Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Bucky,” a voice says, and the asset’s spine prickles all the way up like there are needles in it, small and strange and blossoming out sharp.

“You know me,” he says mechanically.

“‘Course I know you,” the voice answers warily. The asset turns towards it, because it is the voice and what else can he do?

He’s not the asset. Not really.

It’s so much easier to be the asset.

“Bucky,” the voice says again, and a hand touches the asset’s face. The asset goes with it, lets it tilt his head down for inspection, and Steve Rogers stares up at him, fragile and skinny as hell and twenty years old if he’s a day. The asset would’ve estimated younger, but there’s a scar on his jaw that he didn’t get until the tail end of nineteen and he lost that jacket the spring before twenty-one; twenty’s the safest bet, statistically.

“I thought you were bigger,” the asset says, head half-lolling on his neck and tone entirely humorless.

“I think I’m gonna have to hurt some people,” Steve Rogers says, voice tight with rage. The asset assumes that will be him, then laughs at himself for the thought.

He’s not people.

Steve Rogers grips the asset’s arm and pulls, and the asset follows. The asset would follow Steve Rogers barefoot over barbed wire, guiltless over the bodies of the fallen, across the slopes of Hell on broken legs; following him at arm’s length is nothing.

“You know me,” he says. “I know you.”

“No shit. Keep walkin’,” Steve Rogers orders, and the asset smiles beatifically and obeys his orders.

He was right. It is so much easier.

Steve Rogers pulls him off the street and takes him to a tenement apartment that the asset does not remember and could find his way around blind. Steve Rogers fills the bath and makes him strip out of his clothes, and only stares a little at the armor underneath them. Then he makes him strip out of that, too, and doesn’t stare at the arm at all.

“Get in the bath,” he says with his eyes on the floor, tight-shouldered and white-lipped. The asset does. Steve Rogers runs it lukewarm and pours hot water from the stove over his head and it is almost, almost like being warm. And if he cried with his face all wet like this it wouldn’t show--not that it matters, obviously, because the asset doesn’t cry, that is weakness and mission-compromising and a concept completely foreign to him.

But if he did.

Steve Rogers pours water over the asset’s head again and he bursts into tears.

“Bucky, hey, Buck, I’m here, it’s me, it’s okay,” Steve Rogers says roughly, leaning against the side of the tub and grabbing him in close. The asset buries his face in hard against that skinny, concave stomach, soaks through the white shirt and the undershirt underneath it and fists his human hand hard in the back of them. “It’s all right, Barnes, I got you. I ain’t going nowhere, you’re fine. I got you.”

“I’m so sorry,” the asset chokes, and Steve Rogers just tightens his grip on him, his bony fingers all bunched up in the asset’s hair and digging in between his mismatched shoulder blades.

“Bucky,” he says again, and the asset sobs harder. And harder. Until it hurts.

Steve Rogers lets him cry until he can’t anymore, until he’s close to numb with it, and then scrubs him down with a harsh soap and rough cloth and the gentlest hands the asset has ever felt, although really they are not gentle at all.

Not gentle--but not trying to hurt him, either.

He finds it in him to cry a little more, and Steve Rogers puts a hand under his chin and tips his head back with a straight razor in his hand. The asset waits for his throat to be slit, and Steve Rogers does not slit the asset’s throat. He drags the razor over the thin skin in neat, even lines and only nicks him twice. It is the best and worst feeling in the world and so much more than the asset was prepared to handle. Has ever been prepared to handle.

Steve Rogers washes off the soap and lather and touches his raw and naked face and it is terrible and dangerous and everything the asset has ever wanted, everything the asset would sooner eat a bullet than ever experience again.

“Bucky,” Steve Rogers says, quiet and even. “Tell me who did it.”

Never, the asset thinks, looking up at a man he knows would smash himself to pieces trying to make right things that never can be. That never could’ve been.

It might be the only direct order he’s ever ignored, except for how it’s only one of a thousand, ten thousand, ten times ten thousand. It feels good, and it hurts, and it makes something inside him feel like broken glass, but also maybe like it should be broken.

“Don’t ask me,” the asset says, and Steve Rogers's face twists up.

“You--”

“Don’t ask me,” the asset says, and doesn’t know what his face looks like but knows what it makes Steve Rogers's face look like in return.

“Yeah. Okay,” Steve Rogers says, still holding the wet razor and wearing an expression like he wants to stick it in somebody, even though there are much more efficient ways to kill somebody with a razor. The asset thinks it’ll be himself, and then laughs again because why does he keep thinking things like that--as if he were somebody.

Steve Rogers looks wrecked by that laugh, and the asset wonders why.

“C’mere,” Steve Rogers says, setting the razor aside and tugging at the asset’s shoulder, touching the metal like he doesn’t even notice the difference. But that’s not true, the asset thinks, staring searchingly at him; there is no possible way that could be true. He follows the tugging, though, and Steve Rogers guides him out of the tub and dries him off with a threadbare towel. It occurs to the asset, belatedly, that Steve Rogers touches him easily, without restraint--like it’s not unfamiliar.

He has a metal arm and twice the muscle James Buchanan Barnes did even as an active soldier and terrible scars and isn’t the sleek and clean boy who at twenty-one never went anywhere but to work or a dance hall or the occasional art class and--and--and maybe Captain America could see shades of his wartime sniper in the asset, maybe that was not too much to expect, but this . . .

“You know me,” the asset says, more disbelieving than he’s ever been. “You recognize me.”

“Yes,” Steve Rogers says, and that’s all he says. Like it’s just that simple.

The asset starts crying again. Steve Rogers guides him to the kitchen table and sits him down and runs a comb through his hair in a way that makes it clear he’s never had his own longer than his ears, but the asset doesn’t care about the knotting or the yanking if it means Steve Rogers is going to be touching him.

Steve Rogers works the comb through the asset’s hair so hard that it makes his eyes water even more, or that would be a good excuse for still crying, anyway. When he’s done the asset’s hair hangs limp and straight and clean and smells like soap, and Steve Rogers's fingers pull through it smooth and easy.

