I firmly believe that Steve thought the Winter Soldier was Bucky from the first time he laid eyes on him. AND I HAVE PROOF
When Bucky catches the shield we can clearly see Steve making his "what the fuck" face. His brow furrows and he lets out a little breath. He doesn't seem surprised, he looks shocked and confused, as if he's seeing a ghost...
He even takes a beat when the shield is thrown back at him, clearly thinking very hard
In this moment Steve has to make a decision, to either get his head in the game or break down over his (to him) very dead best friend. I can almost see him thinking "get a fucking grip Rogers" It's been only 3 years since Bucky died to him, he probably still forgets that Bucky is dead, probably still looks for him in crowds.
I mean just look at him!! He looks like he's gonna cry
In conclusion Steve Rogers is a miserable, miserable bastard and we do not acknowledge that enough
So I know the event is @catws-anniversary but this is actually one of my favourite Steve-Bucky scenes.
There's been a lot spoken about their seamless teamwork here -- Steve doesn't even look in Bucky's direction when he tosses the shield at Bucky -- but there is just...so much packed into this fluid cooperation?
Bucky as far as we know in CATFA was a sniper (although in the supporting material it does say Bucky learned boxing before he joined the army). It's only when we get to CATWS we see him being a strong melee fighter. A lot of Bucky's new fighting style takes into account his metal arm -- he favours it for blocking and forceful striking to spare his flesh arm. He's also spent most of his recent decades doing mostly solo work. He had backup support during CATWS to get him into position, but actually on task? He's by himself chasing down his targets.
This is the first time Bucky fights on Steve's side after his time as the Winter Soldier. Depending on how you headcanon Bucky receiving his serum, this would also be the first time Steve treats Bucky as an equally strong super soldier. Bucky's experience, fighting style, physical constitution have all significantly changed since the last time they were on the field together, not to mention Steve's own style and experience have evolved.
Yet they slotted straight back into each other's space, like they had never spent a minute apart in the last 70 years. Apart from the "end of the line" spell-break, nothing else speaks such volumes about their bond.
(Also goddamn CEvans with that beautiful pirouette. No wonder the stuntspeople say they can't replicate his footwork)
inspired by this post, here are some headcanons and meta about Steve & Bucky and queerness pre-war.
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Sarah Rogers:
This idea of Sarah's awareness/acceptance of queerness, doesn't necessarily have to be a function of her living in NYC.
If we go with the idea that Steve's parents were Irish immigrants, and Steve was born in 1918... Well that gives Sarah time to have been living in Ireland during the Easter Uprising.
Steve Rogers's mother is obviously going to be involved with that, probably a member of the Irish womens' paramilitary group Cumann na mBan. (Would've also brought her into contact with Suffragists, Socialists, and Trade Unionists to pass that onto Steve, if she wasn't into all that already.)
And y'know who else were involved? A fucktonne of lesbians, that's who (including more than one female doctor and even one butch sniper!)
(My personal headcanon is that she was a nurse on the front lines in 1916, and actually left Ireland because she was in danger of getting arrested if she stayed. She met post-WWI-injury naturalised-American Joseph, either in 1916 while he was visiting Ireland (his home country) and they fought together, or in NYC, after he had been invalided home in 1917, then they married and had Steve in 1918.)
So if Sarah was a part of the Easter Uprising, she could've come into contact with/been accepting of lesbians, at least, long before she set foot in NYC.
You could so easily have her attitude as being like 'ah so there are men like that too, are there??'
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Gay-Community Steve:
It is hard for me to reconcile 'bloody-mindedly honest, terrible liar' Steve with being gay and knowing he's gay, and not being open about it, in a self-destructive-for-the-period way.
So either he was so deeply in the closet that he himself didn't know yet, and so hadn't been a part of a gay community with gay friends because he literally didn't know to look for one.
(Like, he and Bucky are a couple and sleeping together for years, but Steve is so naive or in denial he thinks it's just a thing all bachelors do in the absence of a girl they're going to marry.)
