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“Hey,” Steve says, when they’ve walked the twenty seven blocks from Bucky’s ma’s place to theirs, “looks like somebody’s having a party.”
It’s the winter before the war, which is to say, it’s the winter before America joins the war, which is to say, it’s cold and they’re hungry and all the newspapers are printing disaster in their unforgiving black and white. Bucky’s knuckles are red with chill, his fingers and feet swollen from it. He keeps swiping at his running nose with the sleeve of his jacket, not that it’s doing him any good.
“Yeah.” Bucky stares up at the light in window, the silhouettes of people dancing and laughing. He’s got no damn idea what kind of party they could be throwing, since if their place is the size of his and Steve’s, there can’t be room for more than a few people at a time.
Steve, like he’s reading Bucky’s mind, says, “Looks like the Epstein’s place. Gotta be pretty crowded in there, huh?”
“Yeah,” Bucky says again. He’d say more, normally, maybe push Steve to eschew his comfort zone and drop by, but the Epsteins are their upstairs neighbors, this middle-aged couple and their small children, who -- rumor has it -- fled from the Nazis in Poland. The only words Bucky has ever spoken to any of them were, “Hey there,” to the son, maybe six, this fair-haired, sweet-faced boy who reminded him of Steve when they were small, and then, “Sorry,” to his mother, sunken and frightened around the eyes, who nevertheless possessed a fearsome glare. As far as Bucky knows, Steve’s never said anything to them either, although he could be wrong. Steve’s terrible at talking to women their own age but has at least fifteen of the neighborhood wives telling him all their secrets. There’s something about him that makes him seem trustworthy, whereas when they look at Bucky it always seems to be with suspicion, like he’s sniffing around in hopes that their husbands aren’t home.
It bothers Bucky, a little, and he knows it’s because there’s this small, petty part of him that wants to always be the charmer, that wants Steve to always be the hard sell. He tries not to think about that, though, because it’s uncharitable and wrong, would hurt Steve’s feelings, and anyway he doesn’t really mean it. There are things, sometimes, that Bucky does really mean, like the way he always wants to tell those women he’d have to be pretty damn crazy to try to take a married lady to bed, with looks like his, when he can get any girl he wants. He never does, though. It would make Steve make that face at him, the one that means he’s ashamed to be seen with Bucky sometimes, and the moment of satisfaction wouldn’t be worth it at that price.
“We could have a party, sometime,” Bucky says suddenly. It comes out of his mouth without his really meaning it to, and when Steve slants him a wry look, he shrugs. “Or not. Just -- looks like the Epsteins are having fun.”
“We have fun,” Steve says, and Bucky can’t tell if it’s plaintive or sullen or hopeful or all three. “Don’t we?”
Bucky’s cold down to his toes, and when he says, “Yeah. Yeah, Steve, ‘course we do,” he can’t help but get one of those -- feelings, the kind that make him shiver all over, the kind his ma used to say meant someone was walking over his grave.
Steve looks at him like he knows Bucky means something he won’t say, and then he takes two steps toward their building. He’s been walking next to Bucky for nearly an hour now, face familiar in the growing darkness, in assorted shades of shadow. Bucky would know him anywhere, but when he shakes a rueful head at Bucky the glow of the streetlight catches him just right, color warm against his chapped cheeks and snow-littered hair. He looks, just for a moment, like a fallen angel. Like a tiny king.
“You coming?” Steve says.
“Yeah,” Bucky says, “yeah, sure I am,” and there’s a riot of laughter from the Epstein’s apartment, filtered down through the frozen air to chase them inside.
--
Bucky thinks about that moment a lot, up into Basic and after, huddled in foxholes and marching grimly towards the front lines. Even in the Hydra base he thinks about it, Steve’s face in the light of the streetlamp threaded underneath every repetition of Bucky’s name, rank, and serial number. It’s something to pass the hours with, trying to figure out why he can't let it go. It’s not like there was anything particularly out of the ordinary about it, that moment, at the time.
Steve shows up before Bucky figures it out, familiar face on an unfamiliar everything else, this brand-new body that means he’ll never look like the tiny king of anything again. Bucky doesn’t say, “I’m sorry,” because he’s being rescued and Steve clearly isn’t -- sorry, that is -- but he thinks it, bites it back the way he’s always biting something back, with Steve. He thinks it so much and so often that it drowns out the memory of that night on the street, the sounds of the Epstein’s party and the sharp angles of Steve’s face softening in the wash of the light. He thinks it so much and so often that soon enough, he can’t look at Steve without thinking it -- I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry -- and being glad, in a bitter sort of way, that someone is.
--
In London, a woman comes up to Steve in the street, presses a photograph into his hands and bursts into messy tears. She doesn’t speak English but the language of despair is universal, and as she weeps Steve gives Bucky a helpless look over her hair, eyebrows up and lips twisted in almost comical display of abject terror, before he pats her awkwardly on the top of her head.
“There, there,” he says. “Uh. I’m sure -- there’s something -- I’m supposed to say -- uh. Please? Stop crying? Oh god.”
Bucky tears his stitches -- brand new and itching underneath a uniform that hasn’t fit right since Steve rescued him -- trying to hide his laughter. It’s not funny, of course, but all the more hilarious for that, and he sinks his teeth into his fist to keep himself from making any sound.