“I missed you,” the asset says hoarsely. “I missed you so much.”

“You don’t have to miss me, Buck,” Steve Rogers says, touching the asset’s face with his fingers, and he’s right and he’s wrong, and the asset blinks fast so the tears won’t . . . just won’t.

“I miss you all the time,” he says.

There’s something he wants. There’s something he wants, but he doesn’t remember.

“I’m here. I got you,” Steve Rogers says, touching the asset’s face again and making the freshly-shaved skin feel sensitive and exposed. Cradling his jaw, almost, and not asking questions. Not doubting him for a moment.

The asset wishes Bucky Barnes were here. He’d be twenty-one right now, which is the only thing the asset knows about him, and only because he knows Bucky Barnes is a year older than Steve Rogers who is twenty years old if he’s a day. But he would know what the asset wants, and he could show him how to get it.

He knows he wants Steve Rogers to have him, at least. That . . . that is something he is very, very sure of.

“You got me,” the asset repeats. “You have me. I’m yours.” And he is. He is Steve Rogers's weapon, Steve Rogers's asset, Steve Rogers's sharp knife and sniper rifle; he would kill anything or anyone on Steve Rogers's word and he would do it with absolute certainty and not a heartbeat’s hesitation. He would drag that razor across his own throat right now if Steve Rogers told him it was the right thing to do.

“‘Course you’re mine, sweetheart,” Steve Rogers says, and presses a kiss to his forehead.

The asset goes very still. Steve Rogers leans back, and the asset’s mouth makes a hurt little noise he did not mean to let it make. It makes Steve Rogers's face crumple, which is the worst possible result, but it also makes Steve Rogers wrap his arms around him again, which is the best. The asset can’t find an equilibrium to categorize between the two occurrences, and so can’t tell if he’s done right or wrong.

He buries his face in that soaked shirt again and holds onto the back of it, pretending that he is trying to control his breathing. Pretending that he does not need to breathe at all: he is a weapon, a knife, a gun, the scope and trigger and maybe the watching eye but not the squeezing finger.

But a weapon would not have Steve Rogers's arms around it.

But a weapon would, the asset remembers a moment later, remembering the shield and long-lost guns but mostly the shield, bright and shining and pure and purely destructive. The shield that Steve Rogers dropped like it was useless the moment he wanted the asset for his weapon instead. The asset is a weapon that Steve Rogers would throw away any other weapon for, the asset is that valuable to Steve Rogers that he would throw away any other weapon, even the one and only one he thought was worth keeping through war and ice and every other thing.

The asset lets himself have that thought for a long, long time as Steve Rogers puts him away, lays him back on the bed and wraps him up carefully--to prevent damage, to preserve body heat, the asset can’t quite tell which. Steve Rogers touches his face again, smooths a hand back through his hair, and the asset lets himself go heavy and inoperative under the contact, body sinking into the bed.

Steve Rogers gets up and puts out the light and disappears into the kitchen, and the asset stays still and quiet and listens to his soft, wheezy breathing and the irregular heartbeat his enhanced hearing can just barely pick out. He does not sleep, but he recognizes that he has been put away and so does not move or speak either. Steve Rogers will come back for him when he needs him--when he wants him--and he doesn’t mind the wait.

Steve Rogers will always come back for him, he has learned.

Steve Rogers moves quietly around his half-lit kitchen and then sits down at his small kitchen table with the soft skritch-skritch-skritch noises of pencil on paper and the asset does not sleep, just lies there and listens until everything around him is dim and distant and he does not have to think about anything else. He is Steve Rogers's weapon and Steve Rogers takes care of his weapons, keeps them clean and in good repair and carries them close to his heart, and he is Steve Rogers's most important weapon.

And Steve Rogers does not need him to fight right now. Steve Rogers has laid down his weapon in the dark and the quiet and is in his kitchen making soft skritch-skritch-skritch noises with pencil and paper and is at peace.

The asset still isn’t sure exactly what he wants, but with how this feels, it must be at least part of it.

He loses track of time, eventually, and it is one of the most indulgent and luxurious things he can ever remember experiencing, even more than Steve Rogers's hands on him although maybe not as much as his arms around him. But close, he thinks. Very close.

“Hey,” Steve Rogers murmurs, and the asset opens his eyes. He doesn’t remember closing them, really, but it doesn’t matter anyway because Steve Rogers put him away and then came back for him, and nothing else could possibly matter compared to that. Steve Rogers sits on the edge of the bed and holds out a mug, and the asset realizes belatedly it is for him, but not in time to prevent Steve Rogers from misunderstanding his hesitation and holding it to his mouth instead.

The asset drinks, because of course the asset drinks. It’s broth, thin and nearly flavorless and the best thing he has ever tasted. Steve Rogers makes him drink it all and then goes back for more, and the asset swallows every drop.

It makes him feel warm inside.

He’d forgotten he could do that.

“Anything else I can get you?” Steve Rogers asks quietly after the third cup, brushing the asset’s hair back off his forehead, his small cool fingers grazing skin and nothing like the asset remembers, and exactly like the asset remembers.

“Kiss me,” he says as he thinks of the other’s lips against his forehead like before, knowing it’s greedy but not caring. Steve Rogers does not care when he is greedy, so why should he?

Steve Rogers ducks his head and kisses him, and the asset goes still again under the light press of his lips against--not against his forehead.

“Better?” Steve Rogers asks, leaning back with a sad, barely-there smile.

“Again,” the asset says instantly, catching his arm without even meaning to. Steve Rogers's sad smile gets just a little less so, and he leans back in. This time the asset is prepared, and does not white out completely when their mouths touch. He does not kiss back, either, but at least this time he can say he really feels it.

