Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Part One 

Bucky didn’t realize for a stupidly long time.

Visiting the cemetery wasn’t uncommon for people, especially these days, but the winter storm had been keeping them away. Not Bucky, and not this one other person, too, apparently. Bucky noticed the figure farther up, among the older graves, and it nagged at him, a little sharp dagger at the back of his mind inching forward, cutting through his brain.

Bucky specifically picked this hour for its limited traffic of grievers and he had expected even less would come with the unrelenting weather. No one usually came near Bucky’s section of the cemetery. Not only did this person invade Bucky’s physical and emotional space, but the person was also here for an old grave, for someone who died by natural causes long ago. Even if the death had felt unfair to this person, it could never be as unfair as the new graves, the ones Bucky visited. This person was entirely incapable of grieving in the raw way Bucky and millions of others did, those whose loved ones stopped existing with the snap of a finger, between the blink of an eye, because the world’s protectors failed to save the world.

Bucky was as unforgiving as the devastatingly cold winter.

The frigid wind chapped Bucky’s cheeks and lips to match his chapped heart and soul. He rubbed lily petals between two gloved fingers, trying to shake off his sour mood. Irritatingly, whenever he needed a distraction most, his mind became further fixated and locked on any subject he wished to avoid. His traitorous eyes wandered to the person ahead once more and Bucky tore his gaze away. He let go of the petal in favor of pulling on the red rubber band holding the lilies together, snapping it back in place over and over.

Every time he came, Bucky tried to bring different flowers. Google and its first website links probably bullshitted him for all he knew, but he still searched flower meanings to match his mood, to what he wished to say. Today’s choice was a stretch but also fitting. Becca hated lilies. He found that reason enough to buy them.

Pissing her off was a hard habit to shake.

Fuck. Tipping his neck back, Bucky blinked rapidly. No fucking crying in the cold. Becca had made fun of Bucky for being such a sensitive crier with all the sobbing and snot and a bucket load of tears.

“Fuck,” Bucky said. He dropped the flowers between the two gravestones he visited, unable to bend his knees. He wore three pairs of pants against the cold—thermal long underwear, then pajama pants, and because his own jeans didn’t fit over that, he pulled on a pair of Becca’s old pants. She’d always been a bigger size than him, but wearing two layers underneath her jeans was stretching the limit. They felt particularly tight in the calves, and he considered this as some indirect karma from his sister. Her wrath at him stealing her stuff extended so far that even in her death he suffered from doing so. The universe, on her behalf, was most definitely keeping him from bending his knees and forcing him to waddle like a penguin on purpose. Bringing the flowers she hated probably didn’t help his case.

Exhaling, Bucky focused on the visibility of his breath in the cold. As kids, he and Becca used to press pretzel sticks to their mouths in the winter, pulling the stick back and blowing out air, pretending their misty exhales were smoke.

The loneliness consuming Bucky today was the hollow type demanding to be filled. Half the days, the hollowness kept him in bed away from everybody. People felt like ladybugs eating away at the edges of his leafy hole-filled heart.

The other days, Bucky wanted to wallow in his hurt, to press into it like pushing on a bruise in absentminded boredom. Digging the heel of his palm into the top of his thigh the day after a hard workout, checking the soreness over and over and over until the ache was all he knew.

And then there was today.

It didn’t make sense, why of all days Bucky made a move on this one. Maybe he just missed the old woman from the fall who shared a smile with him when he passed by the grave she visited. Maybe he underestimated the low-key camaraderie he felt when others mourned nearby. Maybe he just felt sad for this poor son of a bitch whose grief powered him enough to trudge through the snow as well.

Bucky’s Mom always said he was overly friendly and protective to a fault from the very second he came out of the womb.

“Hey,” Bucky said. The wind drowned it out. “Hey!”

The person’s figure stilled and Bucky began walking toward him, cursing at the snow and Becca’s jeans. The man at the old grave stood up from a kneel and tugged at his baseball cap, looking at Bucky and away and back again, as if unsure. To be fair, Bucky would be put-off himself if some bundled up marshmallow of a hermit-looking man stalked up a cemetery hill to him. The man pulled at his baseball cap harder. Who the fuck wore a baseball cap in the fucking winter?

This really is a poor son of a bitch, Bucky thought. Baseball Cap wore a light jacket and jeans that didn’t hold two layers of pants underneath. No mittens, no boots. He either didn’t know how to dress for weather or didn’t care.

Relatable.

“You okay, man?” Bucky hated the words as soon as he said it. Baseball Cap’s tensing shoulders, the shift in his stance like he prepared to fight, made Bucky feel all the more worst. “Sorry, stupid question...Nice, uh, flowers. Devotion and rebirth. I brought pink ones.” Bucky lamely nodded to the white lilies lying at Baseball Cap’s feet. Baseball Cap turned his face, filled with confusion, toward Bucky. Panic struck Bucky that Google had lied to him about flower meanings. But people probably didn’t care about flower meanings as long as they looked pretty, which arguably made Bucky look more insane in this scenario without the context. In the following awkward, awkward moments, it truly struck Bucky that he was harassing some grieving stranger in a graveyard.

What the fuck, Bucky?

Quickly followed this thought was the realization of how much Baseball Cap had angled his body away out of sight. In the face of Bucky’s stupidity, Baseball Cap shifted, suddenly coming to a vulnerable stance with confusion.

“Oh my god,” Bucky said, his eyes flickering down to Baseball Cap’s freakishly weird shoulders-to-torso ratio. That face and body—he’d know it anywhere. “Holy shit.”

“Uh,” Captain Goddamn America said, pulling at his baseball cap like it had the power to wipe his identity from Bucky’s mind.

The dagger in the back of his brain surged forth, and in his blind rage, Bucky desperately wished for a real knife to stab into Captain America’s chest. “Fuck you,” Buck said. His throat ached from yelling in the frigid air, over roaring wind. “Fuck you! How—how dare you show your face here.” Anger filled his hollowness. “Get your fuckin’ asshole face out of here. Haven’t you done enough—all of you? Devotion and rebirth, huh? Isn’t that what you’re all about, oh so devoted to your country and dying in ice only to be re-fucking-born. Yeah, what a load of bullshit,” Bucky spat.

Captain America watched Bucky through his rant with a clenched jaw and impassive expression. Fuck that, you fucking coward, Bucky thought, blindly throwing a punch, hitting Cap’s shoulder, trying to force some reaction. Cap’s muscles tensed, his stupid thin shirt stretching across his shoulders, but he remained still. His face remained stoic, not even shocked in the slightest by the strength or solid weight of Bucky’s hidden metal fist.

“Get out of here. Leave.” Bucky pushed Captain America in vain.“Brooklyn doesn’t want you, Steve Rogers.”

Ah.

Bucky hit home.

Captain America flinched, his right eye spasming at his true name. They stared at each other, frozen, as the statement hung in the air. Bucky was strangely breathless and Cap...He just stood there with unblinking eyes.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Captain America eventually said and left, leaving Bucky frozen in his wake.

\\\

A year and a half later, Captain America stood in front of his mother’s grave (Sarah Rogers 1900-1936).

The sight stunned more than slammed into Bucky, unlike before. Back on that winter day in 2019, so raw and hurting, Bucky had tried not to think about it, tried not to think about how Captain America walked past all these graves. How many empty caskets lying six feet under did Captain America have a hand in causing? More than just the ones Bucky visited, that was for sure.

You failed, Bucky had cried that winter night after seeing Cap, you failed, he had yelled as he threw a vodka bottle at the wall.

It was a...dramatic affair. Bucky only had two regrets—cleaning up the glass in the morning and not having said those words to Cap’s face. He continued trying not to think about it through the past year and more. Tried to not think about Captain America. Tried not think of all the better, harsher, truer things he wished he had said.

These days, it was a little easier. He didn’t—wasn’t able to—visit every day. He didn’t mind who grieved or honored the deceased around him. The hollowness he carried had become a comfort, an almost friend.

Bucky even smiled on the walk here, purple iris bouquet in hand. A dumb, offensively bright yellow raincoat draped over his body. Rain drizzled on and off, light and then pouring and then nothing at all. Goofy as he looked, Bucky favored his grandpa’s oversized raincoat hood over umbrellas, except for the windy days when the rain blew in his face.

Captain America, apparently, cared not for coats nor umbrellas. He kneeled on the wet grass, his clothes soaked and plastered to his skin, hair drenched in clumps. If Bucky wasn’t mistaken, Cap wore the exact same light jacket and pants as last time.

Captain America’s baseball cap lied on the ground next to him and every few minutes, he dragged his fingers through his locks of hair. Locks. Thinking back, Bucky vaguely remembered long strands peeking out from under the cap during that winter. His hairdo wasn’t exceptionally long, not like Bucky’s shoulder-length hair. It was only three or four inches in length, brushed backwards and cropped short at the nape of his neck. But it was so very not-Cap.

Across New York City’s five boroughs, Captain America haunted Bucky. All the Avengers haunted Bucky. People graffitied solo portraits, the ‘team’ together, duos or trios of the Superheroes all over buildings, walls, concrete, gravel, everything. Businesses and the city or whatever authorities were left just let it be; the only people painting over the public defacing were new graffiti artists.

Captain America always had bright yellow spray-painted hair, short, even military buzzed style. Sometimes people took a creative turn for 1940s Cap and depicted him in black, white, and grey tones. Artists gave him shockingly bright sky blue eyes, unless they decided on creepy black or red eyes. Usually, murderer was written across him. Or if the cowl was drawn, an F for fascist replaced the iconic A.

Whichever way people chose to depict him, they followed the trend of making him handsome—classically, movie-star style pretty or All-American boy. They wanted to create the perfect image to tear down.

Long hair never made an appearance in any graffiti art. Or the beard. Captain America had a beard. Not that Bucky could see it now with Cap’s back to him, but he remembered it, suddenly, from the winter. Christ, how blind had Bucky been to overlook that massive detail?

“...not worth much, now, I guess. Okoye and Nat kicked me out again. Said I need some time away. To sleep. Well, Nat said that. Okoye told me to bring my moping somewhere more helpful. I don’t know why I came back here again, after what happened last time. Had to see you, I guess. I’ll go to Harlem and then D.C. next...who do you think hates me more, D.C. or Brooklyn?” Captain America leaned forward, his back curving as his head pressed into the grave. “I’m sorry, Ma. You know I’ll always be your Brooklyn boy. Just a kid from Brooklyn.” Cap paused. The hand holding the same white lilies like last time disappeared as Cap brought them in front of him. “April showers bring May flowers, Ma,” he said as a drizzle started up again.

