Fic: Uncharted Territories or, When I am Lost, I Return to You
Title: Uncharted Territories or, When I am Lost, I Return to You
Author: bastet_in_april
Recipient: electricalears
Pairing: Bucky/Steve
Word Count: 2,282
Rating: R
Warnings: Sexual content
Summary: Steve and Bucky, then and now.
Author’s Notes: Written for the steve_bucky Holiday Exchange.
***
“How do you feel?”
“Taller.”
***
Steve finds himself having to relearn how to use his own body. His limbs are longer, he underestimates his own reach, and then overestimates it when he tries to compensate. His grip is stronger; when a child visiting one of the USO war bond drives asks to be picked up, Steve is terrified he will hurt the little boy. He bumps his head when getting into cars, barks his shins when sliding into a seat at the table. He can run a mile without getting winded. It is discomfiting and thrilling all at once.
People look at him now, when their eyes would have slid over him just a few months ago. He looks at himself in the mirror and wonders about where the differences end and similarities begin. He knows that he is still the same man he was before the experiment. His body has changed, but he has not. The difference is that he now has the chance to turn desire into action. His body allows him to fight, to change things in ways he never could before. He still feels trapped, useless. He is no longer made so by 4F status, but by being relegated to use only as a propaganda tool. He is told that he is making a difference, but he thinks of Bucky somewhere out there, fighting, and it never feels like enough.
***
Bucky’s fingers unconsciously return, time and time again, to the planes of Steve’s face, chasing out the ghosts of familiar facial structure just beneath the skin. The eyes are unquestionably Steve’s, warm and brave. Bucky would know them anywhere. He kept himself focused on them, when everything else seemed too overwhelming and unfamiliar, clouded with the pain and the terrors of Zola’s lab that still dog at Bucky’s heels, waking him from sleep at night.
He remembers looking up at Steve from the metal of the table, its cold sunk deep into his bones. His thoughts and his vision blurred by pain and the cocktail of drugs Arnim Zola had pumped into his veins, Bucky hadn't been certain that Steve wasn’t a hallucination. The strong arms that pulled him up, the broad shoulder that had supported him when his knees had threatened to fold under him, these had been inexplicable and had seemed unreal. But Steve’s eyes, darkened to a stormier blue in concern for Bucky, had convinced him to trust that this might be real after all. And even if it wasn’t, it brought Bucky comfort to think that Steve was here with him, if only in his mind.
***
Steve’s fingers stutter to a stop over the seam where flesh gives way to metal. There are scars here, and Steve stops to look at Bucky’s face. There is a brief hesitation there, a fear in Bucky that he has changed too much to fit easily beside Steve again. The physical scars Steve is touching are only the external indication of the scars in Bucky’s mind, of all the ways he had been hurt and twisted into something unrecognizable, until Steve had reached inside of the Winter Soldier and pulled Bucky back out into the light again. Steve watches as Bucky faces down the fear like a challenge, overcoming it. He has never backed down from a challenge for as long as Steve has known him.
Steve clasps Bucky’s metal hand in his own. The fingers are slightly cold, but warm rapidly in his grip. He draws those fingers up and presses them to the center of his bare chest. His heartbeat races beneath their touch as Bucky caresses his skin. Steve struggles to find words for how this feels, to have Bucky here with him again, to have back his best friend whom he had believed lost to him forever.
“I missed you.”
The way Bucky kisses him, long and slow, as though he is trying to crawl inside Steve so that they will never be parted again, tells Steve that Bucky is feeling exactly the same way.
***
After the rescue from Zola’s lab, they seem to fall together. Steve hovers anxiously over Bucky until he is cleared by the medical personnel, watching the way Bucky’s gaze keeps drifting off into the middle distance, the way he startles or tenses if he hears the rattle of metal instruments being laid out onto a tray, or trolley wheels across a floor. Steve bundles Bucky away into his quarters as quickly as he can.
As soon as they are alone, Bucky is kissing Steve.
Steve has seen Bucky kiss his dates before, and he is sure it was never like this. There were hungry kisses, but this kiss is desperate. Bucky is kissing Steve as though he is afraid that, if he stops, he’ll come apart. He can feel Bucky shaking as Steve’s arms pull him in closer, running up his back, cupping the back of his head. Steve feels overwhelmed. Any breath he might catch, Bucky immediately steals from him. He’s thought about kissing Bucky before, but this is nothing like what he imagined. He kisses back, and feels as well as hears the desperate moan rise up in Bucky’s throat. Stubble tickles his lips when he kisses the line of Bucky’s jaw, having to avoid a darkening bruise.
