Motorcycle
Esopus itself was a tiny town, barely more than a scenic stop along the Route 9W winding along the Hudson River bank. That was deliberate. Tony didn't want to set up the HQ somewhere ostentatious; the further they could go away from paparazzi and potential collateral damage, the better.
Of much more interest was the city of Kingston, just a fifteen-minute drive north, with all the strip malls, fast food, and local hole-in-the-wall specialty shops you'd expect from a historic Dutch town and old freight hub. Whenever the more city-side Avengers got bored and antsy with the placid riverbank and green trees of Esopus, they'd put on their civvies and take a short jog up to Kingston to get their taste of hurry and bustle again.
It wasn't long before Bucky and Steve had tried brunch at all the local cafés in the city, but this little sandwich shop was one of their favorites. It was tucked away in a quiet corner of downtown, wide windows looking out onto the old main street, public enough that there was a crowd to melt into but not so public they were likely to be recognized.
"The resumé's online," Bucky said over the last few mouthfuls of his sandwich. "It's public. I can still change stuff, but it's not easy to pull together job experience." He leaned back and slung his arm over the back of his chair. "I mean, whaddya put down, besides this, and the army? Can't exactly call up the fellas I worked for at the docks back in the 30's and ask for a character reference."
He could speak freely enough. Their conversation blended into others coming from other tables around the shop. If any heads turned their way, it was only to get a good look at the handsome fellas who'd walked through the door with tousled hair and motorcycle helmets under their arms...and maybe to oggle the odd cover on Bucky's left arm that was almost but not quite entirely unlike the color of his skin.
Steve was chewing on his sandwich, but his blue eyes flicked upwards. They caught the sunlight a little as he sat up, breathing in through his nose, and began to think it over. "Any idea what you'd wanna do instead?"
"That's just it. I dunno." Bucky drummed his flesh fingers on the tabletop, trying to jog his mind. He sighed. "We spent our whole lives jus' doin' what we had to, to survive. Now I got the whole world in front'a me, and..."
His eyes lost focus. He stared past some undefined spot on the floor. Just thinking about everywhere they'd been, everything he'd seen—when he'd hardly even left his neighborhood in Brooklyn, before the War—was overwhelming.
Steve's smile was wan and thin. "It's big."
Bucky huffed up a little laugh. Yeah. That was an understatement. But as he looked up at Steve, his smile started to soften; Steve would always get it, and fill in the words he couldn't find, even if he didn't say anything.
Bucky tore another bite out of his sandwich and started to think.
Steve shrugged at the ceiling. "You could talk to...well, y'know." He smiled; anonymity or not, they weren't gonna rat out Barton's secret in public. "Looks like he's got the whole 'normal life' thing figured out."
Bucky barked in laughter and crossed his arms. "If he had his way, he'd hire me on as a farmhand full-time." He shook his head. "I couldn't do it. I've tried. It's too quiet. I need the city, I need things movin' fast."
Steve grinned. "You can take us outta Brooklyn—"
"—but'cha can't take the Brooklyn outta us," Bucky finished with a smirk.
Steve leaned forward and offered his fist. Bucky bumped his wrist against Steve's.
Steve stuffed the rest of his sandwich in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Painfully inelegant, that, but, eh, he didn't have anybody to impress at the moment.
"Well, whatever you wanna do, I'm happy for ya," he finally said with a shrug. "'Bout time you got some say in the matter."
Bucky looked at him for a long while, then down at his plate, pushing the last of the mayonnaise around with a bit of crust. "Does it bother you at all?" he asked softly. "That I'm..." He bit his lip. "I'm leavin' ya?"
There was an inevitability, to discussions like this. Talking about other career options was all fun and games until it game to the detail that Bucky would have to leave the team. He didn't like bringing it up; it hurt too much. But at some point, they'd have to face that music.
Steve paused. He sat up, slowly, with a long sigh, and shook his head. "I'll miss ya, if you go," he said, his voice low and wistful. "'S been nice, havin' you around, jus' the next door down. But you're not obligated to nobody, least of all me."
Bucky looked up. He was dead serious. "I'm obligated to you most of all."
"Aw, shaddup." Steve pushed his fist under Bucky's jaw.
Bucky chuckled and let Steve mime a punch, but he didn't take it back. He meant it. Everything Steve had done to give him his mind back was a debt he could never repay. Steve would protest to the end of his days that it was only payment for Bucky sticking by him when he was a scrawny, sickly twig that everyone else thought would be better off dead, but Bucky wouldn't hear of it.
Sticking around with a friend when he got into fistfights with every chump on the block was one thing. Sticking around when he'd literally been tortured and brainwashed was another.
But, well, maybe it was for the better that they were both in each other's debt. Maybe it's why this worked so well.
Steve slung his arm over the backrest and shook his head. "You do what you gotta do. I'm not the boss a' ya—ain't nobody, anymore. I just..."