Of course, Bucky chose this moment to step back, the grass around his foot squelching with mud. Captain America whipped around, on his feet and ready, fast enough to make Bucky dizzy. Muted blue eyes—so different from the bright blue spray paint—appraised Bucky. Tension seeped out of Captain America’s body, though this was not to be mistaken as relaxing. Bucky could see the recognition in Cap’s eyes. He remembered Bucky’s yelling fit from more than a year ago.

Dark circles underlined Captain America’s eyes, his eyes sunken, half-lidded with exhaustion but incredibly alert. His cheeks hollowed and he looked somehow both muscled and starved at once in a desperate way. A deep vertical line laid between his two eyebrows, a wrinkle forever there, whether he furrowed his eyebrows or not. A summer-like tan coated his skin—in his unhealthy state it looked more sickly yellow, drained to a paleness in the cold.

He stared Bucky down as if he didn’t look like death breathed down his neck, or like he dared Bucky to comment on it. Unashamed and ready to take another tantrum.

Blinking through the rain rolling down his face, Bucky had never felt smaller than he did then, standing in his dumb yellow raincoat that looked more like a tarp than clothing.

Captain America placed his hand behind him, touching the grave lightly, and softly said something in another language, still watching Bucky with his muted blue eyes.

He stayed a moment longer, as if waiting for Bucky.

When Cap walked away, Bucky hardly breathed, limbs locked. What did you do with the knowledge that Captain America talked to his mother like she was still alive? How he softly told her that April showers bring May flowers.

\\\

The first year or so, the world crumbled and rebuilt and crumbled and rebuilt in the aftermath of the End. Banks, businesses, politicians, presidents, countries—everything fell away overnight. What did you do when half or none of your employees showed up? If your CEO was gone to the wind? The people who survived didn’t want to work; everyone needed a leave for grieving. The things you took for granted suddenly spat in your face in its absence—garbage workers, cleaners, farmers, factories that produced your trashy junk food, fast-working wifi. For a while, cash even became meaningless paper.

It was like The Purge except with less murder—so many people had already died—and with more petty, often justifiable, crimes. The End threw them into an apocalyptic state where people disregarded laws, broke into stores, and authority held no power.

Before the End, Bucky had finished his second year of college, at the prime of his life since losing his left arm, surrounded by friends and working toward his engineering degree. The first few days after half the world turned to dust, he walked around the eerily empty Columbia campus in a daze. With the snap of fingers, he became a hermit who only left his parents’ old apartment once a day to visit the cemetery and to buy the barest of essentials.

Suddenly owning both his parents’ apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn and the old family property in Indiana was easy the first two years. Once the world dug its fingers into finances and the economy again, he faced the unimaginable decision of choosing one or the other.

Surprising himself in a fit of hysteria, Bucky drove all the way to Indiana one hellish night and into the next day, only stopping for gas and an egg muffin at a suspiciously working fast food joint. He cried the whole first week in his empty great-grandparents house and then on and off again the rest of the year. Guilt clawed up his throat for giving up his parents’ apartment and no longer visiting the cemetery daily in Brooklyn. He went back at least once a month whenever the urge came or grief pushed him to, continuing his dumb tradition of bringing flowers with questionable meanings.

New York City, on the whole, took several steps forward on righting the topsy-turvy world while Bucky’s rural Indiana town mostly ran on bullshit. The town, frankly, consisted of the attitude and mindset of an 18-year-old college student whose health food was ramen and the height of medicine was Emergen-C powder packets. Bucky hardly owned enough money to keep up the small two-story house and backyard but, somehow, rural Indiana didn’t care. New York, however, greedily snatched back the Flatbush apartment.

Unofficially, Bucky worked as a mechanic. Feed a stray cat once and it will keep coming back for more, or whatever the saying was. One of his first days in the town, he found himself numbly reaching out to his extroverted neighbor—not unlike his spontaneity of approaching Captain America that first time—and offering to fix up their car. Before he knew it, people all over came to him for small and huge car problems, sometimes even asking him to check out house problems or other ridiculous requests he ended up doing anyway. They gave him food and trinkets and, thankfully, some cash. One time a man offered Bucky his daughter’s hand in marriage—just a joke! Haha! the guy said, but he had been disturbingly earnest before Bucky recoiled and politely declined. In the past, Bucky would have made some dramatic reveal to the man about how fucking gay he was and laugh it up later with Becca, but he no longer had the energy or care for it.

He liked keeping to himself these days.

Three years since the End. One year since his move to Indiana. Time had washed away his old life into a new one founded in grief and burned his wounds until they cauterized.

\\\

“I was a real asshole,” Bucky said, obtusely beating right through bushes. Captain America must have heard Bucky approaching, but he stood facing forward without giving any indication that he recognized Bucky’s presence. Only five months had passed this time since he last saw Cap at the cemetery. Bucky wanted it noted that April hadn’t brought lovely metaphorical May flowers. Nor June, July, August, or September flowers.

“Mm,” Cap hummed noncommittally.

At a loss, Bucky rolled his lips. “Let me buy you coffee,” he said.

The long pause Cap took stretched and threatened to strangle Bucky. Carefully, Captain America asked, “Why?”

“Because,” Bucky said, shifting his weight. “I was an asshole, okay? My dad would have skinned me alive, so I’m trying to right my wrongs when I can. Plus, you’re real shit at this whole incognito thing and you should get out of here unnoticed while you can.”

“I don’t need your help.” Firm but not unkind.

Fortunately, Bucky’s dignity was far too deep in this exchange for him back down. “That’s a real shame,” he sighed dramatically. “Bet your Ma’s turning over right now, hearing your rude rejection right in front of her. On her very own grave. By her one and only son.” Bucky sighed heavily, shaking his head. “Who shames her name with his rude, rude manners.”

Captain America twisted to face Bucky, his face incredulous and, if Bucky wasn’t mistaken, a little impressed. He quietly studied Bucky. Looking back to his mother’s grave, Cap’s lips quirked up in a smile briefly before he caught Bucky’s gaze again and said, “Alright.”

\\\

The hour walk to Bucky’s shitty motel room passed by in silence. It was both unnerving and comforting—Captain America gave off a genuine aura of no pressure. Bucky’s competitive side itched to do something spectacular in spite of Cap’s low standards of zero expectations.

“Nice place you have here,” Cap commented as Bucky opened the unlocked white-turned-yellow door.

Bucky rolled his eyes and Captain America squeezed his stupid broad shoulders into the room. The hotel stopped having working key cards after the End, so all rooms were unlocked. On the hopeful side, Bucky could deadbolt the door once he was in.

“Alright, wise guy,” Bucky said. He didn’t bother dead-bolting the door. “I thought you’d tell me something like ‘back in my day, you could fit ten families into this one room…’” Bucky trailed off with a cough, realizing he’d gone into his rickety old voice he used to do with Becca. He was mimicking old people to Captain fuckin’ America. What the fuck, Bucky. “So. How does Captain America like his coffee?”

The twin-sized bed let out a horrible crunching-squeak sound from Cap’s weight. He looked unbothered by it, placing his hands behind him on the mattress and leaning back. He kept his legs over the edge, crossed at the ankles like Julie Andrews taught in The Princess Diaries. “At least we had locks,” Cap said. A grin played along his lips and he raised an eyebrow. “Coffee? And it’s Steve.”

Coffee? In My shitty motel? It’s more likely than you think, Bucky thought automatically. He shook his head slightly—he needed to get himself together. “I promised you coffee,” he said. Good start. “On your mother’s grave, too.” Great. Fantastic. Good job, Bucky. Keep bringing up Captain America’s dead mom—Steve’s dead mom. Bucky hoped his face concealed his internal cringing meltdown. He snatched the three packets of instant coffee in a little wicker basket by the broken T.V. “Regular, Hazelnut, or...Mocha?”

“Oh. I was starting to think coffee was a euphemism to get me to your room.” Steve considered the packets. “Do I have to have one?”

“Yes.”

Decisively, Steve said, “Hazelnut.”

Bucky suppressed his sigh. Hazelnut tasted the least worse. He supposed it was worth giving up the flavor just to see the endearing determination Steve had in choosing crappy instant coffee. “Give me a moment,” Bucky said, tossing the mocha packet back into the basket and grabbing two styrofoam cups in its place.

He walked with false nonchalance to the attached bathroom. Turning on the sink and holding his finger in the water stream, Bucky avoided his gaze in the mirror. Honestly, catching his own eye might send him into hysterical laughter—what even was life right now? An eon went by before the water burned his finger. He filled up the two styrofoam cups, poured the regular packet in one and the hazelnut in the other. Spoonless, he moved the cups in a circular motion to swish the water around and help dissolve the instant coffee powder.

“That’s…” Steve took his cup and looked deeply into it. “Interesting.”

“Disgusting,” Bucky said, taking a long sip of his. He grimaced and coughed. “Gets the job done, though.”

Steve watched Bucky with a considering look. He looked amused, maybe pleased. Bucky busied himself by climbing into the grimy armchair by the door, folding his legs up. He appreciated the fading warmth of the cup in his hands, listening to Steve’s first sip. The slurp sounded unbearably loud in the small room and Bucky couldn’t find the strength to look at Steve. Did he swallow it with ease or did he scrunch his face up? Bucky imagined Steve furrowing his eyebrows and emphasizing the little wrinkle between them.

Bucky mulled over what he knew about Captain America—looked like death warmed over, loved his mom, followed strangers into sketchy motels, had some sass, humored an insane person.

“You know,” Steve started, and Bucky let out an embarrassingly audible breath for not having to come up with conversation. “If this coffee is your apology, it’s a pretty shitty one.”

Bucky’s head snapped up and he spilled coffee water down his front. Steve’s face smoothed out into perfect innocence. “You—” Bucky scowled, feeling the lukewarm water seep through his shirt and cool his skin. “If you weren’t so—y’know, then I could’ve brought you to a coffee shop. It’d be a great apology. Chocolate, a shit ton of sugar, whipped cream.”

“Whipped cream,” Steve repeated.

“What,” Bucky said, “you didn’t have that in the 1900s?”

Steve’s face split open in a toothy smile for a millisecond and his following exhale was on the verge of a chuckle. He eyed the ceiling as his expression neutralized. Tilting his head from side-to-side in contemplation, Steve took his time before turning his focused gaze back on Bucky. “Whipped cream. It’s the thought that counts, then. I accept your apology.”

