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The glint of moonlight on the his metal arm gives him away.
“I knew you’d be back again.” Steve—God, why can he remember that name and not his own?—sits up, blankets falling to pool at his waist. The man is not wearing a shirt and his pale torso provides a stark relief in the dark room.
The Soldier steps out of the shadows and closes the distance between them with silent strides, unbuckling his pants as he goes. He’s crunched for time and he doesn’t want, nor does he know how, to waste time on pleasantries.
Steve reaches for him, pulling him into bed by the hips. Lithe fingers remove his mask, setting it on the bedside table, before going to his zipper and tugging. The Soldier bats the hands away, shoves the man down and yanks boxers down slim thighs.
The preparation is insufficient and the act is rough, devoid of emotion beyond the primal chase for release.
They lie in bed after, the Soldier still fully clothed, Steve naked and curled up against his side. In the quiet of the night, broken only by the blond’s snuffling, it feels even more intimate than fucking.
“Are you staying?” Steve places a hand on his chest and the Soldier sinks deeper into the mattress as though trying to pull away from the touch.
“No.” His handlers will come for him if he doesn’t return within the next hour.
“When will I see you again?”
The Soldier shrugs, unable to imagine why someone could possibly want to see him again. Steve’s starting to form a bond with him. He can see it in the microexpressions the flit across the blond’s face, can hear it in the pounding of a weak heart. It’s not in the nature of their exchange and he tells the man, “We aren’t in a relationship. This doesn’t mean anything.” His voice is raspy from disuse. The words come to him slowly, and he can feel Steve’s mood dipping with each one.
“Well, aren’t you the romantic?” the blond says dryly. “You keep sayin’ things like that and I’ll end up falling in love with you.”
The Soldier jolts and extricates himself from the sheets and Steve’s arms.
“I was just kiddin’,” Steve says quickly. “It’s pretty hard to fall in love with someone like you.”
For a moment he wonders if Steve is referring to all the blood on his hands, the wars he’s started and ended, the innocent lives he had snuffed out. Anyone with half a brain would be able to make the connection between his fatigues and mask and metal arm. It reminds him that he’s putting himself in a vulnerable position by interacting with Steve. The blond could sell him out. In the seconds during his orgasm, when he’s let his guard down, he could be brought down with a bullet to the back of his head.
The Soldier leaves without a word, slipping away as quietly as he had entered.
* * *
A little boy is in his line of sight. Golden hair, just like—Steve, why can’t he forget that name? The Soldier lowers his rifle, hand going to massage the sudden ache inside his skull. It’s a persistent throb that makes his eyes water, and as though he’s unlocked a part of his mind, it’s suddenly all he can think about: the name Steve, over and over again.
It rings familiar in his head, but tastes foreign on his tongue.
A previous mission? An old friend from lifetimes ago?
Whatever the name means to him, he doesn’t have the headspace to think about it right now. There’s a mission to complete. He raises his rifle again and shoots, easy as breathing.
He dissembles his rifle and slinks out of the building, pressed close to the walls.
Somehow his feet carry him through neighbourhoods of brownstone houses. Deep mahogany, neatly trimmed hedges and newly paved sidewalks turn into graffitied walls and weeds springing through cracked concrete. He finds himself standing before an old apartment building. The bricks are grimy and the shingles on the roof are lifted up.
The Soldier’s eyes are drawn to a window illuminated by a lamp. That’s the room he’s looking for, though he can’t place why he knows this. He scales a pipe along the length of the building and vaults into the balcony, the metal creaking beneath his weight.
The glass door slides open and a blond heads pokes out and he knows this is Steve. A tension he hadn’t realised he had been holding eases and his shoulders soften. It’s odd to be greeted by a pleasantly surprised ‘Oh!’ and a warm smile.
“It’s been a while. Come in… “
He steps into the apartment. Even through his leather armour, his flesh arm erupts into gooseflesh when he brushes past the man.
