fossilised | werewolves

werewolves

Pumpkin Spice.

It hits the shelves the moment the temperature dips below eighty, before the summer officially ends and the leaves give hint at changing color. It's become an American way of life. Lattes might claim it to be proof of their success and staying power but it's expanded into hand soap and e-cigarettes now. You can't find anything, really, that hasn't been pumpkin spiced these days. Pumpkin pie is too humble to try and reclaim it anyway, and has quietly retreated to Thanksgiving where it waits to mark the end of the most beloved season in New York among straight white girls.

Steve Rogers, while neither straight nor a girl, has whole heartedly embraced the trend and the moment Starbucks announced that it had come back out for a Limited Time Only, Steve had rummaged in his sock drawer for a gift card he was sure had money left on it and stood in line with the masses to claim his holy grail.

It's a comfort. It's a promise that there's going to be something else to look forward to in the coming months when holidays rear their ugly and beautiful heads to remind you that your family is dead and most of the kids you lived with in foster care and group homes have disappeared out of your life. It makes Steve's day and he's already day dreaming about boots and puffy vests the moment he takes his first, iced sip. Steve isn't really a day dreamer, but his head can get stuck in the clouds on the best days and distraction comes easily in a city where you're never and always alone at the same time.

There's charcoal under his nails and a moment of joy in his heart from the iced latte he grasps so fiercely the day he sees Bucky across the street. He'd know him anywhere, even with that long fringe of hair he hasn't seen since before he went off to basic training. The light to cross the street between them is red but Steve ignores the risks. There are two lanes each direction, and all four are packed with yellow cabs and black Uber cars. No one can go fast enough to do him any damage.

The latte gets dropped along the way and Steve doesn't care. It's been over a year and a half since he's seen Bucky. It's been six months since he last heard anything from him actually. He hadn't even gotten a birthday card this year.

"Buck!" Steve is just a skinny guy, five foot four, maybe 100 pounds if he's got art supplies and an easel on him. He has fallen arches and a heart arrhythmia, but they aren't keeping him from shimmying between cars and nearly getting run over. He's out of breath when he makes it across the street and though he's lost his drink, he needs to bend over and cup his hands on his knees to steady himself anyway so it all works out. "Hey." It's smooth and followed by a smile. Something bright and cheery and all too Steve Rogers hopped up on artificial sugar and flavorings.

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Bucky hadn’t slept at all that night. He alternated between prowling the apartment with a restless energy that couldn’t be quelled, in his room attempting to comfort Penny who really did seem like she thought Steve was a threat now, and watching over Steve to make sure that he was okay. Only the fact that there didn’t seem to be any evidence of fever, and that Steve’s breathing was as unobstructed and steady as it ever got, made him not panic when his friend showed no sign of waking.

He had decided that if Steve hadn’t woken up by nightfall that evening then he’d take him into the emergency room and take the consequence of Steve being irritated at him for being overly cautious. Thankfully that didn’t end up happening and he was at Steve’s side the second he heard his name.

“...Jesus, Steve, you scared the hell out of me and that’s all you can say?”

“Sorry...?” Steve pulls his knees up as he sits, bracing himself on one elbow. Bucky doesn’t look good. He looks stressed and exhausted. He smells a little like sweat, like worry. It bothers Steve, it makes him feel like his gut is turning. The last thing that Bucky needs is to worry about him. “I’m fine, look!”

And he really is fine. He feels a little achy, maybe a little feverish, but he also feels good, like he’s been breathing all wrong for years and is now just noticing how much better it can be if he does it properly.

“I’ve been— Shit, it’s dark?! Did I sleep all day?! Oh my God, I missed work...” It’s just too late to call now. Everywhere is closed. That doesn’t stop him from sending furious texts.

"Yeah, you slept nearly 24 hours, if it went on any more then I was gonna take you to the hospital. You didn't wake up no matter what I did, Steve."

Bucky's eyes were ringed in dark smudges showing how concerned he had been, and a whining from the bedroom said that poor Penny was still shut up in there. He had taken her out twice in the middle of the day as far as the sidewalk so she could relieve herself, otherwise she'd been denied her duty as Bucky sat beside Steve.

"You sure you're feeling okay? Think I've got a thermometer around here somewhere, we should take your temperature."

