Surcease 1/3 | Professor!Steve/f!Reader, Steve & Bucky friendship
MCU MASTERLIST | STEVE MASTERLIST | BUCKY MASTERLIST
Summary: Professor Steve Rogers has one hell of a past, a comfortable present, and hopes for a future with you (he's a little stuck on 'step 1: ask you out'). Somehow all three converge with a date, a heist, and a national security threat in one treasure of a night. Word Count/Warnings: 2,400/10k | Rated T
Written for @thezombieprostitute's Heist challenge, with a twist. Set in the vague 2000s in a version of the MCU where Steve and Bucky worked for Howard Stark's SHIELD around 1990. Romance, fluff, angst, action/adventure, No-Powers, MCU-adjacent.
Excerpt:
The next year and a half was spent searching for Bucky. His ‘severance’ after quitting had been a full ride to college, an expense ‘well worth ridding the team of a goody two-shoes,’ according to one former colleague. He’d studied on airplanes, strained to read textbooks by streetlamp doing midnight surveillance, and ran up his phone bill with long distance calls. His grades and his mental health suffered, right up until he was given a note by the waitress at his favorite diner.
Five years. Take care of Sarah
Chapter One: Dramatic
“Oh my God, he’s doing it!”
Steve looks over to see you standing in a widening puddle of coffee, staring at your phone. Your left hand is in a frozen claw, the paper cup with its ‘thank you for being a Lion!’ university branding on it on its side at your feet. He sprints over to grab a roll of paper towels from the nearby cupboard, stripping a bunch of sheets off in a line and tossing it over to start soaking up the brew.
“Shoot, Steve, I’m sorry,” you choke out.
His heart clenches in his chest at the look on your face. “Bad news from home?” he asks, crouching down to clean more of the spill. “Don’t move,” he adds, internally chastising himself for nearly adding an endearment. He shouldn’t complicate the friendship at a time like this.
“Hilariously, yes and no,” you say with a shaky laugh, reaching down to feel for wetness along your pantlegs. “Someone’s just auctioning off The Blue Diamond of Alqualondë. My Holy Grail poem.”
“A poem? Is that possible?” Steve offers some paper towels, colliding with you as you start to crouch. You fall against him with a sound of amused embarrassment. With great care, he ends up lifting you up as he shifts to a stand so you don’t end up covered in floor coffee.
Time stops for a few seconds as the two of you look at each other. He lifts his eyebrows in a silent ‘are you okay’ that’s answered by a sheepish nod. Steve’s heart is pounding so loudly he’s certain you can hear it. To cover for that, he clears his throat and takes one large step, clearing the mess.
“I’ll set you down. Ready?”
“If you insist,” you joke, and he follows through with a wry smile of his own. As usual, you’ve used the unexpected to put him at ease.
“I smell a coffee cup throwing fight, Professor Caesura!” Professor Sunen sings from the doorway. “Someone remind me where the surveillance cameras are as I prepare my weapon!”
“Sorry to disappoint, Kingo,” you tell him as you sop up the last of the spilled liquid. “Good old-fashioned shocked cup drop.”
“Well that isn’t much of a narrative,” the acting professor frowns.
“Gotta jet, office hours,” Steve says, catching a threatening look from you not to mention the poem. He does a ‘zipped lip’ motion behind Professor Sunen’s back and jogs off toward his office.
When Steve surfaces for air 90 minutes and six students later, there’s a sticky note on his door.
Thx babe. Tell you the rest at lunch? Professor ‘Says’
He knows you don’t mean anything when you use ‘babe,’ but his tender heart enjoys seeing it all the same. Coach Wilson likes to tease him about the friend zone, asking Steve how long before he’ll attempt to score.
Neither of you get to take a lunch. A Freshman in ‘Intro to Adulting’ ends up stopping by in tears, and when Steve sends you his apologies, you respond back that you’ve had to step in for one of your fellow English Department profs.
It’s his habit on evening class nights to walk students to their cars. You sometimes join him and break off when you get close to your own vehicle, but tonight you stick around, inexpertly hiding multiple yawns.
“Give me your keys, I’m driving you home,” Steve decides.
“And what? Walk back here at midnight?” you splutter.
“Look me in the eye and tell me you’re safe to drive.”
Defeated, you hand over your keys. “This means I get to bore you with news about the poem, then.” When he holds the door open for you, you add, “I’m also going to feed you spaghetti leftovers.”
“Okay, not to complain about the way you clearly love my cooking, but did you listen to any of that?” you laugh.
