By the time they made it back down to their floor, Steve’s confidence was waning, like he was flying down a zip line and not sure how to safely land.
Bucky gently tossed him on the bed, reached for his belt, saw his face, and immediately stopped and sat back instead. “Hey,” he said gently. “I know you’re nervous. We don’t have to do this. No one has a gun to our heads. If you’re not ready, we can-”
Steve fisted a handful of bedclothes. “I want to.” He swallowed, skin alight, and held Bucky’s wary gaze. “I want you to fuck me.” A sudden thought occurred to him. “Unless… Do you not want to? I don’t think you ever explicitly said. I mean, I know, some guys are never comfortable with it and-”
“Steve.” Bucky was shaking his head.
Heart sinking, Steve stopped talking. Maybe Bucky wasn’t interested in that after all. He’d said he wanted to take Steve to bed, but that didn’t mean anything specific.
“Before,” said Bucky. “If we… I would have laid you out with your skinny legs over my shoulders and your bony ankles digging into my back - or maybe my neck. I would have put a hand-”
“-over my mouth so the neighbors didn’t catch on,” Steve finished breathlessly. The shape of the potential new horror had started to coalesce.
This time, Bucky looked away. “You were always so brave, even when you were hurt or sick or all but helpless sometimes. Stupid, but brave.”
Oh, God. Bucky.
“Sometimes, when they rewarded me by fucking me how I liked, I didn’t… It was so wrong. I didn’t imagine I was Bucky. I went away in my head. And I. I imagined I was you. You. Being fucked. By Bucky.” The sound Bucky made was not a laugh. “I imagined I was you being fucked by me.”
So that was it. It didn’t make anything better to understand, but he didn’t think it made it worse either. After everything, not making it worse counted for a lot.
But Bucky was continuing to speak, picking up speed and pitch, and not looking at Steve. His body was otherwise distressingly motionless. “I’m sorry. It was wrong. I don’t know if they ever knew. If they. If they would have punished me for it or found it amusing or conditioned me to think I was Captain America or what and I. It was sick. I shouldn’t have, but-”
“No,” said Steve, scrambling forward to grasp Bucky’s shoulders. He didn’t know how to feel about the revelation, other than not worse, but he knew what he had to say. “No. If it brought you any comfort or made any of it easier for you to bear, it wasn’t wrong. I’d never grudge you any of it. I’m glad you had that.”
To Steve’s clavicle, Bucky explained, “I told you. They never took you out of my head. Not all the way. Even when Steve Rogers was just a concept. I think I remember it from my training. I could control myself in pain. Feeling good was terrifying. I had no control, but I was punished for losing control. That position - too close, too intimate. I didn’t feel brave. I couldn’t imagine-” His voice cracked. “Bucky being brave. But the scrawny Brooklyn kid who never learned to stay down? I could imagine him being brave.” Slowly, his shoulders eased down. “I’m. I’m really fucked up, Steve. I don’t know if I’ll ever have my head on right. I don’t know a lot. Some of what I know is probably just my imagination.” He glanced up just long enough to make momentary eye contact before dropping his whole head to Steve’s shoulder.
Automatically, Steve pulled him into his lap and wrapped his arms around him. After working his jaw silently for maybe half a minute, Steve said, “I think I hear what you’re not saying, and you’re wrong. You’re not a disappointment and I’m not gonna get upset if you don’t think of yourself as Bucky all the time. I told you. I’m with you to the end of the line, Soldier.”
The other supersoldier’s body shuddered slightly.
“We were reunited under the worst of circumstances. I used you. You still tried to protect and warn me. And I don’t fault you for protecting yourself, no matter what. You were protecting someone I love.”
“Stevie.” It was a nearly-inaudible rasp.
Steve’s shirt was growing damp. He smelled salt.
“I’m with you,” Steve repeated softly. “I love you. You’re my partner.”
They sat together quietly until Bucky sniffed and pulled away to scrub at his face with the back of his right hand. “I think I want a shower, but.”
But.
“I can stay here. You can take a bath. Whatever you want,” Steve promised.
