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“Food was an absolute, for me,” Natasha says, “In that we either had it, or didn’t. The quality wasn’t something I ever gave a thought to. Not until – well. Much later.” She looks thoughtful for a few moments. “One thing that I do remember is one time – god, I can’t even remember if it was training or a mission – there was a bakery, and these little apricot cookies. Rugelach, I think. I was...14, 15 maybe. I ate so many I gave myself a stomachache and a sugar crash. But it was so worth it. There’s a bakery in Sheepshead Bay that makes them around the holidays and they taste damn near the same.”
She twirls her fork in two fingers, pokes at the last of her potatoes. Steve knows that by the time he stands to clear the dishes her plate will be empty, near wiped clean just like his. Sam always leaves some of this or that, goes back for seconds that he doesn’t always finish. A luxury he indulges after a long time eating strict portions in the service. But Steve has noticed that he and Natasha have this in common, the habits of growing up when food was a scarcity; they always take only as much as they know they can finish, and always clean their plate.
“Where I grew up, everybody’s mom was the best cook. But you only ever liked your own mom’s cooking the best. My sister gets pretty close when she cooks, but me? I can’t for the life of me make anything as good as Momma can. She makes this berry-and-rhubarb pie – so good. Every time I eat at her house, it’s like I’m a kid again.” He smiles slow, closing his eyes as if he’s remembering the taste of a home cooked meal right then.
Steve knocks back the last of his iced tea, pours himself a half-glass more from the condensated pitcher. He looks through the kitchen door into the living room. Bucky is perched on the couch watching another in a long queue of Looney Tunes episodes, instead of at the dinner table with the rest of them. He’s in a much better place these days, but among a few other quirks of communication, issues with food still linger. Steve can’t quite tell if it’s because he can’t eat in front of others, or because he doesn’t want to. But food will go missing, and Bucky hardly looks as undernourished as he did when he first came back, so it’s something he tries not to worry about. Plus, it’s a decision Bucky makes for himself and that’s definitely a good thing as far as his recovery goes, if you ask Steve. Bucky catches his eye, sticks his tongue out at him, then turns back to his cartoons. Steve smirks, then turns back to the table.
“We didn’t have much to work with when I was a kid. Y’know, first the Depression, then rationing, both at home and in the service. But I do remember my mom used to make this apple cake. I’ve never seen it in a bakery, or anything close. She used to only make it three times a year – once for my birthday, once for hers, and once for Buck’s.”
Out of the corner of Steve’s eye he sees Bucky prick up an ear at the mention of his name, but he just continues as if he didn’t notice.
“Wish I still had the recipe. I could try and make it myself.”
“Maybe you could try to find it online?” Sam suggests. “Or something similar, at least.”
Steve smiles. “Nah. It’s like you said, nothing’s ever as good as your mom’s version. On second thought, I’d rather just have the memory of it than a sub-par version.”
After a while, they clear the table together. Sam washes the dishes, Steve dries and Natasha puts them away. Steve wraps up the leftovers and stacks them in the fridge. By the time he walks Sam and Nat to the door, Bucky is nowhere to be found.
---
What Steve didn’t mention is that Bucky was actually a pretty good cook himself, back in the day. He could make a meal out of just about any little odd or end in the pantry. He was aces at using herbs and seasonings to make cheap cuts of meat taste good, knew how to whip up a stew using barely anything more than potatoes and onions and broth. He even baked his own bread, round crusty loaves as big as Steve’s head. When they had money enough on the rare occasion for better quality ingredients, he’d roll out a roast to rival any restaurant Steve had ever been to. It made him real popular with the ladies, too – it isn’t only men’s hearts you can get to through a stomach, and a batch of cookies was always a more interesting gift than a bunch of flowers – and cheaper too. Besides, the dames thought it was a novelty that a man knew his way around a kitchen. There was one year he was a busboy at a restaurant downtown; occasionally the chefs would put him to work chopping and mixing if it was a busy night. But Steve knew the better portion of Bucky’s skill came from haunting his mother’s kitchen when she was teaching his sister how to cook. Give the boy a pile of potatoes and a paring knife and it kept him quiet and out of trouble for an hour at least, and Bucky was always the more observant one.
In the war, Bucky would more often than not take over mess duty. While their cans of beans and chunks of stale bread weren’t exactly choice ingredients, at least Bucky knew how to make them not taste any worse than they had to. A little bacon fat here, a little brown sugar there, and even Monty quipped that it tasted like something he might have chosen to eat.
Steve wonders what Bucky might be able to do now that they had time, and money, and the supermarket down the block had nearly every food he’d ever heard of – and some he hadn’t – in copious and ready supply.
But it was a moot point. Steve didn’t even know if cooking would be something Bucky would actually choose to do. They’d gotten good at a lot of stuff out of necessity back then – it’s not like Steve would become a language teacher just because he knew how to speak French and German. Besides, Bucky didn’t seem interested in doing much besides watching television and reading book after book alone in his room – least of all anything to do with food.
Around one in the morning, Steve is awakened by the clink of dishes in the kitchen. Through his open bedroom door he can see the faint yellow glow of the refrigerator light – ten to one Bucky is standing in front of it, hunched over, eating the leftovers straight out from under the tinfoil.
Steve closes his eyes again and falls back to sleep to the sound of Bucky rummaging through the fridge.
---
In the morning, Steve wakes and the entire apartment smells intensely of coffee. Sure enough, there’s a pot on the stove. It’s filled with dark brown liquid, curling off steam. A single mug stands on the adjacent counter, waiting.
Bucky is nowhere to be found.
Steve shrugs, pours himself a cup. It’s the strongest cup of coffee Steve’s had since thawing out, and he knows that even with his particular metabolism that if he were to have more than one cup, he’d be vibrating out of his skin. Halfway through, he has a sudden and vivid memory – five days of staking out a suspected Hydra base somewhere in Poland, taking turns on watch. It was cold and windy and wet, and after 72 hours Steve realized for the first time that even in this body he had a fatigue limit.
“Here,” Bucky said at one point, hunkering down next to him and shoving a cup into his hands. “Drink up, squirt.”
Steve thanked him and proceeded to nearly choke on the generous sip he slugged down.
“Jesus, Buck, what’d you use to make this, oil from the truck?”
Bucky snorted, holding back his laughter. His eyes were bright blue in the gray haze of rain and slush.
