Chapter 2: Feedback
You don't turn it all the way up.
You turn it to seventy-five, because you are a professional and he is a man who has spent decades with his nerves deliberately numbed, and you've seen what happens to people who come off painkillers too fast. He argues. You win. It's the first argument you've had, and you're a little surprised by how much you both enjoy it.
"Seventy-five," you say, saving the config. "For a week. Then we talk."
"You're bossy."
"I'm careful. There's a difference."
"Not from where I'm sitting." But he's flexing the hand again, running the metal fingertips over the edge of your workbench, the grain of the wood, the cool steel of a vise. His face keeps doing something small and helpless that you don't think he knows about. Every new texture, it happens again. The scratch of a wire brush. The fuzz of a felt pad. The wet ring your coffee mug left.
He picks up one of his plums and turns it over in his metal palm, and closes his eyes.
You have to go and stand in the supply closet for a minute.
The week is a kind of torture.
Calibration doesn't stop at the hand. The neural bridge runs channels all the way up the arm, and every one has to be mapped at the new sensitivity: wrist, forearm, elbow joint, the long plates of the upper arm, the seam where vibranium meets scar. You do it with your bare fingertips now, because the gloves dull the data. Inch by inch. He sits on the stool with his shirt off and his eyes on the wall, and you trace slow lines down the inside of his metal forearm and ask him to rate what he feels from one to ten.
"Pressure," you say. "Inner wrist."
"Four."
"Temperature?"
"Warm. Six." A pause. "Your hands are always warm."
"Poor circulation in the rest of me, apparently. All my blood goes to my hands." You slide your thumb up the inner seam toward the elbow. "Here?"
His breath catches. "Seven."
"That's high for the elbow."
"Is it." His voice has gone low and strange. You glance up. He isn't looking at the wall anymore. He's looking at your mouth.
You look back down at the arm very quickly and write seven in the log. Your handwriting comes out shaky.
Sam drops by on Thursday with a box of donuts and the shield slung over his back like a gym bag, which you find both thrilling and deeply ridiculous. He takes one look at Bucky, shirtless on your stool, and at you, flushed and bent over the upper arm with a sensor wand, and grins so wide you can count his teeth.
"Don't," says Bucky.
"I didn't say anything."
"You're thinking it real loud."
"I'm thinking," Sam says, choosing a glazed, "that I've never seen you sit still for anybody this long. Not even Dr. Raynor. And she's scary." He points the donut at you. "What's your secret?"
"I don't let him talk about baseball."
"Damn. Should've tried that years ago." Sam leans on the bench and watches you work, chewing, eyes flicking between the two of you. Then he says, too casually, "You two should get dinner. Celebrate the arm. My sister's got a place she likes down in..."
"Sam," Bucky says, in a voice that could cut glass.
"Just saying."
"Say it somewhere else."
Sam leaves laughing. Bucky doesn't look at you for twenty minutes. When he finally does, his ears are pink.
On Saturday night, you're alone in the lab at eleven, finishing the firmware patch, when someone knocks twice on the glass.
You know that knock.
He's standing outside in a hoodie with the hood up, hands shoved into his front pocket, rain darkening his shoulders. When you open the door he doesn't come in. He just stands there, dripping, and looks at you like he's not sure how he got there.
"Couldn't sleep," he says.
"Bad night?"
"Bad dream." He shrugs one shoulder. The left. You hear the faint whisper of the plates. "I used to just lie there. On the floor. Count backward. Tonight I kept..." He stops.
"Kept what?"
"Feeling the floor." His voice is very quiet. "Through the hand. The grain of the boards. I could feel the cold coming up through them. And I thought..." He looks down at the metal fingers resting against his thigh. "I thought, she did that. And I couldn't stop thinking about you, and then I was walking, and now I'm here, and that's probably real inappropriate, so I'm gonna go."
He turns.
"Bucky."
He stops.
"Come inside," you say. "You're getting rained on."
He comes inside. You lock the door behind him. The lab is dim except for the lamp over the workbench and the blue glow of the monitor, and the rain is loud on the skylight, and he stands in the middle of the floor dripping on your concrete and doesn't take his eyes off you.
"I want to ask you something," he says. "And I want you to say no if it's no. Don't be nice about it."
"I'm never nice about anything."
That gets the half smile. It fades fast. "I've touched a lot of people with this hand." He holds it up between you, the black and gold catching the lamplight. "Every one of them, I was hurting. I want..." His jaw works. "I want to know what it feels like to touch somebody and not hurt them. I want to know what it feels like to touch you. Just your face. That's all. If that's too much..."
You step forward and take his metal hand in both of yours, and you lift it, and you lay it against your cheek.
He goes perfectly still. Then he exhales, long and shaking, and his eyes close.
"Okay?" you whisper.
"Yeah." His thumb moves, barely, along your cheekbone. Cool metal warming fast. "Yeah. You're so soft. I didn't remember. I didn't remember anything was this soft."
You turn your head and press your lips to the inside of his metal wrist, right where the seven was.
His eyes snap open.
"Turn it up," you say against the vibranium. "All the way."
