Chapter 1
Steve is a fucking pervert, and he feels absolutely terrible about it.
His best goddamn friend in the whole world, the one person who knows Steve completely, knows him and loves him and would do anything for him, till the end of the line, is finally back. He’s back from hell, from decades of being treated as a tool, a war machine, a thing, and he needs a friend, some support, and all Steve can do is fucking objectify the man.
He’s disgusted with himself.
But he can’t seem to stop. Can’t stop staring at Bucky’s shoulders, his chest, his waist, at how fucking big he is, and Jesus, do you know how often Captain fucking America gets to feel small? Never.
Steve Rogers used to feel small all the time.
And he had hated it, then. Hated every moment of it except when he was with Bucky, when Bucky would throw a lazy arm over his shoulders, or curl up against him on a cold night in their apartment. Wrap his arms around Steve as they slept, Steve’s crooked back pulled up close to Bucky’s chest, to the little secret softness of Bucky’s tummy that he’d kept right up until the war had stolen it from him, like it had stolen everything. Back then, next to Bucky, Steve would feel small and it was okay. More than okay. It was safe. Warm. Good. Everything that he wanted.
And now he never feels small, never feels much of anything except Captain America Feelings—which, most days, are just righteous anger and a constant low-grade desire to punch someone who deserves it. Until now, that is. Now he feels small again—now that Bucky is back and he’s somehow still big, bigger than Steve, still larger than life in every way that counts and in all the ways that Steve can’t quite articulate.
It’s been six months since Steve got Bucky back, and he’s been ogling the man pretty much the entire time. Staring at the way his shirts pull across his chest. The way his shoulders—flesh and metal both—are a bit too broad for all of his jackets, so that he always looks a little uncomfortable in them.
And—fuck Steve sideways, this is the worst best part—the way that sweet softness around Bucky’s belly is back, like before the war, only bigger, only attached to a supersoldier’s body this time. Every time Bucky sits down, an inch or two of pudge—nothing, really, but god it’s everything to Steve—spills over his waistband, a perfect little pooch of chubbiness on that muscular frame.
Steve is absolutely beside himself. And Bucky—poor, traumatized Bucky, Steve keeps reminding himself—just makes the whole fucking thing worse. It’s like the man purposely sets out to drive Steve to distraction. The tight t-shirts. Or worse, the fucking shirtlessness, the absolute and total lack of modesty. The gratuitous food consumption—cheeseburgers, French fries, every sort of fast food known to man, huge slices of pizza shining with grease, takeout containers of Italian food, leaning towers of lasagna and golden calzones—all of it makes its way into Steve’s apartment and down Bucky’s throat.
It’s a perfect hell. Steve is living in a purgatory of his own making, where he can neither avoid seeing it nor manage not to react to it.
*
Steve is on pins and needles, waiting for Bucky to return to the apartment. He’s just now started going out on his own, little forays into the city by himself. Steve is so proud of him. Blown away by Bucky’s durability, by all the progress he’s made in these six months, from sullen and silent Winter Soldier to a man who—sometimes, at least a little—resembles the Bucky Barnes Steve once knew. And yes, this version of Bucky is also a remorseless killer, often baffled by things that should have been self-evident, like morality and basic questions of right and wrong—but still, a reasonable facsimile of Bucky Barnes.
For Steve, it is more than enough.
When the door to the apartment finally opens, it’s nearly 9:00 and Steve is out of his mind, blatantly pacing from the living room to the kitchen and back again.
“Okay there?” Bucky asks, taking in Steve’s tense posture and obviously reading it for what it is.
“Uh—yeah, yeah, of course,” Steve says, because he can’t say, “Oh thank god you made it home, I was so worried that something would happen to you, invincible cyborg assassin o’ mine.”
“Relax, Steve,” Bucky says, striding into the living room. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed since the 1930s—that patented Bucky strut, all rolling hips and swagger. He did it when he was picking up girls at the dance hall, when he was marching off to whatever godforsaken shithole in Europe, and when he was dealing out death as Hydra’s favorite weapon. It had made Steve ache every time, too.
