Check
Steve turned the corner and stopped.
There was a black car parked across from their house. Usually this would kick off all sorts of alarm bells in him, but he thought he recognized the silhouette in the driver’s seat through the tinted windshield. Still, when he approached the car, he did it with caution.
As he drew up alongside, the passenger window rolled down in clear and open invitation. He moved slightly faster until he could lean down and peek inside.
“Captain Rogers,” Happy greeted him; balding, pushing seventy, but still pleasant and polite as ever.
“Hey, Happy,” Steve said. “Do you want to come inside?”
“Sorry, sir,” Happy said, sounded genuinely apologetic he couldn’t accept Steve’s offer, “but Miss Stark’s asked me to stay out here.”
“Ah." Steve nodded sagely. "Can I get you some water or something?”
“No, no, I’m just fine.” When Happy smiled, his cheeks bunched up the crow’s feet at the corner of his eyes nicely; Steve made a mental note to sketch him sometime. “I have a coffee and my StarkPad, I’m all set.”
“All right. Text if you need anything,” Steve said, straightening back up. Happy rolled up the window as he crossed the street, absently shaking his keys to make them jangle as he climbed the steps. He fumbled his keys as he tried to get them into the lock and dropped them on his shoe, taking his sweet time bending down, picking them up, and then unlocking the door.
Bucky was leaning against the kitchen bar, his legs crossed casually at the ankles, one arm propped up on the surface and the other holding a mug, the one that Steve painted during Morgan’s tenth birthday party: emerald-green slopes and sapphire-blue seas and a topaz-blue sky, inspired by the view of green fields cascading down to the sea from the hill they walked up on their second honeymoon to Ireland.
On a normal day, Steve might have stopped in the doorway just to look his fill. But today, his attention was arrested by Morgan Stark.
She was sitting on the couch, with her backpack leaned up against her legs. Both hands were curled around the sister mug Bucky had painted that same day, with its mottled gradients of black and navy and blues, daubed all over with a sponge except for the white star in the center. There was an air of vague misery radiating off of her.
“Hi, Morgan.” Steve couldn’t stop the way his voice went soft with sympathy. “Uh—” he glanced over at Bucky. “How are…you?” It came out as a question—well, even more of a question; less how are you doing and more should I even be asking how you’re doing?
“Good,” Morgan mumbled, with every ounce of angst her fifteen-year-old body could muster.
“Hey, Steve,” Bucky said, shooting him a quick grin. “Morgan just stopped by for a chat.” He reached out with his free hand and beckoned him over, and Steve went, pretending not to notice the way Morgan’s eyes snapped to them or the way she relaxed a little when all Bucky did was touch Steve’s hip, running a proprietary thumb over the seam of his jeans.
“What about?” Steve asked, and she stiffened up again, hunching over her drink.
“Oh, you know,” Bucky said, shrugging, even though if Steve knew he wouldn’t’ve asked. But he held his tongue from saying so, because Bucky locked eyes with Steve, and there was a subtle but significant weight to them. “Just school.”
The tension dissipated from Morgan’s body. Steve let his eyes roam Bucky’s face one more second, and then he shot Morgan a smile over his shoulder. “Got it,” he said, and then bumped Bucky’s shoulder with his own. “Well, I’m gonna go up to the studio. Yell if my music’s too loud.”
“Happily.”
Steve rolled his eyes and thumped him again, but he took two steps away and then Bucky’s hands were on his waist and he was hauling him closer, close enough to press their lips together.
When they parted, Steve shot Bucky another look, trying to infuse it with as much meaning as Bucky’s did earlier. From the way Bucky’s mouth quirked, he got the message.
Steve headed up to his studio on the third floor of their little Park Slope townhouse. He turned on the radio, set to the ‘oldies’ station which, he was amused to note, was starting to occasionally seed their playlists with music that would've been fashionable when he and Bucky finally escaped from HYDRA and met the Avengers for the first time; it was the nature of time, he supposed, that everything that was new became old.
He was in the middle of painting a sign for a bake sale the Young Avengers were putting on. The apple pie in the center was done, but there was a half-finished miniature tableau of apples and wheat surrounding it. The curved lines of apples and a few golden heads of wheat, fat and heavy with grain, were in place, just waiting for color and detail, but he set the sign aside for now in favor of pulling out his sketchbook. He doodled Happy's face, with its wisps of silver hair clinging above his ears and its Tony-induced stress lines mapping a life lived in loyalty and service, then turned to another page and drew Morgan—smiling so bright that her eyes were squeezed shut, her arms looped loosely around a featureless figure in a stumbling half-hug. He drew some loose rectangle shapes on her cheeks and a flag in one hand, but left both undetailed for now.
