Title: anywhere i go (i carry your heart)
Pairing: Steve/Bucky
Rating: T
Warnings: mentions of canon-typical violence
Spoilers: loosely for CA:TFA.
Wordcount: 2264
Summary: Bucky's heart is big enough for the both of them.
A/N: The concept & spirit of this fic are taken directly from the fic "anywhere i go, you go" by falling-voices, who is brilliant and lovely.
Steve's heart has always been weak, stuttering — the red in his chest is one of Bucky's earliest memories, flickering as if it might go out at any moment. And people could live without a heart, but Bucky was sure, surer than he was of himself, that Steve couldn't — that the light slanting through Steve's ribcage might be faint and small, but his heart was the biggest thing about him.
—
Steve picked fights he couldn't win and refused to lose them, spitting out blood and gravel from between his teeth and staggering back to his feet with his fists held up. So Bucky learned how to hold himself bigger and throw his punches harder; how to keep his feet when it was two-on-one, three-on-one, how to get between a snarl and Steve's all-too-fragile body.
There's one thing he never did learn, through all his years of following Steve: Steve's heart always beat the steadiest during a fight, like he was doing something certain and true, while Bucky could never stop his from rattling against his ribs with worry.
—
It was a cold, hard winter, when Steve hadn't really stopped coughing for four straight months, but this time he was curled on the floor gasping for air in high, tight wheezes and the light in his chest was duller than it'd ever been. Bucky wrestled him into sitting up, put an arm around Steve's shoulders and thumped his bony back, feeling utterly helpless.
"C'mon, Steve," he muttered, not even sure what he was trying to say. "Stay with me, pal, you can do this."
But Steve had a pained smile on his lips when he whispered, "Sorry, Buck," and Bucky could feel Steve's heart skipping under his hand, its beats irregular and fading; and it wasn't fair, when Bucky's was strong and steady in his own chest — when Bucky's was useless to him, because he didn't love like Steve loved, wide and expansive —
"Don't you dare," Bucky croaked. He settled a hand on his chest, and pressed, and pressed, until he felt his heart fluttering against his palm, and it didn't falter as he wrapped his fingers around it and pulled; as he laid it urgently against Steve's thin chest, mouthing please like a prayer—
And his heart was glowing red as it sank into Steve's ribcage, sinking seamlessly into the shell of Steve's heart as if it'd always belonged there, and Steve was still coughing but the color was coming back into his face.
"You shouldn't have done that," Steve finally croaked out in between coughs, "Bucky, your heart—"
And maybe there was a hollowness in Bucky's chest that was more than just the space of something missing, but he put his head on Steve's back and he could hear the thumping, loud and clear.
"Don't worry about it," he said. He tried to smile, and it wasn't very hard. "You need it more than I do."
—
Steve carries Bucky's heart well. It beats for the both of them nestled inside the bell of Steve's ribs, carried along well-trodden streets of Brooklyn as it had always been.
And Bucky, even if he's a little colder at night — if he has to tug Steve a little closer to feel the thrum of a heartbeat against his own chest — he can still convince himself that nothing's even changed.
—
"Take it back," Steve says the night Bucky's number comes up. "You gotta take it back, Buck."
Bucky looks at Steve, the red of his heart reflected in the intensity of his eyes, and shakes his head with a careless hand over his sternum. "Naw," he says. "You keep it safe for me, yeah?"
He's got used to seeing his heart cradled in Steve's chest, but never the thrill of it when Steve stands close to him, so close that he can nearly feel the vibrations in his own body. Well, Steve draws near now, and he looks up at Bucky. "Promise, then," Steve says, fierce, with his heart's beating loud enough that Bucky can hear it. "You can't do anything stupid, because you gotta come take it back."
"Hey," Bucky says, and puts a hand on Steve's shoulder. "Nothing's gonna happen."
Maybe the heart's grown bigger, because the light of it is redder and darker than Bucky remembers. It shines out from between Steve's ribs, and the sight of it's worth the ache in Bucky's chest when he lets go of Steve and turns away.
—
It gets worse. The hollow of his chest hurts, faint but persistent, all through basic, but that's not any different from the rest of him. They give him a rifle and tell him to shoot; he looks through the crosshairs, breathes out and he is still, so perfectly still as he pulls on the trigger.
They clap him on the back and make him a sergeant. They don't ask about his heart.
—
Europe is one long ache. It never stops being cold and he spends nights in his bedroll feeling like his breastbone is bruised right through.
He imagines every kill is one step closer to home. He curls himself into the tops of trees, the scope pressing into his brow, and his hands don't shake. He only lets himself inhale when he sees the enemy go down.
When he closes his eyes, there's the glow of red behind his eyelids.
—
When they capture him, they want to know where his heart is.
"None of your business," he spits at them when they're strapping him onto a bench and prodding him with needles. He says it again and again, even when everything in him hurts, when his vision blurs and all he can see are the masked faces over him.
"Safe," he tells them once, through a haze of pain; he thinks about Steve back in Brooklyn, the steady red beat of his heart inside Steve's chest, and somehow manages a faltering smile.
Then there's a small round man staring at him. He says, "Yes, you'll do just fine," with a strange little smile and touches the curve of Bucky's jaw.
Bucky shivers, and once he starts he cannot stop.
—
He gasps out name-rank-serial number into the cold and gray, but it doesn't stop them. He tries to curl in toward himself, around the hollow echo of his heart, but the straps yank at his shoulders and it feels as if they're slicing into the very core of him, toward something still coloring his vision with faint, phantom beats.
