Bucky guessed it was okay, staying with Steve. Better than anywhere else he'd stayed since he ran, for sure—and at least this way, he got to do less worrying.
That was why he'd come back, in the end. Hadn't been because he relished knowing that Steve knew more about the things Bucky'd done than Bucky did himself. Hadn't been because he liked being fussed over any more than Steve ever had, back when he'd been the sick one, the one Bucky always had to worry about.
Bucky hadn't come back because Steve was worried about him, or because he and his friend had kept on following Bucky's trail, making him have to abandon every bolthole a couple days before he wanted to. No, when he'd come back, it was because every time Steve wasn't following him, he was doing something stupid. And every time he did something stupid, it ended up in the news wherever Bucky was. And whenever Steve tried to get himself killed, Bucky wanted to go yell at him and tell him how stupid he was being.
He didn't actually remember yelling at Steve for being stupid. But when, the day after he'd watched Steve almost get crushed by yet another truck, he showed up at Steve's front door, he found that it came more naturally than anything else.
He must have been good at it, too, because Steve froze as soon as Bucky started. By the time Bucky was finished, Steve's face was leaking.
Not that he actually got to finish. It was kind of hard to figure out what you'd meant to yell about next when your face was pressed into some big lug's shoulder because he'd decided to hug you right when you were about to really get going.
***
Things weren't great, but they were okay. Bucky was more holes than memory, but Steve helped fill in the gaps, whenever he could. Lots of times, Steve would start telling a story, and then halfway through, Bucky would be able to finish it for him. Part of it, anyway. Something he'd said, or that Steve had said, a flash of memory you'd think would lead to something bigger, but usually didn't.
Steve never started on stories he hadn't been there for, though he could have if he'd wanted to; the pained look on his face when Bucky brought them up said he knew more than enough about Bucky's time as the Soldier to refresh his memory there, too. Sometimes, Bucky thought about pressing him for it, for all of it—but instead he'd ask Steve for another story about something stupid they'd done when they were kids, or ask him if something he'd read was true. Turned out there was a lot of writing about the two of them out there. Steve had stacks of books, and the internet had turned out to be a bottomless well when it came to them, just like it was for everything else.
"Why didn't you tell me about this?" Bucky asked, the first time he stumbled onto a book that talked about how the two of them had been secret lovers, way back when. "Seems like a big thing to keep to yourself."
Steve took a look at the book Bucky had been skimming, then turned bright red. "It wasn't like that," he said. "We weren't—they got it wrong, Buck."
If they'd really been lovers, Steve would have said. Bucky knew that. Even if it had been only one time, or if there had been an almost...well, Steve would have owned up to it. If he said there hadn't been anything between them, then there really hadn't been.
Didn't keep Bucky from feeling like he'd just stumbled onto an answer he hadn't known was there, but that opened up whole new rooms. Didn't keep him from feeling like something had been taken away from him, even though he'd never really had it after all. Didn't keep him from sneaking looks into more of those books, sometimes, trying to see if he couldn't make it work with the pieces he had anyway. If he couldn't remember what had really happened, and if there was no sign he ever would get it all back, did it make a difference if he filled in the gaps with the kind of stuff he wished had happened? Bucky decided it didn't.
***
He'd have given it up eventually, probably. As he got back a few more pieces of himself. As he and Steve got more comfortable with each other, and figured out how they fit together in the this new century they'd both made it to, somehow.
Except that then, something happened on one of Steve's missions. One of the ones Bucky wasn't cleared for. Not that he was cleared for any of them; no one in charge of anything wanted him to turn into the Soldier again at the worst possible moment. (Bucky didn't want that, either; whatever suspicions anyone had had about whether he was only here with Steve because Hydra had programmed him to be here with Steve, a sleeper agent just waiting for his moment...whatever suspicions anyone might have had, Bucky had had them first. Didn't keep him from following Steve at a discreet distance, sometimes, but.)
Anyway. There was a mission, and Bucky had almost managed to convinced himself that Steve would be fine—because Steve was always fine, no matter what stupid shit he decided to do—when he got a call. Steve's number...but when Bucky answered it, it wasn't Steve's voice.
