Work Text:
“Bucky! You comin’, love?”
Bucky’s head whips around on instinct, looking for people who might overhear.
“Steve, keep it down with the lovey-dovey shit.” His response is technically a whisper, though he may as well shout it for how sharp it is.
Steve tilts his head and gestures around them smugly, “C’mon, we’re in the middle of nowhere. And even if the Howlies could hear us, they know well enough by now.”
Bucky knows he’s right, but he’s still determined to complain about it. He’s following Steve, God knows where to, through a forest in Somewhere, Europe.
But he kind of has no choice but to go along with the big idiot. That’s his Captain, after all.
Always following. He smiles to himself.
It’s been a couple months since Steve rescued the 107th from Azzano – part of him still wants to say ‘recovered his body’, as though the time that’s passed since has been some kind of confusing, ecstatic, terrifying hallucination in the moments before his inevitable death on Zola’s metal slab.
In a lot of ways, he did die in Azzano. He was being bombed to shit in a trench one minute, shivering in a tiny cell with two dozen other men the next, and then suddenly strapped to a table with his veins on fire. Then – Steve, towering over him like some kinda blond GI angel come to save the day.
The lack of evidence of that sequence of events on his body only added to the disorientation. Really, he ought to have scars, maybe look a bit thinner than he does considering the rationing they’ve been doing. Instead he’s in some of the best physical shape he’s ever been in (if in need of a bath).
He tries to rationalise the whole thing away, to ground himself to the pains of reality and the world around him. The forests and tanks and bomb shelters are too real to be a fabrication. The tree trunk threatens splinters under his palm when he pushes off of it, his hair has grown long in the front and tickles his brow without any product to hold it back. The group keeps their strength up trapping hares n’ shit in the woods.
Thank God Falsworth knew a thing or two about hunting, or else he’d probably have kept losing weight out here like he had been with the main unit.
The war had been some kind of rebirth. Someone else was on that table, someone else got shipped from Brooklyn to Europe all those months ago. He’s a whole other person now, livin’ in a whole other world.
Even Stevie is different.
Steve is bounding through the woods like he was built for it. Like he should be running with horses, or on a savannah somewhere… Bucky’s never claimed to be a poet, but there’s something otherworldly in the grace of Steve’s movement over the ground.
Gotta give it to the hunk, he moves like a dancer – no more gangly boy from Brooklyn. No more clumsy, thin limbs or narrow shoulders with the bones stickin’ out through his skin.
All that serum in his blood, but the core of him doesn’t seem to change. It’s only given him a new lease on life, like he’s been let out of a cage he’d been throwing himself against since the day he could walk.
That’s not to say Steve isn’t haunted as well. They all have their ghosts, and he’s witnessed Steve take out Nazis with a brutal athleticism he would have never imagined little Catholic Stevie Rogers to be capable of conjuring up. But this is what war does to a person – and it keeps Steve up at night, just as it would any other person with a conscience.
Except Steve has that picture-perfect memory now. Eidetic, Stark had called it. Sometimes Steve’s reality gets mixed up in his memories, and the vivid imagination he once treasured conjures up nightmares that have him thrashing in the tent in the middle of the night. Bucky gets it, really – his mind does the same on occasion, and probably would more often if he remembered his whole time as a Hydra POW. So he makes sure he’s there to hold Steve, even when he doesn’t want to explain the things he’s seen that night in his dreams, and Steve does the same for him.
It’s good to fear the power you’ve been given, Bucky reminds him. It means you still have a soul. It means you’ll use that power wisely.
Their old lives feel so distant that he sometimes forgets it was ever real in the first place. Forgets to miss it – almost dreads having to go back to it, because then he might have to deal with all the life he’s lived here.
It’s absurd to think, but he feels like he has a purpose out here. Fighting for his country and for freedom, for the wellbeing of the entire world with Steve. He doesn’t have to think about the inevitable press of the future while he’s out here, just follow Steve into oblivion like he would have wanted to anyways.
Doesn’t have to worry about his growing kill-count, or how many ways he now knows to hurt a man. He doesn’t think about how God might judge him, nor what his mother would think if she ever learned about what he’d done on this side of the Atlantic.
The men don’t think about it, and they don’t wanna talk about it either. They’ve all got red in their ledger. There’s no need to acknowledge it.
Between the horrors of war and the reprieve he’s found with a now-healthy Steve, he fears who he’ll become when he goes home. Resentful, when he finally is pressured into finding a wife. Or (and truly, God forbid) something like his father, an angry husk of a man with nothing but a bung leg, a pension, and a bottle to help forget about everything he witnessed.
When he gets deep and thoughtful about it at night while he’s struggling to fall asleep under the blazing sky (who knew there were so many stars to see out in the wilderness when it wasn’t raining fire?), he almost feels bad for his old man. Almost understands how war made him that way.
But he can’t afford to pine and spiral over his many lives right now. He shakes it off.
Between the two of them, Steve’s alot better at hope. He glitters in the sunlight that falls through the canopy, golden hair and golden skin glowing with the excitement of whatever he is planning for them.
“You gonna tell me where we’re headed?”
Steve makes a tutting sound, “Now, why would I do that?”
