Work Text:
Tony’s Secret Avengers Bunker, the one designed to withstand nuclear blasts, or, yes, alien attacks, is great if you like concrete and recirculated air and not much else. Which most of the Avengers & friends don’t, so. They’ve all fucked off already. Whatever. He and Sam are still here: nowhere else to go, except the tiny pod they’ve both, in unspoken agreement, moved into together. It has two, terrible, thin, twin-size mattresses, the ones with those plastic covers like they’re in prison, and between them they don’t even have enough possessions, what with the five-years-of-blip thing, to fill the narrow edges of floor that the mattresses don’t quite cover.
Bucky pulls the belt out of his jeans, and that’s it. Drops it on the floor. Lays down, stiffly, back to the room. Sam’s moving about - getting undressed, maybe. Or he’s not sleeping yet. The lights in here can be dimmed, but not turned off: only turned down to a red fluorescence, a fire safety thing. And Bucky sees the light change behind his eyelids - he opens them, to see the room bathed in red. He holds his left hand in front of his face. Lets the motors work almost silently to open and close his fingers, and watches how the light reflects off the interlocking segments as they move. Steve is gone. Steve is gone.
Sam’s still padding around behind him. It’s impossible to ignore, not with Bucky’s instincts. Putting his back to things just makes him fear them more: he should know this by now. He should be watching Sam. He should be telling Sam to stop, to lay down. To leave. To get on with his life. Except that Sam says he hates taking orders.
But he also says that he’d do anything for a friend. Bucky wonders what part of ‘friend’ makes you traipse around Europe for two years, extrajudicially, for Steven Goddamn Rogers. It makes Sam seem more like a lapdog, than a friend. In fact, he wonders if it's even possible to meet Steve Rogers, to know Steve Rogers, and not become his lapdog. If it's possible to avoid falling in love with him.
He can feel his heart climbing into his throat. He needs to stop this line of thinking. He bites down on his left thumb, hard, so he doesn't do anything as embarrassing as start to cry. And he’s well acquainted with the scent of vibranium - it’s like your fingers smelling of pennies, 24/7 - but the taste is something more otherworldly and overpowering. It doesn’t stop his breath from hitching, his shoulders from shaking.
Bucky twitches before it happens - Sam putting his hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” Sam says.
Bucky flinches away. Wrenches his thumb out his mouth. “No.”
“Jesus christ,” Sam says, but he does remove his hand. Smart man - you could get your fingers broken, doing that. “What do you mean, no.”
“You want to-” Bucky twists himself onto his elbow so that he can look at the guy, at least. “-what, cuddle? Fucking hell, Samuel.”
“Fuck you, Bucky,” Sam says. He’s down to just a t-shirt. Muscles in his shoulder flex visibly under the thin fabric as he twists his hands awkwardly together. “Just because I'm emotionally mature enough to know that you need comfort, I need comfort, the biological imperative of the ape is- Were you sucking your thumb?”
And it hits Bucky, then, that Sam is just as bad at asking for creature comforts as the rest of them - but he’s grieving Steve too. And, fuck, Sam got so much time with him. Bucky’s heart aches with all the time Sam knew Steve and he didn’t, because he was nothing, nobody, a corpse being puppeteered into the illusion of living.
But, also: at least Steve told Bucky his plan. At least Bucky got to get a head-start on the grief.
“I need something in my mouth,” Bucky says, because he remembers the rubber bit and shudders in revulsion; but teeth are the one thing that don’t heal, not even with superhealing, not if you ground them down with all the force of your jaw while you sleep. “I’ll suck you off,” he suggests. “I get something, you get-”
“Are you being serious?” Sam stares.
“Come on, Sam,” Bucky stares back. Sam’s eyes are brown, but in the red light they look almost black, indistinguishable from his pupils. “What kind of man jokes about blowjobs. You don’t even need to be hard. It’s fine.”
Sam squeezes his eyes closed; runs his hands over his face. “I’m fucking crazy,” he says to himself. “Yeah. Fuck.”
So Bucky rolls onto his hands and knees to crawl towards him, head bowed, slow and supplicant. When he peels his real hand off the plastic mattress it makes a sticky vinyl sound from his sweat; when he thunks his metal arm onto the concrete floor between the beds, it rings out with a single note that reverberates off the bare walls. “Tell me about Europe,” he says, lowering his face to Sam’s thigh. “You and him,” he breathes into the thin fabric of Sam’s sleep pants.
“When we were looking for you?” Sam asks, and fails to hide the hitching of his breath. “Why?”
Bucky doesn’t answer - just rests his head on Sam’s thigh and reaches into his pants to pull out his hardening cock. He breathes in the smell, and then licks the underside, from base to tip. The taste is sharp on his tongue.
“I don’t want to think about Steve while I’m getting blown,” Sam says, above him.
Bucky pulls off. “You don’t?” he asks, and looks up at Sam. Sam looks back. Yes: Bucky’s instinct was right. Sam just squints his eyes shut, and slumps backwards against the wall. Bucky squeezes his cock as a kind of thanks - a kind of commiseration.