“Bucky.” Steve starts to speak, but Bucky swallows the words with his mouth. Steve isn’t sure what he would have said. Why this? Why now? Had Bucky been feeling this way all this time, too? How glad he was that Bucky was here with him? How Steve had felt when he had found him strapped to that table, eyes staring up unfocused, the litany of name, rank, serial number still being recited by that ragged voice? But maybe now wasn’t the time, not when he couldn’t think to find words past the feeling of Bucky pressed against him, warm, alive.
Bucky is tugging at Steve’s costume, trying to get it off of him. He pauses to laugh incredulously. His blue eyes flash up at Steve, who feels the breath catch in his chest, before he finds himself grinning back. “Show me how to get this thing off of you? This is as bad as getting a bra unhooked in the dark…”
Between the two of them, they manage to get Steve’s costume off, and Bucky abandons his own clothes carelessly in the middle of the floor, pushing Steve back onto his bunk. His hands are on Steve’s ribcage, and then his shoulders, running over every inch of him. He is relearning this body, but also learning it for the first time in ways he never had the opportunity to before. He stops to look at Steve, taking in the sight of him stretched out across the bed, unclothed and aroused. He can’t quite believe this is happening, that Steve is looking at him this way, with his heart made clear in his eyes. But Steve’s mouth pressing against his and the heat pressing against Bucky’s thigh are undeniably earthly and real.
Steve’s teeth sink into the junction between Bucky’s neck and shoulders, and Bucky gasps, writhing against Steve desperately, his erection leaving wet streaks across Steve’s belly, making Steve groan.
Bucky reaches between them, fingers wrapping around Steve’s length, reveling in the heat and weight of it in his hand, and the way Steve gasps out his name. Steve presses forward until both their cocks are pressed together with Bucky’s hands stroking over them. Steve is kissing him, his tongue pushing into Bucky’s mouth. He lays one of his own hands on top of Bucky’s, urging him on.
“Please, please, I need…” Steve can’t find the words for what he needs, but Bucky changes his grip, stroking faster now and Steve is biting his lip, trying to muffle a shout, all of the tension coiled into his belly bursting into white light behind his eyelids. Bucky groans his name, pressing his hips forward, and Steve can feel wetness on his stomach.
Steve wonders if they should feel more awkward afterward, but mostly he just feels sleepy and utterly content with Bucky pressed up against his back. This new and wonderful thing between them doesn’t feel like a threat to the friendship they’ve built over the years, it feels like a natural extension of it. Like something that, in hindsight, probably should have been obvious, but still feels like a joyful epiphany.
When the first of the nightmares wakes Bucky from his sleep a few hours later, Steve is there.
***
The tenement apartment building where Steve had lived after aging out of the orphanage was long since gone, the neighborhood gentrified to the point of being unrecognizable. He hadn’t really expected for the place where he and Bucky had lived to have survived the decades he had spent in the ice, but he still felt the sense that something should have remained. Some trace, some reminder of their lives then. The world had moved on in their absence as if those two kids from Brooklyn had never been there at all.
Fort Lehigh had been like the orphanage. Too many people crowded into a communal living space, jockeying for resources and attention. The cliques, the bullies. Avengers Tower was different. They lived in close quarters, and they still got on one another’s nerves, but whether one of them needed space, or a friendly face, the others knew, and provided it. When Bruce made himself breakfast in the mornings, he always made extra in anticipation that some of the other Avengers might drop by. If Tony got too lost in his own head, Clint or Steve was there to pull him out of his thoughts. When Steve demolished punching bags in the middle of the night, Natasha appeared as if out of thin air, and sparred with him until he collapsed in a heap, tension and frustration banished. It was good. They were still a group of very different people thrown together by circumstance, but Steve felt that they were turning into a team. More than that, they were becoming friends.
He still had to catch himself sometimes. When he saw something in this strange, new world he knew Bucky would have enjoyed, or been amused by, his first thought was to tell Bucky about it later. Then came the terrible second thought: that Bucky was gone, and Steve could no longer tell him anything. When he woke in the night, disoriented, he sometimes reached out for a warm body that was never beside him.
The world was strange, and it often felt empty without Bucky in it, but at least Steve wasn’t alone.