“Special recipe,” he said. “Put some cinnamon in it for a kick.”
“As if it needed any more of one,” Steve said, but took another sip all the same. He wasn’t quite sure caffeine worked on him the same way anymore, but he felt more alert already nonetheless, the hot liquid rolling down into his belly and spreading out warmth from his middle.
Bucky tucked up close to Steve, both of them on their bellies, all the better to stay out of sight on the ridge above their target. Above them, half-dead pine branches bent low, heavy with ice and snow. Bucky drank from his own cup, his softly shifting body a warm line against Steve’s.
“You should get back to the tent,” Steve said after a while. “Stay warm while you can. Your watch isn’t ‘til after Morita’s.”
Bucky shrugged. “Cold’s not really bothering me that much. Guess I’m getting used to it.” Steve gave him a look; Bucky only returned it with a devilish smirk. “‘Sides, I like it when it’s just you an’ me.”
Steve smiled, knocked his shoulder into Bucky’s. Bucky crossed his ankle over Steve’s behind them, beneath the blanket that covered them both.
“When we get home,” Bucky said, “I wanna go someplace that don’t ever get any kind of snow. Arizona or something. I’d like to spend a week out camping where my bones don’t creak like ice when I wake up.”
“Yeah,” Steve agreed. “Can I come with ya?”
“Of course, you blockhead. You and me, the Grand Canyon or bust.”
For a minute Steve felt like they were home again, under the washed-soft blankets in their rickety old bed in Brooklyn, just boys trading dreams under covers in the dark.
---
Bucky doesn’t come home until well after dinner that night.
“Hey,” Steve says, looking up from the screen of his tablet. “Where you been?”
Bucky shrugs. There’s a heavy-looking backpack slung over his left shoulder. “Here and there.” Bucky sets it down with a thunk near the armchair, shrugs his coat off, then sits to untie his boots.
“There’s a plate for you in the fridge if you want.”
Bucky nods in vague acknowledgement. Steve knows he’ll take it or leave it, but it can’t hurt to try. It’s the polite thing to do, Steve supposes, at the very least.
“Did you know,” Bucky says, leaning forward on his knees and lacing his fingers together, flesh and metal, “That you can request to look at rare archived books and magazines at the big library? Y’know, the one with the lions out front.”
“Oh yeah?” Steve says, flipping his tablet closed. “Is that what you been up to?”
Bucky shrugs again, but he’s smirking a little. “I got to see some real neat stuff.”
Steve’s trying not to smile, but failing. “Like what?”
But Bucky’s up out of the chair and swinging the backpack back over his shoulder, and striding toward his room, leaving Steve with no answer but a tilt of his brow.
It’s strange, but playful, and though Steve is left alone in the living room completely nonplussed, he’s also a little happy too. He doesn’t even realize he’d forgotten to ask about the coffee until he’s brushing his teeth before bed.
---
Too much to ask, maybe, that the happiness would last.
Bucky has a bad night that night.
Steve hears him scrabbling around in his room, a loud thud and crash and a squeal – sounds like he’s knocked into the desk and pushed it across the room. Steve’s out of bed and across the apartment like a shot, skidding to a stop just short of Bucky’s closed door, tense on the balls of his feet.
“Bucky? Hey, pal –”
“Okay,” Bucky says back through the door, snappish. “I’m fine Steve, it’s okay. I’m awake. I’m awake. It’s fine.” He sounds out of breath; Steve’s fine-tuned hearing catches a thick swallow, a wheeze through his nose. A whimper.
Bucky’s reassurances are reflexive, Steve knows, more than they’re any true indication of how he feels.
“You sure?”
Silence for a long moment. Then: “Yeah.”
He sounds calmer, more sincere. Steve’s heels sink back onto the floor again.
“Need me to come in?”
“Uh-uh,” Bucky says, quick. “No. Go back to bed. Sorry.”
Steve puts his palm against the door, but doesn’t make any move to enter. He wants to respect Bucky’s boundaries more than he needs to reassure himself.
“Nothin’ to be sorry about,” Steve says. “You know where I am if you need anything.”
He drops his palm.
“Yeah, I do,” he hears Bucky say, and his voice is much closer, like he’s leaned right up against the door.
Steve wants so badly to go in there, to look Bucky in the eye, to touch him, ground him, gather him up in his arms –
It’s selfish, really. And useless.
Steve shakes it off and goes back across the apartment to his own room. He leaves the door open – as he has since Bucky’s been staying. He doesn’t do a hell of a lot more sleeping, though.
---
There’s a bowl sitting on the counter the next morning, covered with a towel. Steve stops in transit to the door on his way out for his morning run, stares at it for a moment. He takes a detour into the kitchen to investigate it, but before he even gets around the table, a voice stops him.
“Don’t touch it,” says Bucky. He’s snuck up quiet as the damn devil to lean in the kitchen doorway, arms folded. He’s already showered and dressed, though his feet are bare and his hair’s still damp, pulled back in a haphazard knot. He looks tired, but not as rough as some nights have left him. It’s a shallow consolation.
“What is it?” Steve asks, turning around.
“Something. Don’t worry about it.” He’s got a strange look in his eye, intense and challenging. Steve thinks boundaries and puts both hands up in surrender.
“Okay. Not touching.”
Bucky stares at him for a beat longer, then nods, swinging himself aside like a door to let Steve through. Steve exits, spends a good portion of his first three miles wondering what exactly Bucky is up to.
(For a full ten minutes he has a terrifying thought that Bucky is trying to create some kind of kitchen-cleaning-product bomb, but dismisses it when he realises how ridiculous that sounds. And remembers that Bucky has access to actual bombs, courtesy of Natasha, who he is unfortunately certain would really give him one if he asked nicely.)
When he opens the door to the apartment, the smell invades him.
Fresh baked bread, warm flour and yeast, home.
Steve was already crying when he came through the door.
“Please don’t yell this time, Mama,” he hitched out between sobs. He had blood all over his lip and a raw scrape down his left temple. “I can explain.”
Bucky trailed behind, at once shamefaced and resigned, hands buried deep in his pockets to hide the scrapes on his own knuckles.
