The Answer
”Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.”
The day that Steve Rogers died, Bucky started to remember. He had just pieces of things at first, some colors and sounds disconnected from everything else. Then those pieces attached themselves to each other, and soon he had chains of thoughts and feelings from a lifetime that Bucky was only beginning to realize was his, and all of these fragments interlocked around the memory of Steve.
Well, the memories all end with Steve’s neck breaking and Bucky hauling his body out of the water. Taste of grit in his mouth, blood dripping in his eyes. Whenever Bucky remembers something new, it’s from a hundred years ago and it ends the same way. Everything ends there, on the day that Steve died. Backwards or forwards, whichever way you look at it, the ending is the same.
Steve Rogers is dead. Captain America is dead. The hero who protected everyone before himself, who cared more about saving Bucky than saving himself, is gone. So how is Bucky supposed to live with that? The answer is simple. You don’t live with that, the end.
This time the dream materializes with a sheen as though it’s forming through water. It wavers, catches on the back of the apartment door, then, miraculously, sharpens into something like reality.
Bucky stomps his boots out on the mat, then opens the door and walks in. Everything is exactly where he left it: the scuff marks by the door, the shoes in the hall, the winter jacket he and Steve share hanging on the coat rack. The grandfather clock in the corner clucks away, and Bucky comes into the living room.
“There you are,” Steve says, looking up at Bucky from the sickbed on the couch. A small dimple forms in one cheek. His face is flushed with fever. He holds out a hand to him. “I’ve missed you.”
Bucky takes Steve’s small hand in both of his before kneeling in front of him in a pose of supplication. “I’m sorry.” He presses his forehead into the blanket over Steve’s stomach. “I’m so sorry, Steve.”
“Why?”
Bucky leans back on his heels to look at Steve again, but the dream is already dissolving. The scene is blurry, the rooms of the apartment all bleeding into each other and rearranging as he watches. Or maybe it’s just the tears in his eyes muddying everything.
Steve sits up, coughing wetly as he does. Two spots of color bloom in his cheeks. He coughs again and it goes on so long that Bucky gets worried and takes one hand from Steve’s to touch his forehead.
“You’re warm,” Bucky mumbles. He remembers saying that a lot with Steve. Laying in Steve’s bed in the middle of the night and holding him through the trembling and the aches. “Sweetheart, you’re warm,” he repeats, running his fingers through the babysoft hairs at the nape of Steve’s neck. It’s all so familiar. It’s a dream and not a dream.
“Bucky,” Steve says, like he’s just now realizing who’s here. He wrestles free of Bucky’s gentle touch just to throw himself bodily into Bucky’s arms. He wraps his own arms around Bucky’s neck and holds on tight enough to bruise.
“Did you have a bad dream?” Bucky asks, and that too is an echo of the past.
Steve nods, tears soaking into the collar of Bucky’s shirt. “You were gone. I was trying to find you. I knew you were looking for me too. How could I tell you I was okay? I wanted to tell you, so’s you wouldn’t be sad anymore.” Steve’s whole body shakes as he cries, his voice hoarse and garbled in Bucky’s neck. He must’ve been screaming in his sleep. Bucky shouldn’t have gone out, even for work. “I feel bad, Buck. Real bad. Where’s Ma? Is she here? Will you tell her? Will you tell her I’m okay?” He’s half-delirious with fever, clinging onto Bucky with all his strength. Another hacking cough starts and when Steve’s pressed so close, Bucky can feel the echo of it in his own chest. It’s a suffocating, breathless feeling.
The dream starts to slip away again. It goes sliding out from under Bucky and he’s free-falling before he remembers to cling on too. So Bucky clings, squeezes Steve in a vice.
“Hurts,” Steve mumbles, hiccuping. His voice is ravaged from the coughing fit, sounds like when his voice first started dropping and he could barely stumble through one sentence without the words breaking. “Hurts, Buck.”
Bucky realizes he’s holding him too hard, hurting him. He tears himself away, horrified, and Steve almost falls off the couch before catching himself on shaking arms. The room tilts, and Bucky feels like they’ll be upside down soon. He can barely hold onto the dream anymore.
“I have to tell you,” Bucky rushes out. Steve stares at him from under his heavy lids, half-dozing now. “I have to tell you. It was me. I did it. I killed you. Stevie.” Every word draws the breath right out of him and with every word it’s harder to find than the last. “I killed you. I’m so sorry.”
