fossilised | For Steve

Bucky would take that trust as carte blanche to do what he needed in order to get them across country as safely and as quickly as he could. He dressed as swiftly as he could and then slipped out of the apartment, not minding Steve still being in the bathroom when he left.

He was gone approximately three hours.

When he came back it was in a pick-up truck, new and shining, with two duffel bags on the back seat. He beeped the horn outside the building and waited, but if Steve didn't come down then he would lock up and go up to find him. It might be best for his small friend if he didn't ask exactly how Bucky got the truck or what he had in the bags.

It was all about trust, after all.

Steve decided not to ask questions that he didn't want the answers to. It was part of the whole trust thing. He assumed that Bucky wouldn't rob or hurt people and that they would do their best to get everything settled in without too much lying and cheating. Sometimes it was necessary to break the rules, both religiously and secularly, but Steve wanted to keep that to a minimum.

He was grateful for the help with the boxes and his bags and sort of gob smacked at the truck. It was beautiful in the way all new things were and sure, he had some trouble climbing up into the cab but once he was there, the view was awesome. "We can see over most of the cars!" Steve exclaimed happily.

At least the ride to DC would only be a few hours. The roads weren't nearly as good as Bucky might remember but seven hours or so should get them to the capital.

It was new start. Something fresh.

Steve didn't watch the rearview mirror as they left. He wanted to move on from his old life completely.

Bucky was obviously an expert driver, gripping the stick and wheel in the way that only someone who had been driving their whole life could do, with the ease of a man who could probably take this truck and outrun cop cars if he absolutely had to. Not that he would if he didn't have to.

Perhaps he might not need to be on the run here, not when the people who were looking for him would be doing so seventy years in the future.

"Will you tell me about-- us? About me?"

It was a quiet question, maybe three hours into the drive. He was trying to remember all he could for himself, but he didn't have all the pieces.

Steve had been looking at the window, the glass down and his elbow stuck out into the sunshine. The wind had jostled up his hair and he felt more purpose now than he had in most of his life. Since Bucky appeared at his bedside a week ago, Steve had never felt like he was really capable of invoking chance. The first attempt hadn't worked out but he wasn't the sort of guy that backed down. His friend was dead and that was due to his failure. It would not happen again.

They were in the rural parts of Pennsylvania when Bucky spoke, away from the major roadways. They kept passing these little roadside restaurants and Steve was tempted to ask for a stop for lunch even if they could t really afford it. He'd only been out of New York one other time in his life: Camp Lehigh. And now? Just a few days later he'd left again. It was an adventure he needed to experience all of.

The question made him smile.

"We've been friends since we were kids. You saved me. Or helped me save myself I guess, from bullies. I think we've barely been apart since... Once when your family went to the Jersey shore for a week. And then when you were drafted. And-- You boxed. You taught me a little of that but you were the star. Oh and you loved to dance. I use to lay across your bed and watch you get ready for your dates. Everyone loved you. Old women, young gals from lower grades-- I think every guy we palled around with just wanted to be you."

Steve smiled back at Bucky, the sun making his eyes almost green.

Bucky tried to picture it, he used Steve's words as a sounding board to try and coax out memories from the blank canvas of his mind. It frustrated him so much to remember so little, to have forgotten who he should be and be so unsure who he would be in the future. He wanted to be the man that Steve remembered because he sounded happy, he sounded real.

"I don't remember."

He sounded disappointed. His eyes fixed on the road. He might have stopped there, the Soldier wasn't known for his conversation, but he was determined to push forwards because otherwise how would he ever progress?

"I remember a room and a man that looked like you. He had your hair and your eyes, he spoke in a Brooklyn accent and he smiled at me. I remember what he taught me to do."

And it sure as hell wasn't box.

Still sweet and naive, having never seen the world outside of postcards and what the movies told him tended to be on the rosy side of life, Steve had no idea what Bucky might have meant. He wanted to cultivate all of his memories, even ones that came from times that he himself didn't remember.

This could be a memory about the Captain America Steve, the one that no longer existed and might not exist again. It was important for Bucky to get a grasp on that side of himself too.

