Archive of Our Own ^beta

Both of them are ashamed of the fact that they missed scorching summers of the ‘20s.

Back when they would curl up in bed together, the heat haze waving the air around them and forming condensation on the windows, far too hot for even their thin blanket.

Steve’s poor circulation turning his nose, fingertips, and toes ice cold despite the temperature in their room. Bucky flushing fever-hot, soaking the sheets around him in a puddle of his own sweat, feeling his brain melting out of his ears.

Their limbs wrapped around each other, leeching off the other in symbiosis; Steve’s freezing extremities kindling tiny points of relief on Bucky’s skin, Bucky acting as a personal radiator to Steve’s poor biology.

Steve pressed his cold lips to Bucky’s sweaty forehead, not minding the lingering salty taste. Bucky sighed in contentment, gripping the front of Steve’s t-shirt.

One could not exist without the other, and that was exactly how they both wanted to live.

Steve felt like everything changed when he got the serum.

He had fought for so long in a small body, constantly trying to prove his worth despite his physical shortcomings. Now that he had none, was it selfish to ask for a balm to his insecurities? Was it selfish, in a war-zone, to ask for the familiar, homelike intimacy of Bucky wrapped around him, especially when he didn’t need it anymore to keep him warm? The serum had cured him. So why did he still feel a yearning hunger for warmth?

His circulation, now perfect, regulated his temperature without difficulty, but he still felt the urge to press his fingers against the back of Bucky’s neck to shock him with the cold that was probably no longer there. Or, perhaps, he was still greedy for Bucky’s heat. He still felt a phantom chill after living with it for twenty three years. He was in his physical prime, the healthiest his body had ever been. But when he looked at his second-in-command, his best friend, his soulmate (surely), it was impossible to deny that he was still numb with an illusory cold, still insatiable and covetous, still sick in ways no doctor could cure.

Bucky felt like everything changed when he got the serum.

Not even the bite of the European winter could cool the sear of the fire burning in his veins. The eternal light had been perverted, grown rampant into a wildfire, and nothing could quench it. Whatever had been put inside of him while in that factory had changed him fundamentally, biologically. No canteen of water, no ice baths in forest lakes, no below-zero nights could give him even a moment of relief from the burning in his core.

He wondered if Steve felt the same fire. He wondered if his large hands—no longer calloused from years of art but now baby-soft with new skin—still held a soothing chill. Would it be selfish if he hoped that they did? That the serum had cured everything but that? Steve didn’t need Bucky anymore. If Bucky reached for him, he had nothing to offer Steve. No longer were they symbiotic, two dependent creatures feeding off of each other—no, Bucky was a parasite, and he would not let his sick desperation infect Steve. Not even if it burned him away from the inside, like lightning shot directly into his brain.

After 70 years of ice, Steve couldn’t stand the cold.

He wore thick-knitted socks and expensive leather gloves. Even in early September, he pulls a hat over the tips of his ears. He was afraid to touch anyone, afraid to ask anyone if they found his fingers cold too, lest they tell him it’s all in his mind. He already held so much of himself alone. He was the only one left to remember.

One day, over lunch, he was telling Natasha and Clint a story he had told a billion times before.

“Everyone within five blocks was afraid of old Mrs. Hannaway,” Steve explained. “The older kids always called her a witch, and Buck and I believed them. So we made this stupid plan to try to get her to put a curse on one of them.”

“Was she a witch?” Clint asked.

“Nah,” said Steve, “she was just a crabby old widow the neighbourhood kids hated. But I don’t blame them too much, she was a real egg. Her favourite thing to do was sit on her front steps and yell at the people walking past her. And she had this mangy old cat, too.”

“Ankle biter?” Natasha grinned.

“Yes! She was the worst. Probably gave half the city rabies all by herself. Honestly, now that I think about it, Mrs. Hannaway wasn’t all that bad herself. It was mostly the cat.”

“Alright, then what?” Clint leaned forward on the table, chin in his hands.

“So we made this plan to frame one of the older kids for stealing a dress she had left out on the clothesline to dry. We were gonna nab it, and then knock on her front door to give it back, pretending we’d rescued it for her.”

“I thought you said she sat out on her front steps? Wouldn’t she see who did it?” Natasha narrowed her eyes at Steve, always two steps ahead.

“She would,” Steve acknowledged. “Except, lucky for us, it was the dead of winter and everything was covered in frozen sleet, including her front steps. So she was holed up inside, and we were free to move along with the plan.”

Both Natasha and Clint nodded for Steve to continue.

“So I snuck into her front yard to grab her dress, but her clothesline was too high for me to reach.”