Steve doesn’t reply that he always listens to you. “Pablo Neruda is your favorite poet,” he recites. “After Howard Stark was murdered, his son went through his things and found a poem Neruda gave him when Stark spoke at the UN in the 70s—”
“—an unreleased poem,” you interrupt. “Folded up in his wallet. And the jerk didn’t let anyone see it!”
“It has his father’s blood on it, Caes!”
“He could have taken a picture and kept the original!” You stand up, gathering the dishes roughly. “Now that SHIELD’s making news again, Stark’s auctioning off all of his dad’s stuff from that night, including the poem. With a secrecy stipulation! I’m so mad I could—” you break off, fuming.
Steve had gotten up to help, but now he reaches over and takes the stack of dishes, striding into the kitchen so you don’t see his face. The mention of SHIELD makes his stomach twist as always, but this time, his memories aren’t as full of regret and self-recrimination as they once were.
Before he can stop himself, he says, “What if we could figure out a way to force Stark to release it?”
The next few days are too hectic to focus on anything but work, with Steve helping out with Homecoming activities and you attending a conference away from NYC. News articles about the SHIELD/HYDRA scandal are hard to ignore, given his insider knowledge about the agency’s mistakes. SHIELD had spent more time hiding a gravely injured James Barnes than keeping him safe in the first place.
Steve had been told to sit down, shut up, and accept the casualty.
He’d quit instead.
The next year and a half was spent searching for Bucky. His ‘severance’ after quitting had been a full ride to college, an expense ‘well worth ridding the team of a goody two-shoes,’ according to one former colleague. He’d studied on airplanes, strained to read textbooks by streetlamp doing midnight surveillance, and ran up his phone bill with long distance calls. His grades and his mental health suffered, right up until he was given a note by the waitress at his favorite diner.
Five years. Take care of Sarah
Every mineral in his body had solidified reading the first line, a thousand tiny cuts healed by the sentiment in the second. It was their code, his best friend’s way of ordering him to love himself the way Steve’s mother always had. No one else could have known.
Five years later he took the whole day off and spent all afternoon sitting in the darkest corner of the diner. At five PM, a lean, leather-clad man had slid into the booth across from him and set both hands flat on the table. One flesh, one metal.
His hug hadn’t changed.
Bucky leads an international mercenary team, but they’ve stayed in touch. As a result he’s the one who reaches out first, and the longer between visits, the more Steve worries. They’re at five months now, so he’s strangely relieved when footage of Barnes appears in a news report about SHIELD.
It’s a ‘chase down’ interview, and Bucky glares down the camera, lips moving as the voiceover covers his profanity. Steve reaches for the phone before the segment is over.
They meet ninety minutes later at the diner, both tense thanks to the news coverage. Bucky’s team is injured and off for a while; he only relaxes once the waitress practically forces them to take a couple of pieces of pie. It’s obvious that the woman thinks Bucky can do no wrong.
That’s not true anymore. The team used to call Steve their conscience, and it’s that long-dormant role that has him asking something he’d long avoided.
“Tell me how bad it got. After you— After I left.”
“You really want me to answer that?” Bucky says, voice muffled by chewing.
Steve takes in a deep breath and holds it. “HYDRA?”
Bucky swallows. “Not willingly.”
Pain takes root in Steve’s chest, and it isn’t until Barnes bops him on the side of his head that he starts breathing again.
“Stop mentally tying up my enemies,” he says, tipping back the last of his milkshake and grinning at Steve with a whipped cream mustache. “How’ve you been, Professor?”
Steve obliges, and as ever, his best friend knows his weak spots.
“You’re in love with her. Ask her out.”
“She’s my friend, Buck.”
“Good. Those relationships last longer.”
“What do I have to do to get you to drop this? I don’t think you should eat anything else,” Steve sighs.
“Find me something to do,” Bucky says, smug and comfortable. It has an incredible healing effect on Steve’s insides, enough that he blurts out the stupid, crazy idea he’d been stewing over for days.
Steve’s heart is full. Five years ago he was lost and lonely in the middle of Bucky’s multi-year exile, and now he’s watching you and his best friend huddle over blueprints to the Starks’ New York mansion.
“I can’t believe you even have those,” he tells Bucky as he dries his hands with a dishtowel.
“Steven Grant Rogers, did you do the dishes?” you fret.
“It’s my house, and his prosthetic can’t get wet!”
“Not true,” Bucky mumbles, distracted. He points at the foyer floorplan, saying, “There are multiple chandelier anchor points. Didn’t the article say he was ‘hanging’ the items?”
