In two days, Bucky’s going to turn an imaginary, untouchable number of years. Steve is cross-legged on the living room floor, bent forward to use the laptop in front of him. He has one tab open for Binging local bakeries, one for Binging local florists, and three with image searches for different varieties of flower. Bucky loves Monet’s water lilies, but they don’t live in water, so he looks at tiger lilies, and at easter lilies, and—feeling gawky and dumb and young about it—roses.
Bucky enters the room through the window. Steve shouts, “Jesus fucking Christ, Bucky!” after he’s blindly thrown a couch cushion in a neat arc. Bucky catches it against his chest, hugs it to him. His cheeks are flushed, his hair coming out of the two buns twisted up high on his head. He’s wearing all black, like he planned this when he got dressed, how best to make the cat burglar joke land.
Steve says, “Why was that unlocked?” shuffling to make sure his body shields the computer screen from view.
“Wasn’t. That would be stupid. You think I’d leave it unlocked?”
“It’s not like the house was going to be empty at any point.”
Bucky shrugs. “Not necessarily, Steve. You could have gone anywhere. Australia. Texas.” He slinks over with exaggerated cartoon sneakiness, flattening himself to an invisible wall. He whispers, “I jimmied it. I’m pretty great at locks.”
Steve realizes he can just shut the laptop for now. “Yeah, I know that. You always were.”
Bucky gets on the floor and prowls like a cat to close the distance between them, all-fours and an arched spine. Then he flops down and puts his head on Steve’s thigh. Steve pats at his head.
Bucky says, “Hey, so an old crone had to wait two hours just to get on a bus.”
Steve starts to say, “Yeah, what’d she do that you’re calling her—” but Bucky speaks over him.
“Bus after bus came by, but they were full-up with passengers, and she couldn’t squeeze herself in as well. When she finally managed to clamber aboard, she wiped her forehead and exclaimed, ‘Finally, Glory to God!’ But the driver said, ‘Mother, you must not say that. You must say, ‘Glory to comrade Stalin!’” He squirms, and a hairclip digs into Steve’s leg.
The other visible clips are thick, oblong curves. A tortoiseshell pattern, catching the gold tones hidden in Bucky’s hair. Two clasp at the base of each bun. Steve thumbs at one’s smooth surface.
Bucky coughs into his elbow. “Anyway, so the woman said, ‘Excuse me, comrade. I’m just a backwards old woman. From now on, I’ll say what you told me to.’ Then after a while, she continued, ‘Excuse me, comrade, I am old and stupid. What shall I say if, God forbid, Stalin dies?’ ‘Well,’ the driver said, ‘then you may say, 'Glory to God!'’” He laughs in a series of small puffs, his chest bouncing. “That was my favorite, at one point.”
“It was?”
“Yeah. I don’t know why. Or when exactly. I remember knowing I shouldn’t tell anyone. I think that. Uh.”
He rolls so it’s his forehead digging into Steve’s thigh. Steve used to think that he could read Bucky’s feelings just fine from his voice or the set of his shoulders, or even the back of his neck. He could guess from a handwritten note what Bucky’s face had looked like when he wrote it. How could he possibly now?
But the shift in position has revealed the pale rivulet of skin where Bucky’s hair parts and heads up into the two buns. It’s crooked. Steve touches him there, and Bucky whines: one clear note.
He goes on, “It was fine—sometimes, I mean—for me to think things were funny. But I could never tell what made it fine or wrong. So I never acted like I did, but sometimes someone would say, ‘See the soldier thinks I’m funny.’ Or something like that. And I’d be terrified, but nothing’d happen. But someone told me that joke. Told me directly, when we were alone. So he couldn’t say, ‘See the soldier thinks I’m funny,’ and no one else could say, ‘See, the soldier doesn’t think you’re funny.’”
“But you think you thought it was funny?”
“I know I thought it was hilarious. But no one got to say I felt one way or the other. So I acted like I didn’t think anything. And for all anyone knew, I didn’t.” He drags himself forward so his head is more or less buried in Steve’s crotch. There’s something chaste about it. He says into the open space between Steve’s folded legs, “You tell me something now.”
“What am I telling you now?”
“Tell me something you haven’t before.” He flips onto his back, a vulnerable turtle. Bumps the back of his skull against Steve’s farther thigh. He looks like Steve should be cradling his body, clutching his entirety; he’s glowing and rough-hewn and damp around the eyes. “This goes both ways, okay? Tell me something important. That was important.”
