Chapter Text
“Uh, Steve?”
“Mmhmm.” Steve pulls back an inch or two from Bucky’s face and focuses on him. Bucky’s eyes are so blue. He has big dark pupils, too. Like a Disney cartoon.
“You had gloves on,” Bucky says. “When you caught it, you had gloves on. So how did it get you?”
Steve laughs softly. It is pretty funny. At least right now it is. “Sprayed me right in the face,” he says. He smiles at Bucky. It’s hard to stop smiling. Bucky is so pretty. Steve wants to kiss him again.
“In the face,” Bucky repeats.
“Yeah. In the face.”
“In the mouth?”
“A little, yeah. I guess that’s disgusting, huh?”
“The mouth you’ve been kissing me with.”
“Well, yeah,” Steve says, after a moment of thinking. “Only got the one, Buck.”
Bucky closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath. Steve wonders why Bucky is asking him all these questions instead of kissing him. It must be important. He forces himself to think for a moment. “Oh,” Steve says, and he can feel his eyes go comically wide. “Oh. You have it too now.”
Bucky nods. He lets his head fall back against the pillow. His eyes are still closed. Steve stays very still, watching from his position nestled between Bucky’s legs, leaning over him.
“But you didn’t want it. Are you okay? Is it okay?”
Bucky huffs with laughter and then smiles, still with his eyes closed. “You’re still you,” he says, and that seems both obvious and somehow very profound to Steve. He’s not sure why it’s funny, except that everything is a little bit funny right now. “A little slower on the uptake than normal,” Bucky continues, “and you were halfway to making a pass at Thor when I found you—,”
“He has really nice arms,” Steve interrupts. “I just wanted to touch them. I only want to kiss you.”
“That’s sweet, Stevie. I hope you got a kick out of feeling up Thor—,”
“I did,” Steve says, and the memory makes him smile.
Bucky laughs again, and this time he opens his eyes and looks at Steve. Bucky gets little crinkles around his eyes when he smiles. He’s so beautiful. “Don’t think you would’ve said that sober,” Bucky says. “Anyway, point is, I was worried.”
“About what?”
“You’re still you, but you’re good right down to your bones, Steve. So you get a little more lovey-dovey than normal when you’re high—who cares?”
Steve is concentrating very hard on this conversation. It’s important. Any time Bucky talks about his feelings, it’s important. Steve thinks he knows where Bucky’s headed with this conversation.
“There are things inside me that I don’t ever want to let out,” Bucky says, after a silence.
They’ve had this conversation before, with different words and more silences. Steve always says the same thing. “You’re good, too,” Steve says, because he knows that for sure. He always has.
“You’re so sure of that.”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t ever be sure,” Bucky says, “of anything.”
“Buck,” Steve says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. That’s so sad. Nobody should have to feel like that, especially not Bucky. Bucky deserves every happiness. Steve can hardly come up with the words to describe the life—not life, existence—that Bucky had instead. Steve sits up to look at Bucky, who is staring at something far away. Steve wraps his arms around Bucky. It’s a little difficult, since Bucky is leaning back against the pillows and the headboard, so Steve ends up halfway picking him up and dragging him into a hug.
It feels really, really good to hug Bucky. Steve feels a little guilty about that. This isn’t about him.
Bucky makes a little “oh” noise. It comes out soft and stunned. There’s a moment where neither of them moves. They’re just sitting there in the middle of the bed, Steve kneeling with Bucky pulled halfway into his lap. Then Bucky wraps his arms around Steve’s chest and presses his face to Steve’s shoulder and sighs into Steve with his whole body. They sit like that, holding each other tight and warm and quiet, for as long as Bucky wants. Steve wants it, too, though. There’s nowhere he’d rather be.
“Except you,” Bucky says. “I’m sure about you.”
*
Steve wakes up with Bucky plastered to him, both of them still fully clothed and sprawled out with their feet in the pillows and their heads at the foot of the bed. Bucky is sleeping heavily on top of him. There’s a wet spot on Steve’s t-shirt where Bucky has been drooling on him.
All things considered, it’s not the most undignified position they could have ended up in.
