Sealed With a Kiss - follow_the_sun, littleblackfox (2024)

Chapter Text

“I can’t believe you let Natasha talk you into that,” Steve told Bucky, as the two of them walked out of the bar and turned in the direction of the the subway station.

Bucky tightened his right arm around Steve’s shoulders, pulling him closer, as if he could feel the warmth of Steve’s body right through all the layers of Steve’s heavy coat and his sealskin. He genuinely loved New York in the early part of winter, when all the decorations were up and the city was basking in fluffy white snowfalls that made everything look clean and new, but by March, the snow had clumped into piles that were as much trash and soot as hard-frozen slush, the damp air gave him a deep ache in his left shoulder that never really went away, and even Molly wouldn’t go outside unless he physically carried her to the door and dumped her into the yard. He’d told Steve his seal body didn’t mind the cold that much, and that was true, but it was a sh*tty time of year to be even nominally human. “Oh, now you don’t like music?” he asked.

“I love music,” Steve informed him stiffly. “Nobody likes karaoke. Anyway, it was your birthday party, so you should’ve gotten to choose the entertainment.”

“Hey, if I’d realized you hadn’t been to the Milano yet, I would’ve suggested it myself,” Bucky told him, suppressing a smile. He was pretty sure it was actually the cutest thing in the world when Steve got mad on his behalf, although Steve would be mortally offended if he ever said so. “It’s kind of a rite of passage. You might be married to a fae and de facto living with one, but you’re not really part of the community until you have to sit through some drunk Tylwyth Teg butchering ‘Princes of the Universe’ for the third time in a row.”

“I think I could’ve handled my disappointment. And what do you mean, living with one? I slept at my own place for three nights last week.”

“Only because I was at Becca’s all weekend. Look, I’m not complaining, Steve. I’m just saying I’m close enough to being a lawyer that I can get you out of your lease any time you want to make it official.”

Steve frowned, and Bucky fixed his face in a careful mask of nonchalance, pretending he wasn’t holding his breath. It couldn’t be that much of a shock to Steve that Bucky wanted to sleep next to him more than four nights out of seven. Okay, yeah, on one level having Steve as a roommate was annoying as hell. He coughed all the time, because his asthma got worse at night; and he snored, which would have been fine if he’d been willing to admit it and roll over when Bucky nudged him, instead of waking up just enough to start an argument. And, of course, there was the uncomfortable fact that Bucky’s dick tended to wake up before he did, and Steve tended to notice. It was nothing new in Bucky’s life, but Steve seemed to think it was something he needed to apologize for, as if he was leading Bucky on by mere proximity. Bucky was starting to suspect that nobody in the whole goddamn world worried about sex as much as the one guy who didn’t want it.

Mostly, though—and a few years ago, he wouldn’t have believed he’d ever lump sex into this category, but here he was—mostly, that was the small stuff, because they’d figured out so many ways to be intimate that had nothing to do with sex. Like the way they’d both started going to bed a little early so they’d have some time to talk about whatever was on their minds, or even just lie there in silence, enjoying the warmth and closeness of each other. The way he’d sometimes wake Steve by pressing a kiss to the back of his shoulder, and Steve would give the most contented little sigh, one moment of genuine peace before he woke up enough to start overthinking again. The way Steve didn’t give one single sh*t about whether the stump of Bucky’s left arm happened to brush up against him after he’d taken off the prosthetic, and the little frown line that appeared on his forehead when Bucky apologized for it, like it had never occurred to him that it might freak him out. That was how he wanted it to be all the time, not just on the nights he could convince Steve that he wasn’t overstaying his welcome.

Steve took a deep breath, and Bucky knew what the answer would be, and had time to smother his disappointment, before he said, “Thank you, Buck, but I’m… not ready for that yet.”

“Okay,” Bucky said, keeping his voice neutral. “Well, the offer’s on the table if you change your mind.” When Steve turned and looked hard at him, he frowned back. “Wow, you really thought I was gonna be mad, didn’t you? Obviously I was hoping you’d say yes, but I’d rather you were honest with me, even if I don’t like the answer. How come you’re always so surprised when I act like a decent person, Rogers?”

“Because people usually don’t do that with me, Barnes. I thought you would’ve noticed.”

“Well, they should,” Bucky said firmly. “Even if you do hate joy and love misery.”

“I don’t hate joy. I liked meeting Natasha’s friends tonight. They were interesting people.”

He couldn’t have been more obvious about wanting to change the subject, so Bucky resignedly tabled further discussion of moving in together and went with it. “Everybody knows ‘interesting’ means ‘I think they’re terrible, but I’m too polite to say so,’ Steve.”

“I didn’t mean that. ...Okay, Quill is a little terrible, but his girlfriend seems nice.”

“Yeah, I like Gamora. I mean, she definitely has that ‘I’ll kill you if you look at me funny’ vibe, but anybody who hangs around Natasha is used to that.” Bucky shot him a look that he hoped would come off as grudging respect, because Steve had never met a sincere compliment that he wouldn’t argue with, and said, “I was pretty impressed with how you handled Rocket.”

“Well, maybe I’ve never met a tanuki before, but,” Steve said, “I know what it’s like to be the smallest guy in the room and be maybe a little touchy about it. Oh, I meant to ask, what’s Groot’s pronoun? I didn’t want to assume.”

“‘He, him’ is fine. Dryads don’t really have a gender binary, but apparently it’s impossible to get the pronouns right anyway if you don’t have leaves. You gotta be there sometime when he performs. He doesn’t sing, but he does this light show that’s amazing.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t take a turn on the mic yourself. I know how much you love to sing.”

“Yeah, sure, in the shower. I gotta be in the right mood to do it for an audience, though.” Bucky eyed Steve speculatively. “Now I gotta ask: what’s it gonna take to get you onstage?”

“Twenty-seven point eight million dollars,” Steve said.

“Okay, that’s both weirdly specific and out of my price range, but maybe we can negotiate. What are the chances you’d settle for making out in an alley?”

Bucky suspected his chances weren’t that bad, actually, but Steve glanced at his phone screen and frowned. “We don’t have time. It’s only an hour till midnight.”

“Why? Is that when you turn back into a pumpkin?”

“No, that’s when it’s your birthday and you can have your present. But we have to go to Midtown to pick it up.”

“Midtown? At this hour?” Bucky huddled down in his sealskin, glancing up towards the dark sky, which was threatening more snow before morning. “You couldn’t get it delivered?”

“Not this.”

“I’m just gonna tell you now, Steve, if you got me a puppy, I’m not saying I won’t love it, but you can deal with Molly’s tantrum when she realizes she’s not an only child anymore.”

“It’s not a puppy. Look, remember how you said you wanted to meet more of my friends?”

“Yeah, and you said I’d already met all four of them.”

“I said all four who live in Brooklyn,” Steve huffed at him in mock offense. “I can have a friend in Manhattan.”

“A friend who’s cool with us dropping in at midnight?” Bucky said, suddenly alert. New York had its fair share of humans who kept weird hours, but there were other things in the city that were bad news, and some of them only came out at night.

“Don’t worry, he’s okay,” Steve said. “He’s human, if you’re wondering. He just has trouble shutting his brain off, which is why the best time to see him is at night. I’m not gonna ruin the surprise,” he added, when Bucky opened his mouth to ask his next question. “You’ll see when we get there.”

“Don’t make me regret this, Rogers,” Bucky said, in a mock-grumble of his own, but he didn’t mean it. He’d pretty much given up pretending that he wouldn’t follow Steve anywhere.

“Okay,” Bucky said, looking up—and up, and up some more—at the building in front of them. “When you said we were getting off at Stark Tower, I thought you meant that was just the closest subway stop to your friend’s place, not that we were walking right the f*ck up to the front door.”

“Don’t tell me you’re intimidated,” Steve said, fishing a pair of security badges out of his jacket and holding one out to Bucky. “You’re the one who’s going to be a big fancy lawyer.”

“A fae lawyer, sure, but that’s a niche market. I’ll never be the kind of shark that gets on the Stark Industries payroll. Anyway, I’m not sure it’s such a great idea for me to go in there. You might not know this, but SI is kinda quietly off-limits to fae.”

“If that were true, it would be illegal discrimination,” Steve said, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah, because I’m gonna be a kickass lawyer, I know that, but you can make a place really damn uncomfortable for somebody without technically breaking the law. I also know,” Bucky said pointedly, “that ever since Tony Stark took his unplanned Summerlands vacation a couple years ago, he’s had it in for us fae so bad that people call him the Iron Man.”

Steve reached up and put his hands on Bucky’s shoulders. “You’re the one who’s always telling me to check my assumptions about the fae,” he said. “Bucky, right now I’m asking you to check your assumptions about humans. Please.”

Bucky wasn’t convinced, but he took the badge and followed Steve across the lobby, swiping it over the scanner—and if he made a quiet, contemptuous noise when he walked through the metal detector, Steve either didn’t notice or decided to ignore it. He led Bucky over to the elevators, where, instead of punching a button, he laid his hand on a second scanner.

“Welcome, Steve Rogers and guest,” a voice said over the speakers as the doors slid open, and Bucky jumped about three feet.

Steve grinned. “That’s Jarvis,” he said. “Hi, Jarvis.”

“Always a pleasure to see you, sir.”

“You’re on a first-name basis with the elevator?” Bucky said, stepping inside and bracing himself against the rail. He managed to keep it pretty well under wraps most of the time, but even before the accident, he hadn’t exactly loved being surrounded on all four sides by metal.

“Jarvis is an artificial intelligence,” Steve said, unruffled. “You turn into an aquatic mammal.”

“Together we fight crime?”

“I’m just saying that Jarvis isn’t the weirdest thing in my life right now. No offense, Jarvis.”

“None taken, sir,” Jarvis said calmly, as the doors slid open.

Bucky barely managed not to yelp when the saw where the elevator had taken them, but his right hand clutched the rail hard enough that it hurt. The room was a massive laboratory full of computer equipment and high-tech-looking tools, most of them made of gleaming metal. Every signal in his brain was pinging danger, danger, danger, and he didn’t realize how close he was to bolting until he felt Steve’s hand between his shoulder blades, steadying him.

“Hey,” he said, “I know it’s uncomfortable. But I promise, it’s going to be worth it.”

Bucky shut his eyes, forcing himself to take a slow breath in and let it out again before he opened them. C’mon, Barnes, don’t be a wimp, he told himself, and then, Don’t be like Mom, which worked a little better. He’d been expecting the worst for so long that sometimes it felt like fear was woven into his f*cking DNA, but considering he’d already survived losing both an arm and a sealskin, he had no excuse to keep being scared all the time. Steve, weirdly enough, had actually been pretty helpful in that regard. Not just because he was a reckless little f*ck, although he was, but because being around him made Bucky feel, for the first time in a long time, like maybe there were things worth taking chances for.

He didn’t have time to dwell on it, though, because somebody was moving out from behind a workbench, with a welding mask over his face and a blowtorch in one hand. “Glad you two finally made it, because, Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do,” he called, in Steve’s direction, and then he pushed back the mask and Bucky’s jaw dropped.

“You know Tony Stark?” he said, rounding on Steve.

“Yeah,” Steve said, as if there was nothing that unusual about a broke-ass graphic designer strolling into the laboratory of a genius billionaire.

“You know him personally? Like, stupid-nicknames-level personally?”

“To be fair, he does the thing with the pop culture references to everyone,” Steve said. “Look, I know you probably feel like I sprung this on you, but I knew you wouldn’t come if I—”

“Are you telling me,” Bucky said, very slowly, “that you’re buddies with like the seventeenth richest human in the world and somehow you still live in that sh*thole of an apartment?”

“See, that’s exactly what I said!” Stark tossed the helmet aside and came toward them, and Bucky planted his feet, willing himself not to hunch down into his sealskin and try to disappear. He and Stark sized each other up for maybe five seconds, just long enough to make the silence good and awkward between them, and then Stark abruptly nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Rogers, I see it. Gun to my head, if I had to pick a dude, et cetera, but I’ll admit that you could’ve made a worse choice in the looks department.”

“It wasn’t a—” Bucky started to say, but he cut himself off quickly. If Steve hadn’t seen fit to fill Stark in on the details of their relationship, that was his call. “How do you two know each other?”

“Funny story,” Stark began.

“It’s not that funny,” Steve said. “Remember I told you about my cousin Virginia?”

“Yeah, sure, the only family you—wait. Is your cousin Virginia Potts? As in Pepper Potts, the CFO of Stark Industries? That was a hell of a thing not to mention!”

“I never tell anyone I’m related to Pepper until I know I can really trust them,” Steve said, giving Bucky a long, significant look. “We’re both the only family the other one has left, which means people could use me to get to her. I’m not going to make it easy for anyone else to hurt her.”

“Or yourself, I f*cking hope,” Bucky said, although he really wasn’t optimistic on that front. “Okay, tell me this funny-not-funny story.”

“You might’ve heard about the gang of Unseelie that pulled a Taken on me, couple years back,” Stark began. Seeing Bucky’s expression, he clapped him on the shoulder and added, “Relax, Tam Lin, my beef isn’t with you. Point is, Pepper had a pretty bad time while I was MIA, and Rogers here was one of the people who got her through it.”

“I only did what anybody would have,” Steve said, while Bucky digested this new information. Seeing Stark up close for the first time, Bucky could see that the Summerlands had left their mark on him. There were faint streaks of gray in his hair and beard that must have been Photoshopped out of the most recent round of press releases, but the real difference was in his eyes—a careful, wary look Bucky recognized because he’d seen it in the mirror. Stark had only been missing for a couple of months, but for him, it might have felt like a hell of a lot longer. “I just kept an eye on her and let her vent when she needed to, that’s all.”

“Not the way Pepper tells it. She credits this guy with single-handedly saving her sanity. Then I came home. I’d never seen Pepper cry before that day—and of course, at that exact second, we got mobbed by reporters. One of them stuck a camera in Pepper’s face and started talking about her so-called ‘public meltdown,’ and Steve here—”

“Look,” Steve said, “I don’t like bullies, okay? I don’t care whether they have press passes.”

“How many guys did you punch?” Bucky asked flatly.

“Three,” said Steve.

“Six,” said Tony.

“If that’s true, how come only three signed the police report? Besides, I didn’t really hurt anyone, and the fight made all the footage unusable, so,” Steve shrugged, “win.”

“If you can call a bloody nose and a restraining order ‘winning,’” Stark said, before his voice took a surprising swing toward sincerity. “The point is, Steve was there for the woman I love when I couldn’t be. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to figure out some way to return the favor in a way that doesn’t set off his oversensitive moral compass.”