“Shove over,” Steve Rogers says, and the asset obeys immediately. Steve Rogers crawls into the bed with him and doesn’t push him out, and something electric spikes up the asset’s spine, something hot twists in his gut, something warm clenches in his chest. He is unarmed and unarmored and Steve Rogers wants him close enough to fight beside, to deploy, to use, to--

Steve Rogers draws the blankets up over their heads and kisses the asset’s mouth again, and the asset goes weak and warm and leans into it. He kisses back and is fairly sure he’s not doing it quite right, but Steve Rogers doesn’t complain, just puts a hand on his wreck of a shoulder without flinching and kisses him more.

It feels so good.

“I’m yours,” the asset murmurs, heavy and easy and never wanting to go anywhere else again but this small warm space, wanting to be assured of it. To promise it. “You know me and I’m yours.”

“I love you,” Steve Rogers says, and it is so much stronger than just electric.

“You love me,” the asset repeats, nearly choking on it, and buries his face against the other’s shoulder. Steve Rogers wraps an arm around him and drags a hand through his hair and the asset grabs the back of his still-damp shirt again, knowing that’s something he can grip as hard as he needs to without damaging it. Without damaging Steve. Steve who loves him.

Steve Rogers loves him.

There’s really nothing else to say about that.

“Again,” the asset demands anyway, and Steve Rogers drags his hand through his hair harder and pushes a hand down his back.

“I love you,” he says. It’s too much to cry over, but the asset almost does anyway. He lifts his head and pushes his mouth against Steve Rogers's clumsily and Steve Rogers kisses him not clumsily at all, the fingers on his back and in his hair clutching him tight.

“You love me,” the asset repeats, mumbles between their mouths, and Steve Rogers kisses him harder and swallows those words like they belong in his mouth, like they would never not be there, like he wants them to be there. The asset’s hand fists against the small of Steve Rogers's back and he twists his other arm behind himself before it does something unforgivable. The plates and mechanisms whir and compress and decompress, but it stays where the asset puts it even when Steve Rogers takes his bottom lip between his teeth and very gently bites down.

You love me, the asset doesn’t say again, because Steve Rogers's hands are already saying it anyway, his bony fingertips digging in and dragging hard enough to hurt against the asset’s scalp and spine. He does not doubt it, not even for a moment--if anyone could love a weapon and still understand it was a weapon, it would be Steve Rogers.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” Steve Rogers murmurs over and over between biting kisses and scratching fingers, and the asset melts, and burns. He kisses back, bites back, and Steve Rogers makes breathy heated sounds and strokes his hair and neck and mangled shoulders, and the asset keeps the metal arm behind his back and pushes the flesh-and-bone one up Steve Rogers's crooked spine. They kiss. They kiss more.

The asset has never felt this warm. Warmer than three cups of hot broth made him, warmer than Steve Rogers's arms around him, than being surrounded by raging open flame while sick with adrenaline and terror and screaming for--for something. Someone, the asset can only assume, because he cannot place the memory but he cannot imagine screaming for anything but Steve Rogers.

“Yeah,” he sighs senselessly, shifting closer and then suddenly becoming sharply aware of his erection in the same moment he accidentally pushes it into the other’s thigh. He freezes in instinctive . . . something, some half-aborted instinct or uncertainty, and Steve Rogers sighs sweetly against his neck and drops a hand between them to wrap around his cock. The asset chokes in surprise, the metal hand twisting up hard in the sheets behind him and his dick jerking needily, and Steve Rogers strokes him once and twice and--and--

The asset whimpers, and comes, and buries his face in Steve Rogers's shoulder in an attempt to suppress the tears spilling wetly down his cheeks.

“You needed that, huh,” Steve Rogers murmurs against the asset’s temple, voice low. He doesn’t take his hand off the asset’s cock, just keeps his fingers wrapped loose around it as it softens against his palm, and the asset can’t figure out his own head enough to tell if he should be embarrassed or apologize or . . . or something.

Steve Rogers did that like it was easy, like it was natural, like it was the expected thing to do, and some part of the asset almost, almost remembers when it might’ve been. And he forgets how this works but he remembers how to want it, now, something in him gone shaken and strange and starving.

“S-Steve,” the asset manages, voice strangled, and Steve Rogers kisses his temple and touches the back of his neck with his free hand.

“Hey,” he says quietly. “It’s all right, I’m here. What else do you need?”

“Steve,” the asset repeats, mostly a keen, because what the hell else would he need? He wraps his flesh-and-bone arm around him as tight as he dares to and Steve Rogers kisses his temple again and drags his fingers through his hair, wiping his sticky fingers off on the sheets and shifting just enough to cradle the asset’s body with his own, as if the asset isn’t twice his size and then some, as if he weren’t just rickety scaffolding wrapped around a bombed-out cathedral.

The asset doesn’t question it, though. If he did Steve Rogers might stop.

“Bucky,” Steve Rogers says, tugging down the sheet over their heads to pet his hair and the back of his shoulders. The asset wonders how he ever survived so long without being touched like that; he didn’t remember, but still, all this time it must’ve been killing him not to have it. “Sweetheart. It’s okay, sweetheart, come on, relax. Calm down, all right, I’m not going anywhere.”

“‘Sweetheart’,” the asset echoes in a low mutter, pressing his face in tighter against Steve Rogers's shoulder. As if he’s sweet. As if he has a heart.

But he’s Steve Rogers's weapon, a weapon HYDRA stole from him and used against him but that he knew the specifications of well enough to survive, and so Steve Rogers would know.

The asset lifts his head and pushes their mouths together again, and Steve Rogers turns it into a kiss when he’s still not quite sure how to. He must’ve known how to, once; Steve Rogers so clearly assumes he does, has kissed him so easily, put his hands on him so naturally. Treated him like something that understood.

Someone who understood.

And the most confusing part, the asset thinks, is that some part of him does.

So they kiss, and the asset categorizes and analyzes and remembers how to, and Steve Rogers cradles the asset’s body with his own and is as patient as a saint or a century-shaping sinner, as an experienced commander waiting on his sniper or a good man waiting on his friend. Or his . . . or his “sweetheart”.

Steve Rogers would wait forever, the asset understands.

The asset has waited forever too.

