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“I feel like I should be used to this kind of shit by now.”
Sam Wilson is standing next to a startled Steve Rogers and a worryingly still Bucky Barnes. Bucky is holding a gun. Steve looks unconcerned about this. Sam is shaking his head and regretting some of his more recent life choices: as in, this one.
The three of them stare at each other in silence for a while.
Sam breaks it. “Soooo... are y’all gonna actually talk, or?”
Steve steps forward, closer to Bucky. That in and of itself is kind of impressive to Sam, because Steve is already plenty close already. “Bucky, please come home with me,” Steve breathes out the man’s name like it’s the only name he ever wants to say. Bucky is starting to look a bit overwhelmed by the devotion he’s receiving, yet he steps up gamely and wraps the blonde in a breathtaking hug.
It takes them two minutes to remember that Sam is standing in the doorway of Bucky’s apartment room.
“Oh shit!” Bucky exclaims the moment he realizes. He springs away from Steve so quickly that, if Sam had not been standing there the entire time, he wouldn’t have known the two were embracing- that deeply, so intensely they could have been and possibly were kissing- at all. “I mean—“
“It’s fine,” Steve is quick to reassure. “Sam is fine.”
“Well, how am I supposed to-“
“He’s not going to-“
The two proceed to simultaneously talk both to and over each other, and it’s definitely something to behold. Somehow, they understand one another just fine, despite the fact that they’re unwilling to let one another actually finish a sentence.
“Well, I don’t know the guy, Steve, for all I know he’s going to interpret this–“
“Interpret this the right way?”
“Well, it’s not the- I don’t want anything to happen to you. Besides, it’s not like that and you know–“
“It was like that and you know.” Steve hesitates. “I mean... do you know? About...?” He lets his question linger in the air. He raises an eyebrow at Bucky, who slowly nods.
“I remember.”
“Well, so do I. Where does that leave us? You know and I know?”
Bucky hesitates too, cutting a glance at Sam. “Are you sure he’s alright?”
“I promise. Besides, he. Well. Knows.”
“You told him?”
“No! Nothing about you! About me.”
“Okay, I have no idea what I’m supposed to know, but the two of you really need to cool it with the inseparable twin thing you’ve got going on. Neither of you will talk like a normal person and it’s kind of getting freaky.”
“Sorry, Sam,” Steve apologizes. Bucky pointedly does not do that.
“Steve, you said you told me something?” Sam wisely decides to start off on one of the only parts of the whole mumbo jumbo that he could actually fully understand.
“Yeah, that I’m gay.” Also, that Bucky and I are definitely not doing a ‘twin thing.’
Sam nods. “Ohh, okay. That makes more sense, now.” And it does. It doesn’t take a super soldier to realize what Steve and Bucky are probably tip toeing around, not now that Sam knows a little bit about their conversation. ‘I didn’t tell him anything about you’ in the context of the conversation very much reads that Bucky is like Steve is.
Sam decides on the spot to pretend he doesn’t have any suspicions about that, and just hopes that one day Bucky will be able to feel comfortable around him, and not convinced that Sam’ll rat him out to the police, or something.
“Are you coming with me?” he can hear Steve very anxiously, very much not subtly, asking Bucky. “Will you come live with us?”
“Us?”
Steve tears his eyes off of Bucky long enough to shoot a glance at Sam. “Yes. Us. What do you say?”
Bucky doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, actually. He looks a bit hesitant about it, which is fair enough.
In the end, though, he figures a future with Steve (and Sam) is worth having to live with someone he doesn’t know that well. So, he nods.
“I’d like that.”