Hey all.
Just a little Christmas fic i thought up a while back. If you want you can listen to the song while you read. It's called Baby Please Come Home, personally I prefer the Josh Ramsay version and here's a link youtube.com(slash)watch?v=Q03X01ZgSkA ...and yes, I so totally changed 'Baby' to 'Bucky', I regret nothing. :D
Disclaimer, I don't own anything.
They're singin' deck the halls
It's not Christmas at all
I remember when you were here
And everything we had last year
The first Christmas Steve properly remembers is the year he met Bucky.
He was six and Bucky seven. Bucky's dad wasn't at work and their mas had gotten the day off so they were all at the Barnes' home. A couple weeks earlier Bucky's dad had taken the pair of them to get a Christmas tree and it stood proudly in a corner of the sitting room, decked out in lollies, ornaments and candles, a Roger's family heirloom angel on the top.
Almost every night in the week leading up to Christmas Bucky, Steve and Bucky's twin sisters had gone carolling with Steve's ma.
It had been before the Great Depression so they'd gone all out for dinner. Bucky's dad had come home from work one day with the largest turkey either of the best friends had seen and had watched in awe as Bucky's two oldest sisters had thoroughly and methodically cleaned and stuffed the bird. Bucky's mom had made two of her famous apple pies and Bucky and Steve had managed to get a container of the really good vanilla ice-cream from Mr and Mrs Beck, the nice German couple that owned a small deli a few streets away.
As per a Barnes' tradition they had all opened one present each the night before, the rest being opened after breakfast on Christmas day.
After dinner the three adults sat down together and talked. Bucky's oldest sister had gone out for a couple hours to meet her beau. His second oldest sister had gone down the road to spend some time with Mrs Johnson, a widow who had lost her husband and their only child to the Great War and looked upon Bucky's sister like the daughter she never had. The twins, three years older than Bucky, had squirreled themselves away in a fort they had built in their room, playing with the dolls Steve and Bucky had gotten them.
Bucky and Steve themselves ended up falling asleep in a pile of tangled limbs and blankets in front of the fire and by the time they had woken up it was dark and Bucky's two sisters had returned home. They all stayed up long into the night, Bucky's dad letting them share a small glass of the heated mead, until they fell asleep again, tangled together and surrounded by their family.
Next year, Bucky's dad promises, he'll take them to watch the fireworks.
All the church bells in town
They're ringing a song
What a happy sound
Bucky please come home
When they were thirteen and fourteen Bucky spent Christmas with Steve and his ma. Bucky's dad had died early in the year and his two oldest sisters where married with their own families. His other two sisters were spending the holiday with an aunt and uncle. Steve's ma was working that night so it was just the two of them.
They stayed in, Bucky not wanting to risk Steve getting sick again, he had almost died from a particularly nasty flu a month earlier and Bucky was still shaken from almost losing his best friend.
The only thing they left the small flat for was the church service, Bucky insisted that Steve wear both their jackets, he wore his dad's old one.
They sat huddled on Steve's bed under a mound of blankets, listening to the wireless and watching the snow fall outside while drinking hot chocolate made with real melted chocolate from Mrs Lewis.
Now the snow's comin' down
And I'm watching it fall
Watching the people around
Bucky, please come home
"Bucky! Bucky, no!" Steve yells, running away the other teen.
Bucky turns around and bends overs laughing, hands on his knees as he wipes the tears from his eyes.
"You're a dead man, James Barnes!" Steve grins wickedly as he advances in his best friend, shoving a large handful of snow down the back of the older teen's jacket.
They're fifteen and sixteen and one of Bucky's youngest sister died barely a month ago. This is the first time since that Steve has seen Bucky even smile.
He'd have done anything to hear that sound again, but apparently all it took was being hit by a stray snowball from a group of kids in the park. Of course that led to Steve and Bucky having their own mini fight, which ended with the both of them being semi-frozen. They don't pay a cent of attention to the people passing by who are giving them odd looks as they play in the snow like they're young children.
They're both shivering by the time that get back to the Barnes' and Bucky's ma immediately pushes them into the bathroom for a quick hot shower. Dressed in the warmest pants they own and hand knitted sweaters, blue for Steve and green for Bucky, they sit on the floor, huddled under a thick blanket, with mugs of hot chocolate.
Bucky reads while Steve sketches. Their mas talk quietly, sitting in the armchairs, blankets over their laps. Only Bucky's other youngest sister is home, but she's in the room she used to share with her twin. When Bucky and Steve fall asleep after dinner, it's with her in between them, Steve and Bucky's hands linked on her shoulder.
