Chapter Text
He’s at the shitty Marine Corps pub with Sam again on the first Friday of March. He likes the place better since Sam confirmed that it’s Steve and Maria’s favorite haunt—but not a lot better. He gets the convenience of location to the base but…the ambience is sadly deficient. They could all do better with like, four more blocks of walking. Marines.
Sam is trying to cajole him out of his funk, which is an agreement they have both made wordlessly over the past couple of months. One of them will try to cheer up the other whenever he has gotten a little too down. Unless they’re both down—then they just drink.
“Come on bro, what if I bought us a round of tequila shots?”
That gets a laugh from Bucky.
“I’m serious!” Sam says, motioning as if he’s about to get up for the bar, “I’ll take the hit, man if that’s what it takes.”
“Nah, I’ve seen the shit you drink. If you give me a shot of Jose Cuervo I swear to god I will immediately puke it back on your shoes.”
Sam rolls his eyes, hands up in defeat. “What do I tell you. High maintenance.” He looks down at his feet. “These are my good shoes too.”
Bucky looks at them and scrunches his face. “Are they though?”
“What!” demands Sam, affronted. “These are cool shoes man!”
“Look, I know you’re black so you have a little extra spidey sense for what’s cool as your birthright—”
“—damn straight I do—”
“But you’re still straight, man.”
“So?”
“So you could be doing more on the shoe front.”
“You know what Mr. Teen Southern California, I cannot be having this conversation with you right now. Time for you to drink or get ready to fight me.”
“Alright fine, I will do one tequila shot with you that is El Jimador or better.”
“Coming right up princess.”
Bucky flips him off with a grin as he slides out and heads to the bar, shaking his head.
Then he sighs. The second Sam isn’t there actively taking his mind off things he immediately comes back to that sore, anxious center.
It’s like the moment the calendar flipped from February 28 to March 1 he hasn’t been able to sit still. He hasn’t even had confirmation from Steve that he’s for sure coming home this month—for all he knows this current extra-long silence means his departure is going to be delayed. But his heart still skips a beat every time he writes a date with a three in front of it.
He glances over to the bar, keeping an eye on Sam. Usually the guy doesn’t have too hard a time getting in there for a drink order, but not everybody has Bucky’s preternatural gifts with wooing bartenders, so he likes to make sure his help isn’t needed.
But Sam isn’t at the bar. Bucky frowns, scanning again. No, he’s not tucked in anywhere along the polished length of it. Bucky looks for the obnoxious red t-shirt Sam is wearing, finally catching sight of him at the far end of the place.
He’s got his phone in one hand, the other covering his free ear to hear the person on the other end better over the hum of the pub.
The look on his face freezes every nerve ending in Bucky’s body.
It’s not that Sam looks upset. It’s the opposite actually—his face is such an absence of anything that it can only be the result of needing not to feel one single shred of emotion in the moment.
Bucky doesn’t know how he knows—he just knows. Something’s happened to Captain Hill.
He doesn’t have control of his limbs, but somehow they are unfolding themselves and sliding out of the booth. There’s a droning in his ears drowning out whatever noise the bar is making. His eyes are on Sam. Sam’s set expression and jerky nodding. He crosses the bar without recognizing his feet are doing it.
Sam is hanging up the phone as Bucky reaches him, looking at the dark screen until Bucky reaches out to touch his shoulder.
He spins, eyes not looking quite exactly at Bucky but focusing somewhere distant.
“She’s not—she’s gonna be okay—they said—”
“Come on,” Bucky says, pulling him toward the back door. They’re starting to get a few looks from the around bar—and even though probably the crowd in here would get it better than most it doesn’t feel like the place to do this.
He pulls Sam, unseeing, out into the narrow alley that runs behind the bar.
“Okay, okay, try again—what happened? She’s okay?”
Sam nods on the last word, closing his eyes, and Bucky reaches out to grip his arm. Sam leans his forehead on Bucky’s shoulder and releases a shaky breath.
“They said—she’s in Germany. At a hospital. She’s going to be okay, they said.” He repeats the last part like he’s trying to reassure Bucky of the fact, though Bucky knows it’s for himself to hear.
“Did they tell you what happened?”
