(shrieks in panic because of initial anonfail A N y WA Y)
iii.
All Steve can think in the aftermath of this latest failure is, Don’t make things weird.
He totally makes things weird.
Overcompensating by initiating all kinds of platonic contact with Bucky so that Bucky doesn’t feel uncared for, then panicking and retreating when things become too intimate.
“Did I do something wrong?” Bucky finally asks one evening, absentmindedly twirling strings of spaghetti around the prongs of his fork but never actually raising it to his mouth to eat.
Steve damn near winces, because of course Bucky has noticed his weird behaviour and of course he’s blaming himself for it. The fact that he’s so sure it’s because of something he’s done, despite the total lack of evidence suggesting as much, is heartbreaking proof of how vulnerable he still is to a very specific breed of self-blame, an insidiously quiet kind that manifests itself as a seemingly innocuous overapologeticness and willingness to please.
“Nothing, Buck,” Steve says tiredly. “Nothing at all.”
His halfhearted reassurances do not have their intended effect of settling Bucky’s nerves; rather, Bucky surprises Steve by erupting into frustration.
“Lemme guess then,” he says, each word sounding like something foul being spat out, “ ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ ”
Steve winces. “Well... If you mean that as in that's what I'm saying, then... Yeah. And I know how it sounds –”
“It sounds like it’s your problem, but that I’m a part of that problem. So even if it really is you, not me... it’s still me.”
“It’s...” Steve starts to say, but then realises he has nothing to follow up with, so he switches gears and promises, “I’m workin’ on it.”
Bucky fixes him with unreadable stare for a long time before he gives a minute nod and finally takes a bite of his spaghetti.
+
So it’s back to the drawing board.
Once again, Steve discovers he has no problem getting off when it’s just him and his hand and his safe blank brain, so at least he knows it’s possible. He’s also noticed that his problems usually start when Bucky is in a situation where Steve could be replaced by a HYDRA agent and things arguably wouldn’t turn out much differently. Maybe the trick is to flip everything over on its head.
Emboldened by having a gameplan, Steve no longer waits in anticipatory dread for the next time Bucky might try to go farther than kissing; hell, he even starts to exercise his newly-granted privileges of being able to kiss Bucky without asking first. Ninety-nine percent of the time there aren’t any problems, but Steve does end up a little rattled one day when he accidentally triggers Bucky by using both hands and a too-strong grip to guide Bucky’s face towards his own. To his credit, Steve doesn’t react with the usual panic and over-apologising that tend to be his automatic go-to responses to something like this, he just holds Bucky until he stops trembling, then goes to write the incident down in a little notebook and they both move on, as they always do.
+
Steve decides there’s no better time to test out his new strategy when he wakes up on a lazy Sunday morning - after apparently having drastically rearranged himself on the bed overnight, because he’s damn near horizontal on the mattress, feet hanging off the edge, and the first thing he sees when he opens is eyes is Bucky’s morning wood jutting out of his sweatpants.
Steve shimmies further up onto the bed so that he’s at eye-level with Bucky and he whispers, “Buck? Y’awake?”
“I am now, you asshole,” Bucky replies with a yawn as he rolls onto his back, keeping his eyes closed as he stretches his entire body, so lithe and catlike, just pure uncoiled muscle, and no Steve is totally not staring, except for the part where he is definitely staring, especially staring at the tented area of Bucky’s pants.
“You want me to take care of that?” Steve asks, except most of the words come out stuck together, so it’s more Yawanme t’takecare’athat? It’s actually hugely embarrassing, because Steve thought he’d gotten over this giggling nervousness a long time ago, and besides, he usually reserves feeling this flustered for when he’s making a fool out of himself around strangers – Bucky should not be able to induce this kind of a reaction.
Then again, Steve thinks he might kind of like it. He never had the whole butterflies-in-your-stomach falling in love experience with Bucky because they’d known each other their whole lives. It wasn’t so much a heady headfirst tumble as it was a leisurely advance that just seemed to make sense - a natural and inevitable evolution.
Right now, though, Steve can feel a certain thrill to the tips of his toes. They could be blushing teenagers, sloppy and shy, high on each other’s body heat and the exhilaration of feeling like you’ve discovered something that had never been done before.
He’s feeling so scattered right now that he almost forgets he’d asked Bucky a question until Bucky replies with a broad grin, “Sure, big guy. Take care of me.”
Those four single-syllable words sink into Steve like a harpoon. He’s been waiting to hear them for so long – a lot longer than just this past year and a half of living with Bucky. After leaning so heavily on Bucky throughout their entire childhood and adolescence, all Steve wanted to do was to be able to pay him back in kind, except he couldn’t imagine what the hell a hundred-pound barely-unemployed chronically ill punk like himself could possibly do for someone like Bucky.