“I’m glad to see you,” Steve says, and isn’t that ridiculous? He’s never had someone say that to him before; most people don’t see him a second time.
Steve reaches up to remove the mask from his face, and by pure, Pavlovian instinct, he starts to get hard, cock filling against his zipper.
Steve doesn’t even try to be subtle, rolling his lower lip between his teeth as his gaze slides down the Soldier’s body. A slow smile stretches across the blond’s face when he sees the straining tent in the Soldier’s trousers. “And I’m guessin’ you’re glad to see me too,” he says, voice low.
The Soldier growls, hips jerking when Steve cups him and kneads his erection through the layers of fabric. He shoves the blond against the wall. Flesh and metal fingers alike sink into soft thighs and he hikes Steve up, the blond’s legs going to wrap around his waist.
They rut and grind against each other, hard enough to border on pain. Steve’s clinging to him, one hand around his shoulders, the other fisting his hair. There’s something about the way Steve holds him tight, breathing stuttered moans into his ears… Something about the way the blond mouths wet and desperate at his neck, that makes him feel more human than machine. That’s what he is, right? Human. Sometimes he’s not sure, but he bleeds red the way humans do, so he thinks—hopes.
Steve’s breathing picks up in his ear. He can feel the blond’s heartbeat against his chest, fast, like a butterfly fluttering its wings.
“Ah… Ah, I’m gonna—” Steve doesn’t finish the sentence. The blond goes ramrod straight, throwing his head back against the wall in a thud and exposing the long column of his neck.
The Soldier’s breath hitches as he watches Steve find release. The pink flush deepens on normally pale cheeks. Blond brows furrow and his jaw falls slack in a long and languid moan. The Soldier’s toes curl; his balls draw in and he comes in his pants. He doesn’t know that he will later be punished for this.
Steve unclasps his legs and begins to slide down the wall. The Soldier helps ease the blond down, then sits beside the man, his back against the wall. His head is somewhere in the clouds. Steve is warm against his side and he thinks that this is a more effective alternative to the steroids he’s pumped full with to speed his recovery.
He stiffens for a second when Steve rests his head on his shoulder.
“What’s your name?” Steve asks. When the Soldier doesn’t reply, the blond amends his question, “I mean... You should give me somethin’ to call you. So I know what to scream in bed.” Steve tilts his head up at him to give a cheeky grin.
Names are bad. Names form bonds. It’s probably why he can’t forget Steve. It’s why the Soldier is only ever given a photograph of his targets, along with information relevant to the mission. But fake ones are fine, right? Fake names don’t mean anything. It’s not like he has a real one, anyway. Or if he does, he doesn’t know it.
“James,” he says finally.
“James,” Steve repeats.
* * *
The Soldier can’t escape Steve’s orbit.
Even halfway around the world, his thoughts revolve around a blond-haired man with blue eyes, whom he feels he knows distantly, like there are layers of frosted glass between him.
He finds himself drifting towards Washington.
At first he is wary, circling the perimeter of the neighbourhood he has been guided to. The pull must be attributed to a new enemy technology that will lure him to a place where he can be disposed of. Even as he thinks this, he steps closer and closer until he comes face-to-face with a blond man.
Whoever thought he could be killed by a five-four, hundred pound man severely underestimated him.
It happens often enough that a part of him retains disjointed details of their encounter in between long periods of sleep and days of wakefulness. Either it is unobtrusive enough to be spared from erasure, or there is a flaw in Hydra’s science.
There comes a point when he no longer resists. He is certain Steve will not harm him, in the same way he is certain the air filtered through his mask is safe to breathe.
His handlers trust him to obey and they let him to operate independently, in private. He repays their allowance by carefully guarding from them the corner of his mind where Steve resides. Steve is his secret and connection to the outer world, the only remaining thing that Hydra has not taken from him or tainted.