Bucky doesn’t get that much good sleep, so Steve tries to move as little as possible. Still, he works one arm free and then uses it to rub Bucky’s back, which is warm underneath the thin fabric of his t-shirt. Steve can feel some of the raised scars that crisscross Bucky’s skin as he moves his palm in gentle downward strokes. I love you so much, he thinks, and it feels good to let himself think it. To admit, finally, that the loyalty and the friendship and the overwhelming pull that he feels—has always felt—toward Bucky can all be bundled under one name. I love you so much, he thinks again, and the world makes so much more sense, seen this way. Everything is brighter for it.
It hurts more, too. He loves Bucky and Bucky still suffered so much, still suffers sometimes even now. Love can’t fix everything. But nothing can. They might as well love and hurt together instead of apart.
Still asleep, Bucky sighs and rubs against Steve like a cat.
There are other things they can do together, too.
“Bucky,” he says, all altruistic intentions of letting Bucky sleep forgotten.
“Mmph.”
“Wake up,” Steve says. Keeping on hand on Bucky’s back, he works his other hand between their bodies until his fingers graze Bucky’s erection. Bucky makes another sleepy noise, but it’s decidedly less grouchy. Steve is still wearing the sweatpants he put on last night, but Bucky has on a t-shirt and boxers. Steve doesn’t remember when that happened, but the last few hours before falling asleep are a technicolor blur of happiness. There was a lot of hugging, he thinks.
Steve brushes his hand against Bucky’s cock again. “Wake up,” he repeats. Bucky moves his hips against Steve. The head of his cock bumps against Steve’s palm and Bucky sighs with pleasure. His eyes are still closed but Steve is beginning to doubt that he’s asleep.
Steve slides his hand out from between their bodies, inch by slow inch. Bucky’s arm snaps forward. A metal grip encircles Steve’s wrist and keeps his hand from moving any farther.
“I knew you weren’t asleep!”
Bucky’s voice is muffled because he’s still draped over Steve, his lips half-pressed to Steve’s collarbone. “If I’m awake, will you put your hand back where it was?”
“Where was it, again?” Steve says. He’s looking up at the ceiling and it’s still hard not to smile. “I’m getting old. I can’t remember.”
With his grip still firm around Steve’s wrist, Bucky guides Steve’s hand back to his cock. He doesn’t say a word, but Steve can feel him smiling. Steve slips his hand through the slit in Bucky’s boxers and wraps his fingers around Bucky’s hard-on. It’s easy, natural, almost like he’s done it before. It doesn’t feel like something he’s waited his whole life to do. Steve never imagined it like this. Not that he’d been picturing candlelight and rose petals, but ‘waking up in bed together after we both get high off alien fluff’ wasn’t exactly predictable.
If he’s being honest, Steve has spent a lot more time imagining the physical acts in detail—Bucky’s lips, slick and red and parted, or the slight upward curve that his cock has when it’s jutting out from his body—than he has imagining what kind of situation might lead to the acts in question. He might have guessed that it would be sensual, even reverent.
Bucky prods him in the belly with a cool metal fingertip. “You asleep? Get a move on, Rogers.”
There goes that prediction. Steve smiles to himself. You put two dumb punks in bed together, they’re still two dumb punks.
“You got somewhere to be?” Steve wants to move his hand—this is the one part of sex he’s had practice with, and he’s great at it, if he does say so himself—and it’s a struggle to keep it still.
“Matter of fact I do.”
Steve brushes his thumb across the head of Bucky’s erection and discovers a drop of precome there. Fuck, but that goes right to his cock. He’s spent so much time imagining this. But how could he have known how thrilling it would be to know that he was getting Bucky hot, just like Bucky was getting to him? How could he not have known? It’s all so obvious and so astonishing at the same time. Steve sucks in a breath and tries to pretend he’s not desperately turned on.
“And where’s that?” Steve starts with slow strokes, careful strokes, and wonders, for probably the thousandth time, how Bucky likes it. He can’t wait to find out.
“Between your thighs with a couple of fingers in your ass and my mouth on your cock,” Bucky answers.
Steve doesn’t have a clever response to that. “Fuck.”
“It’s ‘Bucky,’ actually—,”
“Shut up,” Steve says, and tries to pretend that it’s sheer coincidence that his hand is slipping up and down Bucky’s dick faster. Bucky laughs and kisses Steve’s collarbone, and then up the rest of his neck. He lifts his hips and then rocks them down again, following the motion of Steve’s hand. He’s still working his way, inch by inch, up Steve’s neck in fierce kisses. He nips at Steve’s earlobe, and Steve wonders how he’s going to keep it together for all of Bucky’s plans. They haven’t even started yet and his dick is aching and hard in his sweatpants. Every time Bucky moves his hips forward, his body brushes against Steve’s in the most tantalizing way.