The makeup beneath his right eye has grown faint over the course of the day, or maybe rubbed off in his squirming. Deep, sweet shadow; beautiful, difficult man.
“Sam said he’s coming by to drop off a gift for you later.”
“That’s important. But you know what I mean.”
“Mmm.” He cups one of the knobs of hair in his palm. Springy and soft. “You know that I was. Well. Really lonely. For a while. After I woke up.”
“Stands to reason.”
“And I tried not to be. But in a lot of ways, that was worse. I kinda think I should have let myself lie dormant.”
“Do you?”
No reaching his hand out to Sam. No cracking jokes with Natasha. No making small talk with any diner waitresses or grocery store cashiers. No touch at all that wasn't pure violence besides being squeezed body-to-body with others on the subway with everyone doing their best to pretend to be alone.
“No. God, sorry. I didn’t do anything wrong,, and nothing really bad happened.”
“Hey, stop plagiarizing my memoirs!”
Steve laughs, and brushes his hair off his forehead; it's been getting long.
“Fuck. It’s my turn now, and I’ll plagiarize what I like, asshole. It wasn’t anything bad. I don’t think. But I did, well, have sex with a few people. A woman who recognized me in a bar. Two SHIELD agents. Natasha tried to set me up with one of them once, uh, after, and it was hell keeping a straight face.” He shrugs. “Nothing bad. But I felt lonelier after. Every time.”
Bucky stares up at him with his damp eyes. “You don’t have to say anything else.”
“I should. I pushed you.”
“That’s not the point. Besides. I just told you some shit you didn’t ask about. But see? It ain’t exactly easy.”
“I haven’t been asking because I think it’s easy.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He shuts his eyes and turns onto his side, facing Steve, moving closer so he’s practically curled catlike around him. “You’re asking because you think it matters. You think so many things matter.”
The doorbell startles them both awake.
In Steve’s dream, he was about to buy a very small grapefruit. Bucky’s drooled a small very small puddle on his thigh. There’s only a very small amount of light in the living room now, the sun snuffed out. His throat is dry, and Bucky’s crouched next to him, still and ominous in his all-black. They wait.
Then Bucky whispers in his ear, “What are we waiting for here?”
Steve says, “Um,” and his phone starts buzzing from under the couch, in the pattern assigned to—“Sam, right.” He tries to get up, but Bucky shoves him down, and his teeth glint.
“It’s my birthday gift. I get the door.”
“Oh, perfect. I’ll keep sitting here in the dark.”
The open door lets in a punch of cold air. Sam says, “Why do I feel like I’m the one getting a surprise party?”
“Surprise!” Steve yells. Kind of yells. Says loudly.
Sam screams—quietly, not worrying the neighbors—and makes a series of choking noises. “You’ve surprised me,” he hisses out, “to death.”
Bucky says, “Wow, I can’t believe Steve hired me the world’s most melodramatic stripper.” Sam laughs, and then Bucky says, softer, “Hey,” and there’s a pause, and then Sam hissing in pain. Bucky tsks at him. “What the hell kind of ugly-ass tin men are you fighting out there? I hope you have all your tetanus shots.”
“Hey, run-of-the-mill supervillain. You don’t watch the news? It’s gotten a lot more attractive since I showed up.”
“That’s Steve’s gig. I like daytime TV.”
“What, like Ellen?”
“No, like soaps. I love soaps.”
“Well, that’s some info I could have used before getting your present. I hope you like it even if it doesn’t have a secret twin who’s also its grandma plotting to steal its liver or anything.”
Steve calls to them, “You can come in, you know! You’re letting the cold in.”
Appearing in the living room doorway as Bucky smacks the door shut, Sam says, “Stewart Graham Roberts, put on a sweater if you’re cold. And what, you guys’re out of candles?”
“Candles?” Steve snorts. “Come on, Buck and I are men of the future. We use lanterns.” But he stands, groaning at the stiffness in his knees that’ll be gone in a minute, and flicks on the lamp. “See? These nifty electric lanterns.”
Sam is resplendent. Steve laughs at himself for thinking that, but he is, as always. Something ineffably good in his eyes and the set of his shoulders. Even in the cuts and scratches Bucky must have been touching and worrying over in the doorway. One neat set of stitches on his cheek, a protruding scab above his eyebrow. He’s wearing a leather jacket that's too big, and sunglasses perched on the top of his head. Under his arm, he’s got a package wrapped in festive, multicolored paper, ready to be thrown away.
