[by thefuzzyaya,
found here]
Author's Summary:
Artist Steve Rogers moves in next to the Winter Soldier, who has been missing from the news for two years. Steve wants to paint him more than anything.
My Summary:
This is a Shrinkyclinks love story. It's beautifully and sensitively written.
Excerpt:
Are you afraid? Bucky wants to ask him. Are you afraid of me?
He doesn’t. Speaking is something that takes so much thinking through for Bucky that he almost never says anything he doesn’t mean. He almost never says anything without heavily weighing the ramifications of the phrase first.
He wasn’t allowed to speak for a very long time. He doesn’t take it for granted now.
“I like your scarf,” Steve says pleasantly.
Bucky brings his hand up—the flesh one—to touch the fibrous threads wrapped around his neck. The scarf is made of very soft dark blue wool, the stitches big, the yarn thick. A gift from Natalia, for Bucky’s first birthday After.
Bucky likes Steve’s… everything. His nose, his eyes, his smile—which is silver-quick and very kind.
“Thank you, Steve,” Bucky says. He likes the shape of Steve’s name in his mouth. The word is short and smooth, and nestles easily at the front of his lips. He files it away in the back of his mind, right at the top of his list of words he knows he’ll always like to say: Steve, Steve, Steve.
The conversation is stalling, and Bucky knows this is his own fault. Bucky isn’t good at conversation—Bucky isn’t good at people. It’s why he waited so long to meet Steve. He knew he was living next to someone new, and he didn’t want to ruin it.
The conversation is stalling… but Steve doesn’t seem to mind.
He’s sipping his coffee easily, and he’s looking up at Bucky with a gaze that is wide and very blue and carries the weight of zero expectations. He is looking at Bucky like they’re simply two men, seated across from each other in a coffee shop in their town, having a normal day, and not—
Not who they are. The Winter Soldier, and a man made of spun-strong gold.
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