Chapter 10: Soon we'll be without the moon
"Bucky." Steve groans and rocks back on his heels, trying not to overbalance from the abundance of stuffed things he's juggling in his arms. "Buck, c'mon, I don't actually want the whole team. Where would I even put them?"
"Not my problem," Bucky says, and he shoots Steve a grin over his shoulder that stops Steve's heart. Steve used to tease Bucky for the way his smile made girls start giggling and do whatever he wanted, but now it looks like he needs to go back in time and send them an apology.
"It will be your problem, if I decide your half of the room is where I'm going to keep them," Steve shoots back, but then he has to drop his knees and lash out with one hand because Black Widow fell out from the bottom of the pile, and her stitched face is already scowling at him enough without him letting her hit the ground. He catches her on his foot and flips her back to the top of the heap. "This really isn't necessary."
Bucky just hands another handful of dollars to the amused man behind the booth. He hefts the ridiculous plastic air rifle they keep for the grownups, locking it into place between his chest and shoulder like it's an actual weapon he would use in combat. "How many for the Hulk?" he asks.
"Ten ducks," says the man. "If you don't make that, you can trade three Hawkeyes or two Iron Mans."
Steve isn't sure that's a very fair trade for anybody. Then again, the Hulk prize does come up past his waist.
"I am so telling Barton that Banner is worth three of him," Bucky says, bending to rest his elbows on the table. He lets out half a breath and fires, taking out ten of the moving ducks in a row. "Hey, look at that." He straightens up, hands the gun back to the proprietor, and hooks his thumbs in his belt, looking for all the world like he just saved the day. "That'll be one Hulk, my good man."
Steve glares at Bucky, though he assumes he takes some of the sting away when he has to crane his head and stick his chin between the wings on tiny-Thor's helmet. "I have no idea what I did to deserve this, but whatever it is, it wasn't worth it."
"Hey, you're the punk who said he wouldn't be satisfied with a cow, so don't look at me." Bucky just keeps on grinning, and he tosses the Hulk up and down in one hand like he's trying to decide whether or not to lob it at Steve's head. Steve gives him his best Captain's face, and finally Bucky winks at him and turns back to the man at the booth. "How much would I have to pay you to mail these for me?" he asks.
"Half the point is you've gotta lug 'em home yourself," says the man, dubious, and Steve is already aghast that Bucky has paid something like twenty dollars for these gigantic wastes of space, but sometimes the weirdest things catch Bucky's fancy and he refuses to let it drop. Steve remembers the time they were kids and Bucky conned the girl at the ice cream shop into letting them try a sample of every single flavour for free, even though he knew he hated half of them already.
"Fifty bucks," Bucky says. "It'll cost you what, like, five, ten max. The rest is for the inconvenience. Come on, you're not going to get a better deal than that."
He hesitates, but Steve sees the flash of greed on his face when Bucky actually waves the crumpled bill under his nose. "All right then," he says, and Bucky scrawls their address on a piece of paper and hands both over.
"Now, if these things don't show up within a week, I will come back here and kill you," Bucky says, easy and joking, but it still makes something tighten in Steve's stomach anyway. He tries not to let any of it show on his face, and at least Bucky doesn't notice.
"Yeah, yeah." The man takes the rest of the Avengers - plus an extraordinarily grumpy Nick Fury - from Steve and stashes them under the counter. "Pleasure doing business with you."
"I have no idea what that was trying to prove, but whatever it was, let's just consider the lesson learned," Steve says, punching Bucky in the shoulder as they walk away.
"No lesson," Bucky says sunnily. "Except maybe don't try to mess with me, because you might be bigger now but I can still take you. You don't have the conviction to follow through with pranks and stuff like I do."
"I might just find it if you keep this up," Steve says, but he doesn't push it or try to broadcast too much annoyance because it's good - amazing, really - to see Bucky goofing around and acting as though he doesn't have three lifetimes' worth of trauma stuffed into his head like the burritos Clint likes to eat in front of Bruce to watch him gag.
Bucky just laughs. "Hey, I said I wanted this to be a proper date, didn't I? It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure you can't call it a night until you make the other person blush at least once. Since I can't do that, I'm just gonna have to settle for you wanting to sock me one."
"Fair enough," Steve says, and he lets his fingers brush against Bucky's wrist for a second before pulling away.
They cycle round to the boardwalk, and Bucky shoves his hands in his pockets and saunters like he's nineteen again and owns his piece of the world, before war and super-science took that away from him. "I can't believe it's still wood," he says, scuffing his feet against the aging planks, bouncing up and down to make them creak. "I would've thought they'd've changed them to plastic or something by now, like all the playground equipment. How d'you think they managed that?"