He was bobbing his head along to crashing drums and scream-sung lyrics when he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. A moment later, there was a knock on the door. He flicked off the radio and called, “Come in.”
Bucky opened the door and poked his head through, then came inside. Steve got up off of his stool and let Bucky draw him in for a kiss, far filthier than the brief one they exchanged downstairs.
“She left?” he murmured as soon as their lips parted.
“She’s doing homework,” Bucky answered as he slipped his hands into the back pockets of Steve’s jeans, nuzzling along the line of his throat, kissing his way down to his love bite.
Steve hummed approvingly as he tilted his head back for better access. “Hope I didn’t interrupt.”
“Nah. We were winding down. If I wanted you to stay out longer I would’ve texted you.”
Fair point. Steve’s next question was, “Everything all right, then?”
Bucky was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Hard to say? But the immediate crisis is over. I think.”
His wording made Steve’s brows furrow. “Crisis? What’s the matter?”
“I can’t say,” said Bucky, pulling back far enough to make an apologetic face at Steve, his mouth and nose and eyes scrunching unattractively, and Steve wanted this man carnally. To make matters worse, he continued, “If she were our daughter, I think I would’ve pressed her to tell you, or let me tell you, but right now, I think letting her take things at her own pace is more important, you know?”
Fuck. Steve was so far gone on Bucky he was in Chicago. “Yeah, I think it’s fair,” he said, trying to remain measured even though he was so steamed up it felt like he was on fire. If Morgan wasn’t downstairs doing her homework on the kitchen table Steve would’ve broken an easel in his haste to jump Bucky’s stupid denim-clad bones.
For now, he settled for clasping Bucky’s face in his hands and drawing him in for a kiss full of obscene intent. Bucky laughed into the kiss, the old coot. “The hell was that for?” he asked, even as he squeezed two handfuls of Steve’s ass appreciatively.
“What, you complaining?”
“Didn’t say that.” Bucky grinned at him, lopsided and loopy. “Just wondering what’s got you writing checks I have to wait to cash.”
“Teaching you patience,” Steve joked, before amending, “No, I was just thinking—”
“Call the presses,” Bucky muttered. Steve pinched his hip, making him yelp.
“Shut up, you big jerk, else your check may bounce.”
“You can bounce my check any day,” and then, “Fuck, sorry. Go on, you were saying?”
Bucky’s tomfoolery was making Steve grin, though, and he rewarded Bucky with another kiss before pulling back to say, “I was saying—you’d make a great dad.”
Bucky’s eyes went deep and mournful. “Oh,” he said. “You think?” and Steve understood, he got it; they’d spoken about kids in the abstract, and they did have children that grew up without them, but—there was an ocean-sized gulf between having kids and being a dad.
“You’re great with Morgan,” Steve said softly, but Bucky was shaking his head already.
“I’m great with Morgan ‘cause I’m just Uncle Bucky. I’m not sure—” he looked away. “Just not sure if a traumatized ex-assassin with a body count in the hundreds is the greatest candidate to be a dad.”
“Hi, pot, my name’s kettle.” Steve stuck out his hand like he was meeting Bucky for the first time. It was a little awkward because of the closeness, but the way Bucky rolled his eyes meant that he got the message, and he said,
“Hey, kettle. You come here often?” and he and Steve shook hands like strangers.
“Only when my husband’s being a jerk,” Steve said, which made Bucky bark out a laugh.
“Leave him, gorgeous, you’re too pretty for a guy like that.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Steve demurred, “I’ve been with him so long it’d be such a hassle to divorce him. He’s a jerk but he’s my jerk.”
“Lucky son of a bitch. Bagging a smokeshow like you who’s willing to put up with his bullshit.” Bucky leaned forward, nuzzling his throat, and Steve tilted his head up to the wooden rafters of the ceiling, letting Bucky lay soft kisses from his jaw to his collarbone.
“I’m the lucky one,” Steve said softly, before leaning back. Bucky looked up, and he cupped his face with one hand, stroking a thumb along his well-loved cheek. He liked the way Bucky’s long hair made him look dangerous and untamed, but this shorter haircut revealed more of his face and the natural softness that smoothed out his square jaw and aquiline nose. His sketchbooks were filled with Bucky, always, betraying the hours that he spent in repose daydreaming about the boy, the youth, the man he was in love with, but there were some pages where individual features of his face would float amongst the negative space, like puzzle pieces, or not—puzzle pieces had one place where they belonged; a better metaphor would be paints, maybe, waiting to be laid down to form different pictures, blended together, chosen from the great sliding spectrum of forms, with Bucky on one side and on the other—himself.