“I don’t want to be alone,” Bucky said immediately. “You said no baths together. Naked canoodling.”
“Naked canoodling in the bath is fine with me now if it’s fine with you,” said Steve, chagrined he hadn’t made that clear before. “We can even make it a bubble bath.”
“Okay,” Bucky agreed.
It didn’t take long to prepare the bath and it was still relatively early in the day, so it wasn’t like they had much more to do than wash their faces and soak in the heat.
“Steve?” Bucky murmured. He tapped a foot against Steve’s side.
Startled from a half-doze, Steve sat up.
“I know I kinda derailed the conversation earlier,” Bucky said, “but I was tryna tell you that I wanted it too. It’s just that I can’t see it happening from that perspective. My mind shies away from it when I try. I want to, though. We can make it good for both of us. Just some work. I don’t want to hurt you or freak you out.”
“Right,” said Steve, doing his best to re-focus. “Hey. Since we’re already in the water and all, do you maybe want to…”
He trailed off at Bucky’s expression.
“Water’s not a good lubricant,” Bucky said.
Steve frowned. He’d seen Bucky open himself up. The sight had haunted him after the Lockbox. “But-”
“Used to discomfort and my left hand has no fingernails. Plus, my ass was trained.”
“I can-”
Water sloshed violently as Bucky crossed his arms. “Maybe I don’t want you to, Steve. I don’t want it to be anything but good for you.” He winced. “It probably won’t be very good the first time. I can teach you how to bottom, but I don’t know how the rest goes. Not really.”
There had to be better than they knew from HYDRA. He considered asking JARVIS for educational resources and instantly discarded the idea as beyond the bounds of decency.
“You don’t even know what I was gonna say I can do,” objected Steve, but only because he couldn’t not argue.
“I mostly fingered myself to make sure I was clean enough for Rumlow,” Bucky stated flatly. “And you, later on. No different from washing out my hair. STI’s weren’t a consideration, so he never minded too much if I bled a little. If I didn’t wear the plug on the mission, maybe I’d do some brief maintenance stretching to make sure my rim didn’t immediately tear if someone got impatient, but water’s not the best for it. That’s why lube was included in my standard kit.”
Whatever face Steve was making only made Bucky laugh.
“Relax, Steve. It’s not like that now. You said it: we can take our time getting ready.”
Steve was working on it. “Okay, Buck. You’re in charge.”
“Damn right, I am.”
Bucky’s PR manager asked if they could make another video, one in which Bucky explicitly identified himself as Bucky Barnes.
“No,” said Bucky, though his eyes went to Steve with wariness. “That’s what I want to say and how I want to say it. Steve calls me Bucky plenty.”
On their way out, Steve said, “You are Bucky.”
Bucky nodded. “Yeah, but you can call me the other names too. Remind me. I can be the asset too because I’m really both.”
“We’re real, Soldier,” Steve promised. “I’m not about to feed you lines.”
“How ‘bout feeding me lunch?”
“That, I can and will do.”
That evening, Bucky came back from a therapy appointment with handful of printed pages and a completely blank face. His left hand was clutching the rolled top of a brown paper lunch bag with so much force his fingertips had punched through.
Relieved to have a reason to abandon the book he had been failing to read the first few pages of for the last hour, Steve set it aside and waited.
There was a bench in the middle of the row of windows on the far end of the floor. Steve wasn’t surprised when Bucky sat down there, back to the windows, and commenced staring into the middle distance.
“Buck?” Steve prompted quietly.
Bucky barely glanced at him. Neither of his hands showed any sign of releasing their burdens.
Cracking his neck as he rose, Steve studied him. Bucky wanted something; his behavior all but screamed for a response. Steve took a step toward him, then two. No reaction. Another. Steve was almost in reach of him before Bucky said, “Stop.”
Freezing in place, Steve waited again.
