Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It comes with the territory, really: three baby sisters, with a mother as indulgent as theirs is—sometimes—so yeah. Bucky knows the story. Bucky could tell the story himself, if he had to—and he’d pause in all the right places, too; he’d lower his voice, and flutter his eyelashes at the goopy-sugar parts, and Becca’d sigh and Margey would giggle and Betsy’d throw herself back onto the bed with a grin and wriggle her toes beneath the blankets because they’d all be just so taken with the romance of it all: so, yeah.

It’s not that Bucky cares much for it, really, on his own. For himself. Because he doesn’t. It’s all just hearts-and-flowers mumbo-jumbo. And it’s not like everyone’s even got one to worry about, so it’s stupid to sit around thinkin’ on it so hard only to have it be a wash, in the end. Stupid. That’s what it is, mostly. Fairytales.

He’s got three baby sisters, though. And girls, y’know. They ask after that kinda stuff constantly. Can’t get enough of it, eat it up like nothing else. So yeah; he knows the story.

But it ain’t like he’d had a choice in the matter. So, there.

Right.

“But momma,” and Bucky’s eyes almost fall right out their sockets with the way he rolls ‘em, sticks out his tongue to nobody when he hears Margey whining through thin walls, when he flattens his hand onto the book on his lap and mouths exaggeratedly along with the familiar script: “How do ya know?”

And Bucky don’t make fun at the way his momma laughs, ‘cause that’s rude, but he could do it. The point is that he’s heard it just like this, after just that question and before just what’s gonna come so many times that he could copy it with just the same basics, if not the same magic.

‘Cause it’s his momma, after all.

“Well,” and Bucky knows exactly how his mother’s voice will drop before it does: conspiratorial, and Bucky knows how she leans in like she’s telling her babies a secret, and Bucky doesn’t smile when he thinks about it, when he thinks about the wonder in his baby sisters’ eyes. No, he absolutely does not smile to think of that sort of sappiness.

He’s just got something in his teeth from dinner. Just, y’know. Baring his teeth, so he can work it out.

“The biggest mistake people make is going about thinking like it’s a thing that you know you’re missing, when that’s not the case at all, really.”

And Bucky likes that Momma starts it that way—Bucky likes that she gives all the dumb people what-for, because he doesn’t think nobody’s missing nothing, just ‘cause they’ve got a soulmate they haven’t found yet, or maybe they don’t got a soulmate at all. He hasn’t found his soulmate yet, if one’s out there for him, and Bucky don’t like his life any worse or better for that fact. And Steve ain’t got one yet, either, s’far as Bucky knows—and Bucky’d know, if Stevie found his soulmate. He’d definitely know. They’re best friends, they’d tell each other. They tell each other everything.

And Stevie, well. Stevie’s not half of anything. Stevie is all of the good things. All of ‘em. None of ‘em halved, neither.

So he likes that his momma starts the story like that.

Or else, he would like it. If he cared at all about a stupid story about stupid soulmates.

Which he doesn’t. Not really.

Don’t matter to him one bit.

“You never know it’s not there, so there’s no use at all trying to figure out where the little hole you’ve got is, trying to tease out where you’ll feel all warm and full and right all of a sudden, when you meet ‘em.”

And Bucky, well—he’s a curious type, you understand. Thinks all the time. Real intelligent-like, if he’s honest. So the fact that he’s never tried to figure out where he’s got an empty-space where his soulmate’s gonna slot in some day, that’s kind of a given.

Steve asked him, though. Once. Asked if Bucky thought maybe his soulmate could slot in somewhere that’d prop up his lungs, or straighten his spine, or steady his heart. Steve’d been only just getting his breath back after the asthma came and took it from him, so Bucky figures that’s why he said it. Steve’s real smart, see.

But Bucky’d told Steve he didn’t need no soulmate to be better’n just about anybody, weak insides or strong ones. Told Steve he’d be holding up and straightening out and steadying whoever was lucky enough to be his match. Bucky’d said as much, and Steve never said another word about it, just worked at breathing slower, more even.

Bucky didn’t leave his side, didn’t take his hand away from Steve’s shoulder ‘til his face wasn’t quite so red; ‘til his chest didn’t heave quite so fast.

And in the end, Steve was fine. Steve didn’t need a soulmate to be just fine.

“Some people used to swear the world was brighter, that they could see colors better, or that a new freckle’d show up on their skin, that matched their mate’s,” Momma says, and Bucky knows she’s shaking her head as she does. “But that’s all just conjecture, just silly nonsense, it’s not like that at all. Doesn’t happen out here,” and Bucky knows how she’ll bring her hand to rest over her heart. “Happens in here.”

Bucky hears the silence like a weighty thing; knows how his sisters are staring, all wide eyes and slack jawed, all bated breath and wonder.

“As a matter of fact,” his mother lowers her voice a little; “That’s where you feel it first, just here.”

And Bucky doesn’t have to be in the same room to know that his momma’s reaching out to tap playfully just below each of his sisters’ collarbones when she makes the sound with a smile: “Ba-bump.” Mimics that simple beat with each of the girls in kind. “Ba-bump.” “Ba-bump.”

And his sister’s giggle—Margey downright squeals—and Bucky’s hand is only at his own chest ‘cause it’s kinda sore, just then. He was lying wrong against the arm of the couch, though. It’s nothing to make a fuss about.

Nope.

“It’s always right there, and you never think on it twice unless you’re nervous, or you’re excited, or you’re scared.”

Or you’re best friends with Steven Grant Rogers, and you gotta watch careful to make sure your own heart’s not pumping too hard if Steve’s following alongside you. And Steve’s always following alongside you, so you always gotta be careful, ‘cause if your heart’s pounding then Stevie’s almost ‘bout to give way, and that can’t happen.

That can’t ever happen.

“But when you find them,” his momma’s saying, a little dreamy, and Bucky knows she puts it on because the more shine in her words, the more the girls will sparkle with it, the more they’ll get stars in their eyes, have good dreams when they sleep.

“When they find you, you notice it. You notice, and you think, oh, how did I ever think it was right, before? How could I have let it pump away for all that time when it was so very, very wrong without the rest of the melody?”

And they sigh, the girls: well. Becca sighs first, then the other two. The babies always follow Becca’s lead.

Bucky figures they’ll see the error of their ways soon enough, and start followin’ his lead, but he’s patient. He’ll wait.

“It’s like a story where you have the things that are said laid out in quote-marks, but you’ve got no idea who’s saying them, you’re missing why it matters,” Momma’s going on. “And suddenly, there’s a whole book to be read. And even better,” he hears the rustle as Momma leans in: “A whole book to be written, with that one special someone who means everything,” and Bucky closes his eyes for a second, can see how Momma reaches out and pinches each girl’s chin, feather-light. “Means everything because they’re tied up in everything you are. Right down to the blood and the bones.”

Bucky’s eyes fly open when he hears his father’s footsteps in the kitchen, catches the soft smile on his face, and Bucky doesn’t care about soulmates. He doesn’t.

And he’s only rubbing his chest again, now, ‘cause it’s still sore, okay? It’s just sore.

It’s no big thing.

“It’s as if you’ve always had the outline of a masterpiece, and then you’re watching that outline fill up with all the colors,” Momma’s telling the girls, and Bucky can hear as she stands to tuck them in.

“That’s what it is,” she breathes out soft, slow. “You feel it, you hear it.”

And Bucky’s not listening in harder than normal or anything. He’s not holding his breath to hear the end.

“You know it.”

He waits until his Pop’s back down the hall before he lets the breath out, slow.

For no particular reason, of course. No reason or anything.

“Like how a hymn sounds when you sing it by yourself, at home,” Becca says, tone all prim and superior and Bucky sometimes wants to tug on her hair extra hard to shut her up. Just a little. “But then how it sounds on Sundays, with the choir takin’ parts.”

“Just like that,” Bucky knows that Momma nods, there, and then moves back toward the bed where she’d been going closer to the door.

“But you must always remember,” Momma cautions, like she always does. “All sorts of hymns are beautiful. Sometimes they’re best with all the voices, but sometimes one is just as lovely. And sometimes two voices don’t make any sense to bring together, until you do bring them together, and then they’re something really special, out of the blue.” He sees Momma’s shrug, in his head.

“Same’s true of people. Not everyone has a soulmate. Not everyone finds their soulmate even if they’ve got one. It isn’t good, or bad, either way. Love’s everywhere. It comes in all different shapes and sorts. Having a soulmate, having that kind of love, the kind that’s a pulse and a song and a tether that you feel? That’s just one kind.”

And that’s what he always tells Steve, when he looks sad when people talk about soulmates. ‘Cause Steve won’t say nothing, not really, but Bucky knows him good enough, now, to know when he’s sore about something little, versus when Steve’s hurtin’ about something bigger and badder that means a whole lot. And Steve’s not always caught on it, but when the girls in class make eyes at everyone but him, because they’re blind and stupid, Bucky knows Steve wonders. That Steve thinks even though they’re still young, and it don’t mean nothing, that he won’t find a person. That nobody will feel fluttery and right when his tripping-heart tangles up with theirs. And Bucky doesn’t believe that, Bucky can’t believe a guy like Steve could ever be left out in the cold, but he doesn’t know everything.

So he tells Steve that even if there’s no soulmate out there for him, there’s somebody, if he wants ‘em. And if he don’t want nobody, well. He’ll always have Bucky.

Somehow, though, Stevie always still looks sad, after that. Sometimes sadder.

And then it’s Bucky, who starts hurtin’.

“Don’t you fret too badly though,” Momma’s soothing the girls, though, because Bucky knows they’re still too young to understand it, still scared about what happens if there’s not the one waiting somewhere out there, just for them. “Not having a soulmate doesn’t mean you won’t have love, but it runs strong in our families, darlings. Both sides, your Papa and me.”

And Bucky knows the girls are satisfied, knows it before he hears Momma kiss them all goodnight and shut the door. Bucky knows the story.

But, y’know. It’s not like he really cares.

______________________

When Bucky meets Steve Rogers, the kid can’t seem to keep air in his lungs long enough for it to do any good. Once the bullies clear out—cowards—Bucky’s not sure what draws him to settle an arm around the kid, to pull him in closer than he really ought to, given they don’t know each other one bit, but that’s exactly what he does: Bucky pulls Steve in close and tells him to breathe like Bucky does, to follow his lead if he can, and keeps him there until he can. Bucky doesn’t even know Steve’s name yet, but that’s what he does.

It doesn’t take long to figure out that Steve’s wrestling for his right to be alive in the world against a body and a city and a stubborn streak a mile wide that would rather put him in the ground: it doesn’t take long for Bucky to realize this is how it is, with Steve. This is the status quo.

So it’s really no surprise that Bucky comes to think that maybe he needs to be a doctor, when he grows up. ‘Cause when Steve’s real bad, when Steve’s mom’s eyes are red and the priest is leaving and the doctors are shaking their heads: well. Bucky can’t be a mom. And he sure can’t be a priest, that’s for sure: but a doctor. He could probably do that. He’s smart, after all; real intelligent-like.

If you didn’t know.

So he reads. He reads a whole bunch. Where he was always good in school, he pushes for better: he reads science, all sorts, and science fiction, because it’s close enough and a guy can’t just read boring stuff all day, y’know.

But then, Steve’ll get sick again. Steve always gets sick again, and Bucky doesn’t know what to do except sneak into Steve’s room after Mrs. Rogers tells him that his parents’ll be worrying after him, except his parents know already that if they’re worrying after Bucky, it ain’t nothin’ compared to how Bucky’s worryin’ after Steve. And Bucky can watch from the doorway when the doctors’ faces fall. He can watch from the corner and count the too-few times that Stevie’s chest rises and falls when his momma’s bent over him, biting her lip to bruising just to keep from coming apart. He can do that, and he can pray, and he knows he’s probably not good enough for any God up there to listen to, but Stevie is.

Steve’s more than good enough.

And Bucky can’t help it, can’t help the way his chest hurts with how much he needs Steve to be okay, can’t help the way that hurt translates into the motion of his feet, the way he kneels down at Steve’s bedside, a closeness as much as it is a plea—and the buzzing, clawing, twisting hurt makes him takes Steve’s hands. The hurt makes him crawl into bed when Steve’s cold, or when Steve’s shaking even as it’s warm: the hurt makes him line his frame against Steve’s as best he can on the off-chance that the breath Bucky can control if he tries real hard will guide Steve’s own lungs, will give him something to work from; that the heartbeat he can’t keep from racing with terror, with the kind of fear that makes you feel the world’s ending—and it will, the world will end if Steve’s gone, Bucky’s sure of that; something vital will go out and the whole thing will change and everything they know will be different in the worst ways and this world will end and the new one will be a shadow in comparison, Bucky knows—but he can’t keep his heart from pounding hard against Steve’s back, or sometimes up against Steve’s front; he can’t.

So Bucky just hopes that if his heart’s going to rattle at the bones of his ribs, and maybe Steve’s too, for the closeness, that it’s got strength enough to guide Steve's own faltering, skipping, blood-leaking, valve-waning thumping: that it’ll shake hard enough that maybe, just maybe, Steve’s heart will take the extra force of it and learn how to steady, learn to make it hold.

Learn how to stay, and not take half of Bucky when it goes.

Steve always gets sick again. And by some grace that Bucky doesn’t understand but won’t question, not for the life of him, Steve always gets better. And if Bucky’s chest is tight, is raw with the hurting when Steve’s on his deathbed, then it’s loose and warm and bright and full when Steve’s eyes open again, and they’re clear—when Bucky can tip his forehead to the center of Steve’s chest and drink in the relief of his best friend’s heart beating a little too fast, a little too faint, but there. There. His lungs bearing up with a little crackle to them, but nothing too fierce.

Bucky doesn’t know the words for that feeling, for the way it all lets go and puts him right again.

Til the next time.

And every time, Bucky hates himself a little, for not being enough. He makes himself study harder. He reads less fiction. Tries to be more of what Steve needs, tries to learn enough to help for real. There aren’t cures, yet, aren’t treatments good enough for what Steve needs, and maybe it’s funny, that the reading takes him here, puts him back where he started, curled on the couch as his sisters get tucked in.

And the story’s the same, really; his momma had it right, for the parts that really matter: s’all vital signs and brainwaves and biorhythms, that’s what they’re calling ‘em. Bioresonance is what it means, when you find what people call a soulmate. The way your lungs breathe somehow tangle up. The way your heartbeats reach out and sync up. The way your blood flows, how strong or how soft, and the energy in your body, the way you exist in the space you take up, the goddamn rate of molecular vibration: all that stuff, apparently, leaves you all tangled up, sharing something metaphysical and supportive and solid and true.

And that’s all great, really. It’s great. But Bucky’s interested in one bit in particular. Bucky’s interested in how when a person gets sick, their soulmate can help them get well. Their soulmate can hold them close and share something Bucky doesn’t understand, except for the numbers, except for the facts on the paper in black and white that say when this woman had a weak heart, her husband helped her steady the arrhythmias by holding her close, and letting his own pulse somehow steer hers clear. How one man’d been near death’s door with TB and his wife’d braved the risk and brought him home and just breathed, and breathed, and breathed til he was well. It’s not sensical. It’s not logical. It don’t make a lick of sense.

But Bucky knows, somehow, that if Stevie had his soulmate, he’d be well again, too—or closer to it, at least. Close enough. He’d make it through all this. He’d never ever leave, not before his time.

And maybe Steve’s a fucking catch that everyone’s too blind to notice. Maybe Steve himself makes this real goddamn difficult by taking every dame Bucky talks him up to and barely making eye contact, hardly even makin’ an effort. Though Bucky supposes Steve’d know, real quick, if she was the one, so maybe it’s Bucky’s fault. Maybe he needs to find better gals. Maybe.

Don’t matter, though. Wouldn’t be a thing worth earning if it didn’t take a little elbow grease, if it didn’t demand the hardest work Bucky’s capable of putting in.

And it is worth it. Steve’s worth it.

More’n anything in the world, Steve is worth it.

So Bucky tries. And he keeps trying.

And it takes too many years for him to realize that the doctors aren’t good enough, don’t know enough: not to protect Steve from his own traitor-bones.

So Bucky doesn’t need to be a doctor.

He needs to be something better.

______________________

The notice that comes in the mail: Bucky’s not sure it makes him something better.

But it’ll make him something, and maybe that’s enough.

______________________

Bucky doesn’t come home late, not really—and he tries to tell himself that he needs to soak it in, the walk up the stairs, the slide of the key in the lock, the creak of the door and the scent of their apartment: musk and pomade and the cloy of broth from last night’s dinner: and Steve, the scent that’s all Steve and Bucky might never get to know again, and he doesn’t dwell on that, he doesn’t, he doesn’t ‘cause he can’t—Bucky doesn’t come home late. He’s gotta be up and gone, come sun-up.

He tries not to think about how he wants to breathe this place, this moment, this space and the person he shares it with that makes it home: he tries not to think about how he wants to breathe it in and keep it, but he can’t even make his lungs stretch for the inhale. It hurts too bad.

He shucks his clothes and crawls quiet, distracted into bed.

There’s a heat there, a familiar body already between Bucky’s sheets, though: and he’s not distracted anymore.

He’s real fucking aware of the body in his bed.

“Stevie,” Bucky whispers, not sure why. Steve’s awake. His chest rises and falls evenly, which is a blessing, but too fast for sleep. Bucky doesn’t know why he whispers.

He just knows that he’s got to. Just knows there ain’t no other choice.

Steve doesn’t turn toward him, and Bucky doesn’t move, doesn’t shift so their bodies touch—they’ve slept closer, they’ve worn less when it was cold, when Steve’s life depending on it: they’ve done it without a thought, and Bucky can’t speak for Steve, save that Steve woke the next morning, every time, but for Bucky, at least: it was a comfort. It was a comfort to feel heat beside him. It was a comfort to know Steve was breathing, to feel Steve’s heart still pushing on against the odds, stubborn as the man himself—it was a comfort, and Bucky always felt lighter in the morning with Steve still plastered up against him. Bucky always felt a little lesser, when he climbed out of bed to start the day.

They’ve slept closer, they’ve worn less when Steve’s shivered, when he’s needed the warmth, needed it to not give in to the chill in the night.

But it’s the middle of summer, now. It ain’t cold. They’ve worn less, and slept closer when they’ve needed to.

They don’t need to, not now.

Except then Steve reaches—still doesn’t turn, but grabs for Bucky’s hand and pulls, holds it close against his skinny chest, the cut of his ribs through the skin like what’s coming for them’s colder than the frost has ever managed, and Bucky doesn’t know if he’s ever felt Steve’s heartbeat against his palm like this before: he’s caught it pumping heavy out of his nose in too many alleyways to count, raucous and dangerous and like wings in Bucky own chest, in his gut because it’s heavy, but so much heavier than it should be—too much; he’s felt it waning when the pall of death’s drawing too fucking close and Bucky has to step between and curl around and hope and pray and wait until there are more beats than skips in the rhythm, but this.

This, right now—it’s steady, if a little swift. It’s fainter than it ought to be, but it doesn’t falter, and it swells in Bucky’s chest because who’ll be there to keep Steve warm come winter? Who’ll make this heart the center of everything, who’ll give Steve everything he deserves, all that Bucky tries to offer until Steve finds the one he’s meant for, until Steve gets the person whose dips and divots he’s meant to match?

Bucky rests his head in the crook of Steve’s neck and breathes, makes himself breathe because he needs to remember this. He cannot forget.

“Promise me you’ll stay safe,” he whispers, doesn’t expect a reply.

He doesn’t get one. For the best, probably. They’re not liars. Not to each other; ain’t no fuckin’ use, between the two of ‘em. It hurts more than it ever helps.

They always know.

“Promise me you’ll keep lookin’,” Bucky says, turns his head away from Steve’s neck and speaks straight to the shadows because there are things he needs to say, can’t die with ‘em still on his tongue, because Steve’s everything that matters, and Bucky doesn’t think he’ll see him after this night and there are words that are forgiven in the darkness. There are confessions to be made that can’t be seen.

“Stevie, if she’s out there,” Bucky shakes his head, hair brushing sloppy across Steve’s shoulder. “Soulmate or not, Stevie, you gotta try, because you deserve someone who sees you, who looks at you and knows you’re the best of ‘em all,” Bucky gets the words out just before his throat tightens, before his voice cracks around something hollow, something broken in his chest that he can’t name, but probably wouldn’t either, if he could.

“You gotta promise you won’t sulk here alone and let yourself just,” Bucky slides down so that his forehead rests at Steve’s shoulder blade, and he gives himself permission to breathe, just to breathe—his hand never leaves the feel of Steve’s heartbeat, and he gives himself permission for that, too.

Just this once.

“Promise me you’ll keep lookin’, and if you find her, that you won’t let her go.”

The rhythm under Bucky’s hand does something funny, then, and it squeezes in Bucky’s chest like an omen, like a threat because Steve’s the strongest person Bucky’s ever known and just because his body doesn’t understand that doesn’t mean shit, except it does, it does and he can’t leave Steve, he can’t, he—

“Stevie—”

“I promise.”

It’s soft, and it’s more a sigh than it’s speech, really, but it’ll do, and Bucky exhales, and Steve’s heart’s decided on a beat again and it’s okay, it’ll be okay.

It has to be okay.

“I promise, if I find the right partner,” Steve’s grip on Bucky’s hand tightens, the vow of it made close, if still so quiet: “I won’t let ‘em go.”

Bucky nods, just nods, because his voice is somewhere caught in the way his own heart’s hurting when it moves, in the way it’s all too big, too lost, too important, too much.

“Take care of yourself,” Bucky exhales low, because he needs something to drown out the pounding in his ears that feels too loud, too deep: “while I’m gone.”

Steve snorts, humorless. “You’re one to talk,” he hisses, and Bucky feels the catch of his breath that cuts short the words that follow.

“Just, don’t,” Steve swallows hard. “Don’t...”

Bucky nods, let’s Steve feel it. “I’ll do my best.”

He understands what can’t be said. What never needed to be said, between them.

“I know you’re still lookin’ for your soulmate,” Steve’s voice is almost too small to hear, but Bucky feels it. Knows its shape and seeks it, grasps for it and holds it too close to ever get lost, and don’t say a goddamn word because he doesn’t care about his own soulmate—he’s not sure he ever really has. He’s okay with what life gives him, mostly, and the girls he’s had were always swell, even if they were never more than a hint at how people talk about lungs filling in time when he’d breathe heavy over ‘em, of blood pumping like a chorus when he’d suck their lips: they’ve come and gone, and that’s okay. It’s always been okay.

Because when they leave, or when he walks, there’s Steve, and Steve, well: God Almighty, but Stevie’s more’n enough of a gift in one lifetime for Bucky. So at the end of the day, soulmate or no, Bucky’s more than happy with what he’s got.

And Bucky goddamn bites his tongue around what he figures he’s about to cross an ocean to get, because he’s a blessed man, make no mistake. He doesn’t know what he thinks about God, really, but Bucky’s been lucky beyond what he’s earned this far because his family is healthy, he’s got a job that pays the bills, if only just, and he knows what it means to be happy. He comes home, and there’s Steve, and it’s probably enough that a man like Steve is real, but that Bucky gets to know him? Gets to make sure he stays out of the worst of the trouble he finds, gets to say goodnight to him before sleep comes, at the end of every fucking day? That’s, that’s—

That’s why if anybody's gotta find their soulmate, it’s Stevie. Because Bucky don’t know what he’d do without a Steve Rogers in the world, and Bucky knows damn well he ain’t enough to keep Steve’s body from double-crossin’ him, to keep Steve tethered to the here and the now, and whatever little bit he’s done, if anything at all: whatever little bit he’s given’ll be gone come morning. And Bucky doesn’t give a shit about soulmates.

Not unless that soulmate is Steve’s.

“And I want you to find her, Buck. I want you to find her so bad ‘cause you deserve to be so happy.”

Bucky’s brought back to the here and now by Steve’s chest’s moving up and down faster than it should, his muscles tense, the one skippin’ under Bucky’s hand most of all, and Bucky bites a sound back down his throat for the feel of it, the way it does wrong things in his own chest to know the strain, the hurt beneath Steve’s ribs.

“But don’t,” and Steve’s voice breaks, and Bucky’s pulse hammers hard for it, trips over something kneading and fretful and untethered in his veins that makes it shake.

“Don’t forget what you already got, okay?” Steve barely whispers, but it’s a heavy enough thing, in the asking, that the weight makes up for the still. “It’s not much, and it’s nothing like the same—”

And Bucky can’t help it, can’t bear to hear Steve speak like that about himself, about them: he can’t help it when he slips his left hand ‘round to hold Steve around the middle, to clasp atop the hand Steve’s holding to Bucky’s own against the middle of his chest. Bucky can’t help but clutch him close and stay whatever else Steve wants to say because this is it. This is all that’s left, and Bucky’ll be damned if he leaves it lay like this.

He’ll be damned.

“Never,” he bites out, shrill and sharp and choked down the seam of it. “Not ever, you hear me?”

And he doesn’t want to let go of Steve, but he moves a hand to Steve’s cheek and turns his head to face Bucky, and there’s not much to see in the pitch black of night but he can feel it, and he knows Steve can too when he breathes out:

“To the end of the line, Stevie. I meant that. I still mean it. You got me?”

And he does mean it, he always did, and he means all the things wrapped up in those words, all the deeper things, the secret things: too big and strong and too bright to risk even telling to the dark.

Steve’s eyes catch a stray beam of light, and he wishes he could read what they’re telling him, but he can’t, he can’t focus on that and memorize the shade of them, the shape of them, all the little things that need to never stray, and as Steve turns back and Bucky’s hand resumes its place upon Steve’s chest, they both know Bucky’ll leave before Steve wakes in the morning. They both know that much.

Steve breathes, and Bucky feels the beat space out, almost resigned, and he knows the feeling in his own veins, just now: he knows it close and dear and somehow it’s still peaceful. Somehow, it makes him brave when eventually Steve whispers back:

“I got you.”

______________________

“Does it hurt?”

Dum Dum turns toward Bucky at the question, profile lit by the fire.

“What,” he drawls; “my fucking balls freezing off?” he smirks, snuffs out the butt of his smoke as he reaches for another, makes a shrug out of what the rest of them give into as a shiver: “Yeah, little bit.”

“No, dumbass.” Bucky leans and offers Dugan the light from his zippo. “Leavin’ her behind.”

‘Cause Bucky’s curious. And Dum Dum’s the only one of ‘em to leave not just a girl behind, but the one. He left half his everything back in the States, and Bucky’s always wondered if it was as bad as some people talked about—like breathing with only one lung, like losing a limb, like bleeding from the center with nothing to staunch the red: Bucky’s always wondered, and maybe it ain’t polite to ask.

But they’re gettin’ shot at every day, and Bucky hasn’t had a letter from Steve in more weeks than his heart can rightly take, so. He’s not much sure he cares about polite.

“Hurt?” Dugan drags in long. “Naw, not really. It’s more,” he blows out the smoke, chalky in the night: “Lonely.”

And Dum Dum’s quiet, for a moment, breathing the smoke and the dark deep into his lungs, and Bucky shuts his eyes longer than he strictly needs to on a blink, just to savor the look of Stevie with the cigarettes for his asthma caught between red lips, breathing slow and steady, just like he ought to: Bucky shuts his eyes and lets himself have that moment of still before Dugan speaks again.

“It’s more like you can’t keep looking for a thing that's too far to find,” and he sounds thoughtful, and far away himself: deeper, and more real, somehow, than Dum Dum ever lets them see. “Something like that.”

“Hmmm,” Bucky hums, and lights up, himself; and that’s not so bad, really. Lonely. Feeling like you just wanna reach out and touch a thing that’s longer, so much longer than your reach.

If that’s all that happens when your soulmate’s far away, then hell, Bucky don’t feel near as bad about it, now.

S’no different than the rest of ‘em, really.

______________________

When they’re taken captive, Bucky keeps calm. He’s no stranger to bullies. He’s not unpracticed in maneuvering out of scenarios against an enemy that’s bigger, that’s stronger, that’s got more firepower and a longer reach. Better even than the army, maybe; better than experience on the ground, it’s Steve who trained him well, for this work.

So when they start pickin’ off his people, his men: he was never going to do anything but throw his body in front of the fist where it fell. He wasn’t ever going to duck and hide to save his own skin.

In the dark, all the men beside him in these cages, in this prison: in the dark, they all wear Stevie’s face, and Bucky never thinks twice about the way the weasley man with the round glasses smiles too fucking big when Bucky goes, full-weight in front of Falsworth who he barely knows, just knows he won’t see a good man go down before he does; shoves Dugan down and lets them drag him out, lets them struggle at the expense of his own ankles, his own bones because he wants it to hurt on both ends, he wants it to mean something when they take him away to die.

He wishes, now, more than anything in the world, that they’d taken him away to die.

The slab they call the operating table, the slab they call The Chair. The slab where he’s at the wrong angle to spit in their faces without it coming back at his own, but just the right angle for the beam in the contraption on the ceiling to hit him straight in the center of his eye, blinding, penetrating deeper than what he sees and into what he knows until it’s only what he thinks he knows, what he might not know, what he might have imagined, what might be a dream—

The things they do to him. The things they do to him are things that God never meant for man to speak of. God never meant for mortal souls to know words, to find words for the things that they do.

And Bucky isn't sure, was never sure where he stood regarding the question of God, really—wasn’t never sure whether he could buy that there was a God who'd make Steve so weak, who’d try to take him away, or if maybe, instead, he had to praise a God who at least gave Steve just enough strength to hold, and to keep holding on beyond all measure: Bucky still isn't sure about God.

But in this, like this: he has seen the Devil, and he damn well knows the depths of Hell.

They put things in his veins that burn, that freeze, that shake: he doesn’t want to think about the pounding in him, because it’s too fast and hard to be a heartbeat, he wouldn’t be alive anymore if it was his own heart, he wouldn’t—and he is alive, he’s pretty sure. It hurts too much to be anything else.

When he can think, when he can think before they take it away from him, before they make him question and wonder and second-guess: he worries, he worries enough for the pounding to ratchet up even higher and that always brings them closer, makes them curious, the fucks—but Bucky worries that whatever they’re doing is changing him. He feels different. His blood, when it moves, is a thing he can track: thicker. His lungs sometimes take in too much air, and move so slow; and sometimes he’s panting, like he doesn’t even breathe the same stuff he used to, like whatever he needs lives elsewhere. Is different.