Is this the last thing he’ll see before he dies? The gun is still in his hand. He thinks he pulled the trigger, thinks he’s close.
“Listen,” Bucky pleads, digging his heels into the floorboards, “I’m so sorry.” The room starts tipping over, furniture sliding across the floor.
“I love you.” One of them says this.
Then the dream is over.
Bucky’s lying on his side in bed. The pills are wearing off and the only light is a small green light pulsing to his right and the fireplace roaring at the foot of the bed, warm impressions behind his closed eyes. He’s alone, gun in hand.
Then he’s not alone, and someone is trying to take the gun from him. Someone is sitting on top of him with his arms and legs wrapped around Bucky’s neck and waist. A rattling cough from somewhere. Bucky lets his hand fall open and the gun hits the ground with a deafening bang. There’s a short, startled cry, then ringing silence.
Steve, Bucky thinks, Am I dead? He opens his eyes and looks down at Steve’s blond head. The hair is parted in that familiar way, smooth and neat, yellow as the sun. Bucky reverently touches the part in Steve’s hair before stroking his fingers through it. Soft as silk, better than he remembers it being because this time it’s real.
Steve coughs thickly again, coughs for a while, and Bucky wraps his arms around Steve’s small body, as if to shelter him. He should be sheltering Steve from himself.
Steve’s coughing breaks the silence so that Bucky can hear the sound of his own heavy breathing. When the coughs become violent, Bucky sits up with Steve. He half expects Steve to disappear with the movement, just scatter like the mirage that he must be, but here they both are.
Steve’s here and he smells like cough syrup, that grape-flavored nonsense Steve’s Ma always made him drink at the first sign of illness. He’s wearing long-knit pants and one of Bucky’s sweaters from before the war—a woolen chandail that cost a pretty penny and which he immediately gave to Steve. His feet are bare and pink with cold where he’s pressing them into the bed cover, searching out a pocket of warmth.
Bucky pulls the cover back and helps Steve under it without thinking, part of an instinctual ritual preserved. He gets his first real look at Steve’s face when it’s no longer pressed into Bucky’s chest: ruddy from fever and the brow moist.
Steve blinks up at him. “Where’d we go?” he asks softly. He looks so young, Bucky notes with wonder. And he is young. Steve can't be older than twenty-four, before he got the serum.
“Stop moving, sweetheart,” Bucky murmurs as he pulls the cover over Steve.
“You look different,” Steve mumbles, reaching a hand out from under the blanket to touch Bucky’s face. Steve’s fingertips ghost over the stubble on his jaw where his beard is growing in and a shiver crawls down Bucky’s spine. “Are you sad?”
“Stevie,” Bucky says, just that. He could say it over and over again, just fill the room with Steve’s name. Steve tries to touch Bucky’s face again but Bucky takes Steve’s small, soft hand in his larger, rougher one and puts it back under the blanket. Then he tucks Steve in, first one side then the other. Another instinct. Steve watches him sleepily as he does this, still delusional in his fever, probably seeing something else entirely. The look in his eyes threatens to break Bucky down to tears if he looks too long.
Bucky gets up and goes to the kitchen for something to do. He knocks around for a glass and fills it in the tap before bringing the water back over. He kneels and holds it to Steve’s lips and Steve gulps it down gratefully, water sloshing over and down his chin. Bucky sets the empty glass on the table next to the stone and its ethereal green glow.
Somehow, he knows this all has to do with that strange little stone. But how? He’s scared if he looks at it too long, he’ll ruin the dream. Who cares how Steve’s here, just that he is here. He should be here. He deserves to be here more than Bucky does.
“Buck, read me another one,” Steve says. His mouth is damp and rosy and Bucky resists the urge to wipe his thumb across Steve’s lips.
“Another what?” Bucky settles down next to him. He feels like he takes up too much room on the bed. If Steve weren’t so small, they wouldn’t both fit.
“A riddle.” Steve tries to move his hand but Bucky’s tucked him in tight and he’s too weak to lift the blanket. He closes his eyes, inhaling noisily. “Hurts to breathe,” he says after a while. “Read me one. Just read me something.”
Bucky turns mechanically to the bedside again. There’s a bible in the drawer, old and moth eaten. Bucky remembers another fragment from before the war.
