Chapter 27: Morning After the Storm
Bucky woke to cold sheets and the familiar, gut-clenching silence of an empty bed. His hand slid across the mattress, finding only rumpled cotton still warm from Dante’s body. The panic was instant, a shot of cold adrenaline that had him upright before his eyes were fully open.
Then he heard it: a thick, gagging retch, followed by a low, pained groan from behind the closed bathroom door. The sound was animal, full of misery.
He pushed off the bed, the floorboards icy under his feet. The bathroom door was ajar, a sliver of harsh light cutting into the dim bedroom. He didn’t knock. He pushed it open.
Dante was on his knees, forehead braced against the porcelain rim of the toilet, his whole back taut and heaving. The tattoos on his left arm, the intricate sleeve that ended in the dark rose on his knuckles, stood out starkly against skin slicked with a cold sweat. His shoulders jerked. Another dry, wrenching heave convulsed through him, nothing left to come up but acid and shame.
Bucky moved without thinking. He crouched down beside him, one hand going to Dante’s bare shoulder, to the tight cord of muscle at the base of his neck.
The reaction was instantaneous and violent.
Dante flinched as if branded, ripping himself away from the touch. He slammed back against the tiled wall, his icy blue eyes wide and feral, his breath coming in ragged pants. “Don’t,” he snarled, the word shredded and raw. He wiped his mouth with the back of a trembling hand, leaving a glistening smear. “Just don’t.”
The self-loathing in his voice was a physical thing in the small, humid room. It was in the way he wouldn’t meet Bucky’s gaze, the way his body curled in on itself, making his large frame seem suddenly smaller.
Bucky didn’t move back. He held his ground on the cold tile, his own heart hammering against his ribs. He looked at Dante, really looked: the sheen of sweat, the tremor in the hand, the utter defeat in the line of his spine. This wasn’t the Colonel. This wasn’t even the broken man from last night. This was something more primal, a creature cornered by its own existence.
“Okay,” Bucky said, his voice quiet but steady. “I won’t touch you. But you’re gonna drink some water.”
“Fuck off, Barnes.”
“Yeah, heard you the first time.” Bucky stood, turning to the sink. He ran the tap cold, filled a chipped glass. He came back and set it on the closed lid of the toilet tank within Dante’s reach. Then he sat on the edge of the bathtub, putting a few feet of cold, white tile between them. He waited.
Dante’s breathing slowly evened out. The wild panic in his eyes banked, replaced by a hollow exhaustion so deep it seemed bottomless. He stared at the glass like it was a complicated puzzle. Eventually, his hand snaked out, took it. His fingers shook so badly water slopped over the rim onto his thigh. He drank it in one go, his throat working. He put the empty glass down with a careful click.
Silence. The apartment building groaned around them, pipes clanking somewhere in the walls.
“I can smell it on me,” Dante muttered, not looking at him. “The soap. Her fucking soap. I’ve scrubbed my skin raw. It’s in my nose. In my throat.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know.” Dante’s head thudded back against the wall. “It’s like she’s plastered to the inside of my skull.”
Bucky said nothing. He just waited. This was the work, now. The unglamorous, piss-and-vinegar work of staying present while someone drowned. There was no manual for it. No rank that applied.
After a long while, Dante pushed himself up using the wall. He moved slowly, like an old man. He went to the sink, splashed cold water on his face, avoiding his own reflection in the mirror. He rinsed his mouth. Bucky watched the powerful muscles in his back shift, the dark ink swirling with the movement. A map of a life Dante no longer wanted to navigate.
When he finally turned, leaning against the sink, he looked at Bucky. The defiance was gone. What was left was just a profound, weary honesty. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. It was the simplest, most terrifying sentence Bucky had ever heard him say.
“We start small,” Bucky said, standing. “You get dressed. I’ll make coffee. We’ll sit in the other room. We don’t have to talk.”
Dante’s eyes searched his face, looking for the trick, the inevitable withdrawal. He found none. A flicker of something—not hope, but maybe its weaker cousin, acceptance—passed through his gaze. He gave a single, shallow nod.
The weeks that followed were built from those small, fragile bricks.
