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“Come on, Stevie. You know that I promised Maureen that she’d get to take her girlfriend to the Stark Expo. And you know that you want to see it too. So, please, will you come and go on a date with me to the Stark Expo? Pretty please? We can do our next date all on our own again but the girls just don’t get to go out like us without us escorting them,” Bucky pleaded with his puppy eyes in full effect.
Steve managed to resist another few seconds, before finally giving in, after having Bucky bother him about it for almost the entire time since his friend had come back from work. Steve himself was once again unemployed, his bosses never quite saw things the same way as him and he ended up fired, plus with all of his medical conditions and him being rather small and scrawny many refused to even hire him in the first place.
“Ugh, fine. But next time I get to decide where we go and pay for our date and you won’t complain about it even once. Not once! You hear me, Bucky?” Bucky rolled his eyes but nodded and when Stevie still looked expectantly at him, confirmed verbally.
“Yes. I hear you, punk. You decide where we go, you pay for our date and I won’t complain about it. I promise.”
“Thank you. Then let’s go. We don’t want to be late to pick up out ‘dates’, do we?” Stevie grinned widely and with his shoes already on his feet, grabbed his jacket and hurried for the door. Bucky couldn’t help but chuckle at his idiot-boyfriend’s antics.
Turns out that they had to wait for that next date a lot longer than expected, and not only that but they both were basically entirely different men. They still loved each other, but they had had to rebuild that relationship and trust between them and James, as he preferred nowadays, had to first learn to trust himself too.
But here they were, two years after Steve had managed to break the Winter Soldier’s mind control. They were sitting on a couch, snuggled up and watching another movie that Tony had insisted that Steve, and James by extension as well, just had to watch.
“You know, Stevie, you do still owe me a date where you ‘decide where we go and pay for our date’ and I insist that we have it soon too. I can’t believe that we’ve been working on our relationship for basically two years and you still haven’t taken me out.” James bumped his shoulder lightly into Steve’s side and then grinned up at his partner.
They had been sharing a bed again for about three months now and they held hands and cuddled when sitting on the couch or on their bed but they hadn’t even kissed since back in the forties, much less done anything else.
When Steve turned to him, he looked confused for a moment but then he seemed to remember that evening before everything changed and began to laugh.
“You did promise that we’d get to that. And we haven’t actually gone on any date since the Stark Expo. Oh, and speaking of the Stark Expo, we definitely have to bug Tony about the flying car his father promised us back then. Knowing Tony, he’d probably manage to pull it off too but I just want to see him struggle for just a moment. Please?”
“You’re losing the point, punk. We will definitely bug Tony about the flying car, but I want to know the date. Where are we going? Can we go now? I really am in the mood for a date with you.”
Steve was a bit overwhelmed with the openness and eagerness James displayed, he’d still been quite reserved up until now, even though they’d both been working with therapists, and had talked a lot about everything. But James had always held parts of himself back. Now, he seemed like almost exactly the Bucky from when they had been living together in their tiny apartment after Steve’s mother had died. Steve could feel his eyes tearing up and quickly looked away, pretending to be thinking about their date options.
“I think a classic date of a great dinner and then watching a show after sounds great for a second first date. Plus, I think I can get that organized by this evening. You’ll have to put on one of the suits that Tony got you and then we’ll go and eat at one of those dumb fancy restaurants that always seem to serve way too little food, then we go see something on Broadway, and after we go to a diner and actually have fun because 1am diner experiences are apparently the best and we’ll already be hungry again anyways. Any complaints? Oh wait, you’re not allowed.”
“Sounds great, Stevie. Although, if I could offer constructive criticism, we could also go to an art museum and then have great food at a diner, which is more our speed anyway and you probably haven’t been to any museums here anyway?”
“Why do you always have date ideas that are so much better than mine? Fine. I decide that we go to all the art museums in a five mile radius and then go and find a tiny diner where no one will bother us and where we can have great food we both actually enjoy.”
“My ideas are so much better because I actually think about what we both like, not about what we’re supposed to be doing. But you’ll get there. With practice. You’ll be taking me out a lot after this, I imagine. After all, I’m a fancy lady and don’t just put out on the first date. I’ll need at least three, if not five.”
Before he was even finished, James was giggling and running away because Steve had turned around to look for a pillow to hit him with.
“You’ll have to catch me first to hit me with one of these, Stevie. And let’s be honest, your aim’s shit,” James shouted over his shoulder, childishly pointing his tongue at Steve and was promptly smacked squarely into the face with a pillow.
“What was that about shit aim,” was Stevie’s laughing reply, already stocking up with the rest of the couch’s pillows.