“You don’t have to do this, you know.” Steve tells him softly, face half in shadow from where he stands in the doorway.
Barnes- Bucky doesn’t flinch at the sudden noise and arrival, doesn’t stiffen in response, doesn’t even feel the lingering quiet urge to run that he has become accustomed to when among other people.
He suspects that Steve Rogers is perhaps the only person alive who could sneak up on him like this, getting mere feet away when he’s off kilter and vulnerable and bare-chested.
It’s strange, in the way that it doesn’t feel so at all, that even now with Steve almost close enough to touch him and definitely near enough to hurt him were he so inclined, Bar-Bucky feels nothing but safe.
He’s not sure how to deal with safety anymore.
So he nods once, simply to show his acknowledgment of Steve’s statement regardless of whether or not he agrees. He thinks Steve would push the issue further if Bucky didn’t at least give him that much. He knows he would.
A lot has changed since they were eight years old and cradling bleeding knuckles and bruises- most of which he can’t remember but he tries to forget about that - but not this.
It’s remarkably comforting. Steve, it seems, is a reckless punk no matter what century they’re in.
(Words and phrases and comments like these, even if only in his own head, feel stolen, sometimes. How dare he feel the way that old Bucky felt. How dare he try and take his place.)
Steve takes a step closer, but Bucky doesn’t turn around from where he’s looking out the window.
Wakanda is beautiful. The green of the forest melds seamlessly into sleek silver innovation, and Bucky thinks, with only a small twinge of bitterness, that the old him would have loved this.
Before the Fall. Before- well.
For someone who doesn’t have a lot of memories to begin with there sure are a lot he doesn’t like to think about.
Steve’s hand on his shoulder startles him out of that line of thought, just slightly, just in the way that his body didn’t warn him of the blond’s approach and the almost imperceptible way he leans into the touch.
He’d felt the urge to touch and be touched by Steve Rogers since long before the man himself walked into his apartment, decked in that same red-white-blue that tickled the edge of his subconscious with the vaguest hints of recollection.
And now he has it, Steve’s hand bracketing his good shoulder, pinky finger just barely grazing his collar bone and the sheer warmth emanating from the point of contact that makes him want to sink into the sensation entirely.
He can see their reflection in the window, all sharp angles and steadiness, and something terribly young and human in him shudders at the look on Steve’s face- he looks, Bucky imagines, eerily similar to how Bucky himself looked, staring up at a too-big, too-strong Steve from Zola’s table.
“Yeah, I do.” He replies finally, voice harsh and grating from disuse, and turns to meet intense, longing blue eyes. Steve smiles, a weak, pained thing, and Bucky sees how much it takes out of him not to argue the point further, and he loves him a little more for it.
(That love too belonged to another Bucky- but now, after pulling Steve from the Potomac and a warm weight on his bare shoulder he lays equal claim to it, holds it selfishly in his chest because he is many things but lucky is not one of them, and he’s not about to give up the best damn thing that’s ever happened to him for a ghost.)
“Steve.” He’d forgotten that a word can hold such power and not mean devastation- but every time he says this name he gets a flashing glimpse of thin shoulders and soft lips and eyes too bright for the Brooklyn Depression.
Eyes that haunted him every time he went into the ice for reasons he didn’t know, and eyes that haunt him still as he voluntarily submits himself to it now.
Steve moves closer, fingers curling in the hair on the nape of his neck above his spine and other hand moving to rest above his beating heart as though he needs the reassurance, the constant thud-thud proof of both of their survival despite the odds.
“Steve.” He says again, all gentle and vulnerable, tasting the word on his tongue before releasing it into the ever-lessening space between their bodies. He doesn’t know what he expects- that’s a lie.
He expects that Steve will walk away, grown up and moved on from their boyish love, from rushed kisses and quick fingers. He expects Steve to have gotten over their once-mutual adoration and fascination with each other’s bodies and hearts and minds- he expects nothing.
He should’ve expected this.
This is Steve, taking another small step in, eyes a desperate lonely blue amid the strong structure of his face, lips hovering hesitantly over his, need etched in every tense line of muscle and sinew and his voice, lightly trembling but strong despite- or maybe because of- the fear, asking, “Are you sure?”
Bucky can’t know for sure which he is referring to, the empty room harbouring his eminent return to the ice he thought he left behind or the crackling tension wrung tight and harsh between them, but he knows his answer to both. Can answer them both in one.
Steve kisses him, then, and it tastes nothing at all like falling.
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