Chapter Text
The kids had gone to some weird Christmas party that had a certified No Old People Allowed vibe, so Bucky, Steve, Sam, T’Challa, and Natasha had the entire building to themselves.
T’Challa was on some conference call a few rooms over, and the four of them were lounged across the couches, watching Love Actually. Bucky had already cried at least three times that Steve had noticed.
Steve felt boneless and tired in a weirdly good way, stretched out on the couch with his head in Natasha’s lap and his feet shoved under Bucky’s thigh. Sam leaned back, sitting on the floor with Bucky’s legs dangling over his shoulders.
Maybe this was what normal people felt like getting older. Something eternally warm and nostalgic in their guts.
Natasha tugged sharply at a strand of Steve’s hair, and Steve looked up at her. “What,” he complained sleepily.
“Hi,” she said. “I like the purple hair.”
“Thanks.”
“This is weird,” Sam announced abruptly. “I’m the only one aging normally. I feel so old next to you guys.”
“Suck it,” Bucky mumbled. “Be quiet. Pay attention to the movie.”
“Not like you haven’t seen it eighty times.”
Bucky sniffed. “Shut up. This is my favorite part.”
As if Bucky hadn’t said the exact same thing five minutes ago.
Steve gave him a fond smile and wiggled his toes. Bucky loosely circled his fingers around Steve’s ankle without looking away from the screen.
T’Challa wandered back into the room as the movie was winding down, a pinched look to his face. He looked at Bucky, and his gaze flicked to Steve briefly, and Steve felt a spike of anxiety in his chest.
He sat down next to Sam and said something to him that Steve didn’t hear. Sam jolted a little bit. “How the hell does anyone still care?” he demanded. “It’s been—”
“What’s up?” Natasha asked.
Sam and T’Challa exchanged glances.
Finally, T’Challa said, “The UN is trying to take ownership of some files that do not belong to them.”
“Which files?” Steve asked, sitting up, withdrawing from the warmth of his two closest friends in the world.
“Some of yours,” T’Challa said softly, nodding at Bucky. Bucky frowned. T’Challa’s eyes flicked to Steve again, his brows furrowed. “Have you told—”
Steve got to his feet. “Why do they want files on Bucky?”
T’Challa was frowning. Hesitantly, he whispered, “Not for the purpose of persecuting Bucky.”
“What do they know about…?” Steve asked, feeling a creeping sense of resignation.
“That much is unclear.”
“What’s going on?” Bucky asked, rubbing at his scruff with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.
“They’re those files?” Steve asked, forcing himself to not look at Bucky.
“How do you know about the files?” Bucky asked as T’Challa said, “Yes.”
“Late,” Steve said. “That’s very late of them. Why haven’t they done it sooner?”
“My guess is that they are after the same thing that Shield is after,” T’Challa said.
“Great.”
“I’m confused,” Bucky said, and Steve finally let himself look at him.
Natasha gave Steve a harsh look. “It’s been a while, Steve. You should tell him. He has a damn right to know.”
Bucky gave Steve a half-annoyed, half-anxious look. “Tell me what?”
Steve’s blood was frozen in his veins. His fingers spasmed, and he hated himself. “Can I talk to you for a second?” he said, looking at Bucky, and his voice felt faint and resigned and awful.
“Yeah,” Bucky said, looking concerned now. He got to his feet. “Of course.”
Steve rolled his shoulders. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Natasha grabbed Steve’s hand before they went. They locked eyes, and she nodded, and Steve took a shuddering breath. He nodded back. She released him, and Steve tucked his hands in his pockets to brace himself for the outside chill.
It was snowing lazily, and Bucky’s nose was red, and he still hated the cold.
He’d bundled up into a big coat, a warm hat, fucking fuzzy gloves, and insulated boots because he was weak like that. Next to him, Steve stood in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, not looking bothered in the slightest. Not even a single goosebump dotted his arms. Maybe he’d dissociated, but Steve had also mentioned something about liking the cold for some awful reason.
Bucky shuffled in the snow, barely picking up his feet as they walked kind of aimlessly through the dark woods. Anxiety was crawling in his gut. He hated not knowing things.
Steve took a deep breath and closed his mouth. He stopped walking. Shook his head. Kept going. He flicked hard at his wrist, and Bucky grabbed his hand and laced their fingers together to get him to stop.