***
The Alps had been like stepping over the edge of the map into the unknown beyond it (“here there be dragons”). Steve, still that skinny kid from Brooklyn at heart, had never seen anything like it. For all his put-on worldliness, neither had Bucky. The mountains disappeared into the clouds, sharp black teeth tearing at their woolly underbellies. It was cold beyond anything they had previously experienced, and the wind sang at night like distant voices, calling out in the dark.
The Howling Commandos were two to a tent at night, and Steve and Bucky were sharing. The canvas kept the wind out, but it was still bitingly cold, so they pressed as closely together as they could, surrounded by their combined bedding and shivered together. It had taken Bucky ages to adjust to not hearing the comfortable sounds of New York at night, the sound of cars and the noises of the neighbors clearly audible through thin walls. Now, he slipped into slumber immediately, the eerie muffled quiet of the snowy forest made familiar by Steve’s steady breathing next to his ear. He didn’t think about tomorrow.
***
“Remember who you are.”
***
Steve saw him through fire, the wreckage of the building where the man had laid explosive charges burning between them. The distance, the smoke, should have made Steve doubt his judgment, distrust his own eyes, but Steve would know Bucky anywhere.
The way he fought, the way he held the gun, and his steadiness as he prepared to take a shot. His face, the way he held himself. Steve looked at the Winter Soldier and saw the man he had loved, hollowed out and animated in the service of some faceless master.
This man had Bucky’s face, but when Steve looked into the eyes of the Winter Soldier, he saw no recognition, no familiarity there.
He felt more small and powerless than he ever had, even before the super soldier serum.
“Bucky?”
Steve’s voice was faltering, full of disbelief and desperate hope. He would have believed that the name hadn’t reached the other man’s ears at all over the sound of the fire crackling hungrily, if his eyes hadn’t been fixed on the man’s face. Some sharp and dangerous expression shifted across the Winter Soldier’s face, tightening his jaw and furrowing his brow, making his eyes flash darkly.
“Who the hell is Bucky?”
There was a sudden shifting of debris, and the fire roared, flaring up wildly as part of a wall crashed to the ground. Steve had to raise his shield before him to protect his eyes from the scattering of embers and burning flotsam flung loose from the wreckage. When he could see again, Bucky was gone, as if he had never been there at all.
***
Bucky watched Steve’s broad back, now as familiar to him as it had been when it was thin and narrow, with each vertebrae visible beneath thin cotton.
He squared his own shoulders, and did what was as natural and right to him as drawing breath. He followed Steve.
Author: bastet_in_april
Recipient: electricalears
Pairing: Bucky/Steve
Word Count: 2,282
Rating: R
Warnings: Sexual content
Summary: Steve and Bucky, then and now.
Author’s Notes: Written for the steve_bucky Holiday Exchange.
***
“How do you feel?”
“Taller.”
***
Steve finds himself having to relearn how to use his own body. His limbs are longer, he underestimates his own reach, and then overestimates it when he tries to compensate. His grip is stronger; when a child visiting one of the USO war bond drives asks to be picked up, Steve is terrified he will hurt the little boy. He bumps his head when getting into cars, barks his shins when sliding into a seat at the table. He can run a mile without getting winded. It is discomfiting and thrilling all at once.
People look at him now, when their eyes would have slid over him just a few months ago. He looks at himself in the mirror and wonders about where the differences end and similarities begin. He knows that he is still the same man he was before the experiment. His body has changed, but he has not. The difference is that he now has the chance to turn desire into action. His body allows him to fight, to change things in ways he never could before. He still feels trapped, useless. He is no longer made so by 4F status, but by being relegated to use only as a propaganda tool. He is told that he is making a difference, but he thinks of Bucky somewhere out there, fighting, and it never feels like enough.
***
Bucky’s fingers unconsciously return, time and time again, to the planes of Steve’s face, chasing out the ghosts of familiar facial structure just beneath the skin. The eyes are unquestionably Steve’s, warm and brave. Bucky would know them anywhere. He kept himself focused on them, when everything else seemed too overwhelming and unfamiliar, clouded with the pain and the terrors of Zola’s lab that still dog at Bucky’s heels, waking him from sleep at night.
He remembers looking up at Steve from the metal of the table, its cold sunk deep into his bones. His thoughts and his vision blurred by pain and the cocktail of drugs Arnim Zola had pumped into his veins, Bucky hadn't been certain that Steve wasn’t a hallucination. The strong arms that pulled him up, the broad shoulder that had supported him when his knees had threatened to fold under him, these had been inexplicable and had seemed unreal. But Steve’s eyes, darkened to a stormier blue in concern for Bucky, had convinced him to trust that this might be real after all. And even if it wasn’t, it brought Bucky comfort to think that Steve was here with him, if only in his mind.
