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The handle wrenches loose. The air between their hands is freezing.
Steve thinks, Something is slipping here.
And then it's too late.
He comes back and his eyes are so, so dark.
"Bucky," Steve says; he gasps it through the blood in his throat and the gunshot wound in his side, gasps it through the powder burn on him and the starburst of pulled-in skin around the knife driven through his shoulder. "Bucky, don't you remember?"
He looks up, and up, and Steve remembers those inches of height between them, reversed from one side of the war to the other.
He looks up, and up, and up, and he says, "My name isn't Bucky."
Steve is drifting somewhere over the Atlantic, the Helicarrier's engines thrumming through his body. Tony cuts away his shirt and screams for a medic. Steve tastes lightning on his tongue. His hair is frosted. His blood is iced to him.
"Thor," he says.
"Thor's not here," Tony tells him. "He went back."
"Back?"
"Back to Russia." Tony squints at him. Above, beyond, Maria Hill waves a team of medics closer. "Steve, hey," Tony says, "go to sleep."
But Bucky, he thinks. We're leaving Bucky in the cold.
He sleeps.
"My name isn't Bucky," the Soldier says, a month later. He's curled in the window of Steve's apartment, the loose wooden frame hitched on his shoulder. Steve's fingers twitch; he can't tell if it's an urge to touch Bucky -- the Soldier -- or to flip his cell phone out and dial Fury.
"You're -- " my best friend, gone and dead and back, a ghost, some gnarled thing wearing his face, " -- the Winter Soldier."
"That's me," the Soldier says, and spreads his legs, planting a foot inside. He moves slowly, his shoulders flexing like a cat's, all leonine grace and stalking intent. "And you're Captain America."
You ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?
Steve leans on his counter. The summer heat is thick as soup and sticky, clinging to him. The Soldier is soaked in sweat, his thin black t-shirt clinging to the planes of his body. Steve tries not to think of what he used to do with that -- the way he would lick Bucky's shoulders clean, when he worked up the courage, and the way Bucky would look at him with slicked-back hair, still panting from an orgasm Steve could never quite figure out how he caused.
The Soldier comes to stand in front of him, their chests close.
The two of them, Bucky pressed up hard to his back when it was winter and the heating went out. When it was too cold to breathe.
Ice is forcing its way into his lungs.
"Bucky," he says, and it comes out more broken than it should.
"My name," the Soldier says, "isn't Bucky." And his hand is on the counter, a hollow click that makes Steve look out of instinct -- like the cock and pull or the slide of a safety on a pistol. It's nothing; it's the Soldier's hand. All smooth, overlapping plates of metal. Steve is fascinated for a moment, and so guilty.
The train tracks are still right below them, and something's rushing past. Something is slipping here.
"You lost your arm," he murmurs, still looking at it.
The Soldier's lips touch his jaw. "I want to fuck you."
Steve goes stiff, trapped there between the Soldier and the counter, in Brooklyn, sixty-eight years later. "No."
"You want it," the Soldier murmurs. He leans closer, his flesh hand finding Steve's hip. "I saw the way you looked at him, in those videos." His grin flashes fierce and manic at the edge of Steve's vision. "I'm not the only one with a record, Steve. I can find you in history, too."
Don't call me that.
Before: begging Bucky to say his name, to tell him.
After: don't. Don't pretend you're him.
"But I am him," the Soldier murmurs.
"Your name isn't Bucky," Steve reminds him. It's a trick he learned from Tony: parrot, parrot, parrot. Keep them talking. Make yourself a mirror so they can look at you and spot the faults, the flaws, the cracks in their lives.
(Steve isn't sure if Tony was talking about their enemies, at that point. Tony talking about their enemies often devolves into Tony talking about himself. Steve's connecting the dots, now, stepping along and struggling to see. "You aren't cracked," he'll say to Tony, maybe. Tony will laugh at him and drink more, and New York City will sing to them where they sit, watching its lights from Stark Tower, which Tony hasn't thrown himself off.
Loki did it for him. Steve thinks -- hopes -- that he found out he doesn't like falling.)
"But I am him," the Soldier says, and Steve looks at the familiar lines of Bucky's face.
They fuck.
It's short and rough and quick, the Soldier driving into Steve with his metal hand braced on the headboard and his hips working in punishing thrusts. Here, Steve separates them. Bucky was always too careful, too cautious, worried about setting Steve's asthma off or breaking his ribs or, or, or. The million things he worried about, his dark lips spit-slick and pressed to Steve's cheek.
Steve isn't sure he came. He drifts back and the Soldier's hand is wrapped around his cock, his body long and lean and hungry against Steve's. Steve feels heavy and exhausted, but the slow unraveling of climax is absent. He pushes himself up on his elbows and the Soldier moves, quick as snowflakes melt.
"We're going to talk," he says, sitting on Steve's hips. His hand presses to Steve's chest. He thinks he can be a threat to someone who can throw him through a brick wall with minimal effort. He thinks he can intimidate Steve like this, naked with his come-spattered stomach. (Steve can feel the Soldier's in him, sliding down to the sheets, and he thinks, I did that, then.) He thinks he has the upper hand.
He's right.
"I'm listening."
"I know." The Soldier cocks his head, his dark eyes glittering. "I have standing orders, Steve, " and he says Steve's name all wrong, all wrong, "to slit your Avengers' throats and make you watch while I bathe in their blood."
The rush of the ocean around him, inside him. His breath sucking away. The ship coming down on him.
"I won't let you," he says.
The Soldier smiles. "I know."
The cockpit closing in. The instant freeze, the stillness in his veins.
The ice was a trap.
"What are you going to do for me?" the Soldier asks. His hand is on Steve's throat now. "What will you do for them?" He twists the word, making it ugly. Making it jealous.
Steve aches. "Stop," he murmurs. "Bucky."
"What will you do?"
"Anything." Visceral and forced. "Anything." Anything for them, for the family he has now: Tony, manic and beautifully intelligent; Natasha, deadly and supportive; Clint, quick-tongued and surprising; Bruce, placid and rippling; Thor, wise and a stronghold. "What do you want?"
The smile returns. Vicious and jagged. The broken spine of the river. The churning train.
"You. Whenever I want. However I want. Say yes, Steve. This is your only chance to."
Steve opens his mouth.
Something is slipping here.