And like he said: he doesn’t want to think about his heart.

But if he’s frightened by the pounding, and how fast and hard it runs, what scares him even more is a thing he’s never thought to fear.

What scares him even more is whether they’re changing him enough that, if he does have a soulmate somewhere, he won’t match them anymore. They won’t know him. They’ll both end up missing each other on the street, if Bucky ever leaves here. If he survives to walk down a street ever again.

Bucky suspects, in the spare moments between, that he should probably focus on the last bit of that, the if that ain’t ever gonna come; Bucky suspects if he focused on that bit, it’d be easier.

But the laser-light turns on, then, every time, and more fire shoots through his veins, and he never gets that far.

He doesn’t ever get that far.

______________________

When it comes, he isn’t ready. And when it comes, it's just a trick: he’s sure of it.

But he still isn’t ready.

It’s a trick, because they’re not human, they don’t feel, and they’ll use whatever’s there, they’ll take whatever’s left, they’ll reach into his chest and squeeze the pummeled thing to keep him aching, keep the blood moving for them to draw—so it’s a trick, and there’s a part of him that knows it, but that part’s almost dead.

And if this isn’t a trick, then it’s almost certainly the end—for real, this time, after so many nights and days he can’t separate or track; this time, if it isn’t a ploy in their game to break him, to take the numbers and the name from his tongue, if it’s not a cruel device to remind him that he’s owned, that he’s no longer a man, no longer a soul of his own, that he belongs to them for all that he’s locked himself away and tried, he has tried to keep something safe, just in case of a miracle—he has tried, but if it’s not a trick, then it’s dying, and it’s either mercy or the swift hand of judgement that fools what’s left of his mind into holding it close when it comes, either way, and Bucky still doesn’t know what he thinks about God.

But Bucky knows. Bucky knows that this is what the angels sang of, what the saints saw behind those holy eyes: this is what it feels like, Bucky knows, to be whole again, not just a balm against the jagged edges he’s been torn to, but this is what it is to know that you could be better, could be more inside the grasp of something bigger, something warmer. All the notes inside the tune that only you could know because it wasn’t a thing to be heard, no.

It was a blessing to be felt.

And the slab’s still hard on his back. And he knows the marks in his veins where they’d taken the needles, the long tubes leading in and tracing out: he knows they’re gone already, but it all still aches. And his heart’s still a mallet, still a shiver in the snow and he doesn’t understand how his blood pumps so damn hard if the beating’s so fucking swift, doesn’t know how it means a damn thing when his lungs barely take any air, he hasn’t known since he got here, since it started and wouldn’t fucking end, far after it should have fucking ended—it’s all the same, there’s nothing different, and he can’t barely see out from his eyes, wide as they are, blurred as they gaze but he knows that nothing out there is difference, and it’s a trick, they’ve dug too far, they’ve toyed too deep and it’s a lie, but oh, Christ, dear God—

His heart’s pounding, racing, tripping, but there’s something else: slow to build but solid, gentle, like arms around his shoulders and heat against his skin. His heart’s flailing, but there’s something there, growing fast, and it’s not calm itself, it’s not sure or slow but it’s strong. It’s strong and unyielding and unwavering and it is reaching: and it’s a physical thing, the sensation of it. It’s a tangible knowledge that wraps around the thrashing muscle in his chest and strokes like a fingertip, long and artful and dear: strokes and whispers without any words in the language of cells and strings and the universe as it hums—and Bucky feels himself shudder, head and toe against his shackles when it settles like a cover, like a need, like a joy around the way his heart’s been straining: a new beat, leading. Asking. Pleading, and Bucky doesn’t know why, but he’s only alive, still, he thinks—he’s only here at all because he was made to follow it.

And when he does, when he exhales and his heart still shakes but feels safe in it, held for it somehow: when he follows, when he gives, his lungs follow suit, and where tension kept him gasping, where fear kept him on the brink of the dim he doesn’t even have to lift his chest so steep to taste the sweetness of what it means to breathe, to live—it’s relief and release and a freedom in chains, and it is every gift that Bucky Barnes has ever failed to earned made small enough to course through his veins, bright and neither fire nor ice, but rightness, trueness, all that he is and has been and will be, braided through with something unknown, offered but somehow still far, familiar but unknown, and Bucky’s known what it means to have a full heart with affection, with longing, with protection or aching but this, this—

No. No.

Bucky takes the pain that’s receding to the edges, the tatters left of his mind and he grasps for it, clings to it, concentrates and brings it back to bear upon him as fiercely as he can, wrestles his lip between his teeth and his fingernails against the tender give of the lines in his palms and he presses, bites, digs until thick blood trails out, until the soft caress of the enemies' lies in his chest, in his head, in his veins falls short of stopping the pounding in his heart altogether, fails in keeping him from fighting back just this much, just this little bit to root in the present, in the now: alone, so very much alone and that is good, that is good because it means he saved the others as best he could, and there will be good men to still fight for the world beyond these walls, there will be a war to have won and maybe Bucky won’t see it, maybe Bucky’ll never hug him close and feel him breathe but the world will still turn for Steven Grant Rogers and Bucky is alone, now. And that means his battle is as won as it’s gonna get.

So he bites harder, until he settles. Until the words come back to his tongue and so what if he stumbles, so what if he slurs—so what if the feeling of hands on his body, around the harsh contractions of his heart making them smooth, the touch alone like the Hosts of Heaven itself; so what if Bucky leans into it, takes the lie they’re selling in order to spit back at them with the only venom he’s got left, all the more stubborn, all the more virulent because it’s gotta be, because this is the last stand and they’re trying to take his soul, and there may be nothing left for him, aside from this. There may be no more moments to steal, but he will not give them the satisfaction. He will not let them forge the mate of his entire being and sell fool’s gold to his heart, to his self, to his blood and bones, he won’t.

He will not die wrapped up inside so dire a lie.

So he recites his numbers, and he stumbles on his name, and he tastes blood and tells himself against the resonance that’s eating through his mind: it is a lie, it is a lie, it is a lie.

So when he hears footsteps, he knows it’s just a trip inside the falsehood of the twin-beat, the heart behind his own that’s supposed to be reaching, supposed to be matching the pounding, his pulse.

And when he hears the gasping, it’s just the veil parting, it’s just the illusion tearing at seams because there is no heavy-and-heaving-but-holding breath that guides his own, it’s just him: it’s just what’s left to gasp at from long-worn lungs in this hellhole, this torture chamber. This cage.

When he sees the face. When he sees—

His eyes won’t close when he wants them to. His vision won’t clear when he begs for it to sharpen, to make sense of the colors where they match the sound, the voice, that voice—

“Oh my God…”

It’s not real, it’s not real, there is no comfort, there is no soft pressure around trembling chamber of a worn-down heart, there is no breath that shoulders the burden when he cannot draw his own, there is no sun to thin his blood, there isn’t a body that’s too big for the face that hovers before him, the eyes that he knows but can’t know, not here, it’s not, it can’t, he can’t, it is a lie—

“Is,” and his tongue drags through blood on his lips when he speaks.

“Is that,” and he speaks without the will to, speaks because his body is keening, is longing, is reaching and he can’t help it, he can’t fight against the untruths that are clawing so deep it can’t be stopped, so deep he can’t even tell if it should hurt or heal or sting like bliss does, like love—

“It’s me.”

And that voice sings through him, the timbre like a whisper and an aria, an anthem and a poem and a lullaby and all of the perfect things, the psalms and the sighs and the rock to which he anchors, and it’s a lie, isn’t it? It can’t be real, this can’t be real...

“It’s Steve.”

Bucky’s lips curve, and joy slips to shape his mouth because it’s impossible. It’s entirely impossible.

But Bucky’s heart’s not pounding. It’s singing praise, it’s overjoyed, it is redeemed and undone and it’s cradled close and taught jubilation, beat by beat, and that’s impossible. It’s entirely impossible.

But goddamnit all—it’s true.

______________________

Once he’s able to piece it all together, he wishes, almost, that he hadn’t.

Because the truth is this—that Buck is blind, was as blind as any of ‘em, any of the naysayers and the doubters and the idiots who wouldn’t understand, who didn’t see, who overlooked, or worse: looked straight into the bright blue eyes of Steven Grant Rogers and couldn’t glimpse the strength of his soul.

And good God, that’s what it always was, has always been about: the soul. The goddamned soul.

And Steve—

Bucky nearly bites through his cigarette, nearly drops the smoke between shaking fingers, half-ash, his mind elsewhere, his heart heavy, but warm, Jesus Christ; he’s not sure he knew the meaning of that word, before—not sure he should have been allowed to use it, to say it before he knew it like this, and Bucky wants to think he’s only as much to blame, as much as fault as the rest of everyone, as the whole of a world too caught up to see beyond the obvious, but he isn’t, he isn’t.

He’s worse.

He throws the cigarette to the ground, wastes what’s left, and takes too many tries to match the end of a new smoke to the flicker of a light, and it doesn’t take the edge off like it should—hasn’t, not since the table, the room, what was done—it doesn’t coat his lungs and settle his nerves, but it’s almost like it doesn’t need to, even if it could: it’s almost as if there’s a hand at his back even when it’s only the wind that curls around him, even when it’s his watch and his breathing makes the only echo to be heard.

He breathes in, and he holds the taste in his mouth, in his chest: lets his heart beat against it and he hones in on the rhythm, the force, the flutter in it—all excitement and devastation and the whole of life and death, the rise and fall, the give and take, and it’s new except that it isn’t. It isn’t new, and he is worse, because his heart is heavy. His heart is warm, and he should never have said the word before he knew what it meant, but he should have known, he should have known.

He should have seen.

Because when Steve was hurting, when Steve was ailing, when Steve was flirting with death so damned close and sure: Bucky felt like he was dying, too. Bucky’s chest would seize up and feel small, feel cold, feel like it was tearing itself apart and he’d reach for Steve beyond the understanding of why, because why did he need a reason to want Steve to live, why did there ever need to be a reason to hold onto to Steve Rogers and never let go?

And so he’d never thought on it. He’d never bothered to even wonder. And more than never seeing the clear, simple truth where it shone out and grabbed him at his core from the first, he never named what was there beyond souls and frequencies that resonated bright and hot between them.

And it had always been love. Bucky’d never named it, but that’s what it’d always been.

The ash hits Bucky’s lips and he lets go of the butt, tastes the bitter and the death on the skin, just there.

When Steve was sick, when Steve was dying, Bucky’d reach for him, the inclination deep, written firm into his bones, and he never once thought about the way he didn’t blink before he took Steve’s hand in his, before he wrapped around Steve’s body and prayed, and breathed, and begged.

And the softness, and the wonder, the shiver-bliss of Steve’s eyes opening, of his pulse steadying, his world come back into focus and color: Steve's smile when he’d catch his breath after a fight, his heart steadying and his eyes gleaming—Bucky’d never bothered to think, never bothered to hold close and really read what it had to mean that Bucky could only breathe when Steve was breathing, that his heart only lost the wince, the weight, the noose when Steve’s could tap sure against his ribs, if still not so strong: Bucky hadn’t thought, Bucky hadn’t looked, Bucky’d hadn’t seen.

Bucky’d been a goddamned fool.

‘Cause on the table. In that room. In that place. It hadn’t been a lie.

It’d been a horrid fucking cosmic joke.

Because God Almighty, it’d always been Steve, hadn’t it? And Bucky can blame the fact that Stevie’s lungs were too weak to feel lifting ‘round Bucky’s healthy ones, that Steve’s heartbeat couldn’t echo against Bucky’s with enough force to be known: but Steve’s spirit, the soul in him had been Bucky’s touchstone, his North Star, his focal point and his guiding light and the only home that fit for as long as Bucky can remember, for as long as Bucky’s been unwilling to prod any of those truths too far.

It was Steve. It is Steve. His soulmate.

And then there’s Bucky, who wasn’t enough, who isn’t enough, and who goddamn fucking well won’t be, because when Steve needed a soulmate to tether him, to keep him safe, to make him well: when Steve needed the match for his everything to be there, to keep a fist from draining blood out his nose, or a kick from cracking his bones, or a sickness from stalling his blood, from stuffing his lungs, from straining hard against his already stretched-thin heart, Bucky’d been nothing but a warm body grasping at straws: nothing. Nothing.

And now: now, where Steve never needed a savior, he’d used to need an anchor. Now Steve, who everyone sees, finally, but they don’t all see—when Stevie gets his soulmate, finds his true match, his everything and then some, when Stevie finally has everything he’s always been meant to have, it’ll be not for the saving of his body, the steadying of his pulse, no.

It’ll be for the joy of breathing, the thrill of a bounding heartbeat made of bliss, and Bucky will watch, and he will smile, and Bucky’ll know there’s a God who is good, because Steve is well, and Steve is loved, and Steve is breathing and he’s happy and he’s whole.

And Bucky’ll know there’s a God who kept him from dying on that table for a reason.

To watch, and to know what it means to be a blind fucking fool; what it means to overlook a miracle.

Either that, or there ain’t no fucking God that cares for any of it; but there’s Steve.

And because there’s Steve, Bucky’ll always give Heaven the benefit of the doubt.
______________________

When he sees Peggy Carter, Bucky knows.

Bucky knows, and it crushes him.

The way she speaks to Steve, the way her eyes look not at, or through, but in, into the center of the man, the miracle of Steven Rogers; and the way Steve looks at her, the way he was always saving, Bucky suspects. He glances up their bodies, reads their postures, and he can almost sense the way their selves entangle, metaphysical and beyond feeling but he can see it, somehow: how they mingle. How they fit.

And it crushes him. Entirely.

But it’s the fact that he’s selfish enough for it to crush him in the first place: that’s the thing, in truth, that kills him.

Because who is Bucky, really, to ask for what he’s ignored for so long? To beg the universe for a thing he wants like a child, selfish and pining, throwing a tantrum between his own goddamn bones because he saw, too late, what his heart beat to feel, to have, to know?

And more than that, so much fucking more than that: how terrible of a person, how useless of a friend is he to want, where he can’t provide, where he can’t give in turn, where Steve would be less, unfulfilled in meeting Bucky in the middle where he aches, where he feels more than he’s ever felt, now—in Steve’s presence, in Steve’s proximity, knowing the resonance and feeling Steve’s every breath on some level he can’t name, so strong and so healthy and real and full but still far, still not quite there—and more isn’t better, exactly, more hurts where less was static, and Bucky deserves that; no.

No, Bucky will weather that proudly because he loves Steve, and he was too damned oblivious to notice, to say it, to own it and hold it to his chest and breathe it in like it deserved, and Steve is everything. Steve deserves everything and Bucky falls goddamn short.

When he sees Peggy Carter, it crushes him, because she is wonderful. She is beautiful. She is fire and steel and he hears how she believed in Steve before, saw everything that Bucky saw but didn’t understand. It crushes him, because she is everything. And Steve deserves everything.

So Bucky swallows the bile that rises when he thinks about it too hard—what wasn’t lost, but more was never going to be his to lose at all; Bucky swallows that violent thing that comes up and threatens to kill him, every time Steve smiles at him like nothing’s different, like nothing’s changed and Bucky had to smile back and agree when he knows—when Bucky thinks they both know it’s not, they both know it’s changed and there was a loss had somewhere that cannot be undone; Bucky smirks back, and snarks sharp, calls Steve punk when no one’s listening, when he wants nothing more than to reach, than to touch. He swallows it down.

He swallows it down and he bites his goddamn tongue, and the blood is a trick, from a slab in the center of hell.

It’s a trick that they taught him, and it serves.

______________________

In truth, as the weeks drag into months, and they face Death enough to recognize the look in his eyes, to almost call him a friend: in truth it’s a comfort, the feeling of Steve in everything that Bucky is, in his veins, at the bottom of every breath and the beating heart he lets guide his shots—but then also in the spaces, in the spots between. His world is colored with Steve, always has been, but this: this is something, this is tasting forbidden fruit and Bucky’d spent too many nights that should have cut through him colder than they did wrestling with whether it would’ve been better to never have had a hint of it, to never know the longing that’d never be fulfilled, or if a glimpse, the lilt on his tongue as he inhaled: whether that was enough.

And that’s how he comes to terms with it, because when a bullet grazes close, it’s Steve that keeps him steady, keeps him grounded—and more than that: when Steve does something stupid, something unforgivably, idiotically heroic except it’s not fucking heroic, it’s just goddamn dumb; when Steve’s presumed dead in an explosion, or lost in a fight, Bucky just has to close his eyes and wait, focus, feel—Bucky doesn’t have to wonder, doesn’t have to leave his heart to break because he can feel the strength in Steve’s pulse and the breath in his lungs and he knows.

He knows.

And so Bucky makes his peace with what he can and cannot have. He makes his peace the best he can and he does thank whoever, whatever is listening that he gets what he does, that he’s allowed even this much, because he’s a damned fucking fool, a jerk, a moron and a wreck but he’s Steve’s jerk, and Steve’s heart was always so big, and now it’s just as strong as it always should’ve been, and Steve’s the most selfless fuck in the history of being, and whether he knows that Bucky clings to the feel of him, to the life in him like a goddamn parasite, Steve shines like the sun and gives warmth, gives life wherever he can reach, even where he doesn’t get it back in return, and Bucky basks in that fact.

Bucky is grateful for that fact, more than he is guilty.

Steve’s close enough to him here, now, that Bucky can feel his exhales on his skin, not just in his chest. And if their arms brush when they both breathe, just so, Bucky doesn’t shy from it, or complain. If he’s honest, he tries to anticipate the shiver in his lungs, tries to move so that he touches Steve just lightly, just enough: so that it all sparks through his body: not flesh to flesh but contact through layers, accidental but still powerful, and Bucky thinks back to nights wrapped up around each other, Brooklyn murmuring around their bodies—he thinks, and he longs a little, except now Stevie is everything he ever wanted to be. Now Steve has everything he was always meant to have.

Bucky breathes in, and their arms brush, and goddamn: it’s enough. More than.

“Gonna hit the hay,” Bucky exhales slow, slaps his palms to his knees and hauls himself up. Steve stands with him, and Bucky should tell him not to bother, not to leave the group, the warmth near the fire: they’ve got a big day tomorrow. Taking down a train. Getting that fucker who thought it was fun and games to play with Bucky’s mind. To try to kill his soul.

Bucky should tell him to stay. But it’s Steve who’s the selfless one. Not Bucky.

Bucky doesn't say a word, and Steve follows Bucky close enough that Bucky can’t even tell where his own pulse begins, for the way Steve’s curls around the feeling, and oh.

Shit, but that’s gorgeous, and Bucky wonders what it’d be like to give that to Steve right back, to share it, rather than steal it.

Bucky wonders, but not for long. Doesn’t let himself linger in those thoughts for too many moments. Can’t allow for it to fester; can’t allow himself to dwell.

It happens before he thinks about it, before he can stop himself. He removes his glove and reaches, just for a moment. It’s bare hand to clothed shoulder, but he holds it for a moment longer than he should, and then another, and Steve doesn’t say a thing, just looks at him, and Bucky loses himself in those eyes, thinks maybe it’s not losing if he’d left himself inside that blue years ago—maybe now, it’s finding, but it doesn’t matter, none of it matters because Bucky feels his body come alive, feels his heart skip like a record between songs, finding a groove that suits and it’s magnificent, is what it is, and Bucky lets himself linger in it, and Steve doesn’t pull away.

Bucky doesn’t let himself even try to read what Steve’s thinking, what his gaze is giving away; just lets himself feel, lets his lungs drink their fill and his blood soak this in and and oh, but it's everything; it is exquisite even as it is agony and Bucky breathes, breathes.

Makes himself let go.

“Night, Stevie,” he whispers. And that’s all that needs saying.

Before sleep takes him, though, Bucky thinks, ‘cause it’s dark, and in his own mind he can say it, in his own mind he can own the feeling, the need, the yearning. Before sleep takes him, Bucky thinks: I should have reached again, once more.

Just in a case.

Chapter Text

It’s not that Steve’s never been in a fight before; he’s been in plenty.

What’s different is, this time, instead of just standing up and willing his body to hold him up long enough to make his point; instead of just standing up and acting strong, he feels it.

He feels it.

‘Cause his heart’s pounding real heavy, and it makes him feel dizzy. But where the beat wants to swoop and leave him faint-like, leave him off-balance and swaying on his toes, there’s something building underneath it, now keeping it as steady as it can: straightening Steve’s shoulders out against the curve in his spine, planting his flat feet firm against the ground, tugging at his lungs to open wider, to let the air in. And Steve doesn’t know what it is, not just then, not ‘til after. He doesn’t know what it is.

But the punch he throws hits home with a single swing, and if it’d just been the two of ‘em, if the fight’d been one on one, then Steve woulda more than had this dumb cluck on the ropes, he’d’a KO’d the nitwit in just one blow.

Ain’t just the two of ‘em though, o’course.

But before they can do more’n bloody his nose for standing up for the boy they’d been hastlin’—younger than Steve, but just a hair bigger, not that it matters; but before they can do more damage than Steve can shrug straight off, Steve’s hand goes to his chest without thinking on it, without planning to. Steve’s hand goes to his chest and his jaw drops and it’d draw attention, he suspects, if not for the words that ring out, that he feels in the cadence of the breath that lifts the lungs beneath his palm before he even hears them said:

“Lay off ‘im!”

The boy who approaches is tallish, thinnish, but in the way that won’t last—his shoulders are broad, and his body’ll fill out where it’s shot up quick, Steve can see it, Steve can tell, and the promise of it’s tight and breathless under his ribs but it’s more than just the flush in those cheeks as he sneers at the retreating bullies, kicks at their rears as they flee, as he grins down at his barely-scuffed knuckles before he turns to Steve with concern: it’s more than the beauty in him that leaves Steve feels funny, feeling full of something heated, sweet like honey and soft like warm milk.

Steve blinks, and the boy frowns.

“I said, are you okay?”

Steve shakes himself, and his heart pumps hard more times than it probably should without making him feel a little wrong—but it doesn’t feel wrong at all.

“I’m okay,” Steve says, where he’d have scowled and said I coulda handled ‘em, I was fine on my own any other time. To anyone else.

The boy offers Steve a hand, and Steve’d have glared at anyone else’s hand, stuck out like that, like Steve needs it. But there’s a feeling in Steve’s limbs that tells him that’s not this, that’s not here and now, that’s not this boy. There’s a feeling in Steve’s limbs that screams out take that hand.

Steve takes that hand.

The boy pulls him up, but Steve’s own legs are more graceful, more powerful than they’ve ever been before and they help too, and Steve’s off balance with it, and the boy’s not expecting it, and they stumble, and Steve’s chest is up against the boy’s before he can steady himself, before the boy can reach out and do the job himself.

Steve can’t stop the way his eyes go wide when he feels the other boy’s heartbeat, heavy and happy and pumping with all sorts of life; when he feels it up against his own because they’re both breathing in at just the same moments, and where the other boy’s looking at him like he’s hit his head, concerned as he scans for injury, for scrapes bigger than the dried blood on Steve’s upper lip—where the boy’s not bothering to notice the finer details, Steve can feel his heart before he rights himself, before he gathers his wits and pulls back.

Steve can feel his heart, and Steve can feel his own follow its lead, and what’s stranger, what’s more beautiful is it keeps going, it’s still felt when Steve pulls back.

It’s so strong, Steve can barely stand it.

“Y’look alright,” the boy decides, brushing a bit of dark hair from stormy eyes as he nods, a little skeptical, a little bit concerned, like a but needs tacked on because Steve’s a good liar when he needs to be, but whatever's happening inside him just now’s not something he thinks even he could ever be expected to keep wholly off his face.

“You live nearby?”

Steve blinks again, and forces himself to clear his throat and speak strong, steady:

“Close enough,” he shrugs, and he doesn’t want to leave this boy’s side to go, but he knows he should. He’s already late.

“You look peaky,” the boy tells him, straight and sure like he knows what he’s talking about; he can’t be much older than Steve, if he’s older at all, but he talks like Steve’s momma does, about Steve looking not-quite-well.

And it’s funny, a little bit. Because Steve’s never felt more well in all his life.

Steve jumps a bit, at the hand that presses unexpectedly at the back of his neck.

“What,” Steve stammers, before he finds himself tucked up under the boy’s arm, slung casual-like, as if they’re pals.

“What are you doing?”

“M’walkin’ you home, numbskull, whatcha think?” the boy grins, and he’s gap-toothed, lost or punched out, Steve can’t tell—either makes sense, given how well the boy’d taken care of those fiends before—but Steve finds that he wants to know for sure, where the tooth went. Wants to know every detail. Wants to know this boy.

Steve can feel how the blood moves, he can actually feel it, when it floods into his cheeks as he realizes, as he faces head on the fact that he thinks he wants to know everything about this boy, his past, his present. But what makes his blood run hot and thick out of nowhere is how much Steve’s sure he wants to know where this boy will go. Wants to watch this boy grow into a man. Wants to be there.

Wants to stay under his arm, just like this.

“Look at you, you’re all red,” the boy’s glancing over, looks scared for him, his grip on Steve’s shoulder tightening. “Can’t let you go all alone, what if ya keel over?”

And Steve’s breathless enough for everything coursing through him that he can understand the concern. And when the boy asks which way to go at every corner, Steve almost tells him wrong, almost milks the wooziness for everything he can to stay here longer, to know this just a few minutes more—the strength, the rightness, the fullness.

The wholeness.

Steve almost gives him the wrong directions. By the time they make it to his building, Steve sure as heck wishes that he had.

“This you?” the boy asks. Steve nods.

“Yep. S’me.”

“You alright gettin’ up them stairs on your own?” The boy’s eyebrow quirks, like he’s really not sure.

“‘Course I am,” Steve tells him, should thank him, really, but his tongue’s all big, all heavy.

And the boy just grins, anyway. So.

“Watch though!” he says, as Steve goes to climb. He turns, and the boy cocks his head, looks a little sheepish as he tells him, “Take care of yourself.”

Steve grins, and turns back, and his chest’s already aching.

It’s the ache in his chest that makes him turn after three steps; it’s the tightness in his lungs and the rasping in his breath that makes him turn, open his mouth to offer his own name in the blind hope that it’ll give him this boy’s name in kind—

He turns, but the boy’s already gone.

By the time Steve gets to his door, his body’s burning, worse than it should, and for all that Steve doesn’t know why, that’s a lie. It’s a lie, and he’s a real good liar when he needs to be.

But Steve knows.

He knows.

______________________

“Ma,” Steve ducks his head as his ma tucks him in, smoothing the hair from his forehead. He’d tried to talk himself out of asking, tried to make himself feel bad enough about taking away his mother’s sleep to keep his mouth shut. But he’s gotta hear it, after the alleyway, after the feeling in his chest, after the boy without a name and the way Steve’s been struggling to breathe all night for no good reason.

He’s gotta ask. He’s gotta know.

“Will you tell me the story, again?” he asks her with big, hopeful eyes. “Will you tell me about you and Dad?”

His ma frowns.

“Steve, love,” she cups his cheeks softly, and the lines at the corners of her mouth deepen when she feels how warm he is, how hot he’s running. “I don’t know if it’s the best idea, tonight.”

“Please, Momma,” Steve begs, and he ain’t one to do it, not ever; and it kills him to push, but he’s breathless, and his ma’s worried, and Steve can’t help it.

“Just the short version, even,” Steve feels his eyes stretch bigger, and he hopes his ma can see that it isn’t just for kicks that he’s askin’. It’s ‘cause he needs it. “Please?”

His ma looks at him, eyes narrowing, looking—seeing, Steve thinks, because his ma always sees: she looks at him, and tilts her head, and it takes a long couple of moments where Steve’s heart just pounds before she nods, and there’s air in the room again, and Steve doesn’t know what this is, this tightness in his whole body: not quite like the asthma, or the way his heart gets clumsy sometimes—not like that. This is brand new.

This is brand new, and painful, but. But.

Somehow, it’s not a bad thing. Somehow, all the hurt feels like it’s something precious. To be grasped to and held.

“Very well,” his mother finally sighs, settling next to him and leaning close, propped up on her elbow. “But just the short version,” she tells him sternly. “You need your rest.”

Steve nods; though more because Ma needs her rest, really.

She grabs for Steve’s hand and stares off into the nothing until a smile curves her lips.

“I felt it before I saw him,” she says, ever so soft. “Just here,” and her free hand slides to the center of her chest.

“A fluttering, and then so steady,” she breathes out, and her eyes slide closed in memory just in time to miss the way Steve’s own hand covers his heart, and it’s not like that now, not anymore, but it was.

“So strong,” his ma carries on, eyes still shut ; “like being lifted, being held all the while that you’re holding, too.”

And it was, it was that, with the boy. And he’d tried to hold on, to hold right back in kind, he’d tried.

“And I don’t think it’s a thing you’d ever know to miss, if you never find it, if you don’t have it, but oh,” his ma’s eyes open, overbright and far away as she beams at Steve, a little wobbly around the edges, a little wet in her gaze as she speaks.

“Oh, once you’ve felt it, my darling,” she squeezes Steve’s hand in her own. “If you find it, once you’ve felt it, it’s like a miracle against your flesh, in the beat of your heart. It’s lightness, and so much beauty.”

She turns to him, sits up a bit and runs a soft touch across the curve of his head, thoughtful.

“It makes you soar, it makes you well,” she murmurs, and Steve thinks of how strong his ma is, and wonders if his father’d made her more, wonders how that’s possible, and yet, if it was...

“It comes out from nowhere and strikes you dumb, a bit,” Ma’s smiling, soft about it, and Steve’s back in the alley, back earlier that evening with blood on his lip and tongue too thick to talk.

“It makes you new, where you were worn,” Ma’s sayin’, and her eyes close again when she breathes in deep: “And when he drew close, Stevie darling, it was like the world was made of only him. When I looked at him, his chest would rise with mine, somehow, and I couldn’t see or hear it, not yet, but I knew his blood was moving just the same.” She sighs, slow and heavy, so very sad, but Steve’s blood’s humming with those words, because that was it, that was absolutely it, just like that.

“I knew, though I couldn’t say how,” Ma’s telling him, but Steve had known. Steve had known because he’d felt it, real and true and pounding, right against his chest.

Exactly like that.

“It’s not a thing that fits explaining, you understand, not a thing that’s married to sense,” Steve’s ma says, wrapping up the tale, the short version, but Steve doesn’t need the long. He knows, now. For sure. It wasn’t just inside his head.