Steve had been quietly ready for a while. But Bucky was weighed down by baggage that Steve didn’t have and could never really, truly understand—despite his pot and kettle joke, he knew it wasn’t the same; Bucky suffered far worse than he did—so he never brought it up, didn’t try to push for a conversation before Bucky was ready to even talk about it. He trusted Bucky to broach the topic when the time was right, and until then, he was content to wait.
But he didn’t want to let this moment go. He didn’t want to let it slip by without him looking at Bucky and plainly voicing his admiration for him, his love for him, his—would pride be a good word, to encompass the swelling in his throat when he watched the way Morgan and the Young Avengers run towards Bucky whenever they had a problem, confide in him with things they could never tell anyone else, listen to his sage advice and accept his gentle assurances? Could it be enough to convey the depths of Steve’s bittersweet joy, when he looked at Bucky smiling, joking, his face set in thoughtful tranquility or lined with sorrowful sympathy directed towards the kids they found themselves surrounded by almost on accident?
It certainly wasn’t enough to capture the certainty that rang within him, sung by a three-part chorus: the instinct-driven animal that just wanted to breed with the strongest alpha around, the brain that sifted through routes stratagems to ensure their lasting peace, and the heart of him that just loved Bucky unerringly, all in accord.
Bucky would be a great father. It was the truth. Maybe Bucky doubted it, but Steve believed in him, to the depths of his very bones.
Right now, Bucky had a distant look on his face that meant he was mulling something over. Except his jaw was tensed, which meant that he was currently in the process of trying to talk himself out of something that he wanted. They’d been together long enough in their current incarnations for Steve to know that letting Bucky follow that train of thought down that rabbit hole would cause more harm than good.
So he stroked his thumb across Bucky’s jaw, just underneath his ear, rubbing a soothing circle across the tension there. “Penny for your thoughts?”
Bucky blinked twice at him, like he’d forgotten where he was. “Thoughts are worth a quarter now,” he said. “Inflation.”
“I’ll give you a dollar,” Steve offered, “Demand’s pretty high.”
That got Bucky to smile, finally, though he looked away. “It ain’t worth your dollar,” he said.
“What, you think I don’t give a buck?” Bucky laughed at his stupid pun, and Steve grinned, leaning in to press a kiss to Bucky’s cheekbone. “Whatever it is,” he continued, lowering his voice, “If you have to work so hard to talk yourself out of it, you probably want it bad enough that you should get it.”
“Well,” came out as a sigh. “Sometimes it ain’t just about what I want.” But he offered Steve a brittle smile. “Forget it. Whatcha working on?”
It was a transparent attempt to change the subject, but Steve decided to let it slide. He picked up his sketchbook and showing Bucky the picture of Morgan, watched Bucky’s eyes dart around the sketch.
“Future painting?” Bucky guessed.
“Maybe. If she’ll let me.” Steve shrugged. “She could give it to Pepper. Or maybe…” he raised an eyebrow. “A girlfriend?”
“NCND.” Bucky had a huge, idiotic grin on his face, and a brightness in his eyes. “What makes you think Mo's got a sweetheart?”
“Sweetheart?” Steve widened his eyes and blinked stupidly, in a way that never failed to make Bucky have to stifle a snicker; putting on the airs of that aw-shucks fish-outta-temporal-water persona that people still expected him to wear. “Oh, I only meant it the same way Becca did back in the day, talking ‘bout her friends who were girls, that’s all. Golly gee, you know how future words still get me turned every which-way.” Despite his coy playacting, he couldn’t stop his own shit-eating grin from growing just as big as Bucky’s. “But also I remember her crying when that friend of hers moved away when she was twelve.”
Bucky scoffed. “She was twelve. Twelve-year-olds don’t have a clue about romance.”
“I was twelve when Tommy Bass died and I didn’t cry over him,” Steve said, “But I cried myself to sleep for a week when your ma said she was thinking about moving you all back to Indiana.”
“Did I know about that?” Bucky’s brow furrowed. “I mean—the crying. I remember Tommy, kinda.”
“Nope, never said.” He remembered seeing Tommy’s body getting carried down the street. They went to his service and prayed for his soul and Ma made his family soda bread and soup and had Steve take it over, and Bucky had run a block and a half with a hot dish of potato dumplings to catch up with him so they could walk together. Steve had been sad, because Tommy didn’t ignore him or pick on him which meant that he was in the group of people that Steve considered his friends before he met Bucky and knew what real friendship was like, but he didn’t cry, not even at the service when everyone else was, just held his Ma’s hand quietly like a real man ought to. But the next week Ma Barnes mentioned offhandedly how dangerous raising kids in the city was and how maybe they ought to go back to Indiana, and Steve had cried over maybe losing Bucky that night and the next five nights and thought that he was surely going to hell, crying over his best friend of two months moving away when he didn’t cry over a boy dying.