OR...
CATFA's view is the propagandised version of events, and Steve actually did know he was gay, and was out to his friends, and the real reason Captain America kept getting rejected for active service is not because of his disabilities but because... he kept admitting to being gay?
And it was only after he got serum (and got in the news), that his public records were expunged to cover up the fact that their darling supersoldier (good and pure and Therefore straight! or perhaps asexual!) ...had broken the law; both by being gay and by falsifying his enlistment forms multiple times.
(Kind of like how how celebrities get a suspect 4F or dodge the draft, and their PR team makes up a more-palatable lie to feed to the public. Like how Frank Sinatra got rejected for active service on psychiatric grounds, but pretended it was because of an inner-ear problem.)
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So, if Steve did have rainbow connections, where are they?
Possible reasons (beyond hate crimes, imprisonment or institutionalisation), why it looks like Steve only has the one friend:
Steve could also have had friends in the disabled community and lost them to illness?
Lost friends to the Depression/poverty, or had to move away from NYC for economic reasons?
Lost friends to internment (it wasn't just Japanese-Americans!), deportation, or lavender marriages (felt their new concentration on children and straight-passing made them strangers?)
had friends who were not enlisted, but we didn't see them because when we first meet Steve it's the middle of the day and they were all busy working?
had queer friends but: they were all enlisted by the time CATFA rolls around, and/or already died in the Spanish Civil War?
had queer friends but: they were all in the Navy and kept getting in fights with Steve about the Army being superior.
had queer friends but: they were introduced to Steve by Bucky, and 9/10 were actually friendzoned guys harbouring secret hopes and weren't exactly ecstatic to find out that Bucky was taken -- or, even worse, didn't see Steve as competition at all! -- and therefore never formed a good relationship with Steve.
('Jeez Steve why can't you n' these guys ever seem to get along? He was always so nice to me!' 'I know Buck, it's a mystery.' 😏)
had queer friends but: every time he went to a gay bar the men he could've befriended avoided him to hit on Bucky, or avoided him because he was hitting on Bucky, or avoided him because Bucky was hitting on him (and giving them the stink eye), or both of them were avoided because they were too... distracted to pay attention to anyone else.
(And/or the lesbians that talked to Steve all sidled up thinking he was a beautiful butch woman, then panicked once he opened his mouth, or were only there to ask if that friend of his was 'the double-date guy.')
imagine cops running Steve down outside a gay bar to arrest him for being a woman wearing pants… (Bucky would not let him hear the end of it.) And then being like 'oh! uhh sorry sir…' (two second pause before they suddenly clock that Steve and Bucky are a gay couple) 'Wait a second-' (Steve and Bucky already running.)
Maybe Steve would even become reluctant to go to the clubs, out of a fear of losing Bucky to someone else? Or Bucky reluctant to go for the same reason, and because Steve just attracts bad luck? (See: mob-related stuff below.) Both of them just sick of having run-ins with the cops?
had queer friends but: his views were so ahead of his time that even they found him too much.
(IE. barred from the gay bath house for protesting ableist body standards, the lack of POC, fighting the police too hard during a raid, and/or criticising the mob owners... Maybe Steve eventually couldn't go to any gay club, because he was in shit with the mob? Maybe the police actually thought he was straight, because they'd seen his photo up behind the bar as a persona non grata in gay clubs?! Future idiots will say this is 'proof' he stands for 'Traditional American Values.')
Banned from politics club for criticising Stalin's regime; barred from the jazz club for fighting a white dude there; banned from the radical womens group for bringing a trans friend; banned from the trade union for attacking the mob / wanting to fix union and police corruption. (Has he been excommunicated yet? It's probably only a matter of time.)