“I’m supposed to ask questions if I have them,” Bucky told him, still staring into space. His words were the steady cadence of the asset reporting. “I asked. I was given these.” He lifted the papers in his right hand. “And these.” He lifted his the bag in his left. “I don’t know if I can do it, Steve.” Finally, he met Steve’s eyes. “But I don’t think it’s gonna be any easier tomorrow, so maybe we should go for it.” His lips twisted. “Maybe you could order me to do it.”
“Buck,” Steve started to protest.
Bucky shook his head. “Or, I have another idea, but I don’t think you’ll go for that one. I didn’t. I didn’t seriously plan to keep it to use.”
Steve lowered himself to his knees in front of Bucky, careful to keep his eyes on his face instead of looking at what he was holding. “I’m never ordering you to perform any sex act ever again.”
“Permission, then,” Bucky snarled, flushing abruptly. “Or we take all inhibitions off the table like… like…” He deflated. “Don’t look at me like that, Steve. I know. Just… I hate feeling like we have to wait for the goddamn stars to align or something. Sex should be fun, not…” He dropped his head with a sigh and thrust his fistful of papers out. “Here.”
The papers appeared to be a printout of an internet article about safe gay sex. At a glance, most of it didn’t seem relevant. VD, or STI as it was now called, was not a concern for two supersoldiers. “Do I want to know what’s in the bag?” he ventured.
The bag was promptly shoved in his face. “Nothing HYDRA usually bothered with. I guess anyone authorized for my secondary fuck-tion was screened?”
Did he just? Steve blinked. Was that a pun? He looked in the bag and poured a handful of small packets out onto the floor between them. “I don’t know most of these brands, but I take it these are all…”
“Condoms,” Bucky confirmed darkly. “Fucking condoms. Like we need anything else coming between us. And, get this, we’re supposed to have fun experimenting. I thought the point was for me to be less triggered!”
Taken off-guard, Steve let out a burst of air almost like a giggle. Bucky gaped at him.
In surrender, Steve put his hands up and tried to keep his trembling lips sealed.
Scowling, Bucky aimed a half-serious kick at his thigh.
Instinctively, Steve caught his ankle. As his brain caught up with his body, he yanked hard and pulled Bucky out of his seat.
“You punk!” Bucky yelped, and then they were scrambling to pin each other, words done.
“You realize I’m only letting you think you’re letting me pin you,” panted Bucky, some minutes later.
Face in the carpet, Steve grunted something Bucky could interpret however he wished.
“What was that?” He let up so Steve could raise his head.
“We gotta get out of this tower,” Steve told him. “Change of scenery.”
“And get eaten alive? No thanks,” countered Bucky.
But Steve was already wriggling his way free, fueled by a grimly cheerful determination. “C’mon. We’ll be fine. All we have to do is make a reservation someplace they can’t approach us and take a car there. Like a pair of regular swells.”
With a heavy sigh, Bucky rolled off and sprawled on his back on the floor, right hand over his eyes. “This ain’t abouta fix our problem, Steve.”
“It’s not a mission, Buck. We have no orders-”
“Our PR team was pretty fucking clear on our orders-”
Steve ignored that. “-and we’re gonna start chewing the walls if we don’t get out to stretch our legs.”
“Jesus Christ.” Bucky groaned. “No.”
The papers were in crumpled shreds and they would probably be finding condoms under furniture for months, but Steve could only grin. He’d never get tired of hearing Bucky argue.
They didn’t get caught. JARVIS’ silence upon their return felt disapproving, but the headiness of the shared disobedience was such that once they were through their own door they barely had to make eye contact to know the other was on board. Bucky, already half-naked, pushed Steve against the wall and finished helping him out of his clothes just enough to get a hand between them. They didn’t go any farther, and neither of them pushed for more.
Long after they went to bed, Steve lay awake while Bucky slept the relieved and exhausted sleep of the justifiably paranoid. Eventually, Steve considered getting up and attempting to sleep somewhere else. He got up and went to sit on the couch, but he didn’t feel tired enough to lie down. Instead, he went back into their bedroom and took the lube from the bedside table. Bucky fucking him wasn’t a mission, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t approach it strategically.
