Chapter Text
The last place Clint wants to be on New Year’s Eve-eve is IKEA. Not that he has anything against the store in general - who doesn’t love meatballs, and if you have to buy a chest of drawers, it’s obviously more fun if it starts life as a 3D puzzle - but the weather is awful and he’d really struggled to dig up enough motivation to drag himself through the heavy snow and biting cold for a goddamn coffee table.
Clint’s also a little freaked out by the store, too. It’s weirdly empty in a way that’s giving him the creeps. He’d hoped it would be quieter than usual, but the little half-houses and dressed sets are strange without other people milling around them. It turns out they need crowds of people opening and closing all the cupboards and drawers and falling over-exaggeratedly back onto the sofas as if that’s how they actually sit down to seem normal; abandoned, they’re uncanny and liminal.
But Katie’s back from Palos Verdes for New Year’s, and she’s going to be coming over in the morning to shoot with him, as long as the forecast storm holds off for another half a day. The thing is, if she sees that he’s still managing with the single plank balanced on a pile of books at one end and a breezeblock at the other, she’ll be so judgy. So he needs to buy a coffee table, and he needs to do that today, and it needs to be one that he can assemble both single handedly and in a maximum of three hours. Which means that instead of getting ready to ring in the new year (sitting on the couch in his underwear, eating cold pizza and watching It’s A Wonderful Life for the eighty-seventh time), Clint has braved the storm and is now weighing up the relative merits of a LACK (cheap, looks easy to assemble) vs an ARKELSTORP (name is more fun, the flaps look a bit like dog ears) when he sees Bucky.
The fact of seeing him doesn’t immediately register. Clint sees him everywhere, all the time; he’s such a permanent fixture in Clint’s periphery these days that he assumes IKEA Bucky is another product of his sad daydreams, a phantasm conjured up by his brain because it doesn’t think he’s sufficiently miserable or whatever. But his heartbroken hallucinations tend to behave less like actual Bucky and more like the lead characters in the kind of trashy romance novels Nat reads whenever a long mission has a little downtime.
(Presumably. Clint hasn’t read them himself, obviously, so his assessment is based on guesswork and cheesy cover art.)
Anyway, the Bucky in IKEA is acting more like the lead character in a kid’s cartoon, trying to hide behind a display POÄNG despite being several feet taller and not noticeably shaped like an armchair. It’s not a successful attempt; the fact that he’s even trying makes him way more conspicuous than if he’d just walked around like a normal human being.
It’s been a while since Clint has seen him in person, which settled the question of whether or not Nat knew about them fooling around; she’s the only person he knows who’d be clever enough to figure it out and compassionate enough to make sure their professional paths didn’t cross once it crashed and burned. Clint appreciates the gesture, but the practical impact of it is that now he’s faced with Bucky in the flesh (and metal), and he is wildly underprepared to deal with the situation.
It’s not just Clint’s emotions that are all over the place, as unruly as a toddler in a ball pit; there’s a distinct physical reaction too. His hands twitch - whether to grasp or to defend, he’s not sure - and his heartbeat picks up, drumming double-time inside his rib cage. Telling his heart to calm the fuck down, he wanders over to say hi, partly because he wants to know if he’s able to do that without his body giving up on him completely, and partly because he feels like it’s important that Bucky realises how shit he is at hide and seek.
“Hey,” Clint says. “I don’t wanna tell you how to live your life, but you always struck me as more of a STRANDMON guy, honestly.” Bucky scowls dramatically, but Clint’s not going to apologize. The POÄNG looks like it would splinter into kindling if Bucky so much as looked at it the wrong way.
“I don’t want any chair,” Bucky says aggressively. “Not that it’s any of your business,” he adds as an afterthought.
Clint hadn’t realized calling time on their… whatever it had been, had also meant he no longer got to have any opinions on any aspect of Bucky’s life, up to and including armchairs, but he’s not invested enough to argue the point. He shrugs and turns to leave, swiveling on his heel as the store’s PA crackles to life.
“This is a customer announcement,” a voice tells them. The sound is heavily distorted but even that can’t disguise how stressed and frantic they sound. “The, uh. The storm is real bad now, guys, I mean real bad? Like out of a movie bad. Should we be worried about the roof bad. Maybe end of days bad? And I think - Jeremy! No!”
