Chapter Text
[ epilogue; one week later ]
“Feels kind of weird draining a dead guy’s accounts,” Bruce says, staring at his screen. There’s some complicated matrix displayed across the three different screens, green code scrolling from left to right, and numbers that keep changing in different boxes.
There’s only a slightly awkward pause at that. Just a few days ago, Alexander Pierce’s body had been found in his multi-billion dollar apartment. Suicide, the news had reported.
“I’m going to be honest,” Sam says, leaning over Bruce’s shoulder. “I don’t feel too bad about it.”
All beginnings must come to an end and so, too, do all jobs. Sometimes, so too, do even the best of crews.
“Give it a minute,” Bruce says. The numbers keep changing, like spinning squares on a slot machine. With a satisfied sigh, he turns off the monitor and stands up.
Sure enough, sixty seconds later, everyone’s watch goes off.
There’s a low whistle, from either Clint or Natasha, or maybe both.
“Should I retire?” Clint asks, looking up eagerly. “This is enough for—”
“What are you going to do in retirement, Barton?” Natasha asks. She’s sitting on her usual metal table, her hair in a braid again. Clint, surprisingly, or not surprisingly, is next to her. He leans his head into her shoulder and she obliges him with a head scratch.
“Maybe I’ll buy a farm,” he muses. “A big plot of land upstate.”
“What are you going to do on a farm?” Natasha Romanoff, slow to smile and rare to laugh, almost sounds amused.
“Blow things up,” Clint grins. “And raise cows.”
There’s a pause and Natasha rewards him with another head scratch. And then, surprisingly, what looks like a fond kiss.
“How long was I out?” Tony complains. He has his arm in a sling, which is both unwieldy for him and hilariously old fashioned. He’s complained about it once every four minutes since the hospital put him in it. “A guy gets shot, passes out for a little while from blood loss, I might add, and suddenly everyone’s fucking everyone and no one is fucking him.”
There is another, awkward pause.
“I don’t know how to tell you that no one wants to do that,” Bucky is the one to say.
There’s a room full of snickers, at Tony’s expense, which Tony takes grave offense to. Or, at least, he turns to bicker with Bucky, but Bucky is too busy snaking an arm around Steve’s waist and leaning his chin on top of Steve’s shoulder.
This is a very comfortable place for him. Not because Steve’s shoulder is soft and certainly not because the enormously tall and well-built asshole has a particularly malleable torso, but because Bucky likes pressing himself into him and drinking up his warmth.
He presses a kiss to the back of Steve’s neck on purpose, mostly because he knows it’ll make Steve blush and Tony and Sam go apoplectic with indignation. Or something. Anyway, he’s wearing his rainbow ombre bomber jacket with a soft, white crop top underneath that says be gay, do crimes and he’s done the crimes, so he has to be gay, now.
“Bucky,” Steve murmurs and Bucky grins wildly.
Sam lets out a much-aggrieved sigh.
“What about you?” Natasha says, turning from Clint to Steve. “Can’t be Captain if there’s no team to be Captain of.”
Steve looks around the warehouse then. Bucky can’t read his mind, but he can read his body language. It’s not quite tense, but not quite relaxed. All of the lines of Steve Rogers says he’s made a decision, but he doesn’t know if it’s the right one.
“We can keep going,” Natasha says. “But we don’t have to.”
“Are we disbanding?” Tony interjects. Standing over his favorite bench, scattered with small pieces of abandoned and dismantled StarkTech, he waves his arms around and then winces when his injured arm gets caught up in the process. “I didn’t agree to this. Again, I wasn’t out that long.”
Bucky’s been wondering that too, he supposes.
Maybe they all have been.
They look to Steve.
He looks down at his hands. When he looks up, it’s with a small smile.
“I don’t know. I was thinking someone else could be Captain for a while,” he says. He looks at Sam, eyebrow raised, and Sam puts his hands up.
“Don’t look at me,” he says. “I follow your lead.”
