Fingertips brush too lightly over his upper arm. His metallic fingers have only just clamped over the offending appendage when he processes that its owner is saying something. "Bucky? Bucky?"
Realization burns through him. He lets go, stumbles back a few paces. Mistake, this was a mistake. What the hell was he thinking?
He's turning to go when..."What have you got there?"
His attention shifts to the package in his hands. Peeking out of the top is the rectangular box, from where the old man seemed to have gotten the song.
"I..." Where to star? Slowly, deliberately, he extends the box in Steve's direction. "Can you play it?"
In return, he receives a surprised smile, nearly a laugh. "Yes, I think so."
Steve steps back, spine pressing against the door. "Why don't you come in, and I'll give it a shot?"
For a moment, he simply stands, frozen - a little voice in his head whispers, "Run. Run. Run," while at the same time, an unaccountable ache in his chest drags him toward the door.
"Probably take me a few minutes to remember how these things work." Steve continues to smile, easy, untroubled - like dead men knocking on his door was purely a matter of routine. "You feel like coming in, it's the second door on the right."
In an instant, Steve's gone, and it's just him, the open door, and all the possibilities that lie between. He closes his eyes, but the same face is staring at him there, too - hopeful, open...unspeakably beautiful.
In the end, it is the ache that wins out. His right foot inches forward. Now the left. Right again. He repeats this deliberately until he reaches yet another doorway he's afraid to cross.
Steve is muttering to himself as he presses various buttons on a strange machine. Upon closer inspection, the whole back wall of the room appears to be full of strange machines, each outfitted with its own array of buttons and what appeared to be tiny, handwritten notes.
It is an unusual enough sight that curiosity wins out over fear. "What...are they?"
Steve turns and smiles again, that damned memory smile that slices through him even as it warms. "These? Presents from Tony Stark. Well, I say presents - really, I think he just wanted to be able to mock me via Post-It note."
He picks up a bright square of paper and reads: "This one makes it stop." A different square: "This one makes it go." A third: "Now this one makes the bass - that's the low, thumpy bits - louder. Think you can handle that, grandpa?"
He laughs. It's off - too loud, too sharp, but it feels strangely good. Judging by the look on Steve's face, it's a toss-up which of them is more surprised.
"So, did you have any particular track in mind?" Steve's hand lingers over the panel of buttons.
He hadn't thought of that. "I...I don't know." He realizes in a flash how little of this he has thought of. Knuckles on the door, Steve opening it with that smile, then...nothing. Getting that far had seemed ambitious enough at the time, but now...
"Here," Steve cuts in. "I'll press play, you tell me if it's right."
He lets out a breath, nods. The first song hits the air. It's nice - good beat, pleasant vocals - but not right. He shakes his head. The second is similar, though a little more syncopated. A second shake.
It's the third that nearly brings him to the floor again. He grasps desperately at the back of the nearest chair, sending the book in his hands to the ground with a clatter. The room fades in and out for a moment, but it's the expression on Steve's face that keeps him where he is.
"Why...why this one?" Face pale, hands shaking, Steve suddenly looks like he's having a little trouble standing himself. "Why this song?"
"It was real, wasn't it?" He can't feel any true surprise. The memory was too vivid, too sensory to be a dream.
"What was real?" Steve is moving slowly, deliberately in his direction. "What do you remember?"
"You and I - we danced to this." He closes his eyes, and he's drifting in the space between the past and the present. "A woman in a red dress was singing it."
"Yes." Steve's voice, strange and far away, permeates the memory, but does not disrupt it.
"Your hands were on my waist, my back, then..." He blinks his eyes open again, the heaviness of it beginning to sink in for the first time.
"Then what?" Steve is only inches away now. His gaze is so intent, like everything in his world is riding on what is said next.
"You kissed me." The room is getting blurry around the edges again, but he has to get this out. He has to finish it. "And I kissed you back."
A tear makes its way slowly down Steve's cheek, but he ignores it. A charged pause. "And then?"
"I don't know." The pain of that adds pounds to the weight pressing on his heart. "You have to tell me." Please, please tell me.
Now it is Steve who closes his eyes. When he finally opens them again, they are shining bright blue. He speaks with quiet devastation. "You fell off a train, Buck. The next day. I thought you were dead ...until two weeks ago."
They fall on him in an instant - all the years lost; the life the fates nearly gave him; the walking death he found instead...the bright spark of that memory, extinguished before it could grow into something more. The weight of them is unimaginable.
His fingers slip from the chair, legs give out, knees buckle beneath him. He feels numb all over, as if the last bonds tethering him to reality have been sliced, and he's floating out into nothingness.
A wail of pain and anguish fills the room, mixing cacophonously with the music still playing in the background. It takes the scratch of pain at the back of his throat and the sudden emptiness in his lungs for him to realize that he is the one producing it.
Fingers clasp his right arm in a near bruising grip. He's dragged back to the present once more, gasping for air, hands clawing instinctively at the arms imprisoning him
"Bucky! It's okay! Bucky!" The voice is panicked, but the arms constant in their grip. It takes him a few more seconds to recognize Steve as the one holding him. The relief allows him a single breath in, but it is quickly expended in another scream.