“You accept my apology?” Bucky said slowly, dripping with sarcasm. “Great. Thanks, I really,” Bucky tried his best not to smile but it was a losing fight and the more his lips twitched up, the brighter Steve’s face became, “really needed that, uh,” Bucky laughed, “validation.”

Steve drank his hazelnut powder water, eyes watching Bucky lapse into small, short laughs. “When do you visit?”

“Fifteen. I’ll be back on the fifteenth,” Bucky said, grasping the number from out of nowhere. It was bullshit suddenly turned truth as Steve nodded to the information.

Neither of them said anything else. The air thickened but Bucky felt content to not say more, to sip at his terrible coffee with its ugly taste grounding him in reality.

///

Bucky stared at his reflection, hands braced on the bathroom sink. The busted alarm clock on his motel bedside had read 9:00 p.m., which meant it was probably around three in the morning.

The cramped bathroom lighting distorted his skin into a waxy yellow, his face fuzzy and unfocused. He thought of how Becca used to say bowl over and over to annoy him in their teenage years, knowing how crazy it made him—how words sounded fake if repeated often enough. How it became nothing more than a sound, stripped of meaning. More than three years since Bucky last heard her say any word and he still thought this every time he did his nightly routine of looking into the mirror. When sleep stayed out of his grasp or refused to take him back after waking between dreams, he eventually peed and stared into the mirror and let bowl echo in his head on loop.

His mind moved past his face and into a space of nothingness; looking at himself so much he could no longer see. Tonight, his trance led him into thinking over the day.

After the incident that took Bucky’s arm, he lost time easily. First from amnesia and then dissociation brought on by his PTSD. The day already slipped his mind. All he recalled were the flowers he brought to the cemetery and the absurdity of someone singing Call Me Maybe on the sidewalk.

Tomorrow, Bucky would think about Steve and obsess over the embarrassment of everything Bucky had said. Right now, he just floated, not remembering when or how Steve left the motel.

Bucky wondered if death was like the word bowl on an endless loop for Steve, repeated over and over until it meant nothing. Until he witnessed death so much that it wasn’t shocking or even an individual concept—not meaningless, exactly, but without boundaries; a permanent part of life.

An absent-minded thought wormed through Bucky’s haze, the falseness of the accusations Bucky made two winters ago. The truth was, Captain America didn’t carry death on his shoulders.

Death carried Steve Rogers.

Bucky blinked his dry eyes, turned the light off, and decided it was time to lie back down.

///

Most websites on Steve, and the other Avengers, crashed or were hacked to rewrite all biographies into nefarious misinformation. People even trashed library books, which Bucky wasn’t proud to admit he went searching for in three separate libraries.

On the ride back to Indiana from Brooklyn, Bucky listened to an old CD mix that had a lot of Gwen Stefani. He wasn’t sure if it was his or Becca’s, but the scratches on it messed up most songs except, of course, Hollaback Girl.

Bucky’s brain was conditioned to automatically start thinking the song every time he thought of Steve, which was more often than not.

Shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S!

Bucky agreed. This whole Captain America probably meeting up with Bucky again on the 15th was absolutely fucking bananas. He hardly knew anything about Steve. All he remembered was the history lessons repeated every few years, the specials on T.V., and vintage merchandise “quirky” kids used to wear pre-defrosting era. He knew as much about Steve as he did about Andrew Jackson. Jackson was some piece of shit president who did terrible things to Native Americans and Bucky was pretty sure he had something to do with democracy, maybe. Similarly, he knew three facts about Captain America—took a fancy serum, beat up Nazis, and had a pretty face.

Bucky didn’t even know his age, minus the years in the ice.

Ah shit, now Bucky wasn’t going to be able to look Steve in the face without imagining him frozen like an icicle. Shit is bananas! B-A-N-A—

“You alright, bud?”

Bucky opened up the car’s hood, hiding his startled jump. Dorothy was probably Bucky’s most loyal customer, along with her owner, Mr. Franklin. “What?”

“You shivered. It’s eighty degrees, don’t pretend you ain’t feeling sick,” Franklin said gruffly.

“I’m fine,” Bucky grunted. The image of Steve slowly melting out of a block of ice entered his mind. Bucky repressed another shudder. Not thinking, Bucky asked, “You know anything about Steve Rogers?”

The lecture Bucky got for “knowing better about bringing up that name” backfired and made Bucky stubbornly decide to fuck it all—he was going to get to know Captain America whether people liked it or not.

///

“Bucky.”

Bucky’s stomach swooped. Relief flooded through him in a startling way; reminiscent of the feeling when accidentally swallowing an ice cube. A tinge of irritation clung to his mood, the creeping humiliation from standing in the cemetery all alone for an hour refused to leave him completely. Shouldering irritation was easy since that basically summed him up most days. Handling social anxiety, however, was a whole other issue.

“Steve. Hi.” Bucky blinked several times at the man—Steve—waiting on the sidewalk. Steve wasn’t late, he hadn’t intended on standing Bucky up at all—Bucky remembered passing him by when first arriving. He hadn’t even realized.  

“Nice, uh,” Bucky trailed off, not knowing how to phrase it.

“Like it?” Steve asked, his lips curling up. He twisted his head from side to side, giving Bucky a better look at his pierced ears. He had a conch piercing and three lobe piercings on the left ear while his right ear had a tragus and four cartilage piercings. Clunky cat-eye glasses obscured his eye color and made his eyes seem smaller, closer together. He wore a ridiculous green jacket with 80s style dramatic shoulder pads. It successfully made his spectacular shoulder width look like a consequence of his fashion rather than from his real body shape. The jacket fell straight down, not tapered at the waist at all, efficiently hiding his Dorito torso. Then simple blue jeans, white velcro sneakers, and, of course, a baseball hat.

“Cubs?” was the only answer Bucky’s mind could sluggishly push out.

Steve grimaced, touching his hat’s logo. “I thought Cubs was a safe call—they have a lot of fans.” He explained further, “Baseball and I have a complicated relationship.”

“Damn,” Bucky said, mostly on autopilot, “left you at the altar?”

Steve didn’t miss a beat, quirking his lips. “You know what? They did. And they ran off to California with some douchebag named L.A, too.”

Bucky whistled. “That’s rough.”

“Thanks,” Steve said, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets and hunching a little. He ducked his head with a grin, looking at Bucky through his eyelashes and with a tilted head.

Something spasmed inside of Bucky and even as awkwardness grew with their lame banter ending, a foreign type of warmness bubbled its way into Bucky’s chest.

“Burgers?” Steve asked.

“Sure,” Bucky agreed, pretending like he hadn’t stuffed his stomach with Cheetos, Chips Ahoy cookies, and Red Vines from nerves and boredom at the motel room.

They walked to a fancy burger joint that had turned into an IHOP-esque diner after the End. Steve chose his extensive order and hid in the bathroom while Bucky relayed it to the waiter. He wanted to be extra careful about hiding his identity from anyone close-up. Bucky thought that wouldn’t be a problem—even Bucky was having a hard time remembering this was Captain America. It felt more like a pre-End Tinder date with a hot guy who was teetering on the fence of being too weird. That hideous jacket with the shoulder pads—why.

Bucky’s subconscious told him to shut up and that it was absolutely adorable. His animal brain was still stuck on the piercings.

Steve returned as soon as the waitress left and hid by tucking his chin to his chest when saying thanks to the busboy who delivered their food. Alone together and with food, Bucky finally brought up the elephant in the room. “I have to say, I’m honored that you dressed up for little ol’ me.”

Steve chuckled, gripping his enormous burger in his stupid enormous hands.

“Seriously,” Bucky said, tossing a french fry in his mouth. He chewed, swallowed. “What’s up with the change?”

“I’m not terrible at going undercover,” Steve said, rolling his eyes as if he had this conversation a million times. “I just prefer not to when I’m...you know. There.” Steve shoved a huge bite into his mouth, half of a tomato falling past his lips.

Bucky understood emotional constipation. His body enjoyed emotional diarrhea, but he could relate. If Steve didn’t want to say the word cemetery, who was Bucky to judge?

“I like the piercings,” Bucky said. Steve relaxed at the subject change, though he shot mildly horrified looks at the obscene amount of ketchup Bucky squirted on his fries. Bucky casually squeezed even more out for added dramatics.

“Uh, thanks. If you wait a few hours my skin will grow over them and either try and absorb them or push them out.”

“That’s disgusting.”

Steve finished his burger in two bites and smirked at Bucky as he wiped his fingers on a napkin. “That’s disgusting,” he said, nodding at Bucky’s fries.

It was disgusting. Bucky deeply regretted being a little shit by adding more than usual. He picked up a drenched soggy red fry, smiling as he chewed it. “Delicious.”

Steve snorted. Bucky smiled freely at the sound—Steve focused on cutting up his waffle with determined single-mindedness. This was going so much smoother than Bucky had expected—having the distraction of food made everything easier. If Bucky said something embarrassing, he could just shove fries into his mouth. He was still working up the courage to messily eat his sandwich in front of Steve, but he knew he’d resort to it soon in order to stop nervous rambling.

“So,” Steve paused to look at Bucky, “what do you do?”

The interesting thing about Steve, Bucky learned, was he gave complete, undivided attention when Bucky spoke, keeping direct eye contact and nodding along. When Steve spoke, however, he avoided Bucky’s gaze until he finished what he had to say. Steve had an arsenal of instant quips to reply with, some more snarky than others, but when it was his turn to speak or ask a question, he clearly had thought it over in his head and said nothing more than he thought necessary.

Steve excelled at drawing information out of Bucky and redirecting all the attention away from himself. He was too slippery for Bucky to get a real handle on but when Bucky managed to get an answer out of Steve, Steve always answered it genuinely (not necessarily honestly)—he didn’t just hear, he listened.

It reminded Bucky of a mix between Becca and his dad. Becca took everything in and joked as if she didn’t understand, then dropped the raw truth at the end of the conversation. His dad listened intently without ever really responding. (Bucky loved his mom dearly but she only heard what she wanted to hear).

The false familiarity lured Bucky into to talking about Indiana. How people rolled up the driveway and told Bucky that he was a mechanic.

“Sometimes greatness is thrust upon us,” Steve said, wiping his last piece of waffle through a puddle of syrup. He flicked his eyes up to show a teasing gleam.

“Yeah, well, of all things I thought would be thrust upon me,” Steve choked at Bucky’s words, “it wasn’t a car business.”

