They don’t fall into bed so much as collapse, and they don’t collapse into each other so much as dissolve into one another.
If Bucky were to pinpoint when it began, he’d probably answer with a good “Fuck You” emphasized by a knife to the belly.
Clint on the other hand, would probably stammer and blush, trip over his own feet, and splash coffee across everyone in a very conveniently timed accident that probably wasn’t an accident.
It doesn’t really matter when it began, only that they are here now.
That Bucky is here, in Bed-Stuy, laying on a mattress that might actually be as old as he is. That Clint’s hands are tangled in his long, dark hair.
What matters are bruises slicing across Bucky’s chest, perfect little bite marks claiming him, chaining him.
Clint’s hips are no better, nearly matching hand prints, one darker where the metal held firmer, holding him in place just as Bucky had a few moments ago.
It doesn’t matter where it began, because this is where it leads: Bucky taking him apart, his mouth on Clint’s belly, sliding down, engulfing his cock. It leads to Bucky flipping them, pinning Clint and sucking until the ringing in Clint’s ears has nothing to do with missing hearing aids and everything to do with the pleasure that starburst through him.
It leads to Bucky above him, riding him, hands gripping the cheap metal headboard, or twisted in sheets that rip far too easily.
Thick thighs under bow scarred fingers and a soldier who sees nothing but blue-grey eyes and corn silk hair.
Sometimes, after, they both wonder if they should be more concerned with how it began.
Because this is how it ends, two bodies wrapped in scars and guilt and destruction. It ends with Clint cleaning himself with old rags and slipping on the same, ratty, hole-filled boxers he’d had before Bucky crashed through his window.
It ends with Bucky running for hours, until he finally passes out on Stark’s fancy couch, too exhausted to even suffer through nightmares of his own past. It ends with one or the other curled on a tile floor, unsure if they’re trying to weep, puke, or some combination.
“It doesn’t have too,” Bucky mumbles into taut shoulders. “It really doesn’t,” he bites into a perfectly round ass.
“Doesn’t it?” Clint sighs into a scar-ravaged shoulder. “Doesn’t it always end this way?” And maybe he’s a little hard in his thrust, maybe he’s a little cruel as he bites his pleasure into Bucky’s neck.
But maybe that’s the truth in how it started. Two broken beings beating pleasure into one another from their own pain.
And maybe it does end with one staying, an arm wrapped over sweaty hips. Maybe it’s a begrudging cup of coffee served in a soup bowl. Maybe it’s warm milk before lights out, and an “I thought of you” sweater.
Maybe it’s the first time their hands brush in a debrief, and the time they walk away from the bloodshed with their hands gripped tight.
Maybe it starts like, “So Steve, I gotta tell you something.” Or, “Nat, I really think he’s too good for me.”
A slap to the chest, a flick to the temple. “You deserve nice things, you know.”
Maybe it starts a hundred million ways. A series of false beginnings, of stumbles and redoes and, “one more” times.
And maybe it ends on a brand new mattress, in a little place all their own. Closer to the tower, farther from the rats and the carnage. The same hole-marred boxers, soup bowls full of coffee, and bruise-kiss necklaces. But it’s hand in hand, and a kiss good night, and being held so that even when the nightmares finally break through, there’s a warm breath of air to suck greedily into ice-filled lungs.
Maybe it ends with someone else rubbing menthol into old scars, and laughing at dumb mistakes, and maybe, just maybe, it’s the kind of fucking they call loving. Hands twisted, eyes open and soft, bodies curling and caving and collapsing.
Two disintegrating souls twisting into one almost complete being, that somehow feels like enough.