In this memory, Steve is sitting on the church steps after his Ma’s funeral. He’s kicking a bible with his shoe, crying hard. It’s the first time Bucky’s ever seen him cry yet it’s somehow familiar. Steve cries with that full-body abandon with which he does everything: wracking, shaking. He cries like he fights and like he laughs, with everything he has.
Bucky sits next to Steve on the steps and drapes one arm over his shoulders so that Steve can curl up against his side. They don’t say anything, yet an entire conversation happens in that silent moment where they sit together. In the end, Bucky says “it’s going to be okay,” without having to say anything and Steve shuffles closer and says silently, “thank you.”
Bucky shuts the drawer, sealing off the memory, and goes to the window instead. He looks out at the snow unspooling in the night outside and tries to think of something, anything, to say, to make sense of what’s happening here. He’s trying to figure out how he can keep Steve here, without disturbing what feels like a precarious daydream.
“I’ll read you something instead,” Steve says. He takes another laborious breath, goes through another coughing spell. “I’ll read you… something.” He clears his throat in a way that sounds painful, then he’s asleep. Just like that.
Bucky keeps watch over Steve through the night like the dragon in that book he used to like. At some point he makes himself pick the gun off the floor and put it back in the kitchen drawer. He stuffs the hole in the wall the bullet made with a wad of wet newspaper.
Now, Bucky has a window open in his mind and all the old memories are blowing through—smell of Ma’s cooking, taste of lemonade in the summer, sound of the apartment door whispering over the carpet when it opens and shuts. All night Steve sleeps, breathing noisily, and all night Bucky remembers things.
He ends up back in bed with Steve, stroking a hand through his blond hair because he’s afraid Steve is going to disappear any minute. Steve’s radiating heat from his fever and sometimes he mumbles something in his sleep, usually incoherent. Sometimes it resembles Bucky’s name, or comes out melodious like he’s singing a song.
As the sun’s coming up, Steve has a bad coughing fit that wakes him trembling. Bucky’s there with a glass of water again, glad to be of use, and Steve takes desperate gulps before falling back into sleep again.
A few hours later, sun casting slanted light into the cabin, Bucky wakes up. He’s surprised at himself for even falling asleep. He didn’t think he would be able to, even if he wanted to do it. He turns in the bed, reaches out—
And sits up. It’s like waking from a dream into a nightmare. The bed is empty; Steve’s gone.
Bucky gets out of bed and looks wildly around the tight room. The bathroom door is open and dark. “Steve!” Gone. Just like that.
Bucky stumbles a few steps outside, into the howling wind and the snow lashing his face. For a while, he’s blinded by the heavy snowfall. Then his eyes adjust to the movement, the swirling white, and he sees him.
Steve is a hundred yards away, a dark blot in the snow, wearing Bucky’s coat. Bucky runs after him, screaming. The wind tears his voice away before it reaches Steve; he may as well be screaming into a black hole. He’s laughing now, euphoric. Thank god! The snow comes up to his knees, and it’s a slog to move but he keeps going.
When he catches up to Steve, he reaches out with both hands and grabs hold of his coat. Steve is still trying to move forward and looks fiercely around when he realizes something’s holding him back.
“Where the fuck are you going?” Bucky shouts at him, laughing like a mental patient.
“Let me go!” Steve shouts back. “Let me go!” His fever seems to have broken, and all that old stubbornness is back in him.
“Where?” Bucky takes hold of Steve by the shoulders. Steve tries to wrestle himself free, teeth chattering visibly. He pushes out at Bucky, tries to shove him away.
“Get away from me!” Steve screams, startling Bucky. They stare at each other.
“Who the hell are you?” Steve’s eyes are the eyes of a cornered animal. He’s afraid. Bucky’s heart sinks. He lets go and Steve turns around again, trying to keep walking. Bucky follows a pace behind. He wonders how far this will go.
They’re another stretch out from the cabin when Steve stumbles and goes sprawling into the snow. Bucky picks him up again, dusting him off, and Steve barely fights him. Tears are frozen to his pale cheeks and his teeth are chattering so hard they click.
“You’re not Bucky.” Steve is staring at Bucky’s metal arm, then at his face. Bucky bites back the shame that rushes through him at the look on Steve’s face, a look of mistrust and fear.