He'd never remember exactly what the person on the other side of the line had to say. He'd never remember, either, how he got to the hospital. It was all a big blank space, the first one since the hours and days he was missing from the first few weeks after he'd run.
One second, Bucky was in Steve's apartment, answering the phone; the next, he was in a hospital room, looking down at Steve, who was lying in a hospital bed. His eyes were closed, and he had a bandage wrapped around his head.
Distant screaming, out in the hallway, and someone (Sam, Bucky's mind supplied; but the knowledge was almost as distance as the screaming) said, "I'm just going to take this. Okay, buddy?"
Bucky didn't remember taking the AK-47 out of the closet on his way out the door, but he had three handguns and about eight knives hidden elsewhere on his body, so he let it go without a fight.
"What the hell happened?" he demanded.
***
The answer turned out to be head injury. Bad one. Would have killed anyone who didn't have accelerated healing. Had given Steve amnesia. They didn't know how bad, yet, but his memories of recent people and events were real spotty. He barely recognized any of the other Avengers, but he'd been asking for Bucky.
Not too long after the others finished explaining this, and before anyone had managed to explain how the hell they'd let Steve get hit in the head like that in the first place, Steve said, "Bucky? That you?"
"Yeah," Bucky said, walking toward the bed so Steve could see him.
"Get me out of here, would you?" Steve's eyes widened. "What happened to your hand?!"
Bucky had put on a jacket on his way out the door (probably because it had about five deep pockets), but looking down, he saw he must have forgotten his gloves.
"Well, that's a long story, Steve," he said, leaving out the part where he still didn't remember all that much about it himself...and what he did remember was the kind of thing he'd rather have died than describe to a Steve who didn't already know about it.
Thankfully, he didn't have to explain it all right then, because Steve was now alert enough to notice how much taller he was himself than he'd used to be.
***
Eventually, everyone agreed to let Bucky look after Steve while they waited for him to get his memory back. Not so much because that's what Bucky thought they should do (which it was), but because Steve was very, very loud about what he wanted, which was for them to stop poking and prodding him, so he could go home.
The doctors still weren't sure how much memory Bucky would get back, but they said Steve would almost certainly regain all of his, with time. If he were in a comfortable place, with a familiar person, it would probably happen sooner. So Bucky took Steve home, and though one or another of the others dropped by every day, for the rest of the time it was just him and Steve.
Bucky had expected Steve to want to talk about it, and to have a million questions—but instead of asking him anything, Steve spent a lot of time holed up in his room with a stack of books and his tablet. (Bucky had tried to show him how to use it, but Steve had said he could figure it out, sounding even more annoyed than he had when Bucky asked how his head felt and he'd said, "What are you, my nursemaid?")
So it was kind of surprising, three days later, when Steve barged out of his room, came right up to Bucky, and said, "Why didn't you tell me we were an item?"
What Bucky should have said, other than 'how do you expect to tell me anything when you won't let me talk?' was exactly what Steve had said to him when he'd asked that question. But Steve had been pushing him away for days, and it was so familiar from what little Bucky remembered of the days when Steve had been small and fragile, and really mad all the time about how he was small and fragile. It was so familiar, and so it seemed like the stuff Bucky had wanted to be true would maybe fit here, too, more than it had before, with Steve telling him it had never happened. And so instead of saying what he should have said, what Bucky ended up saying instead was:
"The first time I laid one on you, you hit me so hard I could barely open my eye for a week," he said. It seemed like the kind of thing grumpy little Steve would have done. "You thought I was making fun of you, or something."
"You weren't, though," Steve said, a little suspiciously, like he thought Bucky might still be pulling his leg.
"Nah. It's right there in writing, isn't it?"
"Huh."
