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Eventually, Steve gives up on trying to make them pose and starts trying to memorize their bodies. It’s ridiculous, really, how distracted he gets when he’s sitting with Tony in the lab, or Natasha in the training room, or Bucky in the city—there are a million other things that he notices that he shouldn’t. Grease smudges on Tony’s knuckles, the way Bucky sits perfectly still, the way Natasha brushes the hair out of her face in one stroke—Steve tries for form, not texture, not detail, and it never works out.
Eventually, Steve starts trying to memorize their bodies. He stuffs his sketchpad under the mattress of his bed and commits every last detail to memory.
-
“No sketchpad?” Bucky asks, raising an eyebrow. “Something wrong with you, Rogers?”
Steve sinks into the armchair across from Bucky, who’s watching baseball reruns with a considerable amount of interest for someone who didn’t care about it back in the day. Bucky’s watching TV, and Steve watches him instead. There’s sharp afternoon sunlight spilling across his shoulders, striping his hair, glancing across the gleaming metal of his left arm. There are strands of hair hanging across his forehead, and wrinkles on his face that Steve doesn’t recognize.
“Something,” Steve says, and Bucky makes a noncommittal noise and turns back to the Mets game.
Bucky bites the nail on his thumb when the score gets especially close, and lifts his chin when it gets especially far. Bucky bites his lip whenever Steve laughs at a commercial, and Bucky doesn’t laugh at any himself. Bucky is wearing a striped t-shirt with a hem that rides just above his belt when he leans back. Bucky—
“That’s it,” he says, throwing a pillow at Steve as the third round of commercials starts—“Get over here.”
“Why don’t you get over here?” Steve yawns and watches the corner of Bucky’s mouth twitch.
“I give the orders around here,” Bucky says. “I rank higher than you.”
“In that case, yes, sir,” Steve says, giving Bucky a mock salute, and trudges up to his sofa. Steve pushes Bucky’s legs off the cushions, ignoring his grunt of protest, and sinks heavily down next to him. Bucky watches him with eyes that aren’t quite as lazy as he’d like them to be, and Steve takes note of the circles underneath, the stubble on his face. He’s going to say something, but—
“Goddamn,” Bucky says, dropping his head on Steve’s shoulder—We’re losing.”
Steve feels the weight of Bucky’s right hand, his flesh-and-blood hand, on his thigh. He is the opposite of what Steve remembers from 1944—then, he’d be moving, murmuring, rubbing circles into Steve’s slacks, shifting his weight back and forth—but now, it’s been beaten out of him—the star on his shoulder isn’t meaningless—and he stays still, breathing gently against Steve’s side.
Steve doesn’t know how many more innings they watch until he gives in and kisses him.
Bucky’s fingers curl against Steve’s thigh when Steve sucks on his lower lip, and Bucky’s fingers uncurl when Steve slides his tongue into his mouth. He stays like that for a second, warm and pliant under Steve’s body, and then he comes to life—just like he did, from the box they found him in, just like Steve did, from the ice. Bucky wraps a cold hand around the back of Steve’s neck and pulls him in, biting Steve’s mouth and making an approving noise as Steve slides onto his lap.
“Here?” Bucky asks, nipping breathless kisses across Steve’s throat as Steve balances his head on Bucky’s shoulder, fingers fumbling at his belt.
“A good place as any,” Steve breathes, and finally, he can feel Bucky smile against his neck.
The belt clicks open. Steve unbuttons, then unzips, Bucky’s pants. He presses one last kiss to Bucky’s mouth before getting down on the floor, on his knees, between Bucky’s thighs. Bucky’s breathing hard, and Steve is, too, and the TV is saying something about ten percent off all used cars.
Steve meets Bucky’s gaze. There’s color in his cheeks that Steve’s watercolors would classify as flamingo pink, or maybe terra-cotta red. Steve meets Bucky’s gaze, and then Steve sinks two fingers into the waistline of Bucky’s underwear and yanks it down to his knees.
“Take it easy, Rogers,” Bucky manages.
“You know me,” Steve says—“Easy,” and Bucky laughs at that.