“Steve, look at me. I’m still him. I’m still Bucky.” Even as he says it, it feels like a lie. He thought it was the right thing to say anyway, but now he’s not so sure.
Steve just shakes his head and sinks down into the snow. He looks up at Bucky and then starts to cry in earnest, rocking himself. “I don’t understand. I want to go home.”
Bucky kneels too. The snow soaks into his pants, melts in his shoes. The cold is suffocating, but he couldn’t care less. Let them both freeze to death out here, but let them be together.
Bucky tries to communicate in the way he remembers they used to, without words, but something’s irrevocably changed. Steve doesn’t understand Bucky’s silence anymore, or else Bucky’s silence is saying all the wrong things now. He tries to wrap an arm around Steve but Steve yelps and kicks away, sprawling on his back in the snow so that Bucky has to lean over him to help him up.
“Stop!” Steve cries. “Get away from me.” He kicks Bucky square in the chest. He’s wearing Bucky’s boots too, and the shoes are too big, making him clumsy. The kick barely hurts at all, and then only because it’s Steve who hit him. Steve tries to hit him again, whirling a small fist at him which Bucky catches in his flesh hand and brings to his mouth. Steve’s hand is turning purple from cold and Bucky breathes warm air onto it. Steve’s dangerously human, won’t last out here. He’s still trying to fight him.
“Enough,” Bucky says harshly and Steve freezes, terror dawning in his eyes. Fine. He can use that fear if it means keeping Steve safe this time. He stands up, picking Steve off the ground and throwing him over his shoulder. Steve cries out and starts hitting him again, pounding on his back uselessly with both fists.
Bucky huffs out an exasperated laugh and starts the walk back to the cabin. Steve tries to make it as difficult as possible, but when the cabin is back in view he goes limp in Bucky’s arms.
Bucky shoves through the snow and the front door and slams it shut behind them, sealing out the wind like a vacuum. He puts Steve on the bed and goes to start the fire again.
“Where are we?” Steve asks, getting off the bed and going to stand next to Bucky. His teeth are still chattering and he’s shaking like a leaf. His arms are crossed and when Bucky looks up at him from where he’s kneeling in the coals he has a fixed, wrathful expression on his face.
“Siberia.”
Steve scoffs. “Siberia!” He crosses the room again and throws himself on the bed. Bucky suppresses a smile. “And how exactly did I get to Siberia from Brooklyn, New York?”
The fire catches and flares to life. Bucky gestures to the stone on the bedside table. “I think it has something to do with that.”
Steve glares at the stone, then at Bucky. “A rock.”
Bucky barks out a laugh and stands up. “A magic rock.”
Steve is waxy pale in the firelight, still trembling all over. His hair is frozen, gleaming with ice where it hangs in his eyes, and his mouth is pale and quivering around the edges. It’s eerily reminiscent of the dead man, face white as a sheet, with his mouth blue and his eyes unstaring. They look at each other. Despite the fact that Steve’s shivering violently, he manages to look stoic. His quivering chin is raised to Bucky in challenge.
“You’re gonna catch cold, have another fever,” Bucky says after a while. The room is warming and already the feeling is coming back into his limbs. The fingers of his good hand tingle and thaw.
“Who are you, and don’t say Bucky. My Bucky’s in Brooklyn. I was in Brooklyn too, yesterday.”
“What year do you think it is?” Bucky asks carefully.
“It’s January 15th, 1942.”
Bucky’s face doesn’t change. “It’s January 15th, 2014.”
Steve laughs. “You’re crazy.”
Bucky goes over to the fireplace and picks up one of the newspapers. He scans it first, then hands it to Steve. Steve hardly glances at it before tossing it aside.
“I don’t care. You’re crazy.”
Bucky shrugs. “Fine. You still have to get out of those clothes.” He points to the bathroom door. When Steve doesn’t move, he walks inside and flicks on the light. It flickers bright then dims as Bucky’s bending to turn the faucet in the bath. He puts the stopper in the tub and waits for it to fill up.
Steve waits in the doorway, watching him. “If you’re Bucky, what did you give me for my eighteenth birthday?”