When he stepped out of that vita ray chamber in 1943, he finally felt like he had something to offer, but that illusion was shattered after Bucky was taken. Sure, his body had been the means by which Steve had been able to physically free Bucky from HYDRA’s prison, but his muscles and size and reflexes were next to useless when it came to providing Bucky with what he needed once all the cuts and bruises had faded away to nothing.
What people don’t seem to realise is that the train incident wasn’t the first time that Steve had failed Bucky. No, Steve had been letting Bucky down for a long time before that, and would unknowingly continue to do so for an even longer time after – seventy years, to be exact.
He knows it’s ridiculous to be extrapolating all this from what is supposed to be a simple wake-up blowjob, so Steve resolutely buries down everything he’d been thinking and moves to focus on what needs to be done.
“You want my mouth or my hand?” he asks Bucky, already starting to stroke Bucky over his pants with a couple teasingly light fingers.
Bucky’s hips shudder as Steve rubs him with a firmer hand.
“Anything,” he breathes, “Any–ahhh–th-thing, as long as it’s you. I just... Just want y-you.”
The hoarse desperation in Bucky’s voice is almost enough to make Steve’s dick start to stir within his own pants; sometimes he finds more pleasure in watching himself get Bucky off instead of the other way around, and if this is the show that Bucky is going to be putting on for him right now then Steve doubts he’ll need much more.
He slides Bucky’s sweatpants down – he’s not wearing anything underneath – and he lowers his face into Bucky’s lap as if he’s kneeling in prayer. Indeed, Bucky’s body is the closest thing to holy ground to him, he wants nothing more than to worship it with every ounce of devotion in his blood, to drink in all its agonies and ecstasies, memorise each stigmatic scar and never again let its sacred walls be breached.
Steve quickly loses himself in the almost reassuringly repetitive motion of his head bobbing up and down, his hand working rhythmically on what his throat cannot reach. Nothing else exists right now except for the sensation of hot hard flesh between his lips and the tiny, almost stunned-sounding oh– ohhh’s coming from Bucky that are enough to make Steve practically fully hard.
When Bucky comes, shuddering, gasping, exquisite, what doesn’t end up getting swallowed is left trickling from the corner of Steve’s lips and he moves to kiss Bucky but Bucky violently jerks away.
Steve freezes, fearing the worst.
“I’m sorry,” Bucky says immediately, hanging his head, his words perforated with humiliation, “I just– the taste, I can’t... I don’t know w-why, precome’s fine for some reason, but–”
“Hey,” Steve cuts in gently, “It’s okay, you don’t have to explain. I’m glad you told me so I know for next time.”
He grabs a tissue from the box on the nightstand and has just barely finished wiping his lips off when suddenly Bucky is surging up from his previous reclined angle on the pillows and capturing Steve’s mouth in his own. Steve makes an undignified squeak in response before he recovers enough to wrap an arm around Bucky’s waist, pulling him in closer.
The next thing Steve knows, his cock is being tugged out from his pants and underwear and engulfed by the warmth and friction of Bucky’s flesh hand. He lets out another embarrassing sound that’s muffled against Bucky’s skin as he buries his face in Bucky’s shoulder and struggles to lift his hips enough to thrust into Bucky’s fist; the way they’re positioned on the bed makes it an awkward and mostly unsuccessfully endeavour, but it only takes a few more strokes before he’s coming, spilling over Bucky’s hand and splattering onto both of their pants.
“Jesus,” Steve says once he’s caught his breath, slumping bonelessly forward onto Bucky.
“Blasphemer,” Bucky replies lazily.
He drops back into the pillows, letting Steve sink down onto him.
Steve feels like jelly, wrecked by an oddly satisfying combination of exhaustion and relief, though the latter is admittedly a little more than just a physiological response to what just happened. It’s the same guilt-wracked gratitude he’d experienced that first time he’d jacked off in the shower right after the initial mishap with Bucky – an overwhelming, almost visceral sentiment of thank god, everything is going to be okay.
+
Everything is okay. For a little while, at least. Steve is able to fully enjoy Bucky’s deft mouth and clever fingers without any further complications, though he’s always exceptionally vigilant when receiving oral from Bucky, mindful of all the precautions that need to be taken – no hands in Bucky’s hair; hips kept as still as possible as not to force himself further down Bucky’s throat than he’s comfortable with; a stuttered warning before he’s about to come so that Bucky can draw away and finish him off with his hand.