They laughed at the thought.

“Too high?” Clint chortled. “You’re like eight feet tall and she’s a little old lady!”

“Six-foot-two,” Steve corrected. “But before the serum I wasn’t even five-five.”



“Still!”

“She probably used magic to get up there,” Natasha teased.

“That’s so embarrassing.”

“It gets worse, actually,” Steve said, blushing.

“Oh, do tell.”

“I jumped, trying to reach the dress, but instead of slipping off the line, the clothes had frozen solid overnight and I brought down the whole damn clothesline. Better yet, I slipped on the ice and fell on my ass. And,” Steve added, “even worse, Hannaway heard the whole thing and came running out in her rollers and nightgown, seeing me flat on my back in her yard, surrounded by her frozen underwear.”

His audience laughed uproariously, trying to catch their breaths.

“So I freak out, obviously, and try to run away, but I just keep slipping and falling like a cartoon. And then Mrs. Hannaway runs down the stairs to try to catch me, but she slips and lands face down in the snow, feet up in the air, unmentionables on display to the world. Bucky was laughing too hard to be any help.”

Natasha and Clint had tears streaming down their faces.

“You’re a menace, Cap! I didn’t know you had it in you!” Clint guffawed, slamming his fist on the table.

“Hey, it’s not my fault! I was a stupid kid. I’d only just turned eleven. I’m pretty sure Bucky even pled with her not to be angry, since it was just my birthday, I think.”

“‘Just turned eleven’?” Natasha asked. “Isn’t your birthday in July?”

“Oh, yeah,” Steve said, brow furrowed. “Maybe it wasn’t my birthday then, maybe it was Bucky’s.” He frowned. “No, Bucky’s birthday is in March, so it wouldn’t have been his. Do you—?“

He turned habitually, but the empty space to his left washed over him like ice water. He only realized after it had been done that he had turned to ask Bucky if he remembered, but of course Bucky wasn’t there. He was the only one left to hold these stories.

Mrs. Hannaway was gone. The neighbourhood kids were gone.

Bucky was gone.

The sudden loneliness was so cold that it burned, and he shivered from the force of it.

“I don’t remember,” he breathed, not noticing as he began to rub his hands together.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Clint said, the joyous mood sobered. He reached a hand across the table, about to clap Steve’s shoulder, but he flinched away. “Hey, Steve, it’s okay. You’ll figure it out.”

Steve nodded absently, getting up from the table. He gave them a plastic smile, which felt as frozen as he did.

“I’m gonna take off, I’ll see you guys later.”

“Steve,” Natasha warned, standing up and grabbing his hand. He gasped and pulled away, but she frowned at him. “You’re freezing. Are you okay?”

He gaped at her, openly trembling.

“Is there anything we can do?” Clint asked from the table.

Steve swallowed, shaking his head.

“No, I’m fine,” he said. “Just cold.”

After 70 years of ice, Bucky doesn’t know how to exist outside of it.

He spent his first week of freedom in almost a century bouncing between alleyways, sweating out withdrawal. He had never felt this sort of sweltering, all-consuming heat in his life. Or, maybe he had. Even if his head hadn’t been spinning with brain-melting fever, he knew that he was not a reliable authority on his own memories. What he knew, he could count on one hand—what he was familiar with amounted to even less.

He knew that his name was Bucky.

He knew that his ex-target was Steve.

He knew that Steve knew Bucky.

He knew that Bucky was a person. Maybe, even is a person.

He knew these things, but they weren’t familiar. He knew them the way you know things in dreams. Abstractly, and wholeheartedly. They make sense, and are true until you wake up and think too hard about them. He wanted them to be true so badly. So he chose not to think too hard about them.

He was intimately familiar with the Chair.

He was intimately familiar with Cryo.

He was not a fan of the Chair. He wasn’t really supposed to have opinions, but he did anyways, secretly. And one of those opinions was that he did not like the Chair. In fact, he hated it.

The Chair was a black steel monster with black steel arms that wrapped around his limbs and shot white-hot venom through his head, taking away everything inside of it. He hated the Chair, and the Chair hated him back. He could not, would not return to HYDRA, as even in his fevered state, he was sure that they would make him fight the Chair. And that was a battle that he always lost.

Another one of the opinions he had—secretly—was that he didn’t mind Cryo. Actually, he rather enjoyed it. He was always hazy after a fight with the Chair, sweating and confused, but he knew that Cryo was cool and solitary. It was the only place in the world that was safe from the prying tentacles of the Chair. When the door was shut on what his handlers called “the fridge”, he was relieved, which was as close to happy as he understood.

