1937
Steve’s bored.
He’s been bored ever since Bucky left for his shift at the docks nine hours ago. It’s been nine whole hours where Steve’s had nothing to do. He’s already eaten twice and kept it all down, he’s checked his temperature every hour like Bucky instructed, and he’s gotten up to take his first shower in days. He’s delighted when he doesn’t even get winded until he’s putting his thick socks on his feet to lay back in the bed. He’s managed to change the sheets and throw his sweat soaked ones in the wash, too, and feels very accomplished.
But he’s still bored.
Bucky’s made him swear not to get out of the bed more than necessary so he doesn’t push his luck with the passing sickness. Steve’s promise to keep laying down is the only reason Bucky had been able to leave for an extra long shift at the docks, trying to make up for how little he’s been working over the last week and a half while Steve was down with the flu.
Bucky handles their finances very meticulously, and Steve has no idea how badly they need money. He’s given up asking because Bucky always turns down his offers to get a job.
A real job, anyway.
Steve does a lot of odd jobs and art commissions.
Steve hasn’t touched his art in two weeks. He’d been uninspired for a few days before he got sick, and now his hands itch to work on something. He doesn’t have any commissions due soon, but he’s been thinking about drawing Bucky again, maybe bent over the stove cooking or bent over Steve’s bed, pants pulled down to his thighs and ass on display.
Yeah, Steve thinks he’s going to draw the second option. Even if he’ll have to hide the picture once it’s finished.
His art supplies are in a neat pile, and Steve realizes that the whole apartment is actually cleaner and tidier than he’s seen it in a long time. Seems he’s not the only one who has been bored recently. That, or the days he can’t remember must have been worse than he realized and Bucky had stress cleaned the apartment. Bucky claims it helps him focus when his anxieties get bad. Steve always hates how his broken, sick body seems to be the main cause of those anxieties.
Steve pulls his well loved sketchbook out of the pile, and he flips through it, bursts of colors flying by as he searches for an empty page. He gets all the way to the back cover without finding one, and groans as he remembers he’d used up all his free pages. He’d meant to get another book once his motivation returned, but then he’d fallen sick.
He searches for some scrap paper around the apartment, but Bucky’s already gotten rid of all of it, and all that’s left are important documents. Steve can’t draw anything on those, nevermind what he really wants to draw.
So he returns to his art box and stares at it glumly, envisioning the next few hours he’s going to spend being more bored than he was before. Because now there’s really nothing to do.
Until his eyes catch on the small assortment of paint cans in the corner.
Steve’s dug them out of the trash can of their apartment building as well as new stores. He and Bucky would never be able to afford something like that, and Steve already hates how much Bucky spends on supplies for him already. So free, open, used gallons of paint found in the dumpsters? Steve couldn’t even be ashamed.
He picks up a blue can and inspects it, then glances at their white, scuffed up walls. They’ve lived here just over a year, but the walls have been dented and dinged since before they moved in. They could serve the perfect canvas.
Mind made up, Steve uses their rusted hammer to pry the lids off several cans of paint, then grabs an assortment of brushes. He isn’t sure what he’s going to paint quite yet, but he doesn’t really want to have a plan right now. He just wants to go. He starts off by dragging the brush loaded with blue paint over the white wall, just one smooth stroke, and a giddiness zips up his spine.
The landlord had said they could paint if they wanted to, but the two of them decided it wasn’t worth the money or the effort, since Bucky would be doing most of the work. It feels like disobeying an order as he dips the brush again and makes another swipe on the wall. Steve’s always gotten a thrill at breaking the rules. It’s in his nature.
He picks yellow next, then green, and before he knows it, he’s got a large section of the wall covered in overlapping lines of multicolored paint. It’s a nice design, and Steve loves the randomness of it. He decides to keep going, and as the sun climbs lower in the sky, the entire lower half of the wall becomes a mess of colors that blend and mesh so well together Steve thinks it might be art, just like this.
Still, once the paint has dried, he goes in with new colors to paint fruit on top of the chaotic background. He paints apples, oranges, bananas, and strawberries. He even gets bold and paints a pomegranate, though he’s never seen one in real life and it ends up looking so rough Steve turns it into a raspberry instead.
By the time Bucky gets home, exhausted and dirty, the sun has long since set, and the bottom half of their living room wall is nearly finished.
Steve startles at the sound of the key in the lock and turns to face Bucky, looking like a deer caught in headlights. Bucky has his head ducked when he enters, tugging his coat off his broad shoulders and hanging it up, slipping out of his shoes as he sets his keys into the decorative bowl Steve made years ago in a pottery class. Then he looks up, and freezes in place.