Steve coughs, and he might not turn red whenever someone makes a sexual remark like everybody seems to think he does, but this time he feels his cheeks get warm. "Ah. Actually."
Bucky stops, and a couple strolling behind them nearly runs into him. He grabs Steve's arm and pulls him off to the side. "Wait, you? Seriously?"
"Well." Steve rubs the back of his neck. "Everybody knows Captain America's from Brooklyn, right, so when the city commissioners tried to modernize the place and replace all the planks with concrete, the restoration committee contacted me. I did a spot, got Tony to put out a few tweets on the Stark Industries account on my behalf, and he managed to convince the board to let them cover the cost of upkeep as part of SI's pro-bono discretionary spending or something. Good PR for them and SHIELD and the Avengers, helping a national hero protect his childhood home, that kind of thing."
Bucky lets out a low whistle. "Huh. I had no idea."
Steve shrugs. "Well, you were gone - I thought, I mean, you were here, actually, we'd found you but you weren't you and they didn't know if you ever would be, and this gave me something to do. Something productive, which I needed pretty badly. I knew how much you'd hate it if they ripped everything up and put down cement, so I did what I could. I remember thinking it's too bad you weren't yourself to see it, and I thought if worse came to worst I could at least tell you about it and see if that helped."
The realization of exactly what he's saying and who he's saying it to splits Steve down the centre, like sticking his thumbnail into an orange and tearing the peel away from the fruit inside, and for a moment he's almost dizzy. He has to stop himself from catching Bucky in an embrace right there, clinging to him until the world stops spinning beneath their feet. "Turns out I got so relieved when you came back I forgot all about it."
"Holy shit, Steve," Bucky says, and he's dead serious, his eyes very wide and very blue in his face. "You seriously have the most irritating habit, you know that? You make me just -" He runs a hand through his hair. "You do these things, you say things that you don't think are that big a deal but they just make me want to punch you or knock you down or squeeze the life right outta you or - well, or kiss you, dammit," he says, hard and defiant, and Steve swallows. "You're something, that's all."
Steve swallows. "Takes one to know one."
"See, and then you just say things so incredibly cheesy that it's okay again," Bucky says, grinning, and his shoulders relax. He bumps Steve's arm. "C'mon, I think I promised you a ride on the Wonder Wheel, and because I'm a good guy, I won't even try to make a bad pun about that."
"That's only because you can't think of one," Steve challenges.
"Ah, you got me." Bucky stops, buys a bag of cotton candy and doesn't even cluck about the price, which is impressive because it made Steve's eyebrows try to buy timeshares in his hair the first time he saw it. He tears off a piece and hands the rest of the bag to Steve, like they're ten years old again. Steve used to cram his mouth full so that when the sugar melted it left a hard lump instead of disappearing to nothing and the sweetness made his eyes water. Bucky glances at him. "Save some of that," he says, and refuses to say why.
They buy their tickets for the Wonder Wheel and wait in line, behind a family of four kids with their two exhausted parents - the mother catches Steve's sympathetic look and rolls her eyes to the sky before smiling and turning back to the youngest and his ice cream smeared face - and in front of a teenaged couple trying for the world's first voluntary pair of Siamese twins. "Man, this is weird," Bucky says, leaning back and looking up. "Some of these attractions are new, right?"
"I think the haunted house is." Steve looks around the park, struck as he always is by his dual-vision; he keeps seeing things the way he remembers them overlaid on what he sees now, like that series of photos popular on the internet a while back where they superimposed old shots from World War II on modern colour images. Except the thing is, his memories are fading; the twenty-first century is subsuming him, taking over, and it's harder for Steve to remember whether this building or that one was there the last time he was here.
"Well, the wheel's the same," Bucky says, squinting against the lights. "We gonna sit backwards like last time, or be responsible adults?"
Steve quirks a smile. Bucky had insisted, the last time they went on the ride together, that they kneel the wrong way on the bench inside the swinging carriage so they could look out the back window, both of them clinging so they wouldn't topple over, unbalance themselves, fall out and die, which is what the attendant at the bottom had warned would happen if any of you hooligans horsed around up there. Steve remembers being terrified, though he knows now it was less about the rule-breaking than it was about Bucky so close to him.
"I think we're a bit too big to sit backwards, Buck," Steve says, but then they're at the front of the line, and they hand their tickets to the bored college student manning the ride and listen to the monotone lecture about proper behaviour. The attendant takes one look at the couple behind them, then shakes his head and lets Steve and Bucky have their own carriage, which is what Steve was hoping for.