Picture hapless social-secretary Bucky helping Steve limp home from yet another Club that Bucky got him into, and having to listen to Steve rant about why 'they're all a bunch of hypocrites, Buck!' Perhaps homebody introvert Steve, secretly wanting to stay in, while extrovert Bucky keeps trying to help him get out more, and every time Bucky thinks he's found Steve the perfect place this time, Steve's all like 'we'll see.'
had queer friends but: he was so open about it that he was alienated by potential friends who wanted to remain on the DL and considered him dangerous.
(Perhaps especially so, if they were / or about to be enlisted and didn't want to risk a blue discharge, and couldn't sanction the way Stevee blatantly proclaimed his orientation at recruitment stations? 🤔 Whereas Bucky was so invested, and had cultivated such a lady killer rep, that he can not-worry about being seen with Steve.)
Or: he was on the DL and was alienated by potential friends who weren't, and looked down on him for passing?
Or: he was estranged from gay friends who did the same thing he did (ie. declared their orientation during recruitment) but because they actually wanted to dodge the draft, etc.
Also consider: gay Steve and gay Bucky, both aware of their sexuality but not out to each other yet... independently going to any of the numerous gay hot spots in Brooklyn, seeing each other there, and fleeing in horror before they can make any friends, thinking 'omg why was he there? did he follow me?? does he know?!' And not figuring it out... because they are just genuinely that dumb.
Likewise, both of them in the pre-out phase, thinking 'well I can't risk having gay friends because they'd have to be a part of my life and then Bucky/Steve will find out!!' ...because they are just genuinely that dumb.
There are actually loads of options!
You could definitely do a have-your-cake-and-eat-it version of events where Steve has been part of a wider queer community, made friends, and yet still wound up having only one who stood by him. (There has to be reason why 'even when I had nothing, I had Bucky' would be true).
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Other Possibilities:
Steve and Bucky double-dating beards / playing mirkin to lesbian couples? = Hell yes.
(Sidenote: I also headcanon Bucky as having a gay sister, so maybe she could've been Steve's plus one, or they'd take out all Bucky's sisters to act as chaperones?)
Shit, why not turn it into a business? Bucky the Escort who gives his lesbian client a cover date, a great night of dancing, and a second cover-escort guaranteed to not steal her girl!
(Service comes complete with beautiful handwritten love letters (dictated by Bucky, penned by artist!Steve), a personalised sweetheart-style photo of Bucky, and a messy Public Break Up Scene on her stoop.😉)
RE: them moving in together: everyone talks about how queer Brooklyn was, but what if the boys went above and beyond for their own safety -- February House style -- and lived in a building exclusively populated by queer people? Maybe by queer members of the forces, or people who occupied humble positions in creative industries?
If Steve has lesbian friends from BK, and lesbian friends in the chorus line... why not both at the same time? Why not have some of those lesbian friends be Brooklyn girls who signed up to be chorus girls because- y'know -chorus girls, and were then like 'Steve?! Wtf are you doing here?!'
(Why not kill three birds with one stone: one of those chorus girls is Bucky's sister? Cue Spidermenpointing_meme and mutual assured blackmail -- she promises not to tell Bucky what Steve did if Steve promises not to tell Bucky that one of his sisters has run away from home to become a showgirl.)
Bucky as the social butterfly of the two, more likely to be out and about, especially in risky places (ie. he worked on the docks; he could actually get and keep jobs in those places), and/or the safer one, and given their later pattern of Bucky's friends becoming Steve's (ie. the Howlies)... I think Bucky would be more likely to be the one making eye-opening introductions to Steve rather than the other way around. Which could have interesting knock on effects... (see above).
Maybe he got Steve a lucrative job illustrating queer 8-pagers (maybe there's an underground queer magazine out of BK, a la The Circle, and he illustrates for that, using Bucky as a model?
Cue hilarious 'what were you doing at the Devil's Sabbath?' moments when random men come up to Bucky in the street like 'where do I know your face from??' 😱)
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Re: Extended Family
I also headcanon that Bucky had a gay Uncle Jim (maybe a tailor?) who was institutionalized for being gay, and received harrowing medical treatments like electroshock therapy that eventually resulted in his death.