"What did he teach you?" Steve asked, turning around to face Bucky. The seats were wide enough that he could probably stretch out across the bench if he wanted to.

Perhaps in another year, another eighteen months, Bucky might have regained enough sense of self to know this wasn't the sort of story to tell someone else. But right now he was still mostly desensitised to it, the trauma buried under years of being conditioned to accept that it was as it was meant to be.

"He taught me not to move."

His fingers tightened on the wheel a little, tense, but his voice remained level.

"He told me don't move and then raised the temperature of the room until I fell from heat exhaustion and failed, then he took me to the reconditioning rooms for punishment. He told me don't move and lowered the temperature until I got hypothermia and fell, then he took me to the reconditioning rooms for punishment. He starved me for six days and then put a piece of bread in my mouth and told me not to move, and when I swallowed it he took me to the reconditioning rooms for punishment. He taught me not to move, so I could stand on broken legs and go without sleep for days. He taught me not to move."

It wasn't the lack of movement that was important, of course, it had been the obedience even in the face of pain or personal need, it was to drive home that orders had to come above literally anything else.

Not to move? That sounded like an odd skill to learn. Self discipline perhaps? Bucky always told him that, in boxing, discipline was the most important part of it. Not stance or how he held his hands, though they were important too. It was about being able to control yourself, your breathing, and how to slow down the external so the internal could work on muscle memory.

Of course, Steve's smile at the story was quickly wiped from his face as he continued. Steve stared at Bucky and then he turned to sit properly in his seat and just watch the scant traffic on barely paved roads as they drove south for awhile. Finally, he closed his eyes and bowed his head.

This is what Bucky's death saved him from. In part.

"Someone with hair like mine and eyes like mine... Is this what the serum is going to do to me? Is this why you said no testing? Are they going to experiment again...?" What he wanted to ask, and didn't, was if Captain America did the tortufe.

He didn't really understand the question. Would the serum make Steve into a man who would torture him? Or would the serum make it so that Steve himself needed to be tortured and experimented on? His brows drew together as he shifted gears and increased their speed, almost as if he were subconsciously running from it all.

"They never experimented on you, not that I know of."

If he ever found out that they had he would slaughter every single one of them. But as far as he knew, Steve had just had the serum injected and then had been trained up as Captain America.

"And I won't let them test on me again. I'm not going to be that-- I don't want to be the Soldier again."

Steve didn't feel better. That was probably not possible anymore anyway. He wasn't sure how to approach this. He couldn't just reach over and take Bucky's hand or hug him. There was a disconnect happening at the moment, half because Steve was afraid of asking more questions and half because Bucky didn't remember everything. Not about his past at least.

"Did I do that to you?" It was the thing he wanted to know most and the thing he was the most afraid of, for understandable reasons.

He couldn't imagine being that muscled man in the photo any more than he could imagine purposefully hurting Bucky to prove a point they he had power and that Bucky was better off just listening to him. Steve found himself digging a heel of his palm into his eye socket.

He wasn't crying. He didn't deserve to when Bucky wasn't upset about it. He just couldn't stop imagining it.

If this was just one lesson-- Steve nearly vocalized his disgust and his pain for the man next to him, clamping his teeth together quickly to stop himself from being an embarrassment.

"No."

Bucky honestly looked surprised at the question, it just hadn't occurred to him. Why would Steve think that he had been the one to teach him these hard lessons? He thought through it for a few moments before it all clicked into place, voice softening slightly into a low hummed baritone.

"All my handlers looked like you. Even when I didn't remember you, I still reacted the best-- I was more obedient to men with blond hair and blue eyes. But none of them were you, you thought I was dead."

He swung the pick-up into one of the new burger joints at the side of the road and dug out a handful of change, they needed breakfast and he needed to break up this tension.

"It was never you."

All of them. How many men with blond hair and blue eyes 'trained' Bucky Barnes, who listened to them primarily because of their friendship. Steve could feel his heart clicking, like it was a motor that just wouldn't start. It was terrifying, what men would do to other men to get their way. It was worse still that this happened to Bucky.