They were twelve and it was September. Steve babbled, nervous: Mary Slattery’s blotchy, tear-streaked face was still stuck in his mind, the way her whole body was shaking with anger and embarrassment, the dark red stain all over the back of her pretty green dress. The cruel laughter of the boys, who had flung Emily and Annabel away from trying to protect her, so they could keep clutching at her skirt and drawing attention to it.
“They were callin’ her awful names, and snatching at her, and saying mean things for no reason. I couldn’t just let them get away with it.” Steve felt his lungs getting heavy, his breath wheezing. He’d done such a good job holding in his tears and keeping his breath until Bucky’d dragged him all the way home. Now he was losing this fight, too. “She couldn’t help it – you said, when you told me about it. She couldn’t help it, and it ain’t bad!”
His mother’s mouth was a thin pink line, but her eyes were soft.
“Come here, Steve.” She pulled out a kitchen chair and set it next to the sink; standard procedure for the care of wounds and subsequent enactment of punishment. Steve went, sitting in it like it would be electrified at any moment. She turned to Bucky, shrinking against the wall trying his best to blend into the flowered wallpaper.
“James,” she said. He looked up at her through his lashes. “Let me see your hands, too. Come on.”
Bucky went pink, but withdrew his hands from his pockets to show her the damage.
She set about wiping away dirt and icing bumps and bandaging scrapes. She sat them both, wrapped up and wrung out, at the table. Only when Steve had gotten his breath back and was staring absently at the blue checkered tablecloth did he notice how hungry he was.
His mama, like all mamas must, knew before he did apparently, because as soon as he looked up she was plunking down a big warm loaf of fresh bread. The familiar smell calmed him instantly.
“I was going to save this for dinner, but you might as well have some now, while it’s warm.” She sawed into it with her toothy wooden-handled knife, big thick slices that she slathered in butter and topped with just a sprinkle of sugar.
She sat down across from the boys, folded her dry, delicate hands one over the other in front of her. She leveled Steve with a serious look.
“What do I tell you all the time, little love?” she asked.
Steve looked down at his plate. “To choose my battles,” Steve said.
Bucky suddenly piped up at that, like he’d been holding the words inside a bottle and the cork had finally popped under its own pressure.
“Mrs. Rogers, I know we ain’t supposed to fight, and you know I’d be the first to try an’ drag him out, but those boys were awful mean. If it means anything I think Steve chose one that really mattered this time.”
“Oh, James.” His mother smiled, letting it crinkle her eyes. She reached across the table to ruffle his hair, then patted his cheek fondly. Bucky’s cheeks pinked up all over again.
“You’re good boys, the both of you,” she said, and Steve felt as warm in his heart then as the kitchen did. “I don’t want you picking pointless fights, but even I’ll admit sometimes there are people who need to get told a thing or two. Unfortunately, they’re usually the sort that won’t listen worth a lick.”
Steve smiled a little at that, and so did Bucky.
His mother sighed, smoothed the fabric of the tablecloth. “There’s always going to be boys like that, and it’s not going to stop when you leave the schoolyard.”
Something in his mother’s tone of voice, in her sigh, struck something inside Steve. He’d always thought of his mother as a rock, an unchallengeable force. This was the first time he realized that maybe there were adult bullies bigger and meaner and more formidable out there that had dared to put her down – and succeeded, if her sadness and resignation were any tell. But quickly her expression returned to the one Steve knew best – a fierceness borne of nothing but love and care. She reached across and clasped Steve’s little hand in hers.
“Here’s something I don’t want either of you to forget: more than ladies need protecting, they need respect. This sort of thing would happen a lot less often if more boys had brains like you two.”
Steve snuffled, the last of his dread draining away. “So you aren’t angry?”
His mother gave him a small, hidden smile. “I am, but not at you.” She plucked up the knife and drummed it on the dome of the bread. “Now, who wants another piece before I put it away?”
Steve and Bucky both pushed their empty plates forward at the same time, making his mother laugh.
Steve stops in the kitchen doorway. Sure enough, there is a fresh round loaf of bread sitting atop a wooden cutting board on the table, its crust brown and shiny, giving off just the barest wisps of steam.
“Buck?” Steve calls. “Did you make this?”
No answer. Steve peeks down the hallway; Bucky’s bedroom door is open, but he doesn’t seem to be home. Steve goes back into the kitchen.
Next to the loaf the butter dish is set out, along with a knife – and the sugar bowl.
Steve sits down with a little flutter in his stomach. It doesn’t stop him from eating three thick slices of bread, covered in butter and dusted with sugar.
---
Much later, in the small hours of the next morning, Steve hears a creak. He cracks one eye open, shifts his head on his pillow. Bucky’s standing in the doorway of his bedroom, silhouetted in the distant weak light of a lamp somewhere in the living room.
“Hey,” he croaks. “Y’alright?”
“Was it good?” Bucky’s voice is soft in deference to the darkness, but he sounds unmistakably wide awake. It takes Steve’s sleep-swaddled mind a moment to understand what he’s referring to.
“The bread?”
Bucky nods, the swaying tendrils of his loose hair indicating the movement.
“Yeah. Best I’ve had in a long time.” Steve shifts, moving to prop himself up on an elbow, ask Bucky why he made it or how much he remembers or what the reason is behind his sudden kitchen inclinations. But before he can even give a steady look, the shape of Bucky is gone from the doorway. Steve blinks, but lays back down, and before he’s aware he lets sleep pull him under once more.
---
Steve finishes off the bread in the morning, toasting it and using it to sop up his egg yolks. A hunk of it was missing, torn off the end, and he’s glad to assume it was Bucky. He hopes he’s inclined to make the bread again – he wasn’t lying when he’d told Bucky it was great.
Bucky doesn’t mention the food. He talks much easier these days, but he never brings up anything remotely connected to cooking, so Steve follows his lead and takes the hint not to mention it either.
But Steve keeps on finding food laid out somewhere in the kitchen that he didn’t make. A week after the bread Steve comes home to a meatloaf sitting innocuously on the stovetop in an oval baking dish, surrounded by roasted potatoes and carrots and accompanied by a rich brown gravy. A few days after that, Steve opens the fridge to find a stack of wax-wrapped sandwiches: fresh roast beef, topped with crisp, cool tomatoes. A pot of potato and leek soup appears, creamy and hot with specks of pepper through it. Then peach cobbler, sweet and still warm in the oven. Then a roasted chicken, browned and shining, legs crossed over its stuffing. Every dish is something Steve remembers eating when they were younger – but he always somehow winds up eating alone.
