#shoutout to everyone who voted 'countertop' in that one poll; this one's for you!

[firstelevens]

sambucky + “stubborn” for your consideration!

this screenshot was the first thing I saw from the Thunderbolts trailer and unfortunately I was perfectly positioned to have a brainwave about it. now it's a fic. bon appetit.

( read it on AO3 )

As it so often has these days, one in the morning finds Sam crawling around on the kitchen floor, mapping out a pattern in subway tiles. Tonight, he’s gone for herringbone, a choice that he regretted as soon as he started. There’s a legal pad on the floor beside him, covered in notes about angled cuts and tile wastage, and he’s still not sure the pattern looks the way it should. There are probably YouTube videos about this exact thing, but this is the first night in weeks that Sam can’t just blast a home improvement video from his phone at any given hour.

He pushes off the floor and stands to get a look at the pattern he laid out—his knees protest, which he doesn’t have time to be concerned about—and huffs in disappointment. The tiles are far too chunky for the design, the angled set looking more like a mistake than an artistic choice. It might come through if Sam was willing to tile the whole kitchen that way, but it makes his head spin to consider how much tile would be wasted if he did.

He’s still frowning down at the pattern when the creak of the staircase landing lets him know that he’s about to have company. Apparently, not even Bucky’s stealth is a match for hardwood floors in a hundred year old house, and after a moment, he appears in the kitchen doorway.

“Sam,” he says, his voice still hoarse from sleep, “why the hell are you still up?”

His hair is a fluffy mess, caught in an awkward growing-out stage, and he’s wearing a sweatshirt from some charity event that Kamala had wheedled them into attending last month, and he’s just bleary enough that all Sam has to do is hold out a hand before Bucky is taking it and allowing himself to be reeled in. He lets out a quiet oof when he collides with Sam’s shoulder, but immediately readjusts, slipping his arms around Sam’s waist and resting his chin on Sam’s shoulder.

“How are you gonna shake off your jet lag if you don’t get some sleep?” asks Sam. “If you fall asleep mid-conversation at lunch with Joaquín tomorrow, I’m never letting you live it down.”

“I’m over a hundred years old, Sam; I can nap whenever I damn well please.”

“You could also sleep in our bedroom at night like a normal person.”

Bucky snorts. “Are we pretending to have normal sleep schedules now?”

“Shut up, it’s aspirational,” says Sam. “Just like all those kitchen Pinterest boards are about to be if I can’t figure out this stupid tile arrangement.”

“That’s because you’re basically sleepwalking.”

“If you’re just gonna be quippy about it, you can take your ass right back up to bed,” snaps Sam. “We’re already running behind schedule, and I need these tiles set before the guy comes to install the stove, and we bought all these decorative pieces and we had a plan for all of it, but I can’t for the life of me remember how the designer at the tile showroom made it work, and if I can’t, that’s another three weeks.”

He feels Bucky’s arms retreat from around his waist and immediately regrets it. It’s not Bucky’s fault that Sam’s brain isn’t working right now, just like it isn’t his fault that Team Cap got called in at the crack of dawn today to deal with a squadron of rogue androids wreaking havoc in Chicago. 

“Sorry, Buck,” he says, scrubbing a hand down his face and turning in the direction of Bucky’s footsteps. “This is the third catastrophe of the week, and I just– what are you doing?”

Bucky shrugs at Sam as he turns on the tap and fills the electric kettle with water. “What does it look like, birdie? I’m making tea.”

Sam narrows his eyes. “Why?”

“Because I’m not gonna sleep unless you come to bed, and you’re not gonna come to bed until you figure out how to make this tile pattern work. I don’t solve my problem until I solve yours.”

“There’s that romance I’ve been missing,” says Sam, his voice flat.

He gets a raised eyebrow in response. “Romance? Is that what you call staying downstairs to do math instead of coming up to bed when your partner just got back from a month-long mission?”

“It was barely three weeks,” scoffs Sam, like he hadn’t kept up a running tally of days until Bucky’s return. “And your so-called mission was to Wakanda, where you spent most of your time playing with baby goats and being nosy about Shuri’s experiments.”

“And that was very hard, very lonely work,” says Bucky, flicking the kettle on and turning to grab mugs out of the cabinet. He sets them on the counter, then drops in a tea bag each from the fancy wooden caddy that Joaquín got them as a housewarming present. “I pined for you, Samuel.”

“I’m sure you did,” says Sam. He decides to leave Bucky to it and turns back to the tiles, halfway to kneeling on the floor again before Bucky makes a disapproving noise from behind him. He huffs and looks over his shoulder, straightening up again. “What now, Barnes?”

“You keep at it like this and your knees and back are gonna give you trouble for the next month.”

Sam crosses his arms, more annoyed at Bucky being right than anything else. “How else do I make this puzzle work? It’s not going to make sense unless I can move the pieces myself.”

In retrospect, it’s gracious of Bucky to not point out that crawling on his hands and knees didn’t do much to make it make sense, either. In the moment, he just says, “Give me a second,” and disappears down the hallway again, turning into the family room. 

