scrubjayspeaks

Title: Eggshell

Fandom: MCU

Pairings: Steve/Bucky

Rating: General

Words: 2560

Summary: He would tell them what he really wanted from a new arm. What he wanted it to be good for. He would tell them he wanted something that could hold another hand without breaking it. Yeah. Right.

This is a freebie for the February 2018

crowdfunding Creative Jam. It was inspired by a prompt from

ysabetwordsmith . Crossposted to AO3.

***

Steve rapped his knuckles against the glass of the balcony sliding door. On the lounge chair out there, Bucky held up a finger, eyes still trained on the tablet braced in his lap. Steve's appearance hadn't made Bucky flinch and duck; Steve wished he could count that as a victory. In reality, it just meant Bucky had one earbud popped out and the other turned down low, letting him hear Steve before he even entered the rooms they shared. The hypervigilance was a work in progress.

Bucky typed something into the tablet, one-handed and deft, then clicked the screen off. Steve took that as permission and stepped out into the humid air of a Wakandan afternoon. Something hooted in the canopy below them. Steve could never tell if those were birds or monkeys or something else entirely. The deep green hid any sign of it but the voice.

The research facility, outside of any city center, masked by the jungle they studied, had been a relief. Beyond just knowing they were out of the public eye, Steve had needed true rest. He had needed to know someone else could keep an eye on things, someone he could trust. The Avengers training facility had felt like that, a place where he knew the world couldn't reach him without his permission. The loss of it stung for more reasons than just that, but that would have been enough.

The tiny corner of Wakanda he had been granted access to had given him rest and more. Even if he spent a day meeting with T'Challa, and royal advisors, and technicians, immersed in everything still wrong with his world, Steve stopped feeling like he would die if he stopped moving. Moments like this, when his chief concern was whether or not Bucky had come up from his research long enough to eat lunch, helped too.

"Have you been out here all day?" Steve leaned back against the railing, blocking some of the hazy, cloud-splotched sunlight in which Bucky had been basking. He scowled up at Steve--he was like a cat--then turned his attention back to the tablet.

"Want to hear something funny?" His fingers danced across the tablet's surface. The reconstructed ball of his left shoulder hung empty, gleaming new connections just waiting for a prosthetic. Which currently waited, unused, untested, apparently unwanted, in one of the labs downstairs.

"You've had a productive morning, then," Steve said, crossing his arms. Bucky ignored him.

"They say if you remember the 1960s, you weren't really there." Steve flinched, but Bucky wasn't looking. He reminded himself that Bucky never had a mean bone in his body; he refused to believe that might be part of Zola's legacy. The gallows humor wasn't intended to make Steve's chest ache like someone just planted a boot in it.

He would give anything to trade his past for Bucky's. The quiet of ice, the sleep, the time lost cleanly as--his mind shied away from the idea of severed limbs, clean or otherwise. Still. When he had started his own reintroduction to the world, he never could have imagined a worse, more painful way of getting to a new millennium. He had been predictably, horribly wrong about that. And still he would take all of Bucky's half-remembered nightmares and fragmented history if it meant Bucky could have ice and quiet instead.

He must have lost track of time, because Bucky's foot stretched out to kick him lightly in the shin. Steve shook off the sorrow and asked, "Have you gotten to minimalism yet? Or pop?"

"Yes." Bucky's expression suggested he had complicated feelings on the subject, and Steve wondered which one had bothered him more.

Bucky countered with, "Have you read Dune?"

"I haven't had much time." Bucky nodded; he understood that catching up was an impossible task. There was just the next thing to research, the next breadcrumb to pick up, when you were lucky enough to get a chance. The tablet screen flared to life again.

"They're telling me you refuse to test the prototype arm," Steve said before he lost the moment or his nerve. This time, Bucky didn't give him the courtesy of looking away from the screen.

"Yep."

"Do you want me to come with you?"

"Nope."

Steve knelt beside the lounge, crowding into Bucky's space in a way he knew he ought not to. "If you're still worried about your programming going off--"

"I'm not." Bucky's tone made it clear any further pressure would end more than just that topic of conversation. For someone confined to a single building in an unfamiliar country, Bucky showed alarming skill at dodging Steve for as long as Bucky deemed necessary.