So by the time Bucky -- named after his dead uncle -- started showing signs of being bi, Bucky's parents had already had their eyes opened. Or maybe, like Sarah, they had already emigrated from a specific open-minded situation, so queer Brooklyn wasn't such a revelation.
Alternatively: In Stucky fic, people often seem to think as far as 'Brooklyn was queer!' but no farther.
But why not? Why does their queer education have to have started in queer Brooklyn?
Why not have Bucky's or Steve's (or both!) parents be engaged in Lavender Marriages, and open about it? One gay parent, or both?
(This might be another reason why Steve appears to not have friends outside Bucky; he might have got all the queer community he needed from his own family unit. Imagine it! Not just connected to Brooklyn queers but Edwardian queers, darling! The Herstory!!)
What if Steve's mother wasn't single but simply... 'never married?' 👀 Or maybe she was straight, but in love with her late lavender husband?
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And during/after the war:
Re: the Howlies.
(Have brought this ficbunny up elsewhere)
The Howlies knew and were fine about it, because... maybe there was an official investigation during the war to establish whether or not any of the Howlies were gay and/or in a relationship with Steve.
So, being a bunch of professional mischief-makers, and acting completely independently, the Howlies all pulled an 'I am Spartacus!' and claimed to be gay and in a relationship with Steve, under interrogation.
Steve also admitted to being gay, because he is terrible at lying and had to stand by them when he was told all his men admitted they were gay.
(Except for Bucky. He kept his head during interrogation -- sadly, not his first rodeo.)
So Bucky went down in hastily-redacted Army Record as somehow the only straight Howling Commando??
(The interrogators couldn't tell if they were being made fun of or not, and in any case the scandal was considered absolutely monstrous and a terrible blow for morale, so it was immediately covered up and no further steps were taken.)
Ironically enough, Steve & Bucky weren't even the only queer Howlies!
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The Future:
Seeing gay marriage legalised, the Stonewall riots, openly queer films and celebrities and tv shows, queer pride parades etc. etc. would be heart-breaking for Steve... because of course by this point he has become Captain America, deluded women he barely knows have spent decades claiming to have been his true love, and the people that did know him have been loyally covering up for him claiming he's straight. He'd feel like a hypocrite for not being what they said; or like he's letting them down by unmasking all their hard work.
And of course his real beloved isn't here any more, when he's finding all this out he's totally alone, no one to share it with, (doesn't know if any of his other friends are still alive, yet). And he doesn't want to have to relive that pain over Bucky by being interrogated on his love life...
Plus, after a century of being mythologised, he associates coming out with even wider public furore and a violation of the privacy that Steve Rogers never gets to have.
So all he has is the private escape of the 20th century's queer cinema, literature, tv shows, and porn (which all feel like an embarrassment of riches) ...but without being out to anyone - he feels he has to keep it a secret.
Until Bucky comes back, and isn't in a prudent enough mental state to realise all this. So for him, finding all this out about queer rights etc. is an untrammelled joy, and that's what finally gets Steve out of his negative headspace and into the light.
(And then, yeah, out and married. Try to stop Bucky getting his citizenship back when he's literally married to Captain America, assholes! Nowadays, the only women that hit on Steve are lunatics who think they can turn him, and Steve's only other problem is all the gay men who either want in on that threesome or think they can steal him away from Bucky!)
So the narrative for steve and bucky when it comes to money is that they were struggling and such. That since steve was disabled he couldn't work much and bucky had a hard time getting money for the both of them. I decided I wanted to do some research to see if that was true.
First off, income. What were they making? So if bucky working as a general dock laborer, he would be making 88c an hour and as a full time worker he would be earning about $140.80 a month. I know that a few people headcanon that steve drew 8 pagers for money and according to a guy who was propositioned by the mob to draw these comics, they payed $3 per page. If steve made 2 a month he would have been earning $48 a month. This means their total household income was $188.80. That's a lot for two single men back then!
Ok so now onto expenditures. According to bucky's dog tags they lived somewhere in this general area.
