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“6:00.”
“Sam, that’s right behind me, you can just say it’s right behind me.”
“But where’s the fun in that? It’s two more syllables.”
“You’re so annoying,” Steve rolls his eyes and puts his hand on Bucky’s shoulder to direct the two of them around the corner.
Why is it that Toys-R-Us’s only exist in shopping malls? And why do they look vaguely terrifying? It’s a labyrinth of two-for-one deals and plastic dolls.
Bucky goes still when they turn the corner, and grabs Steve’s arm. “Steve.”
“What?”
“What?” Sam says over the comms. Bucky scowls.
“Not you, Sam,” He puts his arm over Steve and pulls them back the direction they just came. “Steve, hostiles down at H&M.”
“How many?” Steve recovers quickly and puts his arm around Bucky’s shoulder, forcing a laugh and keeping his face directed away when two men in conspicuous black suits walk past them towards the escalator.
“Three. Hidden guns and Kevlar,” Bucky rounds the corner again, and Steve carefully swivels his head around for interlopers. His arm is still around Bucky’s shoulders, the bulk of his padded jacket making those zip-zip sounds as the material rubs against Bucky’s overcoat.
“That can’t be true, they’re not showing up on Redwing.”
“Then use your eyeballs and not the bird robot,” Bucky snaps. “Your video is being fed back to you, go fix it.”
“Bucky, chill out,” Steve says placatingly. Bucky scowls but doesn’t argue. “The exit is through Macy’s, we have time to—“
“No, we don’t,” Bucky snarls. “This is the US government. They have access to everything. Once we reach the exit…we won’t. They’ll have people posted every ten feet, Ross isn’t sparing any expense for us—you know that.”
“That’s not even mentioning all the shit Stark probably pulled.” Sam adds unhelpfully.
Steve is silent for the next minute they walk through the mall. His expression is relaxed to the casual glance, but his eyes are flashing through doors and sweeping up and down the bodies of people who pass them.
“Steve?” Bucky asks carefully.
“Hard right,” He says in a completely different, lighter tone than the words implied. Bucky follows him into the Macy’s, his mind racing between aisles and stinky perfume testers, his expression alone causing a woman with a pile of advertisement papers in her hands to shrink back and avoid them.
“Steve,” Bucky warns. He can see two men in the suit section who practically look like the mannequins, but they’re speaking in hushed, guttural tones, eyes tracking the room. One has his hand in his pocket. Illusion of casual: causation of casualty. Bucky remembers being taught that.
“Let’s go get a drink,” Steve says abruptly, and they take a sharp left into the Macy’s Starbucks. He keeps his hand around Bucky’s waist as they stand in line. Good, because Bucky thinks he might run for it, damning the casualties, if he isn’t held back.
“Hi, yes?” Steve says in a light tone to the barista, who looks like she grew up in Southern California and watched a lot of Hazbin Hotel. Her hair is dyed a shitty, faded purple. “I’ll have peppermint tea. And can you keep it in a couple of cups so it stays really hot? I’d like it to last a while.”
Good, perhaps Bucky can throw it in someone’s face and scald their eyeballs if the situation so desires.
“What do you want?” Steve asks him.
Bucky almost gives Steve a double take—somewhere along the way, he had pinched a pair of tortoiseshell glasses and an easy smile. His hand around Bucky’s waist projects a facsimile of either very close friendship or a romantic situation to the other people in the line. Bucky wouldn’t generally mind, if the part of his body that is in contact with Steve didn’t feel like it’s constantly tingling. But it is. It’s tingling. Bucky minds.
“Just an Earl Grey,” He answers, forcing a flirty smile in Steve’s direction. He’s glad that his hair is pulled back under a baseball cap. He doesn’t think the gay lover illusion would work so well if he looked like a homeless man.
But is it an illusion?
Stop. Bad thought. Don’t go there. Steve pays and uses the name James, which Bucky sends him a look for. They go and wait by the end of the table, and Bucky offers Steve a little nudge that convinces him to pull his hand back, to Bucky’s relief.
“Any better exits?” Steve says in a low murmur. He’s still too close to Bucky to be straight.
Bucky shakes his head slightly. “I would say the roof, but it's likely there are guards posted at each escalator.”
“True,” Sam adds. “Where are you guys?”
Steve pulls out his phone, pretends to open a call, and puts the phone to his ear over the comlink instead. “Western end of Macy’s. Starbucks. I got a couple drinks to throw them off.”
