Chapter 20: Year One

Their first anniversary loomed exactly one week away. Steve had wanted to do something special the weekend prior—the eighth of May being a Monday—but the soccer team scheduled a pre-World Cup exhibition match against Mexico that very weekend, so Bucky wouldn't get home until late Sunday night. He didn't let that discourage him. Instead of imagining something to do with Bucky, Steve redirected his ideas to things he could do for Bucky. The perfect idea struck him like lightning when Bucky complained about the scores in the living room wall for the hundredth time since they moved in. They had no idea how it happened, and had occasionally enjoyed coming up with ridiculous anecdotes to explain away the deep scratches in the drywall, but both wished they could fix it. Unfortunately, neither of them knew enough about home improvement to tackle such a project, and neither did their parents. Steve, however, did know somebody who might be able to at least offer advice, if not help. He texted Harry Barton a picture of the area in question and asked his advice.

"The only way to fix that is with drywall mud," he wrote back almost immediately. "And unless you want the patch to be a slightly different color forever, you have to repaint the whole wall."

That sounded like quite the undertaking, but Steve could think of no better anniversary gift for Bucky. He started doing research during his rare spare time at work, and making up false answers for what he was doing on the computer when he researched at home in order to keep the secret. Once he finalized the plan, including choosing a paint color, he asked Harry for help. Luckily, he both enthusiastically agreed and was available the weekend Bucky was away. On Thursday, Steve stopped at the hardware store on the way home from work and hid his purchases in the shed before helping Bucky run through his packing checklist one last time.

Friday morning, he got up extra early to tell Bucky goodbye before his early flight. Instead of his usual run, he got started moving all the furniture out of the living room and taking everything off the walls. Anything that would fit through the doorway he took to the basement, and anything that wouldn't—namely, the sofa—he left in the hallway outside his bedroom. He put the toolbox they'd been gifted by the Weavers to good use to detach the TV wall mount and the hook for the clock, and he borrowed furniture movers from their neighbor Mr. Hodge for anything too heavy or bulky to carry out. By the time he left for work, the living room was completely bare but for immoveable fixtures like the window trim and the fireplace mantel.

He'd told Harry he'd try to get home from work by four, and he succeeded. When he pulled into the driveway, Harry and Bob Lang awaited him on the front porch. "I didn't know you were bringing a friend," Steve said as he got out of the car.

"I thought you could use an extra pair of hands to help move stuff out of the room," Harry explained. "And Bob wanted to help out."

"I did all the moving this morning."

"Of course you did," Bob muttered. Steve actually felt bad because he seemed disappointed, but he didn't want to make them do any more work than they had to, especially considering they agreed to do this for free. He'd tried to put up an offer based on what he'd seen professional painters charge online, but Harry outright refused to take a cent.

"That means we can get started faster," Harry said.

"Yeah. I'll show you guys what I got." Steve took them to the shed and dug out the paint colors he'd chosen.

"I should've known," Harry sighed knowingly. "You're sure this is what you want? It's pretty bold."

"I'm sure."

"Well, it's your house."

They carried the paint cans inside. Steve stood in the doorway while Harry surveyed the room with a critical eye and a hand on his chin. He told Bob to get the stuff from the car and he returned with a huge duffel bag slung over each shoulder. "The first step is to get a coat of drywall mud in these cracks. That's going to take a while to dry, so after we get it on we should think about the other three walls. You're lucky that there don't appear to be any problem spots except right here."

Steve considered that very lucky indeed. He helped Harry lay down tarps to protect the wood floors while Bob took down the blinds and window treatments and removed the outlet and light switch covers. Once everything was protected, Harry opened a bucket of what looked to Steve like slate gray soft serve ice cream. "Clint actually ate a spoonful of this when he was three. Thought it was ice cream," Harry said.

"I was thinking the exact same thing. What happened?"

"He was mildly constipated for a few days. The stuff's nontoxic, so it wasn't that big a deal. But he didn't eat actual ice cream again for months."

"I can imagine it doesn't taste very good."

"No, it does not."

Harry grabbed a handheld metal trough and a spatula-looking tool from one of the duffel bags and scooped some of the mud into it. Steve watched carefully as he placed a lump of it on the blade and scraped it across the damaged area, filling the gashes with mud and then scraping off the excess. "I'll let you do layer two," he said. Steve had never done this sort of project with his own father, so he looked forward to learning such useful skills from the older man. He imagined Harry probably dreamt about imparting this knowledge to his son one day. Hopefully, teaching it to someone else was more therapeutic than tragic for him. Once Harry finished mudding the wall, he scraped the extra back into the bucket and sealed it up.

"Do you have a dirty sink?" he asked.

"There's one in the basement," Steve told him. "But you might have to climb around the sofa to get to the door." He pointed the way.

"Okay. You have to clean these tools before the mud dries or it'll be impossible to get off."

"Makes sense."

"Bob, show him how to sand the walls while I clean these up."

"Sure thing."