“Get him out of that sh*tty job where they don’t appreciate how talented he is,” Bucky suggested.

“I had one lined up,” Stark said, raising his hands helplessly. “Art director for an SI subsidiary, would’ve been right up his alley. He turned me down.”

“I like my job,” Steve said, the frown line reappearing. “And I don’t need charity. When I move up at work, it’ll be because I earned it, not because I got something handed to me.”

“That’s the dumbest f*cking thing I’ve ever heard,” Bucky said. “A genuine billionaire offers you your dream job and you won’t take it because, what, you got something to prove? ”

“That’s the other thing I said!” Stark gestured vaguely in Steve’s direction: Can you believe this guy? “Sometimes I want to punch him right in the ethics. Anyway, imagine my surprise when he tells me he’s finally ready to call in the favor, not for himself, God forbid, but for his brand new shiny surprise husband. So, voila,” he said, sweeping his arm toward one of the tables. “Although I still don’t think this makes us even. Jarvis has been running the numbers, and we think fae-friendly medical equipment could turn out to be a huge untapped market.”

“Don’t get too optimistic,” Steve warned him. “You may have some trust to rebuild before fae are willing to buy your product.”

“Good thing I’ve got Hubby here to be the very handsome face of the new initiative, then. Go ahead, Barnes, take a look.”

Still reeling from the craziness of the whole situation, Bucky steeled himself, metaphorically speaking, and cautiously approached the work table. He stared for a long moment, then turned to Stark. “This is for me?”

Stark snorted. “You see anyone else around here who’s short an arm, pal?”

Bucky picked up the new prosthetic from the table, holding it in his right hand and resting it across his clunky plastic one. He’d looked into just about every adaptive device on the market, and at a glance, the matte-gray arm in front of him looked like a typical high-end model, with smoothly articulated joints and interlocking plates that slotted tightly together. What was weird was that it was completely missing the prickly, sunburn-like feeling he usually got when he touched anything that held more metal than a computer chip. “What’s it made of?”

“Mostly lightweight plastic and carbon-fiber composites,” Stark said. “Still had to use a little metal here and there, but I think I came up with a shielding material that’ll do the trick.” He rapped on the forearm, which made a hollow, knocking sound. “The shell is made of cellulose nanocrystals, which come from—any guesses from the peanut gallery?”

“Wood,” Bucky said, staggered. “You made the most high-tech wooden arm in history.”

“Wood,” Stark confirmed, looking pleased. “Made sure we got the traditional oak, ash, and thorn in there, too, in case that matters to you. Speaking of commercial applications, that’s something I should’ve thought of years ago, because—”

“Let him try it, Tony,” Steve said.

“Right, right. Matter at hand, so to speak. Go ahead, Barnes, put it on.”

Bucky only hesitated for a moment, but Steve noticed and quickly moved forward, sliding the sealskin off Bucky’s shoulders and onto his own for safekeeping. Bucky shot him a grateful glance before he stripped off his shirt, and then the old prosthetic, setting it on the workbench. The new one was wonderfully light, and it slotted perfectly over the stump of his arm on the first try, snug and secure without being too tight. “How’d you make make it fit so well without taking any measurements?” he asked.

“Well, I am a genius,” Stark pointed out.

“Jarvis made a 3D model from about a hundred pictures of the old one I took while you were in the shower,” Steve said.

“That too. Try making a fist. No, I meant with the left hand, pal. You want to—yep, there it is.”

Bucky jumped about two feet when the fingers of the prosthetic contracted all at once. “I thought you had to program these things first,” he said, turning it over in awe.

“Sure, if it was made by Roxxon or Hammer,” Stark said contemptuously. “My tech learns by doing. Try it again.”

Bucky did. He had to rest the new arm against the table and repeat the process half a dozen times before he could close all five fingers consistently, but this device already had a hundred times more utility than the old one. In theory, he knew what was happening: prosthetics like this had sensors that picked up tiny muscle twitches in what was left of his arm, sending signals down circuits to simulate natural movements. Still, if somebody had come along and told him magic was involved, he would have believed it. “You telling me you somehow built a myoelectric socket with so little metal in it that it’s basically undetectable?” he asked.

“That’s right. Airport security won’t even blink. I’m impressed, Barnes, you know your mechanics. Try bending the elbow.”

Bucky did, and watched with fascination as the joint flexed with a faint mechanical hum. “I just like knowing out how stuff works, I guess,” he said, in response to Stark’s implicit question. “For a while when I was a kid I thought I was gonna grow up to be a structural engineer, but it turns out it kind of helps your chances if you can be around steel girders without puking and passing out.”

“Yep, Steve mentioned that even nonferrous metals do a number on you sometimes. I’m guessing that takes osseointegration off the table.”

“Heh. I f*cking wish I could get a titanium implant. The sh*t they can do with those nowadays—”

“Do you like it, Bucky?” Steve asked.

Bucky turned back to Steve—who looked adorably concerned about how the gift was going over, as if this wasn’t the most amazing f*cking thing anybody had done for Bucky in his entire life—and reached out to pull him into a hug. It was a little clunky, sure, but so much better than letting the old prosthetic dangle at his side. He’d missed this. “Listen, punk,” he said, “I love this arm. I’ve had it for like two minutes and I will cut anyone who tries to take it from me. But next time you have a choice between my birthday present and your dream job, take the f*cking job, okay?”

“No promises,” Steve said, and Bucky let himself smile at that before he turned back to Stark.

“I’ve got some questions—”

“And I want to see you put this thing through its paces before I release it into the wild,” Stark said. “Rogers, go grab the last piece off the 3D printer, will you? It’s in the downstairs lab, Jarvis will tell you where.”

Steve opened his mouth—Bucky suspected he was on the verge of a what’s the magic word, because this was Steve, after all—but he thought better of it and headed for the elevator. Bucky knew an excuse when he saw one, but he couldn’t have said exactly what he was expecting to follow it, which was why it came as a hell of a surprise when Stark sized him up one more time, eyes narrowed just slightly, and said, “Just tell me this, Barnes. Will you make him happy?”

Bucky looked back at him warily. “What?”

“You heard me.” Stark picked up a screwdriver and flipped it end over end a couple of times, and Bucky honestly didn’t know if that was supposed to be a fidget or a threat. It was only then that he realized Steve had walked off with his sealskin—unintentionally, of course; awareness of the skin wasn’t hardwired into Steve, and he couldn’t understand how naked Bucky felt without it to hide in. He tried—Bucky was constantly amazed by how hard he tried—but he was only human.

“Look,” Stark said, clearly winding up to speechify again, “me and Rogers, we don’t always see eye to eye. If Pepper hadn’t made it clear that getting along with him was a dealbreaker, I wouldn’t have given him the time of day. But Rogers has turned out to be, and you have no idea how much it pains me to say this, probably the highest-quality person I’ve ever met in my life. So as glad as I am that he finally got over the whole asexuality business, I don’t—”

“Wait, what?” Bucky interrupted.

“Oh, yeah, couple years in there he was telling Pepper he quit dating because he didn’t like sex. Didn’t see the point of it, he said.” Stark rolled his eyes. “Anybody who doesn’t like it is doing it wrong, if you ask me. Anyway, obviously the two of you have figured something out. My point is, I’m sure there was a good reason he sprung a surprise husband on Pepper before he even told her he was dating again after his… hiatus. But you can see where somebody who cares about the guy might sleep better if they knew why the two of you were in such a rush.”

Bucky blinked, trying to figure out if Stark actually didn’t know how offensive it was to suggest that he’d put some kind of love spell on Steve, or if he just didn’t care. He made himself breathe deeply before he answered. “Did Steve tell you what kind of fae I am?” he asked.

“According to him, and this is a direct quote, ‘the stupid overprotective jerk kind,” Stark said, which startled a small laugh out of Bucky in spite of himself. “But beyond the fact that you weren’t Unseelie, he didn’t go into detail. Is it relevant?”

Bucky had spent too much time being both fae and in law school to answer that. “The important thing is that I’m not the really magical kind,” he said. “Look, St—hell. What do I call you?”

“Tony’s fine,” said Stark. “Hey You, Genius, and Merchant of Death are also acceptable.”

“Right. Well, Tony, here’s the thing. I wasn’t exactly looking for a partner when I met Steve. The truth…” The truth was a minefield and Bucky was going to have to plant his feet very carefully within it, but he was used to that, too. “The truth is,” he said, meeting Tony’s eyes, “over the last couple years, I kind of gave up. Not on life, but on people. I had some stuff happen to me that really f*cked with my head, and after that, I mostly wanted to be left alone. I wasn’t looking for somebody to come along and change my life. But Steve… Steve cares, is the thing. We’ve both seen what a sh*tty place the world can be, but where most people would go, ‘f*ck this, I’m out,’ he thinks it’s his job to remind it to get back on track. He made me remember a time when I used to believe in people like that, and he makes me think I can get back there again. That’s the thing that made me give this relationship a shot, and that’s the reason I plan to stick around for as long as he’ll have me. I honestly don’t know if I can make Steve happy, but he believes in me, and I’m gonna do my damnedest to live up to that.”

Stark looked hard at him for several seconds, and it was one of the harder things Bucky had ever done to stand there, feeling completely exposed in every way, and not back down under that cold-eyed gaze. And then, once again, Stark’s whole manner changed, all the aggression leaving his posture. “Right,” he said. “Okay. I’m noting for the record that you still haven’t answered a lot of my questions, Barnes. But you don’t seem like you glamored or geased my friend, so I have to assume he’s with you out of his own free will.”

Bucky allowed himself a tiny smirk at that. “If you think Steve would’ve needed magic to do something stupid, then you don’t know him as well as you think you do,” he said.

Stark burst into a surprisingly loud, appreciative laugh just as the elevator dinged open again, admitting Steve to the lab. He opened his mouth to ask, then shook his head. “I’ll just assume that was at my expense and I don’t want to know. Tony, is this what you were after?”

“Yeah, hand it over,” Stark said, with just enough emphasis on the word hand that Bucky had to suppress a groan. Bad puns were supposed to be his prerogative, not some able-bodied asshole’s. But the thing Steve had brought him was actually hand-shaped. It looked like a glove until Stark started to roll it over the fingers of the new arm, and then he realized it was a thin silicone sleeve precisely the color of his skin.

“Goes on just like a condom,” he observed, and Steve, hilariously, blushed. “This just for looks, or does it protect the machinery too?”

“Under ordinary circ*mstances, the machinery won’t need protecting,” Stark said, an edge of contempt in his voice. “I don’t build anything that can’t catch a bullet, much less stand up to everyday wear. This is just waterproofing.”

“What?”

“Rogers said that would be important to you,” Stark went on, stretching the sleeve over the elbow joint. “I wouldn’t take it deep sea diving, but get some waterproof first-aid tape, make a nice tight seal between the top edge and your skin, and you should be able to spend an hour or two in the pool without a problem. ...Barnes. You with me, buddy?”

Bucky had sat down hard on a stool by the workbench. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I just… wow. I don’t know what to say, Tony.”

Stark shrugged. “You’re my alpha tester, so you’re doing me the favor, really. Give it a good workout. Take notes, tell me how to improve it when I build Version Two. Don’t worry about sparing my feelings, I don’t have any. And you,” he addressed Steve, “call Pepper and let her take you to lunch. For some reason she worries when you disappear for a month and suddenly turn up married, and I’m the one who hears about it. Now, both of you get out. I’ve got a video call with the Tokyo office in fifteen minutes, and there’s a car downstairs waiting to take you two back to Brooklyn.”

Bucky was still in such a state of shock that he barely heard Steve saying his goodbyes to Stark, or to the AI in the elevator. He spent the whole elevator ride turning his arm so he could admire the prosthetic from different angles, reveling in the fact that he was already figuring out how to flex the fingers individually, and he didn’t realize how long he’d been gazing at it until they were in the back seat of the Towncar—it had to be amazing if he’d barely noticed he was getting into a car he wasn’t driving—when Steve finally said, “If you’re mad at me, Buck, you can say so.”

“What?” Bucky looked at him in shock. “No! Steve, I… I just can’t believe it, is all. Why the f*ck would I be mad at you for giving me the most incredible gift of my life?”

Steve’s shoulders drooped with relief. “Good,” he said. “I was getting worried that Tony said something horrible to you while I was gone.”

“Oh, that? No, it was just your run-of-the-mill shovel talk,” Bucky said. When Steve looked at him blankly, he elaborated, “You know, ‘my friend Steve is a precious cinnamon roll and if you hurt him, I’ll beat you to death with a shovel,’ that kind of thing.”

“He said that?” Steve said, bristling.

“Not in so many words, but the gist was there. Don’t worry, I’m not mad. I kind of respect him for it, actually, even though he isn’t very good at it. I have three little sisters; I could’ve given him pointers. There’s one thing I should tell you, though. He thinks us being married means you’re not on the ace spectrum anymore.”

Steve tensed. “What did you do?”

“Let him think so. I don’t give a sh*t what anybody thinks we do in bed, but I wasn’t sure if you would. I’ll go back and tell him off if you want me to, though. He doesn’t get to be the sexuality police, I don’t care if he is a billionaire genius playboy philanthropist.”

“No, I’m glad you didn’t say anything. Thank you.” Steve drew a deep shaky breath that, for once, had nothing to do with his asthma. “It’s not that I need you to stick up for me. I can fight my own battles. I’m just really tired of having that argument with people, and with Tony in particular.”

“What argument?”

“You know. The one where you tell people you think you might be on the ace spectrum and they start psychoanalyzing you. ‘Asexuality doesn’t exist, you’re just repressed from being raised Catholic.’ ‘You’re in denial about being gay, so you convinced yourself you don’t want it with anyone.’ ‘You just aren’t dating the right kinds of people.’ ‘You can’t be bi and ace, you have to pick one.’ ‘Sex is a basic human need and if you don’t want it, there’s something wrong with you.’”

Bucky sighed. “Steve,” he said, “of course there’s something wrong with you.”

“What?” Steve said, his voice low.

Bucky fought down a smile, because that was the quintessential Steve Rogers right there: running himself down all the livelong day, but ready to fight the second he thought someone else was trying it. “A lot of things, actually,” he said. “I mean, your lungs are sh*t, your spine’s a mess, you’re pretty much allergic to the entire planet, and even your dumb red blood cells are all f*cked up. And that’s just the physical stuff. We haven’t even talked about the big one, which is your incurable case of stupid. Notice what I didn’t put on that list, though?”