“Some pretentious BS about an art exhibit/auction that ‘visually breaks the chain of generational guilt,’” you scoff. “He said 'The Diamond of Alqualondë is the jewel in the setting.'”
“And you’re sure it’s not a real gem?”
You step away from the table and slump onto Steve’s couch. “Yeah. The minimum bid is way less than a blue diamond.”
“That and he said it’s stained with his father’s blood,” Steve reminds you, settling a discreet few inches away.
“Blood washes off easy. Unless he’s lying, it’s a poem,” Barnes says.
You shoot Steve a startled look. “So when you said your friend here works as a ‘soldier of fortune…’”
Bucky’s chuckle makes you turn and bury your embarrassed face against Steve’s shoulder, sending his pulse jumping. He studiously ignores Barnes's knowing look.
“I can’t pay him either way,” you say in a sad, muffled voice.
“Stark’s empire benefited from his father’s work with SHIELD,” Bucky says harshly. “Getting to ruin his plans for Howard’s loot will be a privilege. Speaking of which—” He strides over to his leather jacket and pulls out an envelope. “Did you get one of these, Steve?”
Steve shifts his weight, and the two of you share a shy smile as you straighten so he can stand up. That little burst of euphoria lasts him as long as it takes to recognize the handwriting on Bucky’s letter.
“I don’t think I got one, but why is Alexander Pierce signing an invitation to Tony Stark’s gala?”
“The Secretary of State?” you say, coming over.
“It’s PR,” Bucky suggests. “You’ve got Stark cleaning out his dad’s old stuff, the Justice department cleaning out SHIELD’s bad apples, and there’s the guy who put it all in motion standing next to a bunch of respectable soldiers in suits.”
“Cleaning up his image,” you finish for him.
“And they sent you the invitation?” Steve teases Bucky, but you're already scheming.
“No, no, no, that's a million more reasons for cameras! Do the winners get their items right away, or can we wait till the next day to—” you make some vaguely furtive gestures that Steve has to dodge.
Barnes shakes his head. “I wouldn’t risk it, but, do you have a fancy dress?” There’s an impish little twist in his lip as he snatches back the invitation.
“A— what?”
“We’ve got a month, and we’re only after one of the items,” Steve says, pushing back the need to look for his own version of Ross’s invitation. “No one needs to be James Bond, here”
“Indiana Jones,” Bucky corrects, leaning past Steve to make eye contact with you. “You want to write a replacement for us to swap out?”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” you whisper, staggering back to stare at the blueprints.
“I’ll get you some water, Caes,” Steve says, glare-chasing Barnes into the kitchen. Once there, he hisses, “I expected you to play along before telling us it’s impossible!”
“You’re the one implying she’s a Bond girl,” Bucky grins. “No judgement, but you could try not calling her ‘Sis.’”
Steve’s so disconcerted he overfills the glass onto the counter. In an even voice he says, “Caesura. Say-sura. It’s her nickname, means a pause in a poem, like rests in a song.”
“Is it still a pause if you never pick up again?”
“I would never have stopped looking for you.” The dishtowel’s still in the other room, so the spilled water starts dripping onto the floor. It’s the only sound for a long moment.
“I know, but this? This feels like an ending, Steve,” Bucky says, soft words spoken almost in cadence with the drips. “Howard Stark’s accident… what do you know about it?”
“I was still searching. I barely remember.” He catches something awful in his friend’s expression before Bucky turns away.
“Tony Stark’s going to open that famously impenetrable vault of his and auction everything from the car. Clothes, watches, half-invented gadgets, and a hard drive he’s never looked at.”
“How can you know he never—”
“It’s full of evidence proving the infiltration goes back a lot farther than current news reports. I only know because I was sent to steal it.” Bucky’s expression is strangely blank.
Three words echo in Steve’s mind. ‘HYDRA?’ ’Not willingly.’
“So Howard was murdered?” he whispers.
“Crash looked real to me. When I got to the wreck he was already dead. I smashed the decoy I was meant to swap out, turned it in, and waited for someone to make news with the real data.” His tone turns hard. “I’m still waiting.”
Steve’s still reeling, but he forces himself to ask, “You sure Tony isn’t HYDRA?”
“I plan to ask him that myself.”
“And the poem?”
“One hell of a benign reason to be there.” Barnes clasps Steve on his upper arms with both hands, equal pressure. “Look, I’m already involved. That fucking reporter made sure of that. You aren’t. Tell me no and I’ll pretend you never said anything—but there are HYDRA operatives left in government, and the proof is on that hard drive.”
Chapter Two: Epic (coming soon)