Bucky says, “The soaps have got a lot of amnesiacs in ’em. I’m learning a lot about how to be myself.”
Steve and Sam embrace, competing to hug the air out of each other, and Sam is so warm, and he asks over Steve’s shoulder, “Oh yeah? Like what?”
Maybe Steve can’t see Bucky, but he can tell that he’s grinning when he says, “Fake it all and your dreams will come true. Right, former Miss America 1942?”
Steve digs his chin into Sam’s shoulder, the dry stiff leather and sturdy muscle of him. Sam almost-giggles. Steve closes his eyes and mutters, “Open your gift or I’ll open your face,” and the hug ends.
Lounging on the floor, Bucky unwraps a Rubik’s cube, a package of bright hair elastics, and a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. He folds the wrapping paper, neat from how he slit through the tape with a metal finger. He touches each gift with the same finger, with the same kind of wonder he had in his eyes when he was ten and a rabbit came right up to him and Steve in the park like it had no fear.
Sam, sitting close to Bucky with his back against the couch, says, “It’s completely possible that I sent your friends postcards asking what you wanted.”
“Were they signed from their worst nightmares?”
“Y’know, somehow I didn’t see that going over so well. Normal, anonymous postcards from a normal, anonymous benefactor.”
Bucky looks up, and he’s smiling the smallest amount and his hair is in his eyes. He aims a soft punch to Sam’s arm.
“Fifteen, Wilson. It’s like there’s no love.” He whaps Sam’s knee with the book. “You want a beer?”
“I gotta drive back. And you know I don’t drink if there aren’t any games involved.”
“It’s non-alcoholic. And it’s so sweet that you drove all this way. Steve, isn’t he just the cutest, most courteous gentleman?”
Steve says, “That’s right. There’s no competition.”
Sam glares at both of them. “Ugh. That’s to that comment and the non-alcoholic beer. Who’s responsible for that?”
Bucky points at Steve. Steve points at Bucky, who is, in fact responsible for it, because Steve didn’t know they had non-alcoholic beer in the house until this moment.
Sam says, “Uh-huh. Sure. You have coffee?”
Steve returns to the living room balancing three mugs of coffee and feeling proud of himself for it. Sam is staring at the Keebler elves painting from an inch away, like maybe the Da Vinci code is buried inside its clumsy brushstrokes.
Once Sam’s left, Bucky lies back down on the floor with his gifts and his wrapping paper. Steve stretches out on the couch and watches him. The bend in one of his knees. The curls escaping his buns. His hands toying with the Rubik’s cube like assembling a gun—But this is Bucky as he never got to see him, unused to any weapons besides his fists and the occasional baseball bat, clutching a gun for the first time, clumsy and his eyes bright, dark slashes as he learned how to work something new.
The Bucky he found in Italy held his gun close to his body with passionate familiarity, and treated it like his body too. The motions of disassembling, cleaning, assembling, shooting all came off as dull and instinctive as taking a piss. And unless they were keeping a low profile, he always whistled his way through both. Now, he hums.
Steve wants to tell him that he lied when he said he didn’t do anything wrong. That he’s never checked to make sure those two SHIELD agents weren’t Hydra. That he was maybe even more in bed with Hydra than he thought, and he doesn’t even have the decency to verify one way or the other. He can’t tell him that, because Bucky will say, “Fuck, I knew you thought I was disgusting for fucking someone in Hydra,” or maybe that won’t even bother him. Maybe he already finds himself disgusting, and he would think Steve was disgusting too, and that would be fair.
He’s divided on whether he should be mad at himself for the mere existence of the possibility that those people were Hydra; he should definitely be mad at himself for acting like he deserves to remember those encounters the same either way. And he is mad, but it’s woven in with everything else he can be mad at himself about. And he listens to Bucky humming, and the clicking of the cube.
He says, “Why Dorian Gray?”
Bucky tilts his head to look at him. “You know why.”
“What, feeling self-conscious about how old you’re getting?”
Bucky laughs. “Sure. Please. You know why. Come on, honey.”
Steve opens his mouth, closes it again, opens it and says, “Uh.”