So their rent could have been anywhere from $20-$100. I personally think that $30 is a reasonable price so I'll go with that. Utilities were about $3 a month and food was about $22 a month for the average household. Now for steve's medical stuff. His asthma cigarettes would be about 70c a pack. I can't find the actual price of the cigarettes themselves but I think 5c more then just the powder sounds reasonable. All of his other ailments wouldn't have had medicated treatment. That would all be solved by a very specific diet at the time. So I think adding about $4 for things like liver and a lot of it seems reasonable. All this together is about $59.70 a month
So in the month to month basis, they are making a total of $129.10 after expenditures a month. Even if steve isn't working, that's still a total of $81.10 left over.
Edit: forgot about taxes lol. With taxes, they earn $102.35. Bucky's federal tax rate would have been 19% with an annual income under $2,000. I'm not sure what their state tax would have been. And since steve is technically working for the mob, he's not paying taxes lol
TLDR; they probably weren't as poor as everyone makes them seem
bucky being already a sergeant at the start of catfa can be explained away in so many ways but I feel like the general consesus is still "italy, somehow" or "he was just that good even in a non-combat setting" and that's great, sure, no complaints really but i will always think of this moroccan wwII-era song, shortly released after operation torch in 1942 (the allied invasion of american and british troops in north-africa). not only because it could very well have been the campaign in which bucky earned his rank (35k troops were deployed to casablanca post-pearl harbor, among them draftees like bucky) but because this song is literally the most bucky barnes song ever. from the title - "azine wal 'ain al zarq"/"the handsome one with blue eyes" - come on now! - to some absolute banger lyrics like:
"how many admirers they flattered and paid attention to: the americans"
"they gave out candy, cigars, dollars"
"even young women are learning their ways"
"giving them face powder, blush and even sweets"
"even grandmothers today are drinking rum with the americans"
that's...that's bucky barnes people. bucky was the one flirting with local girls (drinking with grandmothers! oh bucky) giving out rouge and chocolate and contributing to anxieties around cultural degradation (tradition turned upside-down, morality, american consumption, conquest, modernity, domination, etc. etc.). i think it's neat.
and i think there could be a funny stucky connection as well. if we fudge with the dates a little bit, casablanca (1942) could very well have been the last movie steve and bucky would have seen in theatres together...right before bucky landed in casablanca for operation torch. aside from the geographical setting, there is something very bittersweet about this movie which speaks to steve and bucky's love story (sacrificing love for higher purpose) and it has those lively, cheeky, quick-witted one-liners that are very un-selfconsciously romantic. there is no one-to-one character comparison to me, but i do think bucky (who imagines himself to be the beautiful Ilsa of course, caught up in the great love affair) would be very taken by the cynicism in Rick, that roguish yet self-sacrificial character (from nyc!) ("Don't you sometimes wonder if it's worth all this? I mean what you're fighting for.")
but also the empathetic, hero in Victor, who is moralistic and Good ("You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing, we'll die. If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.")
(those are all steve-descriptors, people. perhaps going from a rick-steve rogers to a victor-captain america, perhaps all of those all mushed up in stevie from brooklyn)
and i would have liked to think that this movie ("I love you so much. And I hate this war so much. Oh, it's a crazy world") would've been in the back of bucky's mind when he would be drinking rum with grandmothers in morocco.
(also, i believe steve would have quoted rick's "here's looking at you, kid" when bucky showed up in that uniform for the first time back in brooklyn and bucky would have squealed a little at that)
thinking about the way steve and bucky mirror one another again (always) today and in particular the maudlin poetry of steve's weapon being the shield (something designed to absorb a blow) and bucky's being his arm (something that delivers a blow) but also just the heartbreaking way that also reflects the emotional scars they carry, too.
steve wears a lot of his inside (absorbed) and bucky, through no fault of his own has to wear his biggest visibly (the arm). these are not original thoughts I'm sure it's been discussed a lot, but they're with me today as I muse on writing about the boys.