Steve Rogers groans raspy and low and the asset’s stomach clutches up hot, and he follows long-forgotten memories to tug one-handed at the buttons of Steve Rogers's shirt and pull them apart, let his flesh-and-bone hand meet flesh-and-bone underneath. Skinny fingers twist in his hair and skinny arms go tight around his neck and he never, ever wants them to let go. His mouth drops away from Steve Rogers's mouth and drags down his jaw and throat and to the hollow of his collarbone and his hand strokes down his chest and up his ribs and Steve Rogers just sighs and moans and shifts and lets the asset touch him wherever he likes, however he likes.

The asset can’t trust the metal arm. The flesh-and-bone one is already shaking.

“Steve,” he manages, and Steve Rogers lets out another sigh, pliant and stabilizing underneath him all at once.

“Yeah, c’mon,” Steve Rogers murmurs, sweet and low, encouraging, and the asset shudders all the way up his spine. He kisses Steve Rogers’s chest and smooths his fingers up his stomach and twists the metal arm up tighter behind his back, tight, tight, hurting tight, pulling hard at the places where metal and muscle meet, at--

Steve Roger’s fingers slide down the asset’s back, pushing the sheet away, and touch the back of his hand. The asset chokes in shock or something--something else, chokes and buries his face in Steve Rogers’s stomach, and Steve Rogers links his too-thin fingers through the asset’s metal ones. The asset can’t feel it. There’s no feeling in those fingers, just pressure feedback and temperature readings.

The asset can’t feel it, but Steve Rogers’s fingers threaded through his own with absolute certainty that they will not be crushed for it--Steve Rogers’s fingers in the asset’s fingers, reckless and fearless and faithful--

He starts crying again, hiding the sticky tears and cracked sobs against Steve Rogers’s stomach, and Steve Rogers holds his hand.

“I got you, Buck,” Steve Rogers says again. “It’s all right. Whatever you need, you know that, okay? I’m not going anywhere.”

“But you will,” the asset half-wails, burying his face against the hollow of his stomach, the sharp bone of his hip. “You will, you will, you will.”

Steve Rogers is silent and it is tense and terrible, his thin fingers gripping so hard that the asset is afraid to let a single plate recalibrate in case they might cut him. The asset is not silent, because as hard as he tries he cannot keep back the tears and the hitched little noises that come with them.

“I will,” Steve Rogers says. It’s a question, the asset thinks. Is almost sure.

“You will,” he says again, tearful and crack-voiced. Steve Rogers’s fingers tighten around his; dig in against the back of his neck.

“All right,” Steve Rogers says, and breathes out slow. “I will. And then I’ll come back for you.”

The asset sobs.

“I’ll always come back for you,” Steve Rogers swears lowly, and the asset kisses his chest, bites it, grips his hip with the hand he can trust and his fingers with the hand he can’t and mouths down his stomach in a way he can’t remember ever doing and is sure he must have done a thousand times. “Whatever happens, however bad it gets, you gotta remember that. You’ll be okay, ‘cause I’m coming back for you.”

“I know,” the asset chokes out, and fumbles the front of Steve Rogers’s pants open one-handed. Steve Rogers lifts his hips for him but the asset barely bothers with pulling them down at all, just goes right to--he can’t remember, he doesn’t remember, but he knows the theory and Steve Rogers threw away every other weapon for him and always comes back and Steve Rogers loves him, and he wants nothing else like he wants to prove that Steve Rogers is right. Right to throw away his shield, right to come back for him, right to love him. Right to be here right now, to clean him up and feed him and put him in this bed and come into it with him.

Steve Rogers is always right, the asset thinks. It might be a memory, or it might just be extrapolation.

Either way, it’s so easy to swallow his cock.

Steve Rogers moans, his head dropping back against the mattress, and the asset sucks and swallows and works his mouth with single-minded focus, everything narrowed down to this. All the focus he would give a mission, except this is not a mission at all, this is something else. Something for when he’s warm and clean and fed and put away; for when he doesn’t have to expect the next attack, the next impact.

Something good.

Something he likes.

The asset didn’t know he remembered how to like things. The asset didn’t even know he knew how to like things. He likes this, though; likes Steve Rogers trusting him like this, trusting his teeth around his cock and his metal fingers around his flesh-and-bone ones--trusting his body anywhere near him at all.

“So good, Bucky, hell, sweetheart,” Steve Rogers sighs, his hips shifting up and cock sliding deeper into the asset’s throat. The asset almost chokes, but doesn’t--because of chance, or because some part of him remembers what to do, he’s not sure which. He likes how it feels, though, and tries to press closer. His own cock drags against the bed, heavy and still half-hard, and the pull of sheets across it makes him want Steve Rogers’s hand around it again, maybe Steve Rogers’s mouth around it, maybe--

Anything Steve Rogers will give him, and anything Steve Rogers will let him take, too.

“God,” Steve Rogers moans in a voice that makes the asset push his dick into the mattress and roll his hips down instinctively for the pressure. Steve Rogers lifts his head to look down at him, his eyes dark and shudder-inducing, and the asset grinds his hips down again and his mouth makes a noise he can’t categorize around the other. Steve Rogers is watching him. The asset is used to being watched, and can’t understand why it makes his skin feel hot and tight and something shiver low in his gut, why it affects him even more than the pressure against his cock.

Then Steve Rogers touches his face and squeezes his fingers, and it’s obvious. The asset is used to being watched, but only Steve Rogers has ever seen him.

“You look so good,” Steve Rogers murmurs lowly as he brushes a thumb against the slick and stretched corner of the asset’s mouth, proving the asset’s point the same way he proves every conclusion the asset reaches about him. Steve Rogers is always right. Steve Rogers will always come back for him. Steve Rogers wants him. “Just--wait, all right, I don’t wanna come yet. I want more.”

“Yes,” the asset rasps, immediately pulling back to nod in urgent agreement. Steve Rogers proves him right every time. “Me too. I want more too.”