Steve laughed. He carefully stacked his empty plates and silverware in two neat piles, easy for the waitress to clean up. Propping his head up in his hand, elbow planted on the table, he nodded his head for Bucky to go on.

So, Bucky told him about his regular customers, the marriage proposition, how lucky he was to have Youtube still mostly running because he didn’t even know how to change a tire a year ago.

“I don’t even have my license,” Steve interjected at a pause.

“You’re kidding,” Bucky said. “Please tell me that’s a joke.”

Steve kept Bucky’s gaze as he said, with a shit-eating grin, “The first time I drove was with a tank.”

Right. World War Two Super Soldier. “Holy shit,” Bucky said. He pressed his palms into the sticky table, leaning forward like a T.V. drama. He felt a surge of sympathy for Steve’s mom. “Steve.”

“I crashed the first plane I ever flew,” Steve added, unperturbed at bringing up what he must have assumed was his death back in the war. “Did you ever see that Vine—” Steve paused and waited for Bucky’s nod that he knew what Vine was “—parody where it’s ‘Hi, I’m Captain America and I never fucking learned to fly’?”

Bucky knew exactly what Steve referenced and started laughing as soon as he said parody. He wondered if that was still up on the internet—someone had made it after the whole UN signing thing that turned Steve and a few others into war criminals. Bucky laughed harder, imagining Steve growing out a patchy beard on the run and watching Vines in his spare time.

Steve looked out the window connected to their booth, eyes scanning the street, but Bucky saw the smile dancing on his lips.

“Tell me about the tank,” Bucky said. Steve’s faint reflection in the window changed. The wrinkle between his eyebrows deepened, the one sure sign that the Serum did physically age Steve—however slow that might be.

“I don’t really remember. Gabe was with me and bleeding everywhere. I think I ran over a tree,” Steve said, his whole face furrowing. There was a brief smile, warm and stunned. He turned to Bucky, a different type of smile, a little more playful, a little more fake. “Du—Tim insisted I almost ran him over but I swear he wasn’t even on that mission.”

In Bucky’s mind, there were two ongoing lists—one list for everything he learned about Steve and one list that crossed off any assumptions. He nixed good story-teller. There went Bucky’s grand idea about nudging Steve into rambling about stories about his life like he had got Bucky to do.

Picking the conversationalist ball back up, Bucky said, “You know, when I was fifteen, Becca—my sister—she shoved a bunch of moldy carrots in every crack of my room. Literally everywhere. In my pillowcase, dresser, under my mattress. It was disgusting.”

“Does your sister naturally have moldy carrots on hand?”

“The back of our fridge was always full of expired things. There was a huge carrot sale and my mom bought so many bags of baby carrots, that, of course, we never even ate and lived in the fridge for months.” Bucky mentally reeled himself from going into all the details of absurd sales his mother got herself into. Where was this talkative side of Bucky when his nosey neighbors popped by? “Anyway, I can’t remember why Becca did it. I must have done some really dick move but after my accident,” he waved his metal fingers for emphasis, “I had memory problems. Have,” Bucky corrected, “memory problems. She refused to tell me what I did but loved to hold that story over me. ”

“I like your sister,” Steve said, using the present tense. Before Bucky could handle that statement, Steve said, “Excuse me.”

Steve left toward the kitchen and Bucky considered telling him the bathrooms were the other way, but surely a Super Soldier could figure that out. Bucky stared at the crust of his sandwich, obsessing over several things. After some time, he tried not to think about how Steve had been in the bathroom for an abnormally long time. Bucky desperately didn’t want to think of Captain America shitting. When Steve returned, the table had been cleared and Bucky paid. He expected Steve to grumble at that but he rolled with it and said simply, “Next one’s on me.”

Next what, exactly? Bucky mused as they walked slowly down the sidewalk. He lost himself inside his head so completely that Hollaback Girl distantly ran through his thoughts. He managed to pull back into reality when Steve said he needed to go.

Like every time Steve left Bucky, he rendered Bucky in a speechless trance. Clapping Bucky on the shoulder, Steve said something about a thank you and let his hand drag down Bucky’s jacket, past his pockets and ending right on Bucky’s hip. He pulled his hand back, gave a dorky salute, and was off.

Someday, Bucky thought, someday I will be the one walking away and he’ll be the one watching. It was nice watching Steve’s receding form, Bucky had to admit. Those fucking jacket shoulder pads, though. Why. Steve’s ears stuck out adorably from how far down his baseball cap was pulled.

With a heavy sigh, Bucky shoved his hand in his pocket and touched something hard and cold. “The fu…” Bucky mumbled, pulling his hand out and revealing a large chopped piece of a carrot.

Steve was nowhere in sight.

///

The Captain America flying Vine might have still existed but if it did, it was buried under several new video compilations of old Vines that were very anti-heroes and unpopular at the time the person made it pre-End. Now, they were huge hits.

Parallel lines ran through Bucky’s heart—the strong one curated in three years of hate and the new weaker one that opened his eyes up to the pettiness in blaming the Avengers & Co. for how things turned out. A complicated ball of guilt and competing self-indignation rolled in Bucky’s stomach in regards to Steve. His mind opened a little wider in the two times he hung out with Steve and the weeks after where he dissected their interactions. Often, he wanted to figuratively squeeze his mind back shut. Slowly, he came closer and closer to accepting that the heroes were just as human and suffered as much as the rest of the world did. As common sense and duh that was, Bucky’s scapegoating didn’t disappear overnight.

So, Bucky scrubbed his grease-covered hands under hot water and woke up from nightmares and stared at his unrecognizable face in the mirror and spaced out as customers spoke to him and ate beans out of a can and forgot his surroundings while stuck in a memory of childhood and tinkered with his malfunctioning metal arm and curled up from phantom pains and burned his soup.

He went about his days and days and days and thought of Steve like some ridiculous fool. Always in the back of mind, Bucky ruminated about the Super Soldier who had no place in Bucky’s mundane activities.

The internet had nothing helpful for Bucky, so he had to piece everything together bit by bit. Maybe it was better this way—he couldn’t mull over specifics of Steve’s past and what that made him today. Instead, he thought of how Steve’s eyebrows looked meticulous and nice but his beard looked absolutely not cared for. Bucky spent two days coming up with theories over whether Steve plucked his eyebrows or if his eyebrows were naturally nice and therefore he just left his beard up to perfecting itself, which was why it was so neglected. Bucky got so into it that he researched beard conditioner.

The slow process of Captain America becoming Steve in Bucky's mind made the famous plane crash less legendary—Bucky didn’t see it as this whole taboo saving-the-world and patriotic suicide or whatever. He saw Steve exactly as how Bucky saw himself—someone who went through trauma and joked about it because that's how you dealt with shit. It was scandalous only in the same way that Bucky making arm jokes was, which were fucking hilarious if Bucky said so himself.

The world post-End didn’t see Steve this way. People wanted videos saying Captain America should have stayed in the ice.

Bucky ate cold chili he dumped out of a can into a paper bowl and considered how could he handle losing himself in the strange exciting dance of making a new friend while blaming said friend for ruining his life at the same time.

///

Bucky finished his allotted time for sulking at his family’s graves, but he continued to loiter. Steve had appeared three minutes ago, much to Bucky’s satisfaction. Bucky waited, not wanting to impose but itching to speak with Steve again. They hadn’t explicitly agreed to meet up on the 15th again, but it seemed like maybe it was now an unspoken arrangement. Ten minutes passed of Bucky naming different constellations in his head before a woman stepped in front of his mother and father’s joint grave, appearing out of thin air.

Bucky heard she was harder to place without her Avenger’s uniform. No matter how many times he’d seen her face over the city in the past years—a lot of the graffitis of her were too vulgar for Bucky no matter his rage—Bucky knew he could never pick her out as he had with Steve.

And yet, Black Widow stood before him, all shocking red hair and tight black bodysuit. A trenchcoat, beige and hideous and draping over her entire frame, was unbuttoned to reveal her skintight battle costume. Her hands were placed on her hips, casually and purposefully ruffling the overcoat to show the impressive and extensive lining of knives lined up on the coat’s inside.  

“If you hurt him,” she said and Bucky waited for her to continue. Instead, she looked him dead in the eye and said, “Don’t.”

“And if he hurts me,” Bucky said, in lieu of having no other response.

Black Widow turned to stare at Steve, all the while keeping Bucky under the prickly feeling that her eyes never left him. She turned back and said certainly, “He won’t.”

Curious, and frankly a little annoyed on Steve’s behalf, Bucky asked, “You don’t think he can fend for himself?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Is this a shovel talk?”

Widow smiled wanly at him. “If this was a shovel talk, I’d have a real shovel.” She cocked her head. “Though, the convenient location is tempting.”

Maybe a side effect of being a Superhero was leaving everyone in a trance upon leaving. Bucky just stood there, not even thinking really, after Widow disappeared. Steve broke Bucky out of his daze sometime later, saying, “Surprise seeing you here.”

Steve was dressed in his normal graveyard outfit, looking more lively than Bucky had seen him before. Bucky breathed a little easier—later, he’d worry about how fast he’d fallen into concern over Steve without realizing.

“Ditto,” Bucky said. “And a surprise guest, too.” He pointedly turned his eyes toward the entrance where Black Widow watched them with little subtlety.

“Goddammit,” Steve swore softly. His eyes were wide and dark blue. “I’m sorry. I told her to stay in the Quinjet. She promised not to come in. I know you wouldn’t like that, uh, to put it...mildly.” Steve coughed. “At least she stayed at the gates,” he said under his breath with a sigh.

Bucky definitely was not charmed by how crushed Steve looked under the impression that Nat only stood outside the cemetery, not knowing she had come in. The little gay twelve-year-old inside Bucky almost wanted to tell Steve that Nat had come in just so he could have some big muscle man defend his honor. Bucky shook his head, mostly to re-center himself with the perk of it seeming like a reply to Steve.

“I’m sorry,” Steve apologized again.

Goddammit, Steve. Bucky was too much of a grumpy asshole with a resting murder face to lose his reputation by swooning.

Bulldozing over the situation, having no patience to go in circles about Steve’s babysitter-slash-bodyguard, Bucky asked, “What are you doing the rest of the day?”

“Uh.” Steve’s eyebrows shot up, caught off guard. A shot of anxiety ran through Bucky—maybe Steve was surprised to see Bucky here and didn’t plan on hanging out. “Well. I’m going to be visiting a few others,” he nodded to graves in general, “around here. Queens, next. Nat won’t be coming, she’s just.” He shrugged and didn’t offer up anything else.