Because sleeping for that long isn't normal. Ever. Especially not for Steve, unless he's really sick.

The idea of some random, forgotten thermometer being shoved into his mouth is not one that Steve Rogers honestly wants to contemplate right now. He gives Bucky the side eye, though a particularly poignant whine from behind the bedroom door does draw his attention. He feels badly and vindicated at the same time. He’s always been like that, though, guilty as it makes him feel, whenever Bucky’d choose him over a girlfriend. Being Bucky’s number one is a matter of pride, and also part of the reason Steve’s never minded being a loner. How can you be a loner when the coolest guy you know likes you better than everyone else?

“Forget the thermometer. I want to know what you were doing to me to wake me up,” he teases, a brighter, bluer shine to his eyes than there ought to normally be. “And I want to know if there’s photographic evidence that you’re going to upload to Twitter so that I can prepare myself for the onslaught of social media trolls.”

He also wants to mention, again, that he’s hungry. That he could probably eat Penny up right now. And that it’s perfectly reasonable for him to do so. He just props his elbow on the back of the couch and drops his temple to it, smirking.

Bucky had never understood why people thought of him as the cooler one, when it should have been evident to pretty much everybody that Steve was the coolest guy on the planet. Not that everyone else's ignorance bothered him that much, because it meant that he had never needed to fight for Steve's attention growing up. Though he had been in more than one fist fight with some jerk who had genuinely wanted to know why Bucky was "wasting his time with a loser like Rogers".

"It ain't funny, Steve," Bucky frowned at him, though his concern was thawing now that it was obvious that Steve really was okay. "You took another year off my life, you're gonna be the reason I'm grey by the time I'm thirty."

A spitting from the stove tells him that the bacon is done, bacon he had forgotten that he was even cooking when Steve woke up.

"Aww crap. Well-- Penny won't mind it burned."

“Hey! First dibs!” Steve’s body hurts but that doesn’t stop him from scrambling up to his feet and half climbing over Bucky’s lap to sprint into the kitchen. It’s not that big of an apartment, so there’s no time for Bucky’s longer legs to catch up with him.

As if the whole burning fat thing isn’t a problem, Steve fishes out one of the strips of bacon from the pan, blows on it twice, and eats it like his stomach is made of cast iron. He makes a sort of intense, pleasures sound and then glances over his shoulder as Bucky follows him.

There’s grease on his lips still as he smiles somewhat guiltily. “I like bacon. Don’t waste food.”

Because obviously bacon is the whole point of their conversation now, Steve is going to ignore whatever Bucky is trying to make him feel equally guilty for. Even if he thinks he’d look just as gorgeous with silver in his dark hair.

Even if he's used to Steve brushing off concerns about his health, this level of nonchalance is a new one even for him. It's annoying. Bucky has been stressed out of his mind for the last day, he hasn't slept at all, and he's missed all of his appointments today; the least Steve could do is take that seriously.

"Steve! Jesus, you're gonna burn yourself."

He brushed into the bare kitchen and opened a cupboard to show one plate and one bowl, he didn't have a whole lot of possessions these days, and got the plate down to put next to the pan.

"Are you sure you're okay? You're acting kind of weird."

“Me?” It’s normal for Steve to brush anything off that concerns him. He doesn’t want people to notice him, to see the twist of his spine, how his chest looks caved in, or the scars on his body from many, many surgeries. He doesn’t like it when people see his illness either. Not even Bucky. That said, he’s never outright ignored Bucky so much either.

Bacon on the brain, he picks at another piece, eyes turned towards the plate.

“I’m not acting like anything. I’m just hungry. If I slept for a whole day, can you blame me?”

He’s still wearing a ripped shirt covered in his blood. Penny is starting to scratch at the door, huffing under the gap. This whole situation is weirder than usual.

Steve’s more or less completely finished the entire plate before he takes a step back in socked feet to open up the fridge. It had never been unusual for Steve to raid the Barnes’ refrigerator before, so while the act itself is normal, up until a few minutes ago, Steve has been very conscious of Bucky’s space and trying not to overstep. “Any more?”

Bucky hasn't quite figured out what's setting his teeth on edge about this yet, because he's still so unused to his own boundaries and issues that it hasn't occurred to him that Steve has been super careful about not overstepping any of them. He just knows that something itches in the back of his head as wrong when Steve just goes over to his fridge and starts digging around inside.