“Can all customers and staff please make their way to the restaurant immediately,” another voice, possibly Jeremy, requests politely, and the PA switches off with a high-pitched whine. Clint and Bucky share a glance, concerned and confused, before shrugging and heading towards the restaurant. They’re halfway there before Clint realizes he and Bucky have fallen into the same rhythm, their arms brushing against each other as they walk. It seems as natural as breathing, although once he’s aware of it, his arms suddenly feel impossibly awkward.
***
Jeremy is a very tall, very skinny man in his late teens or early twenties, who is softly spoken and looks nervous of their potential reactions as he announces that the storm is not only a little early but a lot worse than expected.
Predictably, nobody is thrilled that they’re effectively trapped there for the foreseeable future, but they don’t complain as much as Jeremy was clearly worried about. Their company for the night is Jeremy, a handful of IKEA employees including an older woman who Clint suspects was the panicky voice from earlier, four other shoppers, and Bucky and himself.
“So the good news is there’s lots of beds,” Jeremy adds. “Just pick whatever place you want to sleep, and eat whatever you want. I think cell service is still good, but if you need to call anyone, you can use the office phones. Umm, I think that’s it?”
“Are you sure we can’t leave?”
“I mean, I’m not locking you in. But I tried to get across the parking lot just now and the snow is so thick I couldn’t get more than a couple of steps out the door before I had to turn back,” Jeremy says apologetically. “I could barely see my hand two inches in front of my face, so, like. Realistically, there’s no way anyone is getting out of here.”
Raising his voice to be heard over the disconcerted mumbling that follows this, Jeremy pleads for everyone not to panic. “I’m sure they’ll dig us out tomorrow, and in the meantime, we’ve got two Avengers here to look after us.” He gestures at Clin and Bucky and smiles weakly. “We’ll be fine in here with the Winter Soldier and Iron Fist.”
***
Clint chooses his ‘room’ for the night based on the people he imagines would live there; he wanted the airy room with the beach house vibes that was home to an artist and her businesswoman wife, but one of the other customers got to it first. He settles instead for a room with dark green walls and a stupidly tall bed that needs a little stepping-stool next to it to climb into, and pictures a writer or journalist sitting up in bed and tapping away at a clackety keyboard. They have a nice life, Clint decides. Simple, but fulfilling, and they’ve never fallen in love with someone who treats them as a mere convenience.
It’s not really late enough to sleep, and he’s not tired anyway. He climbs up onto the tall bed and starts texting his neighbors to see if someone can look after Lucky. He’s just reading an excited response from Deke when he becomes aware of a presence next to his bed.
“Everything ok?” Clint asks, because he can’t fathom a reason Bucky would be here by choice unless an Avengers-level threat has somehow developed in the parking lot in the last fifteen minutes.
Bucky frowns and shakes his head. Clint moves to climb off the bed, but Bucky stops him with a hand on his shoulder. He pulls it away as soon as Clint stops moving, like Clint’s a hot stovetop and he’s just realized he’s not wearing oven mitts.
“Don’t get up,” Bucky says. “Just… I gotta know what they mean, those looks you keep giving me. And if they don’t mean anything, can you stop? Can you just stop looking at me like that, for Chrissake, because it’s killing me. It’s killing me, Clint, I can’t do it. I can’t keep seeing you look at me like that and not have you.”
Clint stares at him, aware his jaw has dropped but unable to lift it again while his brain is busy processing Bucky’s outburst, and not just because it’s more words than he’s ever heard Bucky say at one time before. He turns it this way and that in his head, but doesn’t find an angle that makes it make sense.
“What way do I look at you?” Clint asks eventually.
“Like you want me,” Bucky says plainly, and what the fuck is Clint supposed to do with that? It’s not like he’s wrong. “I don’t - fuck, you know what I’ve been through. When I tell you this is unbearable…”
“Me looking like I want you is unbearable for you?” Clint asks, to clarify.
“Yeah, asshole, it is,” Bucky says, nearly spitting the words out. He’s shaking his head as he speaks, but he keeps his gaze locked on Clint’s face the whole time. “I can deal with not having you. I mean, it sucks, but I’ll live, you know. I can tell myself it’s probably healthier not driving myself crazy over some guy who doesn’t give a damn. But I can’t do that if you keep looking at me like that.”
