Chapter 3
1939
Bucky hurled the big, barrel-chested lout out of the alley. “Fuck off!” He hollered and flipped a rude gesture at the guy when he looked back and seemed to be considering another run at Bucky. Scowling, the man lumbered off, cussing up a storm about pansies. It made Bucky’s stomach clench, but he couldn’t dwell on that.
Turning away from the mouth of the alley, Bucky rushed back to find Steve where he’d left him, curled into a ball, arms protectively over his head. A cursory glance revealed no immediate damage, so Bucky decided against a fully-fledged mother-henning and just nudged one of Steve’s feet with his. “Alright, punk, up you get.”
With concerted effort, Steve pushed himself up from the ground. He was filthy now, grime from the alley smudged over all his clothes along one side. Bucky reached over and smoothed his hair back, brushing debris out of it. “You alright?”
Steve grimaced and beat at his clothes to get some of the dirt and muck off. “Yeah. I had—”
“—‘Em on the ropes,” Bucky finished for him. “I know ya did.” He reached out and gently cupped Steve’s jaw, tilting his head back and forth. “You’re gonna have a helluva shiner.”
“And the sky is blue. Join us tomorrow at six for another segment of What Else Is New.”
Bucky cuffed him gently behind the head. “Smartass.” He slung his arm around Steve’s shoulder and left the alley with him, the smell of rancid garbage mercifully getting lost as they emerged onto the street. “So, what started it this time?”
Steve’s thin shoulders rolled in a shrug. “I caught that jackass hassling a couple of guys.”
“Couple of guys who couldn’t take care of themselves?”
“They were all dolled up, y’know.” Steve’s polite way of saying they were in drag.
Ah, well, that explained the pansy comment, didn’t it? After Steve had stepped in, they’d probably run for fear the police would be called. Bucky sighed. “Stevie.”
The shorter man bristled. “Don’t tell me not to interfere, Buck.”
“I wouldn’t,” Bucky admitted. “I know you gotta.” Lord, did he know. He’d tried for years to deter Steve, tried to at least get him to pick his battles more carefully, but, by now, he’d long since given up. Steve just wouldn’t be Steve if he could walk past a wrong that needed to be made right. “You just have a horrible talent for getting yourself into these fights when I’m not around.” Not that he didn’t end up in plenty when Bucky was with him, too.
They walked in companionable silence the rest of the way to their shared apartment. The midsummer heat was downright oppressive despite the waning day. It was that time of year where the temperature would barely drop to comfortable levels even in the dead of night. Bucky didn’t mind. Steve’s lungs handled the heat, even as humid as it was, better than the cold. Bucky could tolerate being sweaty and sticky.
And, well, if the heat meant that he and Steve both discarded all ideas of modesty and climbed into their shared bed in nothing but their boxer shorts, Bucky wouldn’t think about it too closely.
Bucky let them into their shoebox apartment and pushed Steve towards the bathroom. “You go clean up. You smell.”
“You’re so damn charming, Buck.” Rolling his eyes but with a smile curving his lips, Steve disappeared down the short hall to the bathroom.
After Bucky heard the water start, he went to the kitchen to see what he could find for their dinner. Settling on a can of beans with the last of their bacon from the ice box, Bucky started to bustle around. Under his breath, he hummed I Can Dream, Can’t I and pretended it was just something he’d heard on the radio, not something that resonated inside him, right down to the soul.
I can see, no matter how near you’ll be
You’ll never belong to me
But I can dream, can’t I?
The refrain floated through his mind on a loop as he prepared their dinner then split the beans between two bowls, unable to help himself from giving just that bit more to Stevie. From the breadbox, Bucky took out a loaf of sourdough bread and cut them each a slice. Just then, Steve padded back down the hall, damp and rosy from his shower, dressed in a fresh shirt and pants. Bucky offered him his bowl then sat down at the table.
“Any plans tonight, Buck?”
He shook his head. “Nah. Don’t feel like going out. I just got that new book. Thought I’d stay in and read.”
Steve hummed thoughtfully. “Mind if I draw you while you do that?”
“When have I ever minded?” He loved being Steve’s muse. Loved flipping through his sketchbook and seeing his own face in a dozen different expressions staring back at him. Sure, maybe Steve drew him a lot just because of simple proximity, but it felt like more to Bucky. He may not ever have Steve’s heart the same way Steve had his, but Bucky had enough of him.
I'm aware my heart is a sad affair
There's much disillusion there
But I can dream, can't I?