He can't stop. It feels like every wound of the past seventy years is reopening at once, and the pain is like nothing he can comprehend. His throat burns, his head spins, but still he can't. stop. screaming.
His fingers dig deep into the sleeves of Steve's shirt, but Steve doesn't flinch - just runs warm fingers over his arms, slides them up to his shoulders, kneads them into his upper back.
The minutes pass. Somehow the screams slow and internalize until they've transformed into tremors, rolling outward from the miniature earthquake in his chest. The hands on his back press a little harder, nudge him a little closer, until he finally crumples - just lets himself fall against Steve's chest.
In the growing silence, he can finally hear the murmurs in his ear. "It's all right. I'm here. I'm right here, Bucky." He closes his eyes again, and there they are: echoes of a hundred fleeting moments of Steve whispering those words to him, in back alleys, and living rooms, and abandoned Hydra warehouses. Even more amazing to him at this moment are the hundred other times he now knows he's said them back.
He laughs out of pure, euphoric relief, but it must come out more like a sob, because Steve's brushing a hand through his hair and pressing the other over the metal one Bucky has resting on his shoulder.
Part of him yearns to stay there - to let Steve hold him, soothe him. But an idea is forming in his mind, and it now demands his full attention. He pushes back until he's looking at Steve.
"There's something...something that I need to try." It's crazy; it must be crazy. After everything he's done, the person he's become, to think that Steve could actually...he needs to know.
"Anything, Bucky." He can see in an instant that Steve means it in a way most people could never understand. It gives him hope. It gives him courage. It pushes him forward, presses his lips onto Steve's.
For a moment, there's nothing but awkwardness and panic. Oh God, he's ruined it - the only bright spot in the darkness, and he's snuffed it out. Fear courses through him like poison. His brain is screaming, pull back, apologize, run...
...when hands splay themselves over his shoulder blades; lips part and reposition themselves against his; a fire ignites in his chest, burning away doubt, fear, self-hatred. Soon it all becomes white noise, and there is only Steve.
He's kissing him here and now, knees digging into the hardwood, body still vibrating with aftershocks; he's kissing him in a dimly lit German bar, lightheaded and laughing; he's kissing him in his dreams night after night, as bombs blast and gunshots ring.
So much is still hidden in shadow; his favorite color, his mother's name...the identities of the men and women whose blood HYDRA has forced him to spill. He doesn't even know if a day will come when "Bucky" itself is more than just another mask.
But this right here, he and Steve kissing each other breathless - it feels right. No, more than right...it feels like coming home. So when Steve leans back enough to whisper, "Bucky, I'm with you," he's only a little surprised how instinctively he replies, "Til the end of the line."
Steve smiles blindingly at him, the effect heightened by the tear rolling down his face. "Never thought I'd, uh, hear that again."
But with his mind no longer hanging suspended between eras, the harsh realities of the situation barrel into him with sudden force. "Steve, I..." He pushes back, scrambles to his feet. What the hell was he thinking? "I shouldn't have done that."
"I knew I should have stopped you. It was too fast." Guilt churns in his stomach - Steve looks so angry with himself.
He shakes his head violently, but keeps his gaze purposefully set on the ground. He needs Steve to understand. "It's not that. It's me. I can't..."
"Can't what, Buck?" With a gentleness that sends a shiver through his body, Steve slides a hand over his cheek. "You can tell me."
He closes his eyes. The warmth of Steve's skin against his is making him drift again, back to a place where everything made perfect sense...but damn it, he can't. He forces his eyes open and the truth out. "I can't do this to you."
"Do what?" Steve looks so genuinely confused that he'd laugh if he didn't feel like crying.
"Me." He can't believe how selfish he almost was. "The last thing you need is to spend your life waking up in the middle of the night with these clamped around your neck." He gestures emphatically with his metallic fingers.
He sends Steve one last look, an attempt to lock his face into memory, before striding quickly from the room. His feet have barely hit the living room carpet when a hand is grabbing his shoulder, spinning him around.
"The last thing I need," Steve says with unaccustomed ferocity, "is to spend another damn second of whatever life I've managed to scrape together without you."
It pains him how much he wants to throw his arms around Steve and not let go. But he can't. Shouldn't. Mustn't.
He shakes free of Steve's grip and is just turning to go when he hears, "Tonight, then." Against whatever better judgement he still has, he stops, pivots. "Just stay for tonight."
"Why? So you can martyr yourself on your hero complex? No, thanks." It's harsh, but it's got to be. Steve needs to understand that there's a monster at his door.
"Don't do it for me. Do it for...the Count of Monte Cristo." Steve's smile is strangely pleased. What the hell did he mean by - in a flash, he remembers the book, abandoned in the drifting haze of memory. He's about to lunge toward the other room when Steve withdraws the leatherbound volume from behind his back.
