He can’t talk to Bucky; journaling is useless; and he also can’t talk to anyone else. It’s private; it wouldn’t be fair to Bucky, not knowing that people are looking at him and knowing what happened. But if he asks Bucky for permission, he’ll flip his lid again. He’ll say, “You got an issue with me, tell me directly. What am I, a brick wall? Who is it that doesn’t see me as a person now?”

Since he was a kid, Bucky’s been distressed by the thought of being discussed behind his back. Thank god for him that Steve was the problem child.

It’s not like it’s unreasonable. Of course not. Steve could always handle being talked about up until the point where it was about him having trouble with something. Steve Rogers vandalized the school hallway with his amateur protest art? Say what you want. Steve Rogers got beat up by three boys larger than him but then he bit one on the arm and the kid bled all over Steve’s clothes? Such a good topic for conversation.

Steve Rogers is probably on his deathbed? Well.

But the thing is, he asks himself, How would Bucky handle this if he were me? And the answer is, He’d find a way to talk to someone. No matter the challenges that might come with that; he’d figure it out.

Steve doesn’t, he decides, have to be specific. There has to be a way to broach the topic with someone while making it sound like he’s the one carrying a lot of baggage. The one struggling to communicate his feelings—how to communicate them sincerely and how to know if he’s ready. He can sell that. It’s embarrassing, anticipating it, rehearsing his lines into a hand mirror. But Natasha loves poking at him about this kind of thing, and she might be so gleeful that his embarrassment will get swept under the rug.

After Bucky leaves for Money Management class, Steve sits down in the kitchen and calls her.

Before she can even say hi, he grits out, “I want to talk to you about sex.”

“Oh, this should be good. Is this a clinical issue, or are we about to have phone sex? Do you want to know what I’m wearing?”

“Depends. Is it interesting?” He picks up a salt shaker and rolls it around in his hand.

“It’s coveralls,” she says, voice low and husky and on the brink of laughter.

“You’re a fashion plate. Neither of those are why I’m calling.”

“I’m not giving you sex advice, Steve. Read the Kama Sutra. Go on some forums. The internet is very enlightening, you know.”

“Why coveralls?”

“I’m a janitor today. It’s a whole thing.”

“You’re not strikebreaking, are you?”

“Yes. As a highly trained, multilingual spy, combat expert, and computer hacker with dozens of extensive legitimate resumes under dozens of illegitimate names, I’m so hard up for work that I’ve resorted to strikebreaking. You got me.”

“Impressive qualifications, Nat. Just keeping you honest.”

“You need to see a therapist.”

“What, so they can hypnotize me and tell me I was emotionally crippled by having a single mother?”

“I don’t think you understand what therapy is.”

“Of course I do.”

“Sam goes to therapy, doesn’t he? You don’t think they’re hypnotizing him and saying he was emotionally crippled by having a single mother?”

“He didn’t have a single mother.”

“Don’t be obtuse, Steve.”

“And he isn’t emotionally crippled.”

“And that is a very intriguing can of worms that you just opened, but unfortunately, I have to get back to work. Talk to a professional, Steve. If they bring out the pocket watch and start asking you to count backward, you can always get up and leave.”

Steve makes a disgruntled noise that he knows she’ll interpret as agreement. “Is the janitor gig fun?”

“Oh, it will be in a second. Gotta go.” He hears a volley of shots. Natasha hangs up.

After some staring at the wall (red floral tile that Bucky took an immediate liking to when they first looked at the place, saying it was familiar), he decides to call Sam. With a different approach in mind, of course. Sam definitely has no interest in discussing his imaginary sexual hang-ups. If Steve tried, Sam would prop his phone up in front of the TV speakers and walk away.

Instead, when Sam picks up, with a, “Yeah, shoot,” Steve says, “Board games again?”

“What, your boyfriend’s too busy to invite me himself?”

“This wasn’t delegated. I want you to. We had fun.”

Sam starts laughing, and says, syllables jumping up and down, “You lost miserably. You can’t even stand to lose happily.”