“But it’s so real, my love. So real, and so safe,” and she takes his hand in hers and pats it firmly against her lap, smiles small but strong as she tells him: “It keeps you, as you keep it, and when he looked at me,” she trails a bit, her words small and soft but filled with all the feeling:

“It was steadiness, and fullness, and wonder,” she confesses, and Steve misses his father, though Steve never knew his face.

Ma kisses Steve’s head, checks for fever against her lips before she bids him goodnight, and Steve tells her he loves her before curling up, mind reeling, heart thrumming.

Makes you new, Ma’d said. Makes you well, and yes, he’d felt that. The boy’d been far, still, and it’d brought him strength. Close, though: close had felt just like Ma had said it.

Close had felt like flying.

And when Steve thinks of it, dwells on it: when it sinks into his blood and his bones that Steve doesn’t know the boy from Adam, didn’t even catch his name, it feels like falling.

Steve thinks he might cry, if he was the type to. He isn’t, though.

He isn’t.

______________________

Steve’s barely out his door for school the next morning when the voice breaks through, should startle him into jumping, at the least, except Steve’s already feeling the shift in the ground at his feet, in the set of his bones: straighter, stronger.

His heart jumps when he turns and finds the boy from yesterday on the stairs, bright gap-toothed grin shining up at him as the boy stands, brushing the dirt from his trousers hastily as he takes a step closer—Steve’s heart jumps.

But in a nice way.

“Oh good,” the boy’s saying, and the relief in his eyes and his voice is so real Steve thinks a person could maybe get trapped in it. Drown in it. “I caught ya.”

You did, Steve thinks, though he doesn’t know where it comes from. He feels it though.

He knows, though he can’t say how.

Oh.

“I’m kinda an idiot sometimes,” the boy’s shifting on his feet, a little hesitant, but mostly resolute; “Forget things, get all caught up in one thing and miss another,” and Steve looks at him close as he seeks out the trip of his heart, only to come up short—it’s steady just now. Fast, like it doesn’t want to get left behind by the quick-paced thump of the rhythm that’s settled around it from elsewhere, but it’s hitting every beat, and Steve feels energized for it. Set all alight.

“I’m James.”

And it’s strange. It’s the strangest thing inside of all the strange things, but the air in Steve’s lungs, at that moment, when the boy says the words, gives his name: that air turns sweet.

“But you can call me Bucky.”

And at that, at that, it’s sweet enough that Steve can taste it, all sugar and wonder on his tongue, steady and full and safe and—

Oh.

“I can call you Bucky?” Steve manages to say the words without his voice cracking, manages to make them sound solid. Might even quirk an eyebrow at the boy, this ‘Bucky’.

“Yep. All my friends call me Bucky. I like it better, anyway,” Bucky’s rattling off, grinning wide, and Steve feels something in him follow every word, every pause in between like instruction, like a glimmer in the dark he’s gotta follow, gotta see where it’s from, where it leads.

“One day, everyone’ll call me Bucky. When I’m all grown up and I can tell people what to call me without my momma tellin’ ‘em first,” Bucky’s talking, starting toward the stairs back down, and Steve’s following, with more distance between them than he thinks he wants, lost in his head, caught up inside the way his blood feels when it pumps until:

“This is the part where you tell me your name, Punk,” Bucky’s looking at him, exasperated, maybe. But his lips are quirked up, and Steve can feel that he’s not angry, not frustrated. Not really.

Steve feels it, and he knows that it’s real.

“Don’t call me punk,” Steve huffs out, wondering if Bucky feels that he’s giddy, that the edge to his voice is all play, all front: he’s not sure, because Bucky’s face is hard to read, and the rhythm around Steve’s heart feels like it tightens, like it jumps a little. Steve thinks maybe it doesn’t work the same, for Bucky, so he smirks and rushes his steps and meets Bucky at the bottom with a bump of his shoulder against the middle of Bucky’s arm. “Jerk.”

And then Bucky smiles full-on, and Steve feels the looseness in his chest like a sigh.

“Don’t call me Jerk, Punk,” Bucky quips back, and bumps his arm into Steve’s in turn.

“I’m Steve.” And Steve’s eyes don’t meet Bucky’s, he looks straight ahead as he scuffs his feet along the ground, kicks pebbles far with the tip of his toe.

“Steve.” And Steve’s not sure if Bucky feels it the same on his end, or if he even feels it at all, but the heat when Bucky says his name—the flutter of it like wings and breaths and songs, it’s something Steve’s never known, and that he never wants to forget. Never wants to give up.

It almost makes him stop still in his tracks, but he can’t stop, not while Bucky’s moving. He can’t not follow where Bucky leads, somehow.

“Come on, Steve,” Bucky’s looking at him sideways from where he’s gotten a bit ahead again, as Steve’d slowed his pace. “Else we’ll be late.”

And they will be, if Steve don’t get a move on, so Steve swallows, shrugs like it was nothing when it was every possible thing in the whole of the world, inside him, in his chest.

In his soul.

“I’da handled it just fine, yesterday,” Steve finds himself saying, once they’re halfway to school. “On my own,” and his tongue’s just moving before he has the sense to stop it. “Had ‘em on the ropes.”

And Bucky’s watching him close, like he’s weighing the words, and Steve still don’t know why he’s said them at all, why he needs Bucky to know he’s not weak, not helpless despite how he looks, despite all the walls up against him, he ain’t useless.

But the look Bucky’s giving him isn’t the one Steve normally gets; isn’t pity. It almost seems like Bucky knows already. That Bucky didn’t come to help him ‘cause he thought Steve couldn’t handle himself.

“Couldn’t just leave ya, though,” Bucky finally says, sets it out between them like a given. “Couldn’t just walk away with them comin’ at ya. Couldn’t ever do that.”

And Steve lets that soak in, doesn’t say anything.

“Hmm,” is all he gets out, because the heat around his ribs is soft and sure, and where his heart’s fluttering like crazy, it keeps him grounded, keeps him breathing deep and clear, and oh.

Oh.

This is like the story. This is the thing that’s not married to sense.

______________________

They fit like nothing else—friends within the day, inseparable within a week: it’s natural. It’s wonderful. Best friends. Nothing held back between ‘em.

Which is how Steve learns—and it doesn’t take long—but it’s how Steve learns that, if Bucky Barnes is Steve’s soulmate?

Steve sure as heck ain’t Bucky’s.

Because Steve hadn’t said it out loud, o’course. And maybe that’s a thing held back between them, but only because Steve had thought it wasn’t needed, because Bucky keeps him close, touches him more’n most people touch, and Steve’s never felt better, Steve's never stood straighter or breathed deeper—Steve 's never in his life felt healthier or more excited to wake up and take on the world: it’s the best thing. Bucky is the absolute best thing.

And when Steve gets sick, every year, many times a year: when Steve gets sick, Bucky always comes by, always sits with him; Steve’s ma teaches Bucky what to look for, how to help Steve breathe when the asthma strikes, or a bad cold hit him, and Bucky knows how to keep him warm, tend his fevers: Bucky learns to take care of him, and doesn’t shy from it for a second.

When Steve comes to from the haze of it all, Bucky’s hand’s always in his own. Every time.

And the one time it isn’t, the one time Steve’s only aware enough to hear that Bucky comes, and Steve aches for him to be closer—Steve’s only aware enough to hear Ma tell him that Steve’s too badly off to have him around, that Steve needs rest and can’t risk any more stray germs or swift chills.

And Steve’s chest clenches where it can’t afford to, chokes him, and the next thing he sees, next thing he processes through the fog in his mind, the priest is there, and his ma’s crying near the door, and Steve feels his lips moving, can’t hear if he makes any noise, and it’s all hazy, none of it makes sense except the odd cadence, the wrong-paced tripping of his heart around the thing it holds most dear:

“Buck,” his lips move around the name, all clumsy: “Bucky, Bucky.”

He feels it falter, feels it slip, and there’s a commotion around him, there’s so much bustling, and he falls, he’s falling, and there’s nothing to grasp for him, nothing there—

“Stevie.”

The word crashes over him, and there’re firm hands atop his own, soft palms beneath his heart that hold it, that stroke against it’s withering shape, lungs breathing deep enough that they lift Steve’s in the process, close enough that they share air with Steve and lift the lids of his eyes to the world once more.

“Please Stevie,” the hands that reach out are rough, and only just steady, but they’re perfect, Bucky’s perfect.

“M’here Stevie, just breathe for me,” and Bucky’s not just sitting at Steve’s bedside, Bucky’s climbing in next to him, holding his whole body steady and whispering harsh at Steve’s ear as he rubs soothing, measured and calm down Steve’s heaving chest: “Ain’t going nowhere, and neither are you, you understand me?”

And Steve feels Bucky’s breaths from every angle, inside and out, and Bucky’s hands against either side of Steve’s chest to feel the rise and the fall when it starts to even is almost like a victory, and Steve vaguely recognizes the sound of floorboards creaking when his mother rushes back to the room and stops short at the door, but Bucky doesn’t heed it one bit as he murmurs, close at hand:

“Neither are you, Stevie, not without me, not ever,” and he buries his face, warm and tight against Steve’s neck: “Not ever.”

And Steve sinks into that promise for a spell, lets it hold him and keep him: not ever.

Certainly not now, now that Bucky came, now that Bucky had to feel how much Steve couldn’t breathe without him close.

So Steve drifts, but it’s pleasant, now; and when he comes back to himself, he’s chest to chest with Bucky, who’s drawing circles against Steve’s spine—when Steve comes back, his chest is sore, and his heart hurts when it beats but it’s steadying. It’s coming back to itself, too.

“You came,” Steve rasps, and Bucky’s eyes meet his, wide and overbright as he frowns, as he works his hands down the bony planes of Steve’s back.

“‘Course I did,” Bucky murmurs. “Ain’t nothin’ can keep me away if you need me, you know that.”

“Ma sent you away,” Steve protests, though it’s real weak. “Thought you’d, you’d…”

“Didn’t sit right,” Bucky cuts him off, a little choked, a little faint. “When your ma told me I couldn’t come in, I, I just,” he shakes his head, and Bucky’s lips brush Steve’s skin as he does it, and Steve’s heart flutters—doesn’t hurt one bit, when it does that.

“I had to make sure you were okay,” Bucky says sharply, earnest, his eyes big and full of the soul Steve can almost feel burning, so fucking strong and bright. “I had to see, had to see if you...”

Bucky trails off, and is quiet for a moment, and it takes a second before Steve sees it, before Steve’s heart hurts for beating, but for a whole different reason: tears.

Bucky’s got tears on his cheeks.

“I saw Father Thomas,” Bucky whispers, voice cracking. “I…”

He shakes his head again, back and forth and back and forth and when he finally heaves a breath to steady himself, it shivers so hard Steve feels it shake in his veins.

“You scared the hell outta me, punk,” Bucky hisses, half broken. “Y’can’t do that.” And it’s less a demand than it is a plea, a prayer, and Bucky’s eyes are still streaming with it, quiet and all the more heartbreaking, and Steve would have sworn it either way but now: now, he swears it with everything he’s got.

“I won’t do that.”

And that’s all there is to it. That’s all there is to it until Steve’s heart steadies itself and hopes that, in pumping on its own, the closeness of Bucky’s pulse won’t go away; he hopes that better heart won’t go away, and it doesn’t. Bucky’s doesn’t.

Bucky doesn’t.

And it’s perfect. It’s so perfect.

Until Bucky’s mouth opens. Until the words come out.

“Soon as you get better, m’gonna take you out, find you a girl,” Bucky’s talking more to fill the silence, Steve thinks; Steve knows the tone. But the words still matter, and the words slice hard. “You’re a catch and a half, Stevie, and as soon as you find her, the one,” and Bucky’s voice breaks, hateful and hurting and desperate: he sounds so desperate that Steve comes apart half for the hurt in his heart—new again, the kind of hurting, so many kinds of pain; Steve almost comes apart more for the hurt that’s in Bucky, for the fear and the way that he’s grasping never to know it again, than Steve does for the way that his soul feel bereft.

“Soon as you find her, Steve,” Bucky’s saying, Bucky’s praying through arrogance and a dare against the universe to defy him, to do anything but what he says: “she’s gonna make all this go away, gonna make it all better, gonna steady it all and you’ll never scare me like this ever again, ‘cause she’ll keep you healthy.”

And Bucky nods, and his eyes are big, and he looks more scared now, maybe, than he had before, and Steve’s exhausted, Steve’s torn in two, Steve’s bleeding freely from the wound of what he thought was returned—maybe, beyond all reason: finally—but Bucky’s chest is still against Steve’s chest, and Bucky’s heart is still a bolster to his own beneath the bulk of it, flimsy and failing as it is but Bucky never falters, Bucky never leaves.

“Soon as you get better, Stevie,” he whispers, and he takes Steve’s hand and presses it between them, caught tight when they breathe and it’s in sync, and Steve wonders what he did right to know this, to hold this, but then what he did wrong to know it but to never fully have.

Because Bucky wants to find Steve’s soulmate. Bucky wants to find the one who’ll keep Steve well. Which means he doesn’t know. Which means he’d never known. Which means that Bucky doesn’t see that it’s him holding Steve together, that it’s him who makes Steve well, who brought him back from this brink, who stayed the hand of Death on Steve’s brow where nothing else could, it’s him.

Which means that Bucky’s a far better friend than Steve could have imagined. Bucky’s a far better man than any Steve will ever know. And Bucky loves him deeper than Steve deserves just, just…

Not deep enough. Not like that.

And Steve gets just as sick, more than once, after that. Steve gets sicker, even, more than once. But he never flirts that close with death again, not ever.

Because Bucky’s there, every time. And when Steve’s heart wants to give out, Bucky’s is there, almost saying it’s okay, let go for a second, I’ll take it from here, just rest, but only, only if you promise to let me help you get back up, do you promise, will you promise me that?

And there’s not a thing that Bucky could ask that Steve wouldn’t give with all his being, with the whole of his soul. There’s not a thing in the world Steve’d deny him, if he asked—so Steve promises the voice in his head, the whisper in his heart, and the doctors and the priests can’t explain his stubbornness. On her deathbed, Steve’s ma doesn’t understand it for sure, but Steve knows, knows that if Dad was still here, Ma would be able to recover. Steve knows, and he cries all the harder when he finally breaks because it’s Bucky’s arms around him when it all comes down on his head. Of course, it’s Bucky.

They’re best friends. There’s nothing held back between them.

Except this one thing that Steve can’t breathe without, and Bucky can’t help—can’t fucking help the fact that he can. That Steve needs in one way, and Bucky in another.

Steve’s his best friend. Bucky’d move the world for him, Steve knows.

But Bucky’s not just Steve’s whole heart; he’s the only reason it’s still kicking in his chest at all. Not buts about it.

And maybe it’s funny, or ironic, that that’s the fact that cuts Steve deep enough to kill him. Over and over again; yet Bucky’s worth it.

Bucky’s more than worth it.

______________________

They’re sending Bucky straight into the middle of it, straight to the heart of all the fighting, all the killing, and Steve’s a hypocrite to be so worked up over it, he is. He’s a hypocrite, and more’n that, he’s selfish.

‘Cause he’d go in a heartbeat. He’d go to the thick of it and never look back, because what’s to look back, for? Bucky’d be there next to him.

But when that center doesn’t hold, when that bit shifts: when Steve’s what’s to be looked back to find, at least for now, Steve can’t hardly stand it. Steve’s heart’s in a goddamn vice for it, and Steve needs.

Dear God, but he needs.

Steve doesn’t know for sure if Bucky’ll come back and say goodbye, just them: they’d hugged an’ everything, earlier, and Bucky probably figures that’s enough. Part of Steve even hopes that’s what he figures, because Steve doesn’t know what he’ll do if he’s given more time, more space to fall apart, to cling in all the ways he can’t show to everything that Bucky is, everything that Bucky means and to pray, and to beg, and to hope without words that something in him will suddenly shine and grasp at Bucky hard, and make him see that they can’t be apart, they can’t be, and if they have to be then Steve’s comin’, as quick as he can behind and Bucky’s gotta be safe, Bucky’s gotta be so safe until Steve gets there because Steve can’t breathe around the idea of the world, of life, of himself, of the beat in his heart without Bucky—

He’s breathing in the scent of the man himself on the sheets when the door creaks as it’s opened, and Steve keeps quiet, holds his breath in and savors the scent of Bucky’s body, Bucky’s being as he holds it in his lungs until his chest hurts, until his heartbeat echoes hard in the still and Bucky’s close, Bucky’s close and Steve can feel the space between them lessening, can feel it in the way something warm reaches out and loosened up around Steve’s ribs, the fist around his heart giving way to a palm that simply holds, strokes gentle and keeps close, and when Bucky crawls into bed, Steve knows he’s surprised to find him there.

Steve knows.

And his heart takes to pounding like a wild thing, like a thing that doesn’t care if it’s breaks itself because it’s already fit to shatter except there’s Bucky.

There’s Bucky, and Bucky’s heart’s still there behind his own, holding: mourning something, melancholy but firm, and Steve has to breathe, he has to breathe because there’s Bucky, and Steve can’t resist the pull of all that Bucky is, all that Bucky means inside Steve’s own goddamn veins.

“Stevie.”

And Steve can’t turn toward that voice, can’t press his heart against Bucky’s that close, not right now, not like this, because Bucky’s always known that Steve depends on him, that Steve needs him and wants him around, but Bucky’s never seen, Bucky’s never had reason to suspect that all that he is without thinking or knowing seeps through Steve’s skin with every breath that he takes and makes him weightless, makes him giddy, makes him watch the world like it’s worth a damn and oh, Steve doesn’t have it in him to keep that feeling out of his eyes, to not let it spill with the tears that he’s fighting. He’s not strong enough for that, just now.

Bucky’s still, though, and tense against him, and it hurts in Steve’s chest all the harsher to know it, so he reaches back and takes Bucky’s hand and if he can’t stand, can’t allow himself to fall into the beat of his heart against the one that holds him, that guides him, that keeps him breathing and wanting and seeking out the sun, then he can take Bucky’s hand and cover it, let Bucky hold it, close as Steve dares to giving away the truth, close to Steve shouting out you’re everything, you’re in my chest and you’re a better heart than I’ve ever known and you keep me and you don’t even know it, you don’t even see, and I’m not enough to ever make you look that deep, I’m not enough to have sang your song in my bones, too, and it kills me, it goddamn kills me—

But Bucky’s nervous, and his heart’s too fast for it, and Steve’s coming undone a little, so his own pulse doesn’t mind; and Bucky’s heart his hurting, Steve can feel it: he’s scared and he’s sad, and Steve’s no better, and his own heart’s never had much force in it, so he presses Bucky’s touch all the harder to his skin to feel it, even if it’s weak: but there’s steadiness. There is the firm, unwavering, unflinching presence that is and always will be James Buchanan Barnes, and oh, but Steve doesn’t think he’s ever had Bucky’s hand on his heart when it’s steady, and he wonders: if it could be steady on its own, would Bucky feel it without touching?

If it could beat strong by itself, would Bucky somehow know it in his chest, and want right back?

Bucky breathes in at the side of Steve’s neck, and Steve stifles the shiver it threatens to bring—it doesn’t work like that, he tells himself. You’re either born with the right rhythms, or you’re not.

And for all the things that Steve thinks he’ll never forgive his body for, it’s this, it’s this that knives him deepest, that bleeds him a little more, a little drier, a little closer to gone every day.

“Promise me you’ll stay safe,” Bucky breathes against him, and Steve doesn’t answer.

Of course he doesn’t answer. Of course he doesn’t say that the only way to keep the pieces of himself that matter safe is to follow Bucky, whatever means necessary.

Whatever the cost.

“Promise me you’ll keep lookin’.”

Steve’s throat gets tight when Bucky says it, when he turns away to speak, and Steve misses the warmth of Bucky’s breath on his skin—but maybe he needs to. Maybe it’s high time he learned that feeling closer than the fullness in his blood that’ll be gone, that’ll be lost come morning, he knows.

“Stevie, if she’s out there,” the tickle of Bucky’s hair against him is cold comfort, but Steve lets the sound of Bucky’s voice lull him, doesn’t bother listening because Bucky doesn’t, can’t know that none of it matters, none of it matters because his soulmate’s wrapped around him, just now, Steve’s good at lying when it needs to.

Steve can pretend.

“Promise me you’ll keep lookin’, and if you find her, that you won’t let her go.”

Steve can’t help it, Steve has no say over the way his breath catches, at that, at those words; he has no power over the way his heart twists around itself like it just wants to hurt, just wants to stop being because of how bad it aches when the truth’s right there, right there and can’t be said and for a long moment it’s almost a freefall, because Steve can’t quite suss out the cradling presence of Bucky’s heartbeat up near his own, and Bucky’s hand’s clenching tight against his chest from the outside in, and Bucky breathes in, and Steve can feel the heady pump of Bucky’s pulse at the line of his spine as he exhales:

“Stevie—”

“I promise.”

Steve gives the vow on a sigh, breathes it out, and grasps tight in his own mind to how it’s real, how it’s the most honest thing he can give like this, between them, with what he knows and what Bucky can’t ever know: he holds to it like it’s the last truth on earth, and maybe it is, maybe that’s exactly what this is, and Steve breathes in, and Bucky’s heart’s there ‘round his own again, safe and steady, and Steve settles. Steve speaks his truth as best he’s able.

“I promise, if I find the right partner,” and his fingers twitch atop Bucky’s, because there is no if; “I won’t let ‘em go.”

And damn it all, but he ain’t gonna. He’s going to take the chance he’s been offered with both hands and he’s going to be right at Bucky’s back and he’s going to help, he’s going to keep, he’s going to protect, and maybe Bucky’ll see it, maybe Steve’ll come out strong enough for his heart to beat ‘round Bucky’s, just once: maybe.

Don’t matter if that’s not how soulmates work. ‘Cause Bucky, Steve thinks, is more than even that.

“Take care of yourself while I’m gone,” Bucky whispers, and Steve can’t help but scoff at it, no laughter in it as he rebuffs the request because Bucky’s walking into the jaws of death, all alone, and all the care needs to go with him, and all the stupid needs to stay with Steve, and what if it isn’t enough, what if Steve’s too late in having Bucky’s back, what if—

“Just, don’t,” Steve’s speaking, stumbling over the words where his heart’s still holding to the rhythm Bucky sets, desperate: but still clear and distinct. Every beat. “Don’t...”

“I’ll do my best,” Bucky whispers, nods against him, and Steve feels something in the coursing of his blood that says Bucky understands just how much this matters.

Maybe he doesn’t grasp why, but Bucky feels how deep this runs.

And Steve should leave it. He shouldn’t say another goddamn word.

“I know you’re still lookin’ for your soulmate,” he breathes, because Steve’s never been a man for should’ves.

And he thinks he’ll never sleep again, if he doesn’t say at least this, out loud.

“And I want you to find her, Buck. I want you to find her so bad, ‘cause you deserve to be so happy.”

And it’s a truth and a lie all at once, and Steve can’t help the way he’s breathing heavy for the struggle, the contradiction in his chest threading tension that pulls with every frenetic beat of his flailing heart.

“But don’t,” and Steve can’t help the catch in his words, the catch in his pulse, the catch in his world as the closest thing he’ll ever have to a confession of his soul spills out.

“Don’t forget what you already got, okay?” Steve whispers, shivers, begs. “It’s not much, and it’s nothing like the same—”

And then Bucky’s arms wrapping ‘round him, his other hand is covering both the ones on Steve’s chest and he’s holding as tight as Steve’s ever dared to imagine, he’s clutching like Steve does to every vibration of him in Steve’s cells that can be kept.

“Never,” Bucky hisses out, and Steve feels it on his skin, feels it in his blood, in the rhythm that strikes, sharp staccato beats around his body as it moves, nearer than anything else, than anything that’s his alone: “Not ever, you hear me?”

Steve wants—Steve wishes they lived in a world where the protest on his lips could be voiced, could mean a damn thing to keep Bucky’s hand where it is when it moves, when it leaves Steve’s cold and makes him grasp tighter to the hand that’s still beneath his touch: but then the hand that moves is the hand that’s cupping his cheek, turning his head, leaving Steve to squint bad eyes and pray for sight in the dark but even so, even so, Steve knows that Bucky’s watching him when he breathes out, fierce as the heart Steve can feel pounding in his throat:

“To the end of the line, Stevie,” Bucky whispers; “I meant that. I still mean it. You got me?”

Steve breathes in that moment for a long stretch of time before he sighs, and turns back, before Bucky hand lets him go and settles again on Steve’s chest, and Steve’s tired. He’s so very tired, and he wants to give into sleep even knowing that when his eyes open to the morning, Bucky’ll be gone.

Steve needs a refuge, though. He can’t keep himself together any longer.

“I got you,” is what he says, and it settles the sense of Bucky’s being in Steve’s chest like a breath that’s held, then gone. He says I got you.

Except of course he doesn’t. Except of course it’s the exact fucking opposite, because Bucky has all of Steve, and he doesn’t even know it, because Bucky’s got everything that Steve is and ever will be, but Steve?

Steve’s got a pair of weak lungs, thin blood, and whatever pieces are left of a tricky heart once Bucky walks out come morning.

Whatever pieces are left once it breaks.

______________________

When they choose him for Project Rebirth, Steve’s ecstatic. Because it means he’s accomplished his goal. It means he’ll be able to do what he always dreamed of. He’ll be able to fight the fight he was born to win, and his body won’t stop him.

He’ll go to Bucky, and Steve’ll have his back, like he always should’ve. Like Bucky’s always deserved, and maybe—

Steve’s breath catches, hard: grit in his lungs.

“Will,” Steve stumbles over his words, the empty glass in his hand trembling in his grasp, betraying his fear. “Will it change how I...”

Steve’s heart’s pounding, because of all the things that could scare him now, in this, it’s the idea of losing what ties him to Bucky, losing the feeling of Bucky’s heartbeat, Bucky’s breath, Bucky’s self brushed up against him—it’s losing the promise he’s been clinging to this whole time, of feeling that again, of knowing that again, and even if this means he doesn’t need it to breathe in full anymore, that doesn’t mean he won’t still need it to breathe in well.

Just because the procedure’s meant to make his own heart strong, doesn’t mean he thinks it’ll ever be right unless there’s Bucky there, just alongside.

Doctor Erskine’s watching him with curious eyes above the wire rims of his glasses, glancing at the collar of Steve’s shirt where he can feel the force of his pulse making itself well known, and he chokes out, because he can’t bear the unknown just now, any more than he thinks he’ll bear the answer:

“Soulmates.”

Erskine’s eyes widen, but only just, before he asks in return.

“You have one?”

Steve’s mouth goes dry. “I...”

“It will change you,” Erskine saves him, kindness in his gaze. “I cannot say what it will do to the bond.”

And maybe Erskine understands it, what Steve can’t put into words: that while it’s not a bond returned, it’s one cherished. It’s one Steve doesn’t think that he’ll ever learn to live without.

Doesn’t want to learn to live without.

“And for all intents and purposes, one might suspect it would change the biorhythmic constitution that cements the bond itself,” Erskine muses, and Steve’s stomach drops before the doctor carries on.

“And there is still much we don’t know about what the bond is, how it works,” he adds, looking thoughtful, weighing where he goes before he steps.

“But it is my own belief,” Erskine finally says, “that they do not call such a partner one’s soulmate without reason.” And he looks a little far away, then—like Steve’s ma used to look, when she’d talk about the feeling of it; when she’d give in and tell the story.

“The bond itself is a living thing, Steven,” Erskine leans in a bit, his tone indulgent. “And I think, if it is strong, and it knows the heart of you beyond the walls and chambers, beyond the valves and veins, well,” he shrugs, and smiles, and lifts his glass—twice-full where Steve’s is empty—to his mouth. “I think it would hold fast, don’t you?”

Come morning, Steve suspects they see the fear in his eyes and think it’s for the thing in itself: the vita-rays, the pain, the risk of death, but no.

That’s not what Steve fears most when he climbs into that chamber.

And when they read his vitals and quantify his terror, Steve tries to remember to breathe as he repeats Erskine’s words in his head and thinks, if it’s strong, and it knows the heart.

Steve prays like mad that it’s enough that he feels it. That his own soul’s enough to hold on to what he knows, even if Bucky’s never had a sense of it. Even if there’s no anchor, save for Steve.

And maybe it comes out as a scream, but damn it all: Steve prays.

______________________

Steve shouldn’t have worried.

He crosses continents, oceans; he shrivels in his new, perfected body, all the pieces of him that make the production work shrink and sob when they say he’s likely dead, because he can’t be; Bucky can’t be, and Steve will goddamn prove it.

And it’s the way his heart, his mind, his blood: it’s the way everything in him sobs for, rather than simply mourning—calls out, rather than just screams; it’s that calling, it’s that sense of home that drives him, that directs his motions and draws him in and makes him sure that Bucky’s still there, Bucky’s still breathing, Bucky’s still alive to be found as he navigates the corridors, the dank rooms, the horrors: it’s the beat of his heart with a direction to it, a trajectory. Bucky. Always, always, always Bucky.

And Erskine was right, he’d been right. The soul holds fast.

And the only piece of Steve that’s always been strong, that’s never backed down, that’s never faltered or threatened to give way and end him on sight: if there’s any part of Steve Rogers that couldn’t be touched by the serum ‘cause there was nothing there to fix—

It is his soul.

So he follows it, and there’s a pounding in his temples that rocks him to his core: racing and frantic and too fast, too heavy, too hard and it makes Steve push harder, makes Steve run faster, pushes him, draws him toward the source of the terrifying beat because Steve doesn’t even know if his heart in the now can pump like that, and if this is Bucky, if this is his Bucky—

When Steve finds him, his heart sinks, but it’s almost as if something grasps for it, he feels it—wishful thinking, though, because he feels Bucky, his soulmate, his heart where it lives, not the other way around. But his heart sinks, and he goes to Bucky, murmurs soft, unbinds his limbs and waits, prays for distant eyes to find him, to let his presence calm the racing, the unsteady, unholy thunder of Bucky’s blood in iron veins because it’s almost mechanical, it’s almost unbearable, and Steve can’t stand it, Steve’s terrified to let it hold because he knows that it won’t, that it can’t and he’ll lose—

“Is that,” Bucky’s lips crack, they bleed around the word but Steve breathes deep, and Bucky’s heart doesn’t steady but it does calm, it does ease from the brink and Steve thanks all the Saints in Heaven for it as he reaches, as he cups Bucky’s face and means to hold, because he’s selfish, until he feels it: heat.