Bucky pauses, hand under the hot water. Birthdays flutter by in random order. The birthday where his mom took him to see the lions at the zoo on 7th Street. One of his sisters’ bat mitzvahs, her dress pluming out around her like a fancy cake with blue piping around the neck and sleeves. He and Steve laughed and laughed about the dress until Steve was actually short of breath and on the verge of an asthma attack. Steve’s eighteenth birthday is one of the places in Bucky’s mind where the painting has been taken down and all that’s left is the white patch and the water stains.
“I don’t remember,” Bucky says regretfully, before turning back to the faucet again.
“Then you’re not Bucky,” Steve says vehemently. “Who are you?”
“I remember other things. Your mom’s name was Sarah. You used to wear newspapers in your shoes.”
Steve seems to think about this. “So you’re telling me you’re supposed to be Bucky, just old?”
“I’m not that old.” Bucky turns the water off.
“I’m being visited by future Bucky, and I’m Scrooge. Are you going to impart some Christmas wisdom or what?”
“Get in, smartass.” Bucky stands up from the bath and passes Steve in the door. “Give me your clothes to dry.”
Unexpectedly, Steve gets on tiptoes and peers up at Bucky. He braces himself with a hand on Bucky’s chest. His gaze flickers back and forth across Bucky’s face. His blue eyes dance with firelight. Steve’s other hand reaches up and touches Bucky’s metal arm over the sweater he wears. Both of them look at Steve’s hand.
“Can I see?” Steve asks breathlessly, already pushing at Bucky’s sleeve.
Bucky’s face flames up and he tears away. “No.”
“Why?”
“You don’t need to.”
“I want to.” Steve falls back on his heels, staring up at Bucky hopefully. “Please.”
Bucky stares back and a long moment passes in silence. Finally, he curses under his breath and relents. He pulls his shirt up over his head, as acutely self-conscious as he can ever remember being. He thinks he didn’t used to feel this way about his body, that he used to be barely aware of his body and then only thought of it as a tool for doing things. Now he’s aware of the scars which ripple white on his tanned skin and break up the smattering of dark chest hair. He’s aware of the ugly scarring on his shoulder, where flesh becomes metal, the seam pink and jagged.
He’s aware of this as if seeing it through Steve’s eyes, the monster he must look like. The monster he is.
But Steve just nods thoughtfully, tongue sweeping over his bottom lip. He’s flushed and shiny, but it’s probably from the sudden heat in the cabin and the ice melting on his skin and dripping from his wet hair.
“Cool,” Steve says, a bit breathlessly. “Wow. You look like a medieval knight or something.” He burns up even brighter as Bucky stares at him in disbelief.
“Are you going to get in the bath too?” Steve asks after a while, “You’re all frozen stiff.”
Bucky looks at the bathtub, aware of the fact that he’s used up all the hot water and his bath after Steve’s will be cold. “We wouldn’t both fit.”
Steve shrugs. “We will. Just stay on your side.”
Steve starts to strip. He turns away from Bucky as if he’s somehow embarrassed by his creamy, unbroken skin. As if Steve should be the one ashamed of his perfect, tiny body, of all of that perfection clean and innocent of the filth Bucky’s been used to. He leaves a puddle of dark clothes, Bucky’s coat like a rug at his feet. When Steve turns to get in the bath, his small prick is pink and half-hard.
Bucky casts his gaze to the side as he undresses, looking at the wall as he strips off his pants and underwear. Steve watches Bucky curiously, and Bucky is warm under that gaze. He’s achingly hard, cock hanging proud and heavy between his legs. He can’t remember the last time he was hard at all, and now suddenly he’s so horny it hurts.
Before the war, he thinks he used to be horny a lot of the time. A lot of his memories have some sexual innuendo attached to them, and he remembers how he used to enjoy sex. But what was a distant memory now feels close and almost stifling.
Bucky sinks into the warm bath across from Steve. The warm water envelopes him snuggly, loosening the muscles that he hadn’t even realized were wound tight as wire. Steve picks up the bar of soap from the dish indented in the wall and starts a thick lather in his hands before passing the bar to Bucky.
“So what now?” Steve runs his soapy fingers through his hair, the blond hairs sticking up in licks. “How do I go home?”
Bucky pauses with the soap on his neck. He puts it down and cups some water to rinse as he thinks this over. When he looks at Steve, he knows the answer he can’t say. That Steve is his, belongs to him, in every lifetime. And if he loses Steve again he won’t survive it. That he’ll never let any version of Steve out of his sight again.
