Chapter Text
Steve was happy. Somehow, without him realising, he'd adjusted. Bucky was bright and shining and beautiful and as free as Steve could make him and Steve was pretty sure he was going to love him forever. He'd come to grips with it. He'd found his peace. Bucky's habitual contact, the little touches, were a constant and he always made a barrier of himself in crowds, tucking Steve against him. If Steve would sometimes close his eyes and breathe him in, just for a moment, it was okay. He was happy.
It was coming into winter proper and all the irritations that winter brought, the cold, the damp, his aching joints, his trouble breathing, simply didn't happen. He was never cold, never in pain. Bucky looked after him, eased all the minor troubles that were part of an average human life without Steve ever asking.
Right now, he was trying to sketch out a rough plan for a triptych a client had commissioned, and it wasn't going well. It wasn't helped by the fact that someone was manifesting tiny origami cranes and flying them over to land on his head. Not throwing them. The cranes were actually flapping their tiny paper wings and clumsily landing in his hair. It wasn't so much their landing that was distracting as their confused attempts to nest.
Steve lifted his head and glared at Bucky. Who looked innocently back. "Must you?"
"I must," he replied earnestly, deliberately widening his eyes.
"Why?" Steve asked, but he was having trouble stopping the smile that wanted to escape. Bucky in this sort of mood was impossible to resist.
Bucky shrugged. "You brought this on yourself, you know," he pointed out instead of answering.
"How could I have possibly brought this," he gestured at the cranes on his head, "on myself?"
"You're the one who picked up a bottle up and brought it home."
"I didn't know it was going to have a six foot tall pain in the ass in it!"
Bucky grinned at him. "That's not exactly my fault."
"I'm blaming you anyway."
Bucky snapped his fingers, the cranes disappeared, and it started to snow on Steve's head. Steve just looked at him, deeply unimpressed, and Bucky laughed.
Bucky should have known. He should have known they wouldn’t let him go.
There was no warning. One minute they were walking down the street together, Steve shoving Bucky's shoulder to send him laughing across the sidewalk. The next, Steve was being snatched away from him. Bucky's wrath rose and he turned, ready to rend whoever had touched him into spare parts, and froze.
He couldn't. He couldn't stop them.
They were shoving Steve into a van, hurting him, because he was fighting, but for all Steve's body contained a vengeful and defiant spirit it was small and not strong enough to fight trained operatives. Operatives of HYDRA.
Steve's eyes met his, confused and angry and scared, and Bucky couldn't stop them.
In the seconds he'd stood frozen, Steve had disappeared into the van and the van had sped away. Bucky shook it off, reached, and appeared inside the van, crouched protectively over Steve. As he appeared, he dropped the illusion from his arm and snarled, "Back the fuck off."
The men who'd been pinning Steve to the van's floor flinched away, and Bucky snarled again, sending them scrambling into the corners. They recognised him, knew him from rumour and gossip and those terrified whispers on the wind.
His hands were running over Steve even as he scanned the van, locking eyes with each human being, each fragile bag of blood and bone that he could. Not. Hurt. They were servants of HYDRA and he could not act against them. He couldn't snatch Steve away, because it would be acting against servants of HYDRA. He could do nothing but bluff.
"Bucky?" Steve's voice was a low whisper, steady, and Bucky wanted to weep. "What's happening?"
"It's HYDRA," he replied, voice equally quiet.
He glanced down to meet Steve's eyes and saw that Steve knew what that meant. Knew Bucky would be helpless. Saw the fear flash through his eyes before he pushed it down.
"What the hell is going on back there?" the driver yelled over his shoulder as he pushed the van though traffic.
"It's, it's the Asset," one of the men replied. "It's in the van."
There was a beat of silence and then the driver said, in a voice that was absolutely flat, "Then I guess we got the right person. Pierce will be pleased."
"Bucky, you should go, get away." Steve was pushing at Bucky's hands.
"I'm not leaving you." He could do nothing to protect him and it was clawing at him but he wasn't going to leave him to face this alone. Steve was going to make him go. He saw the intention cross his face and slapped his hand over Steve's mouth. "Don't. Don't do it. Please." Steve finally nodded and Bucky pulled his hand away.
Bucky crouched on the floor of the van, terrifyingly aware of the guns now trained on Steve's fragile human body. He crouched lower over Steve, trying to hide him from sight.
They dragged Steve into a huge echoing room, bare concrete walls opening into other echoing rooms, and flung him to the floor at the feet of an ordinary looking man in a suit. Bucky didn't recognise him, but he recognised his eyes. They were cold, arrogant, absolutely assured that everything their owner did in this world was right.
They weren't alone, surrounded by the team who'd snatched Steve off the street, other armed personnel arrayed around the room.
"Steven Grant Rogers, son of Sarah Rogers and Joseph Rogers. You're an artist, I believe, spend your time painting pictures for people without the talent to paint them themselves."