Bucky waited, even though it felt like his nerves were going to sizzle and fry and burst out of his skin. He’d wait as long as Steve needed because he got the feeling that this entire thing, while directly about him, also wasn’t really about him at all.
“Right,” Steve said quietly, and his voice was so defeated that Bucky almost tripped over his next step. “You know how I—uh—didn’t actually stop fighting ‘til, like, three years after I gave up Captain America?”
“Yeah,” Bucky whispered. “It’s funny, but that’s how long I was in cryo too. Almost like—like an intermission before our new lives began.”
Steve choked on his next breath, and it wasn’t in a funny way or a surprised way, but like he was holding back fucking tears or something, and now Bucky was really worried. Bucky stopped them, and Steve reflexively stopped too. Their hands were still clasped together, but Steve’s chin was tucked down to his chest, and he felt eons away.
“Steve,” Bucky said softly, and he moved to grab Steve’s other hand, shifting them so that they were facing each other. “Talk to me.”
Steve didn’t lift his head. Bucky felt Steve’s fingers twitching in his grip, and his heart beat loud against his chest. “You are going to hate me,” Steve whispered. He wrenched his hands away and took a single step back. “God, I’ve been so selfish. You should’ve known about this from the damn beginning. Fuck.”
“Hey,” Bucky said. “Calm down. Honesty Hour, okay?”
Steve’s jaw tightened. “Okay.”
“I’m here.”
Steve nodded, and he took another step back and squared his shoulders, and Bucky wondered how he’d ever missed for a second that Steve was a runner and a fighter all trapped in one dichotomous body. “I burned down Hydra bases.”
“Yeah,” Bucky said, because he knew that. That was the red dead snake on Steve’s arm.
“I still don’t know what I was looking for.” Steve’s expression was dark and kind of scary, and Bucky resisted the urge to shudder. “Actually. That’s a lie. It was familiar, and it was—I dunno—cathartic—when I couldn’t feel anything else. I was so damn angry, Buck, I don’t think you can even imagine how angry I was.”
If Steve was that disgusted with himself for anger, which had been the only thing that had fueled him before and during the war, then Bucky really couldn’t fathom it. But then he cast his mind back to Siberia, and he remembered the terrifying frenzy to that fight, and he thought that maybe he could start to build a picture.
Steve flicked at his wrist again, seemingly with more intent this time (although Bucky was pretty damn sure he still never knew when he was doing it), and Bucky made a wounded noise in the back of his throat, too quiet for Steve to hear.
“It was like every damn Hydra agent deserved to die, and I was the only one who could do it.”
“How many dead?” Bucky asked roughly.
Steve closed his eyes briefly and gave a jerky shrug. “I don’t know,” he said, voice breaking.
Shit.
“You remember the files,” Steve said, “that got you your mind back?”
“How could I fucking forget them?” Bucky asked.
“They were in a vault in El Salvador,” Steve said distantly, his voice dropping into that numb tone that Bucky hated so much.
“Oh,” he said, like the air had been punched out of him.
Steve dug his nails into his arms, shoulders bunched up. “I wasn’t looking for anything to help you,” he said, and his voice was suddenly intense, and he locked eyes with Bucky meaningfully, his gaze dark but so fucking insistent that Bucky almost couldn’t breathe with it. “I never burned Hydra down in your name. Never.” He faltered and broke eye contact. “At least. Not after you sent me away.”
“Steve—”
“I didn’t get leads to new bases the way that practical people do,” Steve cut in. “I wasn’t good enough with computers, and I didn’t have enough resources, and I’m making fucking excuses for myself.” He shook his head sharply. “The truth is that what I did was easy, and it was what I was made for.”
Steve sounded so damn disgusted with himself that Bucky felt sick. “What?” he asked, and his voice was barely a breath.
“I killed everyone in the base except for maybe ten,” Steve said. “Kept those ten hostages. Sometimes they’d tell me something right away, and I’d make it quick for them and the others. Most of the time they didn’t.”
Cold dread seeped into Bucky’s blood. “Oh, Steve,” he whispered, voice cracking.
“I was—maybe I still am—pretty sociopathic about it,” Steve informed him, his tone detached. “I cut them up and got my new lead and got outta there. And that led to the vault in El Salvador, once. I met Sam there to hand over the files. He told me to stop fighting. I did.”