Steve slides into the seat, pressing himself against the side so Bucky can slip in next to him instead of sitting across. He keeps the cotton candy between his knees.
"Now this is really weird," Bucky breathes, and he runs his hand over the metal struts, sticking his fingers through the gaps and craning his neck to look out behind him. "It actually feels like we're back."
They chose one of the outer carriages instead of the swinging ones in the centre - Steve never liked those anyway, they used to make him almost as nauseated as the Cyclone and Bucky would tease him all night until he got mad and punched him, ineffective as that was - and Steve sits back and watches as the wheel rises slowly over the skyline. It's like being back in time all over again, except that the lights are brighter, bigger, and without really thinking about it, Steve finds Bucky's hand and squeezes his fingers. Bucky doesn't push him away.
The wheel turns, and finally they're on the last quarter before the top. Bucky reaches across Steve's lap and snags a handful of cotton candy, popping it into his mouth and licking his lips, and Steve has to laugh. "Never have you been a more attractive human being," Steve tells him.
Bucky snorts, but then their car moves to the top and the ride stops to let them admire the view. Before Steve can ask Bucky if he meant what he said, Bucky leans in and kisses him. Bucky's fingers press against Steve's jaw; his mouth is warm, and now Steve knows why he asked to save the cotton candy because the slow slide of his tongue against Steve's tastes like sugar, and Steve remembers being a teenager and slamming the lid down on thoughts about that exact detail. "Your hands are sticky," Steve says when Bucky pulls back.
"Really?" Bucky raises both eyebrows. "I take you out to Coney Island, kiss you on top of the damn Wonder Wheel, and you're griping that I didn't bring wet wipes -" He stops, cut off when Steve fists both hands in his shirt and yanks him forward to kiss him again.
It's everything Steve never let himself want when he was seventeen and awkward, including the popcorn- and sugar-sticky hands. Bucky makes a noise against Steve's mouth that sends sparks shooting through his brain and overrides his safeties, and he pushes Bucky back against the wall and kisses harder, trying to keep it going long enough that Bucky stops tasting like cotton candy and starts tasting like himself again.
He doesn't get the chance, because the wheel lurches and starts moving. They spring back, breathing hard, and Bucky pushes the fingers of one hand into his hair. "So Captain America has a thing for ferris wheels," he says, his voice a little shaky. "Keeping that in mind."
"I don't have a thing for ferris wheels," Steve protests. "It's not the location, it's - oh never mind."
Bucky huffs a laugh that's a little breathless, a little amazed, and all Bucky, and for a second Steve thinks he really has fallen out and is plummeting to the ground. "Yeah, no, I got it," he says, and Steve smiles because he knows Bucky does.
After dinner they do another circuit, going on rides and stuffing themselves full of terrible snacks like they're kids with the iron stomachs of childhood to match. Steve knows he's going to pay for it tomorrow - he can't even think about his usual ninety-minute morning run without his insides rolling - but he's having fun. He can't remember the last time he had fun, genuine, act like an idiot and not really care fun, and for Bucky it will have been even longer. They battle it out over ring toss and give their prizes to the little girls who'd been staring at the booth with their fingers in their mouths, and Bucky lets Steve pretend that wasn't his plan all along. They walk along the boardwalk for the second time and stop trying to point out what's changed and what's stayed the same. Bucky asks Steve if he wants to try the Cyclone again and Steve gives him a look, even though he knows that after being carried all over the city by Iron Man a wooden roller coaster isn't going to do him in this time.
"You know what?" Bucky says near the end of the night. The littlest kids have gone home, leaving the couples and the gangs of teenagers that Steve tries very hard not to think of as 'gangs' because he's not that old, and some of the smaller booths are starting to pack up. "This was good. This was a fun night. I really should thank whoever came up with the idea, he's kind of a genius. Who thought of this again?"
"Someone modest, clearly," Steve says, but then he sucks in his breath and jams his hands in his pockets because he was just about to catch Bucky by the front of his shirt and kiss him and he can't, not here. In some ways crowds provide almost as much anonymity as true privacy, but he won't do that. Not when Bucky's still adjusting. Steve's more shocked at himself that it was a reflex at all, but now that he's had to stop himself it hits him. He does want this. It's not going to ruin his day if he can't, but after years of hiding and denial and being so very, very careful, Steve wants to be able to take Bucky's face in his hands and kiss him anywhere.
The problem is that maybe Steve Rogers could have done that, if he'd been born in the seventies instead, but Captain America can't.
Bucky glances at Steve, his expression thoughtful, and Steve wonders if he knows what went through Steve's mind just then. Steve looks away until Bucky's fingers close around his wrist. "Hey," Bucky says, and tugs them both to a stop. The people eddy around them, not caring, and Bucky nudges Steve around to face him. "You're great, you know that?"