“They—” Sam’s voice goes hoarse over the word, and he clears his throat, trying again. “They were the second car in a convoy. First one hit an IED in the road—her driver swerved to try to avoid it but then they rolled.”
Sam recites it in a hollow voice, the same impersonal tone Bucky imagines it was given to him in over the phone.
“Broke her leg, a couple ribs…took some shrapnel.” He pauses, looking at Sam, confused. “I guess that happened after the windows were broken out from the roll? Maybe there was another…thing. That went off. I don’t know. I didn’t ask…I should’ve asked…”
“Hey man, hey,” Bucky says, pulling Sam into a tight hug, “it’s okay you can ask more next time they call. She’s okay, that’s the main thing. She’s okay, and look, they’ll probably send her home soon right?”
“It happened four days ago,” Sam says, stricken. “She’s been hurt, in the hospital, who knows what else for four days and I had no idea.”
The words send a chill through Bucky as he thinks of Steve’s last email. Thirteen days ago.
He pushes the thought away as forcefully as he can. It’s not about him right now, Sam needs him to be the functioning one. It’s their agreement.
“No, shhh,” he says to Sam, with as much confidence as he can muster, “hey, if they’d called you four days ago and told you this had happened but they didn’t know anything yet, it would’ve been torture. You’d have been a wreck just waiting to get information—and you know how bad they are about that. It would’ve been so much worse than getting this call now and knowing she’s safe, she’s in the hospital getting care, that she’s going to be fine.”
“Yeah,” Sam says shakily, though he sounds unconvinced. Bucky can still hear the guilt under the word. “She’s in surgery for her leg and then…then I think it’s just getting her so he can travel.”
“Dude I bet the next call you get will be from her then! Once she’s out of sedation you know she’s going to talk someone into giving her a phone whether they want to or not. Especially once she realizes they’ve called you already.”
“Yeah…yeah. Maybe. I—I hope so.” He pulls out of Bucky’s grip, and rubs his hands over his face roughly.
“What do you need right now?” Bucky asks, peering at him, hands still on his shoulders. It’s as much to steady himself as it is to steady Sam. “You wanna come stay with me and Clint for a day or two? Just so you aren’t on your own?”
Sam shakes his head, heaving a deep breath and looking a little more focused when he looks at Bucky. “Nah man I—thanks. But I should go home. I…I should call Maria’s sister and her dad, make sure they know. I’m not…not sure if they’ll have gotten a call. She changed her emergency contact to me on all the stuff before she left but...they should hear.”
“Okay. For sure. But hey?” He looks at Sam’s face again, the lost expression. “At least let me drive you home okay?”
He makes Sam a large mug of tea and makes sure he manages to get his shoes off before leaving him to make his phone calls. He looks very small as Bucky leaves him, with a blanket around his shoulders, less crossed under him on one end of the couch.
She’s fine, she’s fine, she’s fine, Bucky repeats to himself like an enchantment as he drives home. Stop freaking out because she’s going to be okay. His knuckles are white on the steering wheel.
He’s deeply grateful when he gets home and finds Clint out. He needs to get himself together before he sees anyone else, and the brittle restraint he exercised over himself in order to take care of Sam is fracturing in a million places. Bucky feels like he might shake himself apart.
Baby seems to perceive his mood, and doesn’t rush him with the enthusiasm or force she normally shows when he returns from being out. Instead she pads over to where he stands, just inside the doorway, and sits on his foot. She leans her big body against his leg and looks up at him with sympathetic brown eyes.
He runs his hands through his hair several times—trying to think just enough past the cracking dam wall of his emotions to move himself past the entry way.
He can’t. He can’t just go back to his bedroom and sit here, alone with this.
Bucky turns on his heel, snatching Baby’s leash down from its hook by the door.
“Come on Baby. I’m taking you home.”
Bucky lets them into Steve’s darkened apartment, feeling like they’re sneaking in. In fact he’s been over two other times, using the key Steve left, to pick up a couple of forgotten items of Baby’s.
Both times he’d left as quickly as he could, not wanting to spend time with Steve’s things all looking so lonesome and abandoned (or feeling like one of them).
This time he lets Baby off the leash—she moves immediately to jump onto the couch, curling up with a sigh like she’s glad to finally be back—and heads straight back toward Steve’s bedroom.