Steve cleaned up after they ate while Bucky found the science fiction book he’d bought from the used bookstore a block over. He took a seat on the couch, stretching his legs out over it. Steve sat at the other end with his sketchbook and pencil. He tucked his legs up, using his knees to support the book. Their feet tangled together, Bucky’s long limbs crowding him into Steve’s space. He didn’t complain.
The noise of the city outside faded away. All awareness of a world outside of their little apartment dropped off. Bucky read and Steve drew. It was quiet and simple and enough.
Can I adore you although we are oceans apart?
I can't make you open your heart
But I can dream, can't I?
1945
Bucky woke from the dream-memory slowly, consciousness dragging him kicking and screaming back to awareness when all he wanted was to stay in that moment of peace with Steve. It was a rare and blissful night that he dreamed like that. Most of his nights were spent waking multiple times from visions of horror that his mind invented or dredged up from the war and Azzano. Sometimes it was just Steve’s face, blue and twisted in horror and covered in frost, eyes accusing as they bored into Bucky’s. That one always made him wake up in a clammy sweat.
He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to bring back the smells of their apartment, the feel of the paperback in his hands, the sound of Steve’s pencil scratching across the paper. They drifted away like wisps of smoke. He could remember that evening, the fight he’d broken up, cooking and thinking of that damned sad song. But the feel of it was gone, just a memory once more.
Sighing, he gave up on sleep and climbed out of his bed. He had his next appointment with Howard that day which he needed to be bright and early for. It was finally time to try putting the arm on. It had been a hellish few weeks of surgery and healing to augment his left shoulder to support the cybernetic prosthesis. The doc had been mystified by how quickly Bucky healed, even after he’d been told about the super soldier serum. The guy had apparently anticipated this process taking months if not more than a year.
Bucky walked into the bathroom. Bracing himself, he stood in front of the mirror and pulled off his shirt. He grimaced. It was definitely a jarring sight, one that he wasn’t sure was better or worse than the rough scarring his stump had had. His shoulder was no longer skin. Metal plates like those on his new prosthetic had been grafted into place. Angry red scars met metal where flesh had been fused with titanium. It was surprisingly not uncomfortable. He rolled his shoulder and the plates moved with a soft whirring noise. The stump he’d been left with had been more or less completely removed, leaving a flat plate at the end of his shoulder. The prosthesis would attach there, locking into place and interfacing with the implants Stark and Dr. Wilson had installed with the supports, allowing Bucky to fully control his new limb and sense pressure and temperature.
What would Stevie think of this? He wondered. Would he be glad Bucky was getting a new, fully (or at least mostly) functional arm? Or would he be repulsed by the way he’d allowed himself to be partially roboticized? His mother and sister had been a bit put off by the sight of his metal shoulder when he’d come out of surgery, though they’d tried valiantly not to show it. They had yet to see the arm that Howard was going to attach today; Bucky had to imagine they would blanch over it too. Bucky thought the arm was beautiful, but he could admit that it was also obviously alien. I’m gonna get a lot of looks with that thing. Well, if anyone wanted to hassle him about it, he’d gladly take a play out of Steve’s book and introduce them personally to what it could do.
Bucky dressed and slipped out of the apartment before his mother or sister woke. They wanted to go with him, but it was something he needed to do alone. He doubted it was going to be as simple as slotting the limb into place and all done. In all likelihood, he had a long day of trial and error ahead of him.
Turned out, he was right.
The arm hung like a dead fish when Howard first put it on him. That had been more than a little disconcerting, waves of doubt rolling over him. What if he’d royally fucked up, had this huge surgery on his shoulder, and got nothing to show for it? What if Howard had been wrong and he couldn’t make Bucky’s nerves communicate with the prosthesis?
“Don’t panic, Buckaroo!” Howard said as he lifted the dead weight of Bucky’s arm onto a table at his side. “I just need to tweak some things. Prototype, remember? Breathe.” It was then that Bucky realized he’d begun to wheeze, a sound so reminiscent of Steve that it made his heart constrict. Which did not help.
Without removing the arm from the shoulder socket, Howard popped off a couple of the plates. “Okay, I’m just going to disconnect and reconnect some things and poke around a bit. There might be some discomfort once the cybernetics come online.”
Yeah, “discomfort” was a goddamned understatement. About half an hour into Howard’s tinkering, a blaze of pain swept from Bucky’s left shoulder to every other part of his body, waves of agony searing through his nerves and making his eyes well up from the sudden force of it.