“That game was rigged against me. Something else. Pictionary? I can play Pictionary.”

“Some of us can only draw half a stick figure but, sure, yeah. Wipe the floor with me. Does Bucky know you’re honing in on his territory here?”

“I’ll check with him when he gets back from class. I doubt he’ll mind.”

“That guy minds everything.”

“Yeah, well,” Steve says, not sure what Sam means, “that’s his charm.” He lifts a corner of the tablecloth and triples it up so he can sink his teeth into something for a few seconds. “You doing okay?”

“When aren’t I?”

It occurs to Steve for the first time that Sam might not also be sitting at home doing nothing in the middle of a weekday. He has a job where he goes out. Where he speaks to people. He maybe even speaks to people in other contexts (besides occasionally being Captain America), and just pretends to Steve that he doesn’t. That he’s lonely too.

Still, Steve says, “Haha. Seriously. If you show up and you’re wasting away, I’m mother henning you.”

“You can’t even make a Bloody Mary, Steve. It’s tomato juice. Good luck making me into a baby hen.” The sound of something rustling in the background. “But I’m fine. I’m actually fine right now. I took an early lunch break.”

“Shit. I don’t want to keep you from—”

“Shhh. Shhhhhh.” He sounds like a waterfall. “Text me the details of game night and I won’t hold it against you. Love you. Wilson out.”



How long does Steve stay in the kitchen? The front door groans open. How long has Steve been sitting here with the lights off? Even through the blinds and the barely parted curtains, the room was less gray when he first picked up the phone. At some point, he got himself a mug of orange juice. It sits by his aching elbow, half-finished.

The front door groans and clicks shut. And Bucky sighs in a contained, grumbling way, and kicks his shoes off, and mutters, “Ow.”

Can he tell Steve’s been in the kitchen since he left? No, of course not. Steve picks up the orange juice and downs it. It’s warm and too sour, but it’s not like it can hurt him. “Honey, you’re home,” he says, at a regular, talking-kind-of volume, and Bucky laughs and says much louder, “Honey, you are too!”

“You said ow. You all right?” They both gave up pretending long ago that they couldn’t hear each other’s every move and whisper.

“Finger plate caught on my hair, worrywart. No issue.” He’s got the same slick swagger in his voice that he gets when he tells a joke, and Steve braces himself, clenching the mug handle, not knowing if he’s going to get, Banana you glad I didn't say orange? or Stalin has the conductor shot. The train doesn’t move—

The mug is from Bucky’s favorite library. He donated money and he got a mug. What happens if Steve breaks the handle off? They’re out of Krazy Glue. He unbraces. He pushes it across the table.

When Bucky comes into the kitchen, he flips the light on without commenting on the darkness. Steve blinks more than he has to. Judging by the whorls and bumps still molded in by thickness and time, Bucky had his hair up in some kind of braided bun contraption today, but he’s taken it most of the way down. There are hair ties around his metal wrist, and bobby pins along his t-shirt’s collar.

Khrushchev rehabilitates the conductor. The train still doesn’t move—

Bucky plucks the mug off the table and sets about washing it at the sink, squeezing an absurd amount of dish soap onto their ratty sponge. He hums something Steve doesn’t recognize, high and boppy. Twitches his head from side to side.

“So,” Steve says, and for no real reason but maybe a performance of politeness, Bucky turns the sink off and turns to look at him. “I invited Sam over for Pictionary?”

“Oh.” He smiles a few seconds too late. “When?”

“Not sure. I called him this morning and said I’d check with you. But he’s in.”

“You’re s’posed to send a written invitation.” Bucky turns back to the sink. He rinses the mug out, but puts it in the sink instead of in the drying rack. “It’s not a proper party otherwise.”

“Not one of us is a proper anything.”

“You’re a proper sight for sore eyes.”

“You’re not even looking.”

Bucky looks. He leans with his elbows on the sink’s edge, body on a dramatic slope. “Yep. Just as I thought. Sore eyes.”

He doesn’t say it like he’s flirting, even though he’s used that line on Steve plenty of times, following it up with, “So why don’t you make the rest of me sore too?”