Fill 110g/110h: Undeniable Plausibility - On to the aftermath!
By the time they made it back down to their floor, Steve’s confidence was waning, like he was flying down a zip line and not sure how to safely land.
Bucky gently tossed him on the bed, reached for his belt, saw his face, and immediately stopped and sat back instead. “Hey,” he said gently. “I know you’re nervous. We don’t have to do this. No one has a gun to our heads. If you’re not ready, we can-”
Steve fisted a handful of bedclothes. “I want to.” He swallowed, skin alight, and held Bucky’s wary gaze. “I want you to fuck me.” A sudden thought occurred to him. “Unless… Do you not want to? I don’t think you ever explicitly said. I mean, I know, some guys are never comfortable with it and-”
“Steve.” Bucky was shaking his head.
Heart sinking, Steve stopped talking. Maybe Bucky wasn’t interested in that after all. He’d said he wanted to take Steve to bed, but that didn’t mean anything specific.
“Before,” said Bucky. “If we… I would have laid you out with your skinny legs over my shoulders and your bony ankles digging into my back - or maybe my neck. I would have put a hand-”
“-over my mouth so the neighbors didn’t catch on,” Steve finished breathlessly. The shape of the potential new horror had started to coalesce.
This time, Bucky looked away. “You were always so brave, even when you were hurt or sick or all but helpless sometimes. Stupid, but brave.”
Oh, God. Bucky.
“Sometimes, when they rewarded me by fucking me how I liked, I didn’t… It was so wrong. I didn’t imagine I was Bucky. I went away in my head. And I. I imagined I was you. You. Being fucked. By Bucky.” The sound Bucky made was not a laugh. “I imagined I was you being fucked by me.”
So that was it. It didn’t make anything better to understand, but he didn’t think it made it worse either. After everything, not making it worse counted for a lot.
But Bucky was continuing to speak, picking up speed and pitch, and not looking at Steve. His body was otherwise distressingly motionless. “I’m sorry. It was wrong. I don’t know if they ever knew. If they. If they would have punished me for it or found it amusing or conditioned me to think I was Captain America or what and I. It was sick. I shouldn’t have, but-”
“No,” said Steve, scrambling forward to grasp Bucky’s shoulders. He didn’t know how to feel about the revelation, other than not worse, but he knew what he had to say. “No. If it brought you any comfort or made any of it easier for you to bear, it wasn’t wrong. I’d never grudge you any of it. I’m glad you had that.”
To Steve’s clavicle, Bucky explained, “I told you. They never took you out of my head. Not all the way. Even when Steve Rogers was just a concept. I think I remember it from my training. I could control myself in pain. Feeling good was terrifying. I had no control, but I was punished for losing control. That position - too close, too intimate. I didn’t feel brave. I couldn’t imagine-” His voice cracked. “Bucky being brave. But the scrawny Brooklyn kid who never learned to stay down? I could imagine him being brave.” Slowly, his shoulders eased down. “I’m. I’m really fucked up, Steve. I don’t know if I’ll ever have my head on right. I don’t know a lot. Some of what I know is probably just my imagination.” He glanced up just long enough to make momentary eye contact before dropping his whole head to Steve’s shoulder.
Automatically, Steve pulled him into his lap and wrapped his arms around him. After working his jaw silently for maybe half a minute, Steve said, “I think I hear what you’re not saying, and you’re wrong. You’re not a disappointment and I’m not gonna get upset if you don’t think of yourself as Bucky all the time. I told you. I’m with you to the end of the line, Soldier.”
The other supersoldier’s body shuddered slightly.
“We were reunited under the worst of circumstances. I used you. You still tried to protect and warn me. And I don’t fault you for protecting yourself, no matter what. You were protecting someone I love.”
“Stevie.” It was a nearly-inaudible rasp.
Steve’s shirt was growing damp. He smelled salt.
“I’m with you,” Steve repeated softly. “I love you. You’re my partner.”
They sat together quietly until Bucky sniffed and pulled away to scrub at his face with the back of his right hand. “I think I want a shower, but.”
But.