Heat, and warmth, and radiate, jubilant praise from the space in his chest, riotous and wondrous and effervescent and full and Bucky, it’s Bucky where he lives against Steve’s heart, still, always, but it’s reaching, it’s wanting, it’s grateful and reverent and—

Steve’s found him. Steve’s saved him. Steve’s going to rescue him from torment, from torture, from the worst things in this world: of course he’s grateful.

Of course it’s strong enough that Steve can feel it, that close. Always held so close.

Steve hefts Bucky’s weight against him, their bodies flush as he helps him stand, helps him walk, and it’s good that Bucky can’t feel Steve’s heart beneath his own, he thinks, it’s real good: because Steve’s heart’s a mess, just now, caught between physical efficiency and the heavy rush of feeling, torn in two, pounding and shaking all at once.

It doesn’t mean anything, he tells himself. It doesn’t. He’s grateful. It doesn’t mean anything.

Steve breathes out, slow, and plans the best route for escape.

______________________

“I seem to recall overhearing, quite innocently, I assure you,” Peggy’s sliding to sit next to Steve where he’s perched at the edge of camp, being all too obvious, to anyone paying a lick of attention, about who he’d been watching snuff out a half-smoked cigarette just past the tents. “But I recall hearing you ask Dr. Erskine a question, before the procedure.”

And Steve has to think a second, because there’d been no one around when he’d stammered on about soulmates, at least not as far as he’d known, but Peggy had a tendency to hear and see all of the important things—he admires her, for that.

And he’s not sure there’s anything he’d say is more important to him than this, so.

“He’s mine,” Steve nods, glancing down at his hands and letting out a breath that makes his chest feel small, again. “But,” he starts, and the fist around his beating heart’s not human, too strong even for him, and he wonders if it’ll ever stop hurting, the truth of it all.

“But I’m not his.”

Peggy quirks a brow and purses those bright lips. “Are you sure?”

And Steve hears skepticism in her tone as her eyes dart back and forth between Bucky’s hunched figure at a distance—a distance he’s been keeping too often, lately, as far as Steve’s concerned, and Steve can’t know what happened to him at the hands of Hydra, but he wants to, and he wonders when it happened that they started lying to each other, though maybe that’s the thing.

Maybe they could never lie to each other, and Bucky can’t hold the pretense if he lingers too long.

Or maybe Steve gave himself away when he’d seen Bucky, alive on that table, and maybe Bucky can’t live with knowing, with Steve’s inability to keep this thing to himself, and fuck, fuck—

“I’m sure.”

Steve doesn’t bother to hide the misery in the words. Not with Peggy.

And when she doesn’t push, he knows he was right to trust.

“I’m sorry,” she says simply, and reaches for his hand—doesn’t hold it, exactly, but covers it, pats it carefully, all solidarity and gentle commiseration. “I don’t know how that feels, but,” her breath catches, and her voice strains; “but...”

Steve’s heart swoops, drops low when he sees the strain around her eyes, the sheen to them, and he doesn’t want to press, doesn’t want to say the wrong thing, but he can’t leave her like this, can’t say nothing

“Did you,” he starts, leaves it open for her to lead or not, as she likes, as she’s comfortable. And she smiles, though it’s a sad and twisted thing.

“Lost him,” she nods, presses her lips together hard until the painted color looks wrong for how white the skin goes beneath.

“I’d never presume to try and,” she starts, after a moment; “try and compare, me, to you,” she breathes in sharp, and Steve hears it, the ache, and even though he can’t feel it on the inside, in his veins, he can still feel the way it cuts: it’s that strong.

“You have a rhythm, though,” she says softly, and her hand’s still on top of Steve’s. “In your bones, and then you meet the person who knows the tune without ever having to be taught.” She smiles, eyes fixed over the trees. “And you fit.”

Steve closes his eyes and focuses on the heady swirl of momentum, the echoes of jumbled sentiments that live in the space around his heart, that still keep it tethered, that still teach it sharps from flats in a song that only Steve can hear, that Bucky doesn’t know that he’s singing but that Steve prays never leaves: Steve closes his eyes and imagines, for a moment—not the first, and not the last—what it might be like to know what a duet feels like. One that’s intentional. One that really counts.

“They say you’ll never find the perfect partner again,” Peggy breathes out, a little nostalgic, a little heartbroken. “I think that’s probably true, for the most part.”

Steve nods. He thinks lightning strikes only once.

“But when you said you were waiting for the right partner,” Peggy carries on, thoughtful. “That made sense, to me. As if maybe, someone could feel right again. Even after.”

And Bucky’d always said it didn’t matter if you had a soulmate or not, didn’t make it better or worse, didn’t mean there wasn’t love elsewhere, outside one song, or even outside singing. And Steve’d never thought of it, not really, but he thinks of it now, and wonders.

“If you’d like to maybe,” Peggy clears her throat, draws patterns on the back of Steve’s hand: “Try. Once all this is done.”

She leaves the thought hanging—neither a request, really, nor a want. Just an idle idea, swimming in the ether between them. And Peggy is a revelation. Peggy is incredible beyond Steve’s capacity to describe. She’s strong, and she’s brave, and she’s smart, and she’s witty. And she’s good. Kind and sweet and solid as a rock. Loyal. She’s one of the best people Steve’s ever known, and God knows he’d be lucky to have her.

The bond, Erskine’d said: it’s a living thing, and maybe he can learn to feel it somewhere else. Not perfect, no.

But known.

There’s a shrillness, a sensation of wounding that cries out through his blood, in that moment: that shrieks and sears when his heart pumps it ‘round through his limbs and then back, and Steve’s eyes screw shut, and he chews at his tongue until it bleeds, until the feeling settles and it’s just the heart against his heart that he feels, that isn’t felt beyond his chest and he wonders if he could do it. If he could feel that pull, keep it close, but know another.

He doesn’t know. But maybe he doesn’t have to, just now.

It’s just a thought.

“I’ll owe you a dance,” Steve turns his hand, palm to palm against Peggy’s, and folds their fingers together, grasps loose to her skin so he can feel her pulse at the wrist, and it’s nothing like the pulse in his chest, or behind his own heart, but maybe that’s the point of it. Maybe that’s best.

“I’ll owe you a dance, and we can see.”

______________________

Steve wakes to the morning, to the cold, with the ghost of Bucky’s touch still on his skin; with how close they’d been, the heart of him nearer to Steve than it’s felt in so long, and Steve bites his tongue against it, hard until he tastes the blood because even so it hurts less than hoping, than the idea that somehow there’s a way to change fate and the rhythm of a soul; so Steve bites hard against his tongue and screws his eyes against the sting at their backs before he rises, before he prepares to head into battle.

Bucky makes a smart remark about the Cyclone. Steve doesn’t laugh, but his smirk says enough, and Steve times his motions down to the pattern in which he blinks to sync with the heavy drum of Bucky’s heartbeat weaving around his own.

It all happens so fast, after that.

When he reaches, when his hands fall short Steve can’t feel Bucky’s heartbeat against his own, because for the first time in his life his own is too frantic, too shrill to hear anything, to know anything, and Steve reaches, he reaches until he aches, until his bones creak, and he’s so close—

It’s not enough. It’s not enough, and Bucky’s small until he’s nothing, and that’s the filthiest, the most egregious of all lies the universe has ever tried to tell.

Steve should have reached farther. Steve should have let it break him.

He feels the pull like hands that claw, like lead wrapped tight around his heart and no serum, no miracle can save it, can make it strong enough not to rip, not to split harsh right down the center and bleed out, bleed out, bleed out without a beat because there’s no rhythm, no resonance, there’s only the weight and the downward force that beckons and Steve can feel in every cell the way it’s already killing him.

He can feel the way that fighting it will tear him clean apart.

______________________

In the end, there is no fighting. Just prolonging the inevitable. The pulling doesn’t leave him. The alcohol doesn’t touch him. The sympathy, the knowing care that Peggy offers barely registers in his mind, let alone where it matters, where he needs to feel something, feel whole the most.

His heart beats, but there’s no feeling, no force in it. It animates him proficiently. It does it’s job.

It’s empty; hollow. It’s so small, so vacant.

So lost.

Steve's so lost.

And the only thing that’s left where Bucky used to be inside his chest is that downward motion, that freefall-feeling that pulls, pulls, pulls.

In the end, on that plane: he knows there was never an option. In the end, he thinks, Peggy will understand about the Stork Club.

In the end, hands at the controls, he follows the pulling.

He takes it down.

Chapter Text

In all the months after they found him, after they woke him, after they brought him back to a place that seems hateful, that shines glaring, that feels less—in all the months since he’s been here in this brave new world, this rare new time, no one has been able to explain it.

From the first moment he remembers—strains of a game he knows the ending of in advance, knows for the sounds and the teams and the way Bucky’s heart’d taken off and he’d whooped like a madman when the Dodgers scored a run and Steve’d grinned more for the feeling even than he’d smiled for the sun and the scents and the roar of the crowd: from the moment he stands, the moment he runs, he’d known he was running toward it, the pulling. The freefall in his veins, and the magnetism of the bond is a thing that dies with a mate, but this feeling: this downward thrust that’d plagued him from the moment the blue of Bucky’s eyes were lost to the mountain, to the ravine below, to Steve’s inability to be enough: it’s that feeling that’s driving him, rooted in bones, even now; untouched by time. By cold.

And there have been so many doctors, so many therapists and specialists, experts and scholars, researchers and soul-seers, the whole nine yards because the sensation he’d made the mistake of noting aloud is unheard of, unprecedented, unfounded: worrying, maybe, even—and Steve’s humored them. Steve’s curious himself, in that hollow, useless way that’s really just swimming meaningless in the ether; just biding time.

So he let them poke him, prod him, take his blood and measure his mind and watch the beat of his heart on machines: he let them do what they want, because he was just waiting. Waiting.

One day, he figured, they’d finally tell him the thing he’s known since he failed the only test, the only soul that he’d needed never to lose: one day, they will tell him that the pull’s still waiting for him, because his days are numbered. Because he will come apart with it, in time: it’ll take longer than with other people, normal people—the serum, he’d figured, would fight it, and Steve’s never once doubted that, or regretted: he deserves the long decay. He deserves to suffer the consequences, and then some, again, and again, and again. For as long as it takes.

Because he was nearly thrice his size, all of a sudden, and yet his goddamn arms were too fucking short.

So he let them try to figure him out, try to find the physical markers for the gradual decline that was coming, that would keep coming, until it stopped. He let them.

And so he didn’t think about it, when the pull never left. The shock of gravity; the reach and tug of lead, of brick and mortar: heavy.

Endless.

Steve’d never questioned it.

But when the mask comes off the Winter Soldier on that fateful street, on that fateful day: when that curtain of hair shifts and Steve looks into those eyes, and his jaw drops and his heart hurts, and there’s Bucky, it’s Bucky, but who the hell is Bucky—

When the mask comes off; when those eyes stare back and it’s no better than a void: when Steve sees, he knows he should have questioned it. Steve knows he should have thought. He’s not special. There was never a reason for the pull in his chest: the dimming, the slow death, yes, but the gravity, the sense of calling: no. No, because they’re not even soulmates, there was never any reason to feel it where Bucky’d been, where Bucky isn’t because there’s no Bucky, and Steve’ll die with this, from this, this will kill him where the first blow, where the water didn’t give, it’ll kill him because there's not a goddamned serum in the world that protects against this, and damn well not twice, except—

Steve’s heart hurts, but there’s a feeling underneath. A pulsing. A chill, but a cadence not Steve’s own: measured. Precise. Mechanical.

But there’s a depth, a way it echoes: there’s a quality to the way it shakes that leaves Steve reeling, that's familiar like Steve’s own fingerprints, that’s known like Steve knows his own soul.

And if Steve never questioned what he should have, before, he doesn’t start with this. Not this.

This, he clings to. This, he holds close.

Bucky’s gone, and Steve’s cuffed, and Nat’s bleeding. But Steve breathes. Steve breathes, and Bucky’s nowhere to be found, but the emptiness, the hollow beneath Steve’s ribs: the dregs are still there. The echo remains.

And Steve clings all the harder.

______________________

The Asset can’t feel his limbs. The Asset aches; everywhere. The Asset can’t breathe.

But Bucky, Bucky: Bucky’s gasping, Bucky’s shaking, Bucky presses his wrists against the metal restraints as hard as he can to measure his own heartbeat against the other tempo, the other whisper, the other touch inside his chest that’s faint, so faint, but even as a ghost is there, and it means something.

The Man on the Bridge.

The Man on the Bridge means something.

“His vitals are all over the place,” the man to his left is saying, watching the monitors as they screech in protest, blare out against the tumult, the unraveling that’s skating, that’s razing veins, making the Asset flinch while Bucky leans closer, wants to burn because it’s better, it feels, it feels—

Right. It feels right, when Bucky had forgotten what that was. What that meant.

But it’s a struggle, it’s a struggle, and it’s shivering through him with a force he’s not quite made to hold against, even now, like this: the strongest sense of being at the center of his chest, and he can’t contain it, no part of him, no iteration of who he may or may not be can hold this steady because all the parts of him are pulling apart, are coming undone, are going to flay him alive as they tear him to shreds, as they rip the flesh of him down the middle and leave the precious, painful thing there unguarded, uncradled, free to flee, and the heart it lives beneath hasn’t shaken like this before, hasn’t beat with anything more than industrial precision, absolute efficiency: he can race across a girder and barely feel the pace; there’s no sense to a gun that has to wait on its pulse to settle before it can take a straight shot.

And yet it hurts his heart to move, like this, but moving’s all it does, uncoordinated and frantic and wild like the air atop a mountain, like the shriek upon a fall, and the Asset doesn’t understand, the Asset doesn’t feel fear.

But Bucky thinks, if he could touch it, if he could feel the beating he’s missing beneath the trembling of his blood he could comprehend it. He could know.

He could feel more than the terror that’s eating him alive.

“He’s nonfunctional,” the voice is saying, now: the man at his side. “He could very well fail mid-assignment if you take him out like this. Even his system’s not impervious, and cardiac arrest is a genuine possibility with these readings. He can’t perform in the field until we’ve discovered what’s causing—”

“He’s a machine!”

And that’s the Handler. That’s the one who assigns the Mission. That’s the one who—

This is the reason he nearly stopped the source of the beating, the source of the grounding, the whole of the universe and he doesn’t understand, the Asset does not understand—

“And when machines don’t work, they’re decommissioned,” the Handler sneers, meets the Asset’s eyes—doesn’t catch Bucky’s gaze, and that’s good, that can’t happen, Bucky isn’t real, Bucky isn’t right, Bucky is the only thing despite unknowing, Bucky, and the Man on the Bridge…

The Man on the Bridge is the Mission.

The Man on the Bridge means something.

“Wipe him,” the Handler barks. “Recalibrate him, start over.”

And the Asset is resigned. Bucky’s chest clenches, and the machines scream again: wipe him, recalibrate, start over, and that’s not good. That can’t happen.

That cannot happen.

So Bucky—Bucky, yes, whoever the hell he is, Bucky reaches out and coaxes the recollection, the soft touch of the rhythm he’d felt on the bridge and hadn’t understood, had pushed aside until he couldn’t, until it wasn’t possible, until it was too late to make anything of it, to comprehend or grasp it tighter: until it seared behind his eyelids and shocked at his neurons and and left him shaking, shaking, shaking, not just his body but the blood in his veins and Bucky, Bucky is the one who remembers what it’s like to reach down to the trembling chambers of his straining, failing, reaching heart and encounter what lives inside; what’s missing, what brushed against and left chaos for the memory, and oh god, god, what is memory—

“I don’t care how it’s done,” the Handler is saying, “but he needs to be ready for deployment by morning.”

And it is memory, it is memory and it is promise that drives him, that tells him what he’s facing and what he stands to lose, and if it’s formless and shapeless and no more than a seizing, writhing, hateful-hopeful twinge that snakes along the walls of the heart that’s running him to ruin in the now: if it’s no more than an inkling, than a hint that may well be a lie, then Bucky—whoever and whatever he was or could be—Bucky will risk it, Bucky will grasp it and hold in the hope that it’ll lead to the thing that left the hole he’d never noticed, that it will grow somehow to fill the void that his pulse is echoing inside, around: it’s memory, it’s the breath of something that lives in the ether that he cannot grasp, but that exists to be grasped, he is certain—he breathes.

He breathes, and he thinks there’s a memory in it: the voice he doesn’t know, except it settles into the pores of his bones; the words that were never words where they swirled close against his heart: steady, steady, steady, please.

“Councilor.” The technician beside him, again. Bucky’s eyes are closed, Bucky’s chest is tight, but he stays focused on the un-words, the not-voice, the whisper.

The promise.

Bucky?

He’s heard this voice before.

“Was any part of that unclear?” the Handler asks, but doesn’t ask: means to cut, means to break. It doesn’t matter. That is not the voice that matters.

The bridge.

The Man on the—

“No, sir, it’s,” the technician is speaking, protesting: confusion, in his tone. The Asset notices there is no longer blaring, beyond his own body. Bucky is too immersed inside the breath of something vital in the empty space he maps: steady, steady, steady, he whispers, too, because he can’t be decommissioned. He can’t be kept aside. He can’t be wiped, can’t be broken again, he can’t forget. He can’t forget what it means to remember before he gets the memories he needs.

He has to find the Man. He has to complete a Mission.

“His vitals have stabilized,” the technician is marveling, a little, and Bucky’s eyes open, find the satisfied smirk on the Handler’s lips, because the Handler thinks he understands. Thinks he’s threatened his dog into submission, and maybe he has. Maybe he has, but Bucky doesn’t care, because there is a Mission to complete.

There are holes that need filling.

“Prep him, then.”

And Bucky grips the arms of the chairs all the tighter, ‘til he can feel his heartbeat in his palms, and he cannot feel another breath against his own, but there’s a weight to the squeezing of his heart in his chest that he’s never known before, that was never there before, and Bucky cannot feel what’s made to fill the gap, but he knows that it’s out there. He knows there is a thing that's made to fit.

And that is something.

______________________

Steve’s got the docking point in site: it’s almost done.

It’s almost done, and then he can find Bucky, then he can follow the pulling that’s gotten so strong, now; that’s about to ruin him, that’s about to rip him in two, all teeth and claws and blood that longs to be touched, to be pressed through veins by two patterns, two pulses, two souls that don’t touch, that never have touched but Steve needs them to know one another, needs to look and see the half of himself in the flesh, living and breathing and real because in the months he’s known it, and the years that have stretched, it’s been hell without the steady beat of James Barnes inside his ribs. It’s been a hell he can’t maintain.

It’s almost done.

He lands, he climbs, he places the server blade and radios in Charlie Lock with moments to spare, and it’s too easy, for the mission set to him; of course it’s not that easy, for the mission he’s set for himself, for the mission his own fucking heart requires of him in the now. Maria’s sigh of relief in his ear is a boon in itself, though; but Steve is tired. Steve is hurting. Steve’s chest is too warm and wait—

Wait.

Maria’s telling him the helicarriers will come down in five; Maria’s telling him to get out. Steve might be answering in the affirmative. He can’t be sure.

He turns.

“Bucky.”

Steve sees the man, the soldier, the love of his goddamn life standing between Steve and his evac point, and Steve watches that face, Steve studies those eyes, and they don’t move, they stay riveted to Steve, and Steve’s chest is tightening, Steve’s breath is thin because if Bucky doesn’t know him, if Bucky’s here to stop him then he’s too late, he’s too late, and people are safe and that is what counts, but if Bucky isn’t Bucky, and he’s here to kill him, Steve knows.

Steve knows that he won’t throw a punch. Steve’s spent too goddamn long fighting the soul of him on the inside to ever make it real on the out.

“Buck, you’re,” Steve tries to speak, tries to start, but the words catch, stick; Bucky steps forward, and it’s quick, it’s aggressive, and Steve’s heart plummets hard and fast and—

It’s caught. The feeling’s almost foreign, except that it is everything Steve knows himself to be: held in the rapid-fire pounding of Bucky’s heartbeat, no longer that mechanized dirge but racing, fire-swift and hot like a brand and Steve’s breath escapes him, Steve’s ribs shake for the two rhythms that can’t settle, won’t retreat, and Bucky’s still coming toward him, and Steve doesn’t know what to think, save for what he feels, which is more than thought, more than reason.

Steve feels Bucky in his chest again, and it is everything.

Steve blinks, and it takes him a moment to realize that the ground beneath him is, in fact, shaking: that it’s not just his own sense of the world that’s giving way as Bucky moves, another step, another step: a threat, the steel in his eyes, but the beat beneath Steve’s breastbone isn’t, it isn’t, it could never be—but the helicarrier is coming down. He finished the mission.

And there’s a voice inside Steve's mind as he looks to Bucky, that shrieks out now he’s finishing his, but Steve swallows, and he can damn well taste the rabbit-pumping of his blood, and he knows.

Bucky is near enough to touch, if he reached out.

Steve reaches in though, settles on the sensation of frenetic motion and building strength around his ribs, and if his eyes slide closed then they snap open again when a gasp pierces through the whine of straining metal that Steve can’t seem to care about, not when that breath of sound shivers through him: not when his gaze returns and Bucky’s reaching, Bucky’s touching.

“Bucky?” Steve exhales, barely daring, and his heart causes real, honest pain with how it seizes up, chokes and thrills when Bucky’s hand meets his flesh.

“I...thought,” Bucky’s gasping, and Steve’s breathless with it, through and fucking through: “I—”

And Steve feels it, feels it when Bucky’s heart leaps up in his throat to choke him fierce, and Steve flinches for it when Bucky bites around a bitter, aching kind of moan for the bruise of it, the same bursting of vessels and needing and hope that blossoms tender in Steve’s chest, and Steve wants more than anything, in these moments: Steve curses more than any other thing, more than any other time that he was less, somehow, that he was wrong in some way to not live in Bucky’s soul just the same, because where Bucky’s reeling, and hurting, and so lost and Steve knows it, Steve can’t throw him that anchor, heart to goddamn heart without any words, beneath Bucky’s ribs to murmur I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’m here now, breathe.

This isn’t the end of our line, Buck. Breathe.

“Smaller.” It’s a hiss, it’s grasping at straws, at air, and Steve’s seen this before, Steve’s lived this before and it’s not a falling he can stop with his hands, it’s a collapsing that is wholly found in the way that arteries and veins seem to cave for fear and doubt, for loss and darkness, and Steve needs to hold this time, Steve can’t allow history to repeat itself as Bucky stammers, as Bucky gasps and every harsh pant that escapes him rattles Steve to his core.

“You,” Bucky wheezes, trembles: “You.”

And Steve digs his teeth into his tongue until the pain grounds him in the here, until the pressure against the roof of his mouth holds his own blood at bay so that he is steady, so that when he breathes, when Bucky has to feel the heat of each exhale on his skin if nothing else, if nowhere else and Steve tells himself, tells his heart until it listens, until it matches the cadence, until it spreads steady through his body with the only words he cares to know:

I love you, I love you, please, please—

Bucky’s hands are on him, and his features are slack, mouth dropped open as he stares at Steve like he’s a vision, a ghost when he breathes out: “You.”

“Steve, status! Now!”

Maria’s voice in his ear is a thing that Steve registers, but only tangentially. Only at the peripheral.

It’s the wind in the mountains. It’s the backdrop to the fray, to the point. The only point of anything.

The only heart, Steve thinks, that his own’s been waiting to stop alongside.

And Bucky’s hands, Bucky’s touch is trembling, but the longer he holds at Steve’s skin, the more his palms shiver at Steve’s face, the slower, the steadier the pulse is that rushes along Steve’s veins, that doesn’t belong to his own heart alone, and Steve’s gaping, marveling, and his own lips are parted so as to catch the salt of the tears that escape Bucky’s thumbs at his cheeks.

“Fine,” Steve whispers, because the world has narrowed, now; the world is dying, now, and maybe this is Heaven and Hell, maybe this is all and nothing, maybe this is real, maybe this is what his heart needs before it fails and oh, oh: but Steve won’t fight it.

“I’m fine,” he exhales slow, less as words and more as feeling, and he trusts the cadence of his blood to guide him, to take the hand that he reaches out and offers to Bucky’s face, to Bucky’s self in kind, and the closer he gets the stronger the beat grows and Steve breathes in around it, tries to pair it with the memories that are written against his heart of what it means when Bucky’s pulse rushes just this way, just so: hopes to every God and Devil that of all the things now lost, now broken, this stayed true—please.

Please, let this have stayed true.

“Bucky,” Steve whispers, and it shakes with the force of the pounding, the pumping, the life that’s been missing, that Steve didn’t realize was so much of his own ability to be until this moment, until it’s here before him, murmurs tucked tight, whispers teasing, subtle promises against the grooves and veins, the curve of the heart of him where it swells and falls and needs:

“Buck, I—”

The platform shivers, throws them, gives out beneath their feet without warning, without mercy, and Steve’s reaching, Steve’s reaching—

And Bucky. Bucky.

Bucky’s reaching back, and dear God, this time.

This time, when they reach, they meet.

They hold.

______________________

The Asset knows the trajectory, the acceleration, the numbers and specifics for optimal functionality, post-impact.

Bucky doesn’t give a shit.

Because what Bucky cares about is the harsh, hateful, impossible stillness that is the skipping in Steve’s heart—and that’s his name, the man is Steve; and Bucky only cares about the skip in Steve’s pulse, hard against Bucky’s lungs; followed in turn by the way his own heart stops at the loss of contact, at the way they’re plummeting, at the threat of death below, at the threat inside: Bucky reaches, threatens to tear ligaments in lieu of veins; to break bones instead of his heart on the whole as he turns, as he folds his body until he’s got Steve in range, until he’s got Steve in his grasp, until he’s got Steve in his arms, the softest, most important parts of that precious body, that wholly necessary soul pressed up against Bucky’s chest, Bucky’s left arm curled careful, deliberate across the back of Steve’s neck, head cradled in the metal of his palm: safe. Safe.

So Bucky closes his eyes, and holds, and lets himself drift in the certainty that’s seeped into his own pulse; in the determination that’s rocking him through Steve’s: he lets himself fall first into that before he falls into the River, and he remembers cold mountaintops. He remembers wind with teeth. He remembers relief like an ocean in the middle of a night. Disjointed.

Memory.

It’s only when they hit the water that Bucky realizes that where he’s shaped himself to protect his heart—because that’s what Steve is, he knows that; neither memory nor hope in the dark but fact, fact like sunrise and the color of the sky and that’s why he couldn’t let go of the soft impression of him from the bridge, from everywhere, from the past and the present and the now, carved in his veins, wired straight into his soul where the arm only touches bone, where the chair could only take his mind, where the drugs could only pump his heart to their rhythm: lesser, so much less than this—

Bucky realizes that where he’d reached for Steve and sought to save, Steve’d done the same, that shining shield splayed against Bucky’s shoulders, held tight to his spine, and when they fall, it stings.

It stings, and they falter: Steve goes limp, and Bucky seizes sharp for it—seeks him against the line of his sternum, and they’re sinking, but Bucky can feel the rush of Steve’s blood all the stronger, all the more violent: desperate, frightening against even all the terrors Bucky’s starting to feel the touch of, spectres still but clearer every moment, every second near to Steve; Bucky can feel Steve’s heartbeat all the clearer, knows what it means and what it speaks—suddenly, unforgivingly—in the absence of breath.

Bucky kicks toward the light, single-minded, holding to Steve like a lifeline, like all the air left in the world.

They surface, and Steve’s heart’s still there, behind Bucky’s, but it’s slower now, softer and the blood is sluggish, strangled as Bucky drags him to the shore, as Bucky’s own heart reaches, and remembers that: remembers whispering to nothing, praying to no one for the impossible—to be enough, to anchor a sliver of a boy, a gasp of a man shining brighter than any other, fighting harder than any soul should have to give. Bucky’s heart reaches and hopes at least the warmth might be enough to help, to call where the beat can’t reach and lend and hold and keep.

Because he knows, beyond all else, beyond what he doesn't understand, not yet; but he knows.

He knows his heart can't reach.

Bucky lays Steve on the sodden ground and presses hands to Steve’s chest, lips to Steve’s mouth, knowledge in his muscles not yet revived inside his mind but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter one bit because the sun that shoots through him when he feels the very real sensation of Steve’s lungs moving of their own accord, of Steve’s mouth opening to rid him of water and take in breath: when Bucky feels it shake his own ribcage and Steve’s eyes don’t open; Bucky’s hands don’t stir just yet because he feels it, safe somehow beneath his hands in a way that feels like it shouldn’t be possible, though it’s not clear yet as to why: Bucky feels it.

The beat of it. Steady. Sure. Whole.

Again, and again. Unfailing.

And Bucky’s chest isn’t big enough, his own heart’s not strong enough: it flutters, and he feels faint, and Steve’s breathing for himself and it’s okay, it’s okay—this is his mission, and he’s seen it through, and he can rest, now. He can let go.

He allows himself the first, eyes closing, mind drifting.

But he slides his hand down to Steve’s wrist, grasping there to chart the pulse he knows in his chest but feels grounded, rooted, known inside the touch. He slides his hand and holds because the latter thing, the letting go of this: no. Not ever. Never again.

Because the pace of Steve’s pulse means a thing that Bucky knows exists, but never grasped the timbre of; never knew the saturation or the shade or the taste of it on his tongue but he thinks he recalls the shape of it, he thinks he remembers holding it dear, long ago, and it’s Steve—it is Steve, the word that he knows and forgot how to explain. Steve is sight and breath and light and sense.

Steve is what the concept means, what the letters form: they learned their shape from him. They learned the sound and the way that they land when they’re said. Steve is the only thing that fits the word.

Home.
______________________

Steve starts back into consciousness abruptly: he’s sore, but he’s not broken, and it only takes a few moments, a few blinks up at a bleak, grey sky to fill in the gaps, to add up the pieces.

