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It's an odd mixture of comforting and depressing that the interior of SHIELD looks no different on Christmas day than any other day of the year. Steve makes his way across the front lobby, and it's just as bare and utilitarian as it's been since he'd been driven back from Time's Square, reeling and confused by the city that had fundamentally changed and yet was still his New York. Steve is checked through the levels of clearance required to visit the lower levels of the SHIELD lock up, though the six pack of longneck bottles tucked under his arm did give several agents passing him in the hallway pause.
He wasn't sure what to buy, he'd foundered for a while in the liquor store, staring at the refrigerated display. He didn't know any of the brands, save for two that sounded somewhat familiar. Steve cursed himself now, that he hadn't paid more attention to what kind of beer his best friend drank. He'd always been too preoccupied with hiding his face behind his mug from the latest disappointed lady Bucky had convinced to double date with the pair of them to take note of whether Bucky had preferred Budweiser or some other long lost company that hadn't survived the years. In the end, he ended up snatching the Bud and getting out of there, before he ended up missing visiting hours.
Now that he's there, being cleared to enter what is technically termed the residence of the Winter Soldier, though it's obvious to everyone involved that it's little more than a typical jail cell with a couch, bed, and a television/dvd combination subsidized by a stack of dvds provided by Steve and Natasha, with suggestions from Clint. As he enters the room, he has a wild swell of pride over the fact that his friend is allowed glass now, and that he doesn't have to pour the beer into plastic cups to be taken into the room. He tamps it down quickly, because just because James is no longer physically aggressive to others doesn't mean that he's any closer to remembering who he is. He's doing his best to be pragmatic about the situation, but it hurts too much not to try. It's rooted deep in Steve's nature to hope.
"Hey, brought you something," he says quietly, sitting down on the couch and setting a bottle on the coffee table in front of him. It's hard not to reach out, put a hand on his back or give him a shove to the shoulder because physical closeness had always been as natural as breathing with Bucky. Steve had to learn things weren't the same the hard way, with James either scattering to the other side of the room and shoving himself into the corner with the kind of haunted expressions that felt like a punch to the gut, or finding himself on his back with a shard of something sharp pressed against his jugular, a wild look in James' eyes and flecks of white at the corners of his mouth. Admittedly, these days its more often the former than the latter, but Steve refuses to be the one to get Bucky's privileges revoked.
James still startles, his whole body an instant line of tension and awareness, and it never stops making Steve bite back apologies that he's sure would not find a receptive audience. His gaze snaps over Steve, searching and cataloging and analyzing...and at the end, there's absolutely no look of recognition or acknowledgment or an kind of awareness. And that hasn't stopped hurting, not since they'd tracked the Winter Soldier and Steve had first stared into his best friend's face with a kind of open astonishment, just before being dealt a truly magnificent uppercut.
The Soldier is gone now, but this man who wears James's skin, he's still not Steve's Bucky either. He no longer has the urgent need to dispatch with Captain America at any means necessary, but neither does he retain any of the memories before that long and terrible fall. It ties Steve in knots that Bucky doesn't even remember his own favorite color, or how he liked his burger cooked, or the way he used to wake Steve back in their Brooklyn; yanking the blanket off him with a mischievous grin and pulling him by his ankles to the end of the bed, where he'd meet Steve's grumbling mouth with his own. Even if all of that is in the past, even if Steve never knows how that feels again, he still needs Bucky to remember.
"Hey," James says, and he seems off in a way that is disheartening familiar to Steve these days, and he wonders what they're trying on him this week, what treatment or drug or procedure. After all, having the Winter Soldier as a part of the team would be an incredible asset thinks Steve, bitterly parroting Fury in his head as he gives Bucky his own once over. A little rumpled, with a truly insane amount of bed hair even after James had been persuaded to let Natasha give him a trim, but otherwise looking fairly normal. His body is healthy, at least. From his other side, James grabs a tin full of chocolate covered cookies, and offers it to Steve with a slightly dulled smile. "Tony brought these, but I'm pretty sure he didn't actually make them."
Steve is touched beyond words as he carefully accepts one, and hides a smile as he bites into it, because he's almost positive these are Entenmann's, one of the few products he's become familiar enough to know the taste, but the fact that Tony came to see him at all still makes his love for his team, ragged and hodge-podge as they are, grow more and more by the day. After finishing it off, he takes a bottle of the Budweiser he brought and twists the cap off for Bucky, who still has problems negotiating his cybernetic arm now that he doesn't have the organic programming in his brain to back it up.
"Here, it's Jesus's birthday, I think he'll be lenient of the consumption of alcoholic beverages," Steve says wryly as Bucky hesitates to take the bottle, and though he's given a look like he knows he's being patronized but not sure how to vocalize his distaste of it, he wraps flesh and blood fingers around it and lifts it to his mouth. He blinks a little as he swallows, and looks at the label with some surprise.
"I like this," he says, almost to himself, then showers Steve with an excited smile. "I like this, I like it a lot!" It makes Steve catch his breath, because it's almost like he's remembering, and he waits every time, but as always, nothing else happens. Steve aches to spill his guts and tell Bucky about the first time they'd tried beer; how they'd snuck away from the orphanage and found the nearest bar, and Bucky had drank from every mug he could get his paws on while the owner's back was turned, and how he spent quite a few hours later puking in the alley behind the bar, while Steve rubbed his back. But he can't say a word, because every damn head shrink that's been through Bucky's room has insisted he not share those stories with him just yet, lest they create false memories, and Steve wants every single thing Bucky's brain holds to be real.
"Hey, I'm glad," Steve says, and he can't help it; he slides an arm around James's shoulders and hugs him, brief and from the side, but it's still a hug, and his heart clenches a little at the way Bucky's head leans against his shoulder. So he leaves his arm there, and Bucky keeps leaning into him, and some cartoon is playing on the television that Steve's not playing a lick of attention to, and for a second, things are just the way they should be. It's enough.
"Merry Christmas, James." Bucky turns his face against Steve's shoulder, an unconscious smile on his face and already drifting off, and Steve can't help but hope, because he's Steve Rogers and it's what he's always done when he's got nothing left to grasp. There's always New Year's.