And blowing Sam doesn’t feel like it’s Steve at all - but Bucky can close his eyes and feel the weight in his mouth and the taste of precum bubbling onto his tongue, and pretend.
Sam’s hands slip into his hair. “Europe’s a lovely place. Maybe not in the winter. What am I saying?- you were there. You were making our lives a living hell. I think we singlehandedly caused a bedbug infestation across international lines from all the different motels we stayed in. We had no hope in catching you, not when you didn’t want to be found. Is that what you wanna hear? You bested us? Woo-fucking-hoo?” He sighs. “Sorry. I know it was a god-awful time for you, too.”
Bucky makes a mildly objecting noise around Sam’s cock, to mean: I know I was shit, you’re not the one who has to apologize for it. Sam just bucks his hips against the vibration, and it gets Bucky close to gagging. Funny: squeezing his thumb in his fist is enough to suppress it, even when the thumb is metal and the fist is metal too.
“But Steve would n-never complain,” Sam breathes. “He talked about you all the time - as soon as he knew I’d listen, he’d go on and on about when you were teenagers, and…”
And Bucky resolves to try to forget reality, and imagine a world where Steve isn’t gone. Except his brain decides: emphasis on forget reality part. So he feels himself slipping away, letting Sam’s rumbling words wash over him without comprehension - feels the world narrowing down to just the cock in his mouth and the spit escaping down his chin - until Sam’s fingers tighten in his hair and pull on his scalp, and tug him rudely back to Earth, before he starts slipping again, and then again, and Bucky really fucking wishes that Sam would just let him drift away forever.
So it takes his treacle-brain a second to process it, when Sam starts tapping at his arm, starts saying words that sound vaguely like I’m close. And Bucky can’t find it in himself to pull off - so he lets Sam spill into his mouth, warm and thick - until, suddenly, it gets to be too much, and he has to pull off, half-spitting half-dribbling the spend onto Sam’s plasticky mattress without thinking.
“Gross,” Sam pants. “Were you raised in a lab?” His grip on Bucky’s scalp eases. “Sorry, that’s. Not funny.”
Bucky huffs in an almost-laugh. “No,” he says, “it’s funny.” He rests his cheek back on Sam’s thigh, feeling the heat of his flesh through the fabric, and watches Sam watching him. He realises, faintly, that he’s hard, where his crotch is pressed into his own mattress - his body has got with the program, at least. He grinds his hips down experimentally. It feels good, but it also makes the plastic crackle.
“What would you do?” Sam says, lowly. “If he was here?” And he doesn’t specify who he is, but they both know.
“I would punch him out for being so fucking stupid,” Bucky answers.
“Yeah,” Sam breathes, in agreement. His fingers find a knot in Bucky’s hair - and that makes Sam take his fingers out entirely. “And then?”
“And then?” Bucky says, and rolls onto his back. “I don’t know. I’d tell him I love him. Or something else stupid like that.”
“Do you?” Sam asks. “Love him?”
“What does it matter?” Bucky flares with a sudden anger that makes his arm creak. “He’s gone.”
“You’d have to prove it to him,” Sam points out. “Because he’d never believe you.”
“Fuck, I’d-” Bucky pinches the bridge of his nose. “Bend him over and fuck him, if that’s what it takes.”
“Oh yeah?” Sam says, and Bucky looks back at him. And he’s smiling, his legs still held open; neither of them ever tucked his soft wet cock back into his pants. And Bucky realises with a flash of heat what Sam wants.
“Fuck you,” Bucky says, and lunges forward. Sam is easy to flip over - doesn’t even fight it. “Fuck you for making me talk about this.” He pulls Sam’s pants down, and Sam moans his acquiescence into the crook of his arm.
“You’d have to hold him down,” Sam mumbles. “So he doesn’t wriggle around, fight it, just to make sure you really do want it.” And then shifts, pointedly.
“Fuck you,” Bucky says again, and presses all the weight of his metal arm on the broadness between Sam’s shoulders; settles his legs over the backs of Sam’s knees.
Sam groans, and strains his neck to turn to the other cheek to look back at Bucky. And Bucky stares at Sam’s pert ass and thinks, and looks around - it’s not like they store lube in here - or, not that Bucky knows of. So he looks down at the mix of saliva and cum he dribbled onto the plastic, sighs, and then scoops it up, best he can. It’s gone cold. He smears it over Sam’s hole.
“Fuck,” Sam says, succinctly, and Bucky takes that as good a sign as any to press a finger inside him.
Hot and tight and probably needing some extra spit at some point. And he’d never expected to be here, pressing his fingers inside of him, prying open his flesh in the most gentle way he can manage - not ripping him apart, not pulling his limbs out his sockets, not gouging his eyes and breaking his wings. Because the most time he’s spent watching Sam’s behind has been on security cameras, in exfiltration, weaving behind him through crowds to find their home base so he can stay the hell away from it. But now Sam’s a person, not a threat. A person who Bucky can crook his fingers inside of, and force out beautiful, terrible noises.