Steve sat down in the recliner with his book, and read through the rest of the section about his and Bucky's forbidden love affair. Bucky fidgeted for a few minutes, watching him, then started maintenance on his arsenal, trying not to sneak enough peeks at Steve that Steve would end up noticing and getting mad about it. He was just about done cleaning handgun #6 when Steve got up from his chair, and came to sit next to Bucky on the couch. Came to sit really close to Bucky on the couch, when there'd always been a certain amount of distance between them before (probably because some doctor had told Steve not to hover too much or Bucky might feel trapped...which was hilarious considering how much Bucky had gotten in his face when he'd shown up on Steve's doorstep).
It was weird, having Steve's thigh pressed so close against his own. Weirder, when Steve's arm wrapped around his shoulders.
Bucky finished cleaning the gun, and put it down on the coffee table.
"You should have told me," Steve said in a low voice.
And, before Bucky could say anything, Steve kissed him.
If it had been a bad kiss, Bucky would probably have said something. If it had been too awkward, or if it had felt wrong—wrong in a different way than knowing Steve would be doing it at all if Bucky hadn't lied to him—he'd have put a stop to it.
But it wasn't a bad kiss. Not even close. Steve's mouth was warm and firm, and sure enough for Bucky to wonder what other kinds of things he might have remembered. But there was no way to ask, because Steve still didn't remember anything, and...
After the first couple minutes, Bucky was too busy trying to give as good as he got to worry too much about it.
***
After that, things escalated. Kisses and cuddling on the couch, with or without people there—and the first time they had visitors while Bucky's head was reclined in Steve's lap, with Steve's hands running through his hair, all Bucky could think at first was that Steve definitely would have gotten both of them killed if they really had been together, before. One 'fuck you if you don't like it' glare at someone who took exception to them, and well...Steve had never been good at doing things quietly, which was the thing that should have told all the historians how wrong they really were.
What he couldn't end up thinking, after he was done thinking that, was what Steve's friends thought about what was going on...but none of them said anything, so maybe they'd believed what everyone seemed to believe about what his and Steve's relationship had been back then.
Things got hot and heavy a few times, but Bucky always managed to put Steve off before it could go too far. Steve was real polite about it; kept saying he didn't want to do anything Bucky wasn't ready for, which let Bucky pretend it wasn't about the fact that Steve was going to remember, one of these days. Because Steve was going to remember. Bucky couldn't let himself get swept up enough to forget that—but he also couldn't quite manage to get worked up to confess. Not when he and Steve kissed about seventeen times a day; not when Steve seemed more relaxed than he had been, more likely to smile than to frown...and when he smiled at Bucky, there wasn't any worry behind it, not the way there'd been before he'd hit his head.
It was too easy to get just lost enough, and so Bucky did.
***
One day, about a week later, Steve said, "Why didn't you tell me we used to share a bed?"
What book he'd gotten that out of, Bucky didn't know.
There was a time for the truth. It had been time for the truth a week ago. It was time for it now. But despite knowing that, Bucky said, "I didn't want you to get any ideas."
"Like what?"
"We didn't, you know...do anything. It was just really cold in our place." (There was so much Bucky still couldn't remember about living with Steve, before, but that much was crystal clear: how frigid it got in the winter, and the way they'd had to huddle together, Bucky always worried Steve was about to get pneumonia, and Steve being even more testy about that when he did than when he didn't.)
Steve seemed to take this in. "I bet it was nice, though."
"Yeah," Bucky said, though he was pretty sure it hadn't been nice in the way Steve meant, not back then. "Yeah, it was."
And that was how Steve ended up moving into Bucky's room.
It was nice. Really nice. Bucky didn't have to spend half the night listening to the bed creak in the other room; Steve was right here, breathing and heartbeat loud and clear and healthy. They'd kiss before bed, but only for a minute; in the morning they'd kiss for longer, until one of them remembered a reason they had to get up. It was nice. Almost perfect, other than the undercurrent of sexual frustration, and all the extra showers Bucky had to take because of it.
***
It couldn't last forever, and of course it didn't. Even if Bucky did make up a few stories about dates they'd gone on—cribbed from descriptions of non-dates Steve had told him about before he'd hit his head—most of what he told Steve was true. It was just that the things Steve remembered didn't contradict any of the Bucky's carefully-selected fibs.