A slow smile spread across his face. He shook his head, and the blue eyes looked up. "I just wan'cha to be happy."
Bucky smiled. The sunlight was warm, prickling on his skin, and he had lungs full of fresh air and a stomach full of food and a home to go back to at the end of the day. He was safe. He was free. Life was good. All of that, he owed to Steve.
But even if he had nothing else—if he was cold, and poor, and hungry, without a roof over his head to protect him from the rain—if he was back in those horrid trenches, with mud-soaked socks, ears ringing with shell fire, and a nose full of the stench of death—if the whole world went to hell again, it would be worth it, if he only still had Steve.
I just wan'cha to be happy.
Bucky nudged Steve's foot under the table and leaned forward. "Long as I got you, I am."
The girls a few tables over—who, ostensibly, had so far buried their noses in their phones—made tiny, strangled noises, and started whispering furiously to each other.
Well. So much for anonymity.
Steve choked on his laughter. "Geez, Buck!" he hissed. "We're in public!"
Bucky shrugged and scooped up their disposable plates and coffee cups. "Eh, the tabloids are runnin' anyway," he said just a little too loudly, pitching everything into the trash. "Let's jus' give 'em something less racy to talk about."
Steve laughed. He already had his wallet open, and he slapped a ten-dollar bill on the table.
(It was far too big a tip, but Steve didn't care. He liked to be generous.)
Steve tucked one motorcycle helmet under his arm, and the other, he tossed to Bucky. "You're startin' to sound like Tony."
Bucky tried to fasten the clip under his chin. "My god, he's getting to me," he gasped. "That's horrible."
They stepped out the door, and the bell chimed overhead. "Pretty soon, you'll be thinkin' like a modern man," said Steve.
Bucky looked him dead in the eyes. "When that happens, shoot me."
Steve threw back his head and howled in laughter. He staggered backwards, and then forwards, slinging his arm over Bucky's shoulders half to hug him and half for support. Bucky laughed just as hard and leaned into him, bumping the helmet against Steve's temple.
Man, he loved this big idiot.
They'd come into town on Steve's motorcycle. No use taking one of Tony's cars; it was only a fifteen-minute ride, with warm weather and a clear sky, and—whether Bucky admitted it to himself or not—it was another convenient excuse to stay close.
They took a different route than usual on the way home, winding through neighborhoods and side streets to check out the local scenery. Steve had an incredible memory, thanks to the super serum, and a fantastic sense of direction. No matter what new roads they drove down—no matter how many times they had to backtrack and reroute—they never seemed to get lost.
Maybe that's why they found it.
Bucky saw it in the distance first: a lump of rusted brown, in a ditch on the side of the road. When Steve sat up a little straighter in front of him, Bucky knew that he saw it too.
"What is that?" Bucky bawled over the wind noise.
"No idea!" Steve hollered back.
He slowed down, as they got closer to it. The forest trees weren't whizzing past so quickly, instead wandering past them and echoing back the low rumble of the motor.
Steve pulled over onto the shoulder and popped the kickstand, and Bucky slung himself off the bike. His boots crunched on the gravel, and he knelt in the sparse grass by the ditch.
There, lying on its side, with one tire missing, nearly covered in the shadow of the trees and the tall wild grass, was a banged-up old motorcycle. It was small—not nearly the beast Steve's bike was—and had lost most of its paint, but what remained was a thin luster of navy blue.
"You think it belongs to anyone?" asked Steve. He still had to yell a little over the bike's idling motor.
Bucky shook his head and stood up. "If it does, they haven't touched it in years."
Steve glanced up and down the road. "No one around for miles. Must've fallen off the back of a truck or something."
"Yeah." Bucky meant to climb back onto the bike behind Steve, but something kept him riveted to that spot, looking over his shoulder. "Strange."
He could see his reflection in the fading chrome on the gas tank.
There was a part of him that never did catch on to the fact he was out of the Depression. There was a part of him that still expected to pinch pennies, store dollar bills in mason jars, use buttons instead of zippers and put bones in the soup stock or the garden. He'd tease Steve mercilessly for saving orange rinds and wrapping paper and things like that, but the truth was, it was a habit that didn't die easy with him either.
And now, here was a whole motorcycle, rusting away to nothing in a ditch.
He had to tell himself that it was silly. It probably belonged to somebody, even if they'd left it here for god knows how long, and it probably couldn't be rescued even if he tried. Look how rusted it was; straight up missing a tire. He turned, hands in his pockets, and slowly crunched his way back over the gravel towards Steve. It was a lost cause anyway.
He'd been a lost cause once.
He winced.
Well, that thought didn't make it any easier.
He climbed back onto the motorcycle behind Steve and checked that his helmet was on right—but, to his surprise, Steve didn't knock back the kickstand.
He was still looking at that little rusty lump in the ditch.