“My sexuality,” Steve said, looking resigned and skeptical all at once.

“Your sexuality,” Bucky confirmed. “I get that your identity’s complicated, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid as hell. Look, as far as I can tell, you’re a biromantic demisexual. I’m a guy who turns into a seal and swims around the harbor.”

The corner of Steve’s mouth twitched. “Together we fight crime?”

“Damn skippy we do. Anyway, I’m not saying it doesn’t matter, Steve, because if you care about it, I care about it. But what I care about more is that you’re the kind of person who stands up to Natasha when you think she’s meddling in a way that could hurt somebody, and who turns down a cushy job because you don’t want to take advantage of your rich friend—”

“—Which you just told me at length was stupid,” Steve pointed out.

“Things can be stupid and still be kind of admirable, in a dumb way. And you’re also the type of person who winds up stuck in an accidental marriage to a traumatized amputee with massive family issues, and instead of immediately hating him forever, you not only give that guy a shot, you figure out a way to get him an awesome new prosthetic and give him back his favorite hobby, which he thought he had to give up forever. That’s the kind of thing that makes me fall in love with a person, Steve, not whether they want me to put my dick in them.”

Steve looked across the seat at him with wide eyes. “Did you just say you love me?” he said.

“Well,” Bucky said, “yeah, I guess I kind of did. I love you, Steve Rogers,” he said, testing the words and finding out that they sounded true. “But don’t feel like you have to say it back or anything. Like I said, I’d rather you were honest.”

“I know,” Steve said, reaching out to slip his hand into Bucky’s—the right hand, of course, because as good as the prosthetic was, there was no substitute for being able to hold someone’s hand and feel it. “You know, I don’t feel like I’ve earned you, either,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“The same way I didn’t feel like I’d earned the job Tony wanted to give me. I only get to be with you because of a magical accident. It feels like cheating.”

“Oh, f*ck that noise.”

“I’m telling you how I feel,” Steve said, jutting out his chin in the way that meant he was prepared to dig in his heels, and no amount of logic would change his mind. “That’s what you said you wanted.”

“Okay, but just because I said I don’t mind you being complicated, it doesn’t mean you have to make everything complicated, Rogers. I know I’m the one who said magic always f*cks up more than it fixes, but maybe I’m wrong. Who knows, maybe it even owed me something and you turned out to be the payback.”

“What does that mean?” Steve asked, puzzled.

“It means… a lot of complicated stuff that I’m not really ready to get into in the back of a car at one in the f*cking morning. Could I just take you home and hug you until I either wear this arm out or fall asleep doing it?”

Steve let himself smile. “Well, if that’s how you want to spend your birthday,” he said, “then I guess I’m fine with that.”

It was a gorgeous day in April, and Bucky was in Prospect Park, tossing a football around with Barton and stopping, every couple of minutes, to remind himself that he wasn’t dreaming: he was actually tossing a football around with Barton, and he was having fun again.

Oh, he could have been doing this all along, he guessed—not the football part, but the going-outdoors-with-friends part. Sure, the new prosthetic helped a f*cking ton with his ability to do anything beyond basically functioning, but it wasn’t like losing his arm had resulted in the state of New York revoking his happiness license, or in all of his friends disowning him; if anything, they’d been making more of an effort to be there for him. He was the one who hadn’t been able to accept it. He’d been coasting along out of habit for years now, like something out of a ghost story, existing without really living. And now, all of a sudden, he and Steve were dragging each other out of their shells, spurring each other on to do better. Just that morning, Steve had commented on the gorgeous weather and pointedly asked when Bucky was going to take Clint up on his offer to give the new arm a real workout, and Bucky had replied that he was only going out if Steve came along and brought his sketchbook, and now he was playing catch, and Steve was sitting under a tree doing speed sketches of Natasha while she bent her yoga-agile body into interesting pretzel shapes to challenge him, and none of that was especially miraculous unless you knew that, left to their own devices, probably neither he nor Steve would have gotten out in the sunshine at all.

“Hey, Barnes, go long,” Clint yelled at him, and Bucky snapped to attention as Clint lofted the football over his head. He dashed after it, so focused on the fact that he could raise both hands to catch it that he forgot to look where he was going, caught his foot on one of the paving stones that bordered the lake, and went sprawling, his momentum carrying him straight down into the water.

“Buck,” Steve shouted, scrambling to his feet—which was gratifying, in a way, because it meant Steve had been keeping one eye on him instead of focusing on his sketches. Clint just burst into hysterical laughter. “Oh my God, Barnes,” he said, scrambling over the rocks to fish Bucky out of the shallows. “That was too perfect. I wish I’d gotten it on video.”

Bucky reached out his right hand as if he was going to let Clint pull him up. Then, at the last second, he yanked as hard as he could, sending Clint sprawling beside him into the sandy lake bed. Clint came up sputtering and glaring like a drenched cat, while Bucky shoved his dripping hair back from his face and tried not to die laughing. “Goddammit, Barnes, that wasn’t funny, mine wasn’t on purpose, I didn’t—” His face took on an expression of real dismay as he fished a sodden phone out of his pocket. “Aw, phone, no. I thought I was actually gonna keep this one long enough to get the upgrade, for once.”

“sh*t. Sorry,” Bucky said. His own phone was safe in Steve’s messenger bag, along with his wallet and house keys, because like most people, he’d quickly learned to limit the damages around Barton. Sadly, Barton couldn’t not keep his stuff around Barton.

“Not your fault,” Clint said resignedly. “Hey, Nat? You still got that buddy at the Apple store?”

“You mean Aaron?” Natasha called back. “The one you told I was your fiancée and we were there to look up honeymoon destinations when you were actually hacking the NYPD database? Not your best plan, Clint.”

“It was your plan, Nat!” Clint shouted back at her. Bucky turned to stare at him, and he shrugged. “It was for work.”

“We might buy that if you’d tell anybody what it is that you do, Clint,” Steve said, jogging up behind Natasha. “But since you won’t—”

“No, no, I want him to keep talking,” Bucky said. “Because eventually he’s gonna remember that he’s talking to a lawyer, and then he’ll have to put me on retainer to get attorney-client privilege.”

“You wanna go back in the water, Barnes? Because I can arrange it,” Clint said, giving Bucky a halfhearted shove.

“Ha!” Bucky said, when he stumbled and splashed but ultimately kept his feet. “Joke’s on you, asshole. Water’s my natural f*cking habitat, which means you can’t scare me with—oh sh*t, there’s a swan. Help!”

At least the fact that Clint yelped and joined him in running away made the whole thing marginally less embarrassing. Well, that and the fact that even Natasha backed up when the bird gave its threat display, showing off every inch of what had to be a seven-foot wingspan. “I’m sorry,” Bucky shouted at it, once he judged he was far enough from the water. “We won’t get up in your face again, I promise, okay?”

“Are you really apologizing to a bird?” Steve said—not that he hadn’t also had the good sense to retreat to a safe distance, Bucky noticed.

“f*ck yes I’m apologizing to a bird, and you wouldn’t think it was funny if you had any idea what happens to people who f*ck with swan maidens.”

“What makes you think she’s a swan maiden?” Steve asked.

“The question you want to be asking is, what makes you think she isn’t?” Crisis averted, Bucky walked back to where they’d left their stuff, giving the pond a wide berth. He dug into Steve’s messenger bag for his phone, feeling that little metallic prickle under his skin, like always, when he closed his hand around it—one of these days, he’d be good enough with the prosthetic to make it do all the work and save him the discomfort, which was a damn faint silver lining to losing an arm, but he’d take what he could get—and tapped in his passcode, which was definitely a random series of numbers and not the anniversary of his and Steve’s accidental marriage. Then his eyes landed on the first missed text, and he froze.

“sh*t,” he said. “Guys, I gotta go. It’s Emily.”

“We’re okay,” Emily said, when Bucky crashed into the chair beside her at the coffee shop, but he was pretty sure she was saying it for Kamala’s sake, not for his, and not because it was true. She was hugging her coat to her chest in a way that was painfully familiar to Bucky, even though it was a plain jean jacket and not her sealskin. “Nobody got hurt.”

“Tell me,” Bucky said, turning on his interviewing-a-witness voice.

“We weren’t even doing anything,” Kamala said. Her expression was hovering somewhere between angry and nauseated, but he thought the anger was winning, which was good. Anger could keep a person going where fear would make them stop. “We were just walking around. We shouldn’t have to pretend we’re not fae when we’re just walking around.”

“All she did was make herself a little taller to look at something in a store window,” Emily said. “After that, these guys started following us—”

“How many?” Bucky asked.

“Three. They were calling Kamala—” Emily hesitated, and finished, “—names. Neither of us said anything back, we just tried to leave, but one of them grabbed her arm and I got scared, so I pushed him—”

“Jesus, Em,” Bucky said, less because he was upset with her for escalating a fight than because he was just now realizing that his three favorite people—Nat, Steve, and now Emily—all fell into the category of tiny, pugnacious jerks. Apparently he really did have a type.

“And I was so surprised that I disembiggened by accident,” Kamala said, miserably.

“You did what now?”

“Shrunk herself down,” Emily translated. “Just a little—to eighty percent of normal, maybe. But he grabbed her bracelet, and it came off in his hand.”

“Then I realized what I was doing and got bigger instead,” Kamala continued, “and then they ran off. I didn’t even notice the bracelet was missing until they were gone.” She looked down at her bare wrist. “That bracelet was my grandma’s. My mom brought it with her when she came here from Karachi. I know it’s just a thing, but it’s a thing I can’t replace. I don’t know how I’m gonna tell Ammi I lost it.”

“Hang on, kiddo. Let’s not panic yet. You get a good look at the guys? Think you could give a description to the police?”

“Yeah, they’ll just jump at the chance to hunt down three young white human males wearing baseball caps,” Emily said, with a cynicism beyond her not-quite-sixteen years.

“Right, enough said. Okay, so the police are plan B. Plan A is, you two are gonna go home with Steve, and he’s gonna call Mom and tell them we ran into you at the park and invited you over for dinner.”

“What are you gonna do?” Emily asked.

Bucky looked across the table at her, and the memory of the first time he’d met Kamala rose up to the surface of his mind. He’d been eighteen, nominally in charge of the household while his mom and Bec were away at a swim match, when the call came that Emily had been in a fight. He’d raced over to the school, sick with worry, thinking somebody had come after her for being fae, the way human kids had occasionally come after him behind the bleachers at recess. But when he got there, he found Emily and a little Pakistani girl sitting back to back in the principal’s office, arms crossed and backs straight, both of them openly defiant. His shock had only increased as the vice principal had told him flatly that your sister and Ms. Khan here had pounced on one of their classmates—he didn’t say the classmate in question was human, but he sure as hell managed to communicate it—and started pounding him into the dirt.

Then Kamala had clenched her little fists—little because she was a child; she wouldn’t come into her shapeshifting powers for a few years yet—and shouted, “That’s not true!” And the story that spilled out of her wasn’t about her and Emily at all, but about a new kid in their class who’d been bullied and shunned since he came to the school. After one especially nasty episode on the playground reduced him to tears, Kamala Khan had had enough. She’d taken a swing at the real aggressor, and Emily had jumped in to support her, because Kamala’s response had convinced her that justice needed to be done.

Bucky had listened to both sides, sincerely, and he’d thanked the vice principal for calling him and told him that he’d make sure the situation was handled appropriately. Then he’d taken both girls to a Disney matinee and stuffed them full of ice cream, because Emily wasn’t the only Barnes who had principles, thanks very much. At some point, he’d asked the girls if the new kid was fae, if that was why they’d felt a need to protect him. Both of them had looked at him blankly, over sundaes covered in gummy bears, and said they didn’t know. “Why?” Emily had said, wrinkling her nose. “Does it matter?” And Bucky had said no, because he hadn’t had the heart to tell them that it shouldn’t matter, but of course, in the real world, it did.

Emily had lost a lot of innocence as time went on, and Bucky was saddened but not surprised; it was just a thing that happened in the process of growing up, maybe a little faster if you had a mother who never quit hammering the general danger and wickedness of the world into your head. But Kamala had remained the kind of kid who leaped to the rescue when someone else needed a champion. Bucky had been waiting for it to wear off for her, too, until he met Steve. That was when he’d realized that whether it was through faith or magic or maybe just good old pigheaded insanity, some people managed to go into adulthood still believing that the universe ultimately bent toward justice, even if they had to lean on it now and again to keep it that way. And if Bucky even had a chance to help tip the balance, to keep Kamala more like Steve than like him, well. He knew which way he wanted her to go.

“I’m going to take matters into my own hands,” he said grimly.

It was a terrible idea, and Steve would’ve told him so if he’d known any of the particulars, which was why Bucky didn’t tell him anything except that he was going to talk to some people and see if there was anything he could do. He’d promised not to lie to Steve, but he hadn’t promised to spill every thought to him, either. Humans had figured out enough about omission to put that line about telling the whole truth in their courtroom oaths, but fae were f*cking born to it.

Jessica met him in a parking lot, wearing her traditional uniform of black leather jacket, jeans over motorcycle boots, and assorted scarves around her neck. If he was honest with himself, her ability to pull off that aggressive “I’m not a f*cking hipster, it’s just cold” look was probably sixty percent of why he’d overlooked all the drinking and property damage while they were dating, before he got his head far enough out of his ass to realize he’d lose his shot at law school if he kept showing up to class late and hungover.

The other forty percent was that the sex was mind-blowing, but he was trying not to think about that.

“So what did you lose?” she called out to him, as soon as he was close enough to hear. “Your spine or your balls? You’re obviously missing one or the other, since you haven’t called me in five years.”

“Maeve’s sake, Jones, this is a business proposition,” Bucky said, before he realized that sounded even dirtier. “My little sister’s friend got hassled by some guys who took a bracelet from her, a family heirloom. I want you to locate the guys and the bracelet. How much?”

“Depends. You want the guys roughed up when we find them?”

“If I say yes to that, it’s conspiracy to commit assault,” Bucky said, trying to match the complete lack of concern in her voice. “And if I say ‘we’ll see,’ there’s a case for premeditation, so how ’bout I don’t say anything and we’re both happy?”

“f*ck me,” Jessica said. “How do I keep getting mixed up with lawyers? The fee’s seven hundred.”

“Seven hundred dollars? You’re out of your mind. This is gonna take a couple of hours, tops.”

“Fine, for you I’ll make it five, but it goes up to eight if we have to go to Jersey.”