It registers as wrong enough that he lets Penny out, needing her support. She doesn't go for Steve like last night, but she's obviously wary of him with the way her ears are back and her tail is down, and the way she puts herself between him and Bucky like a mother protecting her cubs from a predator that's wandered in.

There's another two packs of bacon in the fridge, along with orange juice and eggs.

"I guess it makes sense you'd be hungry, we could call in for food if you want? If you're not heading into work tonight?"

Penny doesn’t smell right. Steve isn’t sure why, he doesn’t know that she’s giving off worry and fear in her very scent but he does know that he doesn’t like it. It makes him feel nervous, like he’s doing something wrong. It makes him want to go.

Thankfully, the moment Bucky reminds him that he has a job and roommates and class the next day, he’s shoving the bacon back into the fridge. “Ah crap. Crap, I don’t— I’m real sorry, pal, I just gotta run.” He skirts Penny quickly. He wants to give Bucky a hug, but he can’t. Not wanting to cross the dog, not wanting to make the situation worse, he takes himself and his hunger and his strangeness out of the apartment.

“Ill come check on you tomorrow,” he calls, as if Bucky was attacked, and shoots off various texts as he half jogs home. That he’s not out of breath by the time he gets there says a lot, but he’s too distracted to notice.

None of his clothes fit him. His shoes are too tight. He itches and he burns as he tries to be helpful to people at the art store who are buying supplies he knows they’ll never use and will go to waste. He barely swallows down his anger.

Leaving work means passing Bucky’s apartment. He finds himself climbing the stairs with feet that ache. The buttons on his shirt over his chest are almost bulging, threatening to burst. The itching hasn’t stopped. Going home makes the most sense, but he can’t not see Bucky.

Bucky has had another really bad day. He should have slept after not managing it at all the night before, but the exchange with Steve that evening had left him antsy and unable to settle. Something had been off, and he couldn't quite put his finger on what, just that Steve seemed less... him than usual.

He spends his time with Penny instead, soothing her and walking her. She seems oddly clingy, even for a dog that's trained to stick by him, like she senses a threat and is determined to protect him no matter what. And that, in turn, ramps up his situational paranoia by a significant degree as well.

By the time Steve makes it to Bucky's apartment again that night, he's moved all his furniture back against the walls because it gives him a better line of sight on everything and is sat wedged into one corner with his eyes unblinking on the doors. He knows someone is coming even before Steve knocks, because Penny starts a low and insistent growling, her hackles well up.

“Buuuuuuck.” Steve’s voice is a whine, and he knocks on the door again before he tries the bell. There’s no hesitation about knowing Bucky is there there. He can hear Penny, sure, but more than that, he can smell Bucky, his anxiety is already ticking up against the back of his neck. It’s uncomfortable and it makes him feel almost more desperate to get inside. “Bucky, please. I don’t know what I did, but I’m real sorry. I’m a whole lot better now, you know? I’m sorry I worried you!”

He’ll throw out whatever he can at this point because going home just seems so impossible. How can he go home when Bucky is in there?

He presses his forehead to the door and grumbles something nonsensical, about willing to wait if he has to. The floor is cold, concrete has always been his enemy in the fall and winter, but it feels pretty good for once, counteracting the burn in his skin and his now much too small clothes, pulling against sensitive flesh. He stretches out his legs and lets his head hit the back of the door.

He’ll be there all night if he has to. He’s already decided it.

He doesn't need to be there all night.

It's only a few minutes later when the door opens to reveal a Bucky who looks distinctly worse for wear with dark smudges under his eyes and a laser focus to his darting gaze that suggests he's taking in every minute detail of his surroundings obsessively.

"Steve, what the hell are you shouting about?"

Penny snaps her teeth behind Bucky, before hunkering down to her belly as if before an alpha dog. She doesn't like this at all, she can smell the danger in the air.

"Why aren't you back in your crummy apartment getting some sleep?"

“You’re here,” Steve immediately complains, still leaning against the door as he looks up over the top of his head at the man glaring down at him. “You shouldn’t be alone. It’s not safe. I told you I was attacked, like four stops over on the subway.”

What Steve can do to protect Bucky, sitting outside, unarmed, and as scrawny as he is, is probably not something he’s really listed out. It’s not important.

