Chapter 3: Mercy
Sam Wilson picks up on the second ring and says, "What did he do."
"Nothing." You're standing in the lab in yesterday's shirt with the notebook in your hand. "He left. He left his notebook."
A long silence on the line. When Sam speaks again, his voice has lost all its teasing. "He doesn't leave that notebook anywhere. He sleeps with it."
"I know."
"He left it open?"
"On the last page."
Sam breathes out slowly. "Okay. He's not at his place. He goes to the same spot every time he's trying to talk himself out of something good. Pier Six, the bench by the railing, the one facing the Statue. He'll be there till he's sure you hate him."
"I don't hate him."
"Yeah," says Sam, "I figured. Go tell him. And hey." A pause. "Don't let him do the thing where he says he's protecting you. That's his favorite."
He's there. Of course he's there. Gray morning, wind off the harbor, his hood up and his metal hand in his jacket pocket, sitting on the bench at the end of Pier Six like a statue of a man waiting for a ship that isn't coming. He sees you when you're still fifty yards off. You watch his shoulders go up.
You sit down next to him. You hold out the notebook. He doesn't take it.
"You read it," he says.
"You left it open on my workbench. On top of my good drivers, which you also knocked on the floor, by the way. One of them's bent."
"I'll buy you a new one."
"I don't want a new one. I want to know why I'm on the wrong list."
He stares out at the water. The Statue of Liberty is a pale green smudge in the haze. A ferry horn goes, low and mournful.
"You know who's on that list?" he says finally. "Before you?"
You open the notebook to the last page. You read the heading again, and the lines under it, in his square careful hand. Sleep. Plums. A whole day without checking the exits. Steve. And then, last, freshly inked, you.
"I wrote Steve on there in Wakanda," he says. "After everything. I sat there and I thought, there's no way in hell I deserved that guy. He kept coming back for me. Every time. He dragged me out of a Hydra lab and off a train and away from a whole damn government and he never once asked what I'd done to earn it." His voice goes rough. "And then he was gone. And he spent his whole life on me, and I couldn't pay it back."
You close the notebook. The wind tugs at the pages.
"And last night," Bucky says, "I lay there next to you, and I could feel your heartbeat through the arm. Through the arm. And I thought, I can't do this to her. I can't let her give me this and then ruin it. Because that's what I do, sweetheart. I take things and I ruin them. I'm a good weapon. I'm a lousy..."
"Don't," you say.
He stops.
"You know what you did last night?" You turn on the bench so you're facing him. "You stood outside my door in the rain and asked if you could touch my face. You asked me eleven times if I was okay. I counted. You carried me upstairs and lay down on top of the covers with your jeans on like my grandmother was going to walk in." His mouth twitches, despite everything. "You held me like I was something that might break. You were so careful with me, Bucky."
"I was scared."
"I know. That's what careful is."
He looks at you then, finally. His eyes are red-rimmed. He hasn't slept.
"Here's the thing about mercy," you say, more quietly. "You don't deserve it. Nobody does. That's what makes it mercy instead of a paycheck. Steve didn't keep coming back because you'd earned it. He came back because he wanted you in his life, and he didn't care what it cost." You put the notebook on his knee. "So you don't get to decide I'm too good for you and then turn me down to four percent. I'm not a setting. I don't go down because it hurts to feel me."
For a long moment he doesn't move. Then his metal hand comes out of his pocket. Slowly. It hovers in the air between you, fingers half curled, trembling very slightly. You can hear the plates whisper.
You take it. You lace your fingers through his.
He closes his eyes.
"Okay," he says. It sounds torn out of him. "Okay. A hundred percent."
"A hundred percent."
"I'm gonna be bad at this."
"You were very good at it last night."
That surprises a laugh out of him, wet and cracked and helpless, and he drops his forehead against your shoulder right there on the pier with tourists walking past and a gull screaming on the railing, and he laughs until it turns into something else, and you hold him through that too.
You take him home.
Upstairs, this time. Your apartment over the lab is small and cluttered, half-finished circuit boards on the kitchen table and a fern that's three days from death on the windowsill. He stands in the middle of it looking at everything, the books, the photographs, the coffee mug with the chipped handle, like he's memorizing an escape route. Then he looks at you, and his face changes.