“Fair,” Bucky said. Five hundred was already a stretch for his budget, but if they had to go to Jersey, money would be the least of his problems. “What do you need?”

“Let’s start with a picture of the bracelet, if you have one.”

Bucky held out his phone, the screen showing the day-old selfie Emily had texted him. She and Kamala were flashing peace signs at the camera, and the gold bracelet was clearly visible. Jessica didn’t take it immediately, and several seconds passed before he realized she was unabashedly staring at his new prosthetic. “You wanna stare or you wanna get paid?” he said, before he realized that sounded filthy, too.

“Kinda wanna stare,” Jessica said bluntly, before she looked up at him. “Tough break, Barnes.”

“sh*t happens,” he said, keeping his voice as neutral as he could.

“You know, I heard you got f*cked up in an accident, but I don’t think I ever heard the whole story.”

“And you never will,” he said. “If you want your money, we better get moving.”

Jessica glared at him—or maybe she just looked at him; she definitely had resting glare face. But then she turned her attention to the photo, gazing at it for long enough that a human probably would have asked what was going on. Bucky waited, staying very still, until she raised her head. “Got a lock on the kids,” she said, handing the phone back to him. “Nothing on the bracelet yet, but if we’re lucky, we’ll find them both at once.”

Just at that moment, the phone buzzed in his hand: Incoming call from Steve Rogers. Bucky only hesitated for a moment before tapped the Decline button and said, “Let’s go.”

Jessica’s tracking abilities had never let Bucky down yet. The building she led him to was a sh*tty walkup overrun with college students, and Bucky imagined they probably considered themselves pretty cool and defiant to live in a disgusting place, breaking the maximum occupancy rules, playing their thumping bass music at all hours and scattering beer cans in the halls and sweet Titania, when had he gotten so old and grumpy? Jessica, on the other hand, grinned as she approached a door draped with a huge flag printed with a multicolored pot leaf. “Just like the old days,” she said. “Hey, remember the time we broke your bed?”

“No,” Bucky lied, raising his right hand and rapping on the door.

The kid who opened the door was a type Bucky thought of as Classic Douchebag: a young, tanned, muscled-up gym rat wearing a white tank top and a backwards baseball cap, probably had a name like Chad or Trent or something. Bucky put his age closer to twenty-one than the seventeen or eighteen he’d been expecting, which meant that, in legal terms, the guys who’d hassled his sister were grown-ass men. At that thought, something ugly and bitter rose up inside him, crawling out of the shadows of what a therapist would call his psyche and Steve would call his soul, and before he even knew what he meant to do, he shoved his way into the apartment and grabbed the kid by the front of his stupid muscle shirt.

“Hey,” the Chad-looking kid yelped, and his two buddies, who’d been flopped on the couch playing some video game, both got up and started toward him. Jessica moved faster than either of them. In a flash, she was through the door, grabbing the nearer boy and throwing him into a wrestling hold. The third kid froze, and no wonder; Bucky had seen Jessica’s you want some of this? expression enough times to know exactly why the kid was suddenly thinking better of it.

“You three the ones who were hassling a couple of fae girls earlier today?” he demanded, and shook the one in his grasp, very slightly.

“Whoa, whoa,” said the Chad-looking kid, raising his hands. “I dunno what you heard, man, but we were just messing around. It’s not like anybody got hurt or anything.”

“And besides, they were a couple of stuck-up bi— owwww,” said the kid Jessica was immobilizing.

Bucky didn’t even spare him a glance to find out what Jessica had done to him. He kept his attention on the first kid, maintaining eye contact until Chad looked away. “All you did was tease them,” he said quietly. “Is that what you think, asshole? Maybe you’d like to hear what I think you did. See, in the state of New York, following somebody around to intimidate them is first degree harassment. That’s a misdemeanor. You get a little more physical, you put your hands on them, and now there’s a case for second degree, and you can end up in front of a judge. Then there’s the bracelet. I shouldn’t have to tell you that taking somebody else’s sh*t is grand larceny, which is a felony offense. And that assumes the victims are adults. Those kids, though? They’re both fifteen, and judges don’t look kindly on it when grown men go around harassing underage girls, you get what I’m saying?”

“So what, you’re a cop?” Chad asked, although his swagger had diminished somewhat upon hearing the details of his potential rap sheet.

“Oh, I’m something you want to mess with so much less than a cop, Chad,” Bucky said, and while the kid was still looking puzzled, mouthing Chad?, he let go of his shirt and shoved him a few steps back. “Cops have to follow rules.”

“Yeah, well, so do f*cking fae,” said the second kid, the one Jessica was restraining.

Bucky caught Jessica’s eye. “You see any fae here?” he asked.

“Nope,” she said cheerfully. Chad, Bucky was happy to see, was edging away from her, distancing himself from his idiot friend in the process. “In fact, I distinctly remember you and me spending this afternoon at my friend’s bar in Hell’s Kitchen.”

Bucky decided that Jessica had just earned her five hundred then and there, whether or not they ended up getting what they came for. “Look,” he said, in his let’s all be reasonable voice. “All I want is the bracelet. It’s not worth anything to anybody except her. You give it back, and my friend and I walk away.”

“We can’t,” said the third kid. Then he took a step back as Bucky swung around toward him, raising his hands. “We would! But we don’t have it.”

“Shut the f*ck up, Jake,” the second kid hissed.

Too late, pal, Bucky thought; Jake had already made his call, and it was the smart one. “Look, we didn’t mean for it to happen,” he said. “Todd shouldn’t’ve grabbed the girl, but it was just so weird, the way she went all small like that. Her bracelet just came off, and she ran away before we could give it back.”

Bucky was more inclined to believe Emily’s version than Jake’s, but he couldn’t really blame the kid for trying. “Is that one Todd?” he asked, co*cking his head toward the kid Jessica was restraining.

“Jesus, Jake, you’re such an asshole,” the kid snapped, pretty much confirming it.

Bucky ignored that. “Where’s the bracelet, Todd?” he asked again.

“f*ck you,” said Todd.

“He threw it in the river,” said Chad, who’d apparently decided to get on the right side of this while there was still time.

Bucky turned the full force of his glare on Chad. “In the East River?”

“Yeah. We were heading over to the park to, you know…”

“Smoke up?” Jessica asked blandly.

“Yeah. So when Todd realized he had the bracelet, he chucked it in the water. Big deal, right? You said it was worthless.”

“Worthless to you,” Bucky said, very quietly. Because that was all this little sh*t cared about, wasn’t it? Not if it mattered to Kamala. Not if it mattered to a f*cking fae. “That’s not the same as worthless.”

“I’m just saying, if you were gonna try to shake us down for cash, you shouldn’t have led with that, dude.”

Bucky turned, very slowly, so his whole body was facing Chad. “You terrorized two young girls today,” he said, “you made them feel like it isn’t safe to be out on the street, you took a piece of family history away from one of them, and you think this is about money?”

“Jeez, man, I’m sorry, okay?” Chad said, but Bucky barely heard him. These kids honestly believed they could piss off the fae and not face any consequences? He’d show them exactly what kind of mistake they were making. Hell, he’d remind this whole damn city full of humans about why the fae used to give their ancestors nightmares. He’d call the f*cking Wild Hunt down on their heads, if that was what it took. He’d—

The cell phone buzzed, again, in the breast pocket of his sealskin coat. Jeez, Steve, gimme a minute here, Bucky thought—and then he blinked, abruptly realizing that he’d grabbed the Chad-looking kid, not by the shirt this time, but by the throat. Because that was what he was: not a representative of all the humans who’d ever oppressed the fae, but a kid, a loser kid who was too stupid to understand the extent of his own idiocy.

I don’t like bullies, Steve’s voice said in his head, and a wave of shame swept over him. Okay, sure, he was under no illusions that Steve himself wouldn’t have taken a swing at these douchebags, but the difference was that Steve wasn’t any bigger than the girls they’d been menacing. Bucky had three inches and thirty pounds on Chad, plus a left hand that wouldn’t hurt if he broke it on someone’s face, and he had backup. Maybe it should have made a difference that he wanted to pound these kids into the ground on somebody else’s behalf, but when it came right down to it... No. No, it didn’t. Hurting the kids would make him feel better now, but in the long run, it wouldn’t do anything but make him one of the bad guys. And Bucky realized, abruptly, that he’d rather give up another limb than meet Steve’s eyes and see him look back with disappointment.

He let go of Chad’s neck, and then, in one smooth movement, jerked him around and grabbed the wallet out of his back pocket. “Hey!” said Chad, too late, because Bucky was already pawing through the plastic flaps, coming up with a driver’s license.

“Brayden Vanderlan,” he read, and grimaced. “f*ck, Chad, if you’re gonna have a fake ID, you could at least go with a less stupid name.”

“It’s my real name,” Brayden spat. “And it’s better than Chad, anyway.”

“If you’d rather be a Brayden than a Chad, I can’t help you.” Brayden’s student ID matched up with his driver’s license, though, and Bucky committed the address to memory. “Okay, Brayden Vanderlan, age twenty-one, from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Sorry your parents hate you. Hey, partner, would you mind—”

“Way ahead of you,” Jessica said, holding up Todd’s wallet and license in her free hand. “Guess where Todd’s from?”

“Jersey?” Bucky hazarded.

“Cleveland.”

“Wow. Not that it’s an excuse, but I can see why these guys have some anger issues.” Bucky surveyed the boys. Todd was still trying to look belligerent, but the other two just looked scared. “So here’s what’s gonna happen. Jake, you seem like you might not be a complete asshole, but your buddies here… Bad mistake letting us get your real names, kids, because now the two of you are in deep sh*t.”

“I’m not scared of you,” said Todd, but his hand moved to touch something on a necklace chain, under his shirt. Horseshoe nail, Bucky guessed, or some other trinket made of cold iron. The ones who talked toughest were always the most scared. “And all that stuff about hexing people if you know their true name is bullsh*t. It doesn’t work in real life.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “I’m not talking about putting a curse on you, you dumb f*ck. I’m talking about the internet. See, I’ve noticed that fine, upstanding young gentlemen like yourselves tend to act one way around your buddies, and another way in front of the people you actually give a sh*t about. So if I ever hear a whisper about either of you hassling fae kids again, or anybody else, for that matter, I’m not going to bother coming after you. I’m going to find your friends and families and tell them exactly what kind of sh*t you do when you think nobody’s watching. And you know who I’m going to start with? Your mothers.”

Jessica let out a low whistle. “Wow. These guys are f*cked.”

Bucky shrugged. “Maybe it’ll teach them to pick on somebody their own size next time,” he said. “Now, before we go, I want one of you assholes to tell me exactly where you were standing when you ditched the bracelet.”

Jake, apparently eager to keep his name well and truly off the crazy fae’s sh*t list, was the one who told him, in spite of the increasingly hostile glares coming from Todd’s direction. Good. Maybe Jake would be forced to find a better class of friend. “I don’t know what good you think it’ll do you, though,” he said. “You’re never gonna find it. That thing’s at the bottom of the East River, if it hasn’t already washed out to sea.”

Bucky shrugged. “You never know. Maybe I’ll get lucky. Let’s go,” he said to Jessica, and she released Todd, who staggered backward, and turned to follow him out.

The door was swinging shut when Todd muttered, very quietly, “Suck my dick, you fairy whor*.”

Bucky turned back, but Jessica was too fast for him. Before he could react, she’d kicked the door open again and grabbed Todd. This time she picked him up off the ground and threw him into the opposite wall, hard enough that when he fell to the floor, groaning, Bucky could pick out a Todd-shaped outline in the drywall, like something out of those old roadrunner-and-coyote cartoons.

“Changed my mind,” Jessica said, when Bucky turned in her direction and raised an eyebrow. “Keep your money. This one’s on the house.”

It was almost dark by the time Bucky made it back to the brownstone. He was wet, bedraggled, and exhausted, and worst of all, he smelled like a foundry draining into a salt marsh by way of a sewage line. The East River was technically safe for even regular humans to swim in, but the condition of it varied plenty according to the exact location and time of year, and the water he’d been in tonight had been on the vile side even before he realized, too late to make alternate plans, that the only way to pick up something on the riverbed was to grab it in his teeth. (Selkies seemed to be fairly resistant to norovirus, thank Mab, but there was a lot of mouthwash in his future.) But for this brief, shining moment, he absolutely didn’t give a f*ck about any of that, because he could feel the solid weight of Kamala’s bracelet in the pocket of his sealskin.

The door swung open, and Bucky braced himself for Molly to explode through the doorway, but it was Steve who was running out to meet him. Bucky held out his left arm, which hadn’t been in the water, before Steve could get his arms around him, and said, “Hang on there, pal. You probably don’t want to touch me until at least my second shower.”

Steve looked as if he was about to go in for the hug anyway, until he caught a whiff of Bucky and stepped back. “Yikes,” he said, raising his hands in mock surrender. “I’ll keep my distance. Are you okay? What happened?”

“I—” Bucky began, but by then the door was opening again, and this time it was Emily and Kamala and Molly, the girls shouting and the dog barking as she flung her furry body against his knees. “Here,” he said, taking out the bracelet and holding it out to Kamala. “Just be aware, this was at the bottom of the East River forty minutes ago, so you probably want to wash it before you put it back on. Maybe boil it.”

“You found it?” Kamala cried, and then, “You went in the river for me?” And then she was hugging him, pressing her cheek against his chest with complete disregard for how much he reeked.

He gave it to the count of five before he extracted himself, carefully. “It wasn’t a big deal, kiddo. I’m kind of made for swimming, you know. But you and Emily better get home before our mom and your mom call the police.”

“I’ll throw a leash on Molly and walk them to the subway,” Steve said, grabbing Molly’s collar, which was only possible because she’d stopped running around and started sniffing the hem of Bucky’s jeans with fascination. “You go empty the hot water tank while I’m gone.”

“Thanks.” Bucky blew him a kiss, earning an “eww” from Emily, and went inside to do exactly that.

He’d shampooed his hair twice, and had pretty much finished scrubbing himself down everywhere else as well, when the impact of the whole day finally hit him, and his knees went weak and shaky. He sluiced off the last of the soap, wrapped a towel around his waist, and stepped out into the steamy bathroom, bracing his hands on the sink. His reflection in the mirror looked haggard, the sea-blue eyes empty. He looked, even to his own eyes, very inhuman. And of course, that was when Steve knocked on the door.

“Buck?” he called, and opened the door a crack. Whatever he saw, his eyebrows drew together, and he stepped inside. “Hey,” he said, setting a hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “You wanna talk about it?”