* * *
The Soldier awakes from his sleep with a name on his tongue and a date in his head. After completing his mission, a glimpse of the day’s newspapers tells him that it has been six months since he last saw Steve. He wonders if half a year is enough time to forget someone, and he goes to Washington to find out.
Steve’s apartment is empty, and the Soldier waits in a dark room for the owner to return. An hour passes and he peeks past the curtains. The streets are empty. He returns to seated on the couch, but finds that for all his training, he can’t sit still. He wonders if Hydra has somehow gotten their hands on Steve before he had, and a ball rises in his throat at the thought of it.
The waiting game is making him antsy and he decides to track Steve down himself. He isn’t sure what he’ll do if he finds Hydra has taken the blond, but he’ll figure that out as he goes.
He’s about to walk past an alleyway where a ring of men are shouting and ganging up on another person when he hears a familiar voice say, “I could do this all day.”
Before he even knows what he’s doing, he’s lunging forward, metal hand closing around a neck and snapping it. The man hasn’t even hit the ground before he’s rounding on the next man closest to him, who is frozen in shock and staring at him with wide eyes. He backhands the man, pressure sensors in his arm firing as a jaw crumples under the force. From the corner of his eyes (two men at his 9 o'clock, one at 3), he sees Steve swaying on his feet, one eye swollen shut, nose bloodied and fists held up in guard (“James?”). He’s never killed outside his orders, but he thinks he can find it in himself to do so now.
“James? James, Stop!”
The name isn’t his, but he obeys anyways, fist stopping an inch shy of another man’s nose. He lowers his arm and Steve immediately wedges himself between the man and the Soldier. The remaining men take the opportunity to flee and he resists the urge to shoot down the witnesses. He doesn’t think Steve would appreciate that.
“Jesus, James, I had ‘em.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I did!” Steve insists angrily. It’s hard to take the blond seriously when his hair is mussed up and he’s sporting a black eye and split lips. With a huff, Steve wheels away from him to look at the two men lying on the concrete. “Holy Hell… Did you kill them?”
“No.” He doesn’t add that the man with the broken neck will die without immediate medical attention.
Steve makes a whimpering noise and collapses onto his knees. The Soldier tentatively joins Steve on the concrete. The blond’s breathing hard with chest-whistling inhales that the Soldier has never heard before.
“Steve…?”
“I-I gotta—I gotta call the ambulance,” Steve gasps before reaching into his pocket for an inhaler. Hands shaking, he brings it up to his mouth and inhales, holding his breath for eleven seconds before exhaling. The Soldier must be making one hell of a face because Steve takes one look at him and laughs breathlessly. “Don’t worry. I’m okay.”
Steve’s hands are too unsteady to dial 911, so the Soldier does it on his own burner phone and then holds it to the blond’s ear so the man can talk. As soon as the call has been made, he drags Steve away from the scene, ignoring the other’s protests. He didn’t come all the way here to watch Steve fuss over other men.
Steve sits on the edge of a bathtub while the Soldier kneels on a thin bathroom mat. He presses an alcohol-doused cotton ball to Steve’s cheek and the blond doesn’t flinch.
“Why?” the Soldier asks.
Steve lowers the frozen peas from his eye to squint at him, and the Soldier nudges the blond’s hand back into place.
“You askin’ me why I got into a fight?” The blond sounds a bit nasally from the rolled up toilet paper in his nose to staunch the blood flow.
The Soldier nods, sticking a bandaid on the cut and then smoothing his thumb over it.
“They were harrassin’ some girl.”
“So you decided to take on five men instead.”
Steve shrugs. “Someone had to do it.” He adds, “And the girl got away, so I’ll count it as a victory.”
It must be a normal occurrence for the blond to act so nonchalant about it. How many times has it happened while he was in cryo? How many close calls have there been? He thinks about waking in a world where Steve no longer exists because the blond poked his head where it didn’t belong. His lips twitch downwards.
“I can take care of myself, you know,” Steve says.
The Soldier ignores him and wets a cloth under the sink. “Take off your clothes.”