“C’mere, then,” Steve Rogers says, tugging at the asset’s mismatched shoulders, and the asset goes. Steve Rogers kisses him, presses a knee into his side and a hand down his back, and the asset feels like liquid, like steel, like something pure and sharp and shining. Something with purpose.

There is no purpose like the purpose Steve Rogers gives him, the asset thinks.

“What do you want tonight, sweetheart? How about your favorite?” Steve Rogers asks, quiet and kind as he kisses the corner of the asset’s jaw and runs a hand down his side. He is almost smiling, but it doesn’t look like a smile. “That sound nice?”

“I don’t--I don’t know,” the asset manages, shifting uncertainly at the question.

“S’all right, Buck, we can do something else,” Steve Rogers tells him, leaning back against the bed, and the asset shakes his head frantically and grabs the other’s shoulder. He wants more, whatever “more” is. He does not want Steve Rogers to lean back from him.

“No,” he says. “No, I mean--I mean I don’t know my . . . my favorite.”

Steve Rogers stares up at him for a long moment, his face betraying nothing but his fingers very tight against the asset’s hip. The asset bites his lip and ducks his head, ashamed to admit to the failing, the blank space in his mind that should know this.

Except . . . favorite.

“You’re my favorite,” the asset rasps, head still ducked and words half a realization. “All I want’s you. I--please.”

“Yeah,” Steve Rogers says finally, voice even quieter and much, much rougher. “Okay, Bucky.”

“And that,” the asset says, the plates in his arm recalibrating in response to the tension in his shoulders as his eyes flick back up. “Call me that.”

“Bucky,” Steve Rogers repeats, and kisses him again. “Want me to show you your favorite, Bucky?”

“Yes, please,” the asset manages, blinking fast as his vision blurs wetly.

“Okay,” Steve Rogers says, and pushes at his shoulders. The asset goes with it, makes his body loose and pliant and easily guided, and Steve Rogers puts him on his back against the mattress. He tugs the pillow down and tucks it under the asset’s head, and the gesture is pointless and unnecessary and makes the asset’s chest clutch up tight.

He’s not going to survive this, some part of him thinks. This is too good to get to have, much less keep. This is just the last thing Steve Rogers is going to give him before he puts him away for good, spares everyone the trouble, and that . . . the asset would be fine with that, he thinks. Steve Rogers will still come back for him, someday. A long, long time from now, maybe, but someday. He can wait.

He’s done it before.

Then Steve Rogers kisses him again, and the asset forgets what he was thinking about.

“I love you, Bucky,” Steve Rogers says between their mouths, low and easy, and the asset is soft underneath him and heavy in his body and that is easy too. Steve Rogers kisses his mouth and his jaw and neck and slides a hand up his thigh; the asset tips his head back against the pillow and bites his lip. He curls the hand he can’t trust to grip the sheets above his head and the other one hooks into the rumpled waist of Steve Rogers’s pants and settles in against the bone of his hip. It’s warm there, and the asset doesn’t want to move it, so he doesn’t.

“You love me, Steve,” he murmurs back, relishing the name in his mouth. Relishing the memory of the name, how it comes up clear and easy every time he looks at Steve Rogers--the same way the knowledge that Steve Rogers loves and will come back for him does.

“Yeah, I do,” Steve Rogers confirms, leaning over to dig a hand in between the bedframe and mattress but still keeping the other on the asset’s thigh. Both of his hands are bony and cold--poor circulation, the asset notes distractedly--but feel very good wherever they touch him. He comes back with a half-empty jar and settles onto his haunches to twist it open. The asset makes a disappointed noise at the loss of his hands, and then--

He does not remember the specific jar; he does not even remember jars like it or extrapolate its purpose. One moment it is something Steve Rogers is touching instead of him and the next moment he just knows.

“Oh,” he says, exhaling all in a rush, and Steve Rogers smiles down at him and slicks up his fingers so they shine in the low light. The asset makes a noise he doesn’t mean to and bites his lip again to keep another back. He pulls his knees up and digs his heels into the bed, not quite--not quite sure he’s doing the right thing, but really, really wanting to do the right thing.

Steve Rogers leans over and kisses him, so he must be.

The asset kisses back, draping the arm he can trust around Steve Rogers’s shoulders to tug him down closer, and Steve Rogers makes quiet, content noises between kisses and drops his hand between the asset’s legs. He bypasses his erection entirely and slides two slick fingers back behind his balls instead, putting warm wet pressure against the skin there, and the asset jerks in shock at how sensitive that part of his body is.

“That feels--I feel that,” he manages breathlessly, unable to find better words for it.

“You like it?” Steve Rogers asks, kissing his jaw. It’s a question, but it almost sounds like a statement. It’s a question he has asked before, the asset thinks, or maybe knows.

“Yes,” he says anyway, and then knocks his head back with a moan as Steve Rogers slides his fingers back further and rubs the pad of one over his hole. Steve Rogers has cold hands, the asset knows, but like this they don’t feel cold. Like this they feel nothing like cold. “Yes, yes, I like it,” the asset gasps out, Steve Rogers’s finger rubbing soft circles that make his whole body feel lit up and bright, electric, alive and sharp. Like the chair. Nothing like the chair. Like--

“Relax, okay?” Steve Rogers murmurs. The asset tries to remember how to. It works, mostly--not the remembering, but the relaxing. Steve Rogers’s finger pushes into him and crooks and curls and rubs in a way that makes the asset’s stomach flip and cock twitch, and he presses his shoulders back into the mattress and his hips up for Steve Rogers.

The asset does not remember ever feeling anything like this. The asset is positive that he has felt like this. Steve Rogers is too sure of him for him to doubt it, too glad to touch him; moves too easily to anticipate the little shifts and hitches and gestures the asset does not even know to expect himself to make. They must’ve done this. They must’ve done this so many times.

The asset has not thought very much about the memories he doesn’t have anymore. They are nothing, only missing intel to be worked around, and the ones he does have are problem enough.

This, though . . . in this moment, for the first time, the asset thinks . . . the asset feels . . .