Bucky sighed and raked his hair back. “I almost went off a cliff today, Steve,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know if I can explain it—”

“Try.”

From anyone else it would have been an order. From Steve, it was… well, it was kind of an order, because he was a bossy little punk, but the subtext was, I’m listening, which was why Bucky did. “I went after the guys who were harassing Kamala,” he began, and held up his hand, again, before Steve could jump in with a justification. “No, let me finish. Because I started off with kind of noble intentions, sure, but by the time I caught up with them, it wasn’t about Kamala anymore. It was about all this anger and fear I’d been carrying around my whole life, and how I was making that an excuse to hit somebody back. I… I think I could’ve really hurt those kids if you hadn’t called when you did, Steve. Maybe even killed them.”

Steve was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Did you hurt anybody?”

“No, but—”

“Do you still want to?”

“f*cking… of course not! The point is, I could have.”

“No,” Steve said. “The point is, you didn’t. That’s not who you are, Buck.”

“Yeah, because you know me so much better than I know myself,” Bucky said, his voice shaking.

“Yeah,” Steve said, “I do. You don’t want to hurt anyone. And if you feel this bad about getting that close, that’s how I know you won’t do it again.”

“How can you say that? How can you say that when there’s this whole side of me that you haven’t even…” Bucky let the words trail off. “Steve,” he said, “if I ever… if I ever did cross that line—”

“You won’t,” Steve said. “First, because that’s not you. Second, because I’d stop you.”

“What, you’d throw me over your shoulder and drag me back here?”

“If I have to.”

It wasn’t even the mental picture that finally wrung a laugh out of Bucky; it was the fact that Steve was utterly serious. “I think you’d actually try,” he said.

“You’re damn right I would,” Steve said. Then, as if there was no more to say about that, he asked, “How was the water tonight?” Bucky made an incoherent noise of disgust, and he said, “That bad, huh?”

“I’m pretty sure I found Jimmy Hoffa at one point.”

Steve shook his head. “I can’t believe you found the bracelet at all. It must’ve been like a needle in a haystack.”

“Yeah, that’s why I took a magnet. I got Clint to meet me at the park and put one of his luck whammies on me.” Bucky shrugged at Steve’s look of horror. “Look, sometimes it works.”

“And if it had backfired, you probably would have run into the only shark in the East River.”

“Yeah, but for Kamala? I had to try.” Bucky took a deep breath. “There’s something else, and I want you to hear it from me before you hear it from Nat or someone. I had some help finding the guys, too. I’ve, uh, I’ve mentioned my ex-girlfriend Jessica, right?”

Steve’s spine went rigid. “Oh,” he said carefully.

“Nothing happened.”

“It… wouldn’t really be my business if it had, would it,” Steve said, face carefully blank.

Bucky sighed. “Of course it would be your business. You’re my husband, dumbass. And don’t say I never agreed to it, because I know that, and it isn’t the point. I told you, I don’t want to be the kind of person who cheats. You want to hear something funny, though?”

“Do I?”

“Probably not, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. See, Jessica, she’s kind of known for making really self-destructive choices, right? No judgment from me, she’s got a history and everybody copes with trauma in their own way, but seeing her again tonight, it reminded me how much I used to do that, too.”

“Used to? You mean in the distant past of two hours ago, when you were jumping in the East River?”

“Shut up. The point I’m trying to make, Steve, is that you think I’m with you because I don’t have a choice. Well, tonight I did have a choice. Because Jess asked if I wanted to go get a drink with her, and I knew if I said yes, there was a really good chance I could end up in bed with her again. But I didn’t, because all I could think about the whole time I was with her was how much I’d rather be back here, not having sex with you.”

It was terrible phrasing, and he watched Steve cycle through about six different emotions while he sorted it out, but in the end, he took it in the spirit Bucky intended. “You know, you do this thing sometimes where you’re almost so sweet,” was the answer he finally settled on.

“I know.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“I know that too.”

“I love you.”

“I—” Bucky stopped. “Didn’t know that,” he finished, weakly.

“I’m not offering you any more than that, right now,” Steve said quickly.

“Okay.”

“Because I’m not even sure what it means yet myself.”

“Okay.”

“I just don’t want you to think this means I—”

“Oberon’s balls, Steve, would you stop before you completely ruin the moment?” Bucky said, but he knew he was grinning like an idiot. When this whole thing had first started, all he’d hoped for was that the two of them would be able to get along, maybe even develop a reasonable approximation of a relationship. He’d never expected to get in so deep. He’d never dreamed that he mightfind love waiting for him in the most unexpected place.

And whatever it had cost him in freedom, whatever it might cost him in the future, he couldn’t bring himself to feel even a little bit sorry.

“f*ck the bar exam.”

“Come on, Barnes, it’s not that—”

“f*ck the bar exam,” Bucky repeated, without raising his head from the lunch table. “And f*ck whoever wrote the f*cking evil question about torts I had to answer at nine o’clock in the f*cking morning. And f*ck you for telling me it wasn’t gonna be that bad, Nelson. And f*ck me for thinking I wanted to be a lawyer. f*ck.”

Foggy looked across the table at him, not unkindly. “Barnes, everybody thinks they’re failing the bar while they’re taking it. But you aced the oral exams yesterday, and if you quit now, there’s gonna be nobody at the firm to help me catch Walters when she tries to steal my yogurt out of the fridge, so buck up, okay?”

Bucky raised his head just far enough to look balefully at Foggy. Then he raised his prosthetic hand just far enough to allow him to extend the middle finger.

Fortunately for Bucky, Foggy was pretty good at not taking things personally. “Look, you’re three-quarters of the way through this thing. Just get back in there and do what you can. And keep telling yourself it can’t be that hard to be a lawyer if an idiot like Murdock can do it.”

“Funny, Murdock said the same thing about you.” Bucky pushed himself up, neck popping from a morning hunched over the testing computer, and said, “Sorry. Rough couple days.”

“Leading up to the bar exam? Yeah, I can’t imagine why.”

Bucky’s answering smile felt a little forced, but the truth was, he’d asked Foggy to stop by during his lunch break because he’d figured he was going to need somebody to remind him that he could handle this. Not gracefully, maybe, but he could handle it. A year ago, he wouldn’t have bothered asking anyone, but that was another thing Steve was changing: he couldn’t very well chew Steve out for trying to go it alone all the time if he did the same thing, could he? He hadn’t asked Steve, of course, because Steve probably would’ve somehow wound up punching the test proctor, but he was pretty proud of himself for having asked anyone at all.

“Okay, so I hate to say it, but your break’s just about up,” Foggy said, and Bucky gave a theatrical groan and pushed himself to his feet. Foggy stood up too, and patted him on the shoulder. “Get back in there and knock ‘em dead, tiger.”

“You’re making it weird again,” Bucky said, but he gave himself one last stretch, squared his shoulders—and of course, that was when his phone, which he almost hadn’t bothered to reclaim from the storage lockers, chose the worst possible moment to start vibrating wildly in his pocket.

“Don’t answer it,” Foggy said. “Whatever it is, it’ll just distract you. I took a call from my mom on my break, and it was not helpful. You know she wanted me to be a butcher?”

“Please, not the butcher story again.” Bucky checked the screen: WILSON, SAM. Tapping Accept, he said, “Hey, Sam. I only have a second, what’s going on?”

“Barnes,” Sam said, and Bucky had just time to think he sounded uncharacteristically serious when he said, “I have some news. You might want to sit down.”

“Wilson, I don’t have time for this right now. Whatever it is, spit it out and I’ll be really impressed about it later, okay?”

“Steve was in an accident.”

Bucky’s whole body went cold. “How bad?”

Sam knew how to cut to the chase: “If losing an arm is a ten, this is probably a three,” he said. “He’s alive, he’s conscious, and he’s got all his limbs, but he’s pretty out of it. They’re taking him in for an MRI as a precaution.”

“Okay.” Bucky’s voice sounded far away in his own ears. “Okay, well, you need to tell them about the anemia, because if he’s losing any blood at all, it could be dangerous for—”

“Natasha has his medical records. Don’t ask me how. Listen, they might need you to authorize treatment. How soon can you get here?”

“I…” Bucky glanced around him. People were finishing their lunches, starting to shuffle back into the exam room. “I’m taking the bar exam today.”

There were a few beats of silence, and then Sam said, “Oh. That’s why he kept telling me not to call you.”

“Sounds like him. Look, just… whatever he needs, tell them to do it. I mean, that’s obvious. Why would they need me for that?”

“Because you’re the spouse,” Sam said, in a tone that suggested Bucky might want to reconsider his position as king of all idiots.

“Oh. Oh. sh*t. Yeah, I… Okay, if I leave now, I could… hang on.” Foggy had grabbed his arm. “What?”

“I heard ‘Steve’ and ‘accident,’” Foggy said. “Is he okay?”

“No. I gotta get back to Brooklyn, I—”

“Is there anything you can do for him if you’re there?”

Bucky stared at him. “Are you kidding?”

“Look,” Foggy said, “just consider, if you leave now, you can’t take the bar again until February. The proctors don’t give breaks for personal emergencies. You’ll have to start over on all the prep work, and, honestly…” He leaned forward. “Six months ago, you didn’t even know this guy. Does he even want you there?”

Well, that was a damn lawyerly question, wasn’t it? And it was pretty funny that Foggy was the one to ask it. On the Monday morning after he’d met Steve, when he’d decided to head off the office rumor mill by walking in and announcing that he’d gotten married over the weekend, Bucky had braced himself for a flurry of invasive questions—only, in a startling reversal of everything he’d come to expect from his coworkers, everybody had been suddenly reluctant to ask. Foggy, the only full-blooded human in the place, had been the one who’d broken the silence with, “So is this something we should be celebrating or offering condolences on?” And then, after a short pause, “Because I can do drinks after work either way.” It had been the only thing that made Bucky laugh for the entire terrible workday, but his answer at the time had been, “I’m not sure yet,” and, well, it had been one thing telling Steve he wanted to make it work, another to tell his coworkers he’d gone and fallen in love with the guy when there was still a possibility the whole thing might crash and burn. None of that would make it easy to explain that Steve did apparently want him to stay away, but he had no intention of listening, not because he didn’t care, but because he did.

“It’s Steve,” he said. “I have to be there,” and Foggy looked hard at him for a very long moment, then nodded.

“Find out which hospital,” he said. “I’ll go flag down a cab.”

“I’m looking for a patient,” Bucky told the volunteer at the information desk. “Steven Rogers, he was brought in maybe an hour or two ago. R-O-G—”

“Barnes!” Sam called across the lobby. “This way.”

It was a mark of how sincerely upset Bucky was that he didn’t have the faintest desire to snark at Sam. “First tell me how he is, and then tell me everything that happened and who I get to sue the balls off of for this,” he said.

“He’s gonna be all right,” Sam said. “He’s got a concussion and a couple of cracked ribs, but he didn’t break anything that won’t heal. And I’d hold off on the lawsuit for now, since the cab driver who hit him just agreed not to press charges. I think you have a pretty good chance of talking a judge into throwing out the ticket he got, though.”

“What? He got hit and they’re charging him?”

“Well, he did run out into the middle of the street.” When Bucky stared at him, Sam elaborated, “We’d gone out to grab some coffee, and we saw a woman get her purse snatched a little way down the block. Steve took off after the guy—”

“Of course he f*ckin’ did.” Bucky suddenly felt intensely weary. “And chased him right out into traffic without bothering to look both ways, because God forbid he should act as smart as the average kindergartener.”

“In fairness to him, he actually managed to grab the woman’s purse right before he got hit.”

“In fairness to—you’re f*cking kidding me, Sam. I bet there wasn’t one thing in that purse that was worth as much as our insurance deductible is gonna be for this. Much less, you know, his actual body.”

“Well, that’s not really the way he thinks, is it?”

“No,” Bucky said. “It really isn’t.” As they were talking, Sam had been leading him deeper into the hospital, and the muscles in his shoulders were starting to clench as they passed the sterile white exam rooms, the softly beeping monitors, the occasional harried-looking doctor striding past in scrubs. His sealskin, which usually took on a nice light texture for summer, had wrapped itself around him so tightly that he was starting to sweat. “Uh, just so you know, if you’re taking me to a room with a big metal machine,” he began.

“He’s in an exam room,” Sam said, and it was also probably a mark of how serious the whole situation was that he didn’t give Bucky any further sh*t about it.

He thought he’d braced himself sufficiently for whatever condition he was going to find Steve in; he’d thought wrong. Seeing Steve in a hospital bed with a stiff plastic collar around his neck, a row of butterfly sutures across his temple, and an assortment of developing bruises—including two black eyes, somehow, and a strip of tape across his nose—Bucky had to grab the doorframe and brace himself to keep his knees from giving out. Only a lifetime of practice pretending to his mother’s face that there was nothing wrong allowed him to say lightly, “Hey, I know it’s hard to get a cab in this city at lunchtime, but there are better ways to stop one than using your face.”

Steve looked up, and the instant of unguarded relief in his eyes was enough to tell Bucky he’d made the right call in coming down here. “Buck,” he said. “Is it five now?”

“Five what?” Bucky glanced at Sam, who raised his eyebrows in a told you he was acting loopy look.

“Five o’clock. I told Sam not to call you until then.”

“Oh, right, because that’s when the test’s over,” Bucky said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Steve’s eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”

“What did I do? What did you do? Well, apparently you concussed your dumb ass, for a start.”

“How do you know? You’re not a lawyer. Wait, did you?”

“Shut up. He means, you’re not a doctor, you’re not even a lawyer yet,” Bucky told Sam, who was looking perplexed, “and then he means, unless you passed the bar today, which, I told you, punk, don’t worry about it.”

“That’s what I said . And don’t do the thing. I’m not your mother.”

“I’m not lying! I don’t… technically have the results yet. And you’re not supposed to run out in front of cars, so I think I win this one.”

“I had him on the ropes,” Steve said, presumably meaning the purse snatcher.

“I know,” Bucky assured him.

“Okay,” Sam said, “it’s true, married people really do speak their own language. You got this, Barnes?”

“Yeah, you can go. I appreciate it, Sam.”

“Thanks, Sam,” Steve agreed. “Oh, and Sam, don’t call Bucky until at least five o’clock, okay? He’s taking the bar today and I don’t want to mess that up.”

Sam met Bucky’s eyes. “You two deserve each other, you know that?” he said, before he swung the door shut behind him.

“So,” Bucky said, sliding into the chair beside the bed. “You banged your head pretty good, huh?”