“Okay,” Steve says, and takes a breath. “I guess what I want is to take a minute for myself. Be a little selfish.”
If Steve was expecting anyone to be disappointed with him, what happens is the opposite. Sam lets out a little breath, like finally. Clint grins. Natasha swings her legs under her, looking pleased.
It’s—if not soft, then at least warm.
“You run out of funds, you come back to us,” Tony says, surprisingly. “There’s always more people to steal from and once I get this glove going—”
“That fucking glove!” Sam interjects in exasperation and Bucky giggles into Steve’s back. He wraps his arms more firmly around him and feels Steve cover his hands with his own.
He would hate to admit he feels any sort of warmth toward anyone here other than Steve, but he guesses, fundamentally, the knot he feels in his chest can at least be described as: gratitude. That they survived.
And, gun to head: relief. That these specific people—not just any, but these people—were the ones he survived with.
“So what’s next for you, then?” Natasha asks, softly, looking at Steve—and Bucky. “Where do you go now?”
Steve doesn’t answer this time, so it’s left to Bucky to say.
It’s the happiest he’s been to talk, maybe ever.
“We hit the road,” Bucky says. “I’m going to steal the hottest car I can wire and then I’m going to blow Steve on top of it.”
“Bucky!” Steve grinds out in mortification and Bucky tips his head back and cackles.
“That sounds nice,” Clint says, a bit dreamily. Natasha twines her fingers into the peaks of his fuckboy hair and gives a tug.
“Don’t even think about it, Barton,” she says.
“Aww,” Clint says, sadly.
“What about you?” Steve asks Natasha now.
To everyone’s surprise, she smiles—really, actually smiles.
“I like cows,” she says. “But I also like breaking into things. So I guess we’ll see where the two intersect.”
It’s a bittersweet moment. There’s always the possibility of this, between jobs. One finishes and another one might begin, but it might not. It’s different when the whole structure collapses around their shoulders. LEVIATHAN was a lot of things, but it had gathered a group of like-minded, reckless idiots and forced them to become something more than just people put together to commit crimes.
Bucky thinks, okay, maybe he’ll miss this. Maybe he’ll miss them—the people in this room. His people.
“Nothing stopping us from coming back together,” Sam says. He’s not wearing any chain, any piece of jewelry today. He’s dressed down, in a leather bomber jacket. He’s just Sam Wilson, a guy who always has your six.
“That’s right,” Tony says. He has something in his hands. One by one, he tosses a new watch to each person. The bands are gold. Sam smiles. “I don’t expect any of you to start going straight on me now, so take these and when you’re ready—you know who to call.”
Bucky frowns at the watch. It doesn’t go with his silver, metal arm. Still, he and Sam compare their new modified StarkTech watches and grin.
“Don’t get caught,” Natasha says, reaching up to give Steve a hug. When he hugs her, she is, every part of her, engulfed. “And stay in touch.”
“I’ll see you,” Steve says, letting her go. He looks around at the room, everyone quickly dissolving into their usual states of light chaos and general bickering. “We—Bucky and I—will see you soon.”
“We, huh?” Natasha says, with a wry smile. “I guess character development can happen.”
“Steve,” Bucky calls and Steve turns around then, all expectant smile and something warm—like life deals a lot of blows and it’s not always successful criminal enterprises, but sometimes even the bad guys—if that’s what they are, morality is all shades of grey anyway—get a chance to turn and be with the person who makes them happy.
Bucky’s getting sentimental in his old age, but he smiles then too, warm and happy all over.
“I can put my music on it,” Bucky says, happily. “And play it through the comms.”
“That’s great, Buck,” Steve says, smile all over his face. “Show me how.”
Steve comes over to him and Bucky leans into his side. Sam comes over to bicker and so does Natasha and Clint. Tony and Bruce don’t care to be left out together.
Maybe they were all never meant to be together, but that’s not to say they weren’t meant to be together and do the exact things that they did, for the time they did them.