He feels cheated, in this moment. Like something actually worth having is gone.

Steve Rogers works another finger in and the asset bares his teeth and digs his fingers into the sheets, the plates in his arms recalibrating above his head. He has been. He has been cheated. He should know this. He should remember this. He should remember the faint frown of concentration on Steve Rogers’ face, the look of his just barely open mouth, the stretch of his fingers inside his body and the slight weight of him atop it--what his own damn favorite is.

What Steve Rogers’s favorite is.

“I’m going to kill them,” the asset says, the words coming out almost dreamy. Steve Rogers’s eyes flick up to his face, and his fingers flex inside him. The asset makes a noise, because he can’t not. Because no one will stop him if he does.

Because he will fucking murder anyone who tries to.

“I love you, Bucky,” Steve Rogers says, and the asset’s chest burns hot with the words. He’s thinking about killing people, thinking about it even with Steve Rogers touching him--worse than a weapon, because a weapon can’t want to kill people--and Steve Rogers can still look at him and tell him that.

“Yes,” he says, suddenly sure of it, flesh-and-bone hand coming up to Steve Rogers’s flat, bony chest in search of the echo of that heat, knowing it belongs there. He can’t feel it, but he doesn’t doubt it. “That’s my favorite. Love me.”

Steve Rogers makes a noise a little like a laugh, choked and weak, and pushes another slicked-up finger into him. The asset pushes back into it, the slight discomfort not even worth cataloguing even as part of him does: a different, lower part that is sharpening its knives while it thinks “this is how long it has been since Steve Rogers has touched me.”

The asset’s not sure he recognizes that part. It’s not an old memory, and it’s not part of his programming either. He doesn’t question it, though, because Steve Rogers is spreading his fingers inside him and kissing him again and those things are infinitely more important than any other distraction might be. They stir him up, make him feel too hot to ever freeze--like if anyone tried the ice would melt on contact and the cryo tank would burn out and Steve Rogers would be right there to pull him out because Steve Rogers would have come back for him.

Exactly like that.

Steve Rogers’s fingers crook inside the asset, and the asset moans. Steve Rogers’s lips and teeth drag down the asset’s throat, and the asset bares it and spreads his legs wider, and Steve Rogers sighs against his skin and twists his fingers inside of him. He’s not gentle, but this is the closest to it he’s been so far.

The asset thinks of a bigger man with the same face as the one touching him and how careful and controlled his every movement was, and wonders if he would be different. It would, wouldn’t it? He thinks it would.

This, though. This was his favorite.

There must’ve been a reason.

“Bucky,” Steve Rogers says, drawing his fingers back. The asset grimaces at the loss, feeling--strange. Oversensitive.

Abandoned, a little, even though Steve Rogers is still right here.

“Steve,” he says, reminding himself of that. Steve Rogers leans in and the asset kisses him, shifts up into it and lets his hand come up and cover the back of the other’s neck where he can feel his too-prominent spine. It’s crooked, he thinks vaguely, not sure if it’s a memory from before or a weakness he registered hours ago. It feels fragile even under his flesh-and-bone hand, and it is.

“You ready?” asks Steve Rogers, who is not fragile at all. The asset nods, even though he’s probably not. He doesn’t think he could ever be ready for Steve Rogers.

Technically, though, that’s not what he’s being asked.

“Okay,” Steve Rogers says, moving back. He puts a hand on the asset’s side and the asset follows it, rolling over obediently and lifting his hips just how Steve Rogers shows him to. He grips the top of the bed with the arm he can’t trust and wraps the other over the back of his head restlessly, and Steve Rogers leans in to kiss the back of his neck and--and.

“Steve,” the asset gasps as Steve Rogers pushes into him, his shoulders going tight and whole body moving back into it--memory or instinct or just some kind of greedy urgency, he’s not sure, and can’t care enough to decide if it matters. Steve Rogers’s cock is in him.

“I got you. You’re good. It’s okay, Buck, I got you,” Steve Rogers manages, breathless and raspy. He rolls his hips forward slow, rubs up against parts of the asset that the asset hadn’t even properly comprehended as existing before this moment, and stars go off behind his eyes brighter and harder than getting punched in the face.

“Yes,” he pants, fingers fisting hard in the sheets, “yes, yes, yes, I’ll be good, make me good, Steve.” A weapon with the right purpose, this time--one that belongs to someone who deserves it. Who--who’ll take care of it, who’ll--who’ll--

“I love you,” Steve Rogers says, kissing the asset’s back between his ruined shoulders. The asset whines.

Steve Rogers rocks his hips forward, quick little rabbit-thrusts that make the asset whine all over again, cracked whimpers dropping out of his mouth, making him noisy, making him obvious, showing all his cracks and weak spots. Steve Rogers pursues each one with measured patience, his own breathing rough and slow, and the asset has never liked feeling like someone he barely knows knows him so well. It has always just been a fact of his existence that barely-recognizable strangers would know everything about him and he would know nothing in return.

Steve Rogers makes being known feel like something to appreciate, though, and does not hold back from showing his own cracks.

“Steve,” the asset moans, half-writhing against the mattress as he struggles to keep himself from moving too much--from risking throwing the other off, because as steady and patient as Steve Rogers is, he isn’t physically strong, isn’t weighing or pinning him down. Staying underneath him is exclusively on the asset. “Steve.”

“Yeah, it’s me. I’m here,” Steve Rogers replies, voice rough as his fingers spread on the asset’s hips; as his cock pushes in deeper and lights a fire up the asset’s spine.

“You’re here,” the asset chokes, burying his face in the pillow. He’s all lit up. His spine is on fire, his skin is blazing. His eyes are burning. “You’re here, Steve, you’re here--”

“Came back for you, didn’t I?” Steve Rogers murmurs. The asset lets out a cracked sob, the sheets tearing underneath his hands.

“Yes,” he whimpers, shuddering harder under Steve Rogers, under his slow, patient thrusts and the ragged breath against the back of his neck where the other is hunched low over his body and keeping them as close as possible. “Yes, you came back for me, yes, you always come back. They can’t have me, I’m yours.”