“Can I tag along?”

“Oh.” Steve blinked. “Oh, yeah, sure.”

Apparently, Steve’s plan had been to walk there—

“You were going to walk a whole two hours?”

“I mean, an hour for me. More like three for someone like you.”

—but Bucky vetoed that quickly. They came to a compromise of taking three trains and then walking thirty minutes.

“If you even know how to use the subway,” Bucky snarked to get back at Steve’s asshole remark on Bucky’s regular human slowness.

Steve lightly nudged Bucky with his shoulder, strangely at ease with playful touches. “Of course I know how. Sam has a framed picture of a Us magazine snapping a photo of me on the Q in their pages of Stars—they’re just like us!” Bucky snorted at the uptick in Steve’s voice, the faux eagerness.

Sam has... Bucky pondered at the phrasing. The world knew very little but the common knowledge was that every hero died minus the original Avengers. That included Falcon in the death count. Sometimes, the switch to past tense after death was difficult, even if more than three years had passed. Bucky wondered how close heroes were with each other—he had assumed not much considering the whole UN fiasco that split them in half. He knew after the Battle of New York some people fantasized about the Avengers living together and having movie nights, which sounded like a load of bull. Black Widow obviously cared deeply for Steve, however, and Falcon—Steve’s voice warmed over into this casualness that Bucky wasn’t aware Steve was capable of being.

In 2015, the media had a grand fiasco over Captain America coming out as bisexual—less of a “coming out” and more of paparazzi capturing a photo of Steve kissing a guy. To the first reporter asking, Steve said, what? Who said I was straight? I’ve been working at LGBT-plus centers in a bi-flag outfit since I came out of the ice. Bucky, at that time, watched several remixes of that News video clip rather than the eventual formal press conference. His dad had sent him a link of it, that Bucky never watched, saying it was very inspiring and that Bucky’s mom cried.

Bucky, not for the first time, wished he had kept up with gossip. Had Steve been caught kissing Sam? Captain America and Falcon dating... God, that was so badass. Young Bucky would have freaked if that representation existed when he was an impressionable eleven-year-old raging homosexual.

“—talk and change, okay?”

Bucky blinked, panic surging through him as he came back into his body and realized Steve had been talking through Bucky’s numerous epiphanies. “Yes,” he said, having no idea what he was agreeing to. Change what?

Steve grinned boyishly and jogged over to Widow. Bucky slowly followed, so out-of-depth that he wasn’t even stunned when the two heroes disappeared, no doubt entering some invisible vehicle. Jesus Christ. He waited, his mind occupying itself by running through lyrics of the depressing CD mix Bucky found the other day from one of Becca’s breakups.

Steve emerged alone and Bucky blinked at the outfit change.

He and Steve were strangers, Bucky reminded himself over and over. That didn’t stop Bucky from grinning at Steve’s expense like they were childhood best friends who’d known each other forever.

Steve glared at Bucky. “Don’t.”

Why did this feel so familiar?

Bucky raised his hands in mercy. “I wasn’t going to say anything.” He rolled his lips in to stop the snickering building in his chest.

Steve’s cheeks had a healthy flush—more from annoyance than embarrassment, and he’d obviously been blushing that way for a while. Maybe he and Widow argued over what he should wear.

“Does that actually work?” Bucky couldn’t help but ask.

Steve shrugged. “I guess we’ll see.”

“The beard and hair helps,” Bucky offered.

“Not as much as you’d think.” Which—true, Bucky had easily picked up on Steve’s identity within seconds. Steve smiled wearily. “Let’s go.”

They gained a lot of looks—fortunately only first looks and never second ones, no probing gazes. Bucky hardly believed it. Then again, if he hadn’t known, he’d probably dismiss Steve, too, upon seeing this Captain America-looking man who looked believably bored and wearing a shirt that said No, I’m Not Captain America and Fuck that Asshole. A few people even looked sympathetic for Steve.

As funny as it was, Bucky hoped Steve would continue weirder disguises like last month’s piercings. A selfish want, considering this t-shirt was so much easier and effective and Bucky had no idea what kind of shit Steve went through when recognized.

Steve talked for the first time as they got back off the last subway train, apologizing. “Some people recognize my voice and I didn’t want to risk it while being in such a confined space.”

“Oh. It’s no problem.” Bucky hadn’t even realized the silence was intentional. Sitting with company had been enough for him. He threw ideas around in his head for things to talk about, eventually deciding to continue the blunt persona he’d created.  “Does she not think you can hold your own?”

“Nat?” Steve asked, scratching his beard, stalling an answer.

“No, that old woman pushing her french bulldog in a stroller,” Bucky deadpanned. Steve looked to said old woman and brightened at the sight. After an appropriate amount of time passed of letting Steve enjoy the weird-but-not-New-York-weird sight, Bucky nudged Steve.

Steve picked up their walking pace, side-glancing at Bucky. “No. No. It’s not that. Nat’s.” Steve paused, his little eyebrow wrinkle forming, like he couldn’t finish the sentence. He seemed to throw around answers in his mind like hot potatoes before deciding on the cryptic non-answer of, “Someone recognized me last time and it was ugly.” Steve shrugged like it was nothing. “She’s paranoid.”

“Huh.” Several rapid thoughts shot through Bucky’s brain, mainly what ugly meant.

They chatted comfortably as they walked—Bucky staying in his comfort zone of discussing new customers, the problems of living in an old-as-fuck house. Steve avoided his daily activities, though he offered small insights such as asking about good names for goats.

“How many are there? Do you have any names?” Bucky asked. He puffed out a few breaths, trying to be casual about his very unathletic and not-Super-Serumed body. If Steve slowed down, that was merely a coincidence.

“Like six? There’s a brown one I call Chocolate.”

“You’re a child. Steve, that is absolutely the most terrible name ever.”

“Thanks for keeping my delicate feelings in mind, Bucky.”

“Name one Tea.”

“Like the drink?”

“Yes. You can introduce it to people saying this is my goat, Tea.”

Steve groaned. “Are you proud of yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I’ll name one Cheese.”

“That’s just dumb. Goatee is witty.”

They were almost to graveyard number two when Steve whispered, “Want an introduction to being a spy 101?”

“I thought you were a soldier.”

Steve half-shrugged. “You pick up a few things while on the run.” On the run from the fucking U.S. government and United Nations, Bucky added in his head.

“Sure,” he said gamely.

“Across the street,” Steve said and laughed when Bucky’s head immediately whipped to look. “One thing doesn’t belong with the others.”

Bucky narrowed his eyes, looking at the various people. “Is this a trick question?”

“Purple,” Steve offered.

A girl with lavender dyed hair walked a slow pace across the street, moving in the same direction as them. Bucky studied her—all he really saw were choppy bangs, a messy ponytail, and a comfy Fall outfit. What didn’t belong? Her hair? Or maybe the Fall outfit was the trick—the baggy grey sweatshirt and loose sweatpants. Room to hide something? Steve would be doing something more drastic than playing an Eye Spy game with Bucky if the woman had a gun or grenades hidden. At least, Bucky hoped so.

“She’s walking in time with us,” Bucky said, struggling for a relevant observation. “She’s going slow but also freakishly in step with us. Does she recognize you?”

Steve and Bucky jay-walked and a taxi swerved around them, blaring their horn. Bucky flipped the car off. Warmth spread through his jacket as Steve placed his hand on Bucky’s lower back, guiding him to the sidewalk. It was annoyingly protective but Steve didn’t even seem to notice he had done it, keeping his hand there unnecessarily for a few moments before dropping it.

“Nat.”

“Huh?”

Amusement laced Steve’s voice as he said, “Natasha. Look.”

Bucky glanced over again and squinted, not wanting to believe the purple-haired girl was Black Widow in disguise. Purple Hair raised her hand, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, which would have been perfectly normal if not for the way she used her middle finger to do it.

Steve flipped her off.

Bucky’s heart sped up a little faster. He’d watched Widow intensely and didn’t pick up a single thing. Even the same walking speed and direction hadn’t tipped him off.

“Paranoid,” Steve said, less of an apology and more of a fond I told you so.

The only thing that offset the frightening aspect that someone could hide in plain sight so effortlessly was the hilarity in Widow really wanting Bucky to recognize her earlier. She had a whole outfit planned for the cemetery when she approached him—a well-thought-out outfit just for Bucky. He entertained the thought that she showed herself recognizably as Black Widow so that she’d meet him as who she truly was and not because she wanted to be more intimidating during a shovel talk. It was a nice daydream.

“Okay, can you wait here? This is something I need to do alone,” Steve said, breaking Bucky from his thoughts once again, as they arrived at a graveyard in Queens.

“Yeah. I’ll...I’ll wait over here,” Bucky said, unsure if he should leave or not. Steve nodded to him, funnily command-like. He watched Steve’s back for a few seconds before feeling like he was intruding on something. Trying not to dissect who Steve must be visiting, Bucky glanced around. Widow disappeared again. Needing to quiet his mind, Bucky took out his phone, opening up Temple Run—the cockroach of phone apps post-End.

Steve finished up in a handful of minutes and Bucky felt a low thrum of irritation for having to pause his game and switch mind gears again. He hadn’t even had time to pause the game—he ran into a corner and got caught. The grumpiness faded fast as Steve pulled Bucky back into his orbit. It was easy to forget the world in Steve’s company—the low-key anxiety of getting to know a stranger kept his mind actively thinking of what to say and distracted him from the pits of despair he normally fell into.

Bucky must give Steve some similar type of peace or respite. He had no idea in what he, Bucky Barnes, known hermit, had to offer. He didn’t mean that in an oh, what could a normal human like me ever be of use to a Superhuman. Fuck that. He never believed Superheroes were above others and he knew Steve well enough by now to know Steve was nothing more than a fellow mentally and socially dysfunctional asshole. They shouldn’t click like they do—too similar, too obviously shouldering grief. Most of their time together had literally centered around cemeteries. Regardless of all obstacles, they worked. Bucky wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Steve, unprompted, apologized for asking Bucky to not follow him into the cemetery. “It’s um,” Steve paused, tilting his head in the same way he had when answering Black Widow questions. “I try and visit here if I’m nearby. I want to keep their identity safe. I didn’t really know them, but,” Steve sighed, looking at his feet. “They remind me of Wanda a lot.” Steve visibly shook himself.

Bucky floundered—shocked at the personal information dump that came out of left field by Steve standards, trying to commit it all to memory (Wanda?), and having no clue how to respond sensitively and appropriately.