“Bucky,” Steve gasps, shooting upward against the protest of his rattled frame, and it’s only at the motion that he feels the fingers at his wrist; it’s only in jostling them, in shaking them off without knowing that he even recognizes they were there, and his eyes follow swift to the prone figure beside him, dark and wet and vulnerable in the cold and Steve’s heart clenches, because he can’t tell if that chest is moving—

There’s a moan, though, immediate: and it matches up against the mirror-image of the tightness in Steve’s heartbeat where Bucky’s rings out, and Steve can breathe, he reminds his lungs—Bucky’s living, Bucky’s breathing.

“Oh God,” Steve whispers.

He can breathe.

“Oh, thank God.” And he can’t help but collapse back against the soft ground when he feels it, when he registers it crashing, sea-waves and lost hopes, the steady roll of thunder, of life that tosses Steve boneless back to the riverbank as he struggles for air, as he clings to the newfound feeling of Bucky’s breaths wafting soft against his own—like dew at the crook of his neck and like a song against the waft of his lungs. He breathes. And Bucky breathes. And it only takes a moment until it’s one and the same and Steve thought he’d forgotten what it was like, to have that feeling, to have that closeness, to know that your soul was fulfilled by the presence of another: he thought he’d forgotten.

He hadn’t, though. Because he remembers.

He remembers enough to know that this is somehow more.

It takes Steve time—too much, really—to differentiate the beat of one heart, two hearts, the same either way as they breathe, as the beat responds to the inhale and the exhale with symphonic precision: it takes him too much time to tell that melody apart from something more distant, more sinister.

Chopper blades.

The air feels thin, and Steve’s head spins as he sits up quick, as he assesses the situation and bites his lip so as not to crumble at the way Bucky’s fingers tighten on his wrist again; eyes still closed, but finding his pulsepoint like he knows it, like his own.

Steve looks to the wreckage, the smoke thick: the grey sky less atmospheric and more to do with smog, more to do with death—and Steve knows, with a bone-deep certainty, that they cannot be found. Not now. Not yet.

His heart takes to pounding, heavy and hard as he bends, as he lifts Bucky’s unconscious body into his arms and trusts the woods, the trees to give him cover.

Latches to the still-steady pace of Bucky’s coursing blood as a touchstone, a guidepost, as he runs.

And maybe Steve can’t spare either hand in cradling Bucky close enough to feel every breath before it whisks through Steve’s torso like what life has to feel like when it turns clay to flesh, or dust to words: maybe there’s a reason beyond the irresistible pull of Steve’s lips to Bucky’s temple, to the space where Steve can duck his head as he navigates roots, uneven terrain—maybe there’s a reason.

It might be minutes, might be hours before Steve finds a clearing. It might be minutes, might be hours more before he finds a car he can hotwire and navigate without drawing any eyes. He keeps Bucky's hand in his own as he shifts into gear and follows sidestreets to backroads as far as he can get, crossing city lines toward state borders and if he’s running on autopilot, if he’s more concerned with the visceral, undeniable presence of something precious and long believed lost inside himself, then fine.

Fine, until it’s dark. Until a vehicle is blocking their way.

Steve’s pulse jumps the way it’s not supposed to anymore, the way he’s meant to be impervious to so much shock on the battlefield: but it jumps and he must tense, must clench the hand on Bucky’s in kind because Bucky finally stirs, blinks, sucks in air like a hiss and Steve feels it, dry and rough, sandpaper on his lungs as Bucky takes in the situation, his own pulse deepening but not racing, not yet, and Steve latches to that feeling like a lifeline, clings to it with a selfishness that he’ll hate himself for, but after.

“Steve?”

And oh dear God, that voice around his name.

That voice, around his name.

“S’okay,” Steve breathes out, a little shaky, but gaining purchase, gaining strength from the touch of Bucky’s hand as he turns it over, presses palm into palm but at an odd angle, touched to keep time at the veins.

“Just,” Steve swallows, and lets the motions of it catch first on his pulse, and then low on the echo of Bucky’s: one bounding at his carotid, the other tight, firm against it, reining in.

“Can you,” Steve stammers, and forbids himself from taking Bucky’s hand, from lacing fingers together and bringing it up against his chest like he wants to, like he aches to: Steve forbids himself from presuming too much, from trusting in a thing he hasn’t yet seen save that he has, save that those eyes were dead on that bridge and now they aren’t, now they know things, at least some things, and Steve knows the warp and weft of that heartbeat, he knows it, and when they’d fought on the roof, when they’d clashed before that mask had fallen, it’d just been that falling, that pulling: magnified and amplified, but nothing more.

And now—now it is more. Now it is the murmur of life in Bucky’s soul that’s screaming in Steve’s veins, and it means something Steve doesn’t have the words for, and never did.

There were never words that could fit what it felt like to know James Buchanan Barnes inside his bones.

“Will you be okay,” Steve starts, but Bucky blinks, and Steve feels the words in the change of his breathing before he hears them come to be.

“I will watch your six.”

And Steve closes his eyes, and lets himself steady around the beat of Bucky’s blood, before he goes: woefully unarmed, but strong.

Stronger, now, than he thinks maybe he’s ever been.

In the end, there’s no real need.

“Fancy meeting you here, soldier.”

Natasha’s silhouette against flood lights is unmistakable.

“Nat,” Steve exhales, half relief and half wariness, because the man in the car behind them, the man that Steve’s honed in upon and breathing in chorus with is no more than a ghost to Natasha Romanoff. Bucky Barnes is a dead man, and the Soldier at their back is a threat.

And it’s just not true. Not now

“Nat, I—”

“I’m a spy, Rogers,” Natasha’s tone is impassive, but in the sparse light there's a glint in her eyes that he thinks she means not to hide. “You think I haven’t already picked up on what you’re all tongue-tied over?”

And Steve stumbles, internally, where he stands firm, lets out a slow breath to slow his heart and it’s unspeakable, the way there is almost a cushion, the way there is warmth awaiting the stutter of his blood, the rhythm of his pulse: the way there is nearness and reality in the hollow places of his self that lifts, now; that reminds him of what being alive really means.

What being in love really—

“Come on,” Nat nods toward the truck behind her. “The trip won’t be short, but there are some places left that were never on the books.” She’s halfway to the cab when he looks back, quirks a brow Steve’s way.

“You coming?”

Steve’s mouth opens, but it turns out she’s not speaking to him.

“He trusts you.” And Bucky’s just behind him, stand solid, defensive in the way that’s only noticed with attention; lethal, and Steve swallows. Feels the rhythm.

Steady. Steady. Safe.

Okay.

“Your boyfriend seems game,” Nat smirks a bit, her own posture tightly coiled, ready for all potentialities. “But I see you still need an incentive.”

She takes a few steps, and reaches into the bed of the truck. A flutter of coverings later, she extracts it: unmistakable, despite dirt and grime, remnants of the river and all that got lost.

And all that got found.

His shield.

“Shall we, then? Before the feds get on our asses? Or worse?” Natasha takes Steve’s widened eyes for the affirmation they are, and when he reaches for Bucky’s hand it’s already there, indistinguible who moved first to take that comfort, to cement the way they move and breathe.

Steve walks, and Bucky stays just a step behind, watching his back as promised.

Bucky’s heartbeat, Bucky’s breath, and the soft course of his blood stays a pace behind Steve’s own, but constant.

Chorusing the very same hymn.

______________________

The redhead, Natasha: she takes them by road. By rail, by air. She finds them safety.

Bucky is slumped against Steve’s body, rousing again from sleep—that thing he thinks he used to know but hasn’t, not for so very long; that thing that, much like Steve's heart in Bucky’s chest, was robbed, forsaken, and is given only in the shape of this man and his breath, his body, his being where is shakes through Bucky’s chest, expands to keep him rooted, to keep him warm where there has only been cold, before.

Only cold.

But Bucky is rousing, propped against Steve’s body at rest, and the redhead, Natasha—she’s watching him. Eyes wide. Vulnerable and menacing; hair damp, curls forming: a paradox.

Bucky feels the metronome of Steve’s heart pushing his own toward realization, and Bucky remembers back alleys in a breath. Remembers dark nights of the eyes and of the soul inside a beat. Feels the press of Steve’s being against the curves of his ribs and it grasps like hands at a deathbed too soon, defied and sent packing because no, not Steve. Bucky feels the rise and fall of Steve’s lungs and remembers them different, remembers them the same, and it’s jumbled, but it’s real because it sings the same tune as Steve’s blood, and Bucky recalls it: protection.

The first and only mission that’s ever mattered in his life.

And the redhead—Natasha: she knows protection. She knows protection, and she was a shield, and she did not deflect like Steve’s. She was porous. She was…

Bucky’s heart pounds, heavy, and Steve stirs—too close at Bucky’s chest, undoubtedly more sensitive to the feeling at proximity now, the serum enhancing his cutaneous receptors along with everything else, so Bucky breathes, deep on the inhale, long on the exhale, and he meets her eyes, and lets himself feel, lets himself mourn, lets himself ache with the guilt and the shame and the wrongness, the war between selves that’s muted, here—that by all rights should be eating him alive, should be tearing apart his mind and his soul but it isn’t, it isn’t, because he knows where it all fits. He knows what’s real.

There is Steve at his back, there is Steve pressed behind his heart when it beats: a whisper when Bucky is calm, when Bucky's filling heart barely rasps that vital force of life, and then an anchor, a touch to the line of his spine except so much deeper, so much closer, intimate in a way that means truth, that speaks light, that takes that heart in strong hands and holds it loose enough to thrum but near enough to calm and Steve is there, Steve is there.

Steve breathes steady, sniffs but settles: Steve sleeps.

Bucky reaches, without reflecting on why; slow, so as to be evaded if he cannot read her gaze: but Bucky reaches for Natasha’s hip, does not lift the hem of her shirt, but lays his palm where he knows the scar must be, the skin must shine.

He makes himself meet her eyes, makes himself hold while she reads whatever’s there.

Steve trusts her. She gave them safety.

Her lips twitch, not a smile.

He doesn’t say anything, but she is a spy.

He suspects she saw what was necessary before he ever gave permission to be seen.

The redhead, Natasha, is a blonde by morning. She wears glasses without a perscription, and earrings that make a soft, jingling noise when she moves. Bucky knows there’s a why, and he knows that it’s him.

She passes close beside him, and he grabs for her hand, and she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t tense. He squeezes her fingers lightly before letting go, and he doesn’t need to feel her pulse, beneath his fingers or behind his heart, to know that it is well, with her. To know that she is an ally. That she may well be a friend.

Because Steve is in his line of sight, he suspects that friends exist: did once, can now, will again one day.

Because Steve is not near enough to touch, however: he cannot be sure.

And then, there is the man waiting for them when they arrive at the safehouse—hiding in plain sight was ever Hydra’s approach for themselves, but never for their Asset, so it is strange, it is anathema to Bucky to take refuge in this cottage, bright on the inside, too many windows, but Steve receives it, believes it is safe, believes they are safe and Bucky concedes, because Steve makes up his bones: but when they arrive, there is a man.

Sam. Bucky broke his wings, and cannot look at him for days.

Sam is good, though. Sam is kind and Sam stops looking at him with real wariness, the kind that stings, after the first forty-eight hours: and by then, Bucky knows enough of himself, of the story that’s still evolving, still slotting into place that he is able to feel the sting and know when it ebbs; Sam offers him coffee. Bucky drinks it black because it is a gift, and he recalls what to do with gifts in theory, though in practice his limbs cannot remember.

Sam smiles at him, though, and hands him sugar and a spoon. Bucky stops at three. He remembers apartments, and the salty scent of broth, and the voice of a woman telling stories. The gleeful laughter of girls before bedtime.

A small body, too tiny for his clothes.

Bucky drinks, and says thank you. Sam’s grin persists, but the real reward is the warmth in Bucky’s chest: his own, and another’s.

The only warmth that counts.

Which is not to say that it’s a painless process, for every definition of pain that he comprehends: there’s a soreness in his mind that spikes to agony when Steve’s away from Bucky’s reach for too long, and Bucky hates that he needs so desperately; because for all that remains forgotten, Bucky remembers the story. Bucky remembers his blindness, remembers so many years where Steve was his everything and he hadn’t even seen—where Steve needed a lifeline, and Bucky could not provide.

Bucky remembers what God means, where Heaven dwells, and Hell; remembers what awaits the sin of overlooking a miracle.

And when he thinks of these failures, thinks on his horrors before he became a monster in the flesh, he hates it, hates himself even more in light of the realization, of the ever-enforced knowledge that he is asking so much from Steve without any words, that he is giving nothing to replace the things he has to be gouging from Steve’s soul, the need in him, the presence of a soul as sullied, as twisted by time and by hate as Bucky’s—

When he gets to those thoughts, though, Steve is every sunbeam made to kill the frost, and where Bucky thinks there should be deeper urges toward destruction, toward violence, toward a mission that once superseded the Mission: where Bucky thinks it’s only reasonable that he wrestle between who he was and who he has been, now, for so very long, where he should be railing against the way things fit but cannot fit— in truth it’s all so faint, like the coffee dregs in the cup Sam offers, all that’s left where the whole of his world has been replaced, reshaped, reformed: the whole of the body made a weapon is made a body once more—and above that, beyond that, made a sanctuary, a sacred space to house Steve’s being where it deigns to dwell—without knowing, even, with no promise of recompense, no reason to remain for Bucky where Bucky drowns in this, in the press of Steve’s heartbeat, the meter of Steve’s breath like a caress against his psyche, curling tight around his soul.

When Bucky thinks of himself as broken beyond repair, as undeserving—when Bucky knows that truth, he feels Steve the strongest. He wonders what gives him away, if Steve means to offer more support in those eyes that spell his heart out in bold letters, incandescent in the night. Bucky wonders what betrays the way his own soul withers, what prompts Steve to come to his side and settle in close so that Bucky is surrounded, so that Bucky is encapsulated and enclosed, embraced with absolute tenderness and acceptance from all sides, in all ways—so that Bucky’s body lifts with Steve’s inhales, so that his lungs follow Steve’s lead, and the heart beneath his cheek sounds different from the same beat where it hums beneath his sternum, but no less perfect, no less dear and sure and loved—

Bucky closes his eyes, and listens to the three-part harmony these pulses sing and swallows tight against the unanswered plea that it could be known both ways, that Steve could feel it too, could hear it—except it’s better.

It’s better that Bucky never poisoned Steve from within, all these years, all this time. Bucky doesn’t deserve a place in that chest, not held here as he is; certainly not burrowed in so deep.

So he closes his eyes, and burrows into Steve’s embrace from the outside, underwriting as he is but too selfish, too heartsick above all other maladies, all other wounds; he settles as close as he can to the feel of Steve that moulds against the beating of his own blood, and he breathes in deep against the sting behind his eyes, and lets himself make words out of the sounds, the sensations, lets himself imagine the breaths have meaning beyond themselves:

You’re here, you’re here, I forgot what it was to live without you and you’re here—

“You don’t take sugar in your coffee.”

Bucky’s eyes are still closed when the words ring out; he’d heard Sam’s approach, but there is no threat; and Sam settles the unsweetened coffee on the table in front of them, because Bucky had spoken to him, unprovoked and unasked, when he’d gone to add sugar to Steve’s mug; told him to stop, because Steve has never taken sugar in his coffee, no.

Of course Steve doesn’t take sugar in his coffee.

“Three sugars. That’s what I’ve been making for you,” Sam says, and there’s a strange shift in the cadence of Steve’s heart on every side. “That’s what you’ve asked for since I got you a cup of that goddamn swill we have at the VA.”

Steve breathes in deep, in the way that he has that means he’s trying to keep said breath from catching—all force in the face of breaking.

“But you don’t take sugar in your coffee.”

Steve’s pulse shakes Bucky on the inside, shapes Bucky's breaths for the force of it, nudges at Bucky’s heart from underneath, and Bucky doesn’t open his eyes, because Sam thinks he’s sleeping, but Bucky does move his hand, and maybe Steve will think he’s sleeping, too, when the breadth of Bucky’s palm settles on Steve’s chest, just above the thrum: Bucky remembers, before the war, that night.

Remembers a different beat, a different body, but the same goddamn heart.

“He did,” Sam’s saying, and it takes Bucky a minute, through the growing shame at his own blindness that’s crawling back into his consciousness—it takes Bucky a minute to realize that Sam’s talking about him. “He does.”

Bucky takes sugar in his coffee, yes. Bucky always took sugar because the world was bitter enough, because Bucky was bitter enough about the world, about the way it could hate, about the way it thought about Steve as something less, about the way it threatened to take Steve from him more often than it could just let them be: the world was bitter enough. Bucky remembers that.

Bucky’d always taken sugar in his coffee.

“Three sugars, as a matter of fact.”

And Bucky’s mind is still hazy, still isn’t quite as sharp, or as quick to the draw as it was, as it should be—as it will be, because he feels it every moment, the way Steve makes it better, the way that Steve is healing the wounds that objectively, now that Bucky’s seeing them, now that he’s comprehending the damage as such , for what it is—but even his hazy mind gets there eventually. Even his dull edges pick up the pointed tone to Sam’s words.

But even if they hadn’t, even if they couldn’t: Steve’s heart speaks volumes for what’s being said, being implied—damn well jumps, leaps, and Bucky remember what fear feels like, remembers that sensation beneath his hand on the worst nights, the nights where loss would linger, would threaten, and if it was a bullet to his gut from just outside and the subtle stir it’d cause in him then, the way it’d leave him nauseous and desperate: if it was a horror then, it’s a deathblow now, on the inside, the way it heaves his entire being, threatens to break him and he can’t breathe, can’t breathe, except—

Oh.

He settles in the now, best he can—settles in the way that’s only possible for Steve pressed up against him, and he tries to make sense of the way the leaping is effervescent, almost: the way it’s hopeful for an instant, and filled up in warmth before it ebbs, before it too settles, and Bucky realizes first that it’s joyful, that’s it’s fearful only in that it, too, is scared; he realizes that first, and in the next moment realizes that he misses it, as it fades, and Steve never took sugar in his coffee.

Bucky, though.

Bucky took three.

And Bucky remembers nostalgia; Bucky remembers longing and yearning and missing and a hollowness he didn’t know he had, a loneliness that was always more than he’d envisioned he could know.

Bucky remembers that, even if there’d been sugar to have: on the front, in the trenches, he would have always taken his coffee black.

Always.

And it’s not the same, it won’t ever be the same, but Bucky thinks: maybe. Maybe he does mean something real to Steve Rogers.

Maybe Bucky’s lucky that his momma—and he can see her, now; just glimpses, but they’re sharpening; but maybe he’s lucky that his momma was so wise. Maybe love really does come in all different shapes and sorts, and it’s more than he deserves, but—

Maybe.

Chapter Text

“I’m not a doctor, Steve,” Sam had sighed, once Bucky had let Sam come closer than an arm’s-length with a mug of something warm; close enough to take a real look at him: and throughout the makeshift exam, Steve was always touching some part of him, always close enough to feel Bucky’s warmth through his skin, rather than just on the inside, tucked up tight against his bones because Steve couldn’t have stood to so much as watch the tension in Bucky’s muscles, in the set of his shoulders, even if he hadn’t felt the raucous gallop like a storm inside his ribs.

So Steve always made sure that Bucky could feel his presence; that Bucky could know whatever comfort Steve was able to give—and while Steve would have given his heart, his body, his arm or leg, his blood or his soul to hold Bucky from the outside, and to cradle him close even deeper, even more profound, to take all the fear and hurt in him, in the way he shields himself on the left for a shame he should never have known, the way he hesitates, just enough before he sinks against the heat of Steve’s frame, Steve’s embrace: Steve would give anything to wrap around the heart he holds most dear, instead of just the body, but he’d make do.

He’d fucking make do, because it’s a miracle he gets this much. It’s a privilege beyond his reckoning, and Steve sure as hell doesn’t plan on wasting it.

“I can tell you that I don’t think he’s gonna keel over in the next five minutes,” Sam had gone on on, running a hand across his face and glancing at Bucky where he’d been sitting at the far end of the sofa, Natasha seated opposite: near if needed, far if preferred.

“But the details, after what he’s been through,” Sam’d breathed out slow, and shook his head. “He needs a specialist, someone who can…”

“We can’t trust anyone, here,” Steve had said, definitive, raising his voice just enough so that he was sure, with serum-enhanced hearing, that Bucky would catch his words without trouble; that the frenzied rapping that was cutting up against the pump of Steve’s heart, that Bucky’s obvious dismay would start to ebb, would at least hold until Steve could go to him, try to ease the frayed nerves in his best friend, his whole world. “I don’t—”

“I have an idea.”

Steve’s attention had turned with Nat’s words, back toward Bucky with his eyes where the soul of him was unwaveringly focused always, always on the sense of Bucky in his veins: it’d been a surprise, but then maybe not—Bucky’s relative comfort with Natasha’s proximity, but her arm was propped behind him, the only point of contact being the fingers she was running through his hair, and Steve felt Bucky’s pulse against his own not calming, but neither racing any faster: Steve had heeded the pull, as ever, and took Nat’s place when she’d disappeared without another word.

Which is how they end up here, in a bedroom in their safehouse—the least threatening of all the places they could manage to set up the tech Natasha’d been smuggling in over the past week: monitors and wires and various devices that made even Steve uneasy, but maybe it’s less the devices that causes that reaction.

Maybe it’s more the sinking, the heady-rising barrage of Bucky’s own terror where it’s bleeding, where it’s poisoning the cells that build his heart and Steve can feel it wholly, the affect and the physical blow, an earthquake that hits and stutters his own pulse out of line and it makes him faint, and he glances at Bucky with his jaw half opened to offer comfort, except his face is impassive.

There’s no reason for even Steve to read how deep this goes. Not from the outside. Not by just looking.

So when Natasha approaches Bucky, asks to attach the leads to his chest, to fit the electrode-halo to his scalp, Bucky’s jaw only tightens, and Steve can tell the way he makes to nod.

Steve nearly wretches, for the tumult in his chest that he feels so near, and yet still never as close, as central as Bucky himself feels his own bounding dread, and Steve remembers the lab in Austria and the way the pounding couldn’t be real, couldn’t be living, couldn’t be Bucky—

Steve reaches a hand to Bucky’s shoulder before he knows he’s moved, before he knows he’s gotten that close, and all he really wants is to take Bucky in his arms and not let go.

Not ever.

Bucky eyes him, questions on the surface, but below: below.

Steve’s breath falters as he processes the immediate slowing, the loss of that devastating edge to the beat, all last-goodbyes and the jump from a cliff, the fall from a train.

“She can do it,” Bucky’s saying, and if Steve didn’t know him, let alone feel him inside his own soul, he might believe it. “I’ll—”

“No,” Steve shakes his head. “No, I can, will you,” he swallows, and draws strength from the feeling of his heartbeat tangling, mingling, dancing with Bucky’s as it comes down to something sustainable, something that won’t get lost again.

“Will it be better, if she shows me, and then I do it?”

Bucky doesn’t answer, just stares, and Steve keeps a hand on him because he can’t help it; because he has to keep the pretense that he feels the relief that Bucky won’t speak to in some way other than the pulse against the lowlands of Steve’s own bruising heart.

Natasha instructs him diligently, so quiet; sees the answer that isn’t given because she’s Natasha, of course she sees.

She moves seamlessly between guiding Steve and communicating with her not-so-mysterious medical contact, Mr. Green, who Steve suspects understands all too well what it means to lie low, to stay off the grid: to be so broken that you need the space to pick up the pieces.

And no: Steve doesn’t know who he means; Steve doesn’t know who’s more broken.

“Is this okay?” Steve asks, as he flattens the leads to the skin of Bucky’s chest and perhaps he lingers, perhaps he holds to relish the feel of that pulse kneading the cup of his palm as it massages, eases tension from them both against each ventricle, each vein, tender despite the lingering echoes of fear, and Steve wants to believe that’s his doing. Wants to believe that he’s able to give something to Bucky, like this; that some part of him is capable of being enough.

And then it happens. Fully cognizant. Wholly present. Wide awake.

Bucky reaches out. Bucky reaches up. Bucky covers Steve’s hand on his chest and breathes, and Steve thinks the world might be ending; else it’s starting for the first time, birthing itself anew—because Steve’s never had it quite like this, Steve’s never known in his hands the way he’s wanted to but this, this is closer than he’s ever known, ever dared: he can feel how Bucky breathes, he can feel the fullness of the motion, of expansion and contraction, of filling with life and sending it forth and it’s breathtaking.

But Bucky breathes, and perhaps it’s not for Steve, but it almost doesn’t matter. Not in this moment where Steve can hold against Bucky’s pulsing heart and count the beats, a nearly singular resonance on all fronts, closer together than if he holds to Bucky’s wrist, or brushes at his neck: Bucky breathes, and if it’s not for Steve than that’s okay, because it lifts Steve’s chest like heavenly hosts in almighty song and Steve is selfish to grasp at it, to pretend that it belongs to him.

But Steve never claimed he wasn’t selfish. Not once has Steve ever told that lie.

Bucky’s grip on his hand tightens, just a little, just in time with Bucky’s heart when it clenches, when Steve’s own moves in kind, and it feels like it means something. It feels like it matters more.

It’s not the first time Steve’s wanted the impossible so badly that he’s willed its hints into his mind, though—because he’s selfish, yes.

But he does try his best not to veer toward delusional.

Steve inhales, and pulls away—Bucky doesn’t fight him, and of course he doesn’t; why would he; he glances toward Natasha, who nods from her place behind the laptop, and Steve moves about to position the sensor for the EEG.

“Still okay?” he asks, and Bucky nods, bites at his lip but the pain there seems to soothe him, must soothe him, because as Steve’s fingers graze his hairline, as they lilt across his temple and the pulse that stirs there, Bucky’s heartbeat under Steve’s is more a purr, more a dull and pleasant roar than Steve’s felt since they were children, since they were small and never innocent, but never so unmade.

Bucky breathes, and Steve watches, and he lets himself withdraw slowly, lets himself keep unwavering eye-contact with the man he loves with the whole of his being: lets himself look and be seen, if only to a point.

Bucky breathes, and Steve lets go for a moment—not like before, not like when it was really life or death except it is, it still is, because Steve lets go and waits to see if Bucky’ll catch him like he used to, if Bucky’s soul in him is strong enough to sustain him in the dark, without Bucky ever knowing he needs to reach, to hold, to save.

Steve lets go, lets his lungs empty, and maybe they’re no longer weak, but he is still so tired: Steve lets go and finds a hard bed and a soft body curled around right and he is small and he is coming apart slowly, in sections, in tiny cracks and there is Bucky.

There is Bucky—and this Bucky in the now knows him, knows where to mend him and hold him together, knows how his breath has to move to be ever-sure that it’s sufficient to Steve’s needs, to lifting Steve’s chest for him when Steve himself is too weak; this Bucky is Bucky, his Bucky, and if there was any doubt to it left, it is in that it was never forgotten beyond rescuing, beyond recovery: the way that Bucky learned to breathe around Steve’s failings, Steve’s needing. The way that Bucky never took a chance to breathe outside of the way he held Steve together, not then.

And not now.

Steve lets go, and it’s there, as it’s ever been, as it ever was: Bucky.

Steve floats on it, and only lets himself come down when Nat walks near, her eyes straying toward a tray nearby.

Steve follows her gaze.

“No,” Steve hisses, jaw clenches tight when he sees the syringe. “We’re not taking his blood, we’re not—”

And there’s a sound, a motion—the plates of Bucky’s left arm shift and reveal components Steve’s never seen before, the kind he doesn’t think he’d ever understand; the plates shift, and reveal a compartment, and Steve feels Bucky’s resignation to what’s done, to what is, as he reaches in and pulls a vial: smaller than standard, but filled with dark red.

“Easier,” Bucky says simply. “They said, easier,” he shrugs a bit. “Like this.”

And Steve can barely see beyond the red in that glass—Steve can barely feel around the surge of rage, of heartache, of remorse and regret for what it means that this happened, that Steve let this happen, and Bucky’s spirit is dim, but so present, so real in Steve’s own veins that he can almost forget what they’ve done to Bucky’s, how they’ve violated and manipulated and torn apart this one man, this one soul that Steve believes is worth the world entire, and good God, but Steve’s lungs ache, and he can’t focus, can’t keep his hands from shaking.

He can’t, until Bucky breathes in slow, and deep: deliberate, and Steve realizes the obvious tells of his reaction, of his dismay that Bucky must see in flashing lights, and Steve is a selfish, shortsighted idiot, because if he's hurting, if he’s reeling and he knows that Bucky should be, yet isn’t—Steve is selfish, because what right does he have to be angry at this, and what he failed to prevent, at what he never bothered to be sure could never be, at the disservice done to his own second family, left without the body Steve loved by the soul that he ached for.

“We done here?” Steve forces himself to say; voice too high, too pitchy on the question.

“Yeah,” Natasha nods, and blissfully doesn’t ask, overlooks entirely whatever Steve can’t hide in his face and it’s a favor Bucky can’t feel him, isn’t bound to the crash and give of his psyche these days; Bucky deserves better. Always did.

“Should be everything he needs, for now,” Nat nods at Bucky, who removes the remaining leads himself and stands to leave, and Steve feels the pull again—a different death, so spoiled now to think of mere feet between them as a death he can’t abide, and Steve won’t ask, Steve won’t follow, not unless Bucky needs him—

“Coming?” Bucky asks, and the tone’s a flat one, gives nothing away: but Steve breathes in on the downbeat of his own heart, so it’s all the more clear how Bucky’s skips up: hopeful, and Steve is selfish, but if he is selfish to the point of offering solace—if it’s mutual in this way where it can’t be in another, in the spaces where it counts: if this is all he can give, he will give it.

And he’ll goddamn deal with the guilt of it when the ache in both the heartbeats in his chest starts to abate.
______________________

Natasha’s approaching—she doesn’t need to wear the earrings, to announce her presence, not anymore, but she does.

She does, and that is kindness.

Bucky is near Steve, now; not as near as he wishes, as he wants, but near, and safe, and Bucky feels more whole, more real and solid and comprised of all the selves he’s ever been, an amalgam that’s still finding purchase but that exists, that is permitted to wander because Steve forever patrols the gates.

And for all the questions Bucky’s answered with a change in pulse rate, or a breath sucked tight between teeth, just so: for all the questions Bucky doesn’t have to keep asking, there’s one he suspects he will take to his grave.

Because how in the hell he missed this for love, for love that means matter and form get restrung, realigned—for love that is everything like everything is God: this.

How he missed this, ever, will be a question he won’t ever close.