Bucky didn’t move in. He just didn’t leave. His presence became a fact of the apartment, like the persistent drip from the kitchen faucet or the slant of afternoon light through the dirty west-facing window. He’d go out for supplies: bread, eggs, more coffee, a new bar of plain, unscented soap. He’d come back. He’d cook simple meals, placing a plate wordlessly in front of Dante. Sometimes Dante ate. Sometimes he just stared at it until the grease congealed.
They didn’t talk about the gun, now a permanent, dusty paperweight on the high shelf. They didn’t talk about Jericho’s wife. They didn’t talk about the war, or the dead, or the future. They existed in a narrow, protected present.
They walked. Long, aimless walks along the Hudson as the late spring air turned warm and thick. No destination, just motion. Dante would walk with his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his worn fatigues, his gaze fixed on the horizon where the water met the dirty sky. Bucky walked beside him, sometimes talking about nothing—a ball game he’d heard on the radio, the weird old lady who ran the corner bodega, the stubborn dandelion pushing through a crack in the pavement. Sometimes they walked in a silence that wasn’t comfortable, but was no longer hostile.
One afternoon, Bucky brought home a deck of cards. They played gin rummy at the kitchen table for hours, the only sounds being the flick of cards, the scratch of a match as Dante lit a cigarette, the tally of points kept in pencil on a scrap of paper. Dante’s strategic mind was sharp, even dulled by grief. He won, often. Bucky didn’t let him win. It seemed important.
Bucky also started moving things. Not a lot. Just enough to disrupt the museum of depression Dante had curated. He took the empty bottles out, a clanking bag of them every other day. He washed the blanket from the bed. He opened the windows, letting the city noise—the shouts, the car horns, the distant thrum of life—pour in like a tonic.
Dante watched these small invasions from his throne in the armchair. He never protested. He just watched, his expression unreadable.
One evening, three weeks after the bathroom floor, Bucky was at the stove, frying potatoes. The smell of onion and oil filled the space. Dante was at the table, cleaning his service pistol, a different one, a ritualistic disassembly and reassembly he performed with automatic, precise movements.
“You don’t have to stay, you know,” Dante said, not looking up from the slide mechanism in his hands. His voice was neutral, testing.
Bucky didn’t turn around. He jostled the pan. “I know.”
“They’ll be looking for you. Your unit. The Army.”
“Let ‘em look.”
“You’re AWOL, Barnes.”
“Yep.” Bucky scooped the potatoes onto two plates. He brought them to the table, setting one in front of Dante alongside the scattered gun parts. “Eat while they’re hot.”
Dante looked from the steaming food to Bucky’s face. He slowly began putting the pistol back together, the clicks and snaps a familiar percussion. When it was whole, he set it aside, out of reach, and picked up his fork.
They ate. The potatoes were crispy at the edges, soft in the middle. It was the first thing Dante had finished in days.
Later, with the dishes done and the sky outside a deep indigo, they were in the living room. Dante in the armchair, Bucky on the couch, a scant six feet of worn Persian rug between them. The radio played low, a faint orchestral hum.
Bucky was reading a weeks-old newspaper. Dante was staring at the empty brick wall, but his stillness felt different. It wasn’t catatonic. It was full.
“I still have feelings for you.”
Bucky’s eyes didn’t move from the newsprint, but the words stopped registering. The sentence hung in the air, simple and devastating. He’d said it. Not as a question. Not as an apology. A statement of fact, offered to the quiet room.
Bucky lowered the paper slowly. Dante wasn’t looking at him. His profile was etched against the faint light from the window, all sharp angles and shadows.
“I know,” Bucky said, his own voice barely above a whisper.
Dante’s head turned. Those icy blues pinned him, searching for pity, for flinching. “You don’t have to say it back. It’s not a trade.”
“I know it’s not.”
“Then why?” Dante asked, the word cracking. “After seeing all this. The fuckin’… mess. Why would you feel anything that isn’t disgust or duty?”
Bucky put the paper down. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, looking at his own hands. He thought about the desert, the way Dante’s command had been a solid thing you could lean on. He thought about the fear in his own gut when he’d realized what that solidity meant to him. He thought about the cracked photo of Michael, the gun on the floor, the unbearable weight of a head resting against his shoulder in the dark.