Steve didn't respond, just glared up at him.
"Allow me to introduce myself." He stood over Steve, not even acknowledging Bucky, who was crouched beside Steve, one hand on his shoulder, squeezing, he knew, hard enough to hurt. But he couldn’t let go, couldn’t make himself loosen his grip. "My name is Alexander Pierce and I would very much like to know how you ended up with my Asset."
Steve scowled up at him, pushed himself up onto his elbows, tried to rise but a booted foot shoved him back down and Bucky could do nothing. "He's not yours."
"That is unfortunately correct, for the moment, but it's going to be rectified quite soon."
"Fuck you," Steve ground out and one of the men slapped him across the face, making his head snap back, a trickle of blood running from his nose. Bucky snarled, nothing human in the sound, and for the first time Pierce looked at him.
"Someone move it, please." There were hands on him, pulling him away from Steve, Steve who reached out for him, but there were hands on him, too, and Bucky couldn't resist, couldn't even fight back, because they were servants of HYDRA and that would be acting against them. They let him go, only one retaining a grip on his metal arm, enough to hold him away from Steve, because the one holding him was a servant of HYDRA.
"Why didn't you just kill me?" Steve asked, wiping the blood from his nose, and Bucky wanted to scream at him not to say things like that. But he knew, he knew where this had to end, even as he desperately tried to deny it.
"I considered it, I actually had a man ready to go, but I decided to be generous. To give you a chance to have your death mean something." Pierce smiled, calm and reasonable. "You are, after all, a human being. You deserve that chance. You are going to die. But I'm going to give you a choice. You can die knowing you took a step forward, that your death helped push the world towards order. Or you can die for nothing, let it be meaningless and wasteful."
His expectant look at Steve was met with stony silence.
"HYDRA built in a, let's call it a cancellation clause, when we created the Asset. Can't have a weapon only one person can ever use, and if the only option is killing the holder, well, that gets problematic." Pierce nodded at one of the black clad men and he disappeared through a door, reappeared holding Bucky's bottle. Bucky flinched at the sight of it. "Repudiate it. Send it back to its bottle. I'll claim it and you can have the satisfaction of knowing you did something important before you died."
"He doesn't belong to you. You can't treat him like this. You need to set him free."
"I'm going to take it either way." Pierce was looking at Steve curiously, like he was an anomaly Pierce hadn't quite figured out. "In the end it's not going to make a difference."
"It does to me. And it does to Bucky. I'm not giving him to you."
Pierce sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm disappointed. But not surprised." He held out his hand and one of the black clad men put a gun in it and then hauled Steve to his feet. Pierce pointed the gun at Steve's head. "Any last words?"
Bucky was frantic, his mind was screaming and he couldn't do anything, he couldn’t get away from the man holding him, he couldn't do anything he couldn't do anything he couldn't act against a servant of HYDRA he couldn't...
Steve's eyes locked onto his, calm and clear and very blue. Bucky went still, stared back with a wild desperation as Steve spoke. "I love you. I'm sorry I can't save you. But I love you so much. Just, remember that, okay?"
The words touched off a firestorm, roaring through him, twisting with his rising, helpless rage.
The gun didn't go off. Pierce was lowering it, face twisted in disgust. "Now I'm just offended. It's a thing. They're part of the reason this world is slipping into disorder. The magical races, the abominations, their very existence is an affront to everything HYDRA stands for." Pierce put the safety on the gun. "I've changed my mind. Kill him slowly."
The man in black kicked Steve's feet out from under him, another joined in, wrestling him to the floor as Steve fought. Bucky heard the dull sound of bones breaking, saw Steve's wrist snap, his skin go bone white, heard the grunt of pain as he refused to scream and he was helpless, helpless to save him because everyone in this room was a servant of HYDRA.
Everyone except him.
Time slowed, stopped.
He was frozen in a moment of perfect singing silence. Steve was pinned to the floor, fighting, still fighting, the bright flash of a blade held above him.
Rage and desperation and terror slammed through him, leaving perfect clarity in their wake.
He was not a servant of HYDRA. He was Steve's servant. Bound to him by chains of magic ancient when HYDRA was newly born.
He could act against himself.
For the first time since his capture in the frozen north of the world he reached for that ancient bond, embraced it.
The metal arm they had affixed to his body was forged of magic and metal. Calling on his powers, his cursed, muted powers, knowing this was utter desperation, he summoned a crude axe, crafted of metal and magic and fire, and he lifted it high.
With all his strength and all his will he slammed the blade into his left shoulder where metal joined flesh. He existed only in this moment, in this second; in this moment, in this second, he was not acting against a servant of HYDRA.
The universe listened. The universe agreed.