Nodding to let the other man know that he had heard and understood him, Steve followed Bucky out of the truck across the driver's side because his right hand was stronger than his left on using the handrail to climb down the step to the parking lot surface.

He looked up at Bucky, shorn but still lengthened hair to his cheekbones cast in a halo from the sun. He was beautiful. The world did to break him. Bucky was still standing. He had survived.

"I'm sorry for blubbering, Buck," Steve said as he used his sleeve on his cheeks. "It's probably good to talk about the stuff you remember though. Sorry I'm--" He shook his head. He didn't have the right to make this about him so he looked at the roadside restaurant they had pulled up to. A little dinner of sorts. They dotted the roadways but this one was relatively empty. Inside, Steve could see a waitress in a peach dress pulling the top off of the pie dish and brightened. Just a little. "I think we should have pie for breakfast."

Bucky hadn't intended to make Steve cry. He had rarely cried himself since the early days, and it seemed so strange to him that anyone would shed tears over something less than human. It made him want to reach out and pull Steve into his arms, public place not an issue to him, but he didn't. His arm raised about two inches before he aborted the idea and gestured instead for Steve to go on ahead of him.

"You really think it's good for me to talk about what I remember?"

Now would be the ideal time for Steve to get this out of him. The longer he went, and the more he remembered, the more it would hurt and the less likely he would be to discuss any of it. For now, the pain was still mostly buried under the practised and well-learned mask of neutrality.

"You can ask me questions if you want. In the truck, after pie."

"Can I? I mean definitely in the truck," Steve said as he held the door for Bucky. The waitresses called out to tell them that they could sit anywhere and he picked a spot close to the door, letting Bucky keep his back to the empty diner so he could see whoever came in. "As soon as there's pie in front of me, I'm going to have better things to do than talk," he grinned, eyes still red but demeanor much better, and left the little menus in the holder with the paper napkins. The waitress was already approaching, skirt to her calf and hair pulled up in a curled, high ponytail that was so popular. She was a little younger than Steve but her eyes were on Bucky.

No change there at least.

"What can I get you boys?" she asked with lips as shiny as the vinyl they were seated on. "Coffees to start?"

Steve answered, eyes brighter now. "Absolutely coffees-- What's the pie today?"

"Why it's good old apple pie," she said. "Can I help you to a slice?"

"Both of us," Steve insisted. "But I think my friend is going to need a little more than pie to hold him over."

The waitress seemed to find that delightful as she leaned Bucky's way. "What else can I get you? We do some mean bacon and eggs platters here."

This was now the second time that a woman had smiled at him excessively and paid him closer attention than Steve, and he honestly had no idea why. Steve was by far the more social one at the moment, Bucky still hadn't cracked a smile in about seventy years, he wasn't about to ask any of them to a social.

"Bacon and eggs, sure."

He needed a lot of fuel, and the protein in that would do him good. He could shovel down a few platefuls, his metabolism would need it. He didn't even realise the way that the waitress tracked the curve of his impressive muscles beneath his shirt.

"You boys heading to Washington?"

Bucky's head snapped up as if wondering if he needed to kill her, how could she know that? But she continued blithely on as if she hadn't noticed the threat at all. "Those celebrations they're having for the end of the war sound swell, shame I can't get the time off to go myself. Still, it's not like I've got a fella coming back." She said that pointedly, and Bucky tilted his head in mild confusion. Why would he need to know that she was unattached?

"We are," Steve said, taking the heat from Bucky to answer. He still had his dog tags on and though he didn't fish them out from his shirt, the chain was visible around his neck and he cupped them lightly. "We were almost through basic training when we heard. Never got ourselves a chance to see war but we want to welcome back everyone that served."

The waitress, who had the unassuming name of Sally according to her name tag, looked from Steve back to Bucky as if he might add in something. Bucky didn't seem to be too social, though, so she pressed her hand to the table, turning slightly away from Steve, to try to catch Bucky's eye. "No shame in that. I'm sure you would have done real well if you'd gone. Maybe have tended it all yourself."

