Set post CAWS, AU since CACW. Could be interpreted as pre-Stucky or friendship.
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All of the blankets, sheets, even the curtains had been stripped and piled in the corner of the room. Bucky was bundled in them, only the top of his bedhead visible. Steve would have thought it was cute if the word heartbreaking hadn't come to mind first.
"Can I come in?" he asked.
The bedhead bobbed, disappearing briefly under an Iron Man duvet that Tony had gotten him as a gag gift, but Steve had kept because he'd grown up during the Great Depression and still didn't like letting good things go to waste. Steve entered the room, but then he decided to deliberately misinterpret the invitation. He peeled back the duvet and climbed into the- this time another word didn't come to mind- pillow fort.
Bucky curled against his side, small enough for it to feel like a role reversal. He'd put on some weight lately. Just not as much as he'd lost while he was learning to eat without a feeding tube.
"Bad Day?" asked Steve. As far as Bucky's Bad Days went, this wasn't too Bad. It was highly preferable to the Unexpected Mango Allergy incident. Steve swears they shared a mango smoothie at Papaya King in 1932, (Bucky had a vague memory of girls in the hula skirts handing out free drinks, which was definitely in their price range). Steve wondered if maybe Hydra gave Bucky a mango allergy, although he couldn't quite reason why.
When Steve explained what was making Bucky's lips swell up, Bucky had pulled a gun Steve didn't known about from somewhere Steve didn't want to know about and aimed it at his chutney. After confiscating both the gun and the chutney, Steve had opened his copy of Helping Your Child with Picky Eating, turned to the table of contents and carefully put a line through the chapter titled: Trying New Things.
"Cold day," Bucky corrected. The serum made Steve run hot, but now that Bucky mentioned it, he realized that even he'd felt the sharp wind tunneling down Fifth Avenue. In another century, Bucky had told him that the triangular shape of the Flatiron Building created a wind tunnel effect known for raising women's skirts. He'd said it with a wink. Steve still didn't know if Bucky had been putting him on.
"You should've said something, Buck. I could've turned up the thermostat."
Bucky gave him a wink from another century. "But then you wouldn't be holdin' me, Stevie."
Steve laughed, a little uncomfortably. Bucky had always flirted with every dame he laid eyes on, whether they were wearing hula skirts or getting those skirts blown up on 23rd street, but ever since he'd come back from the dead, he'd flirted with Steve too. Steve just laughed it off, not because of the idea of Bucky flirting with him made him uncomfortable, but because the idea of Bucky returning from Hydra with fewer sexual boundaries made him incredibly uncomfortable.
Steve mussed up Bucky's hair even more than it already was, and Bucky huddled deeper into his side.
"You really don't like the cold do you, bud?" Steve mumbled absently, and then, "Oh, god. Of course you don't. They put you in cryo. I wasn't thinking. I'll try to remember to keep the apartment warmer in the winter. I'm so-"
"You went into the ice."
"What?"
"That's why I don't like the cold."
"I don't understand," Steve said slowly, not wanting to invalidate whatever Bucky was feeling (chapter four of Helping Your Child with Picky Eating, which he'd found himself turning to a lot more than three times a day). "You weren't there when I went into the ice."
Bucky looked away, and Steve realized that no matter how slowly he went, he would never be able to avoid Bucky's landmines altogether.
"Bucky, Buck, that's not your fault. You were being tortured by Hydra. If anything, it was my fault you weren't there. I'm just saying that I didn't think it would be a trigger for you."
"You died," said Bucky. "You didn't think that would be one of my triggers? That's like the whole damn armory."
"You didn't know I died," said Steve. When Bucky didn't say anything, he felt cold in a way that a hundred Iron Man duvets couldn't fix. "Did you?"
Bucky was silent for a long moment. Steve would've thought he'd fallen asleep, if he hadn't known Bucky's breathing patterns better. He let Bucky take his time. Chapter two of Helping Your Child with Picky Eating. The day it had taken Bucky an hour to build up the courage to brush his teeth, Steve had just waited with him, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, humming 40s show tunes. That had been a Bad Day for both of them, because the idea of Bucky being afraid to put something in his mouth also made Steve incredibly uncomfortable.
"That was the only time they let me remember," Bucky said eventually. "I hadn't forgotten everything yet. They still had to strap me down for the experiments. They were trying to make me forget. I was starting to. I couldn't remember my name anymore. They showed me the newspapers. I got confused. I remembered you, but I didn't remember me, so I thought maybe that meant I was you. I thought I had gone into the ice and died. I thought I was you until I didn't remember you anymore."
When Bucky finished talking, Steve wasn't surprised to find tears on his face. He wrapped his arms tighter around Bucky's waist, feeling the ridges of his rib bones, feeling the cloth of his shirt over the scar that Steve knew was there. The one where the feeding tube had gone in.
Steve decided to make Bucky fondue for dinner. It was warm, and he'd never tried it before, but he had tried all the ingredients, so there wouldn't be any Incidents.
Steve decided to flirt back, just a little, the next time Bucky winked at him.
Steve decided to erase the line he'd put through Trying New Things.