He’s still bleeding sluggishly when Steve asks him, a while later, to follow Captain America into the jaws of death, and if he felt like he could make a decent joke of it then he’d tell Steve the truth, probably. That if he could throw Captain America into that gaping maw and keep just Steve for himself, he’d do it. That if there were any way to separate the man on the posters from the awkward, well-meant grimace he saw just hours ago, Bucky would move heaven and earth to achieve it, and screw the stupid war.
He tells Steve he’s following the little guy from Brooklyn who never knew when to back down from a fight. It’s not the truth. It’s not a lie.
--
“I don’t want to talk about the fucking war anymore,” Bucky says in France. They’re walking across some countryside that’d probably be beautiful in other circumstances, and Bucky thinks that, if Hydra were to catch him and strap him to a table again, cut him open to see what was inside, they’d find a brick where his heart used to be, sitting atop a pile of undigested army rations. He feels more and more each day like a clockwork man, arms and legs stitched together in vague approximation of a person, and he doesn’t want Steve to know.
“Good luck finding anything else to fucking talk about,” Morita says, cheerful enough, and shoves Bucky hard in the shoulder. “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s not a lot else going on out here.”
“There’s trees,” says Dum-Dum, in a tone that clearly means he’s just saying it to fuck with Bucky. “You got a lot to say about trees, Barnes? Big opinions on maples and firs?”
“Maybe I do,” Bucky mutters, and when Steve looks at him -- just looks at him, concern visible and overwhelming -- he shuts up.
He knows, the way he’s always known things like this, that he’s taking it all harder than the others. That there’s a part of him curdling, even now, as Gabe tells a foul joke about wood that has everyone else in stitches, as Monty jabs him lightly in the side and runs up ahead to scout. Bucky’s always been a sentimental guy even when he tried not to be, and now he wonders if he didn’t leave that part of himself behind on the table, like Steve left his real body behind in Brooklyn. If everybody pays for a war like this with pieces of themselves, their personality if they’re lucky and their lives if they’re not.
Or maybe that’s the other way around.
Anyway, Steve comes up next to him then and Bucky forgets about it, forgets about everything but how sorry he is that Steve is someone else now, and how glad he is to have him here despite that. He wants to tell Steve about it, the way he wants to tell Steve about everything, and resists the urge. Steve doesn’t need to know. Steve’s better off not knowing.
--
So maybe that’s what it was about that night under the streetlamp -- Bucky read a myth like it, once, in school. Some god who fell in love with a human, and she wasn’t supposed look at him because it would be too much for her, only of course she did look at him, because people are stupid, at their cores. People are stupid and selfish and stubborn, and anyway something happens next in the story -- she dies, maybe -- and Bucky thinks, probably, that he’s going to die here, in this war, and Steve won’t. He’s going to die here, in this war, and Steve will live on, and that’s how it should be, and that’s why even now that night itches beneath Bucky’s skin, buried unevenly under his sorrow. It’s because after years of study that’s when he knew, really knew, the whole of who and what Steve was, before anyone did. Before Steve even did. Before Bucky knew how to explain it to himself.
“That’s Cupid and Psyche,” Steve tells him, head cocked in confusion, when Bucky tells the story over their banked fire to avoid talking about the war. “And that’s not even how the story goes, Buck.”
The others aren’t really listening, Bucky’s sure, so he can’t help but say: “Sure it is, Steve. Sure it is.”
“It’s not,” Steve says, frowning. “The story -- she sees his true form and he runs from her, and then she does all these trials to prove she really loves him. Goes to the underworld, I think. And they end up together, at the end. It’s a happy story.” He pauses, and amends, “Well. For a Greek myth, anyway.”
I don’t want to hear any happy stories, Bucky thinks. I’m too twisted up inside. I’m too afraid that this isn’t one.
Bucky says, “Oh, yeah? Tell me another.”
--
When Bucky falls, he’s thinking of a happy story. It’s him and Steve that night under the streetlamps, only this time, Bucky takes two steps forward with him, and he never sees Steve’s face glow gold and warm like a tiny king’s. Instead he sees the real worry in Steve’s eyes and says, “Hey, come on, of course we have fun, you know we do,” takes him to a bar instead of trudging up the stairs after him, looking at Steve from under his lashes in badly concealed awe. He keeps knowing Steve in the way he did before that night, the worn-in balance of their comfortable friendship instead of the truth -- that Steve was always a fallen angel, a tiny king, that one day a stranger would weep in his arms and he would grimace but hold her while Bucky stood to one side and fought the urge to laugh. He thinks if he'd just taken those two steps he could've kept sleeping next to Steve like Psyche next to Cupid, without ever needing to see the reality of him, could have just taken the happiness in front of him as his due. He thinks that somehow, with that one little change, it never happens: the war, and Steve’s body being left behind in Brooklyn, and Bucky feeling more and more like a clockwork man. They just grow old, telling jokes they’ve heard a thousand times and gathering dust, having fun together the way they always did, before.
It couldn’t have happened that way, of course. It never was going to. But Bucky’s thinking of a happy story.