One afternoon, Sam goes to grab them some drinks, and Steve hears him call from the kitchen, “Hey, can I have one of these?”
“One of what?” Steve calls back.
“These cookies,” Sam says. “Unless you’re saving them for something.”
Steve casually flips backward over the couch and shuffles into the kitchen to find a plate piled high with cookies.
“Don’t think so. Help yourself.” Sam does so with enthusiasm, and Steve snags one for himself. They’re shortbread, crumbly and buttery soft, just a little sweet.
“Ain’t she sweet, see her walkin’ down the street –
– Yes I ask you very confidentially: ain’t she sweet?”
Bucky sang and swayed his hips. The blue dish towel stuffed in his back pocket wagged like a tail. Steve laughed, snorted, laughed harder. Bucky was a terrible singer, but Steve loved it. He had a date tonight; he’s gonna bring her a little handkerchief bindle filled with sugar cookies.
“Sweets for my sweetheart,” he’d tell her, and she’d go all pink and giggly, and leave a smear of red on his cheek when she kissed him. The thought of it made Steve’s stomach knot up in a way that had nothing to do with hunger or sickness.
He was wrapped up in his mother’s old quilt and another blanket over that, huddled in a lump on a chair tucked into the table, absorbing the warmth of the kitchen. He’d had a persistent rattle in his lungs for the last few days, and he finally felt well enough to drag his sorry hide out of bed. Bucky pulled the pan of cookies out of the oven and set them on a rack to cool. Once they were out, he ladled something else out of a pot that had been simmering on the back burner.
“Here,” said Bucky, setting down a large bowl and a spoon in front of Steve. “Eat up. If you’re not doing one-handed pushups by the time I come home after eating that, I’ll consider myself a roaring failure.”
Steve looked down into the bowl. It was a brownish concoction, full of lumps and bits of green, some flecks of black. But it was curling off steam, and it smelled like heaven.
“What is it?”
“Just eat it, it’s good for you.” Bucky took the towel out of his pocket and left the kitchen, still whistling the same tune. Steve could hear him rummaging in the wardrobe, clinking around at the washstand, all the familiar sounds of him spiffing up for a date.
Steve took a tentative spoonful of the concoction, and found that it tasted just as good as it smelled, no matter what it looked like. There was chunks of beef hiding in it, along with greens and carrots and potatoes, and perfectly sweet roasted onions. Steve tasted the fresh cream Bucky’d mixed into the stock – a rarity – and the kick of plenty of black pepper. He hadn’t had an appetite all day, but he was practically licking the bowl clean by the time Bucky came back in to wrap up his cookies.
“Aw, you hated it!” Bucky teased, catching Steve slurping the last of it off his spoon.
“Yeah, it was just awful,” Steve deadpanned.
“You want some more?”
Steve declined, feeling full enough, and nice and warm to boot. He squirmed down into his drape of blankets and watched as Bucky tied his cookies up into a clean blue handkerchief.
“Get some rest tonight,” Bucky told him. “Don’t think I didn’t see that you were working on that poster for the drug store. It ain’t due ‘til Monday, so lay off it for a night. Breathing in that varnish is no good.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Steve said, stubborn. “Go on already.”
“Dope!”
“Nag!”
Steve wandered into the living room eventually, curling up in the corner of the sofa and dozing off.
He was awakened by the sound of heavy feet in the hall, then the door unlocking and squeaking open. Steve glanced at the clock on the mantle. It said a quarter to eight, but – no, that couldn’t be right, it was still dark…
He untangled himself from the blankets and sat up just in time to see Bucky turning around from hanging his coat on the peg. Something was wrong with his eye; it was swelling up, turning yellow and green.
“Buck – what happened? What the –” Steve, still groggy with sleep, launched himself off the couch and stumbled toward him. He’d got Bucky’s face cradled in one hand, turning his chin up toward the light with the other to assess the damage.
“Funny story,” Bucky said, “Turns out Annie’s already got a fella. Forgot to tell me about him though. But I got acquainted with his fist real good.”
“Jesus, Buck. You gotta be more careful – you can’t go dumb for every pair of long legs and big eyes that swing your way.” Steve hustled him into the kitchen, wetting a rag down with water and chipping off some ice from the block in the icebox into it. He pressed it up to Bucky’s eye, ignoring his hiss of pain and annoyance.
“Aw, shush, you think I’m so good,” Bucky said. “Ain’t the first time I stepped out with a dame knowing I was her piece on the side. First time I got caught unawares though.”
“Bucky!”
Bucky waved a shooing hand at his scandalized tone, then reached into his pocket.
“Good news is, I still have the cookies!” He placed the little bundle on the table, undid the knot. Inside was a pile of golden crumbs, with a chunk sticking out here and there in the vague, shattered shape of a circle. Steve took one look at it and cracked up, laughing so hard he started wheezing. But Bucky was laughing too, just as hard.
“Ooh, ow, it hurts to smile, oh – stop, stop it Stevie! I’m wounded!” he groaned in between guffaws.
When he caught his breath, Steve plucked the largest crumble out of the pile and ate it. “Dang, Buck. They were real good, too. Too good for a two-timer at any rate.”
“Well, we sure ain’t gonna let ‘em go to waste,” Bucky said. “Gimme a minute.”
And Steve was watching him fly around the kitchen again. He got out a bowl and the old squeaky egg beater, and the rest of the cream. He frothed it all up into whipped cream and dashed it with sugar. Then he took the handkerchief of cookie crumbs and tipped it all into the bowl with the cream. He went to the drawer, fished out two spoons, and handed one to Steve.
“Down the hatch, pal,” he said, clinking his spoon with Steve’s.
Which is how they wound up digging into the strangest dessert Steve had ever had. Somewhere halfway through, they broke out the bourbon, and before Steve knew it the bowl was almost empty and he was almost drunk.
Okay, little more than almost. But he had a flush in his cheeks and was breathing just fine. The swelling on Bucky’s eye had gone down, turning purplish.
“Quit starin’ at it,” Bucky said. “Ain’t the first shiner I brought home. If anything you should be happy it wasn’t cuz of your big mouth this time.”
Steve shrunk into his chair. “Nobody ever told you you had to stick your big fat head in the middle of me and some other mook’s fist, y’know.”