FILL: vibrations in an empty room [3a/?]
All Steve can think in the aftermath of this latest failure is, Don’t make things weird.
He totally makes things weird.
Overcompensating by initiating all kinds of platonic contact with Bucky so that Bucky doesn’t feel uncared for, then panicking and retreating when things become too intimate.
“Did I do something wrong?” Bucky finally asks one evening, absentmindedly twirling strings of spaghetti around the prongs of his fork but never actually raising it to his mouth to eat.
Steve damn near winces, because of course Bucky has noticed his weird behaviour and of course he’s blaming himself for it. The fact that he’s so sure it’s because of something he’s done, despite the total lack of evidence suggesting as much, is heartbreaking proof of how vulnerable he still is to a very specific breed of self-blame, an insidiously quiet kind that manifests itself as a seemingly innocuous overapologeticness and willingness to please.
“Nothing, Buck,” Steve says tiredly. “Nothing at all.”
His halfhearted reassurances do not have their intended effect of settling Bucky’s nerves; rather, Bucky surprises Steve by erupting into frustration.
“Lemme guess then,” he says, each word sounding like something foul being spat out, “ ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ ”
Steve winces. “Well... If you mean that as in that's what I'm saying, then... Yeah. And I know how it sounds –”
“It sounds like it’s your problem, but that I’m a part of that problem. So even if it really is you, not me... it’s still me.”
“It’s...” Steve starts to say, but then realises he has nothing to follow up with, so he switches gears and promises, “I’m workin’ on it.”
Bucky fixes him with unreadable stare for a long time before he gives a minute nod and finally takes a bite of his spaghetti.
+
So it’s back to the drawing board.
Once again, Steve discovers he has no problem getting off when it’s just him and his hand and his safe blank brain, so at least he knows it’s possible. He’s also noticed that his problems usually start when Bucky is in a situation where Steve could be replaced by a HYDRA agent and things arguably wouldn’t turn out much differently. Maybe the trick is to flip everything over on its head.
Emboldened by having a gameplan, Steve no longer waits in anticipatory dread for the next time Bucky might try to go farther than kissing; hell, he even starts to exercise his newly-granted privileges of being able to kiss Bucky without asking first. Ninety-nine percent of the time there aren’t any problems, but Steve does end up a little rattled one day when he accidentally triggers Bucky by using both hands and a too-strong grip to guide Bucky’s face towards his own. To his credit, Steve doesn’t react with the usual panic and over-apologising that tend to be his automatic go-to responses to something like this, he just holds Bucky until he stops trembling, then goes to write the incident down in a little notebook and they both move on, as they always do.
+
Steve decides there’s no better time to test out his new strategy when he wakes up on a lazy Sunday morning - after apparently having drastically rearranged himself on the bed overnight, because he’s damn near horizontal on the mattress, feet hanging off the edge, and the first thing he sees when he opens is eyes is Bucky’s morning wood jutting out of his sweatpants.
Steve shimmies further up onto the bed so that he’s at eye-level with Bucky and he whispers, “Buck? Y’awake?”
“I am now, you asshole,” Bucky replies with a yawn as he rolls onto his back, keeping his eyes closed as he stretches his entire body, so lithe and catlike, just pure uncoiled muscle, and no Steve is totally not staring, except for the part where he is definitely staring, especially staring at the tented area of Bucky’s pants.
“You want me to take care of that?” Steve asks, except most of the words come out stuck together, so it’s more Yawanme t’takecare’athat? It’s actually hugely embarrassing, because Steve thought he’d gotten over this giggling nervousness a long time ago, and besides, he usually reserves feeling this flustered for when he’s making a fool out of himself around strangers – Bucky should not be able to induce this kind of a reaction.
Then again, Steve thinks he might kind of like it. He never had the whole butterflies-in-your-stomach falling in love experience with Bucky because they’d known each other their whole lives. It wasn’t so much a heady headfirst tumble as it was a leisurely advance that just seemed to make sense - a natural and inevitable evolution.
Right now, though, Steve can feel a certain thrill to the tips of his toes. They could be blushing teenagers, sloppy and shy, high on each other’s body heat and the exhilaration of feeling like you’ve discovered something that had never been done before.
He’s feeling so scattered right now that he almost forgets he’d asked Bucky a question until Bucky replies with a broad grin, “Sure, big guy. Take care of me.”
Those four single-syllable words sink into Steve like a harpoon. He’s been waiting to hear them for so long – a lot longer than just this past year and a half of living with Bucky. After leaning so heavily on Bucky throughout their entire childhood and adolescence, all Steve wanted to do was to be able to pay him back in kind, except he couldn’t imagine what the hell a hundred-pound barely-unemployed chronically ill punk like himself could possibly do for someone like Bucky.