“Asphodel symbolizes regret,” the words exited Bucky’s mouth of their own accord.

“Thanks,” Steve said genuinely as if Bucky gave him valuable intel. “Do you know flowers that mean hungry for Thai food?”

///

Bucky’s phone buzzed three days after he last saw Steve. Despite the unknown number, Bucky didn’t need a wild guess to know who it was. He’d blocked and pushed away all his alive friends within the first three months after the End.

:(

Bucky wasn’t charmed at all by the typed out emoticon. Nope. It was absolutely, in no way whatsoever, adorable nor endearing. His thumbs posed in the air as he tried to plan a cool response. Before he could, another text came in—a video attachment. Tapping on it, Bucky watched as blurry footage showed a nondescript green landscape. The camera focused on a grey blur and Steve’s voice crackled through.

"This is Tea—"

Bucky paused the video and went into the house, leaving behind his neighbor’s broken radio in the garage. He collapsed on his grandmother’s horrible floral couch in the living room and exhaled deeply. He absolutely was not grinning ridiculously and his heart most certainly did not hammer in his throat in the minute it took for him to sit comfortably. Taking a breath, Bucky restarted the video.

"This is Tea, say hi to Buc—ow! Fu—shhhit."

The camera shook as Steve jiggled his leg out of Tea’s jaws. There were a few seconds of struggle before the camera view turned to show most of Steve’s face, particularly the lower half. His mouth frowned dramatically. There was a loud bleat in the near distance.

"Well, that’s goat Tea’s message from us to you," Steve said. His lips turned up just as the video froze at an end.

Quickly, Bucky responded without overthinking.

I like how you censored f*ck with shit

Tea is Iconic and I love him

:(

Bucky laughed. He imagined Steve watching his phone, waiting for Bucky’s replies. It must be late there—if he was in Wakanda, like Bucky presumed.

I didn’t know you liked emojis

It’s emoticons not emojis, came Steve’s sassy response. I have to use a burner flip phone so I don’t have emojis :((((((((((

Oh my god

Poor you

These keys are so small

Bucky responded by picking random emojis, knowing all Steve would see were boxes in their place.

[] [] []

Bucky!!!!!! That’s so rude what emojis did you use I’m desperate

Guess you’ll never know

You’re worse than Tea >:(

The next day, Bucky suffered the consequences of Steve’s flip phone as Steve discovered how you could add a signature to the end of every text. By the end of the day, Bucky cracked.

Noodle arm

Live Laugh Love

Steven for fuck’s sake take that off

Stop what

Live Laugh Love

The four days after that, Steve insisted on keeping Goat Man as his signature. Bucky had caught on by now that Steve was a bit of a troll. The worst Steve trolling, besides the carrot, was when Bucky made a typo and Steve lulled Bucky into a false sense of security by not dragging him for it. The next morning, of course, Bucky woke up to a good morning! text with the typo as the signature.

For having given up texting, except for townspeople sending him requests for mechanical help, Bucky fell back into the rhythm of it quickly. Maybe that was just because it was Steve, who always managed to make Bucky smile or laugh.

It was nice knowing, for the first time in over three years, that someone was out in the world thinking about him.

///

Bucky tried to keep the disappointment from overwhelming him.

Steve had gone M.I.A. for the past four days. Waking up on the fourteenth, Bucky prepared himself for a lonesome cemetery experience. This year’s December wasn’t particularly brutal but Bucky would rather lie in bed and spend his time under the blankets in a nice dissociative episode. Still, he bundled up and got in the car, making the long drive to Brooklyn. The shitty motel room felt smaller, the instant coffee even crappier, which Bucky had thought was an impossible feat.

He woke up earlier than usual the next morning and took the car instead of walking to the cemetery. He parked in a red zone, knowing there’d be a slim chance that he’d get a ticket. No bulky figure haunted the graveyard, no grievers wearing baseball caps. Bucky’s damn eyes searched every few seconds, anyway.

Shut up, he thought to himself, irritated at the slimy way his organs felt, the tightness in his throat that had nothing to do with the brittle wind.

Placing the forget-me-nots between Becca’s and his parents’ joint gravestones, Bucky wilted with embarrassment. Fuck, he felt so dumb. He didn’t know where to find forget-me-nots so he had bought plastic ones at one of those miscellaneous cheap stores. They looked glaringly fake in the wet grass. Bucky had channeled all his emotions into the flowers before he set them down and he hoped all his messages came across. He wasn’t like Steve—people who spoke to graves baffled him. Bucky’d tried it a few times and his words fell flat, his voice quiet and his chest filled with humiliation.

Becca, Mom, Dad—they weren’t there. They didn’t even have coffins! With the End, people started buying headstones, not bothering to bury coffins, allowing cemeteries to have more room for the sudden wave of dead people. Even if their bodies, their bones, did lie under Bucky’s feet, he wouldn’t consider them as being with him. They couldn’t hear them. He visited them to honor and remember them, to make himself feel better. Nothing that he’d say aloud would be sincere and he’d censor himself for fear of others hearing.

So, he brought flowers.

He brought flowers and hoped that his family understood, somehow, even if they weren’t there. The graves didn’t make him feel closer to them; the flowers did.

I’m not forgetting you. I will never forget you. The message was fairly simple with this visit’s flower choice, nothing could go wrong with misunderstanding the meaning of forget-me-nots. There was more that Bucky needed them to know, though, indescribable feelings, emotions raging war against each other. Guilt crept up on him for befriending Steve. He wasn’t moving on, he wasn’t—he wasn’t. He wasn’t betraying his family by not feeling completely miserable. He’d been not-miserable for over a year. Yet, this was the first time he’d come to the cemetery with the news of having lived a month where he’d laughed and smiled and felt a certain pleasantness to life that had been missing for a long time.

But that didn’t mean he was forgetting his family.

He wasn’t.

“No crying,” Bucky said. He looked up at the cloudy sky and closed his eyes briefly. No crying. He spent an appropriate amount of time with his family, staying until the knot in his chest loosened—the knot that started tightening the second he left here and that refused to budge until he returned in a month.

Bucky walked over to Steve’s mother’s grave. He glanced around, hoping to find Steve while also worried about being caught. Was it weird to visit Steve’s mom? No shit, Bucky, he thought. Regardless, he came to a stop in front of Sarah Rogers.

“Hi,” he said awkwardly. His flesh hand twitched and he wished he had flowers for her. He pulled his left hand out from his pocket—his prosthetic metal arm turned horribly cold in this weather and he had to be careful by tucking it away from any bare skin susceptible to its freezing touch. He patted Sarah Rogers’ gravestone. “Uh. Nice to see you again. Your son’s dumb. But I like him. You did...a good job. Raising him. Um, yeah. So. Nice...seeing you.”

Bucky shoved both hands into his pockets and stared at the ground, feeling like he was avoiding Sarah’s gaze and not just her gravestone. Nodding his head—for fuck’s sake, Bucky, what are you doing, you fucking idiot—Bucky looked around. No Steve—disappointment and relief. Bucky’s eyes stuttered to a stop on the grave beside Sarah’s and an intrigued noise fell from his lips.

Joseph Rogers (1897-1918).

First thought—Steve’s dad. Second thought—holy fucking shit, 1897. Steve’s dad was born in the 1800s. The nineteenth century. Okay, it was merely three years before the 1900s, but still. It rarely hit Bucky how not ordinary Steve was, but when it did, it was like having the wind knocked out of him. Being next to Steve’s dad amplified the awkwardness and feeling of invading privacy. He wondered why Steve never brought his dad flowers.

1918. That must have been around the time Steve was born, right? That made Steve...shit. That was one hundred and three, nearly four, years ago. Steve died in 1944 (probably? 1945?) and “woke up” around the alien invasion. Shit, Steve was in his thirties.

Shit—Bucky was turning thirty in a few months.

“Fuck,” Bucky said aloud because, apparently, he was totally okay with talking to himself, just not to graves. Glancing at Sarah, Bucky sent a silent apology for swearing. Something about being at her headstone gave Bucky courage and he pulled the note he carefully crafted at the motel. Using the paperweight he stole from the motel, he placed it next to her grave—you know where to find me. Somehow, it felt less pathetic than texting Steve.

Bucky treated himself to a fancy hot chocolate smoothie thing and then spent the day waiting in the motel, his headphones plugged into the CD Walkman player, listening to a mix that had Paper Planes by M.I.A. and A Love Song by Sara Bareilles. All in all, it wasn’t a bad day.

///

How do you send a holiday apology gift without sounding creepy about asking for an address to send it to?

Bucky stared at the text until his phone’s home screen went to sleep. Steve sent it an hour ago while Bucky took his afternoon depression nap. It’s been two weeks since he last heard from Steve and bitterness swelled up in Bucky’s chest. The urge to be petty and make Steve wait hours or days for a response was almost impossible to resist. Bucky was an adult, though, or at least he was far past being a teenager, and he missed Steve. He saw no point in playing dumb games.

I don’t celebrate the holidays

Who said anything about you? That’s a bit presumptuous

Bucky half-snorted. He ran a hand over his face and then shook his head. This man. Setting his phone down, he walked into the kitchen and shoved a frozen meal into the microwave. A prickling excitement filled his chest and he did a whole body shudder—the floor becoming freezing under his bare feet as he started to pull out of dissociation.

Did you really buy me a gift?

I have a follow-up question to my first inquiry

The microwave beeped. Inquiry, Bucky shook his head. He took his meal tray out and set it on a plate, deciding to be fancy by using a porcelain one. Then soda, fork, salt shaker, couch, computer, Netflix, and an ocean documentary. Taking a bite of his mac-n-cheese with one hand, Bucky used the other hand for texting.

Yes?

What do you buy as an apology gift?

Oh my god

Steve

u r such a dork

Its fine

I should have found a way to tell you I couldn’t come

Send me a video of Tea and I’ll call it even

:D

You’re cheesier than my macaroni

Macaroni is a pasta type, not a cheese

U know what

What?

U r an asshole

Thanks :D

Mister Asshole

Bucky made an outraged noise at Steve’s new text signature and he was glad no one was around to witness the sound.

///

“It’s been so long since I saw you,” Bucky said. Steve looked one part guilty and one part bemused. “I haven’t seen you since last year!”

The utter blankness to a millisecond eyebrow furrow to pure exasperation on Steve’s face was a hilarious journey that had Bucky smiling despite the pain it caused his wind-chapped lips.