“Aw, come on, don’t get sore.” Steve scowled at him. Bucky squinted back. “Y’got something here.” Bucky touched the corner of his lip. Steve’s hand went to his own face.
“Where? Here?” he asked.
“Nah, over a little.”
Steve moved his fingers. “Did I get it?”
“No, it’s right –” Bucky leaned over the table. “Here!”
And whapped a big handful of cream and cookie crumbs across Steve’s mouth.
“Gah!” Steve jolted back. “You son of a –”
Bucky was laughing so hard, he bent double. Steve popped out of his chair and rounded the table.
“Oh yeah, you wanna start something? I’ll show ya –”
And Steve laid a big, sticky, gritty smacker on Bucky’s cheek, like Bugs Bunny in the cartoons. He yawped and squirmed and tried to whip his head away, but Steve just followed, putting a knee up on Bucky’s thigh, trying to smear as much of the mess on Bucky as he could, without hurting his bruise any further. Bucky, though, was not to be outdone. Before Steve could pull away, Bucky grabbed him by the arms, yanked him closer and licked him.
Then licked him again, and again, like some big overeager dog.
Steve sputtered and gasped out a laugh. Bucky, giggling like a kid, licked him one more time and Steve made the mistake of turning his head. Bucky’s tongue slicked across Steve’s slightly open mouth.
They both froze.
The devil must’ve been in Bucky that night (or maybe it was in Steve – or maybe it was just the liquor in them both) because they locked eyes then, and didn’t look away.
Steve, heart beating wildly, leaned in and deliberately licked a sticky smear at the corner of Bucky’s mouth.
Bucky followed his mouth, and pressed his lips to Steve’s. Like he was – just like a –
They were kissing.
Now Bucky was licking into Steve’s mouth, tongue hot and lips full and soft. Steve hummed into it, confused, then again in a sudden wash of pleasure. Bucky shifted, still manhandling Steve’s smaller frame, and before he knew it his legs were draped on either side of Bucky’s, and Bucky’s arms had snaked their way under his to wrap tight around his back. Steve’s bony backside was propped on Bucky’s lap. His own hands had somehow found their way up into the short hairs at the back of Bucky’s head. Bucky was leading him, just like dancing: subtle nudges and adjustments, but Steve found it easy to follow, to fall into the rhythm he was setting.
Everything smelled like sugar, like bourbon and aftershave and warm breath.
Steve squirmed on Bucky’s lap. He was hard inside his pajama bottoms. He tried to shift again, away from Bucky’s belly so he wouldn’t feel it, but in doing so he felt the ridge of Bucky’s own hardness against the side of his thigh. Steve tensed up a little, but Bucky’s hands were on him, big and easy as always, like the way he was touching him now was no different from all the other times he’d ever touched him. Maybe it wasn’t. That thought made Steve’s heart thump loud inside him. Bucky must’ve felt him balk, because he pulled away.
“Okay,” Bucky said. “Okay, uncle! Uncle!” His eyes were bright and he still had a trace of laughter in his voice, like it was all just part of their usual horsing around. Slowly he withdrew his hands, let Steve climb off his lap. He wasn’t sure he wanted to, but Bucky was drawing a line here.
“I uh –” Steve tried, feeling like he should say something, but his brain was all locked up, all his thoughts slow like cold honey. Bucky was just looking at him, all soft and loose, spread-legged and limp-armed in the kitchen chair. Steve could see the ridge of his hard-on in his wool trousers, then realized he shouldn’t be looking. Especially since he was in a similarly shameful state.
Steve wasn’t stupid. He knew two fellas could get up to all kinds of sex stuff. But Bucky wasn’t like that, and Steve – well. He hadn’t really done much in the way of sex outside of jerking himself off. Girls didn’t pay attention to him, so he didn’t really pay attention to girls. Hadn’t even been all that interested in kissing. Didn’t think it would feel like – like that.
He should say something.
“It’s okay,” Bucky said instead, in the silence Steve left, his voice strangely soft. “We’re just bein’ stupid. It happens, don’t mean nothing.” Steve chanced a look at him. He wasn’t looking back, eyes fixed down at the floor. There was a sadness in the shape of him just then and Steve didn’t understand why. But it was gone the next moment when he did look up, reaching across to give Steve’s shoulder a jostle.
“Better get to bed,” he said. “It’s late. I’ll clean up.”
Steve nodded, still tangled up inside his own head, the bourbon not making it any easier to think or stay awake. He shuffled into the bedroom, and laid under his blankets listening to the soft clinking and shushing of Bucky tidying the kitchen. He kept running two fingers over his lips wondering if Bucky knew that was his first kiss, and if it even counted.
They never talked about it again, but Steve counted it, if only in his head.
---
When Sam leaves, Steve pops back out to the store. He comes back with a tub of ready-made whipped cream and spoons some into a bowl. He crushes a cookie or two on top of it and eats it thoughtfully as he wades through his email inbox. The whipped cream is a little too sweet, but it’s close enough to what he was thinking of that it gives him a little flutter in his heart.
Steve leaves the rest of the whipped cream in the fridge. Then he goes over to the tray of perfectly stacked cookies and crumbles a few into big crumbs.
In the small hours of the morning he hears Bucky rustling around the kitchen again. The refrigerator opens, and then Steve hears an unexpected noise: chuckling. Coming from Bucky.
Later, at a more reasonable waking hour, Steve peeks in the kitchen. Bucky is usually very meticulous in that he never leaves dishes in the sink, but there in the basin is one bowl and one spoon, both coated with white smears of whipped cream and the remains of a few buttery crumbs.
---
One rainy Sunday, Steve and Bucky are switching out the flickery old light fixture in the living room with a new one. Bucky’s always been more of the handyman, likes tinkering and knows what he’s doing almost innately, whereas in order not to screw it up the first three times, Steve would have to spend a day watching YouTube videos and reading tutorials before trying – and inevitably screw it up anyway.
It’s the lot of someone who only learns from making mistakes.
So Bucky is up on the ladder with a pink rubber glove over his metal hand, wrist deep in wires spilling from the ceiling when he curses softly and asks Steve to get him the Phillips-head screwdriver. Eager to finally be useful for more than breaking down boxes, Steve leaps up.
“Where is it?”