Bob produced a tool which resembled the head of a Swiffer duster and attached it to a pole. "This is a pole sander," he explained. He showed off the head, which was covered in sandpaper. "Paint doesn't stick as well to flat surfaces, so whenever you paint a wall you sand it first." He started sanding the front wall as he explained. "You don't have to press so hard that you sand away the paint that's already there; you just want to rough up the surface enough to help the new coat stick."

"Got it." Steve took the pole from Bob's hands and tried his hand at sanding. He found the most difficult part was getting it started moving around the wall. It tended to get stuck. By the time Harry returned with clean tools, he'd finished the first wall and moved on to the second.

"Excellent," Harry commended. "Since those walls don't need repair and they're a different color, we can probably start painting them while we wait on the drywall mud. I'm going to go ahead and tape up the baseboard so we can cut in on the bottom of the wall."

Out of the corner of his eye, Steve watched Harry and Bob each take a roll of blue painter's tape and rip strips to place on top of the baseboard around the room. Between the two of them, they made short work of the entire room. Steve finished sanding and dug out a ladder from the shed. Bob also grabbed one that he and Harry had brought. Harry grabbed two brushes from the second duffel bag and two empty buckets. He poured the light grey paint into one bucket and told Steve to watch closely as he explained the process of cutting in.

"Most of the paint we'll roll on, but it's impossible for a roller to get into the little nooks and crannies. So, we have to cut in against any details like trim or baseboard and any corners. Unless you want to touch up your trim, you have to be very careful not to get paint on it."

Steve nodded and watched Harry demonstrate the technique. He pressed the brush into the wall until its bristles separated and slowly advanced it towards the edge of the fireplace until some of the bristles touched. Then, he carefully dragged it upwards, leaving a perfectly straight line of paint on the wall adjacent to the trim. He turned the brush sideways and swept the paint flat. "Never let a lump of paint stick around. It'll dry in three dimensions and the wall will have a bump forever. Always swipe it flat. The goal is to have the entire coat of paint all the way around the room be the exact same thickness. Now you try."

He filled another bucket and offered Steve the other brush. Steve took them fearfully. Having never touched a paintbrush to a wall before, he doubted he'd be able to cut in as cleanly as Harry. His hands he knew were steady—they needed to be for sketching—but he still feared he'd mess up the trim. Steve pressed the brush into the wall above where Harry began and did his best to mimic the technique he'd demonstrated. He found it surprisingly easy to get the brush into the sweet spot.

"That looks great," Harry commended. "You're a natural."

"Thanks," Steve said sheepishly. "You'd never know it, looking at my high school art class painting projects. I was always better with a pencil."

"A paintbrush and a pencil aren't all that different."

"I guess you're right."

Between the two of them, they cut in around the fireplace, the ceiling, the baseboard, and all the corners that needed to be gray. It only took them two hours. Steve and Bob switched out every twenty minutes or so. "You're lucky this color is darker than the one beneath it," Harry said. "I think you can get away with a single coat."

"Do a lot of paint jobs need two?" Steve asked.

"Yeah. Sometimes three in certain spots."

If they'd needed multiple coats, Steve didn't think they'd finish in time to surprise Bucky. He needed the accent wall painted and dry by noon on Sunday at the latest so he could add the details he had planned. Rather than worrying about not finishing in time, he chose to simply trust that they would.

"Would you guys like to stay for dinner?" Steve offered. "I know it's a long drive back."

"Thanks for the offer, but I promised Edith I'd be home by nine thirty."

"And I told Cassie I'd tuck her in tonight, and Hope will kill me if I get home much past her bedtime."

Steve knew both of those to be very important things. He thanked them both for their help and saw them out the door. Harry left all his tools behind and told Steve to start off the next morning by cutting in the corners and window trim of the accent wall, the only part they hadn't gotten to today. Steve dozed off that night dreaming about Bucky's reaction when he saw the finished product.

~0~

He awoke bright and early and worked out in the basement, avoiding all the miscellaneous stuff from the living room temporarily stored down there. The only near-casualty was the vase Wanda had gotten them for their wedding, but he saved it. Afterwards, he changed from workout clothes to an old tee he didn't care about and got to work on cutting in the accent wall. When Harry and Bob let themselves in, he'd finished everything except the ceiling.

"It's a mess in here," a young female voice remarked.

"Cassie, don't be rude," Bob chastised.

"What? It's true."

"Home renovation is never clean," Harry told her. Steve climbed down from the ladder he'd been using to reach the top of the trim of the floor-to-ceiling windows and greeted his guests at the front door.

"I hope you don't mind, but Hope left for a conference this morning so Cassie's tagging along."

"No problem at all. Glad to have you, Cassie."

"Is Bucky here? Can I meet him?" she asked.

"Sorry, he's in Mexico for a soccer match."

The disappointment on her face only reminded Steve of how much he missed his husband. Working on this project distracted him just enough that it didn't cripple him. With Harry watching closely over his shoulder, Steve applied the next coat of drywall mud to the scratches in the wall. Cassie spent that time climbing and jumping on the couch in the hallway—with Steve's permission, of course. She asked a dozen questions about Bucky's gold medal which hung in its box on the wall.

Rolling paint onto the three walls didn't take too long, since they were fairly straightforward. "Nothing is more annoying to paint than a bay window," Harry warned. "To get between that trim, you usually need a brush the size of a pencil."