Bucky frowns and squints at him. “Huh. All right. Yeah, it’s the immortality thing. I like to think about it. What it means for us.” He looks away. He hums more loudly. He’s got one side of the cube all red, one side all blue. Stewart Graham Roberts goes to put on a sweater.
FILL: The True Repairman Will Repair Man (14/?)
Bucky enters the room through the window. Steve shouts, “Jesus fucking Christ, Bucky!” after he’s blindly thrown a couch cushion in a neat arc. Bucky catches it against his chest, hugs it to him. His cheeks are flushed, his hair coming out of the two buns twisted up high on his head. He’s wearing all black, like he planned this when he got dressed, how best to make the cat burglar joke land.
Steve says, “Why was that unlocked?” shuffling to make sure his body shields the computer screen from view.
“Wasn’t. That would be stupid. You think I’d leave it unlocked?”
“It’s not like the house was going to be empty at any point.”
Bucky shrugs. “Not necessarily, Steve. You could have gone anywhere. Australia. Texas.” He slinks over with exaggerated cartoon sneakiness, flattening himself to an invisible wall. He whispers, “I jimmied it. I’m pretty great at locks.”
Steve realizes he can just shut the laptop for now. “Yeah, I know that. You always were.”
Bucky gets on the floor and prowls like a cat to close the distance between them, all-fours and an arched spine. Then he flops down and puts his head on Steve’s thigh. Steve pats at his head.
Bucky says, “Hey, so an old crone had to wait two hours just to get on a bus.”
Steve starts to say, “Yeah, what’d she do that you’re calling her—” but Bucky speaks over him.
“Bus after bus came by, but they were full-up with passengers, and she couldn’t squeeze herself in as well. When she finally managed to clamber aboard, she wiped her forehead and exclaimed, ‘Finally, Glory to God!’ But the driver said, ‘Mother, you must not say that. You must say, ‘Glory to comrade Stalin!’” He squirms, and a hairclip digs into Steve’s leg.
The other visible clips are thick, oblong curves. A tortoiseshell pattern, catching the gold tones hidden in Bucky’s hair. Two clasp at the base of each bun. Steve thumbs at one’s smooth surface.
Bucky coughs into his elbow. “Anyway, so the woman said, ‘Excuse me, comrade. I’m just a backwards old woman. From now on, I’ll say what you told me to.’ Then after a while, she continued, ‘Excuse me, comrade, I am old and stupid. What shall I say if, God forbid, Stalin dies?’ ‘Well,’ the driver said, ‘then you may say, 'Glory to God!'’” He laughs in a series of small puffs, his chest bouncing. “That was my favorite, at one point.”
“It was?”
“Yeah. I don’t know why. Or when exactly. I remember knowing I shouldn’t tell anyone. I think that. Uh.”
He rolls so it’s his forehead digging into Steve’s thigh. Steve used to think that he could read Bucky’s feelings just fine from his voice or the set of his shoulders, or even the back of his neck. He could guess from a handwritten note what Bucky’s face had looked like when he wrote it. How could he possibly now?
But the shift in position has revealed the pale rivulet of skin where Bucky’s hair parts and heads up into the two buns. It’s crooked. Steve touches him there, and Bucky whines: one clear note.
He goes on, “It was fine—sometimes, I mean—for me to think things were funny. But I could never tell what made it fine or wrong. So I never acted like I did, but sometimes someone would say, ‘See the soldier thinks I’m funny.’ Or something like that. And I’d be terrified, but nothing’d happen. But someone told me that joke. Told me directly, when we were alone. So he couldn’t say, ‘See the soldier thinks I’m funny,’ and no one else could say, ‘See, the soldier doesn’t think you’re funny.’”
“But you think you thought it was funny?”
“I know I thought it was hilarious. But no one got to say I felt one way or the other. So I acted like I didn’t think anything. And for all anyone knew, I didn’t.” He drags himself forward so his head is more or less buried in Steve’s crotch. There’s something chaste about it. He says into the open space between Steve’s folded legs, “You tell me something now.”
“What am I telling you now?”
“Tell me something you haven’t before.” He flips onto his back, a vulnerable turtle. Bumps the back of his skull against Steve’s farther thigh. He looks like Steve should be cradling his body, clutching his entirety; he’s glowing and rough-hewn and damp around the eyes. “This goes both ways, okay? Tell me something important. That was important.”
The makeup beneath his right eye has grown faint over the course of the day, or maybe rubbed off in his squirming. Deep, sweet shadow; beautiful, difficult man.