"I've been meaning to finish it for years. Never could manage to find the time." Steve steps forward and extends it in his direction. "Think you can stay long enough to read me a couple chapters?"
He begins to feel like they're having two entirely different conversations. "What would that change?"
Steve shrugs. "Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Me, I hope for the second one. What can I say, I guess I'm still an optimist at heart."
An intense frustration fills him, followed by a strange fondness, almost as if some part of him recognizes this as typical "Steve" behavior. For a reason he cannot name, he wishes desperately for this to be true.
"The only relevant question now is, are you truly going to leave my burning passion for French literature unsated, or are you going to be a gentleman about it, and come in here and remind me how it starts?"
The book hangs heavy between them, suspended in Steve's unflinching grip. He knows he shouldn't, knows that there is a line there just waiting to be crossed.
Yet still his arm extends itself forward to grasp the other end of the volume, still he lets himself be pulled across that line toward the bedroom opposite. It takes him until they're in the doorway to tug at the soft cotton of Steve's shirt.
"I'll hurt you." It comes out as a plea, not a threat.
When Steve turns, the smile is gone. In its place there is only terrifying earnestness. "I lost you once, Bucky. Nothing you could do can me hurt worse than that, and that's a promise."
He has a sneaking suspicion in that moment that he's lost the battle. Yet as Steve leads him toward the bed, all he can manage to feel is relief.
Though Steve relinquishes the book and lies back, he chooses the edge of the bed instead, doing his best to shake off the unexpected realization that it's because he knows what will happen if he moves any closer.
"Chapter One. Marseilles - The Arrival." His voice is still scratchy from disuse, but, he hopes, a little stronger than before. "On the 24th of February, 1815, the look-out at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples..."
It's all he can do to keep his eyes on the book with Steve lying right there. For the first pages, he focuses entirely on the book, not that it's difficult. Certain bits pique his interest, others stir his memory, detaching a cobweb here, blowing away dust there.
It's during the second chapter that he starts sneaking glances at Steve - first only occasionally, soon every other page. To his relief, Steve's eyes are closed, his breathing fairly even, suggesting at least repose, if not actual sleep.
When the chapter concludes on the happy note of birds singing the arrival of spring, he thinks once more about leaving. It would certainly be easier this way - no tortured goodbyes, just one more phantasmic fade into the night.
He's nearly persuaded himself that it's a good idea when something totally unforeseen happens: Steve's expression clouds, his shoulders fold inwards, and his hands begin to shake with surprising intensity.
These are symptoms he knows all too well; it's precisely how he's woken up the few times he can remember having succombed to sleep, tormented by nocturnal visions of his past.
But how can he help? His general coping strategy of lying there, shaking and miserable, until the arrival of the dawn is not one he would wish on Steve. Paralyzed, yet hypnotized, he watches the shaking get worse, until he can no longer stand it.
Though it countermands all his instincts, he wills his hand forward and places it on Steve's shoulder. To his relief, Steve does not flinch away. He inches closer and begins to move his hand down Steve's arm, then over his back, in a purposeful echo of Steve's earlier gesture.
Steve's shoulders relax slightly, but his expression does not lighten. Then it hits him. Without breaking contact, he grabs the book with the other hand and continues to read, privately glad to have arrived at a relatively conflict-free scene.
"Beyond a bare, weather-worn wall, about a hundred paces from the spot where the two friends sat," he reads, willing into his voice a calm that he does not feel, "looking and listening as they drank their wine, was the village of the Catalans."
The words begin to pour out of him, as if they had been waiting for the excuse. He breezes through Chapter Three, then Four, keeping as close an eye on Steve as he can manage while maintaining flow.
Gradually, somewhere around Chapter Five, Steve seems to relax again. Muscle by muscle, his body releases its tension, returning him to what he can only hope is a dreamless sleep.
By this point, he can't stop. The action has picked up, Dantes has been plunged into darkness, and he finds himself filled with a desperate longing to know how it ends. All this is secondary, however, to his (perhaps unfounded) fear that his voice is the only thing keeping Steve out of the same darkness he knows only too well.
So he reads on. The length of the book, even abridged, should perhaps deter him, but he barely gives it a thought. While Steve slumbers, he tells him about Dantes' imprisonment and escape, his rebirth as the Count, his vows of revenge against those who betrayed him so completely.
On some level, it feels uncannily as if the story he is telling is his own, unknown as it is to him. The catharsis is shockingly absolute.
By the time he reaches the last chapter, dawn is creeping unannounced through the window opposite. While the book lies heavy in his hands and his throat aches, his heart is unexpectedly light.
He reads the final string of words a few times, imprinting them to memory before closing the book. With the weight of the night finally pressing in, he allows himself the respite of lying down beside Steve.
By now, his voice is barely more than a whisper as he says, "All human wisdom is summed up in these two words." He savors the anticipation by letting them ring in his mind for a moment, unspoken.
Only when he has locked his fingers through Steve's, eyes finally closed, mind finally at peace, does he set them free, the sincerest of benedictions: "Wait and hope."