He rummages blindly through the drawers of Steve’s bureau, everything folded and left in perfect military order, yanking out a sweater and holding it to his face.
He breathes in deeply, shuddering breaths, trying to let himself be comforted by the scent that lingers in the weave—of Steve’s laundry detergent, and a bit of evergreen from the sachets Steve keeps in his drawers like an eighty year old man to keep moths away…and something underneath that’s just a barely there hint of what Bucky thinks is just the smell of Steve’s skin.
Bucky balls up the sweater in his hands, taking it with him over to Steve’s bed where he yanks the comforter free from Steve’s sharply tucked boot-camp corners. He crawls in and curls up under the blanket, sweater under his cheek, and lets himself shake.
There aren’t any tears. He hasn’t even been able to think enough about what he’s feeling to be upset. It’s just his body being wracked with an instinctive reaction to the fear and tension he’s been holding the last hour and a half bleeding out of him.
He’s been afraid before. He’s afraid every single day that he doesn’t get an email from Steve. But this is different. Maria, lying in the hospital recovering from that is different.
It happened four days ago, Sam had said. Four days before they called him.
And Bucky’s throat does close up now, with the dawning realization that if something like that happened to Steve, there would be no call. Not to him. He’s not Steve’s emergency contact, he’s not family, he’s just…he’s just the dogsitter. Steve’s mom probably wouldn’t even think to get in touch with him. And maybe before it would have been Maria, Maria who would have called Sam and broken the news, asked him to make sure it got to Bucky.
But now he knows that if it happens—fuck, if it has already happened—he’ll find out later. Behind family and friends and whoever else. He’ll be an afterthought. And until then all he can do is wait and hope that moment doesn’t come—hasn’t already come.
That he isn’t right this moment shuffling through the lingering days of waiting for someone to realize he should know that Steve…Steve isn’t coming back. That his life as he has been dreaming it for the past two months isn’t already over before it’s begun.
He still doesn’t cry. For all the nights that he’s shed tears into his pillow, missing Steve, this moment seems too big for that. Instead he can only gasp weakly against Steve’s pillow, like a fish left suffocating on the pier.
He doesn’t notice he’s drifted asleep until he wakes up. Baby has joined him at some point during the night, curled up back to back with him on Steve’s pillow. Bucky gropes for his phone to check his missed calls and email—nothing.
Eventually he drifts back to sleep.
Baby wakes him in the morning, asking politely to go out. He realizes it’s actually pretty late—she must have held her bladder and let him sleep for as long as she possibly could. He walks her around the block, ignoring the one or two looks of concern he gets. He’s barefoot and haggard and he probably looks terrifying.
Then they go back and curl up again in Steve’s bed. Even Baby is subdued and seems happy just to sit quietly near Bucky. Bucky sends an email to a client cancelling their appointment for the afternoon, saying he’s sick.
Bucky feels sick, too. He feels raw and scraped out. Like all the emotion from the night before was a tumor which has now been excised—badly—and the margins weren’t right, and he can still feel the edges of it there, just waiting to grow back in.
And he knows he can’t stay here like this forever, curled in a tight ball with his face buried. But he’s going to think about that tomorrow. Tomorrow he’ll figure out how to just keep living like nothing is different because maybe nothing is. But not today.
***
Bucky manages to find two cans of spaghetti-o’s in Steve’s pantry, which he and Baby eat for lunch. He apologizes to her for not thinking about bringing her food. She doesn’t seem to mind.
Then they retreat again to the cool darkness of Steve’s room, leaving the heavy curtains closed. It leaves the room in a constant sort of grey twilight, without any real sense of how time is passing. Bucky drifts again between being not-quite-asleep where he imagines terrible scenes of war and not-quite-awake where he dreams them instead.
Baby stays mostly by his side, snoring heavily and seeming to decide that what he needs at the moment is full body contact.
Which is why he’s startled from a period of –not-quite-awakeness by her barking in the front of the apartment. He hadn’t noticed that she’d left.
He frowns as her barking intensifies into near frenzy, running a hand through his hair as he slips out of bed. Maybe the mailman is at the door? She usually gets pretty excited about that.
There’s the sound of movement though on the other side of the door, he notes as he creeps down the hallway. He doesn’t know why he’s trying again to be so quiet—it really doesn’t matter if the fedex guy or whatever knows someone is here.