“S’right,” Steve Rogers says, breathing out hard on his next thrust. The asset’s ears automatically prick for signs of respiratory distress, but Steve Rogers snaps his hips in harder, buries his cock in him deep, and he loses the barely-there memory that made him think he needed to.

“Please,” he begs, and it’s so easy. The begging, the torn sheets, the back-and-forth slide of Steve Rogers’s cock inside him--everything. All of it. And Steve Rogers listens, presses tight against his back and thrusts in deeper so the asset feels pinned even knowing he’s not, even knowing how easy he could roll over and throw Steve Rogers off, could topple him off the bed and escape before he could even get off the floor.

He doesn’t want to. He has never in his life wanted to escape less than this, even at his most drugged and pliant and shocked-stupid. Even in the--even in the places he can almost remember, sometimes. Even then he thinks he always wanted . . . something, some other thing. Or he remembers always wanting other things, anyway; not to be on that battlefield, on that table, in that trench, trapped in that tiny apartment, that dead-end job, that--

But not this. This right here--this is the exact place he wants to be.

Whoever he is.

“Tell me,” the asset chokes out, pushing himself into the mattress and close to tears all over again. He doesn’t know what he’s asking to hear, but he knows Steve Rogers will. Because Steve Rogers knows him, and he doesn’t use that knowledge to put him in a chair or point him at a target: he uses it to get him back when he’s been stolen and to make him feel like this.

“I love you, Bucky,” Steve Rogers says, proving him right. Again. Constantly. Every fucking time. The asset screws his eyes shut against the burn and grips the sheets again, the snapped threads tangling in the mechanisms of his fingers. He tilts his hips up seekingly, hoping for deeper, for more, and Steve Rogers gives it to him without hesitation, pushes in hard and fills him up, gives him his favorite. The asset is back to whimpering and the sheets tear in his grip again and Steve Rogers’s cock is making him burn, making him too much for the cryo tank to contain.

Steve Rogers is making him good.

The asset comes thinking that. It’s a shock, sharp and intense and enough to make him shake all over, and Steve Rogers fucks him through it, keeps his cock inside him and his hands all over him. Keeps him overheated, keeps him whimpering and crying out and crying, and leaves the asset sticky and sobbing and never, ever wanting him to stop.

“Steve,” he whines, clawing at the mattress and probably damaging it but in no place to care about that. “Steve Steve Steve, oh, oh, oh Steve--”

32557038, he thinks somewhere in his orgasm-addled mind, with no idea what it means. Some old programming or a forgotten code, maybe, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing does. Steve is still in him and breathing rough against his back, curled down against him, digging his fingers in and--and--

“Stevie,” the asset gasps out, and it feels different in his mouth. Steve Rogers thrusts in and moans into the back of his shoulders, his ugly and scarred and fucked up shoulders, and the asset starts whimpering again. It’s too much. It’s so good. He doesn’t deserve this, he can’t have this, he’s not--he can’t--

He’s so fucking hard. He doesn’t think he even started to go soft, not really, and he’s hard and Steve Rogers is hard inside him and he--and he wants--

“Pleasemore,” he begs in a rush, burying his face against the pillow and the mattress, twisting up underneath the skinny scaffolding of Steve Rogers’s body around the wreckage of his like he’s something worth fixing, worth the time and effort, worth the--worth any of it. “Please more, Steve, please don’t stop, make me good, make me good for you.”

“You’re good,” Steve Rogers gasps out against the asset’s back, and the asset nods furiously, tears leaking from his eyes into the pillow hiding them.

“I want to be, I do, I want to, please make me,” he pleads, rocking back into the other’s thrusts as hard as he dares to. Steve Rogers starts moaning and drags his fingers over skin and the asset doesn’t think he’s strong enough to bruise him anywhere but hopes for scratches, scrapes; some sign, some proof. “Love me. Love me. Make me good.”

“You are good,” Steve Rogers swears, hot and breathless, and from his mouth the asset absolutely believes it.

“My favorite,” he mumbles, the words half-smothered in the blankets. “You’re my favorite, Stevie.”

Steve Rogers chokes on a sharp, heated grunt as he comes, digs his nails in hard and doesn’t pull back at all. He spills himself all inside, everything he has, and the asset muffles an encouraging keen into the pillow and wishes he would do it another hundred times. Another thousand, or however many it would take until his body remembered this again.

And then at least once more after that, because he knows Steve Rogers would let him have it.

“Don’t pull out,” he gasps as soon as Steve Rogers’s thrusts slow, and Steve Rogers buries another groan against his back but doesn’t, just crumples down atop him just as he is. The asset goes with it, lets his body weigh him down flat against the bed even though he could keep his knees against the mattress and hips up for hours even as weak and needy as he is like this. It wouldn’t even be close to the hardest thing he’s had to do.

It feels good, though, letting it be like this. Steve Rogers’s slight weight slumped warm over his back and his own weight pinning his cock to the sticky sheets and making him want to squirm and rut down into it, making him want to shiver--yes, definitely. It definitely feels good like this.

“Bucky,” Steve Rogers murmurs, brushing the hair off the back of the asset’s neck. His mismatched fingers tighten in the sheets again. “How’re you feeling?”

“Like you love me,” the asset answers past a shiver, pushing his forehead against the pillow. “You take such good care of me.”

Steve Rogers laughs like it’s a joke he doesn’t think is funny, a soft exhalation without any humor behind it, and pushes a hand up the asset’s side. The asset stretches underneath it with a moan, then starts panting again. It feels good. Steve Rogers’s hands always feel good, and his cock feels good inside him, too--like it belongs there, even soft and still like it is right now. He thinks maybe he understands why this is his favorite.

“You just came. Twice!” Steve Rogers says, half-laughing again; the asset bites his lip, trying not to squirm.

“M’still hard,” he says, and Steve Rogers’s breath catches.

“You--” he starts, bracing his hands against the mattress, and the asset tenses.