Relief was a concept that only existed in the Cryo chamber. Relief from his handlers, from the words and the blood, relief from the pain and the confusion, from his arm and his back and his neck, and relief from the heat.

He was always so hot.

Underneath his mask and goggles, the muzzle pooled with sweat that his handlers had to drain out after every mission. The arm was heavy and heated up with extended use, provoking new blisters and irritating old scars. He burned from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck, downwards, downwards when the Chair cupped his face between its big hands—

No, its metal arms. The Chair didn’t have hands.

There were always a brief few moments, after stumbling into the Cryo chamber and having the door slammed in his face, that he was lucid enough to think, to appreciate the cool air on his inflamed skin, and to dream.

Sometimes, he dreamed that Cryo was human, his only true ally in the world.

(He wasn’t technically allowed to dream either, but he did that secretly, too. And he loved to dream.)

In his dreams, a human figure curled up behind him, intertwining their limbs and pressing their fingertips against him. He usually hated when people touched him, their skin unbearably hot against his, but Cryo was familiar, his only friend. They were cold to the touch, a solace from the pain and heat of the world outside the chamber.

He always had to close his eyes when he entered the Cryo chamber, so even in his dreams he could never see the figure walk around to his front, cupping his face with one cold hand, the other chilling the back of his neck. It was only in his dreams that the burns and sores left by the Chair were healed by Cryo’s touch, but he felt the soothing balm as if it was really there.

The figure would cry when they saw what the Chair had done to him. He could never see it, but he could feel it in his bones. He wanted to comfort them, tell them not to cry, but his body was already frozen solid and he was unable to move, unable to return a warm touch.

Sometimes, in these dreams, Cryo would speak to him. He was forced to answer in his mind since he couldn’t out loud, but he liked to imagine Cryo heard him anyways.

Cryo would sometimes say things like: “I’m so sorry,” and he would reply “you don’t have to be sorry, you’re making it better,” and he imagined that they appreciated that answer.

Or sometimes they would say: “why would they do this to you?” and he would reply “I don’t know,” which was a disappointing answer to both of them.

And sometimes they would say: “I would burn down the whole world for you,” which would have made him smile if he could, because burning things down was his job, and Cryo was so cold that the image was laughable. Still, somehow, he believed them.

But his favourite times of all was when they would say: “I’m with you ’til the end of the line.” Because that meant that he wasn’t alone. It meant no more fire and no more blood and no more inhuman solitude. The phrase was familiar, even if he didn’t know it.

He could never see the human form that Cryo inhabited in his dreams. But lying in a DC back alley, his fever at an all-time high, he could imagine that they looked a lot like Steve.

Steve, his ex-target.

Steve, who knew Bucky better than he did.

Bucky felt a tear roll down his cheek, and in the scorching late-May sun he could nearly feel it evaporate right off of him. He whimpered in pain and humiliation as he realized that he missed Cryo. He missed the freezing embrace that he knew meant even a short reprieve from the torture he was living. He missed the only morsel of freedom that he could remember, the kindness of Cryo so rare to him the he could only experience it in his fantasies.

In his delirium, he imagined a figure entering the alleyway and picking him up. Their touch was hot but he was too weak to even curl away. His nausea swelled with the motion and his vision went black before he could see who it was. But he couldn’t help but wonder if he had summoned his only friend to life with nothing but desperate yearning.

A week after Bucky had put him in the hospital, Steve was healed and sitting on a worn loveseat. He sat across from a floral-patterned couch which was occupied by a beaming elderly woman.

(“Mrs.…?”

“Doyle, sweetheart, but please call me Evelyn.”

“It’s nice to meet you. I’m Steve.”

“Oh, darling, I know.”

“Well, my ma raised me right.”)

He looked around her cozy living room, surprised to find a framed photograph of himself before the serum, tiny, standing next to a grinning Bucky, on the small side table next to him. He reached for it, looking to Evelyn for permission. She nodded, and he picked it up, studying it.

“Where in the world did you get this?” Steve asked incredulously.

“It was my great-aunt’s,” Evelyn said. “You can have it, of course. She picked it up at a pawn shop some time after the war ended. She always said that she probably only got a hold of it because nobody knew what ‘little Stevie Rogers’ looked like before he became… you,” she gestured to him.

Steve huffed a laugh, looking at the photo again, carefully drawing his finger over his friend’s young face. His mother had always said that Steve had grown into his face before he grew into his body (and Lord only knew how right she’d been), but Bucky had been different. He had held onto his baby fat even throughout the consumption of the ‘30s, and his cheeks were bunched up with joy, captured forever in the photograph. Steve found himself smiling, mirroring the image unwittingly.