Bucky’s eyes flick between the colored wall and Steve’s paint flecked face, and stays silent so long that Steve squirms in place. When he does speak, he’s unfrozen, stepping forward. “I see you didn’t stay in bed like you promised,” is all he says, stepping up to Steve and pressing the back of his hand against Steve’s forehead to check the temperature. Steve’s sure some of the wet paint on his skin transfers to Bucky’s hand, and when he pulls it back, he’s proved right. There’s blue and green on his hand, not that Bucky seems to notice.
“I got bored.”
“I can see that.” His voice is borderline amused, and his gaze flickers back to the wall. “Needed a bigger canvas?”
“Something like that,” Steve grumbles, but his shoulders drop the tension they’d collected the moment Bucky had unlocked the door. He doesn’t know what he expected Bucky to say or do, but he wasn’t really expecting the easy acceptance. “Do you like it?”
Bucky thinks it over, studying the different colors and fruits. “I’ve never been a big fan of blueberries, but I suppose they don’t look so bad with all the other fruits up here.” He grins at Steve, and Steve can’t help but grin back at him.
Over the course of the next three months, Steve paints the rest of that wall and two of the others in the living room. None of the walls match, but Bucky insists that he likes that. “It helps take away from the chaos of the apartment,” Bucky joked as Steve painted a mural of their favorite park on the adjacent wall. “And it’s just as chaotic as you.”
Steve gets a new notebook, but he doesn’t touch it for several weeks as he works to paint every wall in the living room. He does an ocean on one wall, but he puts animals in the water that wouldn’t normally be found there, like horses and giraffes. It makes Bucky laugh, and Steve decides to make something even crazier on the last wall.
He thinks about it for three solid days before he can even start.
He paints a sunset first, then he paints everything he can think of. The sign to Coney Island. A milkshake with two straws like they’d shared in celebration of buying their apartment. A sweater that Bucky’s mom had knit for him but had been so ugly and scratchy Bucky had thrown it in the back of the closet and hadn’t worn it once. He draws boats on the dock and dogs they see running around the neighborhood and both of their favorite flowers, their stems twined together.
When Bucky comes home to see it, his face breaks out in a grin, and he slings an arm around Steve’s neck, drawing him to his side as he presses a kiss to Steve’s temple. “This is my favorite one, doll. It’s perfect.”
But as it turns out, the wall is not perfect.
Steve adds to it over the years.
He paints the fountain from a new park they’d visited, where Bucky had somehow managed to fall into it. He paints a chair after Bucky’s father sat too hard on it and broke it once while he was visiting. He paints a thermometer after Bucky nurses him through another bout of the flu. He paints a purple ribbon he’d tied around Bucky’s wrist after unwrapping a new set of brushes for his birthday. He paints a disco ball after they’d gotten back from a bar where they’d gone for the first time without girls hanging on their arms and sneaking kisses whenever no one was looking.
By the time Bucky gets drafted and Steve finds a way to follow, the wall is so crowded with memories of their life it’s begun to spill onto the walls around it.
Steve wishes he could’ve added more to it.
Steve wishes they had gotten more time together.
2014
Bucky’s running from him.
Steve knows because not only has Steve been desperately searching the globe for him, but he also hasn’t come back to Steve.
Steve doesn’t like to admit it, but it’s tearing him up inside. He wants so badly to see Bucky, to touch Bucky, to bring Bucky home. But Bucky doesn’t want to come home. Doesn’t want to come back to Steve, and that hurts more than anything.
Sam keeps telling him that Bucky needs time, but Steve feels his heart break more and more with every day that Bucky keeps away from him. Steve’s not always been able to help Bucky, but now that he can, it’s all he wants to do. He’s got resources and patience and most importantly, he’s got love. He wants to love Bucky again, now that he knows Bucky is alive.
Steve had wanted to rush off to Brooklyn and find a place there, so Bucky could have something familiar to come home to, but Sam had insisted that Brooklyn wouldn’t feel like home to Bucky. Not if he couldn’t remember the life he and Steve had shared.
So instead, he’d found another place in DC, closer to Sam, and waited.
It’s agonizing, and he tries to linger in the apartment more than go out on the off chance that Bucky would show up. Sam catches onto that quickly and starts forcing Steve out more days, and Steve has to admit it keeps him from getting too depressed during the day.
But the nights are worse.
Steve can’t sleep most of the time, dreaming of the horrified expression on Bucky’s face as he’d bashed Steve’s face in. He has nightmares about what would have happened if he’d killed Bucky during their handful of fights. That one keeps him up on this night in particular.
Steve’s taken to sitting at his table when he can’t sleep. Sam insisted it was better not to associate his bed and his room with feelings of dread that came from wanting to sleep but not being able to. So Steve sits with an open sketchbook in front of him.
