Chapter Text
Steve found Bucky sitting on the sofa, his feet propped on the coffee table, and flipping through a book rested against his knees. He had never been much of a reader; therefore the current situation surprised Steve.
"What're you reading?" he asked.
Bucky lifted the book and let Steve see the cover without taking his eyes off the page. A Bucky Barnes biography, one released before Steve had been thawed. He hadn't read it himself, but he'd seen it in bookstores and considered buying it on several occasions. That had been before he had Bucky back, though, and he had feared it would be too painful.
"A gift from Barton," Bucky said drily. "He thought he was being funny."
Steve nodded. He dropped his gym bag to the floor and crossed the living room to sit down next to Bucky. Immediately, Bucky twisted around on the sofa to rest his head on Steve's thigh and draping his legs over the armrest. He had always been a physical man, but it was different these days. It was as if he was starving for human contact but the only one he would accept it from was Steve. As such, Steve was finding himself on the receiving end of a lot of casual touches, but he didn't mind.
"I was quite a ladies' man, wasn't I?" Bucky said.
Steve chuckled. "Handsome and charming," he said. "Very popular with the dames." He brought his hand to the crown of Bucky's head, ran his fingers through his hair. It was still long and Bucky had never shown any interest to cut it down to his original style; Steve assumed it was here to stay just like the metal arm. He had Bucky back but the Winter Soldier was a part of the package. "Do you remember?"
Bucky shrugged. He rolled his face into Steve's touch. "Some things. There're still blank spaces. I know enough to tell when the book's lying." He turned the page and continued reading for a moment before saying anything more. "I just can't tell what's being censored from what the author simply hasn't found."
"Like what?" Steve had read a few pages of his own biographies, had seen his exhibit at the Smithsonian, had seen a movie that was so inaccurate he couldn't take more than forty minutes of it. He wondered how many changes there could be in Bucky's story. He hoped nothing in the book would hurt the other man too much.
"Some people… The book makes them sound like my best buddies and I don't think I'd met some of them more than once." Bucky bit his lip. His brow furrowed. "Maybe I just don't… No, no, I'm sure I'm right." He sighed and looked up at Steve with a half-smile before turning his gaze back to the book. "And I remember I was popular with the fellas, too."
Steve's fingers froze with a strand of Bucky's hair twisted around them. "You've always had a lot of friends," he said slowly, trying to figure out what Bucky was getting at.
"No." Bucky frowned once again. "No, I mean… Like with girls."
"Oh," Steve said slowly. "I… didn't know that."
Bucky shifted on the sofa, pushing himself up to look at Steve's face. "I thought I told you everything."
"Not this," Steve admitted. How had he never noticed in all these years they lived side by side? It wasn't as if he had spent his youth unaware such things happened; he had simply never suspected it was the case with his best friend.
"Well, you know now."
"Yeah… Yeah, I do." Steve resumed his playing with Bucky's hair. "Thank you for telling me," he added after a moment. He had seen a girl say it on TV recently when a friend of hers told her he was gay. It felt like the right thing to say.
They sat in comfortable silence for a while. Bucky continued to read, turning the pages at a steady speed, and Steve watched the small changes in his expression and learned to understand them. The furrowing of Bucky's brows when he didn't like something in the book. The flicker of eyes to the right when he was trying to recall something and the memory was escaping his grasp. The corners of his mouth turning upward when he came across something that was a fond memory.
Then Bucky reached the glossy pictures in the middle of the publication. The first one was a black and white photo of James Buchanan Barnes in his uniform, handsome young man with an adventure ahead of him. A man who had had no idea what he was going to face. "I was a dashing fella," Bucky said, a half-grin appearing on his face. It didn't quite light his face up the way it used to and it wasn't all that happy. It was nice to see regardless.
"You still are," Steve said and offered a soft smile in return.
The smile on Bucky's face grew just a tiny fraction. He turned the page and Steve felt him tense against him. "Is that… Have you drawn that?"
Looking properly at the picture in question, Steve nodded. "They must have found it in my old sketchbook. There're some in the Smithsonian." Some had been in the possession of SHIELD and he got them back after they'd thawed him. Some were lost in the war.
Bucky traced the lines with the fingers of his right hand. The drawing showed him dressed in casual clothes, leaned against the headboard of the bed he was sitting on, relaxed and happy. It was one of the most human pictures of Bucky Barnes that still remained. "Did I really look like that?"
"That one is very true to reality. I got you to sit still for it."
To his surprise, Bucky laughed. It was a rare sound these days and it made Steve's chest swell.
"I'm better at staying still now," Bucky said, casually. He wasn't looking at Steve and for a moment, Steve wasn't sure how to interpret the sentence. Was Bucky merely stating a fact? Comparing the differences between himself and the man he used to be? Offering to-
"Do you want me to draw you again?"
Almost instantly a frown appeared on Bucky's face. "You wouldn't want to. I'm not a good subject for portraits."
"I want to!" Steve said hastily. He really wanted to. He had tried to drawn Bucky again many times, but it never turned out right without a model. There were too many changes in Bucky's face as it looked now compared to the one Steve carried with himself in his memory. "If you'd let me. I would love to."
There were many portraits of Bucky Barnes from the World War II. There were none of Bucky Barnes, the remade man. Steve wanted to draw the Winter Soldier and capture the myth the way he saw it: his own personal hero.