Steve blows Bucky in the living room with the Mets game playing on the TV and sunlight falling in patches across their shoulders and Bucky’s fingers wound tight in Steve’s hair. Bucky doesn’t make as much noise as he used to, but that doesn’t stop Steve from trying; he sucks on the head of Bucky’s cock, licks down the underside, leaves a scrape of teeth as he travels back up. Eventually, he just lets Bucky thrust up into his mouth, even though it doesn’t feel particularly good. Bucky likes that, now—he likes being in control, likes Steve knowing that they’re an even match, likes the way that Steve submits to him, and maybe Steve likes it a little, too.
Steve wraps two fingers around Bucky and reaches for his own pants with the other, pressing wet kisses under the head of Bucky’s cock as he fumbles with his zipper. When he finally pulls his own dick out, Bucky’s looking at him with eyes that are a little dazed, and more than a little fond.
“What?” Steve murmurs, licking Bucky’s balls so he curses and tightens his grip in Steve’s hair. He rubs his face on Bucky’s dick a little, tonguing away a few drops of pre-come, just for the show. Bucky likes that—Steve knows he likes it, when reaches down and rubs his thumb over the corner of Steve’s mouth.
“You,” Bucky says, and he pulls Steve off and lets go of him. “Get your pants off and get up here, Rogers.”
“Bossy today, Sarge,” Steve mutters, even as he’s getting up and stepping out of his jeans. He falls more than sits down on Bucky’s lap, sliding between his legs and pressing their cocks together. He watches the play of reaction across Bucky’s face when he jerks them off, slowly—the way his lips part, the way his eyelashes flutter, the breaths he lets out between his teeth.
“Good?” Steve asks, sucking on his finger.Bucky’s eyes flicker from the TV back to Steve, taking in everything, the way he was taught.
“We won,” Bucky says.
-
Sometimes, Steve sits and wonders how the hell he got so lucky. It’s a question that makes sense, and a question that has an answer that constantly evades him. Sometimes, Steve Rogers remembers cold smoke and lonely wars, and then he feels the warm skin around him, three different scents of shampoo, and he’ll forget.
Steve’s therapist asks him the same question every time they meet: “How’re you holding up, Steve?”
Steve has the same answer every week.
-
Natasha counts five bottles gone from the cabinet. Steve counts five lines on her face when she tells him, and thirteen steps to the elevator. The four walls around them are like mirrors, so Steve can see himself from every angle; she doesn’t seem to enjoy it as much. She’s wearing her zip-up suit, so she’s one dark line; Steve’s wearing his uniform, so he is a hundred, a thousand scars. She presses the twenty-first floor button, crosses her arms, and waits.
“Sometimes he has to unwind,” Steve says. “Four isn’t so much.”
“Four is three too many,” she says. “He said he would stop.”
“He’s never going to,” Steve says automatically, immediately regretting it when Natasha’s shoulders stiffen—“He’ll try,” Steve adds, but he doesn’t finish the sentence. Natasha’s back is to him, and he takes a step forward and touches his fingers to her arm. “Relax, Natasha. He’s—it’s not easy.”
“It’s not easy if he doesn’t want it to be,” she says. Steve doesn’t argue with her.
In the end, they don’t go to one of his many bedrooms to lecture him about the evils of alcohol; in the end, Natasha doesn’t step out when the door finally opens, so neither does Steve, and in the end, the doors finally realize that no one has any plans to either get out or come in, so they close, and then it’s just Steve and Natasha, standing with polished chrome and gleaming buttons all around them.
Natasha turns around, and Steve notices a scar on her jaw that he hasn’t seen before. Natasha sees it in his eyes.
“One of the prime minister’s bodyguards,” she says, “was a very patriotic man.”
Steve stares at it for a moment more before he realizes that he can touch, now, and he can brush her hair out of the way—it’s straight and long and blonde, because Natasha is fresh off a mission that even he doesn’t have the clearance to know about—and run his finger over the skin where it curls behind her ear. Steve touches his lips to Natasha’s throat, and she doesn’t jump, doesn’t even move. That’s one of the things he hates about her—she is perfectly still, unresponsive, until she determines exactly what the most useful reaction would be.
“It’s a funny thing,” Steve says, licking the scar—“ I’m a patriotic man, too. One could even say I take it a step further.”