“Huh.” Bucky was giving him another sappy look, because they were approaching their ninety-sixth anniversary and they were still crazy for each other, crazier with each passing year, and Steve loved him so damn much and when Bucky gave him that look Steve wanted to grab him by the collar and shake him to get him to stop looking at him with such—awe, reverence, fervor.
Instead, Steve kissed him. He meant for it to be just a quick peck on the lips, but Bucky pressed closer, tilting his head just so so their noses would slot together perfectly, and their lips could move together, and Bucky could slip his tongue inside of Steve’s mouth, licking his way in, and Steve was half-heartedly considering the soundproofing in this place and whether it would be suspicious if they cranked up the radio to the maximum volume—
“Un-cle Buh-key!”
They leapt apart at the muffled sing-song yell.
Bucky had a put-out air to him, his lips slack and slick with their spit, and Steve chuckled, reaching out to pick at his mussed hair, fixing it as well as he could. “Go on. Go be a good uncle,” he said, a healthy dose of his immeasurable fondness slipping through. “And tell her to send Happy home if she’s gonna stay for dinner.”
Bucky ran a hand through his own hair, the single motion resettling his hair far better than Steve ever could with any of his fussing, and licked his lips before grinning. “Gonna make dinner for me and our niece like a good little wife?”
He dodged a flying paintbrush and bolted down the stairs as Steve yelled after him, “Ain’t your wife, Barnes!”
–
Morgan did end up staying for dinner. Steve had been thinking about pizza on his way home, but Bucky suggested actually cooking something, so they ended up making stir-fried chicken and peppers over rice. The kitchen was way too small for two super-soldiers, but they knew how to make it work, their bodies knowing each other and how to move together instinctively, slipping past each other with a nudge or an elbow of warning, passing ingredients hand-to-hand without having to look. After dinner, Morgan still seemed reluctant to head back home, so they watched one of her favorite movies from when she was a kid all squashed together on the couch. Even though they’d seen it enough times he could recite the entire movie from memory (that ain’t saying much, you and your fucking eidetic memory can do that with any movie. Well, you can do it too, can’t you, and your memory is shit. Hey, are you using my amnesia against me, punk? You use your amnesia against me all the time, it got old twenty years ago, jerk) the climax of the film always got to him, and he worried absently at his bottom lip as the shapeshifter began their anguished charge through the city that refused to see the goodness in her heart.
Then, he felt a light touch at the base of his skull. He glanced over, and Bucky’s hand was there, his arm draped across the back of the couch over Morgan’s shoulders so he could rest his hand on the back of Steve’s neck. Steve smiled and sat up straighter so he could free his arm and reach out, too. As he inched his hand closer, Bucky captured it without looking, and they held hands behind Morgan’s back for the rest of the movie.
–
Morgan went home seeming pretty settled once more, and Bucky, too, didn't slip into a downward spiral of self-flagellation all evening, so Steve figured he'd worked out whatever was bothering him.
He did hope that it worked out on the side of Bucky getting whatever it was he wanted, but that was always a coin flip, so he made a mental note to ask Bucky about it tomorrow before tucking it away into the worry-later box in his mind and focusing on enjoying the rest of his evening with his husband.
Of course, he forgot said husband was a goddamn asshole who never cared much for his plans.
“D'you think you're ready?”
Steve was sure ready for something, but he could tell by Bucky's dead serious voice that Bucky wasn’t asking about that. He groaned, letting Bucky's cock slip out of his mouth before sitting up. “I told you to stop pulling this shit, you goddamn jerk.”
“Sorry,” Bucky said, but his apology was mostly insincere, just like Steve's annoyance at Bucky's bad habit of starting serious conversations when they were just about to sex.
“S'all right,” because honestly Steve was used to these occasional interruptions by now; besides, he could get off any time he wanted but Bucky wanted to talk about whatever this was right now. “Ready for what?”
“To…” Bucky visibly rallied himself. “To have a kid.”
Steve's beath caught.
When it restarted, he let himself breathe slow for a few moments, before saying carefully, “To be honest, I think I've felt ready for a while.”