"I try," Steve says, and he's going for flippant but it takes a left turn and ends up somewhere near unexplainably nervous instead. Bucky's eyes are intent, searching, and Steve feels like he does when he jumps off a building and Iron Man waits that extra second before catching him just to keep him on his toes.
"No, really, you are. You've always put up with me and my shit, and I used to be able to tell myself I evened the score by beating the crap out of guys for you, but -" Bucky shrugs one shoulder. His fingers are very warm against Steve's skin. "Well, I don't like leaving debts unpaid, is the thing."
"There's no debt," Steve says, frowning. "Buck, you're my friend, my - you know who you are to me. You're back now and that's all I ever need. It's more than I ever thought I'd have. That's enough."
"No," Bucky says, and his jaw goes tight and his eyes flicker in the way it did when he made up his mind and Steve couldn't stop him from putting on that uniform and walking away. "No, it's not." He steps in close, tilts his head up and kisses Steve full on the mouth.
Someone jostles Steve as they shuffle past, but he barely notices and definitely doesn't care. It's chaste and appropriate, their only points of contact being the kiss itself and Bucky's hand on Steve's wrist, and that should be funny considering it's Bucky, king of the dance hall corner clinches, but Steve's heart stops anyway. Everything roars around his ears like he's on the top of that mountain looking down at the train and the thin zip cord meant to hold all of them, except this time when things settle he won't be staring at his empty hands and thinking about Bucky's body smashed against the rocks.
Bucky pulls away and the sounds slam into Steve again, the buzz of conversation and the screams coming from the rides, the wail of one last toddler being dragged home far too late, the cries of the hucksters trying to get in a few more customers. "There," Bucky says, and Steve can't breathe. "Not even, but a little closer, maybe."
"Fags," calls some kid from behind them, and Steve has to stop himself from whipping around and delivering a full on Captain America lecture, maybe complete with a bit of looming, because that's not acceptable anywhere but especially, selfishly, not now.
Except that Bucky just snorts and rocks back on his heels. "These fags can kick your ass, kid," he drawls, and he brings his right hand up to rub at the back of his neck so the kid can see the line of muscle in his bicep. Steve turns and crosses his arms, and the teenager and his buddies take one good look before muttering profanities and scattering.
"Oh man, if getting old means I get to terrorize tiny assholes, I'm all for it." Bucky grins, and Steve is still trying to figure out how to stand after the world tilted itself ninety degrees on its axis.
"You're not old," Steve reminds him. "The number on your birth certificate doesn't actually mean anything."
"Steve." Bucky goes somber, the smile fading from his face but not dropping off completely, and he digs the heel of his boot into the grass. "I enlisted. I went off to war, and by the time I knew what I'd done the only thing left to know is that I wouldn't be coming back. I was a dead man walking at twenty-seven, literally, and every time one of my buddies got blown to bits I knew I'd never see thirty and I wouldn't forgive myself if I did. Then later they found me, kept waking me up and putting me back to sleep and now I got no idea how old I am at all." He gnaws on the inside of his cheek and looks out over the crowd. "Every day I've got here, now, is a day I never shoulda had in more ways than one. So yeah, Cap, I am old. And I'm starting to love every minute of it."
Steve lets out a long breath, and the foot of space between them becomes a chasm as he fights not to touch, to embrace, to cling and prove to Bucky that they're both here, alive and solid and not going anywhere. "Let's go home," he says.
Bucky's smile slides back into place, then grows into something real. "Yeah, sounds good to me."
Steve has a habit of raising his eyebrows when characters in movies kiss voraciously and start shedding their clothes while still getting through the front door. It always seemed a little ridiculous that they honestly couldn't wait another five seconds - like smoking in the bus stop, or on the subway platform - and while Steve didn't have any experience with it, he did have a fair amount of confidence that if he had the chance to be in that situation in the future, he would be a little more circumspect.
Turns out, not so much.
The only reason Steve knows his keys hit the bowl they keep them in is because he hears the clink after he tosses them. They kick off their shoes without bothering to untie the laces, and Steve makes a note of their position just long enough that he won't trip on them before putting it out of his mind. Bucky's hands are inside Steve's jacket, and Steve might not have done this before but Bucky has; he works the jacket off Steve's shoulders and flings it aside without Steve needing to remove his hands from Bucky's waist for more than a few seconds. Bucky gets Steve up against the door frame, pressing him hard to the wall so that the edge of wood digs into his spine, and Steve is taller than Bucky so it should feel weird but it doesn't. He tries his best to get rid of Bucky's jacket but it tangles around his elbows, and Steve curses under his breath when Bucky laughs at him.