Bucky laughs and kisses Steve on the mouth, saving them both from the hassle of further conversation. Steve can hardly think—his brain, like a needle in the groove of a record, keeps skipping back over the same thought fragments as Bucky’s tongue slides into his mouth and Bucky’s cock thrusts forward against his hand. Bucky wants to finger him and suck him off. Steve lacks real-world experience but he’s well-educated in pornography. Still, there’s probably no way to be prepared.
But maybe not being prepared is part of the fun. Steve knows for a fact this isn’t the only handjob that Bucky’s ever received, but that’s not stopping him from gasping “fuck, Steve,” against Steve’s lips in between kisses. The kisses get less and less artful as Steve speeds up.
Their eyes meet and there’s a split-second of brilliant blue before Bucky’s lashes sweep back down. He looks almost as blissful as he did last night. Steve has never felt as pleased with himself as he does right now. “Wanted to do this forever,” he manages to get out, and that’s the end of the line for Bucky, who comes in a hot rush all over Steve’s hand and then goes boneless for a second.
“Christ,” Bucky mumbles into Steve’s shoulder. Steve laughs quietly, and then Bucky is sitting up and pulling off his clothes and Steve’s. They end up in a sticky pile on the floor, and then Bucky is kneeling between Steve’s spread thighs, staring appreciatively at his body. Steve never much liked being on stage in front of an audience, but the way Bucky looks at him makes him feel like he could parade naked down Broadway.
“Sometimes I can’t believe you’re real,” Bucky says.
“Not too shabby for a guy in his 90s,” Steve says, glancing down at himself.
“Even when you were skinny,” Bucky replies. “I used to wonder how you did it, how you kept being good even when everything around us was rotten. And then you showed up in Azzano and I really did wonder if I’d made you up. Later, too, I thought you might be—a hallucination, a dream.” Bucky stops for a moment and his gaze slides away from Steve, like he’s ashamed of mentioning it. Then he makes a visible effort to get away from those memories and looks at Steve again. “But it started when you were skinny.” He shakes his head and smiles to himself. “It wasn’t all moral, though. I spent a lot more time wondering what it’d be like if you sat in my lap and kissed me senseless.”
“I could sit in your lap now, if you want.”
“Like a Great Dane that thinks it’s a chihuahua,” Bucky says. “Think you might have gained a few pounds.” He runs a hand over Steve’s thigh.
“A few inches, too.”
“No idea what you mean by that.” Bucky smiles, and it’s wicked. Somehow his gaze doesn’t drift toward Steve’s erection, which is jutting straight toward Steve’s navel and beginning to drip in a desperate bid for attention. Bucky ignores Steve so thoroughly that he’s able to turn around and lean over to root through the drawer of Steve’s nightstand. He finds the bottle of lube and pours some over his fingers—the fingers of his left hand, Steve notes, and wonders why that excites him.
“How did you know that was there?”
“You’re not as discreet as you think,” Bucky says, and Steve smiles sheepishly at the idea that Bucky might have—heard him, at some point over the last year. Not so different from the tiny apartment they shared in Brooklyn, he supposes, except back then they were simply too poor for privacy.
“You never told me you could hear,” Steve says.
Bucky smiles. He kneels between Steve’s legs again, and gently touches the skin behind Steve’s balls. His fingers are cool and slick. The slight pressure isn’t enough. Steve wants more. “Would you have stopped?”
“If you asked, yeah,” Steve says.
“Mm,” Bucky says. His fingertip strokes circles around Steve’s hole. With his right hand, he takes hold of Steve’s cock. Finally, oh God, finally. “So all this time, it never once crossed that brilliant mind of yours that we both have enhanced hearing, and that maybe if you didn’t want me to hear you, you would need to wait until I was out of the apartment.”
“I tried, Buck, I did, but—uh,” Steve pauses and tries to remember the end of his sentence. The words on the tip of his tongue are please yes more, but he’s pretty sure he had something else to say. Bucky’s finger is sliding into him, slick and pleasantly tight. It’s so good it makes him want to squirm. “It’s hard—,”
“I can see that.”
Steve isn’t too far gone to roll his eyes. “I need it a lot,” he manages to admit. He never thought he’d be sharing this particular detail of his life with anyone. “’S the serum, I think. It’s like being a damn teenager. And then you were always around, and that made it worse, and—,”
“I didn’t ask for an apology. Make as much noise as you want.”