Behind her, Steve was still grinning. She was pouring on the charm hard. If this had been the Bucky he was used to, he and the waitress would be going for a little drive while Steve ate his pie. Bucky was a good guy. He didn't push too hard but Steve was sure he had kissed at least three dozen girls already. He never minded being left behind for awhile.

The girls were fleeting. Bucky always came back to him in the end.

"You know, I do have a break coming to me--" Steve's smile dropped just a little. He'd been feeling too much for Bucky for it to be true any more that he didn't care about Bucky's conquests.

So he cleared his throat. "Actually ma'am. We're in a bit of a hurry? So just a coulple of plates of eggs and bacon, some coffees and that pie?"

Bucky was so curious as to what was going on, because he had no frame of reference for it whatsoever. The men and women of HYDRA did not carry on romantic entanglements in their place of business, and his missions never really had anything to do with people who were flirting or in love. He had some vague memories of it from before, not for himself but seeing other people, and he knew from the news that the world accepted love in all forms now.

But directed at him?

His gaze flicked from her to Steve, that big grin that suddenly dropped away, and he tried to figure out why. Was Steve disappointed knowing that Bucky wouldn't do anything in her break and wanted to save them both the embarrassment? His eyes lifted back to her and, while he still didn't manage to smile, he managed to look less stoic.

"Thanks, doll."

Why doll? It had just slipped out, but it seemed to be the right thing to say because she flushed and grinned widely, shooting Steve a bit of an annoyed look, before she hurried off to get their order.

"Uh..." The words were right even if the tone was wrong. That was how Bucky spoke, and Steve watched him watch her leave, unsure if it was because he was just doing it unconsciously or if he liked her. Steve felt a little embarrassed and he plucked up the menu anyway just to have something to look at. "Hey pal, if you wanted to spend a little time with her, you can. I wasn't trying to... Step in or anything." He did feel bad for being a block. He'd never been a particularly good wing man because he was small and girls that Bucky set him up with still just wanted to be with Bucky anyway.

Sally hurried back with coffee and pie but didn't linger, the bell at the kitchen ringing for an order up at the counter.

Steve stirred in sugar and cream slowly into his coffee, glancing up at Bucky after. "She's pretty right?" This was the conversations they use to have in places like this. Bucky would tell him he'd never seen someone prettier, even if he had, and would remark and why she was so attractive. Her looks, sure, but also her voice. Or her eyes. Or the way she flipped her hair.

Bucky was thoughtful that way. Always a compliment.

"Why would I want to spend a little time with her?"

Bucky, at least, didn't ask that within her hearing, waiting until she had brought back the bacon and eggs for him before he spoke. He had at least some awareness of what was and wasn't appropriate to discuss in front of people.

"I don't want to spend time with anyone but you."

He had been fully prepared to be alone, perhaps for the rest of his life, after pulling the other Steve from the Potomac. He had never thought to trust anyone again, let alone find someone that he felt safe staying beside. He couldn't care less about this waitress, pretty or not, he just wanted Steve.

As good as that might make him feel, it wasn't right to keep everything from Bucky just so that he'd have an advantage. He didn't remember the way he used to be and as his protector, it was Steve's job to tell him everything.

"So.." He put down his fork and nodded at the waitress. "She's your type. I mean-- I don't know how to describe your type. Pretty. Petite. Long hair. You use to say that a girl couldn't dance right unless she had the hair for it." He made him smile into his coffee. "Any girl like that who showed you interest, you'd be trying to get her number and make a date with. She likes you. The way she keeps looking at you, her smile, that look in her eyes? She's flirting because she wants you to ask her out. Used to be you would is all. And if you want to again, that's fine with me, pal. I can just stay here awhile."

Steve didn't want to be crude about it. Taking a girl out wasn't what Bucky just did. There were more steps to that, steps Steve himself had never taken. He wasn't great with dances. And courtship was a dance like any other.