"D' be a shame for it to go to waste," he said, his hand on his thigh, and turned to look over his shoulder at Bucky.
Bucky felt his jaw dropping open. Slowly, ever so slowly, his lips curled up into an incredulous smile.
How the hell did Steve always get it?
He hadn't even said anything.
Steve grinned and turned off the ignition. The engine's roar abruptly stopped.
He raised his wristwatch to his mouth. "Hey, FRIDAY?"
"Present," the AI answered.
"Could you call Happy for us? Tell him to bring a pickup truck."
"Sure thing," she answered, and the light on the watch went dark.
Bucky was grinning so wide he thought his face would fall off. "Seriously?"
"Hey, you wanted it, don't you?" Steve's eyes sparkled with mischief.
"Well, yeah, but it could belong to somebody—"
Steve checked his watch and then gripped the handlebars again. "It'll take Happy about ten minutes to get here. That's long enough to knock on a few doors."
Bucky snorted and shook his head in disbelief.
And that's how he came home from brunch one day with one more motorcycle than he'd had before.
Needless to say, it needed some heavy repairs. Nearly every spare moment Bucky had was spent in the garage fixing up his motorcycle.
It became a sort of safe haven, for anyone who wanted to get away from the Avengers' patented chaos inside; Bucky welcomed visitors, long as they stayed quiet and didn't touch anything, and it was an unlikely day that his time in the garage was spent alone.
The newbies were his most frequent visitors. Wanda, Pietro, even Vision. They'd talk about their day, or air their troubles, or simply sit in silence and watch him stain his fingers with oil and grease. He'd offer advice, when he could, or just a listening ear, and because his hands were busy, his mind was freer to talk. They seemed to appreciate it, and he enjoyed it, so it was a win all around.
Of course, he had no shortage of critics. Clint, who dropped in on Saturdays for movie nights, had repaired the tractor on his farm so many times that he seemed to consider himself an expert on all things mechanical, so he'd stand in the garage with Bucky and argue with him for hours about how best to fix the week's newest problem.
It was kinda fun, to be honest. A bit of a bonding activity for the "sniper buddies", as Clint called them. But Bucky would never admit that. He had some pride left, after all.
Tony, for his part, offered to just buy a new motorcycle. He had enough money lying around, after all. Bucky utterly refused. This was his money, his project, and if he'd wanted this to be easy, he wouldn't have plucked a crumbling rust bucket off the side of the road.
In the end, he replaced almost every single part. Practically only the chassis was still intact. It was a tiny, ugly, cobbled-together Frankenstein's monster of a beast, but it was his, and he was proud of it.
One hot day in June, he took it for a spin.
It roared. It sputtered. It choked and snarled and leaked oil a little, but it ran. Bucky took it on a cruise around the loop between the Commons, Combat, and the Quinjet hangar. It was a bumpy ride, with suspension creaking in protest, but it smelled like exhaust smoke and victory.
By the time he got back around, almost the whole team had come outside to see what the heck the noise was.
"It runs!" he bellowed to them over the engine.
"It runs?" Natasha echoed in slight surprise.
"It runs." Steve couldn't look more amazed.
Pietro sped over just as Bucky punted the kickstand. "Skvelý!" he cried. "You've done it!"
"You guys wanna take a ride?" Bucky joked and tried to put his helmet on Wanda.
"No, no!" she squealed through laughter and backed up, waving her hands. "No, thank you!"
"Okay, I just wanna say," Tony said, stepping forward with a swagger, "for the record, I believed you could do it from the very beginning."
Sam, with his arms crossed, didn't seem convinced. "Sure, you did."
"I think I'm gonna name it Steve." Bucky tossed his helmet in his hands and couldn't stop grinning.
Just like that, Steve's shoulders dropped, and his eyes softened. "After me?"
"Sure." Bucky smiled. "S' just like you, when I met'cha." He slapped Steve's elbow. "Tiny, angry, an' chokes when it runs."
Sam was immediately in hysterics. Steve didn't look so amused.
"Buck, I swear to god."
Bucky grinned and didn't take it back.
And that is the story of Steve the Motorcycle.
A/N: Any information about Esopus, Kingston, and the Hudson River Valley in general is just what I can glean from Google Maps and the town/city websites. If any locals happen to be reading this, you can feel free to correct me. The sandwich shop, however, is entirely my own creation!
Theoriginalbookthief07 came up with the idea of Bucky looking for another job long ago. I made a brief mention of it in Bored With Puns, and now it's kinda become a plot point in the Remembered AU. However, I don't think that new occupation would be on a farm. Agriculture comes with its own struggles, ones Bucky isn't accustomed to, and I think this city boy will need something a little more fast-paced to make him feel at home.
As always, my "Sokovian" is Slovak, at the mercy of Google Translate. Skvelý just means "great"!
Reviews are motorcycles! Tbc...