"You don't usually do that unless there are bullets flying somewhere," Bucky teases, and he frees himself with a grace that Steve always used to admire and still does before kissing him again.
"Quiet, you," Steve says, twisting his fingers in Bucky's hair and yanking in a way that's supposed to make him yelp but wrings a low growl out of him instead, and close enough.
Steve has had many, many years to actively avoid thinking about this, but he's never managed to get this far even in his brief bursts of imagination before denial slammed the door down. It would have been emotional suicide to picture this, the pressure of Bucky's fingers against his skin as he tugs Steve's shirt free and slides his hands up beneath the hem; the way Bucky's hips jerk when Steve loops his fingers in his belt loops, his thumb brushing the strip of skin above the top of Bucky's jeans. It's terrifying and exhilarating all at once, not unlike the first time Tony took him flying, and Steve's stomach lurches in pretty much the same way when Bucky gets his knee between Steve's legs.
"This is not comfortable," Steve manages to say after a while, gasp-laughing into Bucky's hair, and Bucky gives Steve one last bite on the collarbone before raising his head.
"You got complaints?" Bucky raises an eyebrow and grins at him, laconic, and Steve manages to arrange his face into something that might be the cousin of a glare if you're feeling really charitable.
"Not about you, but some specifics, maybe." Steve digs a finger into Bucky's ribs. "You know, like standing, these stupid slacks, the door frame poking into my back, all of this, could we maybe not do that part?"
"You're the one who wore slacks to the fair," Bucky points out, entirely unnecessarily in Steve's opinion, but he steps back, tugging Steve after him by the hand. They make it halfway across the room before they're kissing again, and this is ridiculous. This is dangerous. There could be assassins hidden in the house and Steve would never know because he doesn't care if it's not about how to get Bucky's t-shirt off without it getting stuck and giving Bucky more cause to chuckle at him.
"Don't make me order you to be quiet," Steve says, and they did that the other day and that turned out way more fun than Steve would ever have thought, but now Bucky gives him a look that curls in Steve's stomach and says Steve won't be making any commands right now and Steve is, perhaps surprisingly, okay with that.
They break to climb the stairs, mostly because neither of them feels like dying of a broken neck - or worse, being rescued because the SHIELD agents watching their house saw it happen and sent an ambulance in time - and by the time they're at the top, Steve's heart has settled somewhat and his brain has managed to click itself halfway back online. "Listen, Bucky-" he closes his hands over Bucky's wrists, and Steve used to spend a lot of time not-looking at Bucky's forearms and he gets distracted now for a second - "Just, before we do this, I should probably say, Tony's, uh, gift, I'm not - I don't want to use those yet. Well, I'd rather use those particular ones never, really, but you know what I mean. I hope that's not going to ruin your plans."
Bucky shakes his head, and his expression goes at least semi-serious as he rubs a thumb over the point of Steve's hipbone in distracted thoughtfulness. "Nah, me neither. Not yet. Still, plenty of ways to have sex, Cap." His grin returns like a physical force. "This is the cue for any SHIELD mooks watching right now to have an unfortunate power outage to the cameras," he says in a loud voice, and Steve should probably be embarrassed or disapprove or something, but he just laughs and lets Bucky drag him through the bedroom door.
Steve's phone goes off before his alarm, and this might be the day Steve's on-call again for SHIELD but that doesn't mean he appreciates them being quite so on the nose about it. "You gotta be kidding," Bucky mumbles, his face mashed into Steve's shoulder. "Answer that and I kill you."
Steve has a crisis of conscience for about five seconds before he turns a bleary eye on the clock next to his bed, and all right, no, it's four in the morning and no supervillains ever attack before dawn. Not enough people are around to make anything worthwhile for your average attention-seeking megalomaniac. "Nope," Steve says, and he cards his fingers through Bucky's hair. "I'll check my messages in about an hour."
"You're disgusting," Bucky mutters, snaking his arm tighter around Steve's waist. "I can't believe you're actually thinking about going in to work."
"You're the one who waited to seduce me until the night before I had to go back to work," Steve reminds him, and add that to the list of things that amaze him to be able to say without repercussions, because instead of jerking away or asking what in the hell he means by that, Bucky just lets out a low chuckle and presses a sloppy kiss to Steve's neck.
The phone stops ringing, and Bucky grunts in satisfaction for about two seconds before it starts up again. Bucky hisses, untangles himself just long enough to slap the phone onto the ground, where it buzzes against the carpet. Steve frowns. That's not good. He's considering whether or not to get up and answer and if that will put Bucky in a terrible mood forever when the phone rings for the third time, and this time it's not Steve's usual ringtone; it's Tony's voice yelling "PICK UP THE PHONE, STEVE" over and over.