"Okay. Okay, Buck. Whatever you need." Steve stood, hand on the back of the lounge but not daring to switch over to touching Bucky directly. "Will you come eat something?" If this was a peace offering, the way Bucky immediately unfolded from the lounge, tablet and research dismissed for the moment, Steve would take it.

***

Bucky hesitated outside the lab door. He would just go in and tell them he didn't need the new arm. Thanks but no thanks. And maybe the hospitality he and Steve had been offered wouldn't evaporate when Bucky made it clear he wouldn't be anyone's weapon again. Maybe.

Or he would go in and accept the arm and find some other way of repaying the gift. Maybe he could trade some of the secrets still lodged in his head. They made him sick, like something that needed to be lanced and drained, but it would still be better than fighting. Better to trade in the old crimes than go out and commit a few new ones.

He would tell them what he really wanted from a new arm. What he wanted it to be good for. The fantasies of a hand better at tucking a strand of hair behind his ear than it was at snapping a man's neck. Of touching things without the fear of punching holes in them with strength he didn't want to have. Fine motor control had only been a priority a far as knife handling went for the old arm. He would tell them he wanted something that could hold another hand without breaking it.

Yeah. Right.

The door whooshed open with a soft noise and a rush of cooler, drier air. The couple of technicians inside looked up from their workstations. He saw things that looked like radio transmitters, the sort of collars they put on animals being studied. On their initial tour, the king had shown them the huge, glass-paneled observation areas, and the fleeting shadows and colors of parrots outside.

"Oh, ah, Sergeant Barnes," one of the technicians said and struggled up from a chair overgrown with loose cables. "We weren't expecting you." Unspoken were the words, because you've refused every invitation down here since we finished the first analysis of your stump.

Bucky shook his head. "If it's a bad time." He inched inside, unsure of his welcome and more than half hoping they would tell him to come back another time. Or never. Never could work.

The tech typed a passcode into a wall rack. "No, I have everything assembled, let me just--" She curled both arms around a long hard case, like something for a rifle, then used her free hands to balance a few more objects. She laid everything out on a table which, when she hit a switch, was illuminated above and below. Pinpricks of blue light along the edges suggested the sort of holographic capabilities they seemed to build into everything these days.

Bucky frowned. "Here?" Even if the table were bolted to the floor, it wouldn't offer much of a test of strength for him. They probably wouldn't appreciate that sort of treatment of the labs anyway. How else was he supposed to check the range of the arm? The techs who first met with him had understood the poundage, the pressure, the locking joints. He hadn't made any secret of his brutal potential, for all that yet another of his arms currently lay dead in permafrost.

The tech didn't look up from unlatching the case. "Yes. The system will be able to analyze your movements precisely. It may not," she added, tone warning and apologetic, "be one hundred percent this first time. We can make adjustments."

Then the lid flipped back and Bucky forgot everything else. The arm--his arm--glowed dully, the surface matte and gunmetal gray. The basic shape hadn't changed much; an arm was an arm, and Bucky had told them he didn't want anything exotic added. One of the techs had burbled about tentacles, the smile dying off his face when he saw the twin looks on Steve and Bucky's. The new arm had slimmed down a bit through the biceps, the hyper-aggressive flex eased.

He reached out to ghost the fingers of his flesh hand along the back of the wrist. His heat left behind a second of fog before the metal cleared again. He flicked his eyes up to the tech. She nodded.

"Ready?"

She used both hands to slide the connections up into place. "A little pressure now," she warned. Bucky braced himself, but she just pressed up steadily until something close to the bone slotted together with the arm. She gave it a fraction of a turn then eased her hands away. Bucky took the weight of it.

His shoulders fell out of their uneven hunch and his balance realigned. Muscles that had spent decades compensating for the weight of the arm had ached from the sudden loss, cramping from the tension of holding up nothing. Now they relaxed, and Bucky thought, okay, maybe it would be worth the price.

The first flex of fingers came out jittery, circuits coming online. The tech danced from foot to foot, the corner of her lip caught between her teeth. Bucky worked his way up from fingers to wrist to elbow to shoulder. He had used the same routine after maintenance, but the movements were too common, too basic to trigger anything. It was just moving his body. His.

