You and a Test of Will

Some Asylum

Steve and Bucky became fast friends.

The morning after their attempted date and Steve's episode, the tension stretched taught over the apartment until Bucky sat up on the couch, rubbed one eye, and said, "Hey."

Steve grinned and replied, "Morning."

After that, Bucky's life took a weird turn into being intertwined into Steve's life. Bucky forgot to be sad, sometimes, when he was around Steve. Together they formed a stronger unit from two screwed up people, and hey, even if it didn't work forever, at least it worked for now. Bucky could do shit he wouldn't dream of doing by himself, and he did the same for Steve.

Last weekend, Bucky escorted Steve to the nearest comic book store. Steve hadn't wanted to go alone, just ordered his comic books online and let them come to his door. But he told Bucky over plates of some fancy meal he'd made himself that he missed the feeling of thumbing through longboxes and the clashing scents of old paper and fresh ink.

So, they went. Steve lit up like a Christmas tree at the hole-in-the-wall comic joint crammed up against several other crappy shops and emerged with no less than fifty dollars worth of comic books ("That's actually not a lot, Bucky, but I just got this month's Wonder Woman in the mail already.").

Bucky stayed at Steve's place more than strictly necessary, especially after Becca left to return to Long Island, with a kiss to his cheek and a too-adult, "Take care of yourself." He promised himself that he would try to let his sister be a kid, even if that meant texting near-constantly to assuage her brother-related anxieties.

Steve's apartment was spotless. Lemony cleaner and carpet shampoo saturated the air, tempered only by the scent of oil paint and old books. Bucky doubted Steve noticed Bucky's skill in observation. The bookshelf didn't rearrange itself on a weekly basis, so Bucky gathered that Steve pulled his books and plastic-covered pulp magazines down from the shelves, dusted and polished, and replaced them in a different order. Sometimes the order of the books made sense to Bucky. Other times, the order stayed locked inside Steve Rogers' head.

At least today, the bookcase was alphabetical again.

Bucky touched his metal hand to the spines of the books. He couldn't feel their texture, couldn't feel temperature, just the pressure, just that the books were there. They existed. Still, in comparison to the temporary prosthetic arm the hospital fitted him with when Bucky first made it back stateside, the Stark tech was a dream.

Steve owned a lot of books. Some of them were novels, but a lot of them were collected versions of comic books. Bucky hadn't read a comic book since he was a kid, and even then, he'd ridden bikes and played video games more than he had read anything, at least until he hit puberty and depression descended upon him like a fast-moving storm.

"Rat Queens? The hell kinda name is that?" Bucky said, pulling one of the books. Comic book, which he'd known from the spine. A couple weeks ago the name Image on the spine of a book meant nothing. Under Steve's influence, he knew it was a publisher.

Steve approached from the kitchen, smiled at Bucky with that dream-boy smile like he didn't know what he was doing. Bucky didn't buy it. He learned fast that Steve Rogers knew what he was doing more than most people credited him for. Steve leaned his shoulder against the bookcase and said, "You'd like that one. There's nudity."

"You know me so well already," Bucky wryly answered. He tucked the volume of Rat Queens back where he found it and didn't miss the way the unease leeched from Steve when the book returned to its exact place. Bucky eyed Steve. He shouldn't ask, but the day Bucky did something that he should was the day he'd been replaced by an android version of himself. So he said: "So, what's up with the cleaning thing?"