“Why do people keep saying that? I’m fine,” Steve said, pushing himself up.

Bucky caught him and pushed him back down before he could fall off the bed. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“You’re here to take me home, aren’t you? Jeez, how hard did you hit your head, Buck?”

Bucky couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. He gave himself five seconds to close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose, and said, “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid until I get back, and I’ll go find a doctor and see if I can spring you from this joint so we can both go home.”

It wasn’t that easy, of course. It was almost dark by the time Steve was actually released, with a long list of do’s and don’ts for head injuries and a list of warning signs for Bucky to watch for, and then they wound up waiting for a cab again, because Bucky didn’t trust Steve not to try to walk home if he left him long enough to go get his own car, and then, once he’d gotten Steve settled, Molly still had to be fed and walked.

“You know, you’re lucky to be a dog,” he told her, while she trotted along on her leash, grinning her big doggy grin up at him. “You don’t care that you belong to a guy who married some idiot who runs out in front of cars. As long as you get your snacks and your belly rubs, you don’t worry about anyth—hang on.” His phone was ringing again. “One of these days I’m gonna chuck this thing in the Bay,” he told her seriously, swiping his thumb across the green button. “Steve, I told you, I’ll be back in like three minutes, just sit tight until I—”

“Hi, sweetheart,” said his mother, and Bucky’s stomach fell straight through the sidewalk.

The neurologist at the hospital had told Bucky that Steve would probably be sleepy and irritable for the next few days, and Bucky felt that he deserved a f*cking medal for not asking how he’d know the difference on the second part. Given everything that had happened, though, he decided he could use a little downtime himself. He called off work and spent the next two days crashed on the couch next to Steve, letting Netflix stream episode after episode of Dog Cops that he watched with half his brain while the other half rehashed his shouting match with his mother. It was ridiculous that he even cared so much; he was a college-educated, mostly self-supporting, grown-ass adult who’d survived losing an arm, for f*ck’s sake—and yet here he was, chewing over what she’d said to him for the hundredth time and wishing he’d had either the stones to tell her to butt out of his life once and for all, or the presence of mind to lie and say he wouldn’t know for sure whether he’d passed or failed until the results came in.

On the third day after Steve’s accident, he wrapped up his arm with waterproof bandaging per Stark’s instructions, took himself to Douglass-DeGraw, and swam laps until he felt like his other arm was going to fall off. It helped, a little; after almost an hour of slicing through the water, filling up his brain with breathing patterns and stroke counts and relearning how to do a flip turn with feet instead of fins, he felt enough like himself again to start making plans. Which was good, because when he got home, Steve was sitting up on the couch, with his laptop open and Bucky’s sealskin draped over his shoulders. “Sorry,” he said, shrugging off the skin and holding it out.

“I don’t mind. Kinda warm for it today, though, isn’t it?”

“It smells like you,” Steve said, and then looked down, cheeks pink. “You have a minute?”

“Yeah. Actually, I was hoping we could talk about some stuff.”

“About your family, right?” Steve gestured at the computer. “Emily messaged me. I’m sorry. For all of it.”

“It was an accident. sh*t happens. You weren’t trying to get hurt.”

“But the bar exam—all that work you did. And your mother—”

“It was my choice to leave the exam. Look, I won’t lose my job. Won’t get promoted, but I won’t get fired, either. People retake the bar all the time. And Mom will get over it.”

“Emily said she threatened to throw you out of this place. That she ‘wasn’t paying for you to throw your life away on some idiot human.’”

Well, he couldn’t exactly pretend that was a secret, since half of Greenpoint had probably heard his mother yelling it at him, but Bucky was going to have a talk with Emily about how it hadn’t been necessary to tell Steve that part specifically. “Ehh, Mom will never do it,” he said. “If she did, she’d be giving up one of her ways of controlling me. And more importantly, I wrote the lease. Termination clauses for days.”

“Sneaky.”

“I am the sneakiest.”

“Natasha is the sneakiest.”

“Fair.”

There was a small silence, and then Steve said, “I want to do something for you.” He got up and stood in front of Bucky for a moment, taking a deep breath, and then he then knelt on the couch, with one knee on either side of Bucky’s hips, to kiss him.

“Oh,” Bucky said, mouth muffled by Steve’s. “I was hoping you wanted to sign a legally binding contract that you’re going to start being less of an idiot, but this is nice, too. Do you feel like—yaaugh!” he yelped, because Steve had just slid his hand up Bucky’s thigh. As in, all the way up, firmly and deliberately, and now there were things going on that were going to make both of them very uncomfortable in a minute. “Sweet Iolanthe, warn a guy, Rogers!”

“I’m sorry.” Steve had already backed off, and was halfway across the sofa, with his cheeks burning red. “I—I thought you’d like it.”

“Like—” Bucky sputtered. “Liking it is not the problem, it’s just… jeez. I thought you were the one who didn’t want me to go getting ideas.”

“Well…” Steve was still blushing furiously. “Maybe it’s time for you to get some. Ideas, I mean.”

“Are you telling me you want to talk about sex now?” Bucky said, startled, and when Steve didn’t look up, he added, “C’mon, this is a situation where I need you to use your words. Are you, Steve Rogers, saying that you want to have sex with me, Bucky Barnes?”

“You’re making it sound like a deposition.”

“Look, I’m sorry, but consent is important. Actually,” Bucky amended, “consent is a low bar. What I’d really like is enthusiasm. And I really, really don’t want you to think you have to do this to pay me back for getting me yelled at by my mother, because that’s literally the last thing I want to be thinking about in this situation.”

“Well, if you must know, I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” Steve said. “In fact, a couple of days ago, before the thing with the car—”

“—Before you got hit by a car —”

“—I talked to Peggy about all of this, so you can ask her if you don’t believe me.”

“Oh,” Bucky said. “You’ve talked to the only person you have slept with about the fact that we haven’t. That’s a fun place for me to be in.”

“You know I talk to her about everything. She’s my best friend besides you.” Steve took a deep breath. “Look, I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, whether I could… be interested for you. And Peggy reminded me that people have sex for all kinds of reasons, not necessarily just…”

“Because they’re horny?” Bucky supplied.

Steve made a face at him, but didn’t deny it. “If I was really, you know, repulsed by it, I wouldn’t be suggesting this, but I’m starting to think that for me, sex might be kind of like golfing.”

Bucky cycled through several possible replies before eventually settling on, “Are you sure this isn’t the concussion talking? Because other than a really bad joke about balls and holes, I have no idea where you could be going with this.”

“Okay, look. When I was in junior high, my mom started dating this doctor from the hospital she worked at. She sat me down and gave me a speech about how she wasn’t trying to replace Dad, and mostly I was okay with it—I mean, she was widowed, not dead. But the guy was a golfer, and he kept asking Mom to go along, and pretty soon she was spending every Sunday on the links with him, even though she didn’t like golf at all. She didn’t hate it, didn’t care if other people did it, she’d just never cared about it herself. So I finally asked her, why are you doing this? And she said, ‘I don’t love playing golf, but I love seeing how happy it makes him, and it makes me happy that we’re spending time together.’ I think I never really understood what she was trying to tell me until I was with you.”

“Um. I get what you’re saying in theory, but I’m still having a really hard time getting my head around the idea of sex being like golf.”

“And now you know what every conversation is like for me,” Steve told him wryly. “I have a hard time relating to the way people think about it in general.”

“Okay,” Bucky said slowly. “Well, I’m not exactly averse to trying some experiments, but even if you hadn’t gotten hit by a car recently—”

“Jeez, Buck, it’s been like three days already. Aren’t you ever gonna let that go?”

Bucky laughed in spite of himself. “Even if you hadn’t, we should probably take this kind of slow, work our way up to, you know, the more intense stuff. I’d like us to find some stuff we can both enjoy, Steve. I mean, later on, when you tell Peggy about this, I want you to say, ‘Hey, so it turns out that Bucky Barnes is a kind, generous, and astonishingly skillful lover.’”

“I’m not gonna tell her the details.”

“No, but she’s gonna infer.” Bucky thought about it for a moment. He knew Steve’s deal wasn’t that he didn’t have any biological sex drive at all, or that any parts didn’t work when properly stimulated; it was just a way lower priority for him than it was for most people. A solo event rather than a relay, so to speak. And Bucky was aware that he’d probably never fully understand how something he liked so much could be stressful and weird for Steve, but if Steve was willing to try it, then the least Bucky could do was try to make it easier for him in return.

“So let’s say your guy likes handjobs,” he said, and when Steve visibly relaxed, he knew he’d guessed right. Steve would’ve jumped right in off the deep end, as it were, if Bucky had asked, but it was a relief to him that he didn’t have to. Besides, it wasn’t like Bucky was going to complain about this option. “But even if you both know that’s the end game,” he went on, “you don’t just start by grabbing his dick. You gotta work your way up to it.” He moved over to Steve’s side of the couch and slung one leg behind Steve’s back, easing himself down behind him so he was sitting with his thighs pressed against Steve’s bony hips. He kissed Steve’s cheek first, then wrapped his arms around him and rested his head on Steve’s shoulder. “Wow, okay, you’re really tense. Anything I can do to help?”

“Should I be taking notes?” Steve asked, trying and failing to sound casual.

“That’s not roleplaying, it’s the truth. If you’re not okay—”

“I can handle it.”

“Okay.” Bucky pressed his lips to Steve’s throat, then to the underside of his jaw. He felt Steve’s breathing change when he started working his mouth over the soft spot between his neck and his shoulder, and he paused to say, “Remember, you’re allowed to tell me to stop.”

“I don’t want you to stop.”

“Good.” Bucky let his mouth curve in a smile against Steve’s shoulder. “Keep in mind that if anything doesn’t work for you, we can try something else. Because I’ve had a good long time to think about all the filthy things I’d like to do to you if this day ever did come, so I’m not gonna run out of ideas any time soon.”

“Oh,” Steve said, and then, “Oh,” a little more sharply, when Bucky slid both hands down his chest. He couldn’t quite cover his flinch, and when Bucky lifted the shirt, he saw why: Steve’s rib cage was still mottled with bruises, green and black and purple.

He must have let his face give away a little more than he usually did, because Steve, who’d just been starting to relax, tensed up again, grabbing the hem of his shirt and yanking it down. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

“Steve, I’m not gonna be turned off because you have a few bruises,” Bucky said. “You’ve seen my arm, for Mab’s sake. I just hate it that you’re in pain, is all. And I wish I could protect you from things like this.”

“That’s not how the world works, Buck. And I don’t need protecting.”

“I know you don’t. That has nothing to do with me loving you enough to want to. Hey, whoa,” he said, because Steve’s expression had completely changed, from wary to… not exactly stricken, but different enough to be alarming. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” Steve swiped his hand across his eyes. “So, there were a lot of good reasons that Peggy and I called off our relationship,” he said slowly. “Our lives just went in different directions, and letting her go was the right thing to do. But after that, I thought I’d never find anyone I could feel that way about again. And if I did, what were the chances they’d even be interested in me?”

“Probably the same as the chances that I’d lose my sealskin to some stranger and it would turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“So,” Steve said, “I guess we should take this party upstairs, huh?”

Bucky had never wanted anything so much in his life. “You’re sure about this?” he asked, one more time, standing up and holding out both hands to Steve, the real one and the prosthetic.

Steve took them. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure.”

“There used to be a greying tower alone on the sea
You became the light on the dark side of me
Love remains—”

Bucky broke off as the bathroom door swung open. “Molly, so help me, you know if you sneak into the bathroom you’re getting put in the bath,” he began, then stopped, because it wasn’t the dog; it was Steve, twitching open the shower curtain.

“Does that offer extend to everybody?” he asked.

Bucky grinned. “I guess it’s one way to save on the water bill,” he said, holding out a hand to help Steve step inside. “Careful. As much as I’d love to introduce you to shower sex, I think we’ll wait until you’re a little steadier on your feet.”

“I’m fine.” Steve took the bottle of shower gel out of his hands and then, to Bucky’s very pleasant surprise, started soaping him up. “Well, don’t let me interrupt. You’ve got the whole rest of the song to get through.”

“Steven, I compare you to a kiss from a rose on the gray,” Bucky sang, and Steve’s face went as red as the aforementioned rose.

“Don’t make fun of me,” he said. “And don’t call me Steven.”

“Look, the song needs two syllables there. How ’bout I make it ‘Stevie’?”

“You’re horrible,” said Steve, thereby sealing his fate forever.

Bucky turned around and put his soap-slick hands on Steve’s hips. Until the night before, he’d never seen Steve completely naked. And okay, his body wasn’t exactly the stuff fantasies were made of; Bucky could count his ribs by sight, along with every knob of his spine, and he’d been knocked around enough in his life that he couldn’t remember the individual incidents when he’d gotten the scars on his knuckles and his knees, or even the one up under his hairline that had obviously needed stitches. The ice packs Bucky had made him put on his face had taken down most of the swelling, but the bruises on his chest from where the car had hit him (and hell no, Bucky wasn’t letting that go any time soon) showed up as ugly black and yellow splotches under the bright light of the bathroom fixture. He was a mess. He was everything Bucky wanted in the world. “Listen,” he said, “I know sex isn’t gonna be an all-the-time thing for you, and that’s fine, but we are naked already and—”

“Not now,” Steve said. “We both need to get to work. We can’t keep burning through our time off if we ever want a real honeymoon.”

“What’s this now?”

“I mean, I think we should. Maybe this winter. Someplace warm and exotic, with a lot of water.”

“Sure, and how exactly are we gonna pay for a vacation like that when you’re always broke and I’m drowning in student loans?”

“I guess I’ll just have to move in with you and start splitting the rent. If that’s still on the table, that is.”

“If—” Bucky started to smile. “You’re an unbelievable punk, Rogers, you know that? If I’d known a little heavy petting was all it was gonna take—”

“That wasn’t all it took,” Steve said, already blushing. “I had to be sure it was the right thing. For both of us. Anyway, is that a yes?”

“Yes, absolutely yes. I can borrow a truck from my uncle this weekend.”

“I need a little more time than that. I’ve still got a lot of my mom’s stuff at the apartment that I should really sort through, instead of just moving the same boxes over again.”

“Oh.” Bucky was aware that it was sh*tty of him to envy Steve for having a mom he still idolized so much when she was dead, but the way he looked when he talked about her, it was hard not to. Sarah Rogers must have been a hell of a woman. Winifred Barnes, on the other hand, still wasn’t speaking to Bucky, which was only slightly more stressful than when she was. “Well, you said you still had some of her paintings, right? We can hang them up in the living room if you want,” he offered, and the look Steve gave him was worth a hundred fights with his mother.