When he reappears a moment later, he has two couch cushions in his hand, dropping them both at Sam’s feet. “Knock yourself out,” he says, gesturing to the tiles on the floor.

“Oh,” says Sam, blinking down at the pillows. He doesn’t know why he didn’t think of that earlier. “Thanks, baby.”

Bucky just hums in acknowledgment. “At least this way we don’t have to put out a press statement about you getting injured in a fight with kitchen decor.”

“Shut up,” says Sam, but it’s much softer now. He kneels on the cushion in front of him and sets to work again, referring to his legal pad and trying to make sense of the tile layout one more time. 

On the other side of the island, he can hear Bucky pouring the hot water into their mugs. A second later, he hears the click and swoosh of something gliding across a smooth surface, followed by the thwack of two coasters sliding over the edge of the counter and landing on the floor. One of them skids far enough on the landing to end up on Sam’s tiles, and though he flicks it out of the way, it makes a familiar fondness bloom in his chest.

“Why are you pelting me with coasters? I know your mother raised you better than that.”

“She did,” says Bucky, coming around the counter. “Which is why I would never put these mugs on these ‘original hardwoods’ that you love so much.”

Sam makes a face. Being excited about original hardwood floors in a house from 1910 is normal and he won’t be shamed for it. “And you couldn’t just, I don’t know, carry over the coasters like a normal person?”

“Then I’d have to make two trips,” Bucky says. “I’m being efficient, Sam.”

“You’re being lazy, is what that is,” says Sam. He reaches up to take one of the mugs as Bucky sits down beside him.

“I prefer to think of it as saving my energy for important things,” says Bucky, setting aside his tea. ���Like saving the world. Or ravishing my partner after yearning for him for weeks on end.”

Sam tries to nudge Bucky, but three years of partnership and supersoldier reflexes mean that Bucky almost never catches a ‘stop being corny’ elbow—although when he does, he makes sure to whine about it for far too long. “All that yearning and you still couldn’t bring me my own Border Tribe blanket?”

“That thing is enormous, Sam; why would we need two?”

“What if I want to curl up in a chair on my own?”

Bucky snorts. “Then I assume you’ll just steal the blanket, the same way you always do at night.”

Unfortunately, it’s an accusation backed up by hard evidence, so Sam has no defense against it, except to say, “What do you even need the blankets for? You’re like a furnace; you’ve got the serum.”

“And what do you even need the blankets for when you’ve got me?”

Sam can see the corners of Bucky’s mouth turning up just slightly, and he opts not to give him the satisfaction of a laugh. “You better be glad you didn’t say that back in Delacroix, because Sarah would never let you hear the end of it.”

“You say that like you’re not going to tell her about this on the phone tomorrow.”

He can’t argue with that, so he doesn’t, turning back to the tiles and the legal pad instead. Bucky watches him work in silence for a bit, drawn-out enough that Sam is itching to break it. It’s easy to forget that even before Bucky was the Winter Soldier, he spent his army career waiting out the enemy from a sniper’s nest, and he can play chicken with the best of them. Three years of partnership has built up Sam’s tolerance, too, though, and when he stays silent, it’s Bucky who finally cracks.

“So should we talk about why you’re this worried about a bunch of tiles? And don’t tell me that anything worth doing is worth doing well. Tile-arranging in the dead of night is not something worth doing.”

“Maybe I just take pride in the things I do,” says Sam, but it sounds surly even to him.

“Of course you do,” says Bucky. “That’s hardly news. But don’t pretend this is the same thing as you getting up at the crack of dawn to work on the boat. This is something else.”

Sam frowns, looking down at the tiles that he’s been staring at for hours. He’s quiet for a long moment, but Bucky doesn’t rush him. There’s no answer that Sam can come up with, really, not one that would be remotely satisfactory.

“I can’t just want this to be done? It can’t just be that I want to check it off the list now and not later?”

“Is that what’s going on, though?”

“Maybe,” says Sam, shrugging.

“So we’ll just tile the whole kitchen the same way,” says Bucky, his voice light. “No backsplash pattern at all. Then we’ll be done.”

“It’s not that easy,” he says.

“Why not?” asks Bucky. “It’s our house, and we have a timeline to stick to, right? If the design is slowing us down, we can skip it.”

“It won’t be the same, though,” says Sam. “It won’t be right.”

Anyone else would be polite enough to leave it at that, but Sam had to go and fall in love with the stubbornest asshole he knows. “What, we don’t get to pick what’s right?”

“We already picked this,” Sam says, his voice sharp. “We picked the design and all the details, and where it would sit, and how long it would take for us to be done. We decided that this is what home should look like. We should be able to have the thing we want.”

And it’s not like Sam can’t hear himself. It’s not like he doesn’t know that his late nights of tile arranging and testing wood finishes aren’t the healthiest choices he could make. He’s just been able to ignore that until now, because for all this time, he’s had something to do and a deadline to do it by, whether it was androids to punch or a sink to order.

He hasn’t let himself think of stopping and what that means, not until right now, with Bucky’s gaze heavy on him and the quiet of the kitchen broken by a murmured, “Oh, sweetheart.”