Bucky jumps, smacks his head off the headboard, curses, and flails away, falling off the edge of the bed. "I'm going to kill him," he grits out, and Steve sits up, eyes wide. "How the hell does he even - you know what, I don't care. I'm going to kill him." Bucky finally finds the phone, holds it up to his face and barks, "What?!"
Steve holds out his hand for Bucky to pass it over, but Bucky doesn't. He says "What" again, flat this time - then again as a question, his voice scaling up into the panic register, and then he explodes in a litany of curses. Steve scrambles to lean over and turn on the light, and there's Bucky on the floor in his boxers, face pale and drawn while Tony's voice echoes tinny through the speaker. "Just a second," Bucky says. "Stark - no, I got it, seriously, stop, but I'm gonna put you on speaker, I don't wanna have to repeat this." He sets the phone on the table and buries his face in his hands. "Okay, Steve's listening, say that again."
"Someone got a picture of the two of you at Coney Island last night," Tony says, and his voice is tight, controlled, which means he's already called Pepper and they're trying to negate the damage but it's not working. "Cell phone camera, pretty crappy quality, but it's enough to ID Captain America. They put it online and it's gone viral."
Steve looks at Bucky, eyes wide, but Bucky still won't raise his head. "Can we contain it, take it down?"
"That's not all." Tony's voice is grim, and no, of course it isn't. "There was midnight printing of a tabloid for this morning's run about Captain America's gay affair, but we shut that down. That's not the problem. It's - the fans got a hold of it, you know, the big-time fans, old-school fans. Somebody ID'd Barnes."
"No." Steve's breath leaves him in a whoosh, and Bucky digs his fingers into his hair. "How? It was dark and the only photos of him are from World War II, how could they -"
"That's not the only photos they got, Cap," Tony says, and he actually sounds apologetic. That sets off more warning bells than Steve knows how to deal with, and a chill runs over him. "Looks like somebody at Deno's is enough of a fan to recognize you, but not enough to respect your privacy when they see an opportunity." He pauses. "There are cameras in the ferris wheel, you know, for security purposes."
Steve swears for the second time in twelve hours.
"Yeah." Tony lets out a sigh that buzzes through the phone's speaker. "I just, normally I'd say congrats, you know, to the both of you, I'm seriously proud and I'm not even being sarcastic, but that got out, and the quality's good enough that some insane fans with every photo of Captain America and the Commandos ever printed matched them up. They've made enough of a positive ID that I don't think we can shut this down. JARVIS has all of us on Google Alert, but I don't own the internet, not yet. Not enough to stop this once it hit Tumblr."
Steve has no idea what a Tumblr is, only that when he asked about it everyone in the room shouted "NO!" and he decided that was all he needed to know. Apparently not. "But it's four in the morning!"
"Looks like some bloggers in the UK got hold of the original post and went crazy," Tony says. "Believe me, there's a whole team of people on my payroll who are about to get very, very fired for letting this get through so far." He groans, and Steve imagines him tugging at his hair. Somewhere nearby Pepper will be in her nightclothes, snapping orders into a phone and trying to clean it up, and regardless of whether they manage to fix it, Steve feels so much gratitude for the both of them that his chest aches.
"How bad is it going to be?" Steve asks. "I assume SHIELD has been alerted and I'll have to make a statement or something. Fury called me in just over the parade thing."
"Oh yeah." Tony's voice goes distracted for a second, the way it does when he talks while doing something else at the same time, probably checking messages with JARVIS. "Fury wants you to come in, both of you. They want to get a head start on this before it breaks for the mainstream crowd."
Steve runs a hand down his face. He has to look away from Bucky, who still hasn't moved from his hunched position. He swallows. "Is it really that bad? In the grand scheme of things, will it really destroy the country if Captain America has a boyfriend?"
Finally Bucky looks up, staring right at Steve, and Steve holds his gaze and shrugs, though the motion is difficult with the weight pressing down on his shoulders. Bucky presses his lips together in the faintest hint of a smile, though his eyes are shadowed and his jaw tight enough that the bone juts out. Steve lets out a slow breath.
"Yeah, that's ... not all we're concerned about, Cap," Tony says, very carefully. "Look, you need to come in. If you don't want SHIELD to send somebody I can come get you."
"Yeah, that's just what we need," Bucky says, and at least there's some grim humour in there underneath the monotone. "Captain America and his gay sidekick, being carried off into the sky by Iron Man. I can't even imagine the headlines."