Steve barely even knew what a bay window was, but he made a mental note never to attempt to paint around one.

With the drywall mud still drying, there wasn't anything else they could do for the time being. Harry spent it wandering the house scrutinizing it for more projects. No doubt he saw countless things that could use improvement, but Steve had no intention of doing any larger scale renovation than the project he'd just undertaken, at least not for a long time. They'd lived here barely a year. He did, however, have some strong words to say about the front door.

"This is pathetic," he said. "It doesn't even match the house. Who puts such a light wood in a house with yellow siding?"

"I don't know," Steve admitted.

"You need a new front door." He whipped out a tape measure and took the dimensions of the doorway. "And you're in luck. I ended up salvaging the door from my last reno project instead of replacing it, so I have an extra that will fit in this doorway. Do you want it?"

"Uh…sure." Steve had never really thought about replacing the front door, but Harry seemed intent on it.

"Bob, remind me to put that door in the trunk when we come here tomorrow."

"He won't remember," Cassie said.

"Okay, then you remind me."

"Okay!"

Bob and Cassie made a lunch run at the nearest sub shop while they waited for the second coat of mud to finish drying. They applied the third and decided to hold off on sanding until the next morning to make sure it dried completely. So as not to waste the entire afternoon, Steve returned the wall hangings to the painted surfaces and the furniture to the back half of the room. He left the tarps protecting the floor on the side that still needed to be painted.

~0~

Harry, Bob, and Cassie arrived bright and early on Sunday morning. Cassie took a nap in the second bedroom, none too happy to have been woken so early to get here. Steve had never used a power sander before, and he nearly sanded his own kneecap off when he flicked it on without respecting just how much power a power tool contained. Luckily, he got it under control before it could cause any harm, and Bob vacuumed up all the drywall dust.

Bob filled the clean tray with the paint color of the accent wall and Steve got to work with the roller. Meanwhile, Harry took their front door off its hinges and attached the new one. Steve had to admit it suited the house far better; a dark wood stain with a glass panel set in the middle of the top half. Paint rolling the wall was a magical feeling, to watch the ugly patches of drywall mud and the old color transform into something much richer. Steve couldn't wait for Bucky to see it.

"Oooh, it's so purple," Cassie remarked. She walked into the room just as they finished rolling the last spot which still bore the room's original tan.

"You like it?" Steve asked.

"I love it."

Steve loved it too. And when he saw the front door, he loved that just as much. "It looks amazing," he told Harry. He thanked both Harry and Bob profusely for their help. "And thanks for letting your dad drag you here, and being such a good sport about it," he told Cassie.

"Next time I visit, Bucky had better be here," she warned.

"I'll make sure he is," Steve promised. If he had his way, Bucky would never leave him for this long ever again.

After his guests left, Steve literally watched paint dry. He waited and waited for the purple to darken to its proper color, and then he got to work. At the store, he'd found a bucket of large wooden flowers and dug out every single rose he could find. Yesterday, he'd painted them gold, and today he nailed them to the wall between the crown moulding and the top of the windows. He placed them in a randomly scattered pattern across the strip of wall, and the result was beyond incredible. A glance at the antique clock now returned to its proper place on the wall told him Bucky would be home in two hours. Steve quickly put the room back together, returning the window treatments, the outlet covers, and the sofa while removing the protective tarps (which he reminded himself to return to Harry) and the lingering layer of dust. Then, he waited for Bucky.

~0~

A single, violent knock sounded at the door. Steve knew this to mean Bucky didn't want to put down whatever he was carrying and instead merely kicked the front door. He hoped it didn't damage it. "Did you get us a new front door?" Bucky asked the second Steve opened it.

"Yep."

"It looks great."

"Thanks. There's…um, one other thing I want to show you," Steve said.

"What is it?" Bucky stepped across the threshold and dropped his bags. Steve inclined his head towards the living room. If he hadn't already, Bucky would have dropped his bags in amazement. "You did this?" he asked.

"I had some help from Harry and Bob on the drywall and the paintjob. But the roses were all me."

"It's so beautiful." He sounded like he was about to cry.

"You like it?"

"Like it? I love it! Steve, you…you always listen."

"That's what husbands are for, isn't it?"

"Only the good ones. What I did feels kinda lame in comparison to this."

"Bucky, no. I'm sure it's just as thoughtful."

"It might not be here for another week or two."

"That's okay. I can't wait to see it when it does."

The next weekend, they had the date of their wedding added to the end of one of the ribbons in each of their tattoos. Bucky chose to place his on the gold ribbon, Steve on the purple. The gift from Bucky arrived, not all at once, but in pieces in the mailbox over the course of four days. A few weeks ago, they'd had a conversation about the traditional year-by-year anniversary gifts, the history of which dated back to medieval times, and endlessly fascinated Steve. Bucky took that discussion to heart and utilized the material for the first year: paper. He sent a total of twelve postcards from Mexico, each containing a description of a favorite memory of his from their first year of marriage. Steve tied them all together with ribbon and placed them in the drawer of his bedside table to read anytime he needed to smile.