He sits down, depositing two paper sacks of Thai food onto the coffee table and then flopping back against the couch, running his metal hand through his hair. “You hungry? I got pad thai.”
“You get that a lot,” Steve says, off-hand.
“Only thing on the menu I know how to pronounce,” Bucky says, shrugging. “That and spring rolls.”
Steve nods, smiling a little. In spite of himself, Steve lets his eyes wander down to Bucky’s waist, where his red henley—his ridiculously tight red henley, and where did that thing even come from, it has never fit, not six months ago and certainly not now—is clinging perfectly to the soft curve of his belly.
Steve sits down, digging through a bag and pulling out several enormous containers of pad thai. “Those are yours,” Bucky says, gesturing to the packages Steve is holding. Then he digs a couple more out for himself, props his feet—boots and all—onto the coffee table, and digs in.
When Bucky polishes off the containers on his lap, Steve hands over at least half of his own. Bucky accepts it without comment, eating with a sort of mechanical efficiency. Steve eyes him, trying to ascertain if Bucky is enjoying it, taking pleasure in it, or just doing it.
It’s a little hard to tell, honestly. Sometimes he’s more Winter Soldier than others. However Bucky feels about it, the upshot is that his stupid fucking henley is stretched even more tightly over his belly by the time he finishes.
Steve excuses himself for bed early, for another night of fevered, guilt-ridden jerking off.
Fucking Bucky. Fucking stupid shirt. Fuck.
*
Steve thinks Bucky is about halfway broken, Bucky is fairly certain. He knows this from the way Steve looks at him, pretty-boy face all screwed up with concern, like Bucky might be dying of cancer.
Bucky isn’t sure how to respond to it, just like he isn’t sure how to respond to a lot of things, now. Before Hydra—well, before Hydra is blurry at best. And while he was there, while he was the Winter Soldier? Then, he didn’t really have to respond. He had missions. He had objectives. He did his job with brutal, emotionless accuracy. And no one was concerned.
But now, here with Steve, he is suddenly the subject of intense caring and scrutiny, and Bucky has no idea what to do with it.
He also isn’t sure what the appropriate response is when you know that your best friend wants to fuck you.
But that is the current situation. That much, Bucky knows.
He knows they never fucked, before. All the same, he knows that Steve wants him, now. And maybe Steve wanted him before, too—Bucky can’t remember, doesn’t know if he ever knew.
Steve is easy to read, his handsome face like an open book, most of the time. Bucky knows that Steve’s pupils dilate around Bucky, that Steve’s eyes follow him around the room. He knows that Steve gets incredibly anxious when Bucky goes out alone, and he knows that Steve tries to hide that anxiety whenever he can.
He doesn’t know how to proceed with this information, though.
As the asset, sometimes his missions required him to be sexually available to a target, to read sexual intent. Like everything else he did for Hydra, he was very good at it. He could be good at it now, too.
If Steve was a target, if this was a mission, Bucky would just follow Steve right into his bedroom, where Bucky knows with unerring predatory instinct that Steve is jerking off. He’d just walk right in, climb into bed with him, be done with it.
Except Steve isn’t a mission. Not anymore.
So Bucky pretends he doesn’t know Steve is jerking off in the next room. Instead, he wanders into the kitchen and fishes a container of ice cream out of the freezer. Steve buys plain vanilla bean, smooth and creamy and simple. Bucky has gone with him to the grocery; he’s seen how much is available, a whole wall of freezers full of every flavor imaginable. It’s weirdly endearing that Steve buys vanilla anyway.
Bucky ends up finishing off the carton, sitting on the couch. He’s not hungry—but it’s good, and it feels good, eating just for the hell of it.