“You’re awful,” Steve said. “Terrible. Happy New Year to you, too.”

It was fourteen days past January 1st, but Bucky didn’t truly consider it the start of a year. Years revolved around the End’s anniversary in April. New Year’s Eve had meant nothing to Bucky except for the video he received of an entire goat hoard bleating as Steve shouted over them.

“Cool,” Bucky said. Realizing that wasn’t a response, he added, “Thanks.” The cold messed with his brain. He wished he could ask Steve if they could duck into a heated store or coffee shop but Steve was disguiseless. Inviting Steve into Bucky’s Grandpa's banged up truck sounded too intimate and he feared Black Widow too much to ask Steve if he could go into whatever invisible vehicle they used. “So,” Bucky said, “do you have a disguise, or…?”

Steve grimaced. “I can’t stay,” he said gravely.

Dumbly, Bucky asked, “What?”

“I have to go.” Steve stared into Bucky’s eyes, apologetic.

Anger crashed through Bucky; he had no words. The wind mussed Steve’s hair, emphasizing the longness of it as strands fell forward over his eyes. Since they started meeting up regularly, Bucky stopped noticing the tired way Steve carried himself. He looked better, healthier, every time they had met. The mother hen in Bucky clucked happily at that.

Steve’s shoulders hunched minutely as Bucky stayed silent. That, along with his messy hair, highlighted the noticeable shift in Steve’s appearance this visit. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were more pronounced and the line between his eyebrows sat firmly there, even with his face relaxed. He looked so drained and dejected. One arm wrapped around his side in what Bucky presumed had been from the cold, but it started to look more like a comforting gesture, holding his side out of pain.

“Do you want to come to Indiana?”

Steve’s eyes widened and Bucky’s face mirrored the same surprise. The offer slipped out of Bucky’s mouth without him realizing—stupid, stupid, he just said he had to leave! The note Bucky left at Sarah’s grave last time flashed in Bucky’s mind and he thanked the universe that the note and paperweight had disappeared within the month, never to be seen by Steve ever.

“I can’t,” Steve said.

The inescapable rejection stung like a son of a bitch.

Taking Bucky’s hand, Steve pressed something into Bucky’s palm and curled Bucky’s fingers over it.

“I’ll text you,” Steve said. He walked backward the first few steps, drinking Bucky up with a fierce intensity, before turning away.

///

It was a little goat poorly carved from a piece of wood, tall as Bucky’s thumb. S.G.R. was scratched into the tiny left front hoof.

///

Someone knocked on the door the morning after Bucky drove back from Brooklyn. Bucky heard it all the way from the second-floor bedroom. He turned over, pressing his face into the pillow.

They knocked again.

More knocking,

The doorbell rang. The doorbell should be broken, useless no matter how hard anyone pushed it.

It rang again.

And again. And again—again and again and again and again—

Springing out of bed, Bucky shoved his grandpa’s giant brown jacket on and stomped down the stairs, throwing aggression into every move. The nerve of the people in this town! Normally, after a few knocks they gave up, like sensible fucking people, and knew Bucky was having one of his off days. No one ever dared to come over at six in the fucking a.m., either.

“What?” Bucky half-snarled, throwing the door open. He knew he looked ridiculous dwarfed in the rough brown jacket, his hair in complete disarray with a scrunchie stuck in there somewhere, his face most likely crossed with sheet wrinkles, and his body adorned in a sheep patterned onesie. That didn’t stop him from giving the person standing outside his door the nastiest glare he could manage.

“Uh.”

Bucky squinted. “Steve?”

“Yes?”

“You’re unsure if your name is Steve,” Bucky deadpanned, the instinctive snarky response drilled into him from his childhood with Becca. Having a sibling forced Bucky to develop an impressive arsenal of instant quips. He usually needed caffeine to help him have better control of his tongue rather than help wake him up for witty banter.

“No, I’m—Sorry, I can leave. It’s just you said, offered—and,” Steve floundered.

Having some sense of mercy, Bucky cut him off by waving his hand in a universal shut up sign. He opened the door wider and padded back into the house, expecting Steve to follow him. The door clicked shut softly and Bucky heard the vague rustling of shoes being tugged off. In the kitchen, Bucky flicked on the switch for the Keurig coffee machine someone had given him in exchange for changing their tire. Bucky thought it was excessive at the time but the person—Susan—came by quite frequently and used Keurig coffee pods as currency for Bucky’s services.

Scrubbing his face, Bucky tried to right the world. Fuck, Steve was really here. He stood right there in Bucky’s peripheral vision. Bucky should say something. Bucky should also shave. And shower. Brush his teeth. Jesus Christ. “Coffee?” Bucky said.

Steve started to shake his head, saw the look on Bucky’s face, and then said, “Yes, please.”

Bucky opened the kitchen drawer filled with coffee pods. Tentatively, Steve came over and chose one—Donut Shop, medium roast, extra bold. With his sleepy fuzzy vision, Bucky read extra bold as extra blond. A surprised laugh burst from him. Extra blond for an Extra blond. Steve’s concern for Bucky was palpable but Bucky couldn’t be bothered to explain what he found so funny.

READY TO BREW, the machine declared on its little screen and Bucky took the pod from Steve. He popped it in and hurriedly put a mug under the nozzle as coffee started dripping out.

“So,” Bucky said, hopping onto the counter and giving Steve his full attention.

“You said I could come here,” Steve said. He was so soft in his dark blue henley and light jeans, his eyes round and guileless.

The coffee stream gave a final drip and Bucky handed the mug to Steve. The brushing of their fingers was purposeful by Steve.

“Okay,” Bucky said, simple and final. “I’m gonna sleep for at least another hour. You can take the guest room. It’s down here somewhere. I don’t know. I’m tired. I think there’s a Howling Commandos poster in Dad’s old room. Sorry. Don’t know if that’s weird.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, a small smile on his face. He pressed a palm into Bucky’s knee and Bucky barely restrained a groan from Steve’s body heat, the warmth of it so welcome. The heating in this old place was practically nonexistent. “Go to bed. I’ll be fine.”

///

Bucky slept for a full four hours. He hadn’t even taken his grandpa’s jacket off before he climbed back under the covers. When he stumbled downstairs, he nearly had a heart attack seeing Steve reading on the great old ugly floral couch.

“Jesus fuck!” Bucky clutched at the thermal material of his onesie.

“Sorry,” Steve said, snapping the book shut and sitting up, ready to stand if need be. Tension built up in his shoulders, hunching up to his ears. He’d taken the henley off, only wearing a white tank that barely fit him. The fireplace crackled with big flames, stuffed with logs that Bucky had no idea where they came from. He never even tried lighting the thing. The room warmed Bucky up comfortably cozy but Steve looked flushed from the heat. The hair at the nape of his neck curled from sweat.

It was adorable.

And Steve’s arms were really impressive.

Wow.

This was one hell of a day.

“This feels very domestic,” Bucky said.

“Is that a good thing?”

Bucky rolled his eyes and walked to the kitchen. “I’m making grilled cheeses. Do you want one or five hundred?”

He heard Steve’s loud huff and smiled. “Only six. Please.”

“Only six. Only,” Bucky muttered. The laugh it brought out of Steve pleased Bucky immensely.

///

“It’s a good thing there’s a snowstorm because you’re spending all your time hidden away inside, anyway,” Bucky said. “I’d rather not get murdered for being caught housing Captain America.”

“Bucky, I’d never let that happen,” Steve said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Bucky had been—mostly—joking but Steve looked wounded as well as ready to fight the world.

Trying to defuse Steve’s intensity, Bucky leaned back into the couch and nudged his foot against Steve’s. “Have you ever been to Target?” he asked. It was less of a Target and more of a store piled high with a wide assortment of clothes in an old building with a red bull’s-eye. Same difference in a post-End world.

“I thought you said I’m not leaving the house?”

“You aren’t. I, however, am free to do as I please. And I’m going to go to Target and buy your impulsive ass some clothes.” Steve ducked his head sheepishly. Bucky, sounding far too much like his mother, demanded, “What’s your size?”

“Natasha and Sam buy me a medium—”

“Bullshit,” Bucky said, giving Steve his most unimpressed stare. “Don’t act all golly gee as if you don’t wear too-small clothes on purpose.”

Blinking with his eyes wide, Steve said, “I have no idea what you’re implying.”

“You’re just an old soul confused by all these newfangled clothes?” Bucky asked.

“The future sure is confusing, Mister Bucky,” Steve said. The overly dramatic awed innocence threw Bucky into a loud gush of laughter.

Steve was the most insane person Bucky had ever met. And to think just yesterday Bucky was driving back from the cemetery, sinking into angry depression over Steve. Life is like a box of chocolates—somedays Captain America rejects your sad ass and other days he turns up on your doorstep like a sad wet kitten.

Bucky hooked Steve up on his laptop, which ended with Bucky being the offended one as Steve apologized, saying that he was used to much more advanced technology despite being the one with a flip phone. Telling Steve to not miss him too much, Bucky left for Target. He called his own number as soon as he entered the thankfully heated store and Steve answered the Facetime on Bucky’s computer.

“Did you see my texts?” Steve asked immediately and Bucky groaned—his phone had buzzed the whole car ride as Steve sent strings of Emojis.

“Yeah. Are you sure you didn’t send me enough squids?” Bucky asked dryly, grabbing a cart and maneuvering to the men’s section.

“Man, I really missed the upside-down smiley face,” Steve said wistfully. Bucky’s phone vibrated in the store cart with what he assumed were either texts full of squids or upside-down smiley faces or both.

Bucky spent an hour grabbing a bunch of clothes in the largest size they had despite Steve arguing that his shoulders weren’t that wide. Steve’s face being propped up in a shopping cart baby seat, on speakerphone, made it hard to take him seriously. The comfortable safety of distance through technology amped up their courage in teasing banter. Bucky hung up three times on Steve, refusing to answer his call for ten minutes after Steve made Bucky shriek embarrassingly loud when Steve accused Bucky of buying oversized clothes so that he wasn’t tempted by Steve’s body.

Honestly, Bucky wasn’t quite sure how to feel about how this impromptu visit was fast-tracking their friendship.

///

That night, Steve and Bucky cooked two giant pots of instant mashed potatoes with shredded cheese dumped in. They ate on the floral couch while watching Shrek.

When Bucky dozed and woke up to Steve having changed into the Care Bear footie pajamas Bucky bought, Bucky decided it was worth it. Whatever this was, however much pride and embarrassment Bucky had to swallow at times, this was worth it.