And, slowly, Sam’s stiffness falls away as he relaxes into the pressure; he goes boneless under the weight of Bucky’s arm, just lazily rolling his hips. Bucky lets his spit dribble onto Sam’s hole, and adds a third finger, making Sam cry out like a wounded animal, but push his body back into it anyway. Bucky realizes now that the patch of coiling hair around Sam’s crotch was a well-manicured exception, a landing strip - but that his crack, the edges of his thighs, were not, in fact, waxed-smooth, but were just starting to regrow. Too long without creature comforts. Bucky doesn’t have a free hand to run over the spiky, just-growing texture - but he’s imagining it.
“Are you gonna do it?” Sam murmurs, and then he must realize that that sounds a bit like a demand, if you misconstrued it, so he corrects himself: “You don’t have to. We can stop. If you- I don’t want to stop, but- I mean, if you want to stop-”
Bucky responds by taking his fingers out, and Sam deflates like they were the only things holding him together. And then Bucky uses his free hand to press himself inside Sam, ignoring the embarrassing hitch in his breath, and focuses only on the heat around him, on the pressure and the push, and the intimacy of what Sam’s letting him do, and why the hell is Sam letting him do this? Why would anyone let his body near theirs - let the machine, let the blood-stained hands, let the-
He rearranges himself to have his body really on top of Sam, holding him down by both arms, and fucks him deep, again and again, the force making the plastic beneath them crackle as Sam’s sweaty midriff and hips and toes, the only bits of skin exposed, rock back and forth, and it still doesn’t feel deep enough, even when his thighs thwap indecorously against Sam’s ass. He keeps trying to wiggle himself deeper, already fully seated - somehow wishing that he could bury himself inside Sam’s skin, and never have to come back out into the real world. But he’s thwarted by the physical constraints of reality: by cock in ass; by body under body.
He tunes into the noises that Sam is making - the grunts and murmurs as Bucky bottoms out, sure, but under that the breath pouring through his lungs, the swallowing of his spit, the rapid beating of his heart, the rushing of blood in his ears, and-
“Steve,” Sam croons, low and gravelly and quiet in his chest, except clamoring in Bucky’s ears, ringing and discordant as he fucks downwards-
“Steve,” he murmurs back, and the syllable tripping from his throat feels like pulling a ripcord in his heart. Makes his body remember how to be a good lover: how to hold a rhythm, hard and fast and unrelenting. “Steve,” he fucks into Sam.
“Steve,” Sam moans, emboldened. “Fuck me.”
And Bucky has to stop himself from clutching at Sam’s arms so hard he leaves bruises, or rips straight through the flesh like he’s squeezing a fistful of play-doh; reminds himself that he’s not fucking a supersoldier, not really. “Steve,” he keens, and drops, and presses his face into the crook of Sam’s neck, skin meeting sweat-cold skin. His thrusts become pathetic things, barely pushing, just grinding, clumsily against Sam; and yet Sam is getting louder, gasping and shaking in a way that might be crying. Bucky clenches his eyes shut, and pushes, and pushes, into that tight heat, and his brain knows what to do even when his body doesn’t (except, isn’t that how they got into this whole mess? That his brain knew that to let Steve go was to die: and yet, he failed to reach out and grip tight and rip out all his fingernails before he ever let-)
His body knows what to do: to flood through with desire, overwhelming and inescapable; to seize up, and stutter, and collapse into the body underneath him; to forget, for a moment, about anything else.
The moment passes. Bucky feels emptied-out. Untethered. He can feel Sam’s lungs expanding as he breathes below him.
“Was that enough for you?” Bucky asks, mean in a way that feels almost embarrassing - that Sam might see the terrible creature, clawing and desperate, within him - but that he cannot stop. “Do you feel better now?”
“Yes,” Sam says. “Get off me.”
Bucky pulls out. Sam's hole clenches around nothing, and then gapes. A little dribble of cum leaks out. Bucky, by instinct, scoops it up with his thumb, the real one, and presses it back inside him.
“Don't,” Sam says. “Now I gotta go sit over the toilet.”
“Have fun,” Bucky says, and rolls off of Sam for real. And Sam moans and groans about his old-man joints as he gets up, and limps out; but both of them know that it’s a farce, even if Sam’s eyes can't get any redder under the red light.
Bucky tucks himself back into his jeans, dispassionately; washes his hands in the pod sink; thinks about changing his underwear and is hit by a wave of bone-deep tiredness that makes him lay back down, listening to the running of water through the bunker’s walls.
He pretends to fall asleep with his back to the room. When Sam slinks back in, he wraps his arm around Bucky’s waist, and Bucky lets him. Feels the heat and warmth of a body behind him, and thinks: he can tether me to this earth. And if he can’t - well, there's nobody left who can.