Steve blushes. “Wow, um—”
“I’m going to wipe you down.”
Steve’s lips make an ‘o’ of understanding and quickly pulls his shirt over his head and shimmies out of his pants.
He doesn’t remember ever seeing Steve naked unless it was to have sex (though his memory often fails him). But to see the blond bared now under harsh fluorescent lights feels alien, out-of-context. Steve must be thinking the same thing, because he’s pressing his legs together and curling his shoulders inwards. The blond keeps his eyes fixed on his lap.
“Are you scared of me?”
Steve glances up at him from beneath long lashes. “I don’t know… Should I be?”
“No. I would never hurt you.”
Holding Steve by the elbow, the Soldier runs a hot cloth down a skinny arm, cleans in between fingers, before doing the other arm. He works in silence, wiping down every bony knob of Steve’s back. Rewetting, then toweling a skinny chest, noting the way Steve’s nipples pebble from the contrast of warm cloth and cool air.
Steve has covered his crotch with a hand—the Soldier can’t understand why; it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before—so he skips to the blond’s feet, holding each in turn in his palm and wiping them down with the same meticulous care he cleans his rifle. Then he moves onto sparsely-haired calves with their map of blue veins. When he places a hand on Steve’s thigh, his hand covering the entire width of it, he hears the blond’s breath catch in his throat.
He looks up and finds Steve staring at him with parted lips, uncovered eye glazed and pupil an explosion of black against blue. Steve’s shifting uncomfortably now, legs rubbing together. Needy, seeking friction.
“James,” Steve starts, voice small. “I-I wanna… Can we…?”
“Not today. You’re hurt,” he says, even though his own body is reacting and heat is swirling low in his gut.
“If not today, then when?”
The Soldier lowers his head at that question. He doesn't have an answer.
Steve makes a noise of frustration. He throws the bag of peas to the floor and then he’s cupping the Soldier's jaw, tugging him up and close so that their mouths smash together. The Soldier braces himself with one hand on the edge of the tub, the other on the small of Steve’s back so the man doesn’t tip backwards.
Once he gets over the initial shock, something surges up in him, and he kisses back, hot and frenzied. Steve opens his mouth for him and their tongues slide against each other. The blond’s lips are impossibly soft. He can taste the faint coppery tang of blood upon them.
He can’t believe this his happening to him. Him, with all the lives on his head and his scrambled mess of a brain. There’s absolutely nothing he has done to deserve this tender gesture. And yet here he is, kneeling on a bathroom floor, Steve’s hands framing his cheeks and they’re kissing and Steve is moaning quietly into his mouth.
Steve pulls away first, panting and chest heaving. He rests his forehead against the Soldier’s.
The Soldier doesn’t know what it means to want something. He understands the definition, though he can’t comprehend it on a visceral level. In the off-chance he feels something other than indifference, he would never be able to recognise it in himself. But this is what he knows now: without Steve’s mouth on his, his lips feel cold and bare.
The Soldier slides the hand on Steve’s back up to rest at the base of the blond’s neck, and then he pulls their lips together.
* * *
He’s strapped down to a chair. Reinforced cuffs bind his wrist and ankles. A metal circlet is fitted over his head and his jaw is wrenched open, a mouthpiece shoved inside. He thinks of strands of spun sunlight, eyes the clearest blue, an unrestrained laugh, a small and gentle hand on his scarred chest. Oh, and wouldn’t it be nice if he could spend his time with Steve in between kills instead of returning to this? He holds onto those thoughts with a tenacity that has his handlers asking, ‘What the fuck is the matter with him? Wipe him again.’
The images don’t fade. He remembers the searing hot press of Steve’s lips against his own with a stunning clarity, and he takes a rifle butt to the face for it.
His nose gushes blood and it fills the cracks in his lips, and then the spaces between his teeth. It reminds him of how Steve had refused to stand down even when surrounded by men twice his size. The Soldier’s been in the business of assassinating for decades now, and he thinks idly he still has a thing or two to learn.