Now the snow's comin' down
And I'm watching it fall
Watching the people around
Bucky, please come home
All people can talk about is the fact that they're on the brink of another war. Prices of everything are going up and, though they don't know it yet, it's only going to get worse.
Both their mas have passed away and Bucky's three remaining sisters all have their own families, so it's just the two of them again. Neither mind it all that much.
They go to the afternoon church service before having a small dinner in their shared flat. What little money they have they save. Steve makes a semi-decent amount drawing cartoon strips for local newspapers and Bucky takes up every odd job he can, spending long hours down at the docks each day.
The sun sets as they walk home, they unconsciously stand a little too close as they walk, covered pinkies barely brushing against each other, shoulders occasionally bumping as they weave through the crowds. Small lights are strung up everywhere and, if they look in the right direction at the right time they can just see some fireworks.
When they get back they grab all the pillows and blankets they can find and build a nest-sort of thing in the main room of their flat and drink hot chocolate while watching the snow fall.
Pretty lights on the tree
I've been watching them shine
You should be here with me
Bucky, please come home
It's never felt less like Christmas.
There are no lights on no trees. The soft white snow they once played in are hard crystals in the dirt and grass.
They may be surrounded by trees, but they're all bare and undecorated. The closest they've got to twinkling lights are the stars in the unpolluted sky. The seven of them had shared a flask of something or another that Dum Dum had brought out as they sat around the small fire they had dared build, that was after a small dinner of ration packs (and some chocolate Peggy had slipped into Steve's pack).
There aren't any fireworks, but maybe that's for the best. The sounds of something exploding and the smell of gunpowder, the sudden lights… it's all too much like bombs and HYDRA weapons.
Technically Bucky and Steve should be in their tent and sleeping, but they left Morita on watch and snuck away a little bit. They can still see their small camp and are close enough to smell the burning wood, but it's far away enough to give them the illusion of privacy.
They're sitting in silence, a blanket around them with Bucky wrapped up in Steve's arms. He's still not completely fine since whatever happened in Zola's lab and something about the serum has made Steve run hotter than the average person so he tends to act as Bucky's personal heater a lot during the nights. Steve doesn't really mind because the close contact is a physical reminder that he did save Bucky and that they're both together.
They wake up as the sun rises, covered by a second blanket that wasn't there when they fell asleep. The only mention the Commandos make of how Bucky and Steve spent the night not in their tent in Falsworth's small tip of his head to them at breakfast. Steve flushes slightly and grins while Bucky smirks and sniggers a bit.
Gabe and Jacques whistle in harmony as they make their way through Belgium and into Germany.
All the church bells in town
They're ringing a song
And it's a happier song
Please, please come home
Bucky falls off the train and a couple weeks later Steve crashes the Valkyrie into the Arctic.
Christmas falls less than a week later.
Neither are there.
Both are dead, or as good as anyway.
If there was a way
I could hold back these tears
But it's Christmas day
Please come home
It's the '50s, maybe.
Or the '60s.
It could be the '70s…
Or the '80s or '90s or even the first decade of the new millennium.
Neither would know any better if it was.
Christmases have come and passed and more will come and pass.
The world has long since forgotten about them and has moved on.
Home,
Come home,
Come home,
Come home
They don't let him out often. Only when there's no one else who can do the job.
He is the asset.
It's cold, but he's used to cold anyway so it isn't bothering him, the jacket is more to cover his arm up.
He sees a small kid with blonde hair and an odd urge to protect shoots up in him for a second, but there's a voice in his head and ear and then the urge is gone again as quick as it came.
The hint of a name lingers.
Fleetingly, he remembers hugging close to another body, a tangle of limbs. The echo of laughing and the ghost of chocolate on his tongue.
The gel packet he gets handed tastes like apple pie and vanilla ice-cream.
He sees fireworks going off as he readies to take out the target but they trigger a faint… something. Laughing as he walked with someone through a crowd… twinkling lights and the sound of singing.
They wipe him and almost everything leaves…
Everything but blue eyes and a warm feeling as he freezes again.
Now the snow's comin' down
And I'm watching it fall
Watching the people around
Bucky, please come home
It's the first Christmas since he woke up.
Steve isn't sure how it happened but all the Avengers have ended up living in the newly dubbed Avenger's Tower.
What's even more… miraculous, maybe, is that they are all there for Christmas. Even Phil, who is very not dead. Pepper, Happy and Rhodey join them, as does Thor's Lady Jane, Darcy and Erik (who Clint is also sort of friends with).