***
Steve’s fingers stutter to a stop over the seam where flesh gives way to metal. There are scars here, and Steve stops to look at Bucky’s face. There is a brief hesitation there, a fear in Bucky that he has changed too much to fit easily beside Steve again. The physical scars Steve is touching are only the external indication of the scars in Bucky’s mind, of all the ways he had been hurt and twisted into something unrecognizable, until Steve had reached inside of the Winter Soldier and pulled Bucky back out into the light again. Steve watches as Bucky faces down the fear like a challenge, overcoming it. He has never backed down from a challenge for as long as Steve has known him.
Steve clasps Bucky’s metal hand in his own. The fingers are slightly cold, but warm rapidly in his grip. He draws those fingers up and presses them to the center of his bare chest. His heartbeat races beneath their touch as Bucky caresses his skin. Steve struggles to find words for how this feels, to have Bucky here with him again, to have back his best friend whom he had believed lost to him forever.
“I missed you.”
The way Bucky kisses him, long and slow, as though he is trying to crawl inside Steve so that they will never be parted again, tells Steve that Bucky is feeling exactly the same way.
***
After the rescue from Zola’s lab, they seem to fall together. Steve hovers anxiously over Bucky until he is cleared by the medical personnel, watching the way Bucky’s gaze keeps drifting off into the middle distance, the way he startles or tenses if he hears the rattle of metal instruments being laid out onto a tray, or trolley wheels across a floor. Steve bundles Bucky away into his quarters as quickly as he can.
As soon as they are alone, Bucky is kissing Steve.
Steve has seen Bucky kiss his dates before, and he is sure it was never like this. There were hungry kisses, but this kiss is desperate. Bucky is kissing Steve as though he is afraid that, if he stops, he’ll come apart. He can feel Bucky shaking as Steve’s arms pull him in closer, running up his back, cupping the back of his head. Steve feels overwhelmed. Any breath he might catch, Bucky immediately steals from him. He’s thought about kissing Bucky before, but this is nothing like what he imagined. He kisses back, and feels as well as hears the desperate moan rise up in Bucky’s throat. Stubble tickles his lips when he kisses the line of Bucky’s jaw, having to avoid a darkening bruise.
“Bucky.” Steve starts to speak, but Bucky swallows the words with his mouth. Steve isn’t sure what he would have said. Why this? Why now? Had Bucky been feeling this way all this time, too? How glad he was that Bucky was here with him? How Steve had felt when he had found him strapped to that table, eyes staring up unfocused, the litany of name, rank, serial number still being recited by that ragged voice? But maybe now wasn’t the time, not when he couldn’t think to find words past the feeling of Bucky pressed against him, warm, alive.
Bucky is tugging at Steve’s costume, trying to get it off of him. He pauses to laugh incredulously. His blue eyes flash up at Steve, who feels the breath catch in his chest, before he finds himself grinning back. “Show me how to get this thing off of you? This is as bad as getting a bra unhooked in the dark…”
Between the two of them, they manage to get Steve’s costume off, and Bucky abandons his own clothes carelessly in the middle of the floor, pushing Steve back onto his bunk. His hands are on Steve’s ribcage, and then his shoulders, running over every inch of him. He is relearning this body, but also learning it for the first time in ways he never had the opportunity to before. He stops to look at Steve, taking in the sight of him stretched out across the bed, unclothed and aroused. He can’t quite believe this is happening, that Steve is looking at him this way, with his heart made clear in his eyes. But Steve’s mouth pressing against his and the heat pressing against Bucky’s thigh are undeniably earthly and real.
Steve’s teeth sink into the junction between Bucky’s neck and shoulders, and Bucky gasps, writhing against Steve desperately, his erection leaving wet streaks across Steve’s belly, making Steve groan.
Bucky reaches between them, fingers wrapping around Steve’s length, reveling in the heat and weight of it in his hand, and the way Steve gasps out his name. Steve presses forward until both their cocks are pressed together with Bucky’s hands stroking over them. Steve is kissing him, his tongue pushing into Bucky’s mouth. He lays one of his own hands on top of Bucky’s, urging him on.
“Please, please, I need…” Steve can’t find the words for what he needs, but Bucky changes his grip, stroking faster now and Steve is biting his lip, trying to muffle a shout, all of the tension coiled into his belly bursting into white light behind his eyelids. Bucky groans his name, pressing his hips forward, and Steve can feel wetness on his stomach.