Bucky honestly didn’t know what to say. What could he say? “The UN wants those files as evidence that you broke the Geneva Convention?”
“Probably,” Steve said. “I deserve it. I deserve everything they have coming to me.”
The awful thing was that Bucky would call this progress because at least Steve was sharing how he felt. “Come here,” Bucky said.
Steve looked at him, exhausted and wary. “What?”
“Come here.”
Steve cautiously stepped forward until he was within arm’s reach again. Bucky took another step and framed Steve’s face with his hands. “How long has it been?”
“Thirty years,” Steve whispered.
“What have you done to make up for it?”
“Nothing.”
“Did those people deserve to die?”
Steve shrugged. “I used to think that I couldn’t decide that, but… They were Neo-Nazis, Buck. Most of them probably deserved at least prison.” He closed his eyes. “I thought they deserved much worse than death, at least at the time.”
“At least you didn’t kill innocents,” Bucky whispered. “You killed bad people.”
“Of my own free will,” Steve snapped, eyes flaring with muted anger. “I wanted it.”
“Honesty Hour, right?” Bucky whispered, and Steve nodded. Bucky took a shuddering breath. “It makes me feel uncomfortable and upset that you tortured people.”
Steve nodded. He’d expected that, at least.
“But I will not mourn for the lives you’ve taken.” His tone was firm. “Hydra agents deserve the worst fates. I will not miss any sleep knowing that you took out a lot of them.”
“Okay,” Steve said. “I can sleep in the van tonight.”
Bucky’s first instinct was to panic and insist that this was a horrible idea, but.
Steve had tortured people. It had been three decades ago, sure. But they had to keep their relationship healthy, and Bucky could not say that he didn’t need some time away from Steve to try to process this. Plus, Steve could use the crutch of the van, even if it always broke Bucky’s heart to see.
“I love you,” Bucky whispered, nudging his lips against Steve’s once. Steve sighed, breath puffing out against Bucky’s face. Warm. “Gimme a few days.”
“I’m so sorry,” Steve whispered.
“You wanna come back inside at all tonight?” Bucky asked.
Steve was already shaking his head. “I’ll see you guys in the morning.”
“I’ll get you some blankets.”
Steve looked like he was going to protest before he closed his mouth. “I—okay.”
“I love you,” Bucky said again.
“Okay,” Steve said, his voice resigned.
Steve had trouble saying the words a lot of the time. Bucky knew that he still didn’t believe him all the way.
Bucky knew that he’d hurt Steve even more if they latched onto each other right now. They needed a few days. They needed this. Bucky needed to digest the information at hand. As it was, he felt numb. As it was, he was going to explode or implode within the next few hours, and Steve and Bucky would only hurt themselves if they were together for that.
But it’d been thirty years, and Bucky would figure out how to reconcile his knowledge of Steve. He didn’t want to look at Steve and think, He’s tortured people, every time they were together. Hydra was not going to take this from him.
He just needed a few days. They’d be okay. They’d be—they’d be alright.
He handed an obscene stack of blankets to Steve, and Steve whispered, “I love you too,” before Bucky made his way inside.
Sam was there for the implosion. And he said—
“That guy that Steve told you about—the one who was angry and tortured Hydra agents? That was Captain America.”
Bucky was aghast. “How does that make any sense?”
“He was a deeply violent person in a steadily depressive state,” Sam said simply. “You met him twice. Didn’t you see it?”
Bucky closed his eyes. Shook his head. “There was a lot I didn’t see.”
Sam shrugged. “He’s a different person now. And I know that it makes you feel terrible to think about Steve doing that to another person, but it makes him feel terrible too. Don’t forgive him of it, but let both of you move on.”
“You’re so smart,” Bucky sniffled. “Is this how you and T’Challa moved on from the Civil War?”
“Sorta,” Sam said. He shrugged. “I’m really not that creative. T’Challa said something like it to me once.”
“You should go sleep,” Bucky said. “Don’t listen to me talk about my relationship problems on Christmas. Go cuddle with your damn husband.”
Sam smiled. “It’s never a burden to talk to you,” he said honestly, and Bucky wiped his eyes hurriedly. “But we can talk about this later, and I’m gonna go cuddle with my damn husband now."
“Good.”
And Bucky conceded that, just the same as Steve probably moved the fuck on and accepted what the Winter Soldier had done, Bucky could move on and accept what Captain America had done.