An “oomph!” forced Bucky to twist his head toward the noise at which point, he realized two things as the pain dissipated. Firstly, his previously-limp-and-useless metal arm was held out straight at his side, palm held up and out in a shove. Secondly, Howard was on the floor against a row of counters, looking like he’d gotten the wind knocked out of him.
“Shit! Howard!” Bucky leapt off his chair and rushed across the room. He knelt down next to him. “Did I hurt you?”
Howard sucked in a breath, blinked at Bucky, and let out a whoop. “It works!” He laughed and grabbed Bucky’s face with both hands then planted one right on his mouth, his exuberance clearly overwhelming him. Using the grip on his face, Howard shook him back and forth, side to side. “It works!”
The enthusiasm was infectious, and Bucky found himself grinning broadly at the other man. Hesitant to use the left arm, he helped Howard up with just his right hand. “Looks like it. I knew you could do it.”
“You doubted me for a minute, but I forgive you,” he said cheekily. He smoothed down his hair, though it was slicked with so much pomade that it had barely been ruffled by his shove across the lab. “Come on, let’s put it through its paces.”
They started small. Bucky had to touch things without crushing them. Surprisingly, not all that easy to do. This arm was powerful. Howard had undersold just how strong it was going to be. Bucky was used to strength by now; he hadn’t been a weakling before, and he’d gotten exponentially stronger after Azzano. The cybernetic arm was beyond anything he’d thought he could do. It was a miracle he hadn’t punched Howard’s chest in. It would take a lot of practice to master this new arm, but Bucky felt more than up for the challenge.
After simply figuring out touching things, Howard put him on a sort of obstacle course of daily life. Things like putting his shirt on (that took several tries and several shirts), opening door knobs (knobs affixed to test doors of which several were sacrificed, crushed to smithereens in Bucky’s grip), and using a knife and fork (utensils and plates alike were massacred as Bucky figured out how to manage his new strength). But he did start to gain control. After he’d more or less mastered grabbing things without mauling, shredding, crushing, or otherwise obliterating them, Howard turned the tables.
“You wanna destroy stuff on purpose now?”
Well, hot damn, don’t gotta ask me twice.
Howard led him out of the lab and down to a basement level. “We’re remodeling this entire area. I need additional lab space. It used to just be storage. So all these walls are going to be ripped down. I’d like to see what that arm can do and if it holds up as promised.”
“You want me to punch through walls?” Bucky was pretty sure he could do that with his regular hand, honestly.
Howard shrugged. “There are a few different kinds, since this is an old basement that has been added to over the years. Some wood, some plaster. I’m particularly interested in the brick.” He pointed at a worn looking red brick section of wall. “Just don’t tear all the walls or supports down. I’d rather all of this building didn’t collapse.”
Bucky decided not to argue with the eccentric scientist. He approached the brick wall. Gave it a bit of a test punch with his right hand, just for comparison. Yep, that was sturdy brick. As resilient as he was, using his flesh hand to break through that would definitely hurt like hell. He grinned, pulled his left hand back, and snapped his fist forward, the whirring and mechanical sounds oddly already growing familiar as the inner workings of the arm worked to follow Bucky’s direction. The sound was cacophonous in the large empty space. Bricks crumbled to dust where his fist had impacted and those surrounding the area were mangled and crushed. His arm had sunk into the wall up to the elbow. He pulled it back and brushed the dust off. Not a scratch.
Letting out a whoop of delight, he attacked other parts of the walls with a vengeance.
Later, they made their way back up to Stark’s lab. That little exercise in the basement hadn’t just been about destruction, Bucky had quickly realized. He’d learned, using the different thicknesses and materials of the walls, how much power he needed to use to break through them. It really was overkill to use the full force of his cybernetic arm to break through wood and plaster. He’d messed with pieces of the debris, learning how to pinch bits of broken mortar between his fingers without crushing it to dust. He’d thrown things into the walls, gauging how much force was needed to make a hole or just have the object go bouncing off. For the first time in what felt like forever, Bucky had just had fun. He suspected that had been Howard’s aim, too. Sneaky bugger.
“Howard, this is amazing,” Bucky said, looking down in wonder at his new left hand. He flexed it, turning it to and fro in front of himself. He’d noticed while putting it through its paces he might have slightly less flexibility in the limb than on his right side, but that was neither surprising nor a big issue.
Howard looked up at him with evident relief. “I am so glad that it works, Bucky.” He smiled softly. “And now one final test for the day.” He held out his left hand.