Steve wonders if they should feel more awkward afterward, but mostly he just feels sleepy and utterly content with Bucky pressed up against his back. This new and wonderful thing between them doesn’t feel like a threat to the friendship they’ve built over the years, it feels like a natural extension of it. Like something that, in hindsight, probably should have been obvious, but still feels like a joyful epiphany.
When the first of the nightmares wakes Bucky from his sleep a few hours later, Steve is there.
***
The tenement apartment building where Steve had lived after aging out of the orphanage was long since gone, the neighborhood gentrified to the point of being unrecognizable. He hadn’t really expected for the place where he and Bucky had lived to have survived the decades he had spent in the ice, but he still felt the sense that something should have remained. Some trace, some reminder of their lives then. The world had moved on in their absence as if those two kids from Brooklyn had never been there at all.
Fort Lehigh had been like the orphanage. Too many people crowded into a communal living space, jockeying for resources and attention. The cliques, the bullies. Avengers Tower was different. They lived in close quarters, and they still got on one another’s nerves, but whether one of them needed space, or a friendly face, the others knew, and provided it. When Bruce made himself breakfast in the mornings, he always made extra in anticipation that some of the other Avengers might drop by. If Tony got too lost in his own head, Clint or Steve was there to pull him out of his thoughts. When Steve demolished punching bags in the middle of the night, Natasha appeared as if out of thin air, and sparred with him until he collapsed in a heap, tension and frustration banished. It was good. They were still a group of very different people thrown together by circumstance, but Steve felt that they were turning into a team. More than that, they were becoming friends.
He still had to catch himself sometimes. When he saw something in this strange, new world he knew Bucky would have enjoyed, or been amused by, his first thought was to tell Bucky about it later. Then came the terrible second thought: that Bucky was gone, and Steve could no longer tell him anything. When he woke in the night, disoriented, he sometimes reached out for a warm body that was never beside him.
The world was strange, and it often felt empty without Bucky in it, but at least Steve wasn’t alone.
***
The Alps had been like stepping over the edge of the map into the unknown beyond it (“here there be dragons”). Steve, still that skinny kid from Brooklyn at heart, had never seen anything like it. For all his put-on worldliness, neither had Bucky. The mountains disappeared into the clouds, sharp black teeth tearing at their woolly underbellies. It was cold beyond anything they had previously experienced, and the wind sang at night like distant voices, calling out in the dark.
The Howling Commandos were two to a tent at night, and Steve and Bucky were sharing. The canvas kept the wind out, but it was still bitingly cold, so they pressed as closely together as they could, surrounded by their combined bedding and shivered together. It had taken Bucky ages to adjust to not hearing the comfortable sounds of New York at night, the sound of cars and the noises of the neighbors clearly audible through thin walls. Now, he slipped into slumber immediately, the eerie muffled quiet of the snowy forest made familiar by Steve’s steady breathing next to his ear. He didn’t think about tomorrow.
***
“Remember who you are.”
***
Steve saw him through fire, the wreckage of the building where the man had laid explosive charges burning between them. The distance, the smoke, should have made Steve doubt his judgment, distrust his own eyes, but Steve would know Bucky anywhere.
The way he fought, the way he held the gun, and his steadiness as he prepared to take a shot. His face, the way he held himself. Steve looked at the Winter Soldier and saw the man he had loved, hollowed out and animated in the service of some faceless master.
This man had Bucky’s face, but when Steve looked into the eyes of the Winter Soldier, he saw no recognition, no familiarity there.
He felt more small and powerless than he ever had, even before the super soldier serum.
“Bucky?”
Steve’s voice was faltering, full of disbelief and desperate hope. He would have believed that the name hadn’t reached the other man’s ears at all over the sound of the fire crackling hungrily, if his eyes hadn’t been fixed on the man’s face. Some sharp and dangerous expression shifted across the Winter Soldier’s face, tightening his jaw and furrowing his brow, making his eyes flash darkly.
“Who the hell is Bucky?”
There was a sudden shifting of debris, and the fire roared, flaring up wildly as part of a wall crashed to the ground. Steve had to raise his shield before him to protect his eyes from the scattering of embers and burning flotsam flung loose from the wreckage. When he could see again, Bucky was gone, as if he had never been there at all.
***
Bucky watched Steve’s broad back, now as familiar to him as it had been when it was thin and narrow, with each vertebrae visible beneath thin cotton.
He squared his own shoulders, and did what was as natural and right to him as drawing breath. He followed Steve.