He hasn’t done much art since he’d woken from the ice. It had never felt right when he was missing Bucky. But now Bucky is alive and Steve still doesn’t have him, and it still feels wrong to try and do art. But every night he tries, and he’s gotten a few decent portraits done. One of Sam, his wings spread out to either side, soaring through the sky. He’s drawn Natasha, too, and the soft look she’d sported in Sam’s apartment after they’d been bombed by Zola. They’re both beautiful sketches, but they’re not what he wants to draw, not really.
He wants to draw Bucky.
He can’t draw Bucky.
So he tries to paint one night instead. He’s got a blank canvas in front of him, and he’s got more paint than he thinks he will reasonably use. That had been another change for him, being able to afford art supplies now. He’s got more money than he knows what to do with thanks to the government, and all he wants is to do is tuck it away like they used to in case Steve came down with an illness again. He always did.
Tonight, though, he’s got the paint out and the brushes ready to go. Everything is set up perfectly, but Steve can’t bring himself to let wet paint on the brush touch the canvas. It hovers, the red paint globbing on the bristles, but it doesn’t drip. Steve’s mind is blank, nothing coming to mind to paint.
He stays like that for close to an hour, frowning at his canvas and getting more and more upset the longer the brush and canvas do not meet. Finally, when he can take it no more, he growls and flings the paintbrush at the wall in a fit of rage. It smacks against the white walls, leaving a bright red blotch of paint on the surface before clattering to the ground and rolling away.
Steve stares at that blotch for several minutes.
Then, achingly slow, he stands and approaches it.
The paint is still wet as he steps up to the wall, inspecting it carefully before he’s moving to retrieve the fallen brush and the palate of paint again. He dips his brush back into the red and gets to work, using the wall as his canvas.
He paints the red star branded on Bucky’s metal arm. He paints the Pontiac river. He paints the shield. By the time the sun has started to cast shadows into his room, the light touching his skin, he’s got a mural on the wall. Bucky’s red star is on one side of the river, and Steve’s shield is on the other side. He’s got a rough outline of Bucky’s metal arm reaching out across the water, and Steve’s reaching back for him.
He doesn’t paint either of their faces or bodies.
The paint he’s using isn’t made for walls, though, and he doesn’t have nearly enough of it. He’s used the red completely, and the blue is nearly at its last drops. Steve will have to pick up some real paint so he can keep going.
As soon as the hardware store opens, Steve heads out and buys ten gallons of paint in various shades. It costs more than he ever could have afforded before, but he barely bats an eye at the price. He’s feeling more lively than he has in a long time, and he keeps working on his painting the moment he gets home.
It takes him three days to fill the living room walls. Sam comes over for two of those days and thinks Steve’s a little crazy, but he has the decency to keep that to himself. Steve appreciates him for that.
Steve paints the shortest wall a mural of the Washington monument. He paints the third wall of the ocean, putting zebras and tigers and cats in there this time. The last wall he tries his best to replicate their favorite wall from the apartment. The one that showed their memories.
He thinks he’s got it mostly perfect, but he’ll never be able to replicate it perfectly. He adds the red star and the shield to this one, too. New pieces of their lives.
Bucky shows up two days after Steve finishes.
Steve’s coming in from getting more paint for the bedroom, and Bucky is standing in the middle of his living room, looking at their memory wall. He’s dressed in plain sweats and a shirt, and he’s wearing a ballcap low on his head. He doesn’t even turn when Steve enters and freezes, his breath catching in his throat.
Bucky gestures to the water fountain among the mess and tangle of memories. “I fell in that.” He says, his voice gruff and thick, and he doesn’t look at Steve still. “It was freezing when the breeze started up. You gave me your coat even though you were already shivering.”
“Yeah,” Steve breathes, setting the cans down and approaching Bucky slowly, like he was worried that Bucky would run if Steve moved any faster. “Yeah, I did. Then fell ill the next day.”
Bucky snorts and finally turns from the painting. There’s tears glistening in his eyes, and his throat bobs as he struggles to swallow.
“I’m not the same Bucky that you shared these memories with.”
“I know.”
“I’ve done some really fucked up things. I’m really fucked up.”
“I know.”
Bucky wipes at his eyes and Steve takes another step closer.
“I don’t remember you. Not a whole lot. Just enough. I thought maybe if I stayed away, my memories would come back, but they’re not, so I came back. I know I’m not the same Bucky you know, but I.. I’d like to stay with you, if you want that.”
Steve can barely contain his grin as he gingerly wraps his arms around Bucky. Bucky is stiff in his hold, but he gradually relaxes and doesn’t hug Steve back.
“I want that. I want you. Any way you’ll let me.”
Bucky stays the night.
In the morning, he doesn’t leave.
That day, Steve paints a ballcap on the wall.