And with that, Bucky leans forward and swallows Steve’s cock right down to the root. It feels incredible. Steve doesn’t even realize he’s groaning with pleasure until he feels Bucky smile. “God, yes, Bucky, that’s—,” and Steve doesn’t get any more words out for awhile, but he conveys the feeling.
Bucky sucks him slowly, just fast enough that Steve can’t catch his breath but too slow for him to finish. Steve lifts his hips and twines his fingers in Bucky’s hair and moans and pants and begs wordlessly for more, but Bucky is immovable. Then he glances up at Steve, and Steve barely registers the flash of blue iris and wicked gleam before Bucky slides a second metal finger into his ass. He gasps at the sweet stretch of it. The metal doesn’t feel like he thought it would. It warms up quickly, so it feels smooth and thick inside him. It’s not so different from when Steve tried this by himself, except that Bucky is better at it than him. Bucky curls his fingers, angles them just so, and then glides them in and out in rhythm with his mouth. The pressure is perfect. Steve could cry.
Instead he comes shouting Bucky’s name, his hands still in Bucky’s hair and his hips canted up toward Bucky’s face. The orgasm stuns him, hits him harder than anything he’s had by himself. Bucky sits up, wipes the back of his hand across his lips, and smiles. Then he walks to the bathroom, gloriously naked, and washes his hands. When he comes back and leans over Steve, Steve is still lying on his back seeing stars.
“Hey,” he says to Bucky, who’s hovering over him upside down. Steve can’t help smiling. He should probably sit up, maybe go take a shower, but he’s not interested in moving.
“You sure you’re not still high?”
“I’m sure,” Steve says, since he’s fresh out of clever responses. “Unless it’s you. Maybe if I pet your head, the same thing will happen as happened with the frittata-things?”
“We should find out,” Bucky says. He sits down on the bed and Steve finally hauls himself upright so that he can push his way into Bucky’s lap and kiss him senseless.
*
Natasha comes by later. She knocks very, very loudly. Steve probably should have left the apartment and conferred with his fellow Avengers before three in the afternoon, but JARVIS said everyone else was fine. And Bucky was in his bed for the first time ever. So maybe the two of them had ordered an enormous amount of Chinese takeout for lunch and laid around in their underwear all day. Steve is allowed to take a day off. He’s ready to explain all that to Natasha, too, but all she says is “Oh good, you’re dressed.”
Steve blinks, and she walks past him into the apartment. Bucky sits up from his prone position on the couch and waves lazily at Natasha. She looks at him, but doesn’t wave back. She keeps both her hands exactly where they are, linked behind her back.
“Jane’s saying goodbye to Thor,” Natasha says. “He’s taking the animals back with him.”
That makes sense. It could be dangerous to have those things around. And Jane had seemed very concerned about their environmental impact. Across the room, something like disappointment passes over Bucky’s features. Steve remembers watching Bucky pet one in the storage room. It was rare to see him look so at peace.
Natasha is still standing in their apartment. Steve watches her expectantly, waiting for whatever else it is that she has to say. She looks away for a moment, and then meets his gaze. “You won’t mention anything that you heard yesterday,” she says.
“What—,” Steve starts.
Bucky interrupts: “We didn’t hear anything.”
“Right,” she says. “Of course not.”
“It was so quiet,” Bucky continues, “almost like you were communicating in sign language—,” Bucky stops abruptly at the look Natasha gives him. Natasha stalks over to Bucky without another word. Steve tenses, because it’s never wise to bait Natasha. But she’s not really angry—he hopes—and Steve likes seeing Bucky comfortable enough with someone else to tease them.
Natasha stands next to the back of the couch, glancing down at Bucky and then back toward Steve, who’s still standing by the door. “I’m not in the habit of buying silence,” she says, and then pauses.
Steve makes a face at her. Natasha doesn’t have to terrify him into staying quiet. He’s good at keeping secrets. He did hide a USB drive full of encrypted intelligence in a vending machine, but in his defense, that was one time. Also, he panicked. Shut up.
“But I don’t feel like murdering either of you, so here,” Natasha finishes. She unlinks her hands from behind her back and drops a tawny ball of fluff in the general direction of Bucky’s lap. Bucky catches it effortlessly in his left hand.
“You stole one,” Steve says.