“Sam said he’s coming by to drop off a gift for you later.”
“That’s important. But you know what I mean.”
“Mmm.” He cups one of the knobs of hair in his palm. Springy and soft. “You know that I was. Well. Really lonely. For a while. After I woke up.”
“Stands to reason.”
“And I tried not to be. But in a lot of ways, that was worse. I kinda think I should have let myself lie dormant.”
“Do you?”
No reaching his hand out to Sam. No cracking jokes with Natasha. No making small talk with any diner waitresses or grocery store cashiers. No touch at all that wasn't pure violence besides being squeezed body-to-body with others on the subway with everyone doing their best to pretend to be alone.
“No. God, sorry. I didn’t do anything wrong,, and nothing really bad happened.”
“Hey, stop plagiarizing my memoirs!”
Steve laughs, and brushes his hair off his forehead; it's been getting long.
“Fuck. It’s my turn now, and I’ll plagiarize what I like, asshole. It wasn’t anything bad. I don’t think. But I did, well, have sex with a few people. A woman who recognized me in a bar. Two SHIELD agents. Natasha tried to set me up with one of them once, uh, after, and it was hell keeping a straight face.” He shrugs. “Nothing bad. But I felt lonelier after. Every time.”
Bucky stares up at him with his damp eyes. “You don’t have to say anything else.”
“I should. I pushed you.”
“That’s not the point. Besides. I just told you some shit you didn’t ask about. But see? It ain’t exactly easy.”
“I haven’t been asking because I think it’s easy.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He shuts his eyes and turns onto his side, facing Steve, moving closer so he’s practically curled catlike around him. “You’re asking because you think it matters. You think so many things matter.”
The doorbell startles them both awake.
In Steve’s dream, he was about to buy a very small grapefruit. Bucky’s drooled a small very small puddle on his thigh. There’s only a very small amount of light in the living room now, the sun snuffed out. His throat is dry, and Bucky’s crouched next to him, still and ominous in his all-black. They wait.
Then Bucky whispers in his ear, “What are we waiting for here?”
Steve says, “Um,” and his phone starts buzzing from under the couch, in the pattern assigned to—“Sam, right.” He tries to get up, but Bucky shoves him down, and his teeth glint.
“It’s my birthday gift. I get the door.”
“Oh, perfect. I’ll keep sitting here in the dark.”
The open door lets in a punch of cold air. Sam says, “Why do I feel like I’m the one getting a surprise party?”
“Surprise!” Steve yells. Kind of yells. Says loudly.
Sam screams—quietly, not worrying the neighbors—and makes a series of choking noises. “You’ve surprised me,” he hisses out, “to death.”
Bucky says, “Wow, I can’t believe Steve hired me the world’s most melodramatic stripper.” Sam laughs, and then Bucky says, softer, “Hey,” and there’s a pause, and then Sam hissing in pain. Bucky tsks at him. “What the hell kind of ugly-ass tin men are you fighting out there? I hope you have all your tetanus shots.”
“Hey, run-of-the-mill supervillain. You don’t watch the news? It’s gotten a lot more attractive since I showed up.”
“That’s Steve’s gig. I like daytime TV.”
“What, like Ellen?”
“No, like soaps. I love soaps.”
“Well, that’s some info I could have used before getting your present. I hope you like it even if it doesn’t have a secret twin who’s also its grandma plotting to steal its liver or anything.”
Steve calls to them, “You can come in, you know! You’re letting the cold in.”
Appearing in the living room doorway as Bucky smacks the door shut, Sam says, “Stewart Graham Roberts, put on a sweater if you’re cold. And what, you guys’re out of candles?”
“Candles?” Steve snorts. “Come on, Buck and I are men of the future. We use lanterns.” But he stands, groaning at the stiffness in his knees that’ll be gone in a minute, and flicks on the lamp. “See? These nifty electric lanterns.”
Sam is resplendent. Steve laughs at himself for thinking that, but he is, as always. Something ineffably good in his eyes and the set of his shoulders. Even in the cuts and scratches Bucky must have been touching and worrying over in the doorway. One neat set of stitches on his cheek, a protruding scab above his eyebrow. He’s wearing a leather jacket that's too big, and sunglasses perched on the top of his head. Under his arm, he’s got a package wrapped in festive, multicolored paper, ready to be thrown away.