It is cold, so cold that Bucky is beginning to lose all feeling. He wonders if this is how he'll go, falling into pieces around the pain at his center.
—
"Bucky," a voice says, with a warm touch to his shoulder, and it can't be Steve, because Steve is small and breakable and safe, half a world away — but it's Steve's steady voice that says, "Yeah, it's me," and at his chest there's bright red pulsing back at him, like a promise, but new.
"Steve," he manages, "what—"
And Steve is laying a frantic hand on his chest, the light of the heart gleaming out from between his fingers — "Take it, take it, Buck, you have to—"
Bucky swallows down a pained groan to reach out and trap Steve's hand against his chest. "You can't," he says. Steve's skin is hot against his and the beat of the heart is thumping faintly against his palm. "Don't you see," he pleads, because he knows the way the shadows of Steve's ribs lie comfortably on his skin, the way the heart beats steadier in Steve's chest than it ever did in his own, "it's just as much yours as it is mine, now."
Steve looks at him, makes a rasping sound in his throat and lets his head fall until his forehead is resting, very gently, on Bucky's chest; Bucky winds his fingers through Steve's hair, and that's enough, for the moment, to let him breath without the ache beneath his lungs.
—
"Not without you," Bucky had said, and it was almost a surprise, that he even needed to say it, because didn't Steve understand—
—
Peggy Carter's heart is a brilliant red and shines even brighter when she's looking at Steve. Steve looks at her back like she's the sun; he drinks in the light of her and it makes him stand even straighter, taller, his hands suddenly clumsy and his mouth soft like Bucky's only seen in his sleep.
Bucky downs one drink, and another. He almost misses the biting cold of the field, the light in Steve's chest muted to a dull glow underneath his uniform, and the sharp focus he can send down a scope instead of...this, sitting here acutely aware of Steve while Steve's not looking at him at all.
—
"You ready to follow Captain America?" Steve asks. Bucky just manages not to rub at his chest and thinks almost despairingly, Don't you see, I've been doing that all along.
—
The night of the commandos' first mission, and Bucky lets it the cold of the air wash over him, sharpen his senses to the highest pitch. It's about time for him to take watch, so he slides out of his bedroll to go find Steve.
Steve's leaned up against a tree, something tall and proud and ancient; Bucky can make out a coppery glow around him. He stops where he is to just look for a moment, at Steve and the way the underside of his jaw is lit up, faintly, and wonders what it'd be like for him to touch.
Instead, he thrusts his hands inside the pocket of his fatigues and walks up until Steve twists around to see him coming. "Thought your uniform was supposed to cover that up," he says, nodding down. "No good if HYDRA can see us coming, is it?"
Steve lets out a short laugh. "Yeah, they said it would," he says, briefly pressing his fingers to the reinforced patch at his chest. "I think it's brighter than they thought."
Yes, Bucky thinks, as Steve touches his shoulder and heads off. Because it's you, Steve.
The rail wrenches off the side of the train, and Steve can do nothing but watch Bucky fall. It feels like something is wrapped around the heart in his chest, squeezing it tighter and tighter, as if trying to crush it to nothingness, and Steve gasps — buries his face in his forearm and braces for the last of Bucky to be taken from him.
Except then the heart gives a great leap and begins to drum against his ribs again, and Steve's left blinking into the snow, wondering if, maybe—
—
No one can tell him why Bucky's heart's still red and wild in his chest. Peggy finds him in a bombed-out bar with a bottle he can't drown himself in.
"It was Barnes's last gift to you," she tells him sharply, but her hands are gentle when she takes the glass from his hand. "Don't you dare waste it."
—
It's easier for Steve to not think about it when he's moving — in action, when there are HYDRA agents in front of him and all he has to do is fight. But when it's night and he's alone in his head, Bucky's heart beating out a steady rhythm is sometimes too heavy to bear.
It's not that Steve's unused to death. This is a war; Steve's lost men, crouched over bodies torn apart and let grief bow his head. But Steve bites his lip and raises a hand block out the deep red glow of it, because there's something profoundly unfair about having a living reminder of Bucky burrowed deep in his chest.
Sometimes Steve thinks — he lets his hand sink wrist-deep into his chest, wraps his hand around the slickness of the heart and thinks about lifting it out. It trembles and turns sluggish under his grasp, and he swallows down curses at Bucky for ever having given the heart to him at all, for making him live long enough to feel this way.
But he can never manage to quite lift the heart out of his chest. He still remembers frighteningly clear the way Bucky had looked, frantic and so afraid as he pressed the heart into Steve's body, and he lets his head drop and lets his fingers uncurl — lets Bucky's heart keep him going, beat by beat.
—
Schmidt doesn't have a heart. "It's a liability, Captain," he tells Steve. "A weakness that we have both outgrown."
For one fleeting moment, Steve wants that to be true — he wants to be able to breathe without Bucky's heart feeling too large for his chest, wants to stop hearing the echo of Bucky in his ears late at night.
But he remembers the moments when Bucky had thought Steve wasn't looking, pressing a hand over his chest with a wince, and the hardness in Peggy's voice, telling him don't you dare; and maybe Schmidt's outgrown humanity but Steve never could.
"You're not my future," Steve spits at him, before Schmidt and the Tesseract disappear in a flash of bright blue.
He steers the plane down into the ocean. the sun flashes brightly off the masses of ice, but he's looking down, at the blue creeping up his fingers and the dull pulses of red at his chest, getting slower and slower—
When they revive Captain America, his heart is the first thing thing to come alive — pale pink at first, slowly reddening as it fills with blood and beating on as if the last seventy years hadn't happened at all.