"I meant the Quinjet," says Tony with some asperity, and who knows how long he's been awake and how hard he was working to recall the damage before finally calling it in. Steve winces. "But sure, be a bitch, that's always helpful."
"Sorry," Bucky says, sounding neither like he means it nor is being sarcastic, just an exhausted neutral, and he hauls himself to his feet. "You, SHIELD, send whoever the hell they want, but tell me if they're gonna shoot on sight because otherwise I'm not gonna bother getting dressed."
Tony rolls his eyes so hard Steve can practically hear it over the phone, or maybe he's just used to the way his tone changes when he does it. "Don't fall down the stairs or anything, someone will be over to get you in about half an hour. It's a public relations disaster, not a matter of national importance, so relax."
"This could very well be a matter of national importance," says Fury, and Bucky slumps back in his seat and throws a pencil across the room, where it sticks in the cork board like one of Clint's arrows. Fury cocks an eyebrow but otherwise lets it slide. "This is about more than Captain America breaking the hearts of men and women nationwide."
Steve frowns. "Frankly, sir, I'm not sure how it's anyone's business. It isn't as though it's going to affect my work."
Fury gives him a one-eyed look that says 'it better not', but it's more than that, Steve can tell. Fury glances at Hill, who takes the opportunity to straighten the edge of the pile of papers she's holding. "The fact is, the public has positive proof that James Buchanan Barnes is back from the dead," she says in her usual crisp manner. "This is a problem."
"So I was dead and now I'm not." Bucky folds his arms. "You're SHIELD. I'm sure you've worked on bigger security breaches and had to spin worse stuff than this. Make something up about finding me in the ice. It's not like the people on the street actually know who the Winter Soldier is, and anybody who ever saw me is in the ground."
Hill gives him a dark, steely-eyed stare, and ice sticks in Steve's chest and spreads out like frost forming on his terrible Brooklyn apartment's windowpane in the middle of January. "Random people aren't the problem," Steve hazards, "but certain people are."
"Precisely." Hill nods curtly and bangs the bottom of the pages against the desk again. Surely that's not necessary. "As Barnes said, most people who encountered the Soldier are no longer around to tell the tale, but the people who made him, who hired him out, they have. They'll know your face. They'll know they lost you on assignment, and now, they'll know we didn't kill you, didn't lock you away, that we let you keep your arm - gave you a new and improved one, even. We've let you run free to hold hands and canoodle with Captain America at an amusement park, and I'm sure it won't take them much time to track down where you are based on that. I expect it will be a matter of hours before we receive instructions on how best to compensate them to keep that information quiet. I also expect that whatever it is, it will not be a price we are willing to pay. At the same time, we can't allow that information to be released; SHIELD is already under enough suspicion. This would likely result in us getting frozen completely."
Bucky swallows. "Does this mean I'm going back into lockdown?"
Fury lets out a gusty sigh. "I'm afraid that's the only choice for now, until we can guarantee your safety. Blackmail and extortion aren't the only worries we have, if someone decides to send an extraction team to fetch their pet assassin back."
"If this was such a problem, why let me out in the first place?" Bucky demands. "If I knew the first camera in my face was gonna send me right back here, I would've - hell, I don't even know, but you can't just lock me back up again after letting me out. I'd rather you just kept me here the whole time."
"We took a chance," Fury says calmly. "It was clearly the wrong one. We didn't expect civilians to be the ones to recognize you after all these years; we underestimated the ardour of Captain America's fanbase, but we won't make that mistake again."
"We'll work on a statement for Captain America to make to the press," says Hill, and Steve notes that she didn't address him as 'Rogers'. This won't be his speech; this will be his persona, the nation's hero, and his chest tightens. "At least we can clean up the greatest symbol of America becoming a gay icon overnight. With the right spin we can turn it around and make it so anyone who has anything to say against it will be attacking America itself, not just homosexuality. Like it or not, the USA is about to become the most visibly queer nation in the world." She says it so matter-of-factly that Steve almost admires her. "The rest, the identity of the Captain's mysterious boyfriend and the reemergence of James Barnes, we'll have to see. We can obfuscate for now."
"The Black Widow is in conference now, giving us a rundown of any contacts she might have that could lead us to the Soldier's latest employees, as well as anyone else who might know his identity," Fury says, tapping one finger against his bicep. "One way or another, we'll find out. If we can build up a case of plausible deniability we'll do that. No one is going to learn about the Winter Soldier if we don't have to."