His mind is able to withstand three wipes before it fragments.
* * *
The Soldier is pulled from cryo twenty-eight days later. Hydra prepares him well, bringing his vitals and temperature from a barely-alive status to optimal. When his eyes finally open, he goes from a deep, impenetrable sleep to full alertness, skipping the transition period in between.
Five men encircle him. Before the man in the centre can form a complete word, he rears, tearing free of his restraints and snapping the lead man’s neck within the blink of an eye. This time, he is sure to sever the arterial connections between the spinal cord and brain.
The men are unprepared for him, hands going to their guns a fraction of a second too slow. He disarms three men, putting a bullet through their heads. The last man manages to shoot at him, but the bullet glances off his metal arm. With a practised ease, he shoots the man in the dead center of his forehead.
Klaxons blare. The base comes to life, gates rolling shut, boots thundering. He slips in and out of shadows, steadily making way towards the exit and then off grounds.
He finds himself in New York, a place he doesn’t remember visiting, yet knowing with a certainty every road and alleyway.
He hotwires a car. Green road signs flash by; concrete highway dividers turn into rocky walls dotted with coniferous trees.
Someone’s waiting for him, in an small apartment in Washington. He clings to the thought, repeating it over and over again in his head so he doesn’t lose it.
He makes it as far as Philadelphia before Hydra agents find him. The windshield shatters under rapid fire bullets and he takes a tranquilizer dart to his throat. His mind swings in and out of consciousness, vision tunneling down and he thinks of Steve—oh, that’s right. Steve’s the one who’s waiting for him. How could he have forgotten that?
The Soldier slumps against the steering wheel, forehead colliding with the horn. The loud, continuous honk isn’t enough to keep him awake.
* * *
After a successful mission, he had been on his way to the pre-determined extraction site when a memory surfaces, welling up from somewhere in the buried parts of his brain. He makes an abrupt U-turn in his motorcycle, boot skidding over concrete for added traction.
His mind is not in the right place when he breaks into Steve’s apartment and takes the blond to bed. There’s a dull, incessant throbbing in his temples and the back of his skull. He grits his teeth through the pain and cuts off Steve’s worrying (“Where in the world have you been? Hey… Hey, are you okay? You look—”) with a bruising kiss.
Steve doesn’t fight him as he grips the lapels of the blond’s pajamas and yanks it apart, buttons flying free and pinging off the floor. He walks Steve backwards towards bed, shoving the man down when the back of the blond’s knees hit the edge of the mattress.
Steve falls into bed with an Oof! His eyes are wide—in surprise? fear? anticipation?—as he looks up at the Solider looming over him.
“James…?”
James? That’s not his name. He doesn’t respond to it.
The Soldier hooks his fingers into the elastic of Steve’s pants and pulls it down and off his ankles. His mouth floods with saliva when Steve, already halfway to hard, is presented fully before him.
Steve looks so good under him, like he belongs there, sharp and pale planes of his body capturing the moonlight. A flush creeps over his concave chest, all the way up to his ears. The blond opens up for him without prompting, takes his fingers and then his cock, so achingly sweet though the Soldier sets a furious pace.
He clasps his metal hand around Steve’s neck. The length of his thumb and forefinger spans the entirety of that fragile neck. It would only take a twitch of metal plates to snap it, and just as he thinks it, Steve gasps, eyes rolling back into his head, body convulsing beneath him. The blond’s back bows powerfully off the bed, trying to buck him off; spindly fingers scramble for a hold in the sheets. Chest rising and falling rapidly. Not enough air. A spike of fear jars him and the Soldier realises, ‘Oh, I’m killing him.’
The memories come back to him, muted as though they belong to a different him in a different universe. Plush lips moving desperately against his own; Steve looking at him, flushed and sincere; slender fingers interlocking with his thick ones. He remembers all of this, the images superimposed over Steve beneath him now, red-faced and with tears clinging to long lashes.