Anyway, Bucky thinks, it’s not so bad, being a part of a team of assholes who couldn’t make a good decision if it meant saving their lives. They were all stupid, impulsive, reckless adrenaline addicts with slightly crazy eyes and more than a small inclination toward moral ambiguity.
But that’s what made them work.
A bunch of like-minded, crazy sons-of-bitches with too much temper and too little brain, Bucky thinks. No wonder they kept getting shot at.
He grins widely and puts on his watch.
Chaos is more fun anyway.
///
“You ready?” Steve asks, with a look Bucky doesn’t trust.
“This wasn’t what I had in mind,” Bucky grumbles. Still, Steve hands him the helmet and he pulls it onto his head without protest.
It’s a day worth killing for, if you were into that sort of thing. Clear blue skies, sun high in the middle, a cool breeze—just chill enough for a leather jacket, but not cold enough to require something more.
Something flutters in Bucky’s chest. It could be feelings, but maybe it’s just nerves.
He narrows his eyes, scraping up every last bit of Steve he can swallow.
“Are you checking me out again, Barnes?” Steve says.
“The view’s free,” Bucky says, popping a bubble.
Steve rolls his eyes and that looks good on him too. He’s good out there—in the field, leading the team, conning people out of codes and money. But he’s good here too—with a leather jacket stretched across his shoulders, in dark denim jeans and a white shirt that’s so thin Bucky can almost see his nipples underneath. The wind stirring his hair, those sky blue eyes watching Bucky with a degree of trust and fondness that’s unheard of among criminals.
His lips curve up when he smiles and Bucky watches it carefully, almost in consternation.
“C’mere,” Steve says, fingers curled into the bottom of Bucky’s jacket and pulls him close. He gets an arm around him and Bucky tries to hold still, even though his first instinct is to squirm away.
“I wanted to drive,” Bucky says, almost petulantly.
Steve laughs and reaches up to pull at a stray curl peeking out from under Bucky’s helmet.
“Let someone else have a chance, Buck,” Steve says.
Bucky hates that. He hates the whole thing, the—smile and the touching and the way Steve’s inflections soften when he says something he means. He hates the way Steve looks at him and he hates the way Steve’s rough palm feels brushing against his cheek. Mostly he hates that he’s probably going to get extremely turned on, seeing how Steve Rogers handles a motorcycle.
“Fuck you,” Bucky says and then winds his arms around Steve’s massive shoulders and kisses him.
They make out against the motorcycle for a while, until Steve is all adorably pink and flushed and his hair is all mussed and Bucky can barely breathe his heart is racing so fast. There’s that kind of adrenaline and there’s this kind. Bucky, he likes both.
He’s never going to tell Steve he loves him. Serves him right, to make Bucky go all weak in the fucking knees and mushy in the fucking head, the absolute bastard.
“Okay, fine,” Bucky relents finally, but only because Steve keeps sneaking his hand up under his shirt and kissing his mouth, which is quite sore and bright red by now. Bastard, Bucky reiterates angrily in his head.
“I’ll make it worth your while,” Steve says, breathlessly.
“Yeah,” Bucky says, seriously. “I said I’d blow you on top of a hot car. But a motorcycle…”
Steve grins—a bright, wicked thing.
Bucky, he unfortunately loves him.
It’s disgusting.
“Like I said,” Steve says, and kisses him one last time. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
He pulls off of Bucky, finally, both of them a little breathless and a lot jelly-like. Then Bucky grabs the spare helmet and shoves it on top of Steve’s head, giggling while he does so. He offers Steve a piece of gum. Steve declines.
Steve gets into the front seat and Bucky climbs on behind him. His arms go all the way around Steve’s waist and he nestles into his back, just where he likes it.
Steve starts the ignition and then, hearts beating fast, wind in their faces, neon lights flickering in the distance, he guns it.
“Gone, baby, gone,” Bucky says with a grin.
That is, at least, until they come back again.