When he stepped out of that vita ray chamber in 1943, he finally felt like he had something to offer, but that illusion was shattered after Bucky was taken. Sure, his body had been the means by which Steve had been able to physically free Bucky from HYDRA’s prison, but his muscles and size and reflexes were next to useless when it came to providing Bucky with what he needed once all the cuts and bruises had faded away to nothing.
What people don’t seem to realise is that the train incident wasn’t the first time that Steve had failed Bucky. No, Steve had been letting Bucky down for a long time before that, and would unknowingly continue to do so for an even longer time after – seventy years, to be exact.
He knows it’s ridiculous to be extrapolating all this from what is supposed to be a simple wake-up blowjob, so Steve resolutely buries down everything he’d been thinking and moves to focus on what needs to be done.
“You want my mouth or my hand?” he asks Bucky, already starting to stroke Bucky over his pants with a couple teasingly light fingers.
Bucky’s hips shudder as Steve rubs him with a firmer hand.
“Anything,” he breathes, “Any–ahhh–th-thing, as long as it’s you. I just... Just want y-you.”
The hoarse desperation in Bucky’s voice is almost enough to make Steve’s dick start to stir within his own pants; sometimes he finds more pleasure in watching himself get Bucky off instead of the other way around, and if this is the show that Bucky is going to be putting on for him right now then Steve doubts he’ll need much more.
He slides Bucky’s sweatpants down – he’s not wearing anything underneath – and he lowers his face into Bucky’s lap as if he’s kneeling in prayer. Indeed, Bucky’s body is the closest thing to holy ground to him, he wants nothing more than to worship it with every ounce of devotion in his blood, to drink in all its agonies and ecstasies, memorise each stigmatic scar and never again let its sacred walls be breached.
Steve quickly loses himself in the almost reassuringly repetitive motion of his head bobbing up and down, his hand working rhythmically on what his throat cannot reach. Nothing else exists right now except for the sensation of hot hard flesh between his lips and the tiny, almost stunned-sounding oh– ohhh’s coming from Bucky that are enough to make Steve practically fully hard.
When Bucky comes, shuddering, gasping, exquisite, what doesn’t end up getting swallowed is left trickling from the corner of Steve’s lips and he moves to kiss Bucky but Bucky violently jerks away.
Steve freezes, fearing the worst.
“I’m sorry,” Bucky says immediately, hanging his head, his words perforated with humiliation, “I just– the taste, I can’t... I don’t know w-why, precome’s fine for some reason, but–”
“Hey,” Steve cuts in gently, “It’s okay, you don’t have to explain. I’m glad you told me so I know for next time.”
He grabs a tissue from the box on the nightstand and has just barely finished wiping his lips off when suddenly Bucky is surging up from his previous reclined angle on the pillows and capturing Steve’s mouth in his own. Steve makes an undignified squeak in response before he recovers enough to wrap an arm around Bucky’s waist, pulling him in closer.
The next thing Steve knows, his cock is being tugged out from his pants and underwear and engulfed by the warmth and friction of Bucky’s flesh hand. He lets out another embarrassing sound that’s muffled against Bucky’s skin as he buries his face in Bucky’s shoulder and struggles to lift his hips enough to thrust into Bucky’s fist; the way they’re positioned on the bed makes it an awkward and mostly unsuccessfully endeavour, but it only takes a few more strokes before he’s coming, spilling over Bucky’s hand and splattering onto both of their pants.
“Jesus,” Steve says once he’s caught his breath, slumping bonelessly forward onto Bucky.
“Blasphemer,” Bucky replies lazily.
He drops back into the pillows, letting Steve sink down onto him.
Steve feels like jelly, wrecked by an oddly satisfying combination of exhaustion and relief, though the latter is admittedly a little more than just a physiological response to what just happened. It’s the same guilt-wracked gratitude he’d experienced that first time he’d jacked off in the shower right after the initial mishap with Bucky – an overwhelming, almost visceral sentiment of thank god, everything is going to be okay.
+
Everything is okay. For a little while, at least. Steve is able to fully enjoy Bucky’s deft mouth and clever fingers without any further complications, though he’s always exceptionally vigilant when receiving oral from Bucky, mindful of all the precautions that need to be taken – no hands in Bucky’s hair; hips kept as still as possible as not to force himself further down Bucky’s throat than he’s comfortable with; a stuttered warning before he’s about to come so that Bucky can draw away and finish him off with his hand.
When things go wrong again, it’s Steve’s fault.