His pleasure is forgotten. Panic rises in his throat, unfamiliar and immediate. The gears in his arm whir and click and he pulls away, grip unhinging. But before his fingertips can leave Steve’s neck, the blond’s hands shoot up to keep his hold there; even encourages it, pressing the Soldier’s fingers over his throat.
The Soldier groans. The glazed over look Steve’s eyes, the pulse fluttering wildly beneath his fingers, the streaks of white across the blond’s abdomen and chest… Steve came from being choked, and the submission and trust he’s giving the Soldier—the control—has him growling deep in his throat. He keeps his hand on Steve’s neck, the other going to grasp the blond’s calf to move it higher on his shoulder. And then he’s snapping his hips into that delicate body with enough force to bang the headboard against the wall. Steve takes it all with wrecked cries, pliant and willing.
He finds his release in the smaller man, nose buried into sweaty blond strands, teeth marking his only possession.
After, they lie side by side in bed, the Soldier's breathing having returned to normal, while Steve’s still struggling with his. He squeezes an arm beneath Steve and wraps it around the blond’s shoulders.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” the Soldier says. His throat closes up and he swallows hard.
“It’s okay,” Steve says, burrowing into him. He mumbles against the Soldier’s chest, “I… I liked it. It was good. Really good.”
“I could have killed you.”
“But you didn’t. I trusted that you wouldn’t hurt me, and you didn’t.”
He doesn’t know what he’s done to earn that trust. It’s a fragile thing, but he feels the weight upon him like an added thousand pounds. He doesn’t deserve any of it. Steve is good and he is not, and he knows this because good people do not kill with a clean conscience. In another timeline, Steve would be the kind of man the Soldier is assigned to kill. There must be better men out there for Steve, men who would trip over their own feet just to make the blond smile, men who could be a constant in Steve’s life. Not like him, who flits in and out of the world, disappearing for months and years at a time and existing solely to destroy.
Anyone is better than him.
“I missed you,” Steve says, and the Soldier's heart aches at how small the blond sounds. “I hadn’t seen or heard from you in so long. I didn’t know if you didn’t want to do this anymore, or if you were hurt, or dead.”
He knows he must put an end to this. Every minute he spends with Steve puts the man in danger. They’re lucky to have had this much time together, but he knows it won’t last. Hydra will find out, and he doesn’t want to think about what would happen to Steve then.
He will let this be their last day, and he will try to give Steve what the blond deserves, if only just a fraction.
So he starts off by saying, “I missed you, too,” tasting the words carefully on his tongue. They feel right.
* * *
A small slip of paper on S.H.I.E.L.D director Nick Fury’s desk, left by an unknown and untraceable persons, reads:
Possible Hydra target with connections to the Winter Soldier
Steven Grant Rogers
56-1212 Southern Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20032
* * *
Hydra crumbles under the force of the Avengers, taking S.H.I.E.L.D with it. The Soldier had thought his life would take a turn for the better without the organisation, until he remembers that he is Hydra’s mascot.
Seventy years of assassinations and torture catch up to him and the Avengers come to collect their due.
His metal arm has been torn away at the elbow, wires exposed past the jagged edges. Lacerations on his chest and organic arm are already beginning to heal over. He has three broken ribs, two on his left and one on his right, and a bullet lodged in his side. He can feel his ribs moving back into place, bones melding together.
His head his shockingly clear as he weaves through the opposing flow of traffic on a motorcycle. A part of him has already accepted that this will be the day he dies. And isn’t it a pity, that in his acceptance, he feels more free than he ever has?
A deep hollowness has settled in his abdomen. He thinks it might be regret or frustration from being forced into this half-life, from being denied everything that makes a person human.
If things had been different, maybe he could have been the sentinel of justice and peace Hydra told him he was.
If he were stronger, he could have fought the brainwashing. It could have been him and the Avengers against Hydra, instead of him and Hydra against the Avengers.