I wrote a scene for my Stucky Texas roadtrip fic and I need to talk about it
Here's the passage:
They arrive on a paved lot on East Cesar Chavez.
Las Trancas is a white trailer the length of a semi, sporting a red bronco as its logo. Next to it, blue picnic tables sit under a covered structure strung with bulbs. The Austin skyline sits behind it to the northwest, close enough to see but not close enough to matter. The menu is on a board mounted to the side of the trailer: asada, pastor, lengua, buche, tripas, cabeza, barbacoa, chorizo, carnitas, campechano. No descriptions. Just the cuts.
Torres goes up to the window.
Bucky watches him.
The Spanish comes out fast and easy, because Torres probably grew up doing this. Probably learned Spanish before he learned English. Knows the difference between how you talk to the window and how you talk to everyone else. Buenas noches. Cuatro tacos de buche, dos de lengua, uno de barbacoa, uno de campechano. A pause, something Bucky doesn't fully catch, then Torres laughing at the response, sí, sí, con todo.
The woman behind the window jots it down without looking up.
Bucky gets most of it but not all of it. His Spanish is operational, assembled over decades from missions he is still excavating the details of, from Guatemala and Chile and places that don't appear in any official record. He knows how to ask for things and how to understand answers and how to follow a conversation if it doesn't move too fast. He knows the vocabulary of urgency. He knows the vocabulary of threat assessment. The vocabulary of two men at a taqueria window on a Saturday evening in Austin is warmer than anything he was trained for and he follows it without effort, which is its own strange thing to notice.
Torres comes back.
"Twenty minutes," he says. "They're busy."
He sits down across from Bucky. Sam is at the drinks cooler near the trailer, pulling a Topo Chico from the ice. Torres gets up again and comes back with a lime Jarritos for himself, the glass cold and sweating immediately in the August air. He nods at the cooler. "Get the Mexican cola. Glass bottle. Cane sugar."
Steve is already reading the label on the bottle he's holding.
"Cane sugar," Steve confirms.
"Trust," Torres says.
Bucky gets one. He twists the cap off with his metal hand and takes a drink. The cola is cold and real, sweet without being sharp, the cane sugar doing something different from what corn syrup does, rounder, more complete. He takes another drink.
"Yeah," he says.
Torres nods. His recommendation confirmed.
The breeze coming through carries music from the trailer's speaker, brass and clave, a Cuban dance band. The cadence warm and insistent in the August dark. Bucky listens without meaning to. The texture of it reaches for a rhythm in his body but doesn't quite find a category. Big band. Dance halls. Glenn Miller on a radio somewhere in 1943. This is none of those things and all of them slightly.
The lot has filled up since they arrived. A family sits at the table behind them, two men on bicycles who've locked up and joined the order queue, a woman eating alone at the far table with her phone face down and her food in front of her like she's decided to be present for this specifically.
Sam looks at the menu board.
"What's campechano," Sam says.
"Steak and chorizo mixed," Torres says. "Best of both. You want it."
"I was going to get that," Sam says.
"I know."
The order comes up in parts, tacos in paper-lined baskets, the salsas already on the table in small cups, green and red, and Torres adds lime from the wedges in the basket at the center without asking if anyone wants lime because everyone wants lime.
The buche arrives on two tortillas, the filling dark and tender, braised until the fat has rendered into itself and the whole thing has become something deep and porky. Bucky looks at it for a moment and then eats it.
It tastes like sense. Like the logic of using everything, of nothing going to waste, of the cheaper cuts treated with enough time and attention that they become the reason you came. His grandmother—his father's mother, Mecklenburg County roots, German Lutheran, a woman who kept a spotless kitchen and believed wasting food was a moral failing—would have understood this taco completely. The specific economy of it. The patience of it.
He reaches for a second one before he's finished the first.
Steve watches this happen.
"Good?" Steve says.
Bucky doesn't answer because the answer is obvious.