“It’s in my room,” Bucky says. “Needed to fix my desk chair.”
Steve hesitates. “Can I...?” He gestures toward Bucky’s room with a jerk of his thumb. He’s not been in Bucky’s room in months – Steve was steadfast in his conviction that Bucky should have an area all his own that Steve didn’t haunt. But Bucky rolls his eyes, waves his pink hand in a shoo of permission.
“It ain’t gonna swallow you whole. Just don’t go and nag me about the mess.”
So Steve goes.
Every flat surface save the bed in Bucky’s room is stacked with books and papers. His laptop sits on the desk in a rare clearing, closed and charging. Steve rummages through the papers and finds the screwdriver. But as he stacks them all back together, he notices what they are.
Scans of old ladies’ magazine pages, screenshots of Good Housekeeping archives, copies of handwritten recipe cards. Steve looks around. Stuck in among Bucky’s history books and biographies and Russian novels and science fiction anthologies are cookbooks. Better Homes and Gardens, Betty Crocker, Baking is Fun! by Ann Pillsbury – all from before or during the war. There are more, from inside the time they had not seen: Joy of Cooking in two thick black and white volumes, Mastering the Art of French Cooking and The Way to Cook, both by a woman named Julia Child. A lot of them looked secondhand, beat-up, stained pages and cracked spines. These books had seen other kitchens, had been leafed through by other hands stained with butter or oil, served as accidental spoon-rests or been splattered by sauces. They had history; they were used by people to make good things to fill up the people they cared about.
That’s what all of this has been, thinks Steve.
All this time he’d been so worried about Bucky chasing memories, when it was really the other way around. Bucky had been getting him to remember things even he’d forgot.
“I ain’t gettin’ any younger out here,” Bucky calls in a singsong.
Steve snaps out of it and goes to deliver the tool.
“Woulda been quicker if you didn’t bury it under a forest’s worth of paper, Barnes,” Steve says, handing it up. Bucky points warningly at him.
“Hey, what’d I say about nagging me?”
“Just making an observation,” Steve says, putting his hands up in surrender.
“Smartass,” Bucky mumbles, a plastic wire cap between his lips.
Steve laughs and goes back to stuffing the packing material into a recycling bag. The rain tats against the windows, but inside they’re warm and dry, and happy. If someone looked in on them right now, they might even think they were rather boringly normal. If he’d told the pair of them even six months ago that they’d be here, he would never have believed it possible. But here they were.
What a novelty. What a miracle.
Whatever version of the serum they had given Bucky wasn’t quite the same as Steve’s. There were certain differences that were especially salient – Steve’s version gave him rapid healing, incredible endurance, a near-eidetic mind, whereas Bucky’s seemed to have been targeted more toward increasing his strength, his pain tolerance, his muscle memory. Among other things, this meant Steve hardly had a scar on him that he didn’t have when he was smaller. Bucky however, despite healing as fast as Steve, was peppered with scars.
When he was finally able to speak again, Bucky had pulled off his shirt, stripped down to his shorts, came to stand in front of Steve.
“I want you to see,” he’d said. “Want you to know, so it doesn’t eat at you.”
Steve felt sick, being presented all at once with the evidence of what Bucky had been through – but he understood. Bucky still knew him well. He knew Steve would catch glimpses that Bucky couldn’t hide, would lay awake at night and wonder how and why and when each gouge and slash and tear had been made, and the pain of it would put a wall up between them.
They didn’t need any more barriers.
Steve stood and looked him over, circling slowly as Bucky stayed still, arms slightly raised.
He used to know Bucky’s body so well. Now, like everything else, it was changed by time that he hadn’t seen, circumstances he couldn’t have changed even if he were awake.
There were lots of different scars. Long, jagged white ones along his back, made by chains and knives. Smaller, thinner pinkish ones along the back of his neck from repeated surgical incisions. Gouges in his thighs from bullet grazes. The mottled flesh around his metal shoulder that spoke of fitting and refitting the hardware with no regard for aesthetic or comfort, only function.
Steve stopped when he had made a full revolution, eyes coming to rest on an odd, circular scar in Bucky’s upper abdomen. Bucky followed Steve’s gaze. It was the only one whose cause he couldn’t immediately identify. Bucky thumbed it.
“Feeding tube,” Bucky said, without Steve having to ask.
Steve nodded, because he couldn’t speak without fearing he would vomit or burst into tears. He sat on his unmade bed and watched numbly as he redressed himself. When he was clothed again Bucky sat down next to him.
“It’s why I don’t like eating,” he said. “Chewing still makes my teeth feel strange, swallowing too much at once makes me gag. Tastes are still too intense.” Bucky curled his toes in the carpet, twisted fingers in the rumpled sheets. He looked at once very young and very tired.
“Thank you...for telling me,” Steve said quietly. “Letting me see.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say. Nothing appropriate anyway. Nothing useful or forceful enough to convey just how angry and saddened he was. But Bucky knew anyway. He leaned slowly over, until his real shoulder was pressed against Steve’s. Steve stayed still, closing his eyes and focusing on the line of warmth against his arm. Physical contact was rare now between them, and Steve was adamant that Bucky be the one to initiate it. So he took whatever little he offered and held it sacred.
“Is there anything I can do to make it easier?” Steve asked. “Anything you want me to avoid cooking or ordering because of the smell, or anything you know you can stomach that I can get more of?”
Bucky looked down at his flexing toes. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve could see Bucky biting at his lip, thinking.
“I like that caramel ice cream you got last week,” he said, finally. “And I ate some of those round bread things Sam brought over.”
“The pita pockets?”
“Yeah.” Bucky kept his head down. “But uh. The chicken thing, in the orange sauce? I thought it smelled good at first but it made me gag after a while.”
Steve nodded, making a note of it in his head.
Bucky looked up at Steve. “Is that okay?”
Steve smiled. “That’s just fine.”
Bucky, to his delight, smiled back. It was small and broken-looking, but it was the first in a very long time.
---
Steve wanders through the supermarket. As always in such bright and crowded places, he feels a little overwhelmed. The fruit section alone is daunting; he counts at least twelve different types of apples alone before he decides on the right ones, or at least the closest he thinks would be best after consulting the internet. It occurs to him that Bucky’d had to have come here at least a few times to fetch ingredients for the things he’s cooked lately. Steve wonders how he was able to bear it, until he realizes that it’s a twenty-four-hour store.