And maybe, if a butterfly across the Atlantic had beat its wings to a different rhythm, he could have been born in the same world and time as Steve, and they could have been something to each other.
The Soldier swerves just in time to avoid a beam of energy that uproots concrete.
He’s stayed away for so long, but he would like to see Steve again, even if the blond has someone else in his life now. It’s dangerous and selfish, especially under these circumstances. Still, it would be nice to see once more the only thing that’s ever made him feel more than just a weapon. Just a glimpse would be enough.
The shabby apartments and narrow roads are familiar to him in a detached sort of way, though one in particular stands out to him. He leaps from his motorcycle and rolls to standing and then breaks into a run. He doesn’t know how he’ll get to the third floor where Steve is with just one arm, but he’ll find a way.
A shadow drops from above him and the Soldier skids to a halt. Steel wings collapse inwards in a metallic susurration and the Falcon steps from the air onto concrete, dual pistols raised. “Stand down, Soldier.”
His Derringer is fully-loaded and he still has a combat knife in his utility belt; a well-aimed throw could give him enough time to flee. But then the Falcon is joined by Iron Man and the Black Widow and he doesn’t see how he can escape now, not without a head start.
Three Avengers and a half-dozen field agents, all ready to strike. He’s flattered.
“On your knees. Ankles crossed.”
He does so.
The commotion draws a crowd. Eyes peek past curtains and passersby slow to watch, murmuring excitedly at the sight of the Avengers and a broken man. The Soldier scans the faces for blond hair and blue eyes. There’s a bitter taste in his mouth.
He doesn’t know whether to be relieved Steve had been spared all of this, or disappointed that he won’t get a chance to see the blond again. It depends which part of him is asked.
“What’s going on here?”
The Soldier perks up, head turning to follow the voice.
There, in the rippling and disgruntled crowd, Steve pushes his way to the front, blond head poking out first, followed by bony shoulders.
Steve stumbles free of the crowd. “James?”
Their eyes meet and the blond makes a sound like he’s dying, and then he’s launching himself into the Soldier.
(“Steve, no!”)
Already off-balance without his arm, The Soldier is thrown to his side. He grunts in pain, the clench of his jaw softening when Steve wraps his arms around him and burrows into the crook of his shoulder. Steve is shaking and the Soldier places a hand on the small of the blond’s back.
“You jerk!” Steve growls against his neck. “You drop off the face of the Earth for three years without saying goodbye and then you come back looking like… Like—” Steve pulls away from him then, eyes widening as though it’s only now he sees the state of the Soldier.
(“Steve, get away from him!”)
“Jesus Christ…” Steve whispers, taking in the extent of damage. The blond reaches for the remains of his metal arm, before thinking better of it. “What did they do to you?”
(“Steve, listen to me! He’s dangerous.”)
Steve curses and yells over his shoulder, “Hey, you wanna shut up, Sam?”
The Soldier's lips twitch upwards and the blond turns back to him in time to catch the tail end of his amusement.
“What’s so funny?” Steve demands, voice cracking.
How does he even begin to answer a question like that?
He’s an amnesiac assassin who remembers only four things: mission intelligence, weapon skills, languages, and Steve Rogers with a stubbornness so resolute even Hydra can’t erase him.
He’s lying flat on his back, pinned down by all one hundred pounds of a blond, arm gone.
There are guns pointed at him from all directions and still, there is nowhere else he’d rather be.
“You are,” he replies.
Steve rolls his eyes.
And there, in the middle of the road and broad daylight, Steve takes him by the jaw and kisses him, full on the lips. He feels terrifyingly vulnerable even as he pushes closer and lets the blond in. His hand moves to grip the back of Steve’s neck and he tilts his head so their lips can slot together.
There’s a floaty, tickling sensation in his chest—a swooping in his stomach like he’s falling from a great height—that he has never felt before.
The Soldier isn’t supposed to know what it means to want something, but he thinks that this might be it.