Carrying Small Stones

He’d come here to yell at him for being so reckless, and he wasn’t really sure how things had gotten so far off track. But Bucky wasn’t making it easy, he just just kept good-naturedly nodding at him while he searched the kitchen for something, apparently entirely unconcerned with Steve’s wrath.

Steve wasn’t used to people not stopping to listen to him when he got angry.

Well, not since Bucky, who always just sort of let him rant and then would look over at him and ask if he was finished yet.

Anyway, Steve wasn’t entirely oblivious, so he knew that he didn’t really have any right to lecture Bucky on anything in the first place. Him lecturing anyone on being reckless was the height of hypocritical, but this was Bucky. And Bucky had always been the steady, cautious one. He was the one Steve could send up into the trees to cover his six while the rest of them went storming in, until that time he got careless and sent him down a line to a speeding train instead.

But he wasn’t thinking about that right now, or he wouldn’t be able to think about anything else.

Right now, he was trying to figure out why Bucky was pulling out one of the kitchen drawers to tug out a stack of colored paper straws that had been hidden beneath it.

“You can keep yelling at me if you want, I mean, I don’t know why, but if it makes you feel better you can,” Bucky told him, which was underhanded and passive aggressive and so Bucky that Steve wanted to either roll his eyes or cry, he couldn’t even decide. “But first, I want you to try one of these.”

“You have a secret stash of…candy straws?” Steve asked, successfully sidelined from his objective even though he knew exactly what Bucky was doing.

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t tell Pepper,” he added after a moment, looking shifty. He frowned when Steve still didn’t reply. “You’ve been in the future so much longer than me, don’t tell me you haven’t even tried a Pixy Stix?”

“Uh, no?” Steve answered warily. “What is it?”

“Well…flavored sugar, basically,” Bucky admitted, then tossed him a grin as he ripped the end off one of them.

“You don’t like sugar,” Steve told him, nonplussed.

Bucky froze, the Pixy Stix held between his teeth, his eyes going wide like he’d been caught at something. He reached up to slowly to pull it down. “Uh, okay?” he said. “I sort of do, though?”

Steve blinked at him for a moment before he realized what he’d just said. “Right,” he said quickly. “Right, of course. I didn’t mean…”

Bucky tilted his head as he watched him, and Steve recognized the calculating look in his eyes—it was just the first time it had ever been directed at him. Bucky used to know everything there was to know about him. “Here,” he said, tossing him a red one. “Try one.”

Steve caught it out of the air and reluctantly shook some of it out. It was a little too sweet, but good enough, he supposed. It was just a little hard to pay attention, because all the while, a sneaking suspicion was winding itself around his mind. How much of this new Bucky was really new, and how much had Bucky just been hiding from him before this?

He hadn’t known Bucky liked boys as well as girls, never would have suspected it in a million years, the way he’d carried on with every pretty girl that had ever glanced his way (and there were a lot that had). Steve didn’t care, even before he’d woken in the future, it wouldn’t have changed a thing between them. But if he could hide that, what else had he kept from him?

How much of himself had he hidden away to keep Steve safe?

Steve thought of the things he used to know:

Bucky didn’t like sweets, he told Steve so every time they only had enough money for one: “Ah, come on, Stevie, you know I don’t really like it anyway, you’re the one with the sweet-tooth, just take it already” , he didn’t mind staying home with a bed-ridden Steve every time he was too sick to go to a ball game: Who wants to stand around yelling the whole time anyway? I’d rather just wait and see who won, he was fine after being tortured for weeks: They didn’t do anything, I swear, was just a bit sick before they tossed me into isolation, but you got to me in time.

Steve had never gotten to him in time.

This was what Steve knew now:

He’d left Bucky behind when he fell: They found me before you woulda gotten to me anyway.

Their entire history was a catalog of all the times that Bucky had saved him in a hundred different ways, and all the times that Steve had tried to save him back and fallen just a little too short.

“It’s just candy, Steve,” Bucky told him slowly, frowning over at him with his face scrunched up in a way so familiar that it made his heart ache. “You don’t gotta look at me like I’ve grown another arm.”

Steve started to reassure him, then paused, rewinding what he’d just said. “I can’t believe you just said that,” he told him, breaking out into a reluctant, but unstoppable grin.

Bucky grinned back at him, wide and mischievous. “I mean, technically, Helen grew it. Not me. So…”

“You’ve been spending too much time with Tony,” Steve told him.

Bucky laughed brightly, moving past him towards the living room. “Not possible,” he countered simply.

Steve followed him over to the couch, standing beside it awkwardly while Bucky threw himself down onto it like he didn’t have a care in the world. Bucky was so comfortable here. Tony’s tower had always set him on edge—everything was too sterile, too glossy, too new. “About that…” he started.

“You gonna give me the take it slow speech?” Bucky asked, raising an eyebrow, back to worrying at the Pixy Stix with his teeth. “You? You who fell in love with Carter the first week in?”

Steve opened his mouth to protest, and then sighed. He apparently couldn’t lecture Bucky about anything. “So you and Tony then…?” Steve asked, instead. “You’re really—“

“It’s a little soon to try and define it, Stevie,” Bucky told him wryly, but the way he was avoiding meeting his eyes had Steve pretty sure that wasn’t true.

“Well, you know I’ll support you in anything,” he told him.

Bucky shrugged in a way that Steve worried meant he didn’t know that.

“Bucky,” Steve started, his voice nearly breaking, as he dropped down onto the couch beside him. “I just want you to be happy. I don’t care who you want to be with, and I don’t want you to pretend to be something you’re not. Things are so different now…you don’t have to hide anything from me, okay?”

Bucky let out a shaky breath, staring at his Pixy Stix like it held all the answers to the universe. “Yeah, okay,” he said quietly, awkwardly scratching at his ear. “I mean, me too.”

“You’ve always accepted me for who I was,” Steve told him. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to do that for you, too. You were always too busy taking care of me to let me take care of you. Even after Azzano I never really…”

Steve trailed off, thinking back to all those signs he’d missed about what Bucky had been through, about his state of mind and all the physical differences he’d reasoned away. “I’m just sorry, Buck.”

“If I kept things from you,” Bucky started haltingly, in a way that Steve knew meant he absolutely remembered keeping things from him, “it was because I thought it would keep you safe.”

Steve sighed and fell back against the couch, bumping Bucky’s shoulder as he settled. “We’re a pair, huh?” he asked. “Still just a couple stupid boys from Brooklyn, even after everything.”

Bucky huffed out a laugh, before falling back against his shoulder. “Speak for yourself. Pretty sure you took all the stupid with you.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I did,” Steve agreed, pressing his eyes shut like it might hold his emotions in. “God, I’ve missed you, Buck.”

“I would have missed you,” Bucky promised him, “if I could.”