“How the hell is that gonna throw them off?”
“Misdirection,” Bucky answers for him. “They won’t expect someone trying to run to be carrying an iced mocha latte.” He puts his hand on the small of Steve’s back when a woman across the room eyes them surreptitiously, and Steve elicits a little shiver.
“Yeah, cause you’ll spill shit everywhere!” Sam complains, missing the point entirely.
“If it goes right, we won’t have to run,” Steve reassured him. “We can walk out of here like we just went Christmas shopping.”
“Did you actually order an iced mocha latte?”
Steve rolls his eyes. Bucky is disappointed that Sam can’t see it.
“Speaking of walking…” Bucky side-eyes another three men who come into the shop with their eyes pasted around the room. “Grab the drinks,” He commands, and keeps his hand on Steve’s back as they make their way across the room.
Steve deftly takes the drinks and hands one to Bucky. He takes a swig as they pass the people walking in, so he doesn't get noticed. The tortoiseshell glasses fog up.
“Sam, where are you?” Bucky takes the phone and extricates his hand from Steve’s back so he can hold it. Steve takes both drinks and they exchange a tight, fake smile with a woman who rolled a cart past them.
“Just chilling outside. Getting some work done on my laptop. Watching the game. Aiding in the smuggling of two fugitives across Europe.”
“Sam…”
Bucky glances at the woman again and looks quickly forward. Her eyes follow them. No, they don’t. Bucky is just being paranoid. Right.
Right?
“I can see you on the security cameras. You need to go down the escalator.”
Steve shakes his head before Sam is done talking, and switches to a verbal refusal once he remembers they’re on a call. “No, we can’t do that.”
“Why not?!” Sam demands. “It’s the quickest way!”
“Exactly, they’ll be expecting it.” Steve puts his hand amiably on Bucky’s shoulder and leads them both into a perfume stand, where they stand and absently pretend to coo over masculine-sounding men’s hair products. “We can’t go down that way, it’s the center of the mall. They’ll notice immediately.”
Steve’s elbow interlocks with Bucky’s. Bucky almost gives it a glance, but then sees the man running the perfume stand eyeing them, so he makes himself relax into it, putting the fake Sam call closer to his ear.
“There’s a flight of emergency stairs in Macy’s,” Bucky supplies. “Listen, all we need to do is get downstairs.”
“Too sneaky. They’ll catch that too. And if you pull on the door, it makes an alarm.”
Steve goes still for a second, and then rounds on Bucky with wide eyes, who gives him a double take. “I know!”
“What?” Bucky asks.
“What?” Sam asks.
Instead of explaining, Steve waves awkwardly to the man running the stand, and puts his hand back around Bucky’s waist to lead the two of them into a Waterstones.
Bucky, flustered and trying not to show it, takes this in stride and uses a long drink from his boiling tea to hide his face from the man in black clothing perusing the selection of Classics.
“There’s another flight of stairs at the back of this store. I remember buying a book here back in June.” Steve’s hand inches downward just slightly. Bucky’s face heats up. “If we’re lucky, we could use it to get down to where Sam will be waiting.”
“When have we ever been lucky?” Bucky mutters. Steve huffs out a laugh, which makes Bucky blink.
“Steve,” Sam says over the comlink.
“Sharon is supposed to have the shield and Sam’s wings at Leipzig-Halle airport in about three hours.” Steve continues, not having heard. “If we get out in the next ten minutes we’ll have time to catch a—“
“Steve!” Sam repeats, and Steve falters. Bucky panics slightly—he can see two men in identical black jackets walking down the opposite direction of the store, Steve can’t afford to falter—and he pinches Steve in the side.
Steve stifles a yelp, but it wakes him up enough to catch sight of the two men making their way down the hall. He reaches back and blindly gropes until he finds Bucky’s arm, then pulls them both into the side aisle. Great, now they’re surrounded by Queer YA novels. How wonderful. Bucky is going to die surrounded by Simon Snow mangas and reprints of Divergent in fancy colors.
“Steve,” Bucky says warily, as Sam recounts statistics in their ears.
“There’s two more coming in from your other side. You’re cornered. If you have some secret power, you better use it now, or you’re fucked.”
“I know.” Steve answers, his eyes dashing around the area down the hall.
“Two meters from you,” Sam adds. Bucky sends Steve a demanding look.
