After a few months of sharing a bed again, Bucky notices that Steve doesn’t fall asleep very easily. He senses him lying awake next to him, sometimes shivering a little and always tossing and turning, and eventually he gets him to admit that it’s the dark. Steve can’t stand how dark it is in their room. It’s too confining, too all consuming, too much like the harsh blackness of water flooding into a cockpit and the taste of blood filling his mouth.
And really, that won’t do. So Bucky goes to the store and gathers a few packs of glow stars and planets and spends a while arranging them in constellations and clusters on the ceiling one afternoon while Steve is at his art classes at their local community college.
“What’s this?” Steve asks, backpack slung over one shoulder and socked feet shuffling on the wood floor of their bedroom when he enters. Bucky looks over from where he’s arranging Mars near his ceiling plants.
“Oh, you know. A little something so nighttime isn’t so dark,” he says.
And that night as they lay cuddled together, Steve on Bucky’s chest, looking up at their bedroom ceiling and trading little stories about their own constellations, Steve feels safe. He sleeps through the entire night.