None of the Avengers, except for Steve, had ever really had a proper Christmas, but times have changed and Steve was still adjusting so it had fallen to all the non-Avengers to make the day really happen. Steve and Darcy ended up cooking a whole array of dishes for the day while Pepper and Happy took Thor and Tony to get a tree. Phil, Erik and Rhodey band together to get Clint, Natasha and Bruce decorating the entire place.
When Pepper, Happy, Thor and Tony return they all help with decorating the tree.
After a large breakfast of pancakes and waffles and bacon and eggs and pop tarts and whatever else anyone wanted they open presents, which takes way longer than it really should have. But then again there are only two explosions and three (non-explosion related) injuries, so it's not all that bad. It could have been worse.
After lunch, which is an even bigger affair than breakfast, they play games while drinking spiked hot chocolate, tea and/or coffee. They also eat most of the way too many cookies that Steve and Darcy spent an entire two days baking and decorating.
By the time dinner time rolls around they are all too lazy to do anything more than pull out some leftovers and eat them while watching a movie or three.
Steve manages to sneak away and ended up on the roof with a sketch pad as he thinks of Christmas with Bucky. It's not that he hasn't enjoy spending the day with his new team and friends, it just that he and Bucky had spent every single Christmas, without fail, together since they had met and it was hard to finally realise that he would never have that again.
That he and Bucky would never go to one of the Christmas service's again, not because they really wanted to, but because Steve's ma had always insisted on it. That they would never muck around in the snow together or go and watch the fireworks before walking home in the candlelit dark.
Or that they would drink proper hot chocolate while curled up together in a mass of blankets before falling asleep in a tangle, not knowing where one ended and the other began.
He couldn't remember having Christmas without Bucky, like the two couldn't ever be mutually exclusive. It wasn't really Christmas without him.
Pretty lights on a tree
I've been watching them shine
You should be here with me
Bucky, Bucky come home
It's his third Christmas since being woken up, but only the second he's actually celebrated.
But this year, unlike the first, he just can't find it in himself to even pretend that he's even a little okay.
It was easier to pretend that first year because everything was so new and they didn't really know each other that well. The second Christmas he had been somewhere in Prague… possibly. There had been intel about a HYDRA base being destroy and Steve knew it had been Bucky, so he'd gone there with Sam, who refused to let him go off alone, and they had spent a few weeks in the middle of nowhere with only each other for company.
But then seven months ago, after almost a year of hopping around the globe with the occasional stop in New York (more specifically the Avenger's Tower), he stopped looking, much to the relief of just about everyone, because they were all convinced he was killing himself on a hopeless mission.
For seven months he had restrained himself from booking a ticket and jumping on a plane to where he thought Bucky might be. Instead he had stayed in New York and had decidedly ignored anyone that brought Bucky up, after not long the others stopped trying because it almost always lead to several destroyed punching bags (Tony Stark enhanced ones at that) and a mopping Steve, which wasn't all that unusual these days.
He had still helped Darcy cook and bake, creating plenty of Rogers' and Barnes' family favourites. Two days, again, they spent making an army of gingerbread men and sugar cookies. He made half a dozen apple pies and had Tony find a kilogram of an exact chocolate so that they could make hot chocolate. Sam had spent almost an entire day (and well into the night even when he had started at three in the morning) making a number of his dad's family dishes.
No one mentioned anything when he slipped away after lunch.
Steve ended up on the roof again, sitting on the edge with his bare feet swinging as they dangled high above the ground, a mug of hot chocolate sat at his side as he sketched. He didn't move when it started snowing, never mind that he was only wearing a t-shirt and jeans.
"There you are," a voice said behind him some hours after he'd disappeared.
"Tony," he acknowledged quietly as the engineer came to stand just behind him.
"Wondering where you were," Tony stated. "Thor broke Jenga, didn't actually think you could break Jenga, but there you go. Natasha won a Monopoly, just so you know. It was brutal."
Steve sighed as Tony rambled on.
"…your friend Wilson's fun. Rhodey's happy to have another Air Force man to talk to and Clint's started calling him his birdbro and he and Darcy won't stop flirting, it's actually pretty entertaining..."
"What do you want, Tony?" Steve asked flatly, interrupting him and not really bothered about the fact that he was being rude.
Tony was silent for so long that Steve turned around to check that the man was still there. Tony was wringing his hand together, lips pursed and forehead marred by frown lines.