Bucky lunges forward to smack his ass, “Asshole.”
Traipsing through the woods, over the sound of Steve’s laughter, Bucky catches the faint bubbling of a stream.
The emptiness of the forest and evacuated towns they’ve been frequenting has given him room to hone his senses. He’s getting used to the silence, of looking over long distances – and then the intermittent overload of bombing and gunfire by contrast. It was unsettling at first, but the mind finds things to hear after a while. Bucky has found that he prefers the quiet places, after all.
He’s a city boy, how was he supposed to know there was an echo in a forest? It’s a novelty, still. He’s even come to enjoy the moment after a shot where the air rings, but he can admit that the sound of the brooke is much prettier.
“You takin’ us to water? Do I stink that bad?”
Steve gives him a pointed look, “Yes, and yes.”
Bucky snickers.
The stream itself runs, though not too rapidly. It is banked by stones, smoothed by time and erosion, dressed in moss and stubborn tree roots. It’s picturesque, another one of those moments that doesn’t seem real after how much time they’ve spent in bombed-out ghost towns.
They start to strip down, folding their clothes on the stones with practiced military precision and efficiency.
He always loved Steve and loved his body too, but Jesus Christ. The break in the canopy over the stream allows the sun to pour through fully, catching the ridges and contours of his new(ish) body. He looks like a damn myth from those Ancient Greek picture-books Tommy Mahoney used to bring to second period to show off to the class when they were kids.
He looks like Achilles.
Bucky pictures a golden hero in a chariot, shield and spear at the ready. For a second he wonders what his single weakness is – maybe his heart, his goodness. His hopefulness borders on naïveté sometimes. Or maybe it’s him; Bucky.
What a terrifying thought, to be someone’s fatal flaw.
“You gonna keep ogling, or are you gonna join me?”
Bucky grumbles something about I wasn’t ogling, you fuckin’ wish while laying his folded pants on the stones. He keeps his dog tags on – well, Steve’s dog tags. They swap sometimes, in the quiet spaces between missions.
The water is cold, but in a good way after all the fighting, walking, and sweating they’ve been doing the last few days. They completed the mission, rigged a base with an explosive and sent a damn clear message to Hydra in the process. Bucky also sniped some goon trying to get the jump on Dernier, and had impressed even himself with the shot. Even Steve hadn’t had time to notice the guy before Bucky had blown his brains out.
Steve’s praise afterward had gone straight to his head – both heads. He played it cool though.
But Mission: in progress meant they hadn’t had many opportunities for bathing and other such frivolities. Mission: complete meant they had to reconvene. It was a few days of relentless trekking to make it back to whatever blown-up hole or army base they were meant to liaise with the Allies in.
Mission: complete also meant a night of celebration. Tonight, probably, if they made it back when they expected to. They’ll be back by late afternoon in time for inappropriate levels of revelry, no doubt.
Bucky and Steve were just making the most of a brief window in their joint schedule to get clean. Enjoy a little foreplay before they got their asses on something resembling a bed.
Steve splashes him in the face, he pretends to be offended and dunks Steve’s head under the surface even though the water isn’t that deep. It feels almost hysterical, roughhousing in the waist-deep water.
How could this moment be real?
Steve cups his hands, gathering water and pouring it over Bucky’s hair and back. He’s completely wet already, Steve just likes to care for him.
They don’t mention when the water runs off black and brown and red, or when blood scrubs off with no wound beneath it. They just repeat the motions until the water runs clear.
Steve runs his warm hands over Bucky’s shoulders, across his chest and through the spattering of dark hair there – his hands are always warm, now. His pinky finger catches on the dog tags and he lets it linger, tracing the weave of the chain with an artist’s focus. Bucky feels his eyes flutter closed with the intimacy of it.
“How does it feel, Buck?”
Bucky drops forward, pressing their foreheads together, “Good.”
Steve hums happily. That boy glows like the sun.
They touch dazedly in the water. Slow, melting. Their hands move in familiar ways, soothing and cleaning each other with just enough enthusiasm to earn an involuntary grunt.
“I love you, Bucky,” Steve whispers against his cheek, “James.”
And Bucky might hate it normally, but sometimes Steve calls him that when they’re alone in their own world like this. When he’s desperate for Bucky to know that he’s serious about this thing that they have.
It’s like laying a milepost, to say, I have called you by your name, and you are mine. A shiver runs down his spine, equal parts pleasant and overwhelming.
“I’m yours, Stevie,” he cups the back of Steve’s neck, pulling their foreheads back together so they can barely see anything except each other’s eyes. “A chuisle mo chroí.”
My pulse. It is immediate, the blinding smile that spreads across Steve’s face. Bucky feels his true pulse, the blood in his veins, expand and stutter in time with it.
He presses their smiling lips together one more time before pulling back and gathering enough water to run over Steve’s shoulders.
Even with their bodies wanting, even amidst chaos, it is enough to be quiet together. To bathe each other in the stream – washing each other clean of the carnage of this last mission.
Steve knows it all, just as Bucky knows all of him in return. It doesn’t matter how much red he has in his ledger, so long as Steve is there to wash the blood out.