“I can stay here. You can take a bath. Whatever you want,” Steve promised.
“I don’t want to be alone,” Bucky said immediately. “You said no baths together. Naked canoodling.”
“Naked canoodling in the bath is fine with me now if it’s fine with you,” said Steve, chagrined he hadn’t made that clear before. “We can even make it a bubble bath.”
“Okay,” Bucky agreed.
It didn’t take long to prepare the bath and it was still relatively early in the day, so it wasn’t like they had much more to do than wash their faces and soak in the heat.
“Steve?” Bucky murmured. He tapped a foot against Steve’s side.
Startled from a half-doze, Steve sat up.
“I know I kinda derailed the conversation earlier,” Bucky said, “but I was tryna tell you that I wanted it too. It’s just that I can’t see it happening from that perspective. My mind shies away from it when I try. I want to, though. We can make it good for both of us. Just some work. I don’t want to hurt you or freak you out.”
“Right,” said Steve, doing his best to re-focus. “Hey. Since we’re already in the water and all, do you maybe want to…”
He trailed off at Bucky’s expression.
“Water’s not a good lubricant,” Bucky said.
Steve frowned. He’d seen Bucky open himself up. The sight had haunted him after the Lockbox. “But-”
“Used to discomfort and my left hand has no fingernails. Plus, my ass was trained.”
“I can-”
Water sloshed violently as Bucky crossed his arms. “Maybe I don’t want you to, Steve. I don’t want it to be anything but good for you.” He winced. “It probably won’t be very good the first time. I can teach you how to bottom, but I don’t know how the rest goes. Not really.”
There had to be better than they knew from HYDRA. He considered asking JARVIS for educational resources and instantly discarded the idea as beyond the bounds of decency.
“You don’t even know what I was gonna say I can do,” objected Steve, but only because he couldn’t not argue.
“I mostly fingered myself to make sure I was clean enough for Rumlow,” Bucky stated flatly. “And you, later on. No different from washing out my hair. STI’s weren’t a consideration, so he never minded too much if I bled a little. If I didn’t wear the plug on the mission, maybe I’d do some brief maintenance stretching to make sure my rim didn’t immediately tear if someone got impatient, but water’s not the best for it. That’s why lube was included in my standard kit.”
Whatever face Steve was making only made Bucky laugh.
“Relax, Steve. It’s not like that now. You said it: we can take our time getting ready.”
Steve was working on it. “Okay, Buck. You’re in charge.”
“Damn right, I am.”
Bucky’s PR manager asked if they could make another video, one in which Bucky explicitly identified himself as Bucky Barnes.
“No,” said Bucky, though his eyes went to Steve with wariness. “That’s what I want to say and how I want to say it. Steve calls me Bucky plenty.”
On their way out, Steve said, “You are Bucky.”
Bucky nodded. “Yeah, but you can call me the other names too. Remind me. I can be the asset too because I’m really both.”
“We’re real, Soldier,” Steve promised. “I’m not about to feed you lines.”
“How ‘bout feeding me lunch?”
“That, I can and will do.”
That evening, Bucky came back from a therapy appointment with handful of printed pages and a completely blank face. His left hand was clutching the rolled top of a brown paper lunch bag with so much force his fingertips had punched through.
Relieved to have a reason to abandon the book he had been failing to read the first few pages of for the last hour, Steve set it aside and waited.
There was a bench in the middle of the row of windows on the far end of the floor. Steve wasn’t surprised when Bucky sat down there, back to the windows, and commenced staring into the middle distance.
“Buck?” Steve prompted quietly.
Bucky barely glanced at him. Neither of his hands showed any sign of releasing their burdens.
Cracking his neck as he rose, Steve studied him. Bucky wanted something; his behavior all but screamed for a response. Steve took a step toward him, then two. No reaction. Another. Steve was almost in reach of him before Bucky said, “Stop.”
Freezing in place, Steve waited again.