He cut into his pie with the side of his fork and chewed the piece thoughtfully., eyes downcast, just in case he happened to be looking at Bucky the same way that girl was.

"No, I don't want to."

It wasn't brusque or mean, just a simple statement of fact. He had no interest in that girl; if she had been his type once upon a time, she wasn't his type now. Maybe she would be in the future again, but that was far from here and he certainly wasn't going to go and ask for her number so that he could just lose it somewhere.

He paused halfway to pushing another forkful of eggs into his mouth and glanced sideways at Steve and the way he was watching the table as if it were the most interesting thing in the whole world.

"Is this about last night?"

Should he not be mentioning the incident of homosexual temptation where others could hear?

Steve was small and he probably didn't have quite as much blood as some people rushing through his veins but all of it instantly went to his face. He could feel the heat in his belly and across his cheeks and he wanted to just sink down against the back of the booth.

"Uh. No." He wanted to tell Bucky thst it had been an isolated incident, but he couldn't lie to him. He chose, instead, to say nothing at all even if the evidence was all over his face that Steve Rogers was having a massive crisis of faith and the natural order of things. He was cutting into the grain. He wondered if he shouldn't admit himself to a hospital willingly-- But Bucky needed him. He just had to ignore his urges. He had to be better than them. Didn't Jesus have a larger burden to bear?

Steve held his coffee a little too tightly and forced himself to meet Bucky's eye because he wasn't afraid. And he wasn't backing down. He could do this.

"This is seperate. It's who you are-- or used to be. And I promised to help you remember that, right? Last night-- that's one hundred percent on me. It's my problem and not yours." He didn't ask Bucky to drop it, however. Bucky needed to be free to ask and say anything he wanted or needed to.

He had already told Steve that it wasn't a problem. How the other man felt about him wasn't an issue, didn't make him wrong, and definitely didn't change anything between them. He hadn't yet managed to work out how he felt in return, though, probably because he didn't even really know who he was.

He grunted in acknowledgement, and then just went back to his eggs and bacon. Something here was snarled up in ways that he didn't understand yet, but he would unpick it eventually and figure out what to do. For now, though, it was better that they got back on the road and away from this waitress that had caused such a point of confusion.

"Come on, we've got a long way to go."

And they might have trouble finding someplace to stay when they got there, if the city was going to be full of people coming for end of war celebrations. For some reason he had never even considered that this might be a thing, but of course people would want to throw a party at the end of such a bloody war.

"Forget her, I'm not interested."

"I hear you," Steve said, trying to build his smile back up as he switched his plate out for Bucky's. The pie would fill him just fine by he took a piece of bacon anyway. "But you need to finish your breakfast before we go."

They left a five on the table for the meal and headed out, the waitress calling that they should stop back here on the way home. Steve waved not to be rude but climbed into the truck a little too quickly to facilitate their need to leave. The road was indeed long, and as they skirted Baltimore, the traffic jammed up the roads. It was already dark by that point and Steve was asleep against the door, cost thrown over him like a blanket. Motorists were turning off at motels and as they hit the edge of Washington, it became pretty clear that they would probably need to stay in the suburbs that evening.

A motel with a vacancy sign popped up after several had illuminated the NO section of their signage. It was a little fancier than the rest and offered breakfast at the attached diner in the morning. A Soldier's Special for anyone of the military persuasion or their families. Bucky would get the last room from a old man who could barely see from cataracts. It was no where near as nice as the hotel from Manhattan but it had views of the Capital all done up in lights from the window.

Bucky was almost prepared to just pull over and let Steve sleep where he was in the passenger chair of the truck, but they needed a proper bed. Not him, he could survive without, but Steve's health was fragile and Bucky had promised to take care of him. That's what this was.

At least there had been no questions, even though he had offered, once they got back into the truck.

He woke up Steve to get into the hotel room and then slipped into bed beside him again, same as before without hesitation. For once, he slept. He needed to every few nights and this was the safest he was going to get with Steve in his arms. He dreamed, though, his words coming out in whispered Russian straight into Steve's ear and his metal arm clamped down hard enough around him to bruise.

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