“One could,” she says, and Steve feels her fingers at his waist, but she doesn’t tell him to stop, so he doesn’t. Steve wishes he knew who did this to her, how they did this to her. He wants her to tell him, and he wants—
Natasha slams him against the elevator wall, and Steve lets her; she claws at him, digs her fingernails into his suit, tearing through all of the buttons and zippers until she can work his pants open and slide a warm hand into them. Steve’s breath comes in a stutter, and Natasha bites the side of his face when he says her name.
“Missed you,” Steve says, and exhales, slowly, as Natasha’s fingers curl around his cock.
“Did you?” she asks. It’s small talk—it’s—
“Shouldn’t go on such long missions,” he murmurs, tipping his head back against the chrome as she starts to jerk him off—“—dangerous. And—oh God—you’re an Avenger now. You don’t have to—oh God,” Steve gasps—“Oh fuck. Natasha—”
“Doesn’t change anything,” she says, and Steve could almost laugh at that, how he always picks the perfect times to start an argument.
Natasha’s suit is impossible for Steve to maneuver without some assistance. He fumbles with what appear to be zippers, but turn out to be paralyzer dart casings, at her wrists, and then he runs his hands up her side in an attempt to find something vaguely resembling a button—he can feel Natasha’s breath quicken, almost imperceptibly, as the pads of his fingers slide over her breasts. Steve can’t say he isn’t pleased when he finds the zipper just below the first vertebrae of her spine, and he can’t say he isn’t pleased, either, when Natasha peels the suit down, down, down, until she’s standing in front of him in nothing but her bra and panties.
Steve wastes one second looking for anything else—another scar, another bruise, the telltale angles of broken bones—until Natasha pulls him against her, against the wall, so he’s on top of her, now, holding her against the wall with nothing except his sheer bulk. Her arms are around his neck, her legs are around his hips.
“Fuck me,” she breathes, as Steve presses his face in between her breasts. She looks at him, and her mouth is parted slightly, and her eyes are pine green.
Steve doesn’t even bother pulling the panties off; he presses one hand against the wall, fingers digging so deep that they leave spiderweb cracks that Pepper is going to kill him for—and Steve’s name is on Natasha’s lips as he slips two fingers between her legs, stroking long wet lines against her cunt before pushing them inside of her.
“Oh God,” Natasha moans, as he crooks his fingers—“Steve, fuck—now, I—”
Steve presses a kiss to the scar before reaching for his cock. “Yeah,” he says, as he presses inside—“Yeah. Oh God, Natasha—fuck,” and Natasha is wet and warm and tight around him, and her breath hitches with every thrust. Natasha likes it fast and hard, and Natasha likes it when Steve fits two fingers against her clit and presses hard, and—and God, Natasha likes it when Steve bites her shoulders when he’s coming inside of her. She follows soon after, spilling warm over his hand, and Steve brings it back up between their mouths so he can lick it off with Natasha’s breath fast against his face.
“Tell me next time,” Steve says, his voice muffled through her shoulder. “Don’t just disappear.”
“That’s what I do,” Natasha says, but there’s something soft in her voice that Steve doesn’t recognize.
-
If Fury notices it, he doesn’t say anything. He must have, by now—the way that Tony’s smartass comments have turned from razor-sharp to mostly-kidding, which no one, especially Coulson, is used to—the way that Bucky, James Barnes, isn’t so on edge anymore, and how he doesn’t look like he’s five seconds away from slitting somebody’s throat most of the time. Natasha is Natasha, as usual, but even she has a kind of switch in her step that’s different from the grim determination that the rest of them are used to.
Steve—Steve doesn’t feel different, but he must be. He’s not the same person he was before, and he’s not the same person he was after, either.
Bucky’s voice comes through the walkie-talkie Steve’s holding in his hand, and even though he’s standing next to a pile of rubble in Albuquerque with cars screaming and buildings burning and reports of enormous lizards in the sewers, Steve feels like he’s come home.
-
“Pass me that wrench, will you?”