Bucky's eyes dropped, and Steve scooted closer so he could catch Bucky’s hand in his own, giving it a quick squeeze before guiding it to his own waist. He felt Bucky’s fingers flex and dig into the meat of his side, and he waited until Bucky said, just as carefully, “I guess—can we handle having kids, that’s what I’m more worried about.”
“Physically? Mentally? Emotionally?” Steve asked.
“Emotionally,” Bucky said. “Just—lots to think about, yeah?”
“Yeah.” So much to think about, much more than they could talk about in one night. Such as— “We’re gonna outlive them.” Fifty years down the line, their kids would look older than them. Fifty years after that, they’d be—
Bucky sighed. “We already have.”
Steve's throat closed in on itself, and he looked down, nodding quietly. “Guess so,” he said lamely. He wondered, sometimes, if Dr. Erksine ever suspected what would become of the boy he turned into Captain America. Maybe that was one of the reasons he was so choosy about his candidate, in case he ended up unleashing a maybe-immortal super-soldier on the world. But while he couldn't imagine that kindly doctor from Queens neglecting to inform him of all of the potential consequences before injecting him full of the serum, 1943 was three lifetimes ago and he honestly didn’t know Dr. Erksine all that well. Didn't know any of them all that well, which was strange to think about: how the trajectory of his life and many of his fondest memories were dictated by a period of a year and a half some ninety years ago.
“But,” Bucky said, “That just means we'll be around to see them live out their lives and be—real people. Real people with—jobs and families and opinions and real people problems.” The not like us went unsaid as he leaned forward to press their foreheads together, taking a deep breath.
“Yeah,” Steve said, getting choked up himself.
When he was twenty years old, he sometimes daydreamed of them being together and starting a family. But his dreams were of an artist and a mechanic in matching lavender marriages, sharing six kids between two houses, pretending to love their wives in the day and sneaking into each other’s beds at night. That dream was out of reach, now, had been out of reach since nineteen-forty-three, but in its place was a better dream, a dream where maybe they couldn’t be normal fucking human beings ever again, but they could be married to each other and not have to hide and—maybe they could have kids who could be who they were, love who they wanted, do what they wanted to do, and Lord in heaven, he wanted that so bad his teeth hurt. He wanted to see a kid with Bucky's features growing up, from a baby to a kid to a full adult; and he wanted to see Bucky be a father, the only and most important thing remaining from his nineteen-forty dream; and he wanted to tell Bucky—“Yeah. You'll be a great dad to our kids.”
“Takes one to know one, pal,” Bucky murmured, his eyes wet. He tilted his head so he could kiss Steve again. As he did, his left hand slipped in between them, resting lightly against Steve's belly, and like Steve could suddenly read his mind with the touch, he got a flash of what he was thinking—the hard line of Steve’s abs, softened into a gentle curve, and it was such a flagrantly obvious metaphor for their stupid lives that he snorted.
Sensing his amusement, Bucky gave him a hard look. “What's got you laughing like a goon?”
“Nothing,” Steve said, because he was mentally shelving that mental image (a metal hand, built as a weapon and installed with pain, gently splayed across the curve of a belly, muscles made for fighting hidden under the soft touch of growth) for later—a painting would be a great gift to reveal the pregnancy to Bucky when it came time to do that. “Just realized you're gonna be insufferable when you knock me up.”
Bucky laughed. “During both the pitching and the run,” he agreed readily. He was smiling, now broadly, giddily, despite his reservations and insecurities, and Steve found himself grinning back, unable to help himself in the face of Bucky's growing joy. “So—we doing this?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think we are,” Steve said, and he felt like he was full of helium, like if it weren't for Bucky's hands burning his body he'd float clear to space. Sure, there was shit they needed to discuss and make plans for, but they could do that later, it wasn’t like they were going to pop out a child tomorrow, they could—make this choice now, say yes, and deal with things as they came. “Gonna—maybe see about getting my IUD removed. I mean—it's probably gonna take a lot of effort—” four or five times over fifty-something heats, that was a ten percent success rate at best—
“You know what?” Bucky cut in, interrupting his train of thought, dry as a bone. “Got a feeling I'm not gonna mind putting in the hours.”
Steve laughed, pulling Bucky in for a euphoric kiss, and then another, and another, and then Bucky tipped them over onto the bed and they were making out like teenagers, grinding against each other, pulling each other as close as their bodies could go, but then Bucky pulled in the wrong direction, still with that stupid grin that Steve wanted to kiss off his face, and said cheekily,
“Is the bank still open? I got a deposit to make.”
And Steve laughed and punched his arm and laughed some more, and let Bucky tumble them into the sheets because while it may not do anything right now when he was still on birth control—
Hey, practice makes perfect.