"I … we are … you…" he stumbled, growling slightly in the back of his throat. "Alright, I'm not good at this shit and I don't know why the others elected me into doing this but here I am, Steve."
Steve sighed again, he had almost been expecting this and wasn't surprised that it was coming from Tony. They had, oddly enough, become really close friends. They didn't really actually talk much, mostly it was Steve sitting in Tony's lab while the genius worked or them watching movies together with Tony giving a running commentary or Tony patiently helping Steve with some piece of technology. But it was Steve that helped Tony with his nightmares and flashbacks and who got the genius to actually eat food instead of trying to live on only coffee. In the same way it was Tony who had helped Steve realise that this new time he had woken up in wasn't all that bad after all.
"…but Pepper's really worried and you know how Pepper gets when she's worried and Sam may or may not be freaking out and I think Phil's about to have a conniption because you're Captain America and it should illegal for you to be all despondent and kicked pupp…"
"TONY," Steve said loudly.
Tony blinked stopping mid-sentence, "Yeah?"
"You should go back to the party," Steve said softly, turning his back to the Tower.
Tony huffed. "I'm under orders to not return without you," he said. And Steve could practically hear the man pouting.
"No thanks, Tony."
"Look, it's not an option. Please, just come back inside. Oh god, I even said please, that's got to be a record or something. I never say please. I'll even promise to help you escape if you don't want to hang around but I swear I think Bruce is going to hulk out if you continue trying to freeze yourself."
Sighing, Steve stood up, knowing that Tony wouldn't leave him alone. Sticking the piece of charcoal into a pocket, he picked up the half-drunk mug of the hot, now warm, chocolate and followed the smugly smirking engineer into the Tower.
The noise of the party reached them first. Someone had put on some soft music and Steve could hear some laughing, but mostly his serum advanced senses were hearing Clint yelling.
"Put the damn bow on or I will superglue it to your damn face!" Clint yelled as they walked into the open floor where everyone spent most of their time.
Thor and Jane were sitting in one of the loveseats together. Pepper, Phil and Rhodey were talking, sitting to one side and half paying attention to what was going on in the middle of the room, absolutely not intending to get anywhere near it. The rest were all standing in a sort of circle around Clint and another figure who had their back to Steve and Tony.
"You are his damned present," Clint was yelling somewhat good-naturedly. "Which means you can either wear the bloody bow or we…"
From what Steve could see Clint had a large bow made of bright red ribbon in one hand as was trying to get it on the other guy who was standing with his arms crossed over his chest. He was in jeans and a hoodie, the clothes masking his features, and his longish hair tied back with a plastic band. But despite it all Steve knew exactly who it was.
"Bucky?" he whispered softly, the mug slipping from his hand and shattering on the floor, covering his (bare) and Tony's (shoe-clad) feet in the luke-warm drink.
Almost immediately everyone shut up, Clint squeaking as the bow flew from his fingers.
Bucky himself turned around slowly, arms falling to his side as he smiled tentatively at Steve. "Hey, Stevie," he said softly, staring Steve straight in the eye.
Not really sure what to do, Steve turned to Tony, a desperate and lost look in his eyes.
"Merry Christmas, Cap," Tony said a genuine, soft smile on his face as he nudged Steve gently.
In less than a second Steve was across the room and barrelling into Bucky, sending the both of them stumbling as Bucky wrapped his arms around Steve.
"Shit, punk," Bucky said. "I can't leave you on your own ca…"
"Don't," Steve said tightly, shuddering as he burrowed his face into the crook of Bucky's neck. "Just… don't…" he whispered, his voice cracking with unshed tears.
"Hey, hey," Bucky said softly, rubbing a hand up and down Steve's back. Steve shook under the motion and Bucky felt his shoulder growing wet. "I'm sorry, Steve. It's okay, I'm sorry…" he murmured.
"It's okay. Wasn't your fault," Steve said, his voice muffled as he fisted a hand in the back of Bucky's hoodie.
Eventually they all ended up sitting around with spiked drinks and cookies. And if anyone noticed the way the two ninety-year-old supersoldiers fell asleep curled up together… well, they didn't mention it.
(A few days later a pair of simple wooden photo framed appears wrapped in Bucky and Steve's floor, each containing several photos.)
Come home
Hope you liked it. Again, I don't own song or the characters. Sorry the last little bit sucked, I had trouble writing it and it just wouldn't happen, I really hate it when that happens.
Anyway, Merry Christmas, I hope you are all having a wonderful time with family or friends or however you choose to spend this day. If you don't celebrate Christmas then YAY random public holiday for you, have fun with it.
-Nita