Sam still doesn’t let himself look up, skimming his fingers over the tiles in their pattern. “I just want it to look like we wanted,” he says softly. His thoughts drift to the office upstairs, the classified files in the secret compartment of Bucky’s desk, and the lump in his throat is immediate. “So anyone who sees it knows that it’s a home. So they know that it’s our home.”

Bucky sighs, and then there’s some shuffling before he’s pulling on the sleeve of Sam’s t-shirt. “Come here, baby.”

A quick peripheral glance reveals that Bucky’s back is resting against the island cabinets now, and his arms are open. In any other circumstance, Sam might be embarrassed by how fast he moves, but he can’t bring himself to care. He lets himself be hauled into Bucky’s arms and manhandled into a more comfortable sitting position, his back to Bucky’s chest and Bucky’s arms curled protectively around him.

“Sammy, sweetheart,” says Bucky, “I don’t know what world you’re living in where it’s not already obvious that this is our house. Our dining room has purple walls, Sam. Purple. The whole room. I’ll tell you right now, nobody’s walking into that room and imagining anything except the truth.”

“It’s maroon, you heathen, and it’s a nice color,” says Sam, his voice still a little watery.

“It is,” Bucky agrees. “It’s nice, and you chose it, and every time I look at it, I’m going to think of how you told the girl at the paint counter that your man had old fashioned taste but no budget constraints, and she thought you were someone’s sugar baby redecorating their love nest.”

“That wasn’t as funny as you thought it was,” Sam says. Then, because he’s sleep deprived and his brain to mouth filter is gone, he adds: “And for the record, I’d be a great sugar baby. My taste is expensive as hell.”

“Yeah, Sam, you’re a real material girl.”

Sam frowns. “I should never have let Sarah teach you about Madonna.”

“I’d like to see you try to stop Sarah from doing anything,” says Bucky, with a snort.

“I’m sure it’ll happen plenty when I’m back down in Delacroix,” says Sam, and he feels Bucky’s arms tense. “Maybe the boys can record it for you.”

“Maybe,” echoes Bucky. He’s quiet for a long moment before he says, “I haven’t talked to them yet. I don’t know how to explain myself. I thought it might get easier when I came back stateside, but it just feels more overwhelming now.”

Sam covers Bucky’s hands with his own, giving them a squeeze. “You just have to tell them it’s the same as any mission. We go out there, we do something scary but important, and then we come back home. It’s all fine as long as you come back home.”

“I know,” Bucky says. “Just this one thing, and then we’ll both be back home.”

“Uh-huh,” says Sam.

“Just one thing,�� repeats Bucky, “and then we’ll both be here, and it’ll be home, and it won’t be because of the backsplash or the baseboards. It’ll be because it’s you and me. That’s home.”

Sam doesn’t bother to hide his sniffle this time. “Just that, huh?”

“You’ve got no idea, songbird,” says Bucky, tucking his face against Sam’s neck. “The two of us? You looking at me and actually seeing me? I think that was home even before I remembered what home was.”

He feels himself go very still as his brain makes sense of Bucky’s words, thinks of stilted conversation on a train platform and scowls exchanged in a rearview mirror. It’s not even worth trying to stop his eyes welling up.

“What the hell, Bucky?” Sam croaks, swiping at the tears. “Is this you making me feel better?”

“What?” asks Bucky, smiling against Sam’s neck. “No good?”

Sam shakes his head.

“Sorry, honey,” says Bucky, with a conciliatory kiss to Sam’s pulse point. “How ‘bout a distraction instead?”

With another sniffle: “What kind of distraction?”

The last thing that Sam is expecting is for Bucky to reach out and point at the tiles, now slightly askew with Sam and Bucky’s readjustments and their legs being sprawled out in front of them.

“What, you want to do math?”

“Not exactly.”

Sam narrows his eyes. “Then what?”

“First, I want you to remember we’re so in love that it made you tear up a second ago. Just keep that in your head for a second.”

“Bucky.”

“What, you don’t want to think about how far we’ve come?”

“Bucky.”

“Fine, but you’re going to hate it,” says Bucky. When Sam waves a hand for him to continue, he takes a deep breath and says, “I think I solved your tile thing.”

“No, you didn’t,” says Sam.

Behind him, Bucky shifts a little, then uses his foot to nudge one of the tiles out of its overlap with its neighbor, knocking it out of the herringbone shape. Then, he nudges it again so the short side of one tile sits flush against the long side of another. Straight on, it’s a right angle, but rotated forty-five degrees, it’s…

“Fuck off, I know that didn’t happen,” says Sam, pushing up onto his knees to get a better look. He leans over and replicates the pattern with four more tiles just below it: a perfect herringbone, and tight enough from the offset that the pattern is clear even with a handful of tiles. “What the hell? Was it that easy this whole time?”

“I mean…”

Sam covers his face with his hands. “Maybe you were right,” he says, but it’s garbled behind his hands.

“I don’t speak Dwarvish; can you repeat that?” asks Bucky, and Sam elbows him just because, but then he lets Bucky take his hand and lead him up to bed anyway.