The explosion of light and heat killed the man who'd been holding him in place. The dead metal dropped to the floor, dissolving into blood and ash and smoke as it fell, the pieces in his body dissolving to nothing. He swallowed his scream, agony driving through him. Spun his power to heal his flesh as HYDRA's bindings burned away, leaving only the old binding, the first binding, linking him to Steve.
His power, his true, unfettered power, was free.
Rage painted the room red and he moved, blindingly fast, intercepted the blade about to slice into Steve. Tore it from the man's hands. His smile was feral, teeth bared.
"You can't—" was all the man got out before Bucky was in motion. He was death, faster than thought, and even one-armed he brought ruin down upon them. Rendered every living thing that was not-Steve into blood and bone.
No one was trying to kill Steve, no one cared about him any longer in the face of their destruction, but he was still at risk from errant blades, from stray bullets, as HYDRA tried to save their lives. But nothing touched him. Bucky was there, between him and danger, and nothing touched him, not even a drop of blood.
***
Steve knew he should be horrified. People were dying. Bucky was tearing them apart. But he wasn't. These were the people that enslaved Bucky. But he didn't look. He knelt in the centre of the room and locked his eyes on his knees, hand wrapped around his broken wrist, chest tight, body throbbing with pain, and he did not look.
Finally, the room fell silent, the only sound Steve's harsh breaths. They were joined by the sound of footsteps, sticky as Bucky walked across the blood slicked floor. His shadow fell across Steve. Steve didn't look up. He wasn't afraid. His heart was pounding and he couldn't look up but he wasn't afraid. There was nothing in him that knew how to be afraid of Bucky.
Bucky crouched in front of him and Steve had no choice but to lift his head. He meant to meet Bucky's eyes but his gaze caught on the empty left shoulder and stuck there. It was smooth, the skin silvery pale, almost gleaming, visible through the tattered sleeve of his blood-soaked shirt. The metal arm was gone. Convulsively swallowing, his eyes darted up, meeting Bucky's. "Your arm."
His eyes were glittering with specks of gold, his face was spattered with blood, and there was nothing even remotely human there. "It was never mine," he said and placed his now clean hand against Steve's cheek. It was warm and Steve closed his eyes and leaned into it as he felt Bucky's power flow through him, healing his wrist, his face, soothing his breathing, every ache and bruise fading.
When he opened his eyes, the room was empty, all evidence of the slaughter gone, and Bucky was clean of blood. Bucky's hand curved around the back of his neck and Steve tipped forward to lean his forehead against his chest. "How?"
"They bound me never to act against a servant of HYDRA. I wasn't their servant anymore, I was yours. So I acted against myself."
"You cut the arm off." He couldn’t keep the horror-tinged awe out of his voice, couldn’t help lifting his hands to wrap his fingers tightly in the front of Bucky's shirt.
"I didn't know if it would work, but I was desperate." His fingers curled convulsively and he pulled Steve closer.
"Does that mean you're free?"
"Of HYDRA."
Steve pulled back to look at him.
"I'm back to being a genie like in the stories," he said gently. "That means you have three wishes now."
Steve's heart stuttered and hope welled up in him. With a shaky smile he carefully cupped Bucky's face in his hands. "There's only one thing I want," he said. "All of my wishes, all of them, I want you to be free."
Bucky's eyes went wide and the colour melted into pure gold.
There should have been explosions of light, the universe should have trembled, the very heavens shifting in their spheres.
Instead, the bottle crumbled to dust.
***
Bucky felt it flow through him, golden and warm, pushing out through his skin, scouring him clean of the chains placed on him so long ago in the frozen north of the world.
He was free.
Genies were creatures of fire, of flame, and he felt it thunder through him. The physical body into which he'd been forced dissolved into light. Freed from the physical, he laughed and spun around Steve, whose expression was pure wonder as he was surrounded by Bucky's true form. He had substance enough to flow across Steve's skin like water and he poured warmth and joy into him before he twisted away and leapt towards the ceiling, disappearing from Steve's view.
He was not precisely in this dimension, but not precisely gone. He wouldn't leave Steve alone in this place but he had to journey forth into the realms of his kind, where he had not been for over a thousand years.
There was no longer a chain binding them together, but Bucky was still aware of Steve, still had the link he'd placed on him. He felt Steve's frosted edge of sadness as he stared up at the ceiling. Knew some small part of him wondered if Bucky would return.
It was both revelation and not when he realised he would always return for Steve. Steve had set him free, had been setting him free from the first day he'd summoned him, all unwitting, from the bottle.
Bucky paused, spun around, and dove back towards Steve. It was easy, with his powers fully restored, to gather the physical body around him once more. It wasn't a surprise when it manifested exactly as it had been, with only a single arm. This body had grown too used to having only one arm that was truly its own. It would be simplicity to create a new body, to spin a fresh physical manifestation out of magic and power, but that wouldn't be him, it wouldn't be Bucky, who Steve had named, who Steve knew. It wouldn't be the body that knew Steve, that had learned him, and Bucky wasn't prepared to risk it. He would live with this body.