Wanting to get out his clothes, however, is.

“Can I borrow a shirt? Mine is being weird,” he complains, as if this is a normal thing. He can smell something on Bucky that is starting to really agitate him, too. It makes him scratch at his chest, causing a button to finally give up the good fight and burst. The bit of plastic skitters to the ground and rolls down the stairs.

Bucky knows Steve Rogers better than he knows himself, and he can see a difference. Steve is taller, broader, but only by tiny amounts that have Bucky doubting whether what he's seeing is real, or whether his screwed up perception of reality is now altering even what his best friend looks like.

But then that button pops off.

"Did you eat peanuts again?" It's the first thing he can think of, the last time that Steve ate something he was allergic to he had swollen up to almost twice his size and ended up being able to fit into nothing of his own clothing for three days until the steroid shots properly kicked in. "...come on, come in, I'll grab you something."

Peanuts. Of course! “I don’t know. Probably. No one knows how to clean up their kitchens anymore.” The easy way that Bucky diagnoses him doesn’t even surprise him anymore. No one knows him better than Bucky does, though no one has ever taken the time to either. He feels better, having a reason for his symptoms. He’s not extra puffy in his face and hands, but he does feel like his skin is burning and he’s a little off of his usual game. He’s never had an allergic reaction that’s made him more capable of smelling things, but perhaps he actually isn’t, and his nose is just more sensitive. “I don’t want to go back to the hospital.”

Luckily, he tends to keep unused medication laying around. Sometimes Clint breaks into his stash for painkillers, but the guy pulls himself home looking about as bad Steve had the night before after the dog attack.

He kicks his shoes off at the door, his feet feeling much better, and undoes his fly too so that he can breathe again. “Do you have any Benadryl around? That should help.”

Steve tries to be careful with his buttons but two more are lost before he can get his shirt off. He curses under his breath, but lets it go.

"No, I don't."

Bucky wrestles with himself a moment, though there's no outward indication of this. Different to the man he used to be, who wore his heart on his sleeve at all times, now he tends to keep his emotions very tightly under check. It's a lesson learned from being tortured, never let them see you in pain or afraid. So even though he doesn't want to go out, and the idea of leaving someone - even Steve - in his home without supervision itches at the back of his brain, it doesn't show much when he adds his next offer.

"But I'll run out and get some. You can't have eaten much, or you'd have a rash too, but you should still take something. The closet in the bedroom has some sweats and shirts you can wear."

That's about all it has. His closet is a depressingly empty affair now, two pairs of pants, three pairs of sweats, and about six assorted shirts or hoodies. There's also a handgun and a rifle hidden in the upper compartment, ones he probably shouldn't have now that he's been discharged.

Bucky used to be a walking fashion plate. He and Steve used to rummage through Good Will and Salvation Army offerings a few times a month and Bucky would always come out looking like he stepped out of a magazine. Steve tended to look like he was in handmedowns from someone's ten year old kid. He actually is pretty interested in seeing what Bucky has on offer now, but Penny won't let him in her human's bedroom.

Steve carefully puts his hands up, and then uses one to scratch at the back of his neck.

"Uh... Maybe we should just go back to my apartment..." He doesn't like the idea of Bucky judging him for it, but at this rate, Penny just isn't going to let him hang out here anymore. "I know I have a whole stash."

He doesn't want to try and stuff his feet into those shoes again, but it doesn't look like he has a choice.

"No, Penny'll just have to learn to deal with you."

He can't have his best friend, the one human link he has to this world, barred from his apartment because his dog, who is supposed to help with his emotional support, doesn't like him for some reason.

"She's not gonna bite you, she's better trained than that. Try to make up while I'm out, give her some treats from the kitchen and she'll love you forever." Bucky leaned over to look Penny sternly in the eye. "Friend. Down." Commands taught to show her everything was fine.

Even though she didn't look happy about it, she was obedient so she dropped to her belly and whined.

"I won't be long."

Treats. Right. Steve looks a little bit skeptical as the door shuts, and Penny gives him such a terrible look that Steve goes immediately into the kitchen to make her love him again through treats.

"I don't know what I did to make you stop liking me," Steve says softly, dropping the treats on the ground when Penny refuses to take them from his hands. "Probably that art class huh? I'm sorry, girl. I had no idea... I guess I really made a mess of things."