The doctors had said Steve might keep getting things back in bits and pieces, or that it might go like that for a while before everything came back all at once, like a dam breaking. And that was exactly what happened, five or six days after he'd started sleeping in Bucky's room.
Bucky was in the kitchen, looking for a snack; and when he came back to the living room, he found Steve sitting right where he'd been before, looking at the same book he'd been looking at when Bucky had gone. He was in exactly the same place, but he was completely different. He was more still, and when he looked at Bucky, he was a hell of a lot more cautious. The way he'd been cautious before, when he seemed to think anything he said or did might set Bucky off; the way he hadn't been since he'd forgotten. Bucky hadn't missed that look, and he hadn't been looking forward to seeing it again.
"Hey," Bucky said.
"You could have told me," Steve said, in a tight enough voice that he probably wanted to yell (except he never did anymore; this Steve was too busy worrying about what Bucky would do if he spoke wrong or moved wrong or breathed wrong to start yelling at him). "You didn't have to do all that. You could have just—you could have told me."
"I know," Bucky said. Didn't seem like there was anything else he could say.
"I don't know why you thought you had to pretend."
"Who said I was pretending?" Bucky had thought about what he might want to say, when it all came out; he'd never once thought of what he'd have to say, or known it would all come spilling out of him as soon as the subject came up. "I don't know if I'm ever going to remember what things were like between us before. But what I do remember...I know you said we were never together, not like everyone thinks. But even if it's not true, it feels like it could have been. Should have been, maybe. The person I used to be, I don't know—"
"Bucky," Steve said, sounding pained, the way he always did whenever anyone reminded him that Bucky really wasn't the person he'd been, not anymore.
"—I don't know what he would have thought of it. What he would have wanted. But when it comes to me? It feels like it fits. What the books say about us. What everyone thinks about us. It feels like it could be true. I wish it had been."
Steve didn't say anything for a moment, and then: "Me, too."
"—What?"
"I wished it was true, too," Steve said. "Even before we—before I hit my head."
"Then why didn't you say something? God's sake, Steve," said Bucky, ignoring the fact that he hadn't said a word about it either.
"I didn't want to scare you off," Steve said, which was the hell of the whole thing, everything that was going on now, that had been since Bucky came back. Steve had never been worried about scaring Bucky off before, but now he worried about it all the time. Anyone could see that, any time they were in the same room. "I didn't want anything to change, either."
Bucky laughed, a harsh sound that didn't sound anything like him (that sounded exactly like him, the way and the person he was now). "Steve—everything's changed. Everything. Take a look at your phone if you don't believe me. Look out the window. Hell, take a deep breath without almost passing out after."
"We're still here, though."
"Sure," Bucky said. "Everything else is different, but I guess you can have that one."
"We're here, and we're together. It matters, Buck. Sometimes I think it's the only thing that does."
Bucky wished he could believe that. He wished, too, that he could remember more of their past. Maybe if he could, he'd have that rock-solid faith Steve seemed to have, under all that worrying. It was hard to see, sometimes, but he'd come up against it before he even knew his own name.
"I don't want to go back to the way we were before," Bucky said, because living with Steve had been okay. Better than anything else...but still not exactly what he wanted. He didn't know what he wanted, except for maybe one or two things. "There's nothing there for me, not like there is for you. Shut up." (Steve, who'd opened his mouth to say something, closed it again.) "The only way for me to go is forward. You can come with me, if you want. But I'm not going to stay where we were before. I just can't."
And so Bucky leaned over the back of the couch and planted one on Steve. For a second, Steve didn't do anything. It was long enough for Bucky to wonder if maybe Steve had just been trying to let him down gently, when he'd said he'd wished they had, too—but then Steve kissed him back, and it was pretty much the same way he'd kissed when he hadn't known this wasn't something they did, except that it was different too because he did know, now. And then Steve was pulling Bucky over the side of the couch, and they were lying there together, and Bucky's hands were on Steve's skin under his shirt, and Steve was undoing Bucky's jeans, and it was all so different this time...but they were together, and maybe Steve was right after all, about that being the part that mattered.