“I’ll punch my way out. Or I can—“ He tries to answer, but Steve sends him a look full of so much fire the world could quite possibly melt from the intensity.
“No, Buck,” Steve hisses sharply. “If the next word out of your mouth suggests that we leave you behind, absolutely not.”
“One meter.”
Bucky scowls, and he is well aware of their proximity as he tries to peel around the wall. All he can see are black suits, the imaginary spots in his peripherals that feel like guns being pulled out of pockets. “Then what do you expect me to do?! We’re cornered—“
There’s a moment of strange realization that flickers in Steve’s eyes. “Trust me,” He says, and before Bucky can react, he flips him around so Bucky is pressed against the wall, and kisses him fully on the mouth.
Bucky lets out a muffled sound of protest, his brain short-circuiting. He can feel the warm strength of Steve’s hands wrapped securely, demandingly, around his waist, and the sheer strangeness of it has Bucky’s mind go back to the phrase he thought as the Soldier when something went wrong.
This is not protocol.
Steve’s mouth is warm and Bucky lets out a strangled gasp when he pulls back just a centimeter, one hand tantalizingly low on Bucky’s waist.
“Relax,” He whispers softly, right over Bucky’s lips, and Bucky closes his eyes because that’s the only way he feels he can school his expression right now.
He’s flat-up pushed against the wall, and with Steve’s arms keeping him there, he’s even lifted a little off the ground. He manages to move his hands, and they go around Steve’s neck. One of Steve’s hands threads into his hair and—Jesus Christ Lord Above—he works Bucky’s mouth open, his body thrumming with heat against Bucky’s own. Bucky almost lets out a very undignified noise.
There’s a clomp from the other end of the aisle. A moment later, a man’s voice makes a noise akin to a boy on an elementary school playground witnessing parents holding hands.
“Dude, come on,” Someone complains.
“It’s PDA? Really? I did not ask to walk into this, god,” The other groans, and out of the corner of a half-slit eye, Bucky can see one of the men in the black suit wave awkwardly at them. “Sorry. I—“
Steve ignores the interruption without a hitch, and continues to drag his hand lower down Bucky’s spine, making him shudder. Then he groans, almost obscenely, and Bucky almost feels bad for the other guy walking into this, even though his own pants feel incredibly tight now.
“Yeah, I’m out,” The man says, giving up, and Bucky closes his eyes again. He can hear the agent make his way down the store with his partner, a quiet clomp-clomp of expensive shoes that eventually fades away.
“Check the escalators…” Is the last thing he hears from them.
But Steve doesn’t let go.
Bucky can feel him just as steady against him, and the way his hand moves from going through Bucky’s hair to cupping his chin. Bucky doesn’t want to open his eyes, because then the whole show could fall apart. God, this is something he had in a fever dream, not reality.
It’s a moment too long, Bucky’s heart beating a mile a minute, before Sam says “Bogeys took the escalator. You’re free to find whatever that staircase is.”
Steve pushes back almost immediately, giving Bucky room to breathe and running a hand through his hair. His face is flushed, but that’s nowhere near what Bucky feels right now.
“Steve?” He asks carefully, still frozen against the wall.
“Hmm?”
“What the hell was that?” He demands, trying to quell his roaring mind. He can tell Steve notices, by the shit-like grin twitching up at the corners of his lips, and the light in his eyes. He quirks an eyebrow, like he can’t fathom why Bucky would say such a thing.
“Public displays of affection make people uncomfortable,” Steve says simply, and grabs the drinks. The shoulder of his jacket is rumpled, and the tortoiseshell glasses lay askew on his nose.
“Yeah,” Bucky takes in a shaky breath and wipes a hand down his face. He can feel how red it is just by sensing it. “I bet they do.”
“Coming?” Steve asks, already at the end of the hall. He turns around and waits for Bucky to hastily recover himself.
Bucky grunts a response, and follows behind him. The staircase is easy to find, and they make their way out of the mall even easier than they had gotten in. And that had been before they were being stalked.
Sam eyes them as they pile into the backseat of their tiny, borrowed Volkswagen Bug. His gaze dances between Steve’s cool expression and how Bucky is as tense as a wire. “What the hell happened back there?” He asks, pulling them into reverse.
Bucky and Steve share a glance, Steve alight with humor that Bucky thinks is entirely unnecessary. “Nothing,” He responds placatingly. “Don’t worry about it. Want a peppermint tea?”