Okay, so it wasn’t shower sex, but it was still enough to make his good mood linger all morning in the office, so much so that several of his coworkers commented on it. Even Murdock said something about how cheerful he was, which led to Foggy making the obligatory even a blind man can see it joke, which led to Murdock tripping him with his cane, which led to basically no work getting done in the office all morning. He’d almost gotten himself back on track when his phone buzzed, and he glanced over and saw Steve’s name on the screen.

“Take it outside,” Murdock told him, before he even reached for it. “Nobody needs to hear you and your husband being cute at each other.”

“How the hell did you know it was Steve?” Bucky demanded, throwing both hands up in aggravation.

“Your heart rate goes up twenty percent when it’s him.” Murdock paused for a moment, then added, neutrally, “It’s disgusting.”

“Excuse me while I take my gross heart out in the hall, then,” Bucky pretended to snarl, but as soon as the door shut, he couldn’t keep himself from smiling. “Hey, sweetheart.”

“Are we doing that?” Steve said. “Because it feels weird to me if we’re doing that.”

“We don’t have to,” Bucky said, trying not to sound too crestfallen.

“I didn’t tell you to stop. Your mother called me.”

Bucky blinked. “What?”

“I don’t understand either. She was very polite, though. She was calling to invite us to Emily’s birthday party.”

“Both of us?”

“She said ‘you and my son,’ for whatever that’s worth.”

“I guess you and your husband would’ve been too much to ask.” Bucky considered. “She’s up to something.”

“That was my thought too.” Steve tended to look for the best in people, but that didn’t mean he was either naive or stupid. “But whatever it is, we can handle it. You can’t miss your sister’s birthday.”

“Not sweet sixteen, no. They make movies about that sh*t. Not to mention that I’ve put her through enough hell lately already. I wonder if we can afford to get her those New Rock boots she’s had her eye on for like two years.”

“Yeah, I’m sure we can. I mean, how much can one pair of boots really cost?”

“Honey,” Bucky said, “Peggy was right. You really don’t know the first thing about women.”

He wound up putting the boots on his credit card, and Steve was still shaking his head about it—“No, I get that they’re well-made and she loves the aesthetic, and I’m not judging her for wanting them, I just don’t understand how they can charge that much for shoes” —when they rolled up outside his mom’s house. “Right, birthdays,” Bucky couldn’t help saying, as they walked up to the door. “We clear on the rules?”

“We’re not bringing her a gift, we’re leaving something in the house that then becomes hers,” Steve recited. “Nobody says ‘thank you’ and nobody is under any obligations.”

“Right. And?”

“I don’t talk to your mother if I can possibly avoid it.”

“And?”

Steve sighed heavily. “It’s probably best if I just don’t talk at all.”

“I love you.”

“Jerk.”

As long as Steve wasn’t questioning the underlying wisdom of the plan, Bucky didn’t see any reason to disagree. He led the way up the stairs and pushed open the door. “There a birthday girl in the house?” he called out, and was rewarded almost immediately by Emily launching herself into him and wrapping him up in a hug.

“Bucky!” she said. She’d been using his real name more lately, instead of any of the usual sibling abuse-endearments; it was a huge step up from ‘Fish Breath’ and honestly, it made Bucky a little sad. “Did you bring Steve?”

“Hey, what am I, chopped liver? Yes, I brought Steve. And we both brought something that doesn’t fit either of us and somebody else might get some use out of if they happened to find it in a bag with pink ribbons on it,” he said, and she squealed and raced off to find Steve and her present, probably not in that order. He watched her go, allowing himself a small, fond smile that was more than a little bittersweet. Sixteen. Holy f*ck. He’d known this day was coming, but he guessed it was official now: she was always going to be his little sister, but he couldn’t think of her as a child anymore. If she tried to do half the sh*t he’d gotten up to when he was sixteen… He shuddered. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Which reminded him. He glanced around the room, getting the lay of the land: probably a dozen high schoolers running around, most of whom he recognized as long-time friends of Em’s; his Aunt Ramona, over in the corner with a wineglass, which meant the younger Barnes cousins were around somewhere, which meant Bucky was, at some point, almost definitely going to get cornered and roped into a long, mind-numbing discussion about the latest goddamn Pokémon game; a handful of neighbors, all fae, who his mother must have invited, because Em certainly wouldn’t have; and—there he was: a kid Bucky hadn’t met before, who was sitting on the sofa with his shoulders rigid and his expression on high alert. Yep, that was definitely the look of a kid who’d been brought along with the express purpose of being introduced to his girlfriend’s mother. “Hey,” he said, turning a friendly smile on the kid as he sat down next to him. “I’m Bucky, Emily’s brother. And you must be the boyfriend, right?”

“Oh, hi,” said the kid. “Yes, yes sir, Mr. Barnes, I’m Peter.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Okay, you seriously need to relax, kid. First off, Mr. Barnes is my father, and the ‘sir’ thing might actively kill me. Second, I’m not here to scare you. I just wanted to meet you. Emily really likes you a lot, and I trust her judgment. What classes are you taking this semester?”

“Um. AP History, AP Calc, Physics One, AP Bio—”

“Wow, heck of a course load. You must be as smart as Emily says you are.”

“Oh, uh, thank—I mean, that’s nice of you to say,” Peter said, looking relieved.

“Which means I definitely don’t have to tell you,” Bucky said, “that if you touch her in any way she hasn’t explicitly agreed to, or pull any dumb juvenile bullsh*t like dumping her by text message on the day of the big dance, or generally treat her with anything less than complete and total respect and honesty at all times, I will call down the Wild Hunt on you so fast it’ll make your ancestors roll in their graves, and all the iron in every bridge in Manhattan won’t be enough to stop me from making the rest of your mortal life one long, drawn-out lesson in misery.” He leaned over, patted Peter on the shoulder, said, “You seem like a good kid. I’m glad we had this chat,” and stood up while the kid was still too stunned to respond.

“And that’s how you do a shovel talk, Stark,” he murmured, as he pushed open the door to the kitchen. Sooner or later, if he didn’t find his mother, she was going to find him, and it would be easier to get it over with.

She wasn’t in the kitchen, but Becca was—and so was the prodigal Barnes sister, Rachel. “Rach!” he said, snagging a seat at the table, where they were talking, with coffee cups in hand. “What’d Mom bribe you with to get you to come by?”

“It was guilt, not bribes,” Rachel said. “‘Your baby sister only gets one sixteenth birthday, you know.’ Becca’s the one who did the bribing. Here.” She glanced around, then slid a flask across the table.

“Day drinking, Bec?” Bucky sighed. “Really? And you didn’t tell me? I would’ve been in here fifteen minutes ago.” He glanced around, made sure the coast was clear, and took a swig before passing it back to her. “That’s good sh*t.”

“Only the best for my dysfunctional family,” Becca said, with what he estimated to be three-drink cheerfulness. “You meet the boyfriend?”

“Yeah. Seems like a good kid. Put the fear in him anyway, you know, just on principle.”

Rachel frowned at him. “You know us girls can take care of ourselves without all that hypermasculine posturing, right?”

“Yeah, of course. But having a big brother means you don’t have to. You guys seen Mom?”

“Upstairs, I think,” Rachel said. “Probably soldering bars on Em’s bedroom window. Thank f*ck I don’t have to live here anymore.”

“Hey, watch your f*ckin’ language,” Bucky told her, grinning. “I’m gonna say hi to Mom and go get it over with, and then I’m gonna go rescue my husband from whatever predatory relative found him first.”

“You really like him, don’t you?” Becca said.

Bucky turned back. Her face was unreadable, but her voice was a little wistful. “Yeah,” he said. “I really like him a lot.”

Steve was talking to Kamala in a corner of the living room, and looked safe from Aunt Ramona for the moment, so Bucky cut across to the stairs, where his mother met him on her way down. She was carrying a gift bag not unlike the one they’d gotten for the New Rocks, although this one was simply sealed with tape, lacking Steve’s artistic touch with the curly ribbon. “Hello, Bucky,” she said, smiling, and then reached past him, catching Peter, who was just walking past, by the shoulder. “Peter, dear, give this to Emily, would you? It’s not a gift; you don’t need to say anything, just have her open it.”

“Um, yes ma’am,” the kid said, and scooted off as if he might get bitten if he stood there for too long—which, Bucky supposed, was reasonable. She turned to him. “So you’ve met the young man,” she said. “I saw you talking to him earlier. What did you think?”

“Seems like a good kid,” Bucky said, with a shrug. “Polite.”

“Yes, it’s certainly nice when my children choose to be around polite people.”

Bucky knew his cue when he heard it. “It was nice of you to invite Steve today,” he said, stopping just short of thank you.

“Well, he is part of the family now,” his mother told him. “It was only right for him to be here for Emily’s big day.”

Bucky looked at her, standing there, and a chill ran down his spine. Her smile was bright and brittle. “Mom,” he began, and that was when a shriek split the air.

“Emily!” Bucky cried, but of course it was already too late. It was easy to see what had happened, though. Peter had given her the bag; she’d opened it. And out of it, onto her lap, had slithered a silvery-gray sealskin, splotched with patches of baby-white fur.

“You’re insane!” Bucky shouted at his mother, once the door had closed behind the last of the fleeing party guests. Aunt Ramona had made herself useful by clearing out anybody who might have been tempted to linger, before grabbing her own kids and distancing herself from the drama. Not that it had been hard to convince anybody: almost all of the kids who’d been invited were friends with Emily and Peter on social media, and most of them had checked their phones as they dinged with a status notification, blanched, and made a break for the nearest exit. Now Emily was upstairs, sobbing into her bedpillows, and Becca was trying, probably futilely, to comfort her. Rachel had vanished, with a death grip on her own sealskin, and Bucky didn’t blame her a bit. The kid, Peter—f*cking hell, that was his brother-in-law Peter, now—was also gone; Bucky had heard him say, bewilderedly, “I can’t be married, I… I have homework” just before Steve yanked him out into the relative safety of the alley behind the house. That was good, because it was probably the one and only situation where Steve was actually the person best equipped to be the voice of reason; it was bad because now there was nobody standing between Bucky and his mother. “What the hell were you thinking? She’s sixteen years old!”

“I was thinking that I wasn’t going to send another of my children out into the world to be trapped by the first human who came along,” she spat. “This way, neither of them has to worry about it. He’s a good young man, a smart young man. She clearly likes him well enough. If they make a go of it, fine. If not, they’ll be young enough that they can break it off amicably and find other partners.”

“But they’ll still be married,” Bucky said, unable to believe he was hearing this. “For the rest of their lives, Mom.”

“You seem to have adjusted well enough.”

“Do not make this about me and Steve,” Bucky hissed.

“Oh, of course it’s about you and Steve,” she fired back. “I couldn’t even trust you to take reasonable precautions. You’re going to end up just like me, and I’m going to have to watch you suffer exactly the way your father made me suffer.”

“Steve,” Bucky said, almost breathless with rage, “is nothing like Dad was, Mom. Nothing.”

“He’s cheating on you, you know.”

Bucky’s breath went out in a wheeze of something he couldn’t quite call laughter. “Steve? Oh, no, Mom, I don’t think you’ve thought this one through.”

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me.” She marched across the kitchen, jerked open a drawer, and pulled out a manila envelope. “Not until you saw it with your own eyes.”

“What the hell—” Bucky grabbed it and dumped the contents onto the kitchen table, fanning out a sheaf of printed photographs. “Are these surveillance photos? Did you have somebody following Steve?”

“I had a right to know about this human who was part of my family now.”

“And Steve didn’t have a right to privacy?” Bucky held up one of the photos: Steve and Pepper, seated across a lunch table from each other at one of the swanky little bistros she liked so much, both of them laughing. “Mom,” he said. “The woman in this photo is his cousin.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“Yes! I’ve met her! She’s a lovely person!” Bucky said, almost despairing. How had he not realized how bad things had gotten until things had come to this pass? Well, he guessed he knew: he’d been busy falling in love. “Mom, look, I know what it’s like to be burned. Believe me, I know. But Steve is literally the last person in the world who’d cheat on me. And what happened between you and Dad is not what’s happening between me and Steve, okay?”

“Emily will come to understand that this is for her own good,” his mother went on, as if she hadn’t heard him. “That boy will treat her well, whether or not they stay together. And it’s not as if he doesn’t get anything out of this. He’s an orphan, no family except an aunt who’s getting on in years, so we’ll be his family now.”

“This is getting crazier by the second. You know, stealing human kids from their families went out of style around the time of Shakespeare, Mom.”

“I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Good, because I f*cking don’t!”

“Don’t you use that kind of language with me, young man. I’m your mother.”

This time Bucky did laugh, maybe a little desperately. “Oh, marrying two kids off against their will is totally okay, it’s for their own good even, but Oberon forbid I cuss. You know what, Mom? You’ve lost it. You’ve officially lost it, and I’m done pretending this is okay. Em!” he called up the stairs. “Pack a bag. You’re coming to stay with us while we sort this out.”

“You can’t take her out of my house. She’s a minor.”

“Nope,” Bucky said, “pretty sure she’s married, which makes her an adult, and if she decides to come with me, I’ll be happy to fight it out with you in court until she graduates. I know a lot of lawyers.” He started up the stairs, fighting the urge to look back.

“That boy is going to ruin your life,” his mother shouted after him. “It’s all going to end in tears. You know that, don’t you?”

Bucky’s shoulders stiffened, and he froze for a moment, feeling almost too tired and heartsick to take another step. “Doesn’t it always?” he asked softly, and when he started walking again, she didn’t follow him.

In the end Bucky and Becca wound up packing Emily’s stuff while she waited in the car; Steve put a blanket over her, and she was asleep before Bucky pulled away from the curb. “I sent the Parker kid home and told him to have his aunt call you tomorrow to talk about options,” Steve said, after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence. “I hope that was okay. I’m not sure if you can sign a postnup before you’re eighteen…”

“We’ll figure something out.” Bucky glanced across the seat at Steve and added, “I hope you’re not taking any of this personally over there. Because I know how you think, and I want you to know it’s not your fault. My mother’s the one who’s responsible for this mess.”

“Then it isn’t your fault either,” Steve said. “Because I know how you think, and you’re probably feeling responsible for not guessing what she was planning and putting a stop to it, which I’m not sure anybody could have.”