Steve picks up his own buche taco.
Across the table Torres is watching Steve take the first bite like he's waiting for a verdict that matters to him. Steve chews. His face softens and he makes the pleased sound only Bucky's ears can pick up when food lands true.
"Yeah," Steve says.
Torres looks satisfied and goes back to his own food.
Sam is already most of the way through his campechano. He puts it down for a moment and looks at Torres. "Your cousin really just handed over his camping gear."
"He offered," Torres says. "I told him we were going to Big Bend and he said take whatever you need."
"He didn't want to come."
"He worked a double shift." Torres wipes his hands. "He'll come next time."
Sam nods. He picks his taco back up.
The string lights do their warm work in the dark. The lot grows louder, more tables filled, the trailer window steady with orders. A kid at the family table behind them declares his love for quesadillas with loud enthusiasm. Down Cesar Chavez a car passes with the bass turned up.
He had spent time here before. Not here specifically, not this lot, but in neighborhoods like this in cities he can't fully remember, moving through them fast and without appetite. Latin America had been consistent work across the sixties and seventies and into the eighties, the Cold War's southern theater, the whole architecture of interventions that left countries in configurations that still haven't resolved themselves. He had moved through places like this and not been able to stay.
From the trailer’s speaker, the music shifts into something slower. The first line after the interlude, Tu Precio… the brass soft and the clave steady, a romantic bolero that feels made for warm nights even if the lyrics speak of heartbreak and fleeting romance.
Bucky drinks his cola. The cane sugar, the lime, the buche, and the warm night combine into something that has no name except this: East Austin, August, the four of them at a blue table under string lights the night before the drive west.
When they are done eating, Sam and Torres take the baskets to the bin near the trailer, Torres already talking about drive times tomorrow. Their backs are turned.
Bucky hears the clave drop into the next phrase and acts before the decision fully forms. He catches Steve’s hand as they stand in the middle of the lot, spins him out once—light and easy, matching the slow sway of the song—and brings him back in. Steve makes a surprised sound that is almost a laugh. Bucky catches him at the waist, holds him there in the gentle rhythm of the bolero, and kisses him quick and sure, the August night warm around them and the singer's voice curling through the air like an old promise.
Steve smiles. Right at him. Like he couldn't help it, and Bucky's heart can't help but do a flip.
Sam turns around from the trash bin.
He doesn't say anything. He just smirks, slow and deliberate, making sure both of them have seen it.
Torres looks over. His face breaks into a grin he doesn't try to contain.
For this scene, I was trying to look for the song they were dancing to. I landed on a bolero:
Here's my annotation of the lyrics:
Your price
(War)
Tu précio
I could have paid it
(He would have gone to war twice so Steve wouldn't have to. He was always capable of this level of sacrifice.)
Pude haberlo pagado
Without having to give you
Sin tener que entragar-te
My heart
(He lost himself for 70 years)
El corazon
Your cravings
(The machine of war swallowed him)
Tus ansias
I could have savored
(His youth before the vastness of war came, the years before spent happy with Steve even though they were poor)
Pude haber saboreado
I didn't know you were
(Couldn't see clearly the nature of the machine in his youth)
No sabia que eras
A fleeting romance
(Patriotism)
Romance de ocasion
Wicked
(HYDRA, the machine)
Malvada
You have shattered my soul
(Turning him into the Winter Soldier)
Mi alma has destroçado
The love I gave you
(Patriotism, fighting for his country)
El amor que te di
You exchanged for another
(The reality of procurement)
Por otro lo has cambiado
Your price
(Turning exceptional men into soldiers)
Tu précio
I could have paid it
(He would die for Steve, still would die for Steve)
Pude haberlo pagado
It's too late
(They both paid it. Irrevocably changed.)
es demasiado tarde
You've charged too much
(Both super soldiers with blood on their hands. The machine grinds on.)
mui caro lo has cobrado
---
And suddenly Bucky is not a character anymore. He's a person who paid too much and knows he paid too much and would pay it again and is dancing anyway on a warm night in August with Steve smiling at him like he couldn't help it.