"I have some tests to check calibration," the tech said. At Bucky's nod, she started popping latches on cases and pulling out--

"What." Bucky picked up the tiny cube in his right hand.

"Dice. And I've got some fabric scraps and thread, some paper, hmm..." Tiny, delicate, ordinary things spilled out from the cases.

Bucky reached out with the left hand to pick up a strip of fabric. The weave was heavily textured. He rubbed his thumb across it. The impression came through hazily, as though he had thin gloves on. It still blew the old hand's sensitivity out of the water. He turned his hand over and looked at the faint ridges printed into the metal.

"They've got conductive pads, so they'll work on touch systems," the tech explained. "Those are an experimental model, so they might wear out faster than you'd like. I'd...appreciate any feedback on them." He could tell, from the suddenly shy and formal tone, she had been personally involved in the development of that feature.

She didn't interfere with Bucky's investigation of the other objects. The furious scribbling of notes kept her occupied. Flashes of light let Bucky know the table was making its own accounting of the arm's skills. At no point did anyone offer him weights to lift or pipes to crush. No one seemed to care if the arm was strong.

"Oh, oh!" The tech suddenly dashed off to her workstation and fished in a drawer. She came out with a small box, made of layered compartments. She pulled something out and came back over.

Between finger and thumb, she held up a brown-shelled chicken egg. "It's hard-boiled, cheating, I know, but would you like to try? It's just going to be lunch, so breaking it doesn't matter."

Bucky didn't have words to tell her how not breaking it was suddenly the only thing that mattered to him. He reached out and closed his own finger and thumb on it, side to side while she held top to bottom. He listened for the tiny creak and crack of the shell breaking. It felt cool, the texture smooth, the weight trivial. Tiny plates along the length of the fingers shifted as he held it more firmly. The tech opened her hand and pulled back. The egg stayed, precisely held, surface unbroken.

"Next check up," she said, "I'll bring a fresh one."

***

Steve came back from a run in the center's gym to find Bucky curled up inside, but otherwise unchanged from usual. The sky outside the balcony doors had gone heavy and sodden through the afternoon, and now rain fell in an endless sheet of water. Steve pulled off his shirt and toweled his hair as he wandered from door to fridge.

Propping a hip against the counter, Steve asked, "Made it to the seventies yet?"

"Mhm." Bucky, over on the sofa, didn't look up. Steve downed half a jug of water. Bucky didn't offer any elaboration.

"Did you see the Osaka Expo '70 yet?" Bucky shook his head, distracted. He kept fiddling with something in his--hands.

Two of them.

He must have gone down to the lab after Steve left that morning, the sneaky bastard. The water jug got tossed empty back into the fridge as Steve went over to the sofa. He opened his mouth to ask Bucky about it, when he got a clear look at what Bucky was doing. He had a length of rough twine with a few knots tied in it. He measured out sections again and again, somehow dissatisfied with each attempt. Steve watched a blush creep up the side of Bucky's neck and around the curve of his ear under the scrutiny.

"What've you got?"

Bucky brandished the tablet at Steve with his right hand. The page pulled up showed diagrams of knot patterns. Macramé. Huh. Bucky took the tablet back after only a moment. He used his new left hand to skim down the page. Steve watched in silence as Bucky tied the next set of knots in the pattern.

After a minute, Bucky must have reached a good stopping point, because he tossed the tablet onto the seat next to him and, with considerably more care, laid his project out on top of it. Steve came around to sit on the coffee table in front of Bucky. The blush hadn't faded.

"It turned out okay?" Steve prompted. Bucky looked up, though his hands continued to fidget in his lap, each one smoothing over the other.

Finally Bucky reached out, metal hand poised over Steve's resting on his thigh. "Can I?"

Steve turned his hand over, fingers spread in invitation. Bucky twined his fingers--cooler than the last ones had been, Wakandans must have done a better job of dealing with heat byproduct in tech--between Steve's. Bucky's thumb stroked across the back of Steve's hand, the pressure gentle and even.

"They do good work here," Bucky said. Steve could hear all the extra meanings packed into that, the trust straining at the seams. It wasn't news to Steve, but he understood the strength it took for Bucky to risk finding out himself.