Natasha sits lightly on the arm of the sofa, pauses to observe before diving straight in:

“He’d like to see another—”

“No.”

And that’s Steve, and there are so many layers that Bucky knows, now—has remembered and relearned both and it’s a kaleidoscope, almost, of the many fragments making new truths, remaking old certitudes and calling them vibrant, lending them dimension where before they were flat, they were known: Steve tells him it’s better. Steve tells him it’s more suited to who he is, down deep.

Steve almost says soul, though, then: it’s suited to his soul—Bucky hears the hiss of the letters that may have been, and Bucky tries his damnedest not to let the swoop in his chest get betrayed on his face, by his smile, because he thinks of Peggy Carter, and he wonders how Steve aches to have been robbed of that blessing, between them.

And while Stevie won’t say broken when it comes to all the shards that Bucky soldiers on in piecing into recognizable visions, mosaics that serve some shred of sense, Stevie won’t say broken, no, but at least Bucky has Steve’s heart, Steve’s breath, Steve’s being like a fire at his core: at least Bucky has that, and what does Steve have? What is Steve left with, stronger and braver and more deserving of the world than anyone: Bucky hadn’t been enough even before he was fractured, and sullied, and wrong—and now.

Now, Bucky is quite possibly everything that Steve doesn’t deserve—more, worse than unworthy, he is everything that Steve is better than and never should have had to endure: Bucky is a burden and a memory that should have been forgotten, and here’s Steve, Steve who Bucky can feel when he’s never earned it, never been able to give it in kind: Bucky feels him, feels the protective instinct and the immediate remorse for overstepping, for taking agency, for speaking for Bucky when Bucky can speak for himself, when Bucky deserves to speak for himself now that he can, when he’s spent so long with his voice stolen—Bucky can feel that in the strange rapping of that pulse because Bucky knows Steve like he knows nothing else, is sure of Steve as he would never trust another, and Bucky doesn’t deserve such loyalty, such love when he can’t be what Steve has lost.

“Unless,” and Steve’s tone is so apologetic underneath a mounting anxiety, a palpable fear in the new depth, all the bass and shiver of Steve’s pulse in Bucky’s veins, heavy in the center of Bucky’s chest—Steve’s mounting terror is countered only by the regret that he’s taking Bucky’s voice, by the persistent attempt in those eyes to chart whether Bucky hates it, whether Bucky resents it or attaches it to his captors, his tormentor, and Bucky, truly, can only marvel because it’s Steve, and Steve is, is…

Is.

“Unless there’s something wrong—”

“No,” Natasha cuts in quick, sees the mounting panic in Steve’s posture, and Bucky lets himself ride the immediate turn in Steve’s vital, thrumming presence inside Bucky’s chest: all that fear draining, leaving them both smaller, but yet so at ease, and if Bucky’s foolish, if Bucky is hatefully blind to the reality and accepts only the want that sparks the way his own heart pumps: if Bucky is foolish, then he can call the entangled, then he can call them entwined beyond breaking, too.

“No, he’s,” and Natasha shakes her head as she reaches one hand each to cover Steve’s on the left, and Bucky’s on the right; turns her attention to Buck, her eyes smiling as she tells him simply: “You’re doing really well.”

And the breath Steve lets go is magic and flame, is soft and warm and dew before dawn: it is what the world must have looked like in perfection, before the Fall: it is rightness, it is pure breath and light, and Bucky’s never deserved that. Bucky feels like it might be sin to know it now.

Except Steve shakes Natasha’s touch, and she pulls back quick from Bucky too before Steve’s hand can grasp, needy and immediate, intrinsic as he covers Bucky’s hand with his own and tightens his fingers around Bucky’s knuckles: the hold absolute. An unshakable truth.

And Bucky’s heart trills for the feel of Steve’s finally approaching softness, rightness: finally ebbing back from fever pitch, and it’s an impossibility, except that he feels it. It’s an absolutely hopeless figment of Bucky’s own pathetic need, but it almost seems as if Bucky is what steadies Steve. It almost feels as if Steve requires his presence, his well being: Steve calms at the touch of him from without, even if he isn’t capable of holding him close, keeping him safe from within.

And Bucky’s own heart does strange things: impossible, hopeless—when he thinks about being something that Steve can need, somehow; not how he wishes, not how he wants, and Bucky had forgotten, for so long—Bucky had forgotten so much, and it’s only in this moment, with Steve’s hand on his own, that Bucky remembers, wholly and fully and without relent, what it means to want: he wants Steve near him, not just for the way his mind, his thoughts slot into their proper places.

“You can do,” Bucky speaks up; there’s been too much silences, too long—Natasha and Steve both start a bit, when the words come. “You can scan,” he gestures at his head, swallows hard when Steve’s grasp tightens: “But just that.”

“Bucky,” Steve murmurs, but it’s a firm thing in the sound, in the way it bolsters up against the skip in his pulse: “you don’t have to—”

“No,” Bucky shakes his head. “I can,” and it’s true. “That’s fine.”

That’s less true.

But Steve helps Bucky’s mind work right, Steve helps him remember, and he remembers so much, so many things that still float untethered and make no sense but so much more that’s coming together and making sense, and Bucky remembers science. Bucky remembers medicine and novels and research and needing to save. Bucky remembers wanting to be enough, even then. Needed to be more.

For Steve.

“You’ll,” Bucky lets his words fall gently, lets his fingers curl so the tips stroke Steve’s skin, measure his warmth, the flow of his blood. “You won’t, you’ll be—”

“Right there,” Steve promises; Bucky doesn’t even have to finish the thought. “Whole time, if you want me there.”

And it’s horrible of him, maybe; or maybe not, maybe it’s human, maybe it’s best—but Bucky’s well aware of how they fit when Steve’s body brushes his own, shoulder to shoulder; of how Steve’s heartbeat near his ear makes the one in his chest burn bright and sheer and perfect; how Steve’s fingers in his hair, light and so very gentle as the touch whispered at the jawline, the temple: Bucky thinks that Steve stayed, that his hold, the contact; it lingered because Steve wanted to help him but maybe, maybe, he’s seen the progress, the way that Bucky’s found himself for how he’s tied, how he’s tangled up in Steve and always was, always would be—maybe Steve sees that he’s everything, maybe some of it shines through Bucky’s eyes, or his face, or his beating heart where Steve feels it through the skin, though not beneath, and maybe it’s something, if not quite enough—and Steve’s had his share of breaking. They both have had their share.

Warm and full and right, his mother’d said: and Bucky can’t justify taking more than his own soul merits, but if it’s Steve, if it helps Steve, if it might, sacrificing beautiful martyr that he is—if Bucky gets to feel alive in the process of helping Steve to heal the wounds he never should have suffered, then Bucky’s always been luckier than he deserves.

And maybe some of it’s wishful thinking, wholehearted want he shouldn’t touch, shouldn’t reach out and bring toward ruin: but Bucky can’t explain away the way Steve’s heartbeat takes to war drums, makes him hurt and fear and then he reaches, then he touches Bucky—of all things, of all shameful things—but he’ll reach, and Bucky’ll wait for him, or meet him, or sometimes, sometimes he’ll reach first and there is no explaining the way the war ends, the way serenity reigns over moments, the way breaths feel innocent, giddy, terrified to hope and yet made themselves of hope: Bucky cannot make that in his head. Bucky cannot blame that on self-deception, on greedy fantasy.

“I,” Bucky says, stammers: “yes. Yeah, yes.”

To Steve near him; as long as Bucky wants. To Steve and all that he is, that he means, that he’ll give but more: that he’ll let himself receive as a consolation prize he never should have had to settle for, but Bucky will give whatever small thing he wants to brush again, whatever ease he can offer: even if Steve gets nothing in return, Bucky would give his heart and soul entire, and he wishes Steve could know—wishes that, for all that Steve might one day comprehend of it, that Steve could know the truth, and never doubt it.

“Yes.”

And Steve Rogers never needed a savior, and Steve Rogers may have lost the anchor he deserved.

But sometimes when Steve reaches for him before he can stop to think twice: sometimes, where Bucky feels himself being mended, stitch by horrible, agonizing, beautifying stitch and he knows, he knows that Steve is the thread; sometimes he knows just as sure that Steve’s mending, too. Sometimes the sting of the needle and the beauty of the sutures drawn close, so close, sometimes it’s everywhere. Sometimes it secures the pieces of Bucky’s heart, and sometimes it lives, too, in the spaces around it, above and below. Sometimes there’s a loose fastening, even, and Steve accidentally ties them together, damns himself because he’s too good, because he gives too much.

And Bucky’s selfish; Bucky’s human. He doesn’t undo those stitches.

But if being near Steve, if giving Steve what he can, if easing war into peace for someone who was never made for battle, and has seen too goddamned much: if Bucky can do that, if Bucky can be that, well.

Bucky may never be bonded to Steve in the way he’s always ached for. But he’ll be damned if he gives up the chance, the honor, the privilege of holding Steve together, nonetheless.

He will be damned if he fails the only mission he cares to see through.

It is the least he can do.

______________________

Natasha’s got the aggregate data back from her less-than-anonymous health care professional friend, all the scans and tests Bucky’s consented to over the past week and a half. Steve feels off-balance, feels not-quite-right before he even looks, before he even starts to read the notes; feels worn thin, heart pumping just a touch too hard—he reaches with his hand, before he can stop himself, but Bucky’s not there. Bucky’s getting better, slowly but surely—indomitable, unbreakable—and for all that Steve relishes the exams that make Bucky’s own pulse rush, for all that Steve takes full advantage of that time to touch and to breathe and to comfort, the need for it waning, and Bucky doesn’t need to be coddled, Bucky’s pulse runs if not wholly predictable, but healthier on it’s own every day. Bucky speaks to Natasha, makes everyone coffee. Bucky’s getting better, all on his own.

Steve, though.

Steve tells himself it’s not healthy, it’s not okay to lean on Bucky—who isn’t well, isn’t fixed but has improved so quickly, so incredibly, and Steve wants to say he’s had a hand in it, wants to believe that he’s good for Bucky too, because it might break him entirely to know that for all that he takes, for all that he leans and soaks in Bucky’s soul where his own still feels frail, feels too bruised to reach too far: Steve tells himself he needs to breathe deep on his own, again, except he doesn’t think he ever has. Steve wills his heart not to try to beat out of his chest just because it’s seeking, searching, wanting.

Steve does try.

He hates himself for the way his eyes close, for the way he reaches in and finds it: he loves deeper than he knows how to hold when it’s there, still there despite the distance—just a room, but a room, and for minutes, hours even, now, and it’s an ocean, it’s a chasm, it’s a valley between peaks—

No.

No, not that. Never that again.

And Steve is selfish, is weak in ways that no one’s ever bothered to judge, and they should have, they should still: Steve is selfish, weak.

When he grabs for the data, the reports, and starts reading, starts breaking: he can’t help himself.

He reaches for Bucky’s presence, the crest of his solid, steadfast beating heart, never abandoning a post he never knew he held, and Steve breathes. Breathes.

It’s not just the results. There are photographs. There is Russian.

Steve doesn’t need to speak the language to make a whole from the shreds—he doesn’t need to speak the language.

He can follow the blood stains, the trail left, just fine.

“You’ve gotta stop blaming yourself,” Natasha cuts through his thoughts, tone full of care, but unyielding. He’s heard it before. “None of this—”

“Bullshit,” Steve hisses, then flinches back from the venom there: not for her, never for him. No.

For himself.

“Bullshit, none of this is my fault,” Steve says, softly and just this side of mournful for the sick way his heart takes to pumping as he swallows bile, as the words and the implications on the papers in his hand sink deeper, deeper still.

“I never went for his body,” Steve breathes, chokes: “I thought, I never could have—”

“Who could have?” Sam cuts in, plaintive. “Who could have imagined this, Steve, who in their right minds—”

“He was different.” And those are the only words that matter. That is the only thing that counts.

Bucky was always more.

“Come here,” Natasha instructs him, laptop open before her on the kitchen counter, screen propped against a bowl of fruit—innocuous, misleading for the things, the images now running through Steve’s head, now searing bright behind his eyes.

“Look at this,” Natasha points to the screen as Steve leans over: it’s a brain scan, Steve recognizes that much, but the sophistication, the detail: it’s like nothing Steve’s ever seen.

Stark Tower must be real busy, these days.

“This is what Mr. Green—”

“You can say his name,” Steve interrupts as Nat starts to explain, which gets him an unamused glare.

“Which is Mr. Green,” she shoots back pointedly—and yes, fine: even in a safehouse, there may still be ears everywhere.

“But here. Watch.” Natasha clicks on the scan, and the image starts to move.

“See that?” she says, voice hushed, almost excited as she points to places that light, and lights that then skitter, then ignite and spread and die, only to emerge elsewhere: beautiful.

“Those are neural pathways,” Natasha explains; “those are functions and connections and memories that Hydra scorched out of him.”

Steve’s mouth goes very dry, very fast; his eyes sting as he watches the lights: memories.

Bucky.

“And that’s the progress?” Steve asks, tries to keep the choke from his voice. “That’s over the last few days?”

Natasha’s eyes pin him down: unreadable. Intense.

“Steve,” she breathes out. “Steve, that’s the progress over the course of the initial exam.”

One exam. One time, just minutes, just moments strung together: and the lights were diffuse, at first, but now.

Now, it’s the grid of a city. Now, it’s the stars in the middle of nowhere, the galaxy paved in the dark.

“But this here,” Natasha doesn’t have to point when the darting lights synchronize, when they seem most orderly, most vibrant, most breathtaking as Steve’s heart starts to race for the promise of them, for what they mean.

“This is when you were closest,” Natasha says, and for a moment, Steve doesn’t think he’s heard her right, can’t have understood.

“Every time,” she clarifies. “Like this.”

And Steve is speechless, at that. Steve’s heart soars, and he thinks; maybe it’s okay to love him to the point where it kills him.

Maybe it’s okay that Steve can’t help but breathe in time with Bucky’s lungs, if he can give Bucky this.

Because Bucky’s lost so much, has had so much taken from him: his arm, his voice, his will, his mind, his memories, and hell—if he’d had a soulmate, she’s surely gone, now, and Christ, but Bucky deserved better, Bucky deserved everything, and maybe it’s okay that Steve’s heart only pumps the way it’s made to if Bucky sets the pace; maybe it’s okay, If Steve can offer, if Steve can help guide Bucky toward a way to find himself.

Steve’s never thought of himself as special, or worth more than anyone else, but this. The light; his touch.

Steve doesn’t know the proper words, not for this.

“It’s almost too bad we’re off the grid, really,” Nat saves him from the silence, from the quiet he can’t fill, from the tumult, wondering and reveling in the pump of his heart and the echo of Bucky’s like the songs his ma used to sing in the night.

“I know he’d love to see it first hand,” and Nat’s talking about Bruce, yeah, Steve follows that part. “Paradigm shifting revelations happening here and whatnot.”

That’s where he gets stuck.

“What?”

“The two of you,” Nat turns, casual as anything. “Do you have any idea how far from typical this is, right here? Absolutely unprecedented, Steve,” she shrugs. “Empirically speaking,”

“That mysterious Mr. Green’s rubbing off on you,” Sam smirks; even he knows who “Mr. Green” is supposed to be.

“He’d give his big toe to watch this in person,” Natasha shakes her head ruefully. “Soulmates with a bond that can overcome decades of brainwashing? And I mean, I don’t pretend to know all of their trigger phrases, but the ones I have are almost undoubtedly ones they embedded in his programming, and he’s fought them,” Natasha leans forward on folded hands, chin propped, lips pursed as she marvels, doesn’t look quite at Bucky in the room beyond, but Steve sees that she means to.

“I mean, Jesus, Steve,” Sam whistles low—less a sound than the intention behind it. “He was with them for decades. He’s been with you less than a goddamn month. Do you even know how impressive that is?”

“It’s not just impressive,” Nat raises an eyebrow, knowingly. “It’s unheard of.”

“Your boy’s something else,” Sam agrees, but Nat shakes her head.

“Your bond is something else,” she corrects, grabbing a grape from the center of the table and popping it between her lips. “I’ve never even heard of anything like that.”

Steve’s stomach bottoms out, and he thinks about not correcting them. Thinks about letting himself live here, in this space, where the lie he’s longed for his whole goddamn life is the reality, is the truth his heart was built to know.

“But it’s not.”

Steve’s an idiot, though. So.

“Kinda really is, Cap,” Sam scrunches his face, rolls his eyes upward in mock consideration of what’s obvious, to him, and Steve wishes Sam was right, good God, how he’s prayed for Sam to be right, but that’s not a prayer that gets answered, and maybe Steve should leave it. Steve should probably just leave it.

“No, I mean, it’s not that. Not a,” Steve bites his lip and shakes his head and wishes the tang of iron on his tongue was twofold, was the blood he’s always had and the blood he’s always known was more, worth more.

“We’re not,” Steve breathes; grabs for a blueberry and rolls it against his thumb and forefinger, lets it stain. “He’s mine. But I’m not his.”

Idiot. Steve’s a fucking idiot.

The berry in his hand is pulp and juice, is a stain and Steve sucks harder on his lip, shreds the skin there between his teeth before he looks up.

Two sets of eyes. Disbelieving.

Natasha blinks last, but speaks first.

“What?”

And her tone’s so clipped, so flat that Steve feels he’s committed a crime, a sin, almost—it cuts that sheer.

“Bucky is my soulmate, yeah.” And saying it out loud, like that, is some kind of balm: just not enough. Not enough for the other half that needs to follow, that always comes.

“It’s just that I’m not Bucky’s.”

There’s a silence, that follows, where Steve can hear his heartbeat like the shattering of glass; there’s a silence.

But it doesn’t last.

“No.” Natasha says it, spits it almost: fierce, and it brooks no argument. “No, that’s,” she shakes her head, curls bobbing: “That’s not true.”

“You don’t have to hide it anymore, Steve,” Sam says at his side, understanding: safe, and if Steve didn’t already feel nearly ill with it, with all this, that’d do the trick itself. “You know you can trust us,” and Sam gives him a small smile, kind and sure: “And besides, it’s not like it isn’t obvious.”

Natasha’s still studying him, eyes narrowed, as Steve shakes his head, lips quirking up in the kind of soft grin that comes from dying, and never wanting anyone there to watch the decay.

“It’s not that—”

Natasha’s at his side, turning him around and grasping at his hand before he can finish wherever his words were planning to go.

“What are you doing?” he hisses, but she doesn’t meet his gaze.

“Proving my point,” she says vaguely, fingers tracing the line down his thumb.

“Look at him,” she instructs. “Watch the way he moves.”

As if Steve can do anything but.

Except Natasha’s holding Steve’s wrist, and her fingers are just tight enough, just loose enough for their pressure to make his pulse impossibly clear, to draw attention to the rhythm as a secondary concern to watching Bucky: to matching the shift of those shoulders and the blinking of those lashes to the greater symphonic resonance that orchestrates Steve’s ability to be with any reason, with any sense—he watches, and he feels it as his heartbeat shifts to match the subtle motions, the little turns and curves of Bucky’s own, and he lets himself live there, lets himself breathe it in like sweetness, like wholeness, like Heaven has to taste before he makes himself come back to the here and now, to Natasha’s knowing eyes that don’t actually know.

That can’t, and it hurts.

“No,” Steve murmurs, and tears his hand from her grip; she lets him, brow furrowing in concern, in bewilderment.

“No, it’s not,” Steve runs his hands over his face. “It’s not a bond, it doesn’t go both ways, it’s just me, I’m just responding to him because I always respond to him, I always have. I just…”

Steve breathes in deep, tries to steady himself: draws on Bucky. Always on Bucky.

Always.

“He’s everywhere,” Steve whispers, and it’s true. There is not a piece of Steve’s body, not a shred of who Steve is that doesn’t depend on Bucky’s breath and blood and life to be worth a goddamn thing. Not really.

“He’s everything I know,” and Steve’s voice strains, his throat gets tight. “He’s always here, and I,” he shakes his head, screws his eyes shut tight.

“Even before, but then now, having it again,” and there aren’t words for that gift. For the way he can’t forgive himself the joy, can’t disguise how grateful he is, even in light of all the hurting, all the horror—Bucky is here, and Steve’s compass points north again. Steve’s soul has a port in the storm.

Steve swallows, and tries to explain the unfathomable, tries to give words to the face of God.

“The pull of him,” Steve says, low and reverent. “It was so lonely and it hurt so much, for so long, and I thought he was gone but he’s here, and now it’s, there’s,” he breathes in deep, steadies, clenches his hands tight until the crescents of his nails dig in red, violent. Real.

“It’s not him responding to me,” Steve exhales slow. “He’s just,” and it’s overwhelming, to think about it clearly enough to place it into words, no matter how poorly they’re made to fit: “He’s so much, y’know?” And Steve’s eyes are pleading, he can feel it as they lift, as he meets Sam and Nat’s gazes and wills them to understand what they can’t; to understand just enough that they'll let it go.

“You can’t help but get caught up in it.” Not that Steve ever wanted help, not that Steve could ever extricate himself from all that Bucky is.

Not that Steve would ever try.

“You’re telling me this is one-sided?” Sam finally says, and Steve knows he’s incredulous, that he doesn’t quite buy it, but Sam’s tone is clear of judgement, Sam’s face gives nothing away.

“Yep,” Steve nods; “always has been.” And Steve crosses his arms over his chest: protects himself the only way he has.

Ineffectual. Doesn’t do a goddamn thing.

“Steve,” and Sam’s looking at him strangely, now, face no longer blank but still unreadable: his eyes bright in a way that Steve’s never seen in that face that’s normally so placid, so open. There’s a sharpness there that Steve’s not sure he’s ever thought to imagine on Sam’s features. “You ever met someone with an unrequited bond?”

Steve blinks. It wasn’t something people talked about; it wasn’t something he ever wanted to talk about, either.

“‘Cause that’s what you’re saying you’ve got here, right?” Sam presses, and Steve swallows, starts to feel cornered, but Bucky’s on the sofa, Bucky’s calm on his own and that’s a boon, that’s progress worth preserving and Steve doesn’t want to draw attention. Doesn't want to break the still, the calm breaking of the surf at dawn that is the pulse against Steve’s own.

“I guess?” Steve concedes, and Sam’s lips twitch, but there’s not a drop of humor in it when he says, plain and dry and harsh, desert words:

“Yeah, ‘cause it sure as hell don’t work that way.”

“Whatever it is that governs this,” and Sam gestures, amorphous, but they know what he means; Steve knows that he means it’s the very thing he lives for, unmarried to any sense.

“This. Whatever it is, whether it’s biology or coincidence or freakin’ kismet, if the match isn’t returned, the way it feels gets muted. The bond’s not clear, it’s... it’s muddy. It almost makes you feel woozy, even, sometimes,” Sam smiles, then, and it so full of sadness that Steve’s insides twist for it, for the way it aches just to see.

“Self-preservation, probably,” Sam nods, his eyes distant. “Survival technique, or some shit. Keeps a person from falling into a thing that’ll only burn them in the end, steers ‘em toward looking elsewhere, finding something that’ll last, that’ll hold, that’ll be what they need.”

Neither better nor worse, wouldn’t know it if you never had it—all the stories, Steve thinks. Remembers.

“But it’s like the last touch of a hangover, really,” Sam carries on; “and I didn’t put it together, at first. Most people don’t. Or so they say.”

Sam shrugs, like it’s the heaviest thing in the world, the hardest task on earth just to move those shoulders up and down.

Sam breathes out, and it’s heavy, too. So heavy.

“I wasn’t his soulmate,” Sam finally says. “He lost his back in high school. Car crash, middle of winter. But he,” Sam’s voices doesn’t break, but Steve knows that it will, that it would have if he hasn’t stopped to regroup.

It’s a tactic they both know too well.

“He was mine.”

Riley. His wingman.

Oh God, Steve thinks. Oh God: Sam.

“We were together. And it was good. It didn’t feel wrong, after a while. It was almost like,” Sam sucks his lip between his teeth for a second before he works up to the words: “Almost like loving him, and being loved by him, it was like takin’ aspirin for the headache,” he chuckles, a sick sound as he ducks his head. “It made it alright.”

“I never told him,” Sam breathes out, thin and strained and full of regret, full of remorse, full of resolve. “It was war, y’know? Wasn’t something you needed to say, knowing where it would go, or, well. Wouldn’t.” Sam shrugs again; huffs a bit, a little lifeless.

“And I was happy with what we had. You don’t go around fixing what ain’t broken. Particularly not when the world’s breaking all around you every goddamn day.”

And Steve knows that; he knows that.

“But the thing is this,” Sam starts again, pulls Steve out of his own mind, his own heart that’s too goddamn stupid to have learned, even now.

“You got yourself an unrequited bond?” Sam quirks a brow his way. “You never feel it, not the way a match feels. You never feel them in your chest, you never know the way they move from the inside, you never sync your breaths to their heartbeat just because you feel that much. It’s not like you can overflow on one end so it’ll even out the other side. That’s not how it works. It’s not better, or worse, I don’t think. Not really. But it’s not the same. Not at all the same, Steve.”

And Steve’s heart is pounding, heavy and hard, and he sees Bucky out the corner of his eye: back straighter, no indication that he feels it too except the way his own heart starts to speed beneath Steve’s, starts to gain in pace, to chase Steve down and hold and Steve can feel his breaths getting tighter in the hope of keeping control, but Bucky sees it. Bucky’s already seen, because Bucky’s always watched Steve closer than anything else, always kept Steve near like he mattered the most, and Bucky’ll hear them; Bucky can’t hear this, can’t know how Steve’s wanted, how Steve’s taken from him and leaned upon him and waited every goddamn moment to feel through him, through his presence in the cells and the spaces, strong enough to teach Steve’s heart to beat, to squeeze when it needed to, to let go and trust that it wouldn’t all come apart, Bucky cannot know—

“And when they fall,” Sam’s voice is low now, face solemn as he leans in, intent: “When they’re gone, your heart’ll break, but there sure as hell ain’t no ‘pull’ left over,” he stares at Steve with an impossible force of meaning. “There’s nothing that tugs you down to meet them.”

Steve’s mouth is dry, and he can feel the pump of his blood against the collar of his shirt at the throat.

“He wasn’t,” Steve protests, because they don’t get it, they don’t understand that for as much as Steve wishes they were right, that’s not enough. “He didn’t—”

“Steve,” Nat cuts in, voice almost plaintive; knowing, close to pity, even. “Steve, even your run of the mill soulmates don’t feel their mates across that much distance,” her eyes flicker out toward Bucky’s frame where he sits, a room away. “Across that much time.”

“A mismatched bond, though?” Sam huffs out slow, disbelief heavy in the sound as he shakes his head. “Ain’t a chance in hell. There’s no resonance to pull at, you feel me?”

“But we’re not,” Steve starts, stammers, because they have to understand, he’d give everything—he gives Bucky all of him anyway, it’s just that Bucky doesn’t know.

“He’s not, it’s just,” Steve swallows hard, voice cracking; “It’s just how we are.”

Natasha and Sam are silent, staring at him with a wide-eyed disbelief that’s been leveled at him before: never flatteringly, and never quite so potent.

“Shit, you know what?” Nat hops to her feet. “There’s an easy way to solve this.”

And Steve’s already panicking for what he knows she’s about to do, the impossible, unforgivable, undeniable thing she’s about to do—

“How about I just ask him?”

Steve’s lunging forward to stop her as she goes to the couch, but Sam’s got a hand on his shoulder.

“Ride this out, Steve,” he urges. “Worst that can happen is she confirms what you’re so damned sure you know.”

Except no. No.

That’s not the worst that can happen.

______________________

Her steps hit in the middle-spaces, the gaps in the rapping of his fingers on the cushion beside him; in the beating of Bucky’s heart against the heart that makes him whole.

“Is it because of the bond, then?” Natasha nods to the tension, the white knuckles, the rapid tattoo beating out and he looks up at her, withdraws his hand so she can sit as he nods—of course it’s because of Steve’s fretting for whatever reason, for the files Bucky knows are on the counter, that he let Steve read on his own because he can’t speak the things in those reports, those records, not yet, maybe not ever; he nods, because there’s no sense in hiding from her: she sees him. It’s unnerving.

It’s kind of a relief.

“Does it help with the memories, the connection to him?” she asks, like it’s not earth-shattering, like it’s common knowledge. Pushes her fucking cuticles back as she waits for a response. And Bucky thinks about not offering one, until he’s glancing behind her, gauging Steve’s nearness—figuring how soft he has to speak to not be heard.

“It’s,” he swallows, throat rough; tight. “It was what,” he shakes his head; “when they…”

And he can’t find the words for the snapshots, the flickering recollections of what was done to him, of what was taken: of Steve on ice, of Steve gone, of the connection he sponged off Steve and fed off of, lived off of, needed more than air or blood or his own flesh and bones: of Steve dormant, and gone from him, and not there to be taken but there to be mourned when he couldn’t understand; Bucky doesn’t have words for it, but he has words for the only truth that matters in it, beyond it, above it.

Above anything.

“He’s saving me.”

Natasha nods, like it’s not his soul he’s bearing; like he’s not flaying open his heart for her to read.

“That’s what soulmates do, when their match is hurting, struggling, dying even. They anchor them.”

Bucky ducks his head, sucks air in harsh.

“He’s not, we’re, it’s…” Bucky’s hand goes to his chest before he can bring himself to look her in the eye.

“I can feel him, and he brings me back. He gives me back what I lost just by breathing, just by that heart still beating—”

And the beat’s so strong, just then, just now: it catches him off-guard, and it burns through him like the flares of the sun and Bucky lets it simmer, lets it fuel his world, give it color and shade and makes it matter, where for so long the universe had lacked any depth, held no relief.

“And it’s not even fair,” Bucky breathes, and there’s no air, and he’d be choking, he’d be dying if not for Steve’s lungs underneath him, teaching his to fill; his heart’s tripping something awful: the slab again, the cold again, the chair—but no, no, because Steve’s heart is hurting, Bucky knows that, Bucky can’t stand that but it’s steadier than his own, it’s insistent, it’s nudging his own to beat, too. So it does.

Bucky breathes.

“It’s not even fair, because I couldn’t even do that for him, and I wanted to. Jesus,” and his eyes flicker back to Natasha’s for just a second, begging her to imagine, to even scratch the surface of the truth and see.