Bucky grips the arms of his chair, and the plastic bends and cracks under the pressure of his left-hand fingers. He doesn't seem to notice. "They'll put me on trial for crimes against humanity," he says, and it's impressive how neutral he makes that sound. "They'll pin any even remotely political assassination from the past fifty years on me, and there will be no way to say yes or no."
"As you're well aware, you aren't the only former assassin we've managed to take under our wing," Fury says coldly. "We look after our own, and whether you choose to accept it or not, that's what you are. We aren't going to turn you over to the authorities just like that. SHIELD operates outside the official government branches for a reason."
Steve thinks back to his and Bucky's fight before the battle with Molecule Man, where Bucky accused SHIELD of having ulterior motives when it came to its villains, exercising its own brand of justice with no one higher up to regulate it. Whatever truths that might hold, Steve finds himself so relieved to be on the right side of that privilege that he has to struggle to breathe. SHIELD is not and never will be the Commandos, and Fury isn't Colonel Phillips, but sometimes Steve feels like they're close enough.
"The bottom line is, we will fix this," says Fury, and Steve has never had anything even close to absolute faith in the man, but he knows he has to trust him now. Fury sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose, and when he looks up there's something unfamiliar about his expression until Steve identifies it as regret. "For what it's worth, boys, we'd all be happy for you in different circumstances."
They're in a meeting, which means Steve stays at attention instead of sliding a hand down his face, but he really, really wants to. Bucky, under no such obligation, snorts and sinks further down into his seat. "Thanks," he says. "Appreciate it. Tell whoever won the pool that they owe me takeout from someplace good."
Fury pauses. "I believe that's Jenkins, from marketing. You should take that up with him."
"Oh believe me, I will." Bucky drags a hand over his face, then glances at Steve, his face tight. "Hey, you, c'mere." Steve risks a quick glance at the front of the room, but Hill is packing up her things with her usual quiet efficiency, and Fury turns to speak with her. He closes the distance between them and stands next to Bucky's chair. Bucky sighs and curls his fingers in Steve's sleeve. "It's okay," he says, and his voice is dull but not dead, and he manages to dredge up a small smile. "This is absolute shit, but it's okay. I still wouldn't take yesterday back just because some fucker with a camera ruined it."
Steve sends a silent prayer to Phillips and every hard-nosed trainer in the SSR for all the abuse they poured on his head, because it means he can keep standing instead of collapsing with relief. "That's good," Steve says, which is remarkably inadequate but that's all he can say in the presence of SHIELD agents and still trust himself to keep it together. "I wouldn't either, except for the part where it put you in danger."
"Please." Bucky's eyes are dark, and he stares at his left arm, opening and closing his fingers. He was going to meet with Tony today to get the new synthetic skin installed. "I was always in danger; this was just all of us kidding ourselves. It's like enlisting all over again; it's never over. Just sometimes you die while you're still waiting for the next big one."
Steve twists his hand to grip Bucky's fingers, and they stand and sit together in silence while Hill finishes gathering her things and walks out, her shoes tapping against the floor.
"Gentlemen," Fury says at last. "Let's get you to your quarters."
"You don't have to stay," Bucky says to Steve, and when he stands he looks at Fury, challenge written across the just of his jaw and the line of his shoulders. "He doesn't have to stay."
"No, he doesn't," Fury agrees, at the same time that Steve explodes, "The hell I don't!" Bucky glares at Steve, and Fury clears his throat. "You will, of course, be needed elsewhere and expected to report for duty when necessary, but there's no reason why you can't use the temporary living quarters when you're not directly required, if you so choose."
"I choose," Steve says, and he gives Bucky a hard look. "I'm not going anywhere, and I'm definitely not going back to sleep at the house without you."
Bucky holds Steve's gaze for a few seconds, but finally he gives in. "Fine," he says, and Steve squeezes his hand. "Is it going to send the free world into chaos if I go back to bed?"
Fury shakes his head. "No, everything that needs to be done for the next few hours will be on our end. You boys get some rest. I get the feeling you're going to need it."
Bucky snorts again. "Well, when you put it like that," he says dryly, and he frees his hand from Steve's hold and stands up. "C'mon, you need to sleep until you stop looking like somebody slapped your mother," he says to Steve, forcing lightness into his tone. "Can't meet the press like that." Steve doesn't argue.
Fury leads them to an extra suite and hands them their passkeys. "We will fix it," he says again. "And Captain - welcome back."
Steve didn't think himself capable of saluting sarcastically, but apparently there's a first time for everything. "Thank you sir, always a pleasure."
[EDITED TO ADD: THIS IS STILL GOING. THIS IS NOT THE END. I'm not sure why so many people are confused by this when I marked it as "in progress" and not "complete" but I've made several notes just in case.]