“Don’t pull out,” he blurts again. “I like you inside. I want you to stay.”

“Yeah, okay,” Steve Rogers breathes, then presses his mouth into the asset’s spine again, his fingers dropping to his hip instead. “You’re hard?”

“Yes,” the asset confirms with a shudder, back shifting up reflexively against Steve Rogers’s mouth.

“You wanna come again?” Steve Rogers asks, and the asset nods fervently. Coming again means more of Steve Rogers’s hands on him, more touch, more proof. He’d never refuse that.

But he could, if he wanted to, and Steve Rogers would let him.

“Okay,” Steve Rogers says, kissing the back of his neck where anyone else would jam a taser or bring down a nightstick. The asset noises back at him softly and gets touched softly in return, Steve Rogers’s hand pressing down gently against his hip. It takes him a moment before he realizes Steve Rogers is guiding him, and he muffles another whine in the sheets as he follows the pressure of the other’s hand to press his hips into the mattress. It’s tacky with his come, but feels good anyway.

Then he thinks about the fact that Steve Rogers’s come is inside him, and it feels better.

Steve Rogers stays close, but his cock is soft now and slips out as he guides the asset’s hips down again, and the asset can’t help the disappointed noise. Steve Rogers shifts behind him, moving up onto his knees, and drops his free hand to slide his fingers inside in its place.

“Better?” he asks, and the asset nods emphatically, rocking back onto them. He would take Steve Rogers’s hands on any part of him and it would always be better, he thinks, no matter what they were doing.

This, obviously, is still the best option of the bunch.

“There you go, Buck, c’mon,” Steve Rogers murmurs into his shoulder--the right one or the wrong one, it doesn’t matter enough for the asset to notice. He moves his hips with the hand Steve Rogers has on them, rocks back onto Steve Rogers’s fingers and grinds down against the bed exactly as slow and gentle as Steve Rogers wants him to, and lets it all overtake him. He’s here. It’s safe here. “There you are, sweetheart.”

“I’m here,” the asset agrees breathlessly, fingers curling against the edge of the bed. “I’m here, I’m with you.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Steve Rogers tells him, squeezing his hip a little harder. The asset grinds harder into the mattress in response, overwhelmed and overheated. His hair is a tangle, his hands are restless; his skin feels ice-meltingly hot. Steve Rogers feels perfect on top of him. “You’re with me, Bucky. You’re always with me, no matter where you are.”

“You love me,” the asset sighs, a hot rushing feeling of contentment rising up in his skin, sinking into his bones. “I belong to you. I’m yours.”

“Always,” Steve Rogers swears roughly, his fingers curling inside the asset. “You’re mine for good.”

“I’m good,” the asset agrees blissfully, rolling his hips down just that little bit harder and coming again that easy with Steve Rogers’s hand on his hip and Steve Rogers’s fingers inside him, Steve Rogers’s bed underneath him. It’s different this time, longer and slower and hotter, and he feels like fireworks look. He doesn’t remember what fireworks look like, not for sure, but in his head--it sounds right, in his head.

He whimpers his way through it, sharp little noises that make Steve Rogers grip him tight and breathe heavily against his back. Steve Rogers pulls back, reclaiming his hands, and the asset whimpers at that too, but for a different reason.

“God, Bucky,” Steve Rogers rasps as he slumps onto his side, his voice hoarse; the asset automatically pricks his ears for respiratory distress, but Steve Rogers recovers in a reasonable amount of time. He lays a hand on the small of the asset’s back while he does and it makes the asset feel quiet and settled. He stays still underneath it, warm and waiting.

He likes being underneath Steve Rogers’s hands.

“Okay,” Steve Rogers manages after his breathing has evened out into a slightly irregular wheeze that something in the asset marks as within normal parameters. His face is flushed, but not worryingly so. He pushes his hand up the asset’s back and the asset shifts up into it and makes soft noises for him--the ones that he liked when he was fucking him, and which make his breath catch again now. “Fuck, Bucky, that was . . . didn’t think you could go that many times so quick.”

The asset could go again, he thinks, looking at Steve Rogers’s face. He thinks he could go all night if it was with Steve Rogers. Steve Rogers himself, however, obviously cannot, so he says nothing and just closes his eyes. He is very warm and feels very good and does not see any reason to move ever again. Eventually Steve Rogers will want him to, he assumes, but for now he likes how he feels where he is.

“You looked so pretty like that, Buck,” Steve Rogers murmurs, and the asset smiles effortlessly into the pillow, toes curling at the praise. Steve Rogers tugs at the asset’s hip until he rolls onto his back, then wipes the come off his thighs and stomach with the dirty sheet before tossing it to the floor and arranging the damaged ones around and over them. The asset watches him dreamily, relishing the feeling of being put away properly; of being treated with care and concern for his long-term functionality.

It is a very good feeling.

“You love me,” he murmurs, completely satisfied. It is a perfect sentence. Steve Rogers stills in the middle of drawing up the last of the sheets, and glances up to his face again.

“I do,” he says. “I love you for good.”

“Yeah,” the asset agrees, face splitting in an easy grin. He recognizes the feel of the expression belatedly--he’s tried to copy it from old recordings before, but it’d never looked quite right. Right now it feels right, though, and Steve Rogers isn’t looking at him like he’s gotten it wrong. He’d know, if anyone would.

“Get some sleep, okay?” Steve Rogers says, settling in against the asset’s undamaged side and dragging the blanket up to their shoulders. “And--we’ll figure everything out in the morning, yeah?”

“So I can leave,” the asset murmurs, closing his eyes. He has to leave . . . or he thinks he does, anyway. Is fairly sure. It’s one of those things he can’t quite remember, but probably should.

“You don’t have to leave. You can stay as long as you want, Bucky,” Steve Rogers tells him, squeezing the metal hand in his own. “And if you can’t stay, you can always come back.”

The asset smiles, and it’s still easy, and he still feels safe.

“Yeah,” he says, squeezing back with careful fingers. “And if I can’t, you’ll come get me.”