“You can’t even know what it was like when we were kids, when he was sick. He needed someone to anchor him, to keep him hale and whole but I couldn’t find her, I couldn’t find her for him so that he could have his mate and he could be okay and I couldn’t be her, either, and I’d sit there and he’d be just almost near to gone and I’d, I was…”

And he gasps, the air all gone, and somehow Bucky can’t reach for Steve’s, can’t find it, and he’s frantic, he’s weightless, he hurts, he hurts everywhere—

“And then here he is. With me,” Bucky rasps out, eyes burning, and Natasha’s hand settles on his: soothing in theory, but he can barely feel it, and his heart is pounding so hard, so hard—

“Ain’t right,” he shakes his head, grasps at the inhale he feels guiding his own: too shallow, too quick, but he’ll take it, he’ll take it because he’s greedy and he’s desperate and he has to and he can’t help it.

He can’t help it.

“It ain’t right for him to give me what I was never good enough to give him,” Bucky finally says it, finally tells someone this truth: “him saving me when I couldn’t save him back.”

And it doesn’t liberate him the way he’d hoped; maybe because he doesn’t want to be free of it. Not ever.

“And there’s me,” Bucky frowns, inwardly and outwardly and he was a shameful fucking wretch before they took his arm and warped his mind; “Just, just leeching off him, taking what he is without him even knowing it, because his heart’s so goddamn big that I can feel him even when I don’t deserve it, even when it’s just me clinging to it with nothing to offer him in exchange, and I—”

“Shut up.”

Bucky’s head snaps up, looks before he makes sense of the feelings, the sensations that come with it: Steve’s there, in view—jaw slack, eyes wide, cheeks wet. Chest heaving, skin pale.

Bucky’s own chest can’t help but heave in kind.

“You,” and Steve’s voice is wrong, cracking down the center rather than breaking at the sides. “You shut the hell up, James Buchanan Barnes.”

And the words are harsh, even as they shake, as they tremble. They should slice through him without any mercy. They should break him without any relent.

And it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make any sense, but it doesn’t break him. It doesn’t hurt him.

Bucky’s heart is racing, and so is Steve’s. But Bucky can’t lie to himself, won’t lie to himself, couldn’t dream it up on his deathbed if he tried, no.

Because Bucky’s heart is racing, and so is Steve’s, but Steve’s is reaching. Steve’s is holding. Steve’s is present, and somehow Bucky knows. It makes no sense, and it can’t be real, but Bucky knows, it’s not just felt, it’s not just there.

No.

Bucky knows, beyond all reason, that Steve’s heart against his own is there for him.

Chapter Text

“Bucky.”

Steve is staring at him, gaping at him, and he knows it, he can feel it; and Bucky can’t look anywhere but the source of his name, that face, that mouth, those lips: he can’t hear it, can’t quite hear that voice over the din that’s rising, that tugging at the walls of his chest, but he knows that voice is shaking, he knows that voice isasping, and where Bucky tries to grasp for purchase against Steve’s pulse, against the motion of Steve’s heart he hits nothing, slips off the sense of Steve’s soul inside Bucky’s ribcage and the gap that yawns is frigid, metallic; feels more like death than all the deaths he’s known.

Steve’s eyes go wide, and his breathing stutters, and his being seems to tremble as he stares, as he stares at Bucky with unreadable feeling: intense, and saturated, full and sour-sweet on the back of Bucky’s tongue but Bucky doesn’t know what it is, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know—

“Steve,” Bucky forces himself to rasp out, to wheeze: he feels it but still, he can’t hear, he can’t hear except for Steve’s racing heartbeat, his gasping breaths.

And Bucky’s own.

“Steve, I—”

“Bucky.”

And Bucky shivers, tremors of the whisper not from the lips but from the lungs, straight through Bucky’s body, the breeze, the rasp of death, of dying, of wishful thinking and all he’ll never have, never see again because he’s selfish. He’s selfish; he’s not enough and never has been, and now Steve knows, now there’s no hiding, now Steve’s heart is pounding with so much vivid, vicious pressure, so much passion and soul—and the soul in Bucky feels it in turn, the echoes, except no: closer. More.

“What you,” Steve’s chest lifts once, twice, three times in rapid succession and Bucky feels his own body shrink, his own heart rebel against the way that there’s no air, no air in any one of those breaths and it’s clawing, it’s aching: they’re both aching.

“Is that...”

“Steve,” Bucky cuts in, tries to halt whatever’s coming, wherever Steve needs to go, whatever Steve needs to say in the face of this, to the face of him that the storm, the hurricane that is devastating Bucky from the inside can’t quite manage to speak in the right volumes: so much closer, so much less a figment, a whisper than it’s ever been a scream. And Bucky’d been foolish, to speak it at all, to let his guard down, to give the secret where it shouldn’t have been given. But Natasha had known, she’d seen: Bucky had been foolish before this moment but now he is lost, he’ll be lost because now Steve knows and it’s killing Steve from the inside, demanding in that pulse in a way even a serum shouldn’t be able to withstand and Bucky’ll die for it, Bucky will give everything for it, he’ll—

“Stevie, I’m sorry,” Bucky gasps, whines: and it’s the worst lie of all the lies he’s ever told, because he could never be sorry for the sensation of a heart so much better, so much stronger and deeper and perfected long before a serum fortified its walls—he could never be sorry for knowing that, for holding that, for knowing and holding and cherishing Steve so close, so fucking dear but if this is the result: if this is what he’d stolen from that blissful presence, that sacred touch in the name, in the anticipation of, then he’ll repent. If this melee, this havoc, this machine-gun fire that won’t let up is where he kneels in the end, hands raised, surrender given, then dear God, he’ll go back to the ice and he’ll never breathe again if it means Steve is safe, Steve is sound, if it means that Steve’s pulse will stop bludgeoning so goddamn hard against the revelation of Bucky’s soul.

“You’re,” Steve whispers, or maybe it’s a hiss—Bucky still can’t read him, and Steve can’t seem to hear Bucky’s words, can’t seem to process what’s said, though he has to grasp it more than what is meant; and he’s stepping closer on shaky legs, shaky ground, on the tremulous rockslide that is the strain on Bucky’s arteries for the pressure, the pressing, the force of the blood that’ll stretch him to breaking; “You’re…”

“Steve, please, I can,” Bucky stammers, and his voice shakes in time with the beating and its twin, the sound twisting, bastardized, made monstrous and malformed around the waves of sound and motion, against the hateful, unrelenting pulse, a hum for its speed but not its pitch, never: too harsh, too much like a death knell—resonant, frantic, wild. “I mean, I’ll—”

“Bucky,” Steve exhales, or would, if breath were enough in this, just here. “Buck, I,” he shakes his head, and Bucky can’t see his eyes, can only try to count the beats and fail too fast for the way they bleed: for rage or for betrayal, for disappointment or shock or pity, or even care, even love of a different kind, maybe, Jesus; because Steve is the best of all men, Steve is the best of all seizing hearts and Bucky’s half-strangled for the sheer strength of what’s happening, what’s pummeling and heaving, what’s washing over him like a cascade, like a tide: Bucky’s half-riveted by whatever it is that he can’t comprehend, because what he does comprehend is Steve.

And that’s the blessing, just as well as it’s the curse.

“I—”

“Steve,” Bucky cuts him off, fights with himself on whether he should reach, because Steve’s close enough, Steve’s close but Bucky has no right, Bucky’s never had the right.

“Steve, please,” and he’s begging, yeah, he knows he is, and he’s been ashamed of enough things, too many things in his life but never this: never pleading for Steve’s life and Steve’s heart and Steve’s everything to be okay. “Please, just, calm down.”

Because it is then, really, in his mind—it’s then as much as it’s now, and the lines are blurred something horrible, something fierce: because Steve’s body changed, and Bucky could feel him in his chest when the muscles got strong but Bucky’s felt that heart beneath his hands so many more times as wingbeats, plucked feathers and flightless but never for trying, for wanting—Bucky’s been wrapped up around Steve’s tiny frame, he remembers, he knows, except it’d never felt small, the size had never counted except for the fact that it taxed Steve more than he’d ever deserved, and looking at Steve now, those wide eyes and that breathless stare and the pulse in his throat, he can be six-foot-something or barely scraping Bucky’s shoulders and it don’t matter one bit, it can’t speak strong enough to Bucky’s mind, let alone his pounding heart where it needs to race, it has to race because there’s nothing else, there’s no losing Steve to the dust and he has to catch up, he has to keep safe.

And the thunder of that blood surges like an avalanche, like a flood and the momentum only gains, only builds and Bucky’s chest isn’t just sore, doesn’t just burst vessels and veins for the force, no—no, there are fibres in the muscle, and Bucky feels every one of them, feels as they stretch, as they pull until they threaten to tear apart, to rip so that whatever blood’s inside between beats will spill, will coat, will boil and sear and Bucky remembers the war, Bucky remembers the ravine, Bucky remembers all the times his heart was fit to fail on a table, when the beating staggered for the shocks, for the voltage through his skin but this; this.

This is Steve. This is Steve’s heart, and that doesn’t just mean that Bucky’s own is racing alongside it toward oblivion, because Steve’s heart isn’t just the maestro to whatever music he makes: Steve’s heart is Bucky’s heart, Steve’s breath is Bucky’s breath and he’s only ever spoken to God with any feeling to keep it going, to keep it standing and Bucky’s gasping in the past, Bucky’s sucking in Brooklyn in the bitter cold and Bucky's staring and he can’t take it, it’s too much, and he’s lost enough to have learned it by rote; he’s lost enough to suspect this might kill him but it’s better, it’s always better if it’s him before Steve, it’s always better.

Always.

“Calm down?” Steve’s gaping at him, frown tugging down his mouth and there is a place in Bucky’s mind that’s less foggy, that’s less sheared off and blind to logic: there’s a place in Bucky’s mind that watches the expression on Steve’s face and recognizes it as something less than furious, something that doesn’t stab through the spine, all knife in the back: no. It’s genuine bewilderment, but Bucky can’t focus on that now, because the place in his mind that sees it can’t speak loud enough to be heard, not over the way Bucky’s body is railing, not over the way his blood’s only just staying put in the veins. For now.

“Bucky, what are you talking about?” Steve’s asking him, Steve coming closer, ever closer; “I’m not upset, I just—”

“Please, Steve,” because maybe it doesn’t matter what Steve is, how Steve feels, just that it’s threatening, just that it’s the edge of a knife that Bucky’s danced on too often, that’s worse than any other death he’s known at his own hand, flesh or steel: he’s done this. This is his fault, whatever’s coming, whatever does come, and he’ll stop it, he’ll do anything to stop it.

“Please, I’ll do whatever you want, whatever you need,” Bucky can’t control his words, his breath, the rhythm. “I’ll leave, I’ll never say a damn thing about it again, I’ll pretend it isn’t there, that you’re not…”

And it’ll burn him alive, straight down to the bones, but he’d strip all that he remembers, all that he’s learned about his own hurting heart: he’d offer his self and he’d sell his soul if it was worth a damn, if it had ever been enough to save Steve Rogers, to make a goddamn difference for all the wanting and the need; and he can’t help it, just like he couldn’t help it on the worst nights, in the worst times—just like he couldn’t help it when he feared the fucking worst, when Steve was slipping from him, when Steve’s blood couldn’t even move for the flutter of that pulse because it was too weak, too weak, too weak and so quick.

“Please,” he exhales, even as it catches in his throat, snags on the downbeat, on the upstroke of everything the world’s ever meant, could ever know: “just, please.”

And he can’t help it. He can’t.

Bucky reaches, has to feel; has to know it.

Has to touch.

And when he does, it is torrential, it is ungainly: it’s the sound of rain, or how falling stars have to sound up close—and it stutters, and Bucky starts to break for it, except that it almost feels like a reset, like a fallback: like going to ground and building anew, because Steve’s heart’s a jackhammer one second, then it trips—too familiar, too reminiscent of late nights where the morning might not come—but when it trips, Bucky gasps, and his own heart almost leaps from his throat.

When it trips, with Bucky’s hold pressed up against it: Bucky’s heart moves faster to vibrate out a foothold, somewhere safe to land except it isn’t necessary, because Steve’s heart tumbles softly, lands, steadies before it falls but then, but then—

Bucky feels give, and Bucky’s breath barely holds: and then it lands, featherlight, wholly known, balsam and sweet lips and fingers entwined with the way that when it steadies, when it settles, it does so against the platform, against the dais Bucky’s heart provides, and they settle, they settle.

“Calm down,” Bucky exhales, eyes stretching wide, heart barely daring to pump for fear of shaking Steve free, for fear of losing the impossible perfection that’s starting to seep through his veins: inexplicable.

Unimagined.

“You,” Steve’s struggling around the words, lips faltering around the shape of them, and the beat is steady, but it’s so heavy, it shakes Bucky to his core; “you could...”

And Steve’s tongue traces his own lips, and Bucky doesn’t think he’s ever felt him on so many axes: the air in Steve’s lungs lifting Bucky’s own, lifting Bucky’s hand, warm on Bucky’s cheek and he cannot blink, because Steve’s heart’s against his palm, Steve’s heart’s against his heart, Steve's heart is in those eyes when he breathes, disbelieving:

“You could feel it?”

Bucky can’t say it, can’t speak it, but Steve knows him: Steve knows him, and has always seen everything but this, this thing he kept hidden but now even that is known, and Steve can read it: Bucky’s not sure how, not sure what precisely gives him away, betrays his heart as it trembles, trembles—threatens to give but has to hold.

“Bucky,” Steve’s hands dart out, grasp Bucky by the forearms and hold tight, tight enough that Bucky feels the bruises, feel the reroute of Steve’s rhythm to the blood in his veins as paths give way beneath that grasp.

“Oh my God,” Steve breathes out, and Bucky feels it like summer rain and the kiss of the sun: it curls around the heart where it’s threatening to give way, and it’s not anger, it’s not betrayal, it’s none of the horror Bucky was fearing. “Bucky.”

But it makes no goddamn sense.

“How long?” Steve whispers, murmurs, all full of aching and tremulous…

Tremulous hope.

And there’s no hate in those eyes, no judgement for reaching and feeling and taking strength from all that Steve is, over all of these years, whether he knew it or not, whether he could feel it around his heart like a force or inside it like a presence, like a promise of all that was good, that was necessary in the universe: there’s no betrayal, no venom—as if Steve could ever gather those feelings enough to be known, but Bucky knows that he likely deserves them, yet they’re absent, and more than that.

More than that they’re replaced, they’re spoken for by a brightness, by a light that Bucky can’t name but feels, oh, dear God Almighty.

He’s never felt anything like this.

“For always,” Bucky exhales, because there’s only room for truth in the way small space between them, in the juggernaut force of Steve’s steady pulse against Bucky’s own, moving ever closer to perfect counterpoint, to absolute harmony and the surge and give in time. “For always, but I...”

“You never said,” Steve’s slow, gives Bucky plenty of time to flinch as he reaches a thumb to smooth across Bucky’s cheek, across Bucky’s jaw, but Bucky doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch: how could he, how could he move back, how could he be strong enough to resist this—

“I didn’t realize that it was,” Bucky’s tongue is moving before he can stop it, before he can shape the words and hold anything back, and that’s for the best.

It’s for the best, because his heart’s already feeling lighter for it, and he thought he’d lost the ability to feel so freely, to know so wholly: he thought they’d taken that from him, but no. No, they couldn’t.

Because that ability lives in Steve, and they could never take Steve from him. They left the heart in Bucky’s chest, for as often as they saw fit to stop it, and Steve remained. Steve remains.

Steve is here.

“I didn’t know.” Bucky tries to let the way Steve’s pulse feels, nudged up and flush against his own: he tries to let that lessen the feeling of shame that follows whenever he considers, whenever he dwells on what he’d missed, what he’d overlooked and misunderstood for so long; he tries, and it almost works. Almost.

“I wasn’t,” Bucky shakes his head, and fuck, fuck if there isn’t the very real, very known feeling of fingertips against the pump of his heart just like Steve’s at the line of his jaw: needing tendril of touch, of worship, of feeling like reverence and disbelief and awe, and Bucky doesn’t know how to take it, Bucky doesn’t know how to withstand it, Bucky doesn’t know how not to break against it so that it seeps into the cracks of him and makes something new that is more this than anything that came before, he doesn’t know.

But he does know that he never wants this to end.

“I didn’t know, but then I did, I figured it out, and fuck,” Bucky’s breath catches in his throat, but what starts as a harshness turns kind as Steve’s hand cups Bucky’s jaw, long fingers splaying, sliding down just a little to touch, to hold where the breath stammers, where the blood bounds, and fuck. Fuck.

“Fuck, but I was an idiot, and then,” Bucky stumbles, breathless, staring Steve straight in the eyes and wondering if they’ve always been that depthless and it’s just one more thing Bucky took for granted, or if they’ve learned that since, if they’re burrowed deeper over time. “And then there,” and Bucky swallows around the memory of a red dress and matching lips and a matching fucking soul; Bucky swallows, and it brushes up against Steve’s touch, the motion of it, and Bucky doesn’t know what to do with any of this, with anything at all.

“Then there was—”

“It was always you.”

Steve’s voice echoes in a still Bucky hadn’t noticed, not until now. Steve’s words make no sense on the outside, don’t compute within his brain but in his chest, beneath his ribs, inside the heart, Jesus.

Jesus Christ.

“What?” Bucky feels his mouth open, his lips form the shapes but he can’t hear a goddamn thing that isn’t drumbeats, isn’t a song that feels like wonder and breathes like joy, and it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense.

“You were it,” Steve’s breathing out, his lips turning upward, his eyes shining too goddamned bright. “You were here,” and his hand cups wide around Bucky’s at his chest, presses soft: keeping.

“You were right here. You were my anchor. You never needed to find anyone else, you never, I was,” and Steve swallows hard; his heart thrums harder; “you, it...”

Steve’s looking at him, and Bucky feels that gaze from head to toe. Feels it mapping the precise dimensions of the chambers in his heavy-pumping heart. Feels it reach out and trace the lines of his immortal soul.

“It was always you.”

And Bucky can’t breathe, for that. Bucky can’t.

“Moment we met,” Steve’s still speaking, hand still at Bucky’s neck, body still so close; “I,” he licks his lips; “I knew it, I could feel it. Always you, Buck. From the very first.”

And it’s dizzying: the rush of blood, the weight of feeling, and the impossible truth of what it is that shines so bright inside that gaze, that warms so near inside Bucky’s veins.

Impossible.

“No,” Bucky shakes his head, bites his lip, and hates that something dampens in Steve’s eyes, just then; that he causes it, but he has to explain, has to make sure that Steve knows.

“No, you were,” he lets his hand wander, lets it smooth across Steve’s chest, so much broader: and he doesn’t need Bucky to be well; never did. Bucky couldn’t do it, Bucky couldn’t make him well—

“You were sick, you were always sick and a soulmate,” Bucky’s voice is shaking, and he wills Steve to understand, wills him to see: “Your soulmate woulda made it better—”

“He did.” Steve cuts him off, and Bucky nearly gasps for the way his touch abandons, for the way his heart stumbles at the loss—for the way Steve pulls back enough so that there’s no contact, so that there’s no hiding in the comfort Steve’s hands can bring; but then.

But then Bucky damn near moans for the way Steve’s hands bury deep in Bucky’s hair, massage his scalp, and it takes a moment, it takes a couple of moments to register the cosmic shift, to recognize the shattering of the earth itself; to realize that Steve’s not just drawing circles and carding fingers through the tangles on his head, no.

Steve’s hands move rhythmically. Steve’s fingers expand and contract in the same patterns, the same cadence, the same yearning tempo as Bucky’s heart does as it reaches, as it realigns to Steve’s after stumbling.

Bucky’s eyes grow wide, and his heart speeds up, dislodges painfully from the hold of Steve’s beating, living pulse and Steve’s expression shifts, tightens, but he doesn’t stop cradling Bucky’s head, doesn’t stop kneading into the flesh and the bone with infinite care, with exact measure to Bucky’s racing blood.

And he isn’t touching anywhere else. He can’t feel it, not that close, not that precise: his fingertips, barely whispering at the deadpoints of Bucky skull—no.

No, that’s; that’s—

Steve’s breath is full of catches, stitches; his voice is filled with cracks when he exhales, when his hands cup the curve of Bucky’s neck and reach up to frame his jaw, to hold him close: to cradle him dear:

“You did.”

And Bucky’s heart can’t stand it, can’t contain it: starts to pound with all the pent up murmurs of futility, of fruitless hope—wants to burst for the span of it, for the foolish wanting, the useless aching, and he wants to believe that Steve feels it, feels him—that Steve flailed in this life, yes, but somehow held to it and that was for Bucky’s soul tethering him close, knowing long before Bucky understood what Steve meant, what Steve was, and he can’t quite grasp it, even as Steve telegraphs his frantic pulse, tiny tremors that start without instead of sympathizing from within—evidence that he feels it, that he knows but Bucky isn’t equipped for the revelation of the stars, for the gift of all that’s good and right, for the answering of a prayer from a God he couldn’t grasp, never saw, didn’t want if it risked Steve—

But there’s the holding, again: the sense of rightness, of infinity and what it means to live and die, dancing close around the reckless thrashing of his pulse. There’s Steve, reminding Bucky’s wayward heart where it belongs. To whom it belongs.

Bucky blinks. Bucky meets Steve’s eyes.

Steve’s lashes are fluttering of their own goddamn accord, except they’re not. Not quite.

They’re matching the muscle down to the double-twitch, the catch and release—the in-out, the lub-dub, the beating that, at this speed, can’t be heard: Steve knows it. Steve breathes it.

Steve’s lashes move, ever so slightly, in tune with that god-given hum.

“Bucky, you gotta know,” Steve’s sighing, Steve’s begging: “you can’t understand how much you did.”

And Steve’s sighing, and his breath soars through Bucky’s chest; Steve’s begging, and it’s shaking in Bucky’s veins: Bucky’s heart skips, stills for just a second, and Steve’s goddamn lashes don’t move.

Bucky wants to speak, wants to sob; his breath collapses in upon itself and the noise he means to make is choked—he can’t see straight, he can’t breathe right, but Steve is there.

Steve is there, and maybe, maybe—maybe, Steve feels him, too.

Steve’s thumb is grazing over Bucky’s lip as he whispers, pulse tightening with apprehension as he gazes down, as he asks:

“Can I?”

And Bucky doesn’t know what he’s asking for, exactly, but it doesn’t take him any thought before he nods—because yes. Steve can.

Anything.

Steve hesitates, though. Steve’s breathing quickens from all sides, stretching Bucky’s own chest until it makes the decision for Steve as he hesitates, as he reaches but doesn’t make contact: but on the inhale, swift and deep, Steve’s palm brushes against Bucky’s chest, and it’s then that Bucky understands. Bucky has rested a hand against Steve’s heart in more than just his mind, in more than just the whispers of his soul: Bucky has held it and willed it to endure more times than he can count, but Steve’s never done it in kind, not ever: not like this.

Steve’s hand brushes, and it breaks the still, the tension: Steve gasps, and presses his touch to Bucky’s sternum—bruising. Desperate.

Steve blinks, his hand trembles, all in time to the beat beneath his palm.

And the tear that falls from those gleaming eyes: it trembles, too, in the gasping, in the shaking, and Bucky’s heart follows suit, shivering around the blood that fills and the beat that hums and the touch that holds: and then they breathe.

And it’s unnamable. It’s untenable. It is home.

And there are hollow places in Bucky that he never knew, never noticed, never sounded for the depths: there are hollow places, but they are filling; with every breath they take in time, with every shift of a touch above a heart against two chests that matches, that holds above and below, alongside and within, blood in veins and ventricles, them, them, them—there are hollow places.

There were hollow places.

No longer.

“Oh,” Bucky whispers, exhales through parted lips that can’t close, can’t contain all that is within his body. All that’s becoming of his soul.

“Oh God,” Steve’s breathing back, and they call it a song, call it a knowing—a being known that cuts through your body and makes you whole, except this isn’t that, no: this is a newness. This is life inside his cells that’s never sung before, never known the touch of sun or the breath of air: this is rebirth, this is new ground, this every piece of Bucky’s being that he didn’t know had still been living, still been aching within ice until it gasps in the now for knowing warmth again, oversensitive and feeling every spark of current that makes a heart think to beat and relishing it, reveling in it, breathing in just to know its taste and Steve is there, Steve is in it, Steve is in him and their gazes don’t falter, never leave the other’s eyes to read the meaning in each gasp as it unfolds, the agony of creation conducted to the beat, beat, beat of what they are as it dies, of what they’ll be as it rises, as it claims them both and makes them whole.

“Buck—”

“Yeah,” Bucky breathes, and it’s not a conscious choice, not a decision he makes to press their hands between their chests, to lean in and exhale close against the swell of Steve’s lips, to feel the full body shudder on every place and plane of Bucky’s body, shaking close to Bucky’s heart.

“Yeah, I,” he swallows hard, eyes wide, so close to Steve’s own that he can’t see a goddamned thing except the blue, except the sea of that endless, teeming soul. “Stevie?”

And they breathe in time to breathe each other in, to live inside what it means to be alive in itself, in their chests that rise as one and it is infinite, it is the unmaking of the ground upon which they stand, but then deeper: the words upon which flesh is wrought, dust unto dust unto breath unto this.

Unto them.

And there’s no choice, there’s no motion that anticipates the action in itself when their lips touch, slide, fold into one another and embrace on their own terms; when their pulses meet, touch at the bow of their mouths, as they breathe in without parting and taste each other’s heat, as they breathe for and in and through one another in a way previously untested, unknown: where Bucky’s prayed his breath into Steve’s weak lungs, where Steve’s more than lifted Bucky’s own, filling him with sweet warmth and the goddamn light of day—where Bucky had thought to know before, this here, in the now: this is novel, this is unspoken, this is the end of intimacy and the beginning of what it means to be one—and Steve’s tongue slips into Bucky's mouth and learns the shape of it, maps it decadent and reverent and precise and it feels like love lapping swift against the slick flesh, against the ridged teeth: it feels like hands and soft caresses, breathes like life in the cold against the secrets, against the untamed hope that’s dared to take root inside Bucky’s pounding heart, touching close and making known the unturned corners, the dark, unspoken recesses where no one’s ever seen, no one’s ever touched, no one’s ever thought to look but Steve, only Steve—because only Steve could live there. Only Steve could ever fit.

And it is every prayer turned benediction, it is every smile on that face when it was thin, when it was gaunt, when it was full and bright and strong: it is the curse of heat after freezing, it is the breath of life after death, it is the burn of air after drowning as much as it is drowning itself, and Bucky prays one more time, makes it count, recants all the others to have this one hold as he licks into Steve’s mouth and swallows the sugar, the lance of copper that is the gasp it brings: he swallows that sound and takes it into himself like nectar on Olympus and he prays that it means that Steve feels it, too. Prays that it means that, in the dark, hidden places of Steve’s unfailing heart, Bucky fits.

Like nothing else.

“I never thought,” Bucky gasps out, and for the first time, when he grasps at the beat of Steve’s heart against his chest, the action is mirrored, the need is reciprocated between his ribs—inside both their ribs and Bucky reaches, aches, needs and feels Steve’s hand clutch at his shirt, at the skin beneath; feels Steve’s heart bend beautifully to meet him, feels his being lilt around Bucky and hold, so close. So goddamned dear.

“They,” Bucky’s breathless, Bucky’s overwhelmed, Bucky’s overjoyed; “they never said it’d be like this.”

Because the stories, the wonder, the fairytale of what it means to match a soul, to share a heart down to the blood it houses close: Bucky doesn’t know that he believes it’s just a matter of miscommunication, of words not quite fitting what it means to feel this full: no. No, he thinks—the stories never spoke to, never hinted at this perfection, and this unending stream of light: some unnamed undulation, some harmonization that can only be proof of infinity, of life beyond death because this is undying; unending.

“No,” and Steve is trembling; “no, but,” and his lips are still parted like he still can’t make heads or tales of reality or something less, but his eyes, good God: his eyes are shining with a kind of absolute wonder, a kind of soul-searing bliss that is contagious, that is pressing through Bucky’s veins in sheer exultation with every beat their hearts see fit to make and Bucky’s is drawing in for Steve’s ecstatic breaking forth, and Steve shakes his head in amazement, in awe: he shakes his head and Bucky's chest aches for it, his throat is dry to the swallow because of it: because Steve is beautiful, and Steve’s heart is stronger than any other notion, any other construct known to Heaven or to Earth and Bucky knows it. Bucky feels it.

“Buck, I think,” Steve wets his lips and Bucky’s heart skips a beat for the surge of heat that melts his veins—skips, and Bucky only has to look, only has to glance to watch it leap at Steve’s throat but he doesn’t need to.

Bucky doesn’t need to see, to know.

“Buck, I think maybe, whatever it is they told us about,” Steve’s voice his low, eyes hooded, and the rhythmic pounding of life against his chest is not merely doubled; it is infused with unmitigated joy.

“I think maybe this, maybe, maybe us,” and Steve looks at him, them, and Bucky doesn’t know what shape a soul takes; doesn’t know what it’s made of: but he feels it. He feels it heavy and real; tangible and whole as he looks into Steve's eyes, as it burns like white gold and red coals and sacramental flame—he knows it, and he welcomes the burn, the way it marks him and makes him and binds them unending as Steve breathes it, names it, and the soul is made of willing, the soul is shaped by those lips:

“I think we’re more.”

And Bucky feels it, in every fibre of his being—in all the pieces he’s only just reclaimed, in all the starts and stops that have only just remembered life; in all the parts of himself that are inevitably, immaculately, untarnishably Steve’s, Bucky feels it, Bucky knows it.

Bucky takes Steve’s mouth once more, and tastes.

______________________

Natasha had made herself scarce, and Sam as well—Bucky hadn’t noticed before, hadn’t cared, but they’re gone now. It’s just him and Steve. Just them.

Only ever just them.

Steve leads him to a bedroom, tacitly his own but Steve’s spent more spare moments of rest with Bucky tucked against him, sprawled artless, unintended, save for the way their bodies have always sought each other, the way they’ve always needed and looked to reach: in the still of night where both their hearts could settle, Steve’s spent more hours in the quiet on the couch over the past weeks than he’s spent them anywhere else, and they were blind, really. They’d both been so blind.