Almost always Steve has said, “I’d love nothing more,” and made him sore all over, fucking him harsh and fast, twisting his nipples until he screamed, biting purpling marks into his shoulders and hips and neck and twisting his arms behind his back, and trying to make him heart-sore too, to make him feel all bruised up on the inside in a warm, content way.

“You could close your eyes if it’s a problem,” Steve says, and Bucky says, “Nah,” and walks toward him, but falls short. He’s walking with a slick swagger too. Staring sore-eyed at Steve, he pushes his hair back off his face, with his metal hand, and from the wince on his face, the finger-plates catch again, but he won’t make any noise about it this time.

His finger-plates never catch on his hair. He has great control over when they flex open or closed, except sometimes when he’s all fucked-out, but he isn’t. He can’t be.

He doesn’t walk closer, but he does bend forward, face floating in front of Steve’s. “I’ve been thinking about something.”

There’s the faintest scent of gin on his breath, mixed with cinnamon gum.

“Yeah. Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Why in some of the Little Audrey jokes was she evil but in others she was just a stupid slut?”

“I’m not really comfortable with you saying that, Buck. It’s, uh. Unsavory?”

“It’s true, though. And don’t act like you don’t say those words.” His hair is still stuck in little bumpy shapes in places, and his eyes look close to unfocused. He licks his lips.

“It’s different than saying them about a woman. A young woman.”

“A fake young woman. Like me.”

Bucky breathes out a heavier gust of gin and cinnamon. He rolls his eyes. “Fine. I’ll think about it by myself.” Still bending over, he takes another step forward.

“Hey.” Steve raises his arm and hovers it by Bucky’s side, in the vicinity of his waist. He wants to pull him into his lap and hold him and smooth his hair out and maybe put it up for him again, if sloppier than before.

Bucky slips his metal hand into the hovering hand and then drops it like it bit him.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.” He straightens up and backs away until he hits the lip of the sink.

“To do what, Buck? I reached for you.”

“To touch you. You don’t want that, right? You don’t like it. That’s fine.”

“I can touch you.” He pulls his arm back and crosses it over himself like a seatbelt, digging fingers into the flesh between shoulder and chest. “I just don’t know if we should be having sex.”

“Well, that’s a fucking arbitrary line to draw.” He should look angry as he says it, but he just looks worn out. He runs his hand through his hair again and the plates catch again and this time he says, “Ow,” ostentatiously as though daring Steve to make something of it before shaking his head like a wet dog and barreling forward.

“Why not admit you don’t want me anymore because you think it’s disgusting that I would fuck someone in Hydra? I’m not thrilled about it either, but it’s a hell of a lot less reprehensible than any of the other shit I was doing at the time. You’ve somehow forgiven me for all that.”

“I didn’t have to forgive you for being brainwashed and I don’t need to forgive you for being raped either, Buck.”

“Not when you put it like that, I guess. It’s real convenient that you get to choose what language we’re using.”

“I don’t understand. Do I hate you for it or don’t I, in this delusion?”

“You hate me and want to talk like you don’t, fuck. It isn’t complicated.” He turns away, toward the sink. He rinses the mug again and moves it to the drying rack this time.

“That sounds awful for me.”

“Yeah, well, it’s awful for me too, but you’re doing it anyway.”

“I’m not. I’m just worried. You’re drunk, Bucky. I didn’t know you could get drunk.”

“Of course I can get drunk. I’m a normal fucking person.” Steve doesn’t rise to the bait, even as an anvil sinks from his throat down through his chest and into his guts. Bucky never says that shit to him except in jest. Steve doesn’t say anything. Bucky stays staring into the sink. “When are you going to stop punishing me for not being sad?”

“I wouldn’t do that, Buck. I don’t want that.”

“Well, we don’t even own Pictionary.”

“We can buy it. What can it cost, five-hundred bucks?”

“I’ll get it out of the library.” Finally, he turns, and he grins. “Don’t touch my mug, please. You’re just going to break it.”

Brezhnev closes the curtains and says, “Now we’re moving.”