.
Steve snorts. “Thanks, champ.” He pinches Bucky’s side, where he’s a little ticklish, and then can’t resist petting the sweaty stretch of Bucky’s stomach, drawing his knuckles through the hair there. Bucky’s cock is mostly soft again, so Steve can see how his foreskin has drawn up over the head, hiding most of the piercing. It’s still wet with come. Steve entertains for a moment the idea of showering together, washing each other thoroughly just to get dirty all over again. Maybe later.
He touches a contemplative finger against the piercing’s upper ball, pressing so he can see the lower one push out Bucky’s foreskin. His stomach does a slow hot clench of appreciation. Bucky makes a noise like he feels the same way.
“You like it?” Steve asks, repeating the question Bucky asked him last night.
“I like how you like it,” Bucky replies, soft, which is sort of an answer.
Steve grins. He’s kinda floating inside, every nerve in his body singing. “I can’t believe you did this,” he says after a minute, rolling his thumb around the bar to make it move some more. “Maybe I should get one. Did it hurt like a hot damn?”
Bucky’s hands are loose on Steve’s thigh, eyes dreamy and far-away. He shrugs one shoulder. “Don’t remember.”
Steve chuckles. “It was only two days ago, Buck.”
“Nah, I’ve had it for years.”
Steve’s hand goes still. He looks up. “What?”
Bucky’s gaze is still distant, fuzzy. His hips are rocking a little against Steve’s, but not with any purpose. “Twenty years maybe? I don’t know, mid-nineties sometime, I think. That’s when it was all the rage, right?” His eyes slide to Steve’s, a lazy grin crooking his mouth. “Just bought the new bar for it the other day, though.”
Steve stares back at him. “Buck…” he says, a slow horrible comprehension crawling through him. “Do you…” He hesitates. “I mean, did…” He can’t say the word Hydra. Not here, not in bed with dawn coming through their white curtains and the wrecked sheets smelling like the two of them, their clothes heaped together on the floor. That word would blister the air like the name of a demon.
“There used to be a bunch,” Bucky continues. He’s still looking at Steve but sort of off-kilter, not quite focused. He puts a hand on his dick, where Steve’s grip has gone slack, and touches the bar. “This is the only one that lasted.”
Steve stares, and swallows. He’s not going to ask. He’s not.
“What…” he starts. Stops.
But Bucky hears the question. “Mm.” He traces a finger along the underside of his cock. “These ones didn’t heal right, got infected. I think there are scars if you look close.”
Steve doesn’t look close. He’s looking straight at Bucky, at the hazy softness of his face, the gentle curve to his mouth. There’s an innocence there, a quiet happiness Steve doesn’t think has anything to do with what he’s describing. He’s seen it before, mostly from years past when Bucky would tell him made-up stories about traveling to tropical islands or going to the moon, so far in his own head that he’d come out the other side to some other world where there was nothing cold or desperate or painful, just coconuts and sunshine and pretty moon ladies.
“There was another one here first,” Bucky continues. Steve glances down long enough to see that he’s touching the tender notch under his cockhead, where the barbell’s lower curve emerges. “But it ripped out.”
Steve’s hand clenches reflexively where it’s come to rest on Bucky’s thigh. His stomach lurches. Bucky looks up at him quickly, a spark of something flaring behind his eyes, startled at first and then retreating into wariness. He shuts his mouth on whatever he was about to say.
Steve feels instantly horrible. “Sorry,” he whispers. “Go ahead.”
Bucky regards him for a moment. “This is shitty to talk about,” he decides. “Sorry.” He moves like he’s going to get off Steve’s lap, but Steve clutches at him.
“No, no, it’s okay. Talk about whatever you want to talk about, I don’t mind.”
He minds a whole fucking lot. But that doesn’t matter. It happens so rarely, this kind of talking, and almost always in moments when Bucky is full of self-loathing and violence turned in on himself, lashing out at Steve with his past like a sharpened scythe, aiming for the bone.
“Oh, yeah?” Bucky’s voice drops lower, vicious. “You don’t mind hearing how they did it with a fish hook one time? Or a pair of pliers? Sound nice?”
“It sounds fucking awful,” Steve says. “Tell me about it.”
Bucky falls silent, watching him, clearly searching for the slightest sliver of weakness or insincerity in Steve’s resolve. He finds nothing, because there’s nothing to find. Eventually he takes a deep breath, dropping his eyes. He shrugs and strokes his hand across Steve’s belly, smoothes his thumb through the tacky jizz drying there. “I guess it was fun for them,” he says. “Or… I don’t know, horrible. Most of the shit they did, there was a reason, you know? Something practical. I don’t think any of this was practical, just fucking around.” He lifts his hand to touch the barbell. “This one, they put a ring in it. Tied it to all kinds of stuff.” He pauses. Steve thinks there’s about to be a monotone accounting of every foreign object that had ever been attached to his cock, but instead Bucky says, “I used to wear a collar.”
It’s almost a non sequitur, just left of center, until Bucky takes Steve’s hand and brings it up to his throat, holds it there firm against his adam’s apple. “They’d chain the ring to it, tight. But at the back.” He slides Steve’s hand around accordingly. “Back between my legs, so if I… got hard…” He lowers Steve’s hand back to their laps, slips his fingers between Steve’s. “That wasn’t so bad, actually. They’d get me hard on purpose then, that was nice.” His eyes slip mostly shut, and his head tips back. “Got more blowjobs strapped into that chair than…” His mouth quirks, almost into a grin. “This one kid, Kavinsky, that boy was queerer than a three dollar bill, Steve, he was volunteering for double shifts all the time, just--”
He stops. Clears his throat, apologetic. “Anyway. It was bad. But some of it was… less bad than it could have been, I guess, all things considered. At least I wasn’t out--” He glances up at Steve and cuts off immediately. His face transforms into nearly panicked horror. “Oh, god, I’m-- I’m sorry, I didn’t mean--”
Steve is confused for a second until he realizes his eyes are filled with tears. His face is hot with it. He reaches up and scrubs a hand over his eyes, shakes his head. “No, Buck, it’s fine, it’s just--”
It’s just that it’s not fine. Not remotely. Not by any definition of the word.
Bucky’s hands flutter midair, reaching for him and then retreating, unsure of everything all at once. Steve sits up under his weight and drags Bucky into his arms, squeezes until he hears the breath go out of him. “You can tell me anything,” he says into Bucky’s ear, through Bucky’s messy hair and his own runny nose. “Anything ever, even if it's awful or upsetting. Or if it’s neither of those things. Okay? I promise, anything.”
Bucky stays stiff in his arms for a moment, like he’s not sure whether to bolt or play dead. But then he relaxes, and his arms slide up around Steve’s back, and he nods into Steve’s neck. “Okay,” he says. He sounds bewildered. “Okay, Steve.”
Steve sits there holding him for a long time, past the point where he thinks Bucky is enjoying it anymore. He feels numb, packed in ice. He’d lain here giddy with arousal, with lust for the torture Bucky had gone through, had joked about doing it to himself like it was nothing. And Bucky just…
Steve shudders, and pets Bucky’s long tangled hair, and doesn’t think he’s ever going to let go.