Tu precio. Your price.
Bucky Barnes who spent seventy years as a procurement system's most refined product, dancing to a bolero about a love that charged too much. On a warm night in Austin. The night before they drive to the border.
And the song is addressed to the faithless lover. The thing that took everything and gave back nothing. And in my reading that's HYDRA, the Cold War's southern theater, the whole machine of war. The thing he gave his heart to without knowing what it was. No sabía que eras romance de ocasión. I didn't know you were a fleeting romance. I didn't know you were going to cost this much. I didn't know you were going to shatter my soul.
But here's what breaks me about the lyrics annotation.
Pude haberlo pagado. I could have paid it.
He's not saying he regrets it. He's not saying he wouldn't. He's saying the price was real and knowable and he was capable of paying it. Which means somewhere underneath everything, underneath the seventy years and the asset and the procurement and the conditioning, there was still a person who could have chosen this. Who had the capacity for this level of cost.
The machine didn't make him capable of paying that price. He brought that capacity with him.
That's the thesis. That's what separates my characterization from the standard "broken soldier" reading. Most Bucky narratives treat him as something that was destroyed and is being rebuilt. I am saying something more specific and more devastating: he was always this person. The capacity for that level of sacrifice was his before HYDRA touched him. The machine didn't create a weapon out of nothing. It found someone who would have burned himself down for love and country and redirected that. That's the horror. That's also the dignity.
No sabía que eras romance de ocasión. The faithless lover as patriotism, as the abstract ideal he gave everything to before he understood what it actually was. That's a classical structure, the beloved who turns out to be faithless, but I've made it political and personal simultaneously. He didn't know. He was twenty something and he didn't know what the machine was going to ask for. That's not naivety to be embarrassed about. That's just youth, and what war does to it.
And then es demasiado tarde. It's too late.
Which is true. You can't unpay what's been paid. The machine charged what it charged and took what it took and the years are gone and the people he knew are mostly dead and Steve came back through ice and time and that's a miracle but it doesn't refund the seventy years.
Too late. Too much. Cobrado. The transaction closed.
And he spins Steve out anyway.
That's the dance as theological defiance. Or something quieter than defiance. The acknowledgment that the price was real and too high and paid in full and here, anyway, is what survived the paying. Here is Steve smiling like he couldn't help it. Here is August in Austin. Here is the clave steady underneath everything.
The bolero is the tragedy. The dance is what tragedy looks like when it doesn't get the last word.
And Sam sees it. Sam who knows everything, who was there for the tarmac and the pardon, who watched these two men be unable to say a true thing to each other in the middle of a firefight. Sam turns around from the trash bin and smirks, slow and deliberate, making sure both of them have seen it.
Because Sam understands what he's watching. He's watching a man dance to a song about what it cost and choose to be here anyway. He's watching the price get paid forward into something that isn't tragedy anymore.
Torres grins and doesn't contain it because Torres is young enough to just feel the joy of it without the full weight of what's underneath.
Sam knows the weight. Sam smirks anyway. Because the weight and the joy are both true and this moment contains both and Sam Wilson has learned to hold both without flinching.
The song plays. The clave is steady. The August night is warm.
Mui caro lo has cobrado.
You charged too much.
And here we are anyway.
---
I already have two chapters of this fic published on AO3, if you are interested, here's the link:
Friends, friends, friends, I've found it. The most Steve Rogers quote *ever*. I'm reading Kristophine's Love Stories for Tedious People--which is excellent, BTW.
Steve is trying to convince a reluctant Bucky to go out with him and he says, “And what if I’m just out there being wrong about things when you’re not around to correct me? Isn’t that going to drive you nuts?”
So true. So perfect. It's writing like this that keeps me enthralled by this fandom even in the year 2025.
Happy New Year! Here's to more Stucky adventures, Chris/Seb collabs, and all the lovely people in the fandom with no quit.