Tony doesn’t look up from the joint he’s soldering, only holds his hand out. Steve stares at him for one long second, bent over a lab table with sparks flying and his mask heavy over his eyes, and then sighs, picks up the wrench, and puts it on Tony’s palm with maybe a little more force than required. Tony ignores him and goes on with the tiny circuit board he’s working on. Steve watches him for what feels like a long time—Tony Stark, in his laboratory, with shining metal and spinning holograms around every corner. Tony Stark, with silver lining the roots of his hair and fresh bruises at his wrists.
“Where’d you get those?” Steve asks, leaning forwards in his chair.
“Natasha,” he says—“Or maybe it was Barnes.” He flips his mask up and grins at Steve. “They like it rough. What can I say?”
Steve raises an eyebrow.
“Oh, come on, Cap,” Tony says, sliding off the stool and slapping Steve’s ass as he walks by him—“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t put up with a little rough handling for some really fantastic master-assassin sex.” He turns around, slightly, and runs his eyes over the marks on Steve’s neck. “I think I already know your answer.”
“They left this morning,” he says, tracing the burn marks on the table. “Co-op. Hill says they’ll be back in twelve days.” He glances up at Tony, but he’s disappeared behind a pile of used-car parts. He listens to Tony rattle around, knocking engines over onto tires and axles, and watches him emerge, looking considerably more smudgy, carrying a jumble of little metal parts.
“So it’s just you and me?” Tony dumps the pieces onto the table, and Steve catches the few that roll off.
“I guess so,” Steve says, and his eyes meet Tony’s.
“Sounds like an invitation,” Tony says. Steve doesn’t respond—he’s trying to pinpoint the exact shade of brown in Tony’s irises, but all he can up with is some combination between copper and chocolate, which is ridiculously cheesy and not at all useful in an art store.
“—there’s lube down here,” Tony is saying. “And condoms.” He cocks his head to one side, ignoring Steve’s sound of protest—“Do we need condoms? I don’t think so. We’ve done this, like, a hundred times before. You’re a super-soldier, and I’m... me. I’m pretty sure JARVIS would have already had a freakout if he found out I had VD or something. We do? We don’t,” he finishes, and rolls his eyes at Steve, who’s red in the face. “Come on, Cap. I know you want it,” he says, and reaches for Steve’s face across the table.
Tony tastes like coffee and Heineken, which is by no means a good combination, but Steve lets him lick over the tops of his teeth and suck on his tongue anyway. Tony kisses deep and hot and makes Steve want to pull him into his lap and have his way with him—but instead, Steve pulls away, breathless, and watches a strand of his saliva hang from Tony’s bottom lip.
“Natasha’s worried about you,” he says, voice almost a whisper.
“Oh Jesus, not now,” Tony murmurs, and leans forward until Steve pulls back again. “Really, Steve?”
“Just saying you should think about it,” Steve says.
“I’ll think about it after I fuck you,” Tony growls, moving around so he’s on Steve’s side of the lab table. He pushes Steve against it, so the metal digs into the small of his back. Tony runs a hand through Steve’s hair, and Steve remembers that Tony likes to think that he personally is seeing to the corruption of America’s national hero, mussed hair and all—and then he yanks Tony’s tank top off. The arc reactor glows electric blue, the color of summer skies and something vaguely inhuman. Steve lets him settle in between his thighs.
“Mm,” Tony says, nipping at Steve’s earlobe. “Lube. We need lube.” He scrabbles in a side drawer until he finds what he wants, and then he’s tugging Steve’s slacks down to his ankles. Tony presses a halfhearted kiss to Steve’s chest, stubble brushing over hard nipples, before squeezing some onto his fingers and slapping Steve’s hip with the other hand. “Roll over. Atta boy.”
The table is cold against Steve’s bare skin, but Tony’s hand is warm against the inside of his thighs. Steve bites his lip when Tony’s slick fingers run up the crack of his ass, trace his hole, and he can’t help the sound that comes out when he pushes the tip of one finger in, up to the first knuckle.
“Fuck,” Steve says. “Jesus—oh, Tony.”
Tony’s breathing hard behind him. “Come on, open up for me, baby,” he purrs, and Steve rocks his hips into the table as Tony starts to bend his fingers, stretching him open—one finger up to the second knuckle, up to Tony’s palm, and then two fingers—Steve moans and Tony makes an approving sound behind him, trailing his fingers down to tug at Steve’s erection.