“Out of the high-security cardboard box in Jane’s lab,” Bucky points out.
Natasha shrugs one shoulder. They both look at her for another moment. “I thought it might be nice to have one around,” she finally says in a low voice. Steve can’t say the thought hasn’t crossed his mind. Bucky doesn’t even look up. He’s already petting the one in his hand. His fingers are bare.
“Anyway,” she says, and walks out of the apartment before Steve has a chance to ask what the hell this thing eats, or if it even eats, and where are they going to keep it. Steve looks from the closed door back to Bucky, content on the couch, and then shrugs at no one in particular.
*
Caring for the frithrkottr is easy, as it turns out. They buy way too many supplies and make it—her, Bucky insists, despite a total lack of evidence—a little habitat, and they offer her every kind of food they can think of, but she doesn’t seem to have any interest in eating. They worry a lot at first, even though she doesn’t seem to be suffering.
“Maybe she doesn’t eat in the way we would think of it,” Bruce suggests. They hadn’t been planning to tell anyone about Natasha’s little transgression, but after the frithrkottr refused food for days, Natasha brought Bruce in on the secret to ask for advice. “Think about photosynthesis.”
“But we keep her inside, away from the windows,” Bucky says.
“I’m not suggesting she lives on sunlight,” Bruce says. “But maybe she’s turning something else in her environment into energy.”
“Like what?”
Bruce rubs the back of his neck sheepishly. “It sounds crazy, but… I was thinking she might live on attention? Or contact with other animals somehow. That’s the only thing she really seems to want, right?”
Bucky nods. The frithrkottr only ever squeaks at them if they leave her alone for too long. Bucky has gotten very practiced at touching her just enough to satisfy her without getting himself too stoned. Steve doesn’t have the skill down yet, but everything seems mild compared to getting sprayed in the face by new-mother hormones. And if there have been one or two evenings where Steve has been a little more cuddly than normal, Bucky has not complained.
“Given the rest of our lives, this thing living through contact with other animals doesn’t even register as ‘weird’ any more,” Steve says.
Bruce reaches into her cage and strokes her very carefully. He looks thoughtful for a moment. “Would you mind if I—borrowed her? On occasion?”
“Of course you can,” Steve says.
Bruce smiles. “I’ve been using other methods, but I’m always interested in exploring new options. Strictly for scientific purposes.” He sticks his hand back into the cage.
“Strictly for scientific purposes,” Steve agrees.
“Her name is Ginger,” Bucky informs them. He shoots Bruce a stern look. “Treat her right.”
*
They don’t exactly keep Ginger a secret, but they don’t exactly tell everyone. Natasha knows, so Clint knows, and Bruce knows, and the two of them know, and that’s already way too many people to keep a secret. Steve figures there’s no harm in telling Sam, although to be fair he doesn’t so much tell Sam as put Ginger in Sam’s hands and then burst out laughing when Sam says “whoa.”
“Could be a good thing to have around,” Sam muses, wisely returning Ginger to her cage. “Like a service dog, but instead it’s an alien gerbil that magically makes you calm and happy.”
Steve nods in agreement. There haven’t been any disastrous overdoses since the first day—not counting the couple of times he himself has accidentally gotten a little high from petting Ginger—and even that first day hardly qualifies as a disaster in retrospect. Bucky treats Ginger like a pet. If he’s been feeling the effects of touching her, Steve can’t tell. Steve did notice two orange plastic bottles of pills show up in their shared bathroom a few days ago, but he hasn’t asked any questions. It’s good that Bucky now feels comfortable filling his prescriptions. His choice to use modern medicine from Earth instead of mysterious Asgardian lore is his own business.
*
Steve wakes up feeling like the ice is crushing the air out of him. It’s the first time it’s happened in several weeks. God, it’s so real. He still feels cold. As he listens to his heart race, Steve reflects that he’s spent so much time thinking about Bucky’s mental health in the past two years that he’s barely spared a thought for his own. There is no therapist’s number in his phone. There are no prescriptions with his name on them in the bathroom. Pepper has offered, discreetly, to find him someone, but he has always told her it’s not necessary. There are other people who need help more than him.
He’s grateful he didn’t wake Bucky, at least.
Steve pads out of the bedroom, thinking he’ll go pet Ginger until he can get back to sleep, but she’s gone. Panic spikes in his heart for a second, but there’s a note on her cage: Bogarting the tribble? Not cool. —T
It’s three-thirty in the morning. Steve pulls on a hoodie and talks a walk down to Tony’s workspace.