It is, Clint thinks distantly, patently absurd to expect to unpick all of that. It would be impossible on a good night, and tonight is already far too weird to be categorized as ‘good’. So the entirety of Bucky’s ludicrous pronouncement will have to remain unanalyzed. He chooses the part of it that stuck out in his brain the most to pick at, instead. “I don’t give a damn? I don’t give a damn? I - me? I? Don’t give a damn?!”
“Yeah.”
There are probably a million better ways to respond to that than kissing Bucky, but Clint has never claimed to be a master strategian. He twists on the bed, clutching at Bucky’s shoulders, and lets their lips find each other. They fit together so perfectly, he thinks, surely this is what they’re supposed to do, while he’s still capable of any kind of sensible thought. And then Bucky’s pushing him back on the bed and climbing up to lie on top of him, and his mind goes completely, blissfully empty of any thoughts that aren’t letting his legs fall apart so Bucky can slot himself between them, or the slick-slide feel of Bucky’s tongue against his. It’s not until he’s tipping his head back so Bucky can suck a bruise into the paper-thin skin of his neck that his thoughts catch up to him.
“I gave so many damns,” Clint tells Bucky, fingers clenching tight in his hair, then relaxing when Bucky grunts in protest. “All of the - fuck, Bucky, do that again - all of the damns. So many dams, I’m practically the Netherlands.”
Bucky grunts into his neck, which feels weird and tickly. Clint can’t tell if he’s agreeing with him, or disagreeing, or some secret third option that only makes sense in Bucky’s head. Then he pushes himself off Clint and looks down at him with dark eyes.
“You said no, on the plane.”
“I - yeah, but not because I didn’t give a damn,” Clint says exasperatedly. “I was trying to look after myself. I’m not the one who left, every time.”
“And what if I was trying to look after myself too?” Bucky asks. His eyes grow darker still, and he drops down to claim Clint’s mouth in a fierce kiss. There’s an edge of possessiveness and desperation to it that’s unfamiliar to Clint, but not unwelcome. “What if I thought you didn’t care about me, and I had just enough instinct for self-preservation left to try not to get too close. What then.”
Bucky lets Clint roll them over and straddle him, kneeling up and looking down at him. He reaches for Clint’s thighs, gripping them a shade too tightly, as if he’s still scared Clint’s going to bolt away. Clint puts his hands on top of Bucky’s, strokes his thumb over knuckles clenched tight. There are so many things he wants to say, and none of the words in his head seem right. They won’t line up properly in his mouth. “I don’t know how you could think I didn’t care,” he settles on. It’s not all he wants to say, but it’s not far off it.
“You always wanted to keep it a secret. Keep me a secret. You dragged me into cleaning cupboards and bathrooms and whatever to make out with me, and then you avoided me in public.” Bucky’s eyes flash with something Clint’s never seen before, and he finally looks away. “That first time, on the train… When Hulk showed up, you couldn’t get away from me fast enough. I thought you were gonna give yourself a stitch, the way you leapt off me like that.”
“Shit. Shit. Bucky, really?”
“I get it, you know. I wouldn’t want anyone knowing either, if I were in your shoes, but I - ” Clint shuts Bucky up with a kiss, tipping himself forward and stopping his fall with hands on Bucky’s shoulders. This time when their mouths meet, Clint doesn’t try and swallow his moans, lets them fall freely while his hands dig in, claiming Bucky as his own, gripping so tightly it feels like his hands will never shake loose again.
“Oh my god,” Clint says a few moments later, when he’s had to pull away to catch his breath. “This is what Nat means when she says idiot4idiot, isn’t it.”
***
“I can - I could go,” Bucky says later. The store is quiet around them, that snow-covered, muffled sort of silent that Clint usually sleeps through and misses. He turns his head and burrows into Bucky’s neck a little, breathes in his scent shamelessly.
“Stay,” Clint says.
“I’m sorry.” Bucky’s hand squeezes his shoulder, not tight, just long enough that Clint knows he didn’t dream it.
There’s a lot more to talk about, probably, but Clint figured most of it can wait until the morning. Until then, he only needs to say one more thing. “Don’t be sorry. Be mine.”