So that’s where Bucky’s been going in the small hours. One more mystery solved.
He stares at the array of nuts at the end of the produce section. Bags, jars, plastic containers, organic, raw, roasted, dried. He blinks, then chooses ones that look like a balance between the least amount of work (already shelled) but without much else added (pass on the wasabi-dusted air-roasted sea-salt whatevers).
There’s still so much he wants to try, even if only to say he has. There’s cereals that are more candy than actual food, little chocolate pieces and marshmallows and sugar frosting. There are weird fruits from tropical places that are one color on the outside, and a completely different one in the middle. There’s every kind of meat he can think of from pig’s feet to filet mignon, stacked in bright refrigerated displays along the back wall of the market. There’s an entire section that’s nothing but bottled beer, each label more visually interesting than the last, infused with berries or citrus, dark and light and every shade in between.
Soon, he thinks. Not now, though. For now he just gets what he planned to get.
But he does grab a Hershey bar on a whim as he heads for the checkout. Eats half on the walk back to the apartment; leaves the other half on the counter.
It’s gone by evening, though he hadn’t heard or seen Bucky take it.
There was a base in Czechoslovakia somewhere, a blue-tiled shower room where they’d had their first douse under hot water in three weeks. They laughed and whooped and sighed as they scrubbed themselves down. Falsworth and Morita left, whipping their towels at Dum Dum all the way through the locker room, leaving the pair of them alone. Bucky eventually went quiet and a little strange, like he had been every now and then since they’d been out on their first few ops with the other Howlies. But it was a lot more awkward when they were alone together, in a way that it never had been before.
“What?” Steve asked.
Bucky snapped his head away. “Nothin’.” He turned the water off and grabbed his towel, turning away. “Just – still not used to seeing you like this, is all.”
“Still the same me,” Steve said.
Bucky snorted, still with his back to Steve. “Yeah.”
“Look.”
Bucky only did so to give him a disapproving glower, but it caught his eye when he realized Steve was pointing at his abdomen, just above the dingy white of his towel slung round his hips. A long white scar intersected with the ghosts of stitches rested along the bottom curve of his stomach.
“Appendix, third grade. Remember? I was in the hospital for a week and you brought me a big sticky handful of candy every day I was there. We shared that melted Hershey bar, licked it right off the foil.”
Bucky’s brows un-knotted just a bit, but his eyes were still hard, his mouth pursed. Steve lifted his right arm, pointed to just above his elbow where there was a tiny divot.
“Teddy O’Brien’s snaggletooth, when we were sixteen and he said that awful thing about Abe Roth. First time I ever landed a hit that shut anybody up without you having to help.”
“And it was an accident,” Bucky grumped, but Steve wanted to beam at him for finally getting a reaction. “You were aiming for his nose and missed.”
Steve hitched up his towel slightly and pulled up his knee, pointing at the roughened patch below his patella.
“Kick-the-can, the summer I turned eleven. I saved everyone from Jail, and all I got was a bloody knee.”
“That’s the savior business for you,” Bucky said, trying for snotty but falling short enough that Steve knew he didn’t really mean to be mean. “And yet you still ain’t given up on it yet.”
Steve gave a small laugh. Bucky sat down on the bench Steve had his foot propped up on. He reached over, ran his thumb across Steve’s rough knee. Steve stayed very still.
“Still the same,” Bucky said, as if to himself.
Autumn was rolling in, foggy and wet, but Bucky was by his side again, nudging him on the walk back to camp, offering him the other half of his chocolate bar, like he always used to. They were both of them hungry all the time, and uncomfortable, and cold, and scared. It would only get worse as they went on. But in those few moments over too soon he was satisfied for the first time in a long time.
It had nothing to do with the chocolate.
---
Steve’s first attempt is a disaster.
It comes out of the oven sunken and black, the house smelling like burnt sugar.
The next attempt is still liquid inside, splatters all over the table when Steve tries to turn it out of its pan. The next few times it either crumbles to bits, tastes like nothing but a lump of flour, or comes out wet and soggy on the bottom.
He decides to put on on hold for the rest of the week – nearly an entire carton of eggs and a whole bag of flour is more than he wanted to waste, and that’s what prompts him to stop. He won’t give up – but maybe he needs to do more research first.
This is harder than he thought. Like a lot of things, his mother made it look easy – and so did Bucky.
It was a long way through the mountains. Three more days, and because of the thin air and the climbing, they’d used up all but one more day of rations. Though Bucky kept trying to slip an extra M-unit into his pack, Steve refused to eat any more than the rest of them, even though he was supposed to eat twice that. He’d been hungry before, enhanced metabolism or not. Didn’t matter.
Except that inevitably, as often did when food was scarce, the boys couldn’t stop goddamn talking about it, and Bucky was the worst.
“Brisket,” he was saying as they climbed up through a rocky pass. “Oh my god, my Gramma made the best beef brisket you ever wrapped your lips around. It had this gravy… Oh, and my Ma’s chicken – Stevie, you’ve had my Ma’s chicken, with the thyme and the parsnips and carrots and all that.”
“Please Sarge,” Dum Dum groaned. “Shut the fuck up or I’m liable to take a bite out of Frenchie’s behind thinkin’ he’s turned into a goddamn ham.”
“Les porcs ne devraient pas manger leur propre espèce, il leur fait déments,” Dernier retorted over his shoulder.
“Isn’t he already, though?” Gabe said, and they laughed.
“Buck, really,” said Steve, in only half-feigned desperation. “If you don’t have one of your Ma’s chickens in your pack then stop talking about it.”
Bucky goosed him in the ass, but stopped talking. For about ten minutes.
“Steve, you know what I could really go for?”
Steve sighed, but humored him. Being distracted by being hungry was marginally better than being distracted by the cold or the pain in his legs from climbing. “What could you really go for?”
“Your Ma’s apple cake,” Bucky answered.
Steve didn’t know what to say to that; the last time they’d had it was years ago on Steve’s 18th birthday, before his mother had gotten sick. Steve was a little surprised Bucky even remembered it. But Bucky was like that – he remembered, even stupid little things that anyone else would think meant nothing.