“I know what three of these words mean,” he says as he walks through the door. All the lights are on. “Unless we count your initial as a word. In that case, I know four.”
“Bogart, as in Humphrey,” Tony responds, without looking up. He’s bent over a workbench, tweaking some kind of very complicated mechanical object. Ginger is settled on his shoulder. She seems happy, insofar as a ball of fluff with no distinguishable features can seem happy. Steve knows who Humphrey Bogart is, but the verb is opaque to him until Tony speaks up again. “He never shares a smoke in any of his movies.”
Tony puts one screwdriver down and picks up another, smaller screwdriver. “Tribble,” he says. “As in ‘The Trouble with.’ Did you not watch Star Trek yet?”
“It’s a long list,” Steve says. “I’m working my way through it.”
“Anyway, don’t worry, I’m just borrowing him,” Tony says. “Couldn’t sleep. Bruce mentioned you had something that might help.”
“Her,” Steve corrects, and then realizes he has absolutely nothing to back that up. Tony glances at him and raises an eyebrow. “Uh. Bucky decided. Named her ‘Ginger.’”
“Barnes decided you could be the adoptive parent, huh?”
“What?”
“Rogers,” Tony replies. “Ginger Rogers.”
“Oh.” That never occurred to Steve, but it does make him smile. Bucky had loved to watch Fred and Ginger dance. And it’s maybe a little joke on his part. That’s good. “I guess so,” Steve says. “So you know we’re—,”
“Putting all your eggs in one basket? Dancing cheek to cheek? Yeah. I know. Pepper knows. Fury knows. Banner knows. Romanoff knows. Thor knows. Wilson knows. Hell, even Barton knows, and that guy still has a phone with a cord and—,”
“Yeah, okay, Tony,” Steve says. “Are you done with Ginger?”
“Why? Barnes having nightmares?” Tony says it far too casually. He looks back at his workbench and fiddles with some tools. Steve knows that Tony, like Bucky, has PTSD. He seems to cope well most of the time, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t need any help ever.
“No,” Steve says slowly, not sure if he’s protecting Bucky’s privacy or his own. “I’m sorry we didn’t tell you about Ginger. Jane thought it was a bad idea to keep them on Earth but then Natasha stole one and left it with us and—we should have told you.”
“Forgiven,” Tony says, not looking up but waving his free hand dismissively in the air. “But I can’t promise not to break into your apartment and steal her again.”
“Or you could ask.”
“And admit that I’m human and vulnerable and sometimes in need of help? Nah. Doesn’t sound like me. Gonna continue breaking in, thanks. Took me almost fifteen full seconds to pick your lock. Who put the security system in this place? Somebody tell that asshole to give me a real challenge next time.”
Steve shifts his weight from one hip to the other. He came down here barefoot and the floor is cold. ‘Human and vulnerable and sometimes in need of help’ sounds about right. “Tony, it’s—me. I’m the one with the nightmares. Tonight, anyway.”
“Is that so,” Tony says. “Welcome to the worst club ever. Come over here and get this fluff ball off me before I hug you and things get weird.”
Steve gratefully plucks Ginger off Tony’s shoulder. Tony hugs him anyway. It’s not that weird.
*
“You were gone,” Bucky says, when Steve has safely returned Ginger to her cage and crawled back into bed. So much for not waking him. Steve hopes he wasn’t worried. The bed is still warm. That means Bucky has been here the whole time.
“Tony borrowed Ginger,” Steve says. “I wanted her back.”
“Are you okay?”
“I am now,” Steve says, curling against Bucky. Bucky fits himself against Steve’s back.
“And Tony?”
“Yeah,” Steve says. “I think he’s okay, too.” A moment passes, and then Steve adds, “Did you name Ginger after Ginger Rogers?”
“Her full name is Ginger Barnes. Don’t get any ideas. She likes me better, anyway.” Bucky kisses the back of Steve’s neck. “But I’m glad she helped you.”
“She does like you,” Steve says, pondering that. Ginger always heads straight for Bucky, given the choice. “Well, there’s no accounting for taste.”
Bucky slides his metal hand under the hem of Steve’s t-shirt and Steve yelps. But after a minute, the metal warms up. Bucky just keeps his arm there, wrapped around Steve, with his hand over Steve’s heart.