“It kind of is my fault, but for a different reason. I think this has been coming since I lost my arm, really. And not because of that, either. Because of my father. Really, I think Em and I are both paying for a mistake that happened before we were born.”

“What do you mean?” Steve said.

Bucky glanced in the rearview at Emily. She was apparently sound asleep, but he had his suspicions. Then again, if she was old enough to deal with being married off against her will, she was old enough to know the truth. “You know there are two kinds of fae,” he said. “Seelie and Unseelie. Different kinds of magic. Summer and winter, day and night. A lot of humans believe the Seelie are the good guys and the Unseelie are bad, which is a dangerous way to think, because there are plenty of Unseelie who are just sort of mischief-makers who don’t actually mean you any harm, and there are Seelie who’d kill you as soon as look at you, but in general, the Seelie take a more positive view of humans overall. Whereas the Unseelie are the ones who started the Wild Hunt, which is… well, calling it f*cked up is putting it mildly. You with me?”

“I haven’t heard it put exactly this way before, but yeah.”

“’Cause you’ve heard the human version,” Bucky said. “As long as you’re in the human world, the stuff you know will keep you safe. The other parts, we don’t exactly advertise. Anyway, the Seelie and the Unseelie used to go to war with each other pretty regularly, but Odin cracked down on that pretty hard at one point—”

“Wait, Odin? As in the Norse god of wisdom, that Odin?”

“Yeah, not important. Anyway, these days it’s more about symbolic victories. One-upping the other Court, getting people to defect, spilling embarrassing secrets, typical Cold War-style bullsh*t. And sometimes, those of us who are closest to being humans—like selkies—get used as pawns in that bullsh*t. For the most part, we usually know better than to fall for it—unless there’s something we want really, really badly that we can’t get any other way. Sometimes somebody in the other Court will find out what you’re after and try to bribe you with it, and sometimes people wind up listening. But most of us know that what you get is almost never worth the price you pay in the end.”

“And since this has something to do with your father,” Steve said quietly, “I’m guessing whatever he wanted wasn’t worth the price he paid, either.”

“Oh, he did the only thing worse than paying the price. He didn’t pay it.” Bucky risked another glance at Steve before returning his eyes to the road. “So you remember how I told you there’s no legal loophole under fae law that can break off a selkie marriage? Well, that doesn’t necessarily stop people from trying. Couple times a century, maybe, somebody will get desperate enough to go to the Unseelie Court and offer them something in exchange for breaking up the marriage in a not-so-legal way. Even then, most of them decide not to go through with it when they find out how it works.”

“Which is?”

“If marriage is ‘till death do us part,’ then to break one up, what you gotta do is die.”

“It seems like there’s a pretty obvious flaw in that plan.”

“Well, the thing is, people die and come back on a pretty regular basis these days. Heart stops on the operating table for three minutes, they shock you with the paddles, boom. You’re single. And if you know anything about the really old traditions, like the ones involving harvest rituals and stuff like that, you can probably guess that there are Unseelie who get a lot of magical juice out of a sacrificial death at the right time, under the right circ*mstances, with a willing victim. The coming-back part is real hit or miss, though, and you just have to trust that the other person will try to bring you back at all, which is why people usually bail. If they’re smart, they do that before they agree to anything they can’t take back. If they’re like my dad, they have to either go through with the terms of the deal, or find some way to wiggle out of it.”

“So what happened with your father?”

“Well. Flash back to about five years ago, when I’ve just finished my senior year of college and have three months to kill before law school. All of a sudden, my dad, who I haven’t spent any real time with since I was a kid, shows up and tells me he regrets bailing on us kids and he wants to be part of our lives again. Starting with me. And he wants to take me on a road trip.” Bucky smiled humorlessly. “He says, let’s go see the Grand Canyon. All the places you could take a selkie, and he picks the furthest point from any water that touches the ocean.”

“So you said no.”

“I would now. But remember, back then I was a dumb kid who didn’t realize my controlling asshole of a boyfriend was cheating on me, either. I thought Dad was being sincere about it. So we packed up the car and started driving. We were somewhere around the Allegheny National Forest when he told me why he really got back in touch. He said he’d met this woman and fallen in love with her—must’ve been the fifth or sixth one after the one he left Mom for, at that point—and he wanted to marry her so bad that he was willing to do anything. He told me about going to the Unseelie. And then he spun me this sob story about how he’d realized he couldn’t risk dying because he had so much to make up to us kids, and he wanted me to help him get out of it. So I was like, okay, I know some good lawyers, this might actually be an interesting legal challenge, human enters a deal with the Unseelie but the fine print’s specific to a fae thing, how can we play this? And then he says no, that’s not what he wants. See, he’s human, but I’m fae. And they’ve been implying that if I throw my allegiance to the Unseelie Court, maybe join the Wild Hunt for a year and a day or something, then maybe they’ll let him off the hook for his own bargain.”

“Bucky, that’s horrible,” Steve said. “I can’t believe he asked you to do that.”

“Oh, you think that’s the bad part? So I did say no to that, obviously. I said no way in hell would I do that, especially not for someone who’d abandoned my family, and I was going to make sure none of my sisters would do it either. I told him I wasn’t spending another minute listening to his bullsh*t, that he could pull the car over and I’d walk back to Brooklyn if I had to, but there was no way in hell I’d join the Hunt, not for him or anybody. We were still arguing about it when the deer ran out in front of us.”

It had been a massive pure white buck, so big that it looked almost prehistoric, with a rack of antlers like nothing he’d ever seen, and that was how he’d known it wasn’t an ordinary accident. He still wasn’t sure whether the Unseelie had sent it in response to his refusal, or whether they’d just lost patience with George Barnes trying to wiggle out of his bargain and got so eager to punish him that they didn’t care about a little collateral damage. One young, dumb selkie wasn’t worth all that much, in the scheme of things. “When I woke up,” he said, “there were sirens and flashing lights all over the place. A piece of metal from the car door had basically sheared through my arm. I don’t have to tell you what happens when a fae takes damage from iron, and they made things a lot worse by sticking me with needles and loading me up on a metal stretcher before they figured it out, so it was a while before I was lucid again. When I was, I found out Dad had been thrown from the car. He hadn’t gotten his death, though. Hadn’t paid for it. He’s been in a vegetative state ever since. Good news for him is that as long as Mom can’t divorce him, her insurance pays to keep him alive. Bad news is, Mom went from being married to a cheater to being married to a guy who isn’t quite dead enough for the doctors to pull the plug.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, his voice low and anguished. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Bucky said. “I mean, it wasn’t for a long time. It sucked ass, honestly. But I spent a year in recovery and then I went back to law school, and then I met some punk in a bar, got married, and fell in love, even if it was a little weird to do it in that order. I know it was incredibly tough on Mom living through all that, but… okay, I thought if you and me could actually make a go of it, maybe all of us could stop focusing on the bad things and remember that we still have a lot of good in our lives. It never occurred to me that Mom might be so far gone that she’d try to make sure Emily didn’t get all her choices taken away by, you know, taking all her choices away.”

“So what are we gonna do now?”

Áine bless you for that “we,” Steve Rogers, Bucky thought, and said, “First, we’re gonna make sure Emily never has to go back to that house. We’ll get her legally emancipated if we have to. I expect the Parker kid’s aunt is going to hit the roof, which might actually help with that. I can’t represent her if she brings suit against my mother, because I’d be a primary witness, but I bet I could get Murdock to take this one on pro bono. Then I can draw up a postnup for the kids, and then—”

“Do I have to go back to school?” Emily asked, from the back seat.

“Yes,” Bucky and Steve said, at the same time. “Why wouldn’t you?” Bucky added.

“Everybody knows what happened, by now,” Emily said.

Bucky started to say something about priorities, then stopped, because she was right; as hard as it had been for him to tell his coworkers about his accidental marriage, at least he hadn’t been under the magnifying glass of a high school. He’d seen what happened when kids got hold of gossip: maybe ten percent of them would hear the truth, or care about it if they did, and the rest would believe whatever they wanted to believe about her having tricked a human boy into marriage, and treat her accordingly. She’d be lucky if the worst thing that happened was getting a couple of anti-fae slurs painted on her locker. “We can look into switching you to another school, get you a fresh start,” he said. “If you move in with us, you’ll probably have to do that anyway. This isn’t going to ruin your life, though, I’ll make sure of that. And, Em? Don’t be too hard on Peter, okay? You know none of this is his fault.”

“He’s going to hate me now,” Emily said glumly. “Because I trapped him.”

“I can promise you that’s not true,” Steve said. “He told me he was afraid you’d hate him.”

“But if he ever decides he does hate me, I won’t be able to date anyone else,” Emily said, and when Bucky started to argue, she cut him off with, “Would you date someone you could never marry? Not ever?”

“Em,” Bucky said softly, “we’ll figure it out.” He forced a smile at her in the rearview mirror, and added, “Listen, Snowball, do I ever make promises I don’t intend to keep?”

Emily flopped down across the seat with such quintessential teenage-girl flounce that it might have been funny, if the situation hadn’t been so terrible. “No,” she admitted.

“Okay then. Let’s all get some sleep. I’m not gonna tell you things will look better in the morning, but they will soon. Trust me.”

She didn’t respond to that, and she was out again by the time they reached the brownstone, so deeply asleep that he had to carry her into the house—it was lucky for both of them that she was small for her age, and that now he had a fancy prosthetic that could actually take her weight. He settled her on the pullout couch, just for the night, mentally adding “get a real guest bed” to his list of tasks for tomorrow, and Molly hopped up onto the mattress, glancing at Bucky as if she was asking permission. “As if you wouldn’t do whatever you wanted anyway, you little monster,” he told her, ruffling her fur, and she snuggled up to Emily, who let out a sigh and seemed to relax a little. But she still had a death grip on the sealskin she hadn’t even known she’d lost a few hours earlier, and even in her sleep, she wasn’t showing any signs of letting go.

Bucky tucked his own sealskin a little more closely around his shoulders, but not because he was afraid of having it taken. It was the tail end of summer, and there was a little nip in the air that said autumn was coming. In practical terms, it didn’t change much, but even a fae with as little inborn magic as a selkie could sense the turn of the seasons, the Seelie Court losing just a little of its power and the Unseelie getting stronger. He tried hard to tell himself that was the only reason he was shivering as he turned out the light.

He went up to the bedroom, and Steve was waiting for him. Well, he was pretending to read, but he was doing it badly enough that he might as well have been holding the book upside down. When Bucky got into bed, he said, without preamble, “Is that how you felt when I picked up your sealskin? Like your life was ruined?”

“No,” Bucky said. “I mean, when I was seventeen and the girl I liked stood me up for the prom, yeah, then I was pretty sure my life was completely over. Not when you took my sealskin, though. I don’t really know how I felt, but it wasn’t despair. I mean, worst case, I knew I’d get to spend some time with you while we sorted it out.”

“You know, I already fell for you,” Steve said. “You don’t have to keep using the cheesy pickup lines on me.” Then, more seriously, he added, “Buck, promise me you aren’t planning to go to the Unseelie. I feel terrible for Emily, but I won’t let you risk your own life to put it right.”

“What? No, of course not,” Bucky said, genuinely surprised. “There aren’t too many lines I wouldn’t cross to protect Emily, but I’d have to have a death wish to offer myself to the Unseelie, and if there’s one thing I am, it’s a survivor. There’s just one thing I want to know, though, and I need you to be honest with me.” He took a deep breath, gearing himself up, and said, “Now that you know there could be a way to undo us being married, if you got the chance, would you take it?”

“No.” Steve’s response was measured, firm. “I would have at the beginning, but not now. In fact, now I think I’d do just about anything to stay married to you, as long as it was what you wanted, too.” He smiled a little. “And I’m always honest.”

“Good.” Bucky reached out and took Steve’s hand, looking into his eyes. “Steve, my heart belongs to you,” he said. “Nobody else, only you, forever. Remember that, okay?”

“Um. Sure,” Steve said, puzzled. “But you’d still better not do anything stupid.”

Bucky almost laughed out loud. “I’d better not do anything stupid? Excuse me, but which of us runs out in front of f*cking cars? You really are the worst, Rogers,” he said, tucking his right arm around Steve and pulling him close. “But you can’t get rid of me that easily. I’m not going anywhere.”

They took him two days later. They took him off the street, grabbed him from behind as he was walking past an alley and shoved him into the back of a box truck before he had any idea what was happening, and the shock of being dumped on the metal floor gave them the seconds they needed to zip-tie his right wrist to a tiedown loop on the bed of the truck and yank his prosthetic off his left shoulder. There was no point to struggling, but he did anyway, until somebody bashed him in the stomach with a crowbar. He was lying on his back, devoting most of his willpower to not puking his guts out, when an altogether too familiar face loomed over him.

“Brock,” he said weakly, and then, “What the hell is this?”

Brock Rumlow smiled. “Look, Bucky,” he said, “I want you to know, this isn’t personal.”

“It feels kinda personal.” Bucky thought furiously for a moment, and said, “If this is about some legal case my firm’s handling, then you’re wasting your time. I’m basically just an intern. I haven’t passed the bar, so they don’t let me in on a lot of the confidential stuff.”

Brock grinned, and Bucky wondered, not for the first time, how he’d ever trusted this guy enough to get in bed with him. The Bucky of five years ago, the one who had two arms and a trusting nature, had been young and naive and, yeah, maybe he did have a history of making questionable decisions when really good sex was involved, but even then, he should have seen how much Brock’s grin made him look like a predator. Granted, seals were also predators in their way, but even wild seals usually had the good sense to steer clear of sharks. “This isn’t about a case,” he said. “This is about the harvest sacrifice.”

Bucky’s whole body went cold. “Whatever my father promised you, I never agreed to it,” he said. “If I go missing, somebody will figure it out. I might just be one selkie, but I’m Seelie, and the Court doesn’t take this kind of thing lightly. They’ll take it all the way up to the High King if they have to, and then you and your bosses will be really f*cked.”

“Not if we convince them that you defected,” Rumlow said, clearly unconcerned. “But hey, at least your little sister gets her life back. After all, everybody who knows you knows there’s nothing you wouldn’t do for your family.”

Bucky understood the rest of the plan then, saw the whole scheme laid out from top to bottom, and he started to struggle even harder against the restraint, but he already knew it was no good, even before Rumlow motioned to the other guy, who picked up the crowbar again. When it hit him, he saw stars, and then for a long time he didn’t see anything at all.

Emily Barnes’s relationship status has changed to: Single.

James B. Barnes (Bucky)’s relationship status has changed to: It’s complicated.