Steve reaches for the soap, gets his hands all sudsy again, and starts to wash his thin chest and arms. Bucky washes too, all too aware of Steve across from him.
“So are you part robot?” Steve asks nonchalantly, gaze fixed on the metal arm Bucky’s draped over the side of the tub. Steve leans back to rinse the water from his hair and his knee knocks into Bucky’s. Bucky clasps Steve’s knee in his flesh hand without thinking, lets go just as quickly.
“Sure, pal.”
Steve sits up all the way and squints at him from underneath his soapy brow. “Like in Rossum’s Universal Robots?”
Bucky thinks about this. He thinks he remembers the play they went to. It’d been a double date. One of the girls was talking in his ear the whole time when she wasn’t kissing him. “I’m like Radius.”
“You rebelled?”
“Yeah.”
Steve thinks about this. “And you have magic, time travel?”
Bucky nods. “Sort of.”
“Will you send me back?”
Bucky’s mouth thins. He shakes the water out of his hair and looks down as the drops plink, plink, plink into the bath.
“If I stay here, will I get a robot arm too?” He might be joking but Bucky looks up at him seriously.
“No, Steve. I won’t let anything touch you. Ever.”
A draft must come into the room; Steve shivers and looks away. The room grows quiet, just the occasional splash from one of them.
Eventually, Bucky starts to drain the tub. Steve gets out first, grabbing the lone towel and drying off. Bucky climbs out after him and Steve turns.
“Promise me. Promise me nothing bad will happen here.”
Bucky nods. “I promise. Nothing bad will happen, not to you.”
Steve gives him the towel and goes into the main room. When Bucky comes out with the towel around his waist, Steve is sitting on the bed in Bucky’s flannel with his feet facing the fire.
“We’ll leave tomorrow,” Bucky says, partly to himself, as he goes through the little bureau for a clean shirt and thermal pants. He tosses a pair of pants at Steve.
“Put something warm on.”
Steve shuffles into them, standing awkwardly by the bed and holding it up at the waist with both hands. “You got even bigger. Not fair.”
“So did you.”
“I did?”
“Future you,” Bucky tries to explain, then shakes his head.
“There’s a future me?” Steve looks delighted by this. “And he’s big? How big? Can I meet him? Is he a robot?”
“It’s complicated,” Bucky says, regretting saying anything at all. “I’ll explain some other time.” He feels sick again, but he’s out of pills.
Steve wraps the string at the front of the pants around his waist like a belt before tying it. Then he gets back on the bed.
“Where will we go?” Steve asks, and Bucky’s grateful for the change in conversation.
“There’s some places I have to clear out. I don’t want to stay here too long. There are people looking for me.”
“The people you rebelled against? Like Radius?”
“Yes, like Radius.”
Steve nods at this. He yawns and lays down. “When will we go?”
“After we sleep.” Bucky gets into bed next to him, tries to leave a respectful distance between them. Steve hums in response, curling up under the covers.
“Fine, after we sleep.”
Fireworks are booming all down the street outside. Steve is leaning over the back of the couch to watch the dozen auroras from the window. The color washes over him in brilliant flares.
“Stevie,” Bucky says.
Steve turns to face him, bracing himself against the back of the couch. “Wha—“
Bucky kisses him. He bends over Steve, one hand on the back of the couch, and one cupping his face. Steve gasps into his mouth, sweet and unsure, and Bucky sweeps his tongue in—
Bucky wakes in the middle of the night holding Steve under his flesh arm. Steve is tucked into his chest, breathing heavily. His metal arm is braced under his head in a way that’s almost painful, yet this is the most comfortable he’s been in a long time. He was so used to that constant dull throb of pain that this, just this contentment and calm, is a surprise.
“I kissed you,” Bucky mumbles.
Steve stirs in his arms, awake too. “What?”
“For your eighteenth birthday, I gave you a kiss.”
Steve sits up then and Bucky has to force himself to loosen his hold. He doesn’t want to let go. Steve is smiling, holding himself up on one arm.
“So you do remember.”
“Lie back down,” Bucky tells him, “We still have a few hours.”
Steve settles back down under his arm and Bucky places his hand on the small of his back as if to keep him there.
“I was scared no one would ever kiss me,” Steve says into his chest. “It was the best birthday ever.”