"Bucky!" Steve was scrambling to his feet. Bucky smiled, the joy of his freedom still humming through him, and his eyes were molten gold. Steve was scrambling over to him, leaning in to hug him, but he hesitated. Bucky wrapped his arm around Steve's waist and held on tight and Steve put both his arms around Bucky and pressed his face into his shoulder. "You came back."
"What, did you think I wasn't going to?"
"Maybe."
"Idiot. I wouldn't leave you here."
Steve's laugh was muffled and he rubbed his forehead against Bucky's chest. Turned his head to look at Bucky's left shoulder. "It's still gone. I thought..."
Bucky glanced over at it. "It's how this body remembers being. I could create a new body, one with both arms, but this is the body that knows you. This is the one you know. I don't really want to change that." He tapped his forehead against Steve's. "Ready to go home?"
"Yes." Steve suddenly sounded exhausted and Bucky held him close.
"Close your eyes."
Steve closed his eyes and Bucky carried them through the dark.
The apartment was torn to pieces. HYDRA had ripped it apart in their search for the bottle. Steve didn't have time to do more than stare in shock before Bucky restored it.
"Thanks." Steve slowly walked around the apartment, gently touching things, and Bucky leaned against the table, watching him closely.
"Steve." He looked up. "You okay?"
"No?" he ventured. "Maybe. I don't know. They almost took you and I almost died. All those people did die and I think I'm glad they're dead. And you're free," he added, with a kind of awe. "It's a lot to take in."
Instead of replying, Bucky pushed off the table and held out his arm. Without hesitation, Steve walked into him and wrapped his arms around Bucky. Bucky hugged him tightly, his one arm firm across Steve's back. He held him until he felt the tension melt away, until Steve was relaxed against him. "It's never going to happen again. You're as safe as I can make you and I have all my power now."
"That means you're safe, too. Doesn't it?" Steve asked.
"I know what the magic feels like. I won't be caught in a bottle again." Bucky's voice was an eloquent mixture of threat and promise and Steve breathed a quiet sigh of relief. They stood together, Bucky's chin resting on Steve's hair, until he leaned back so he could see Steve's face.
"There's something else." Steve made a quiet, questioning noise. "You said you loved me."
"I'm sorry." Steve looked away. "That's not, it's not something you have to worry about."
Bucky let go of Steve long enough to put a finger over his mouth and say, "Hush," before folding his arm around him once more. Steve fell silent and Bucky smiled. "You were about to die and you said you loved me. You said you were sorry you couldn’t save me. That you couldn't save me." Steve's eyes were fixed on the floor. "Look at me?"
When he lifted his head, Bucky carefully, gently, kissed him. It was a very human thing, kissing, but Steve was human, and Bucky wanted to, needed to, speak his language. It was another part of that strange physical need he'd developed for Steve. Steve was looking up at him with wide eyes. "Bucky?"
"I don't know if I love you," he admitted. "I don't know what that feels like to a human. All I know is that my universe is divided into two parts: you and everything that isn't you. I know you're the only one I want touching me and you're the only one I ever want to touch."
Steve swallowed hard, his eyes bright. "That's sounds a lot like love to me."
"Good." Bucky tipped his head down to kiss him intently, sliding his hand into his hair to hold him close, and Steve pressed up into it, making a noise low in his throat.
Eventually, Steve broke the kiss, shaking his head a little, like he was clearing it. He took a deliberate step backwards, put one hand up against Bucky's chest to stop him from following. "Shouldn't you be out there? Being free?" he asked. "Not back where you were before you found your freedom."
Bucky put his hand over Steve's where it rested on his chest, wriggled his fingers until they were twined with Steve's. "That's the thing about freedom. It means I get to choose. I will be out there, there's so many things I need to see, so many things I need to do. But I also need you. I want you. I want to be with you, here in this apartment, and out there. I want you to come with me."
"Where?"
"Everywhere."
***
Steve imagined their future: much like their past, but with Bucky gloriously, wondrously free. All his quicksilver wit and his annoying behaviour and his mischief and his protectiveness and everything that made him Bucky.
Being free to say shut the hell up when he was being an asshole.
Being free to say I love you.
Being free to love him and be loved, however Bucky felt it, in return.
"Yes."
"Yes?" Bucky's eyes were very gold and his grin was bright and warm.
"Yes," he repeated. "I love you and I need you and I want you, here with me and anywhere you want to take me." He smiled as he leaned up to kiss Bucky, leaning into him, both hands sliding up his back to hold him as tight as he could. As Bucky's hand cupped the back of his head, he smiled against his mouth and said, "I'm really glad I didn't dream you," and Bucky tipped back his head and laughed.