He looked up at Evelyn, whose smile had gone soft while watching him. Even nearly a century apart, Bucky’s youthful glee was still contagious.

“Your great-aunt knew me before I was Captain America?”

Evelyn nodded, excited. “Oh, yes. Half of the reason she’d keep that photograph out in the living room was so that she could regale guests with stories about the two of you. Apparently you were a right terror.”

Steve blushed as he thought back. “I’m not sure I remember any Doyles living around us.”

“No, Doyle’s my married name,” Evelyn explained. “My great-aunt was Alice Hannaway.”

Steve’s eyes widened as he dropped the frame in his lap. “You’re pullin’ my leg,” he exclaimed.

“I’m not! Her favourite story in the whole world was the day Captain America tried to steal her bloomers!”

“I was not! I was just tryna steal her dress, I didn’t mean for the rest of it to come raining down!”

Evelyn cackled, leaning over with laughter.

“What in heaven’s name were you going to do with an old woman’s dress? On her birthday, nonetheless!”

Steve took in a breath, his body seeming to sigh in warm relief as the pieces fell into place. “It was her birthday! Oh, Evelyn, you haven’t got a clue, I’ve been trying to work that out for ages.”

She giggled, face colouring as she waved him off. “Well, you’re always welcome back here, I’ve got a bunch of her old stories. And more than that photograph to give you. Follow me?”

She stood, and Steve rushed to help her up and take her arm. She scoffed as she turned them down a hallway towards a bedroom.

“Such a gentleman! You wouldn’t have guessed it from the things Auntie Alice said about you,” she said with a laugh. “Your friend, though, James? She said he was a real charmer, even small as you both were.”

Steve swallowed past the lump in his throat as he nodded. “He was always the responsible one, really. Though it should be known that he was there for the dress stealing incident, too. Even helped plan the whole caper.”

Evelyn slapped his arm lightly, grabbing hold of it, then letting go to turn the door handle to the room they’d stopped at. “You’ll have to tell me about that another time. Now, try to keep quiet, yes?” She waited for him to nod his assent before pushing open the door.

Steve gasped as his eyes fell to the figure asleep on the bed. Bucky lay on top of the covers, his long, lank hair fanned out around his head on the pillow. He lay still, breathing softly, a light sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Steve tried turning to Evelyn, but he couldn’t pull his eyes away from Bucky.

“How—? What? How did—?” Steve sputtered, unable to even complete a thought as he kneeled at his friend’s bedside.

“My grandson found him quite ill, near his work downtown. He recognized him from the picture. He clearly needed some critical help, but he couldn’t bring him to a hospital, not with…” She gestured to the small armoury in a pile next to the bed. “He’s a doctor, so he fixed James up here and had us reach out to you. I hope that was alright.”

“That’s more than alright, it’s—“ Steve’s voice broke, tears spilling over as he looked to Evelyn. “Thank you, so much. You have no idea what this means to me.”

Evelyn rested her withered hand on his shoulder. “My Auntie told us that you two were close as can be. I hope I’m not overstepping when I tell you that I believe my Nancy and I were the same way.”

She squeezed his shoulder and Steve’s attention was drawn to the ring shining on her finger. She gave him a smile and turned to leave the room.

“He’s still rather sick,” she explained solemnly. “We’re still waiting for his fever to break. Be gentle with him.”

Steve nodded, pushing himself up onto the bed. He delicately brushed Bucky’s hair away from his forehead, and he heard Evelyn quietly shutting the door.

Bucky’s eyelids fluttered and he took in a long breath. Steve cupped his face in one big, cool hand, carefully slipping the other behind his head. He rubbed his thumb back and forth on the nape of his neck. Bucky sighed softly, his whole body relaxing, and he turned his face into Steve’s hand.

“Buck?” Steve asked in a whisper.

Bucky cracked his eyes open, lids at half mast as he looked at Steve. He licked his lips before turning further to press a kiss to the palm of Steve’s hand. Steve let out a wet chuckle and leaned down to brush his lips against Bucky’s sweaty forehead.

“You’re here,” Bucky murmured happily, closing his eyes with a smile. “I was waiting for you.”

Steve released the sob that had been building in his chest and he dropped his head.

“Bucky,” he said, voice wavering, “I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Bucky mumbled, already drifting back off to sleep. “You’re making it better.”

When he was still once more, Steve looked to the door before curling up next to Bucky, entangling their limbs the way they had done ages ago.

And for the first time in this century, Steve felt warm.