His stomach hurts by the time he goes to bed, but he doesn’t mind. Sleep doesn’t always come easy—hasn’t, since 1941—but a full belly helps. He curls up in Steve’s spare bedroom, his big body pulled small and tight in the fetal position, cradling his swollen tummy.
*
Steve knows Bucky is eating—like, eating a lot. He knows because he does the grocery shopping, so he knows exactly how much food is disappearing from his kitchen, and at what rate. He knows that Bucky likes salt and vinegar potato chips enough to finish off a bag in one evening, but that he ate one Dorito—one single chip—and put the bag right back in the pantry, never to touch it again. He knows that Bucky likes awful microwavable shit, like single serve burritos and fish sticks, and would probably subsist on that dreck a good deal of the time if Steve didn’t cook or suggest takeout.
He knows that Bucky can take down a carton of ice cream in two nights.
And Jesus fucking Christ, that shouldn’t be sexy, but it is, and Steve cannot stop thinking about it.
Which is probably why, finally, Steve decides to sort-of-accidentally-but-actually-totally-deliberately get up to get a drink of water tonight and catch Bucky on the couch, ice cream carton in hand.
Steve’s been in bed maybe half an hour when he decides to get up, and he knows Bucky is still awake, still in the living room. In fact, Steve’s almost one hundred percent certain that he heard Bucky open the freezer just a few minutes after Steve went into his room.
When he pads out into the living room, he’s not surprised in the least to find Bucky sprawled out the length of the couch, carton of ice cream balanced in his metal hand, scraping the bottom of the container with a spoon.
He’s not surprised, but it still takes his breath away. Bucky looks—he looks so achingly, painfully good. His face is tilted down, peering into the carton, and the pose highlights the softness around his jaw that you could probably call a double chin, if you wanted to be technical about it. His t-shirt—plain black, no frills—is straining pretty much everywhere, from his shoulders to his chest to—dear god—his tummy, where the fabric is pulled so taut that the indention of his belly button shows. And the whole thing is made worse by the obvious tightness of his jeans, which just pushes his little belly out further, over the straining waistband.
Fucking Bucky. Steve cannot endure this shit.
“Hey,” Steve says, slipping through the living room and into the kitchen, feeling like he needs to follow through on his whole getting a drink ruse.
Bucky, for his part, doesn’t appear concerned by Steve’s presence, and just continues spooning ice cream into his mouth. “Hey.”
Glass in hand, Steve comes back into the living room and picks up Bucky’s booted feet so that he can sit down on the end of the couch. Bucky doesn’t move to sit up, so Steve just drops his big feet back into his lap. He gives Buck shit about putting his boots on the furniture all the time, but Bucky seems disinclined to be barefoot anywhere other than in bed. Steve had actually wondered if Bucky wore his boots there, too, until one morning he’d seen Bucky putting them back on and realized that he did, at least, remove them for sleeping.
“Can’t sleep?” Bucky asks, eyeing Steve as he shoves another bite of ice cream into his mouth.
Steve shrugs, taking a drink of water just for something to do. “Guess not.”
Bucky observes him for a minute, looking watchful but not uneasy. “Want some?” he finally asks, extending the ice cream in Steve’s direction.
Steve peers into the container, which is nearly empty, and grins. “There’s none left, pal.”
Bucky tips the carton back toward himself. “Not true. There’s at least five spoonfuls left.”
“You eat them,” Steve says, his voice sounding quiet even to his own ears. A little tentative, maybe.
Bucky gives him a strange, considering look, and then proceeds to polish off the last few bites. He starts to lean forward, like he’s going to set the empty container on the coffee table, but stops, dropping his flesh hand to the side of his tummy with a little breathless ‘oomph.’ Like maybe he’s too full to move like that, like maybe he’s fuller than he expected.
Steve inhales sharply, unable to stop it.
Bucky sets the container down on the floor without getting up, then rests his metal hand on his belly, as well, pushing lightly against it. Watching Steve with his blue killer’s eyes the whole time.
Steve swallows hard and wonders how much Bucky realizes.