Penny probably agrees with that, and Steve sits down on the floor, still shirtless and shoeless, back against the cold refrigerator. He doesn't even think that it could give him a kidney or bladder infection, it just feels so good.

Eventually, Penny does stop guarding him and returns to the living room to wait by the door for Bucky. Steve decides to make a careful break for it, crawling across the apartment to Bucky's room....where everything just smells utterly amazing.

Ugh. He pulls down a hoodie without standing up and presses his cheek into it. He's always really liked Bucky's cologne and his aftershave.

The way that Steve in inhaling that scent, it probably would surprise him to know that Bucky didn't wear aftershave or cologne any more. It was trained out of him when he started going on covert ops overseas and working as a sniper, it was no good if the enemy caught a whiff of something perfumed on the breeze to give you away. So all that Steve was smelling was Bucky's own scent.

Penny was struggling, because Steve looked human and Bucky had said he was a friend, but he smelled like an alpha and a dangerous one. Like a rabid dog, or a wolf, and that instinct said to fight and protect. In the end she decided she'd tolerate his presence but be watchful.

Bucky is fairly sure that Steve won't discover his illegal guns, he's the sort of person to not go snooping when he's been careful of Bucky's boundaries so far - the last day or so of oddness notwithstanding - but he's still down to the corner shop and back in record time, running so as not to give himself time to panic.

"Steve?"

He nearly falls over Penny at the door, craning his neck to look for his potentially swollen friend.

There's too much going on in Steve's changing brain chemistry to register much. The human brain is a strange thing, it fills in gaps to avoid having blank spaces and so what Steve smells might be Bucky, but his mind is desperate enough to supply that with a better, more palatable reason: aftershave. It feels less strange to find comfort in that than in what is actually triggering parts of him that he'd never noticed he'd had before.

Humanity would slip from him all too quickly in the coming days. The change is not as slow as one might think, but also not completely instantaneous. That said, the way Steve looks when Bucky finds him sitting in his closet is more or less the way he'd left him.

With one small difference.

Steve's chest has been concave for as long as they've known each other. Heart surgeries tend to do that. They also tend to leave very long scars.

But when Steve stands up and hides Bucky's hoodie behind his back (like he'd been caught doing something wrong), he looks fine. He looks healthy. There are no scars. His chest his flat, almost broad. It's odd.

For a moment Bucky feels a pitch of vertigo and the all consuming panic that he's back overseas. Because it's not like he never had hallucinations of Steve brought on by various factors, and sometimes those hallucinations warped and shifted from what he remembered, making him more or less sick, depressed or happy, or--

But the feel of Penny's nose against his hand grounds him, and forces him to look more closely at this very odd reality.

"Steve, you-- how the hell did you bulk out that much? Did you start taking something while I was away?"

Surely this had to have happened slowly over the time he was overseas, some new skin treatment for the scars or steroids to bulk his muscles? But even that makes no sense, it's just his mind desperately grafting towards something that might make some sort of sense.

Steve gives Bucky a look. It's one he's often given him, when he's seen through a rouse. There's no way in hell that Bucky is going to get anything over on him right now, though it's a pretty cruel joke. "Bulk out? What are you even talking about?" he dismisses, feeling ridiculous for trying to hide the hoodie. He steps partially out from the closet to pull it on over his head, which really doesn't help Bucky's feeling of delusion.

It's no shift of light, no play of shadows across his skin. Steve isn't pale, or sickly. His skin looks almost pristine. His collarbone and ribs don't stick out.

Bucky's seen him completely nude not too long ago, too, in that art class. Even if Steve had bulked up while he was gone, how could he possibly have either hidden it, or somehow only ballooned up in the last few days?

Bucky is torn between pushing the issue because he's so sure now that he's looking that Steve is different, and pretending he hadn't said anything out of terror that his already tenuous grasp on reality is slipping. Surely Steve would have noticed his body changing, right?

"Steve-- just..."

He hesitates and there's something dreadful and pained about the muted look of terror behind his eyes. He's scared of losing himself, genuinely not playing a joke on Steve.

"...just go into the bathroom for me, take off the hoodie and look at yourself in the mirror. Please."

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You were missed!

<3

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