It takes you three tries to type the command, because he's behind you with his right hand on your hip and his mouth on the side of your neck, and every time your fingers hit the keys he does something with his teeth that makes you forget the syntax. When the bar finally slides to a hundred he makes a sound against your skin like he's been punched. Then he turns you around, and kisses you.
It isn't careful. You were braced for careful. He kisses like a man who's been starving in a room full of food, his flesh hand fisted in the back of your shirt and the metal one cradling your jaw so gently it makes your eyes sting. You get your hands under his hoodie. His skin is hot and damp from the rain. He shivers when your nails catch on the scar tissue at his shoulder and pulls back long enough to drag the hoodie over his head and drop it somewhere on the floor.
"Tell me," he says, breathing hard, forehead against yours. "Tell me what you want. I need to hear it."
"You," you say. "Here. Now. I want you to touch me with that hand and feel every second of it."
His pupils blow wide.
He lifts you onto the workbench like you weigh nothing, which to him you probably don't, and sweeps a tray of micro-drivers aside with his forearm, and you'll think about that later and be annoyed, but not now. Now he's pulling your shirt off over your head with a kind of reverence. Now he's running the backs of his metal knuckles down your sternum, between your breasts, over your stomach, and watching his own hand move over you like he can't believe it's his.
"Christ," he breathes. "I can feel you breathing. I can feel your heart."
"That's what it's for."
He bends his head and puts his mouth where his knuckles were. You arch into him and grab his short hair and hold on.
He's thorough. Of course he's thorough; he's a soldier and he's patient and he's had decades to learn how to wait. He unhooks your bra with one flick of his flesh hand and spends a long time learning you with his mouth, his tongue slow on your nipple until you're gasping, his metal palm spread wide across your back, holding you up. When he finally works your jeans down your hips, he does it slowly, kissing the inside of your knee, your thigh, looking up at you through his lashes every inch of the way to check you're still with him.
"Yes," you tell him, before he can ask. "God, yes, Bucky, please."
The first time he touches you there with the metal hand, you both make a noise.
It's cool for a second and then it isn't. His fingers are smooth and precise and impossibly controlled, and he slides two of them through how wet you are and goes completely still, staring at you with an expression you'll never forget. Like something holy just happened to him.
"You're so..." His voice breaks. "I can feel everything. How warm you are. How you're..." He pushes one finger slowly inside you, and you cry out, and his eyes go dark. "Oh. Oh, sweetheart. You feel that?"
"Yes."
"I feel it too." He crooks the finger. You see stars. "I feel all of it."
He takes you apart like that, on your own workbench, under the lamp, with the rain hammering the skylight. One finger, then two, the vibranium warming inside you until you can't tell where it stops and you begin, his thumb circling your clit in slow, exact strokes. He's calibrating you. You realize it somewhere through the haze. Every time you gasp, he does it again. Every time your hips jerk he files it away and comes back to it, patient and merciless. When you come it's with your hand over your mouth and your other hand gripping his metal wrist hard enough to hurt yourself, and he holds you through every shudder of it and kisses your temple and murmurs something into your hair in Russian that you don't understand and don't need to.
You pull him up by the waistband. Your hands are clumsy on his belt. He helps, breathing hard, and then he's pressed against you, thick and hot and heavy against your inner thigh, and he stops.
"You sure?" he says. His whole body is trembling with the effort of holding still. "You can..."
"Tell you to stop," you finish. "I know. I'm not going to."
He pushes into you slowly. So slowly. His forehead drops to your shoulder and he groans into your skin as you take him inch by inch, your legs wrapped around his waist, your hands on the scarred seam where metal becomes man. When he's all the way in, neither of you moves. You can feel his heart pounding against your breasts.
"Okay?" you whisper.
He laughs, short and wrecked. "Doll, I've been shot less than this."
Then he starts to move.
It's slow at first, deep and rolling, his metal hand braced on the bench beside your hip, the wood creaking under it. His flesh hand slides up your back into your hair. He watches your face like he's memorizing it, learning you the way he learned the arm, and using every bit of it, harder, deeper, until you're clinging to him and the bench is rocking and your tools are rattling in their trays. When he gets close he gets quiet, and then he gets loud, and he drags his metal hand from the bench to your hip and holds you down onto him with a precision that makes you see white. He comes with your name in his mouth.
It's a long time before either of you moves.
You wake up in your own bed, upstairs, a little after six.
You don't remember climbing the stairs. You do remember him carrying you, laughing quietly at something you said, and lying down beside you on top of the covers in his jeans like a gentleman from another century. You remember falling asleep with your cheek on the warm metal of his shoulder.
The bed is empty now.
His side is cold. His hoodie is gone from the lab floor when you go down. The door is locked from the inside, the key back on its hook. And on the workbench, on top of your scattered micro-drivers, there's a small battered notebook you've seen him carry in his back pocket every single day.
It's open.
Pages of names, most of them crossed out in neat black lines. Amends, you realize. People he's apologized to. People he couldn't. And on the last page, under a heading written so hard the pen almost tore through the paper, a single new line in fresh ink.
The heading says: THINGS I DON'T DESERVE.
The new line is you.