They reached the top of the pass and without discussion fell into a heap to rest. Even Steve was winded; he could only imagine how exhausted the rest of them were. Bucky tucked himself in behind an outcrop of rock that blocked the worst of the wind, and Steve fit himself in right beside, thinking not for the first time that it’d be easier if he was still the right size.
“I could go for some of Ma’s cake too,” Steve said.
Bucky looked over at him, something light in his eyes, something real that wasn’t the bluster of putting on a cheerful mask for the benefit of the other boys’ morale. “Yeah?”
“Sure,” Steve said, bumping Bucky’s shoulder. “Tell you what. When we get home, it’ll be the first thing I make you. Even if it ain’t anywhere near either of our birthdays.”
Bucky’s eyes traced over him. He knew as well as Steve did that the odds of them being sent home at the same time were slim to none – and the odds of one or both of them not making it back at all were too damn high.
But all he did was bump Steve’s shoulder back. “Promise?”
“Cross my heart.”
“All right then, Rogers,” he said. “I’m holdin’ you to it.”
---
He wakes up the next morning and the house smells warm. Cinnamon, sugar, butter.
Steve sits up, then swings his legs out from under the covers and follows the scent into the kitchen. On the table is a ring-shaped cake, topped with candied walnuts, soft browned slices of apples peek through the sugar dusted along the sides.
Steve stares at it. It looks and smells exactly like the one his mother used to make. He can see her in his memory: already dressed in her whites for the night shift, using her faded floral potholders to pull it out of the oven.
“Not until tomorrow, Stevie. It always tastes better once it’s cooled anyhow.”
“Well, you gonna wait til it jumps off the plate on its own or you gonna cut yourself a piece already?”
Steve turns. Bucky’s standing in the doorway, smiling ever so slightly. He takes a step closer. Then another. He’s nearer now than he’s been in weeks. Steve is stock-still, one hand resting on the back of a chair. He doesn’t dare move.
Bucky picks up a fork and digs a chunk out of the top of the cake. He holds the fork out in offer, metal hand cupped beneath it to catch errant crumbs. Steve hesitates; Bucky arches an eyebrow and moves the fork closer to Steve’s face.
Steve leans down, and without breaking eye contact with Bucky he closes his lips around the forkful of cake. Bucky slides the tines from between his lips slowly, carefully.
Steve chews. Soft, tart apples, sweet sandy sugar, toasty nuts. It tastes exactly like his mother’s. Steve feels a prickle behind his eyes as he swallows.
“Well?” Bucky says.
“Just like Ma’s,” Steve says. Bucky’s smile twitches wider. “But –”
“But what?”
I was supposed to make it for you, he thinks, but the thought makes his eyes burn even more and his throat go tight.
“It isn’t my birthday,” Steve says instead. It comes out a little wobbly.
“Ain’t mine either,” Bucky says.
“So what’s the occasion?”
Bucky is still only inches away now. Steve feels his arm wind around his waist before he even sees it, and then Bucky is tucking the rest of his body up against Steve’s, until they’re touching from thigh to chest.
Then Bucky presses his lips softly to the pillow of Steve’s lower lip.
Steve has forgotten how to breathe. He needs to swallow again but his throat has gone dry and he knows it will sound like a gulp to Bucky, so close. Too close.
Not close enough.
Bucky’s eyes are bright, mischievous. Expectant. It’s a dare.
Nothing ever changes.
Steve dips his face down and crushes their lips together.
When they draw back, Bucky’s already looking Steve in the eye. He wonders if he even ever closed them.
“Is this occasion special enough?” Bucky says. He’s trying for cocky, as usual, but this close Steve can hear the waver of uncertainty. It’s what finally gets him to wrap his own arms around Bucky and tuck himself into the crook of his neck. More than bread or apple cake, it’s him that is the smell of home.
“Yeah,” he breathes against Bucky’s warm skin. “Absolutely.”
Bucky’s lips continue to press kisses all along Steve’s jaw, the curve of his neck, behind his ears. Steve’s heart is beating fit to burst and his insides feel as if they’ve turned to warm syrup. All the strength enhancements in the world couldn’t keep his knees from going weak at the sweetness of Bucky’s kisses, the way his hands move. Though they’re not a matched set anymore, they’re still all Bucky in the way they settle naturally on him; one on his hip, the other splayed against the small of his back.
“So tell me,” Bucky says between nips at Steve’s earlobe. “Just how many bags of apples had to be sacrificed at the hands of your abysmal baking skills?”
It takes Steve longer than it should for the words to reach him through the haze of it all.
“Hey!” Steve says sharply, though it’s rather tempered by the fact that he still has his own arms locked around Bucky’s waist, unwilling to let go even in offense. “Listen, I was practicing. I wanted it to be perfect.” Steve casts his eyes aside. “You deserved as much, after all the time I made you wait.”
“Hey,” Bucky says, his turn to be sharp. He lifts his hand enough to turn Steve’s chin so that he’s facing him again. “Don’t start that. Okay?” He doesn’t look away until Steve nods. “I’m here now,” he says. “Here I am. Here we are.”
Steve has to bury his face in Bucky’s shoulder for a few more minutes until he’s sure he can breathe again without starting to sob. Bucky lets him, holds him still and secure in the middle of the quiet kitchen.
Finally Steve looks at him again. “You gonna have some too?”
Bucky only looks a little nervous when he glances at the cake. Then he pulls away and sits down at the table, kicking out the seat next to him for Steve. Steve sits, but can’t resist scooting just a little closer than usual, like he can’t stand to be too far from him now he remembers how nice it is to be so close.
Bucky picks up the fork in front of him, but instead of digging into the cake, he nudges it across the tabletop toward Steve. His finger tings against the utensil, metal on metal. It takes Steve a second to realize what he’s asking for.
They finish the entire thing, never eating off the fork they’re holding. And taking plenty of breaks to kiss away the stray sugar on each other’s lips.
When they’re done, Bucky gets up and presses a few buttons on the oven, then goes over to the cupboard and starts pulling things down.
“Come on,” he says to Steve, gesturing to the little city of ingredients and bowls he’s laid out on the counter. “Your turn to make it for me.”
Steve is sure his face looks all kinds of dumb-puppy happy when he goes to stand next to Bucky.
“Okay,” Steve says, cracking his knuckles and picking up a measuring cup. “Where’s the recipe?”
Bucky taps his temple with two fingers. “All in here, Stevie. It’s all in here.”