Bucky arched a brow. “You sure you wanna try that? I’m still better at breaking things than not.”
“I trust you.”
“Alright, but don’t sue me if you end up needing a metal hand, too.” He grinned and reached out, hesitated for a moment, then clasped Howard’s hand with his. No crushing, no scream of pain. Just a handshake.
When Bucky left (after promising to return soon for more testing and also lunch), it was late afternoon. As expected, it had taken all day to fine-tune things and get his arm (mostly) under his control. He would have to be extremely careful when he got home. Howard didn’t care if Bucky broke most of the stuff in his lab because, a. he’d been expecting that to happen and had removed anything he couldn’t bear to lose, and b. he was filthy rich and could easily replace whatever it was if needed. Bucky and his family couldn’t really run out for a new one if Bucky tried to cook and destroyed the stove.
He arrived home after dark had fallen. Though it was warm, he’d made sure to take a jacket with him to Stark’s so he could hide the prosthesis on his way home. He was fully prepared to deal with stares and people asking about it, just not that day. As great as it felt to have the arm now, the elation of his day at the lab was fading, leaving him feeling raw. The hole in his heart opened up, that emptiness reaching out for him. He missed Steve with a burning intensity right then. Steve he would’ve wanted with him throughout all of the process. From the first meeting with Howard discussing the modifications he needed to the surgery to today. He ached wishing that Steve could’ve been there to share his joy at having the use of both his hands again.
Bucky stopped outside the apartment building and looked up at the sky. He missed being able to see the stars. It was something he’d gotten accustomed to the last few years. They’d rarely been in cities over in Europe, mainly at the SSR base, which was set well away from any major town, or camping on the way to or from a mission. There had been starry skies as far as the eye could see. Dernier had known the names of all the constellations—though only in French, so Gabe Jones had had to translate them for the rest of the Howlies. But Bucky had learned them all over time. Above the streets of Brooklyn, there were no stars, only clouds and blank, blue-black sky.
Sighing, trying to find the happiness that had held him aloft for most of the day, Bucky let himself into the building and headed up the many flights of stairs to the apartment he temporarily shared with his mother and sister. He still wasn’t used to the weight on his left side; he favored that side now, leaning more on his left foot than the right. Well, guess my shoes are doomed to wear unevenly no matter what.
The smell of dinner reached him first as he approached the apartment door. Pot roast. One of his favorites. Of course, his mother would make that for him. Either a celebration or a consolation, ready for however the day turned out for him. Smiling at her thoughtfulness, he let himself inside.
His mother was at the kitchen sink, Becca at the table, the newspaper in front of her, spread open to the classifieds. She’d just graduated high school earlier that month, right before he’d gotten home. Now she had embarked on the hunt for a job. A pang went through his heart. When she was younger, she’d had dreams of going to a university, even becoming a doctor. Was it too late to get her in somewhere? He’d talk to her about it tomorrow, he decided. He could find a job, maybe two, and see about paying for her to get a degree of some kind, if she still wanted one.
Becca noticed him first, just inside the door. She gasped when she saw that his sleeve was not empty or pinned to his chest. “It works?”
He smiled and shrugged out of his jacket, leaving him in just the tank top undershirt he’d worn under his button-down. He’d ripped the button-down trying to get it back on, of course. “Yup,” he said, popping the “p.”
Winnie turned away from the sink and dried her hands before walking over. “Oh…my.”
Becca hopped to her feet and approached him, running her eyes over the gleaming metal that flowed seamlessly into the shoulder support. “It’s…yeah, wow.”
He laughed softly. “You guys hate it, don’t ya?”
Becca’s eyes widened. “No, no! It’s just, y’know, really different.” She held her hand out. “Can I?”
“Yeah, absolutely.”
She tentatively ran her fingers over the plates of his forearm. “Can you feel that?”
He shook his head. “I can feel a bit of pressure from your fingers, but that’s it. Stark wants to add full sensation, but he’s pretty sure even he is decades from a breakthrough like that.” Carefully, so very, very carefully, he raised his hand and captured hers. He stroked his metal thumb over her knuckles. “I can tell that your hand is warm.”
Becca’s eyes filled with tears. “That’s…Oh, Bucky, that’s amazing.” She leaned in, finally catching sight of the insignia on the bicep. “What’s--?” She stepped closer, shifting more to his left to see it. “Oh.”
Bucky looked down at his arm. There on the bicep, engraved and colored in across the plates, was Captain America’s shield.