Bucky says, “The soaps have got a lot of amnesiacs in ’em. I’m learning a lot about how to be myself.”
Steve and Sam embrace, competing to hug the air out of each other, and Sam is so warm, and he asks over Steve’s shoulder, “Oh yeah? Like what?”
Maybe Steve can’t see Bucky, but he can tell that he’s grinning when he says, “Fake it all and your dreams will come true. Right, former Miss America 1942?”
Steve digs his chin into Sam’s shoulder, the dry stiff leather and sturdy muscle of him. Sam almost-giggles. Steve closes his eyes and mutters, “Open your gift or I’ll open your face,” and the hug ends.
Lounging on the floor, Bucky unwraps a Rubik’s cube, a package of bright hair elastics, and a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. He folds the wrapping paper, neat from how he slit through the tape with a metal finger. He touches each gift with the same finger, with the same kind of wonder he had in his eyes when he was ten and a rabbit came right up to him and Steve in the park like it had no fear.
Sam, sitting close to Bucky with his back against the couch, says, “It’s completely possible that I sent your friends postcards asking what you wanted.”
“Were they signed from their worst nightmares?”
“Y’know, somehow I didn’t see that going over so well. Normal, anonymous postcards from a normal, anonymous benefactor.”
Bucky looks up, and he’s smiling the smallest amount and his hair is in his eyes. He aims a soft punch to Sam’s arm.
“Yeah, Happy Birthday, man. You’re what, thirteen now?”
“Fifteen, Wilson. It’s like there’s no love.” He whaps Sam’s knee with the book. “You want a beer?”
“I gotta drive back. And you know I don’t drink if there aren’t any games involved.”
“It’s non-alcoholic. And it’s so sweet that you drove all this way. Steve, isn’t he just the cutest, most courteous gentleman?”
Steve says, “That’s right. There’s no competition.”
Sam glares at both of them. “Ugh. That’s to that comment and the non-alcoholic beer. Who’s responsible for that?”
Bucky points at Steve. Steve points at Bucky, who is, in fact responsible for it, because Steve didn’t know they had non-alcoholic beer in the house until this moment.
Sam says, “Uh-huh. Sure. You have coffee?”
Steve returns to the living room balancing three mugs of coffee and feeling proud of himself for it. Sam is staring at the Keebler elves painting from an inch away, like maybe the Da Vinci code is buried inside its clumsy brushstrokes.
Once Sam’s left, Bucky lies back down on the floor with his gifts and his wrapping paper. Steve stretches out on the couch and watches him. The bend in one of his knees. The curls escaping his buns. His hands toying with the Rubik’s cube like assembling a gun—But this is Bucky as he never got to see him, unused to any weapons besides his fists and the occasional baseball bat, clutching a gun for the first time, clumsy and his eyes bright, dark slashes as he learned how to work something new.
The Bucky he found in Italy held his gun close to his body with passionate familiarity, and treated it like his body too. The motions of disassembling, cleaning, assembling, shooting all came off as dull and instinctive as taking a piss. And unless they were keeping a low profile, he always whistled his way through both. Now, he hums.
Steve wants to tell him that he lied when he said he didn’t do anything wrong. That he’s never checked to make sure those two SHIELD agents weren’t Hydra. That he was maybe even more in bed with Hydra than he thought, and he doesn’t even have the decency to verify one way or the other. He can’t tell him that, because Bucky will say, “Fuck, I knew you thought I was disgusting for fucking someone in Hydra,” or maybe that won’t even bother him. Maybe he already finds himself disgusting, and he would think Steve was disgusting too, and that would be fair.
He’s divided on whether he should be mad at himself for the mere existence of the possibility that those people were Hydra; he should definitely be mad at himself for acting like he deserves to remember those encounters the same either way. And he is mad, but it’s woven in with everything else he can be mad at himself about. And he listens to Bucky humming, and the clicking of the cube.
He says, “Why Dorian Gray?”
Bucky tilts his head to look at him. “You know why.”
“What, feeling self-conscious about how old you’re getting?”
Bucky laughs. “Sure. Please. You know why. Come on, honey.”
Steve opens his mouth, closes it again, opens it and says, “Uh.”
Bucky frowns and squints at him. “Huh. All right. Yeah, it’s the immortality thing. I like to think about it. What it means for us.” He looks away. He hums more loudly. He’s got one side of the cube all red, one side all blue. Stewart Graham Roberts goes to put on a sweater.