“That’s right,” Tony says—“Get hard for me. You want me?”
“Yeah,” Steve says, involuntarily, and then Tony’s finger hits an electric spot inside of him and—“Oh God—oh fuck.”
“That’s enough,” Tony says, and there’s a hitch in his voice that tells Steve that he’s touching himself—“Get up, handsome. I want you to ride me.”
Sometimes, when Steve’s hands are planted on Tony’s chest, one on each side of the arc reactor, and he’s sinking slowly onto Tony, and Tony’s grinning and hissing and running his hands over Steve’s shoulders, Steve’s thighs—sometimes, Steve likes to imagine that the arc reactor is supposed to be there. It’s not hard to believe—the way that Tony’s eyes flutter shut so all Steve can see is the dark smudge of his eyelashes, the way his fingers clench around Steve, the way the blue light flickers in time to his thrusts—sometimes, Steve lets himself believe that the scars around it are just the injuries of a day’s work.
“Fuck, come on, Steve,” Tony growls, fingers dipping into the sweat pooling in the small of his back—“Harder. Oh—oh fuck, baby, just like that—”
Steve jerks himself off through the final few strokes, slamming down on Tony and curling his fingers around his own cock in time—and then Tony says his name, jumbled with fuck and Christ and beautiful and Steve snaps, spilling across Tony’s chest, coming over the arc reactor. Tony pulls out of him, panting, and jerks himself off in front of Steve, eyes locked on his, and follows him over the edge.
“Fuck,” Tony groans, dropping his head back down onto the table. “Fuck.”
Steve runs his hands over Tony’s sticky chest. “Don’t think this gets you out of talking about things,” he says, folding his fingers in between Tony’s.
Tony closes his eyes, but he squeezes Steve’s hand and grins at the ceiling nevertheless. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
-
It would be nice to say that they fit together, like pieces of a puzzle that Steve could never work out on his own, but Steve thinks they’re whole puzzles themselves—none of them has been fit together yet. If anything, he’s the best-off out of all of them. Tony has nightmares and drinks to forget them and has more nightmares when he drinks, and Bucky isn’t the same kid from Brooklyn with a few sticks of gum and a whole lot of hope jangling in his pockets, and Natasha still doesn’t like going to sleep without tucking her Beretta under her pillow, but Steve—well, Steve has all of them, and he’s not one to be greedy.
-
“Any of you notice,” Bucky asks, holding his cigarette between two fingers and blowing smoke into the summer air, “That Steve doesn’t draw anymore?”
“He does,” Natasha says, automatically, quick as a whip or, more accurately, a gunshot—“Sketchbook’s under the bed. In the mattress, to be exact.”
Tony makes an indistinct sound and turns his face so it’s not pressed into the pillow. “I’m not even going to ask how you know that.”
Steve wants to draw them, right now, even though he’s sure that the three of them would object to his disturbing the peace—the four of them, sitting on a bed in a room with green wallpaper and all of the balcony windows wide open. The air is still, the city is still, and Steve thinks his heart might burst from the ridiculousness of it all.
Natasha’s sitting closest to the window, on the edge of the bed with her knees drawn up and the sheets pooled at her hips. Bucky is next to her, with one hand wrapped around her waist. Steve is at Bucky’s thigh-level, on his back, and Tony is beside him, facedown in the pillows. It’s like—it’s like the last scene of a movie, Steve thinks, and, if the status of their clothes was to be taken into account, probably a blue movie.
“What time is it?” Steve asks, yawning. “Jesus.”
Bucky presses his lips to Natasha’s cheek, and she smiles, faintly, turning away from the window. He runs a cold hand through Steve’s hair. “You got anywhere to be?”
Tony moans. “Charity ball at seven. Thank Coulson for that. Says we need some good PR after that whole exploding bus stop debacle.”
“Five thirty-eight,” Natasha says.
“Good,” Steve says, closing his eyes. “We got time.”
The thing is, Steve realizes—now that they have all the time in the world, he doesn’t have to burn every detail into his mind. He doesn’t have to remember because their bodies are there beside him, warm and real and here, and Steve—well, sometimes, Steve sits and wonders how the hell he got so lucky.