“It’s not about why,” Bucky finally said, looking up. “It just is. You’re it for me. The mess is part of it. I can’t… unscramble it. I don’t want to.”
The admission left him feeling skinned alive. There was no romantic filter, no pretty lie to dress it in. It was just a raw nerve, exposed.
Dante stared at him, his jaw working. For a long moment, Bucky thought he’d shut down, retreat behind the familiar, impenetrable wall. Then something in his expression fractured. Not into pieces, but into a reluctant, aching transparency.
“I have feelings for you, too.” Dante said it like he was confessing to a crime. His voice was gravel. “They’re all mixed up with everything else. The guilt. The anger. It’s not clean. It probably never will be.”
He looked down at the dark rose inked across his knuckles, flexing his hand. “I don’t do anything I don’t want to,” he said, echoing his own long-held creed. “And I don’t want you to go.”
It wasn’t a declaration of love. It was something harder, and maybe more real: a statement of need, from a man who had built his life on never needing anyone.
It was something harder, and maybe more real: a statement of need, from a man who had built his life on never needing anyone.
The quiet after his words was immense. The radio’s orchestra had ended, leaving only the faint crackle of dead air between stations. Bucky didn’t know what to do with his hands. They felt too large, too present in the space between the couch and the chair. Dante was looking at him now, directly, the full force of that unnerving focus stripped of its usual armor. He looked young, and impossibly tired, and so lost that Bucky’s chest ached.
“What does that even mean?” Dante finally asked, his voice low. “Don’t go? Go where? To the corner store? Back to my unit? Into the fucking river?” He shook his head, a sharp, frustrated jerk. “You should be running. You are running. From me, from this.”
“I’m right here,” Bucky said. It was the only true thing he had.
“But why?” Dante pressed, leaning forward in the chair. The leather sighed beneath him. His knuckles were white where he gripped the armrests. “Look at this place. Look at me. I’m a fucking ruin. I’m poison, Bucky. I ruin good things. I fuck my dead friend’s wife. I have a gun on a shelf that I was too much of a coward to use.” He spread his hands, a gesture that took in the whole dim, whiskey-scented room, his own ravaged face. “This is the ‘this’ you’d be choosing. So I’m asking you. Why would you want this?”
The question wasn’t rhetorical. It was a plea for a map out of his own despair, a reason he couldn’t find for himself.
Bucky stood up. The floorboards didn’t creak this time. He crossed the Persian rug, its threads worn thin, and stood before Dante’s chair. He didn’t kneel. He just looked down at him, at the dark hair falling across his forehead, at the lines of grief carved around his mouth. Dante stared back up, his blue eyes wide and defensive, waiting for the blow of a platitude or the final dismissal.
Slowly, Bucky reached out. He placed his hand on Dante’s cheek. The skin was warm, rough with stubble. Dante flinched, but he didn’t pull away. He just held still, his breath caught somewhere deep in his chest.
“Because I know I care about you,” Bucky said, his thumb moving softly over the high ridge of Dante’s cheekbone. “That means highs and lows. It means the desert and this apartment. It means your brother’s smile and the goddamn cracked photo. It means the gun on the shelf and you sleeping on my shoulder.” He leaned in, his voice dropping to a whisper meant only for the space between them. “It’s all the same man. And I’m not leaving him.”
He bent further and kissed Dante’s cheek, just beside the corner of his mouth. It was a gentle press of lips, dry and soft and infinitely tender. A kiss of benediction, not passion. A sealing of a promise.
Dante’s entire body shuddered. A sharp, silent inhale hitched in his throat. He squeezed his eyes shut, as if the simple kindness was a physical pain. When Bucky started to pull back, Dante’s hand snapped up, his fingers circling Bucky’s wrist with a desperate, surprising strength. He didn’t pull him closer. He just held him there, anchored, his forehead dropping against Bucky’s sternum.
Bucky stood there, his hand still cradling Dante’s face, feeling the tremors work through the larger man’s frame. He didn’t speak. He just let the weight of Dante’s head rest against him, a solid and trusting pressure. He listened to the ragged, unsteady breaths slowly begin to even out, matching the rhythm of his own heart.