“I’m supposed to ask questions if I have them,” Bucky told him, still staring into space. His words were the steady cadence of the asset reporting. “I asked. I was given these.” He lifted the papers in his right hand. “And these.” He lifted his the bag in his left. “I don’t know if I can do it, Steve.” Finally, he met Steve’s eyes. “But I don’t think it’s gonna be any easier tomorrow, so maybe we should go for it.” His lips twisted. “Maybe you could order me to do it.”
“Buck,” Steve started to protest.
Bucky shook his head. “Or, I have another idea, but I don’t think you’ll go for that one. I didn’t. I didn’t seriously plan to keep it to use.”
Steve lowered himself to his knees in front of Bucky, careful to keep his eyes on his face instead of looking at what he was holding. “I’m never ordering you to perform any sex act ever again.”
“Permission, then,” Bucky snarled, flushing abruptly. “Or we take all inhibitions off the table like… like…” He deflated. “Don’t look at me like that, Steve. I know. Just… I hate feeling like we have to wait for the goddamn stars to align or something. Sex should be fun, not…” He dropped his head with a sigh and thrust his fistful of papers out. “Here.”
The papers appeared to be a printout of an internet article about safe gay sex. At a glance, most of it didn’t seem relevant. VD, or STI as it was now called, was not a concern for two supersoldiers. “Do I want to know what’s in the bag?” he ventured.
The bag was promptly shoved in his face. “Nothing HYDRA usually bothered with. I guess anyone authorized for my secondary fuck-tion was screened?”
Did he just? Steve blinked. Was that a pun? He looked in the bag and poured a handful of small packets out onto the floor between them. “I don’t know most of these brands, but I take it these are all…”
“Condoms,” Bucky confirmed darkly. “Fucking condoms. Like we need anything else coming between us. And, get this, we’re supposed to have fun experimenting. I thought the point was for me to be less triggered!”
Taken off-guard, Steve let out a burst of air almost like a giggle. Bucky gaped at him.
In surrender, Steve put his hands up and tried to keep his trembling lips sealed.
Scowling, Bucky aimed a half-serious kick at his thigh.
Instinctively, Steve caught his ankle. As his brain caught up with his body, he yanked hard and pulled Bucky out of his seat.
“You punk!” Bucky yelped, and then they were scrambling to pin each other, words done.
“You realize I’m only letting you think you’re letting me pin you,” panted Bucky, some minutes later.
Face in the carpet, Steve grunted something Bucky could interpret however he wished.
“What was that?” He let up so Steve could raise his head.
“We gotta get out of this tower,” Steve told him. “Change of scenery.”
“And get eaten alive? No thanks,” countered Bucky.
But Steve was already wriggling his way free, fueled by a grimly cheerful determination. “C’mon. We’ll be fine. All we have to do is make a reservation someplace they can’t approach us and take a car there. Like a pair of regular swells.”
With a heavy sigh, Bucky rolled off and sprawled on his back on the floor, right hand over his eyes. “This ain’t abouta fix our problem, Steve.”
“It’s not a mission, Buck. We have no orders-”
“Our PR team was pretty fucking clear on our orders-”
Steve ignored that. “-and we’re gonna start chewing the walls if we don’t get out to stretch our legs.”
“Jesus Christ.” Bucky groaned. “No.”
The papers were in crumpled shreds and they would probably be finding condoms under furniture for months, but Steve could only grin. He’d never get tired of hearing Bucky argue.
They didn’t get caught. JARVIS’ silence upon their return felt disapproving, but the headiness of the shared disobedience was such that once they were through their own door they barely had to make eye contact to know the other was on board. Bucky, already half-naked, pushed Steve against the wall and finished helping him out of his clothes just enough to get a hand between them. They didn’t go any farther, and neither of them pushed for more.
Long after they went to bed, Steve lay awake while Bucky slept the relieved and exhausted sleep of the justifiably paranoid. Eventually, Steve considered getting up and attempting to sleep somewhere else. He got up and went to sit on the couch, but he didn’t feel tired enough to lie down. Instead, he went back into their bedroom and took the lube from the bedside table. Bucky fucking him wasn’t a mission, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t approach it strategically.