Baby’s barking has reached a frantic height, morphing into a pitiful little howl that he’s never heard her make.
Which is when he hears the scrape of a key being inserted in the lock.
Bucky feels for a moment like he’s been completely paralyzed. His blood is humming under his skin and roaring in his ears. The lock is turning.
He takes a half step, half stumble backwards so that he can lean against the wall for support. As the handle turns, he closes his eyes tight.
He doesn’t know who else would possibly have this key. Most likely there’s some good explanation for why a neighbor or a friend or Sam is stopping by to check in. But for a moment, Bucky closes his eyes, and lets himself believe that when he opens them it will be the one person he wants to see standing there. His heart feels ready to break his ribs.
The door swings open and Baby’s howl turns into yips of excitement, and he can’t stand here huddled against the all with his eyes shut and so Bucky opens them.
And he knows he must still be dreaming, because the eyes that meet his are unmistakably wide and sea-blue.
Bucky stares, wanting to drink in Steve’s face before he wakes up—because he knows he’s going to wake up any minute—only…he’s not. And the longer he looks at Steve and Steve looks back at him across the dim living room, the more he thinks he might not be dreaming.
Baby is falling to pieces, jumping and dancing in front of Steve, and Steve finally takes pity on her to kneel down and allow her to shower him with kisses—all the while not taking his eyes off Bucky. His mouth is slightly open and he looks as surprised and off-balance as Bucky feels.
And Bucky comes to his senses, crosses the room in four strides, and falls to his knees to throw himself into Steve’s arms.
Steve twists to wrap Bucky up in them, holding onto him so tight he can feel his ribs shifting to accommodate for it. Baby gambols around them happily.
After several long moments, Steve releases his grip on Bucky, pulling away to look at him with an expression like awe.
Steve’s eyes rove over his face, and Bucky’s are doing the same. Steve’s hair has grown a little longer, and Bucky thinks it hasn’t been cut since he left. He has a beard too, and Bucky cups his hand against Steve’s cheek, memorizing the feel of it against his palm. Steve runs his hands over Bucky’s head and shoulders and arms and chest, lightly, barely touching him, as if Bucky is made of glass or vapor and the wrong touch might cause him to vanish.
“You’re here,” Steve says, just above a whisper.
Bucky grates out a laugh, flinging his arms again around Steve’s neck.
“You’re here!” he says. “How are you here? Am I dreaming?”
But he knows he’s not dreaming. He would never think to dream Steve with a beard, or the way Steve’s uniform hangs a little looser on his frame than it did when he left, or the slight dusty scent of desert sand that rises from it when Bucky presses his nose to Steve’s shoulder.
Steve nuzzles the side of Bucky’s cheek, and his beard tickles, though not in a bad way.
“I’m sorry—I got the okay to come back a couple of days ago and I just—I thought I’d just do it. Come back and surprise you. I didn’t want to be smart and make arrangements or anything. But then I heard about what happened with Maria while I was en route and I realized you must’ve—that Sam would’ve just heard too.”
He buries his face in Bucky’s neck so the next words are muffled. “I’m so sorry. I should have called you the second I finished that last mission I just—I didn’t want to call. I wanted to see your face.”
Bucky is nodding against his shoulder, but his chin has begun to quiver and there’s a shake in his voice when he says,
“I couldn’t go home after Sam—I realized I wouldn’t even—nobody would even call me if—”
His voice breaks on the last word and he turns his face away, trying to swipe quickly at the tears which have made a sudden and vengeful reappearance. Steve puts a hand on his cheek, turning his face back to him. He leans in and presses a light kiss across one wet cheek, then the other, then each of Bucky’s eyelids, and Bucky sighs so heavily, sinking against Steve, that he thinks his lungs might have given up.
“I know,” Steve is saying, quietly, “I know and I’m so sorry.”
Bucky shakes his head and snatches up both of Steve’s hands into his, holding them to his chest.
“No,” he says, fiercely, eyes intent on Steve’s. “Don’t be sorry. Be here. Stay with me. Let me be your person—”
Steve cuts him off with a rough kiss, and Bucky’s fingers come up to twine through Steve’s newly long hair.
“Yes—always, always.”
Steve whispers the words like a prayer against Bucky’s lips.