"Can I," he starts.
"Yes."
"You don't know what I was gonna ask."
"I know it's yes anyway."
He crosses the room in three steps and kisses you. It's nothing like the lab. It's slow and deep and almost painfully tender, his flesh hand cupping the back of your head, his metal hand spread warm across your lower back. He kisses you like he has time. Like he's planning on having a lot of it.
You undress each other in the gray light from the window. No hurry. He pulls your shirt off and spends a long time just looking, and when you reach for his belt he catches your wrist in his metal hand and brings it to his mouth and kisses your palm, the callus at the base of your thumb.
"Let me," he says. "Last night I was... I want to do this right."
He lays you down on your bed. Then he kneels between your thighs on the floor, and you prop yourself up on your elbows to watch him, and the sight of him there, broad shoulders and metal gleaming and his eyes dark and fixed on you, does something to your chest you're not ready to name.
He kisses up the inside of your knee. Your thigh. He runs the cool vibranium fingertips along the crease of your hip, and you shiver, and he stops and looks up.
"Cold?"
"Good."
"Tell me if..."
"Bucky. Please."
He puts his mouth on you.
You fall back against the pillows. He's slow. Unbearably slow, and so focused it's almost frightening, his tongue broad and soft and then pointed, his metal hand spread flat on your stomach to hold your hips still when they start to buck. He listens to you. Every sound you make, he answers. When you grab at his hair he groans against you and you feel it everywhere. When he slides two metal fingers inside you and curls them, exactly where he learned last night, you hear yourself say his name in a voice you've never heard come out of yourself.
He doesn't stop when you come. He gentles, licks you through it, slows, and then builds you up again with a patience that borders on cruelty, until you're shaking and begging and coming apart a second time with your thighs clamped around his head and your fingers knotted in the sheets.
When he finally climbs up over you, his mouth wet and his eyes blown black, you pull him down into a kiss and taste yourself on him and wrap your legs around his hips.
"Look at me," he says, as he pushes into you. "Please. Need to see you."
You look at him. You don't look away.
It's slow, this time. Deep, rolling, unhurried, his weight on his flesh forearm beside your head and his metal hand laced through yours against the pillow. You can feel the plates move as his fingers tighten. You can feel how carefully he's holding your hand, all that strength gentled down to nothing, and you squeeze back hard, harder, until he understands.
"You won't break me," you whisper.
His breath shudders. His grip tightens, real now, firm and sure, and his hips snap forward and you gasp and arch up into him and he does it again. Again. The bed creaks. The fern rattles on the windowsill. He buries his face in your neck and says things against your skin, filthy things, sweet things, the Russian and the Brooklyn tangled together, and when you come for the third time he follows you over with a sound like something breaking open, your hand crushed in his and his whole weight pressing you into the mattress.
You lie tangled together a long time afterward. His metal arm is around you. He's drawing slow circles on your bare hip with one vibranium fingertip, over and over, and every so often his breath catches like he's surprised all over again.
"Still feel it?" you murmur.
"Every bit." His lips brush your shoulder. "Don't you dare turn it down."
Late that afternoon you find him at your kitchen table in his jeans and nothing else, the notebook open in front of him, a pen in his metal hand.
He's crossed out the heading. Not neatly, the way he crosses out names. Hard, with a dozen black lines, until you can't read the words under it anymore.
Above it, in that square careful hand, he's written a new one: THINGS I'M KEEPING.
You're standing behind him reading over his shoulder, which a week ago he never would have allowed, when your phone buzzes on the counter. A video call. The name on the screen makes you freeze.
You answer. A woman with sharp eyes and a dozen tiny braids fills the screen, a Wakandan lab glowing behind her.
"So," says Shuri, without hello. "I have been reviewing the firmware logs remotely, as one does. The repairs are beautiful. Truly, I am impressed. I will be in New York on Thursday to see them in person." She leans in, very close to the camera, eyes narrowed. "But I have one small question for you, engineer. Why does the haptic lattice show a sustained full-sensitivity event at eleven forty-seven on Saturday night that lasted two hours and nineteen minutes?"
Behind you, Bucky Barnes drops his pen.