“Doesn’t matter.” Steve is breathing against Bucky’s mouth, life to his soul as he lowers them both to the bed. “Doesn’t matter now,” and Bucky doesn’t voice the worry; it’s not spoken, the anxious rush, but it doesn’t need to be, not between them. Not like this.

“We’re here.”

Beyond all reason, beyond all sense. For all the span a heart can reach and hold across continents and centuries and never so much as think to let go—they are here.

Bucky reaches, cups Steve’s face in his hand, marvels at the play of the light in the room and the light of Steve’s eyes against the dull metallic limb—the way it makes the gears whir, the mechanisms shake beyond their making. Steve turns his head, lines his lips to the smooth alloy at the palm and kisses slow, and it’s almost flesh and blood again, the way Bucky is so aware of it, the way he can feel the pressure against the surface and the pleasure in his chest, the way Steve relishes it, the heady pulse of wanting and feeling and reveling that doesn’t subside, that doesn’t change or recede for which hand’s being touched, for where Steve’s lavishing attention. It’s unbearable, it’s unimaginable. It’s absolute and overwhelming and Bucky is shaking, he is shaking from head to toe and Steve licks, laves adoration that can’t be explained or justified into each juncture, each meeting of the plates and Bucky can’t help but take Steve’s hand, can’t help but guide it to Bucky’s own chest and let him feel every hitch and swell, every disbelieving, giddy-stumbling shiver of his heart that Steve’s the cause of, that Steve’s the reason for: the heart that Steve kept true—that Steve reminded how to move toward any real aim, toward any worthy end.

Steve himself: the only worthy end inside this world, or in the next.

“I,” Steve exhales, eyes so big, so goddamned bare, hiding nothing, but it’s not a risk. Bucky knows, he knows there’s no risk to this, to them: they both know that much.

They both feel that much.

“How do you...”

“I,” Bucky swallows, and Steve’s pulse comes first, heavy in his neck where his throat works around the wave of it, the yearning strain and keen. “I want you to,” and Bucky eases Steve down to him, chest to chest, lifting Steve’s frame with the force of their breaths, the lightness of what it is to share chests, to share bodies, to share selves and lungs and lives and to know it with absolute certitude, to be unable to deny it even if they tried.

There is no risk in this, in them. So Bucky asks.

“I want to feel you everywhere.” Pulse knocking at Steve’s open hand caught between them, begging: “Can I,” his eyes slide closed as his breath runs out, breaks anything but clean: “will you…”

“Anything,” Steve whispers, fervent and full and reaching out, slicing flesh on the jagged edges until the blood that’s spilled only pulls, only beats to bring them closer, to baptize this between them: to ensure that nothing’s ever lost again.

“Anything and everything and all of me,” Steve’s breathing, panting, vowing the end of the world and the beginning of tomorrow where it spills into the ether of what it means to never die:

“To the end of the line,” he whispers, and he captures Bucky’s lips to breathe into those lungs:

“To the end of the line, and then some.”

They shed clothes with a deftness, a reverent inevitability they’d have never tried to fight if they had understood, if they had seen, if the way they had endured the haze of mourning had ever given way to clearer sight. Yet for all the time lost, for all the hurt known, it is irrelevant, it doesn’t matter a goddamn bit because they have arrived in this space, at this time: they are meeting and merging between beats and bones and they are alight with a wanting, with a desire for the perfection that lies in how they match, how they sync and it doesn’t matter that they’ve taken the long way, it doesn’t matter if they’ve stumbled, or fallen, or broken, or doubted. It doesn’t matter: so long as they made it here.

They’ve made it here.

And maybe it should be a surprise, the fact that Steve knows exactly how to work him open, that Steve sets a pace that stretches only in the gives between heartbeats, doesn’t fight against the push of blood that cradles Steve’s touch as he slides one finger, two fingers, more—doesn’t fight but praises it, worships it, and the catch in his breath is felt everywhere, known everywhere, and Bucky is set alight with it: with touch and with air and with the knowledge that this feeling means want, means joy.

Means love.

And when Steve finally withdraws, Bucky moans; when their eyes meet, Steve is staring at him like he can’t believe Bucky’s real, and Bucky thinks that Steve can hear his pulse as it pounds, from the outside; Bucky can hear Steve’s, and that’s it, that has got to be it.

That’s the music. That is the harmony, the melody, that’s the heady percussion and the soft-sting of strings: that’s it.

That’s the tune they say to listen for, the one they say you’ll know. This is the song that two souls are born to sing.

Steve leans in to kiss him, raw and yearning, wet and full of fire, laced with what it means to keep: Bucky kisses back, and gives everything between their lips, and never once feels less, never for a breath feels empty for it, for taking himself and offering it without exception, without relent or regret; he doesn’t feel the loss of it, not ever, not once because Steve is doing, Steve is giving, Steve’s soul is open just the same.

Steve pulls back at the hips, lining up on instinct and pressing in: offering, giving, being that, too; and Steve fills him, floods him—Steve is everything, has been everything, will be everything forever and yet.

Yet.

It’s the space of an instant—the instant they come together fully, body in the image of soul, when Steve sinks as deep as he can reach and Bucky’s pulse, Bucky’s warmth envelops him as Steve’s heartbeat throbs through his length where he’s buried full in Bucky’s body, in every way that can be known; it is the space of an instant, but Bucky feels it reach out toward infinity. Time stops, stretches far and makes of itself something liminal, something woefully, wretchedly, wonderfully in-between and crafts tendrils, stardust and lightning as it wraps them inside and takes them, not merely to bring them together, but to make them inseparable.

Bucky can damn well feel it, when the cells, the membranes, the boundaries between one body and the other, the light from one soul against its twin start to dissolve, start to subside.

“It’s,” Bucky gasps, and he clings to Steve, holds him close and doesn’t dare to breathe: “You’re—”

And there aren’t words, precisely: there’s no precedent for what comes, what sweeps him up, what encompasses and envelopes and pervades. There aren’t words, none that fit, but words don’t have to, not when Bucky and Steve and all they are and seek to be—not when the two of them more than meet and clasp and hold, not when fit is superseded by the way they start to fall, the way they start to melt into one another as Steve moves, as Bucky lifts into the rhythm that they’ve always known, that they’ve always held above all sacred things, above all miracles and truths without knowing, beyond knowing: deeper than what a mind can comprehend.

Because this is undoing, this is unmaking and rebuilding so that Steve lives inside Bucky’s cells, so that Steve draws the map of Bucky’s veins, conducts the flow of his blood—reroutes the course and reaffirms the cadence, fingertips on the first spring petals, the gentlest slip of flesh against ice drops, smooth and delicate and marveling and almost like a prayer, tracing tenderly down across the quivering muscles, along the organ that sings for them both, in them both as Steve reaches, as Steve wraps about his body and opens palms against his soul, cradles the glass heart of him that trembles, that quivers for the immensity, for the sensation of Steve in all things, in all breaths and beats and bones. And he holds close, holds dear—the creases in those cupped-caring hands remaking the contours of Bucky’s heart and changing him by half-gasps, by whole worlds, shifting the velocity of his blood, charting the paths of what he knows it means to be alive and showing him a newness, a fullness he thought he'd known, thought he'd long been reveling inside in secret, all stolen treasures hoarded, undeserved, except Bucky hadn't accounted for the shadows, the fearful hesitance, the tiptoeing for fear of breaking, of pushing unto loss.

And it is all that he never envisioned, all that he never dared to imagine or conceive: it is finding, and knowing, and discovering that all he never dreamed to be is his—it is profundity beyond measure, and it breaks Bucky’s heart wide open beneath Steve’s hands and oh, but he can feel it: oh, fucking hell, but Steve knows it, Steve has to know it because Bucky can feel the way it’s Steve’s blood, Steve’s being, Steve’s unshakable soul that surges forth and sears, burns the broken parts and makes them molten, makes them iron, makes them steel and diamond, forges them new; makes them perfect and whole somehow where Bucky had been living in pieces, in parts—and where Steve had lived within him before, where Bucky could tease Steve’s presence, the pump of Steve’s heart like a companion alongside his own, Bucky can’t tease it any longer. Bucky can’t parse it out as singular, distinct.

Because when Steve’s heart beats, Bucky can’t feel it next to his own, nudging and brushing close, caressing soft and swift and so strong, so tangled in all that Bucky is: Bucky can’t feel it near, against the walls.

Bucky can’t, because he feels it within: feels Steve’s ventricles moving his own, feels his blood filling Steve’s atria, feels the valves in Steve’s heart opening, granting Bucky’s leave to give and it is Bucky’s that conducts the stirring, the voltaic shiver that pumps, that kicks, that shakes through them both, gives them life in a single, indecipherable contraction and release and it's magnetic, it's resurgent, it’s—

“Everywhere,” Steve whispers, rasps out like the making of the universe, the taking of all things and reimagining them better: “Everywhere, there aren’t, there isn’t, there’s no space, there’s—”

“Whole,” Bucky exhales, and shivers and clenches and wraps arms around Steve’s shoulders, grasps wild and frantic and bleeding out need until his heart pounds dry except it won’t, it can’t, it’s Steve;

“It’s whole, I’m—”

“Whole,” Steve nods, lips wet, catching, dragging sloppy and sweet against the hollow of Bucky’s throat, against the pulse in his neck as Steve rocks into him, that singular rhythm that is written in their souls.

“Whole, yeah,” Steve gasps, and they’re both so close, so close to all things, to all that matters, to all that is: to one another. “Yeah.”

And it’s so precise, it’s so absolute: it is so heavy and so present—pervasive so that it moves in Bucky’s marrow and changes the shape of his bones; moulds the curve of his aorta with the touch of a lover, reforms him by breaths, by blinks and shudders, by halves before it takes him by storm: all whiplash and bass thrums and for all that he's felt, all the things his skin has seen, his body's known, this is uncharted territory, this is the space untouched and the thing unseen: this is novelty. This is absolution and the first breath of all life and the mingling of their blood in tears they cannot fight back, in the chambers of their hearts: their one, entangled, impossible heart.

“Bucky,” Steve gasps, and Bucky feels that heart of his, of theirs, as it fills damn near to bursting, as it races toward undoing, and when Steve comes hard, Bucky follows in an instant, and the pulse that carries them down is unmeasured, inextricable: they fall and they catch and they break and are remade.

And it is easier than breathing. It is brighter fire in the night. The shape they take together is so far beyond anything they’ve ever been or known, it is unfathomable, it is immensity unbound.

It is them. This is them.

“I love you,” Bucky gasps, shakes, stares upward into nothing and feels everything stronger, closer than he’d ever have survived alone. “I love you, I love you, I love you. Steve.”

“I love you back,” Steve’s arms tremble, spent and undone as he reaches to frame Bucky’s face. “I love you more than, than,” his voice cracks, and his eyes shine stark, brim bright: “Bucky—”

And Bucky only knows one thing, in that moment. Bucky feels it in his bones, hears the whisper in his pulse, knows the murmur in the soul inside his soul.

He reaches up, and pulls Steve down, and kisses hard, deep, full. Steve kisses back, just the same, just as fierce, just as much. It’s all that either of them knows, for more breaths than they can count; for moments beyond measure and far outside of time—this is all that they can grasp, all that they can breathe.

It is enough.

______________________

It’s minutes, it’s hours, it’s days later for all Steve knows, or even cares: it’s relative, it’s insignificant. He is curled around Bucky, pressed up tight against Bucky’s warmth, Bucky’s chest, and he moves when Bucky breathes, and he can feel the brightness, the wonder still sheer and shimmering around his bones, inside his veins—he is curled around Bucky.

The world could end, and he wouldn’t care.

The immediacy, the unparalleled experience of their selves merging full is starting to give, slow and comfortable: not a loss, so much as a promise of return, and breath exhaled, a relaxing that shifts not that they fit entirely, but only how and where. And Steve doesn’t mind, not a bit, because Bucky’s arms are wrapped around him, strong and sure, and Bucky’s heart is still curled up against his own, and Steve is perfectly content just to lie here, just to press against it with one ear to the flesh, and one palm to the bone—and one hand still to his own chest, measuring the variance, an orchestra at work that plays the opera of angels in the night, and Steve can’t help the smile that stretches his mouth, can’t stop the way that joy rises in him, escapes him: like laughter, in a way, but more giddy wonderment, more a prayer of gratitude to the universe, to the gods and the saints and whoever has ever listened, had ever saw fit to give this, to make this possible.

Bucky’s heart in Steve’s chest. Bucky’s heart at Steve’s ear.

Perfection.

“What?” Bucky asks him, startled by the huff of breath, of pure elation, and Steve presses grinning lips to Bucky’s chest and breathes: just breathes.

“I’ve felt you my whole fuckin’ life, Buck,” Steve murmurs, nuzzles idly at the skin beneath him, before pressing back to hearken close:

“Never got to really just listen though,” he whispers; “not like this.”

And he’s solemn almost, as he considers the marvel of it, the revelation of what they are, what they’ve been and never dreamt to exceed and yet; and yet.

This extends beyond imagination. This is more than a single heart is meant to hold.

So Steve presses closer, and screws his eyes shut tight; kisses soft against the moving, beating drum of the heart he shares, now: willingly and knowingly and wholly ‘til he breathes his last, and is grateful.

Fuck, but he is grateful.

“It’s yours,” Bucky breathes, and Steve feels the rumble of the words against his lips. “Before I ever understood, it was always yours.”

Steve keeps close, holds open lips to the heady beat of that pulse where it presses firmest to the surface, where it wants to know Steve’s touch, Steve’s adoration: Steve’s worship where it lives, endless and full.

“I didn’t care about finding a soulmate,” Bucky says, and his hand creeps to the nape of Steve’s neck, his fingers sprawling to thread through Steve’s hair: “Not when I had you.”

It’s Bucky’s turn to laugh now—light and brief but beautiful, real and true, woodwinds in the symphony.

“Shoulda known,” he breathes out, and holds Steve all the tighter.

“You didn’t, though?” Steve can’t help but to ask.

“Fuck no, Stevie,” Bucky’s answer falls in a hiss, piccolo-sharp in the aria played between them. “If I’da known,” Bucky shakes his head, and Steve hears it, feels it when his heart twists for it, pulse still steady but strained as he exhales: “Jesus.”

Steve doesn’t move, doesn’t speak: burrows closer, deeper toward the beat and holds. Just holds as Bucky’s hands roam over his arms, his back, his body: he is small again, somehow—tucked whole and true inside the warmth of Bucky’s frame, of Bucky’s heart, made worthy of something beyond himself within the gleam of Bucky’s soul.

Steve wonders if knowing, if having this would have been too much, back then. He wonders if this is always how it was meant to play out. He can live with that, he thinks; lets his breathing fall into time to the seventh beat of blood beneath him, and yes. Absolutely, yes.

He can more than live with that.

“You were always so sick,” Bucky breathes out, tense and filled with long-festing grief, long-withering mourning.

“I’d feel,” Bucky swallows, hard and raucous as it skips in the rhythm, shakes foundations for all that it holds, for all that it tries to wash clean.

“I’d feel more wrong, or more right, for how healthy you were, or how close. But I just figured,” Bucky’s hand reaches to trace, to cup the line of Steve’s jaw and tilt his face up to look, to see where their eyes meet, to read the depth of the truths to come, and Steve can’t hear Bucky’s heart move from the outside, anymore, but his hand doesn’t falter; he can read the pulse, the life that shakes inside the color of Bucky’s irises—telling and potent and painted with the rain.

“I just figured I loved you, so fucking much, that that’s how it always feels,” Bucky breathes out, and Steve feels it warm him, feels it course like fire and water and the goddamn gift of life, the breath of God in his veins: “I just figured that’s how it feels when you love somebody, when you need ‘em that bad.”

And Steve can barely breathe around just how immense that is, just how much that fills every space he’s ever held for wanting, for wishing—Steve can barely breathe for just how much that means, to have been that loved.

All this time—and he knew, he knew Bucky cared, knew Bucky loved, but that much, to have meant that much—

“And I never made you better.” Steve makes himself refocus, regroup and inhale deep, doesn’t have to force the frown that forms of its own accord for the way the pulse under his hand is snare-drum tight, staccato and far too harsh, like a lance against Steve’s palm, like the salt of sorrow against the place where Steve’s heart’s the most open, where his soul is given wholly, wide and vulnerable, to wrap around Bucky’s and never let go.

“That,” Bucky’s rasping, lamenting; “if I ever woulda thought on it, and thought it might be me, that would’ve shut down the notion real quick." Bucky sucks in a sharp, steadying breath that only partially does its job. “‘Cause a soulmate would have—”

“Do you remember,” Steve cuts him off, splays his hand over Bucky’s chest, traces invisible paths around where the beat makes itself known; “when I was real sick, and Ma told you to leave, ‘cause I was doing too bad to have company?”

The ugly swoop of despair that grips in Bucky’s chest, that pumps futile and shrivels hateful against Steve’s hand: it takes Steve back to the place, to the time, and it makes him faint to remember it, to feel it so viscerally in his body—but in the moment that Steve feels himself falter, even if mostly in his head, even if to no real consequence, Bucky steadies, Bucky readies himself for battle against death in Steve's name and Steve lets himself fall into that familiar warmth, that unerring solidity that’s always kept him, that’s always held him: just as he’d always imagined, always dreamed—and they were both blind, Steve thinks, as he feels Bucky’s arms around him tighten, as he tucks his head into the crook of Bucky’s neck and lets himself breathe in, lets his eyes fall closed as Bucky’s lips press to the crown of his head.

“Father Thomas,” Bucky whispers, the tension in him, the latent fear that never died: the need to preserve, to protect still so clear, so plain, the forefront of all that Bucky is in this moment and Steve has to wonder how he’d ever missed it, how he’d ever doubted, when Bucky just barely escapes trembling at the mere memory—when Bucky’s heartbeat lays a foundation for Steve’s to fall into without question, without thinking, so taut and strained that it may well snap in two to keep Steve safe; may well fall in upon itself in keeping Steve sound.

Steve wonders how he was ever foolish enough to doubt that Bucky loved just as deep as he ever did, as Bucky breathes out regret, the remnants of a grieving Steve remembers living always on the fringes, always ready to consume if Bucky let his guard down, if Bucky faltered for so much as an instant, forfeited his vigilance against the Reaper, and he doesn’t, he didn’t, not ever.

If he only knew.

“Yeah,” Bucky finally murmurs, voice cracking where he can’t allow his pulse to waver in kind: “Yeah, I remember.”

He draws in a shaky breath, and Steve’s hand automatically starts to rub circles against Bucky’s chest, easing the heave of those lungs.

“Don’t know if it’d ever been that bad before. Or after,” Bucky sighs, and the relieved smile that cuves his words is paper-thin, almost tearful as he crushes Steve close, closer still and exhales into his hair: “Almost lost you.”

Steve doesn’t hesitate, then, to share almosts in the making of always.

“You would have,” Steve tells him, and steels himself, his own pulse against the way that Bucky’s threatens to give: “You did, I think. For a second or two. But you pulled me back,” Steve dips his head, presses lips warm and full and grateful to the swell of Bucky’s heart between his collarbones.

“I felt you, and you didn’t leave,” Steve whispers, speaks straight into the blood itself, breathes until he feels it start to calm. “And when my own heart couldn’t hack it anymore, when it got too tired and it had to give out, yours was there. It was like,” Steve falters in the recollection, in the memory of that first moment when his life had been hanging in the balance, and the wire had cut and he’d fell, he’d fell but not far, wasn’t lost because there was Bucky, always Bucky as it was, it was—

He looks up, pulls back just enough to look Bucky straight in the eye, to show him the truths in his heart and his soul that Steve knows Bucky feels, but can’t be sure he understands their weight.

“You saved me.” Because it’s as simple as that. It’s as intrinsic and fundamental and life-or-death as that simple fact, because Steve would be nothing, Steve would be no one, Steve would be rotting in the ground, if not for Bucky.

“You were always saving me, Buck.” And Steve doesn’t flinch when his own eyes threaten to flood, to spill; does reach, though, when Bucky’s do the same.

“You’re my soulmate,” Steve whispers, “and you’ve always been saving me.” He leans in to kiss the salt-tracks, to brush the tears away from Bucky’s cheeks as he breathes:

“You make me better,” and Steve can’t help the wonder, the awe that he feels, that he knows is so plain in his gaze: he can’t help it. It’s Bucky. “You have always made me better.”

It’s Bucky. And Bucky is his.

And the fact that Bucky’s eyes are mirrors, that Bucky’s heart feels as overwhelmed, moves with the same brimming fullness against Steve’s soul—it is beyond saying. Beyond words that can speak. It’s beyond anything the world’s ever promised.

It’s unfathomable, save that it’s the only blood in Steve’s veins, now—the only life he’ll ever know.

They breathe, together; it shakes, for the feeling—but they breathe.

“When you came for me, that’s when I knew,” Bucky says suddenly, pulse high in his throat where Steve can see. “I thought it was, I thought I…” He swallows hard. Steve reaches, and strokes the tear-damp pad of his thumb across that frantic push of blood against the skin and it’s a salve, a boon; it does the trick.

“I thought they were fuckin’ with my head, at first,” Bucky murmurs; “I thought it was a trap.”

And he reaches out to frame Steve’s face with broad hands; to drink him in and damn near marvel, and it’s so warm, it’s so safe in Steve’s chest that he doesn’t know how to swallow around it, how to maintain the illusion that makes this perfection so, except it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t have to know: this is an impossible surety. This is the most real thing that Steve’s ever known

“But I could feel it,” Bucky brushes Steve’s hair from his face, traces his features with nothing short of awe. “I could feel you.”

“The serum,” Steve ventures; “made it stronger?”

“The bond, no.” Bucky says it with a certainty that makes something bright and fierce and brilliant rise up through Steve’s chest: a heat, an embrace that wraps arms and promises forever—and Steve can’t help but smile, but burrow into it: inside and out.

“No, but this,” and Bucky holds Steve’s gaze as he brings a hand to Steve’s chest.

“You could breathe okay, your heart wasn’t,” and Bucky’s eyes are wide, are wet with all the times that Steve couldn’t, and his heart, it’d, it would; “Wasn’t...”

“I was so afraid,” Steve whispers, lets his lips tremble against Bucky’s skin without shame where they catch, where they drag with the words: “When I took it, the serum, when they told me how it’d change me, I was so scared I’d lose you.”

Bucky laces their fingers together, and Steve doesn’t quite notice which chest he gathers their joined hands against, because the same rhythm, the same warmth emanates from both.

“Won’t ever lose me,” Bucky murmurs, vows between their bodies, threaded deep. “Not ever.”

And Steve’s not prepared for how it shakes him, that promise; Steve’s not prepared for how much those words would mean to hear. And if his heart takes to dancing in between their pressed-close palms, well—Bucky knows the steps, and leads them through it, and every right partner Steve’d ever thought to wait for is caught inside and transformed, made perfect for the way that Bucky breathes, for the way they move.

“I felt like such an idiot, Stevie,” Bucky exhales against Steve’s brow. “Such a fool, not to have seen it, to have missed what you, what we…”

He holds lips against Steve’s temple for long seconds before the kiss is pressed, before Bucky pulls back and breathes in deep.

“And then, then I saw you, and I,” he sucks on his lower lip, and Steve can’t help the swell of affection that’s always been there, that takes Steve back to alleyways and the scent of salt on Brooklyn streets, a little boy with his teeth dug into his lips as he thought, as he fretted, as he wondered and oh—Steve loves him.

Goddamn, but Steve loves him more than life.

“I saw you, and,” Bucky breathes in sharp, seems to steel himself against whatever’s to be said: “Peggy. I thought,” she shakes his head; “I was sure—”

“She was sure, too,” Steve smiles, a little rueful; “About this. About us.”

And he takes the tension in Bucky’s pulse and breathes around it, through it, eases it with his own steady beat until it’s loose, until it’s free and unfettered and can dance again, can keep the beat they’re charting out and writing new.

“Told her she was seein’ things,” Steve shakes his head; wonders what his life would have been like, if he’d believed Peggy’s clearer gaze, her shrewder eyes. “Told her she was crazy to think you’d, to think that it was more’n one-sided.”

“Never,” Bucky squeezes his hand, rejects the notion with fire in his eyes, in the blood Steve can feel as it courses hard with sheer resolve.

“I,” Bucky starts; stops, lips parted, and Steve can feel the way it’s neither uncertainty nor lack of feeling that trips him, that catches his words—they’re just too big. The heart in him’s too full. His mouth’s not equipped to express so much.

“Steve, I, you’re,” and Steve’s never felt how people treat him—he never felt fragile, exactly, when he was small; never felt incredible, once he wasn’t, but in Bucky’s eyes, in Bucky’s gaping mouth, in Bucky’s awestruck pulse and the way it hums exultant, and makes Steve’s sing in kind: he feels worthy. He feels like maybe, just maybe, he is some shred of the wonder that Bucky sees, that Bucky feels him to be.

It’s a heady thing, and Steve used to think that he knew music, before—except then there’s this. Then there’s them and nothing before what they are, what they make, could ever be enough.

“God,” Bucky’s whispering, drawing Steve back into what a moment means. “You’re more than I’ve ever deserved—”

“That’s a lie,” Steve cuts him off, before he can get any farther with such a blatant untruth. “That’s a goddamn lie, James Buchanan Barnes.” He gathers Bucky close, with both hands, with whole heart. “You’re more than I ever thought possible, and then—”

His breath catches before he can stop it, and his heart tries to crack before he can stand against the split but Bucky’s there. Bucky’s there, and he smoothes the tearing, he mends all of the fraying, shores up the weaknesses Steve had been once feared he’d die with—feared more deeply that he’d have to live with for longer than he could stand.

“When you fell, I still felt you,” Steve whispers, because Bucky holds to him; because Bucky already shares the whole of him. Because Bucky makes him brave. “I could still feel you and I thought it, I thought I was…”

He chokes on air, but Bucky is there. Bucky is there, and they breathe anyway.

They breathe anyway.

“I was just waiting to die, Buck,” Steve confesses, tight in his throat. “To be with you, to feel you again, but that wasn’t what it was, that wasn’t what it meant.”

And Bucky draws him close, and his body gives automatically to the shape of Steve’s, and Steve’s breathless, Steve’s eyes burn on the verge of breaking, and he’s sorry, he’s so sorry for not running, for not leaping, for not reaching and for not falling when his soul slipped from his grasp, he’ll never be sorry enough for that, he’ll never—

“I’m—”

The apology’s not out, never said, because Bucky’s lips swallow it whole, take the words from Steve’s mouth before working the sour things straight from his heart, right out from his soul, letter by letter with the silent, shouted, murmured words that aren’t words, that Steve realizes now that there were always whispers in the way he’d felt Bucky’s heart in his chest all this time, and where he’d banished them before as wanting, as figments in his head, now they’re real. Now they unspin the shame, the guilt in Steve with deft breaths, with steady hands:

Never, never, never be sorry, never be sorry for what was lost and what was never your fault and what was vile and never touched you, thank God it never touched you, and I’d take it all again if it meant you were safe, and we’re here, we’re here, never be sorry that we’re here—

“But then you made it back,” Steve exhales, breaks the kiss because then he can speak it, can offer that disbelief, the gratitude that rises in him when he thinks about this, them—Bucky in his arms; when he affirms that fact as truth. “You made it back to me, and I, I...”

“I love you,” Bucky speaks for him; knows the words, feels them, takes them where Steve gets caught on their fallibility, their incapacity to gasp and suit and fit what this is; their mouths are pressed close, and Steve can feel the grooves in Bucky’s lips when he takes the words from Steve’s tongue and breathes them out: “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Steve gasps around the feel of it, eyes sliding closed as Bucky bows their heads together, breathes in against his skin and Steve feels like he’s been breathing only by halves, his whole life—like even the serum hadn’t taught his lungs to fill because only this, only now does Steve know what air tastes like, what life feels like when he breathes in, when it soaks into his blood, when it makes his heart run wild. Just this.

Only this.

“I will say those words until the bones can’t even keep them, Stevie,” Bucky breathes, gasps, swears between Steve’s lips; “but they’ll never be enough. They’re never, they can’t—”

“I love you,” Steve breathes right back, and it’s not like Steve didn’t know it, but he’s not sure he fully understood what it meant to breathe in not just because Bucky does, because Bucky leads, because Bucky’s strong, but because Bucky damn well needs air just as much.

“I love you and it won’t ever mean enough but I know,” and Steve licks against Bucky’s lips, bites against the flesh until he can tease Bucky’s pulse through the skin.

“I know what it wants to mean, what it means between us, I,” and Steve doesn’t know if it’s a laugh or a sob that escapes him but it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter because Bucky catches it, Bucky catches him and they weave it into the song their bodies hum in sync with flawlessly, unflinchingly: and that’s it. That’s it.

“I feel it. I feel you,” Steve exhales, and Bucky trembles: “I love you.”

And the words fall short, the words aren’t right, but Steve remembers what they said: kids on the schoolyard, bright eyes in the war, doctors in the now; books and films and Natasha's knowing gaze. Steve’s ma, Bucky’s sisters. He remembers.

It’s a rhythm in your bones, and then you meet the person who knows the tune without ever having to be taught.

And they have the tune, they have the notes: but a song’s got lyrics, too. And the words, Steve finds—when he looks, when he listens, when he seeks: the words are already there.

“I love you,” he whispers, and somehow they’re changed, somehow they sound different, feel different, and he can tell that Bucky sees it, knows it, too.

“You’re my heartbeat.” And Bucky’s breath catches, and Steve’s heart’s never pounded quite like it is just now, and he knows beyond all reason, all doubt that Bucky’s shaking through the same: something primitive, something endless, something undeniable. Undying.

The words were there already; those long-set truths. They’re easy.

The last of them, though: they’re the easiest.

“You live inside my soul.”

And Bucky’s hands are shaking when they grasp Steve’s face, when they guide Steve’s mouth back flush against Bucky’s, when Bucky presses Steve’s chest against his own until their pulses move the skin above the heart and through the bones and fucking touch for how they need, and Steve knows it, they both know it, they both feel it through and through: that this is the hymn they are built for, that they’ve crafted between chests, that every part of who they are and what they share sings inside, dances through, and Bucky says it: does not repeat it, but knows it. Feels it. Recognizes the words where they rise, where they breathe:

I love you.

You’re my heartbeat

You live inside my soul.

He says it. They say it. Their hearts find the rhythm of it, and move to live inside the beat. They say it.

They don’t ever stop.