“What?” Steve asked. The overly large sizing caused the clothing to pool around his ankles and hands. Steve’s feet didn’t even reach the padded foot part at the end of the onesie.

“Nothing,” Bucky said.

A minute later, Steve put the hoodie of the onesie over his head and snuggled into the couch cushions, huffing an amused breath over something Donkey said.

///

They watched kids movies and documentaries, falling in and out of half-assed conversations, for five days. Time slipped by so easily sometimes, hours bleeding into each other faster than he thought possible.

Steve stepped out into the freezing cold and took calls that Bucky never asked about. Bucky stepped into the garage to tinker, knowing Steve wouldn’t mind or follow. On the third day, Bucky even invited Steve into his little workshop. Steve found a stool and spent three hours sketching, not hovering or offering opinions, while Bucky worked on his grandmother’s old motorcycle. That night, Bucky saw the flip phone in person; Steve had him say hello to Black Widow, who said hello back in annoyed amusement.

///

On the morning of day six, Steve reluctantly said he had to leave.

“You look less like death,” Bucky said. In the place where disappointment used to reside, Bucky had anticipation, a calm knowledge that Steve would come back.

Steve wrinkled his face in what was becoming his signature confused puppy look. “Thanks?”

“You’re welcome,” Bucky said.

///

Next weekend, Steve slipped into Bucky’s workshop and shyly gave Bucky a black metallic bead they could use as a form of FaceTiming. It gave a little trill of warning before a projection of Steve’s upper body popped up, cupped in Bucky’s palm. Steve used his own bead to quickly demonstrate the reverse, showing Bucky’s upper body popping up in Steve’s palm.

“Gotta go. I’ll call you.” With a goodbye grin, he departed with, “Also, I finished off all your Fruity Pebbles!”

///

Bucky laughed, truly, fully laughed so hard his belly ached and his face hurt for the first time since the End. Cheese, the goat, nipped at Bucky’s finger, the projection of his teeth painlessly going through Bucky’s flesh.

It was two a.m. in Indiana and Bucky couldn’t care less about it, not with Steve and a goat in his palm.

///

They talked for an hour most nights via Indiana time when all threats of townspeople showing up were no longer an issue. Steve told Bucky numerous times to call whenever and that he hardly slept.

“You know that’s the opposite of a reassurance, right?”

“It’s not bad if it’s the truth.”

“I pray for anyone who has ever had to deal with you. Seriously, Steve.”

“You’re the one who befriended a Superhero.”

“Superhero? Please, you’re a bisexual disaster at best.”

“And at worst?”

“Just a plain old disaster.”

The bead technology constantly amazed Bucky—he could see the happy crinkles at Steve’s eyes as he squinted from smiling so wide.

///

I can’t make the 15th :(

Staring at the text, Bucky let out a whoosh of a breath. He poked around his mind—sometimes he went into instant dissociation, a wonderful tool gained from losing his arm. However, it wasn’t a lack of feeling in himself, no numbness, actually, he felt...relieved. Fine. Not driving all those hours to New York and sleeping a night or two in a grimy motel—it lifted a weight off Bucky’s shoulders. He’d moved on from daily cemetery visits, maybe it was time to move on from monthly. Before Steve, he sporadically drove when the grief overtook him. Now, he used the 15th as a day to see Steve. If they could see each other outside of that day, then what was the point?

Can you come over a diff day and watch movies

Becca loved Harry Potter

The point was to remember, of course. He’d just do it in a different way.

The 17th? I should warn you, I know most of the lines by heart

The response was good enough—not making it a big deal. Steve was deserving of Bucky’s trust, of being witness to Bucky’s grief over Becca. However, he would appreciate if Steve didn’t think the solution to all emotional problems was giving space and distracting. To be fair, it kept Bucky from wallowing, even if it felt like a brush-off.

I should warn you

I’ll scream GAY everytime Sirius and Remus come on screen

I’m pissed as hell do you know how many times motel tvs have run Harry Potter marathons while I was on the run

Not ONE time did Sam ever suggest Sirius and Remus as lovers

Why did no one tell me this?????

Bucky didn’t know what to be more charmed by, that this was the first time Steve sent multiple texts in a row, as it was harder to do by flip phone, that he used the term lovers, or the multiple question marks.

Sam clearly doesn’t know the gay agenda

The first thirty minutes without a reply, Bucky assumed Steve got caught in some Superhero business. Around forty-five minutes, he wondered if Steve didn’t get the “gay agenda” reference. At an hour, he scolded himself—Steve wasn’t anything like the stereotypes of an old man that people pinned on him. The thirty minutes after that thought, Bucky depressed himself by dwelling on how Steve felt being called “A Man Out of Time”.

It took four entire hours for Bucky to realize he was a dumbass. Sam didn’t make it past the End—either killed in action or dusted away. Good job, Bucky. There Bucky was, mere minutes prior to sending that text, thinking that Steve needed to work on his sensitivity skills. It might not be the smartest move, but Bucky reopened his texting app. His mom drilled in communication is better than silence to him and Becca, even if what they had to say was disastrous, repeating the advice over and over until their ears bled.

What’s Sam’s favorite food?

Bucky woke up the next morning to two message notifications.

Depends. Tacos for movies.

The second text is time-stamped seventeen minutes later.

:)

Bucky wanted to cradle the smiley face to his chest. He looked at the ceiling, sending his mom a thank you.

///

At first, they were stilted in their answers. By Prisoner of Azkaban, they had scarfed down Bucky’s shitty tacos, ordered pizza, and argued heatedly.

“McGonagall or Hagrid?” Steve talked over Bucky’s rant. “McGonagall or Hagrid?”

“I’m gay! My only option is Hagrid!”

“Please. Anyone would throw down with McGonagall.”

“Fuck, Steve. Just say fuck. And in this house, we call her Minnie.”

“Fine. Minnie McG—”

“Are you kidding me—”

“—and throw down doesn’t mean fuck, Bucky.”

“Then what the hell does it mean?”

“Anything. Hold hands or date or—”

“Like I’d emotionally tap that?”

“Yeah,” Steve said.

Thoughtfully, Bucky said, “I don’t want to hold hands with Hagrid. No offense.”

“Exactly! Minnie McG!”

“Okay, fine! Just this round. For Minnie. Platonic love.”

Steve crossed his arms and wiggled into the couch pillows, extremely satisfied.

Bucky waited until he paid the delivery boy, hauled five pizza boxes into the living room, and only when Steve was in the process of inhaling his third slice, Bucky asked, “Filch or Pettigrew?”

Steve choked for a good ten seconds. “What?”

“You heard me,” Bucky said. Calmly, he took a bite and chewed his veggie pizza slice slowly. He swallowed. “Are you ace or demi?”

Steve groaned, setting the pizza box he used as a plate down. “Why?”

“Are you uncomfortable with the option being fucking and not throwing down?”

“Bucky, I was in the army. Nothing you say will make me uncomfortable. And as much as I hate you for it, I’m fine with that question.”

“Filch or Pettigrew?”

“Morally, I’d have to say Filch. Peter sold his friends out and kills Cedric. Plus, Peter was a rat for, like, eleven years,” it was thirteen, but Steve spoke so passionately Bucky let him keep going, “and that feels like bestiality at this point, you know?”

Bucky choked on his pizza.

“What? It’s true,” Steve said plainly.

Bucky’s mother would have been amused, his father just wouldn’t want to know, and Becca—this was exactly what she would have wanted. Bucky hacking up a ball of cheese and all.

///

Steve spent the night. The next morning, Bucky walked in on Steve doing push-ups in the living room. He scrunched his face up and remarked, “Sweaty,” before continuing to the kitchen where he ate cereal with half-closed eyes.

“I have to leave tomorrow morning,” Steve said, sitting down as Bucky worked his way through his second bowl of Fruity Pebbles.

“Merg,” Bucky said. Then, “Get off my chairs with your sweaty ass and shower.”

Today they hung out in the workshop, leaving the last three Harry Potter movies for tonight. Last night had finished with an argument about throwing down with Umbridge and having to kill a centaur or throwing down with Kingsley but having to kill Tonks. Bucky was ashamed to admit at this point he couldn’t remember who proposed the question, though it very likely could have been him.

“How do you know my address?”

Steve hummed an inquisitive sound. He chose sitting on the ground and leaning against the garage wall rather than the stool. He worked his way through the stack of crayons Bucky found for him, the dark blue one down to a little nub at this point. Nothing in the garage was even near the blue spectrum.

“My address,” Bucky repeated. “I invited you to Indiana but never told you what city or town or street.”

Steve wore his half-smile face that was more of a grimace than anything—he used it when he was sheepish, self-deprecating, apologetic, and a variety of other tones that had Bucky scrambling to decipher. “With Shuri’s tech and Nat and Nakia’s skills, I could know the hospital a random person on the street was born at. Or where their grandmother was born. What are you drawing?”

Bucky rolled his eye at the deflection. “That’s creepy but unsurprising. I’m an engineering student—or was. I know basic drawing. I’m working on details.”

“I didn’t look up anything about you. But I do know of you. Uh, Stark talked about the prosthetic program when he was starting it up and you were one of the few candidates. What details?”

“Just something I’m working on,” Bucky said, writing down questions and possible supplies he could buy at a hardware store. It was for his metal arm but he didn’t want to discuss that—didn’t want anyone to ever point out that he wore a Stark prosthetic. After the End, he refused to wear it for weeks before giving in. The reason he initially got fitted with a prosthetic was because he got painful carpal tunnel from using one arm. He still had days where he took it off, revolted by wearing something made by someone who had a hand in losing the world’s fight.

The problem Bucky worked on was that it needed to be updated and looked at yearly. Bucky barely made do with his fixer-upper ideas and it wasn’t something open for discussion with Steve. The subject probably was a minefield for Steve himself in a different way—the prosthetic program started up right before the big superhero break-up, right when Steve and Stark took separate stances. Because of that fiasco’s aftermath, the program got put on hold indefinitely. Bucky and a handful of veterans were the only ones to receive the prosthetics and given check-ups.

Huddled with his parents and sister, Bucky had watched Iron Man go up into space during what would soon be the End on his parents’ T.V. He wondered if Stark found his way back down to wherever Steve stayed.

“What do you know about me?” Bucky asked lightly, hoping to guide them into a more playful territory. He focused on poorly sketching what his arm looked like when he jammed a plate open to look at the circuit. Steve opened up more without direct attention.

“James Buchanan Barnes. At the time: five feet and eleven inches, one hundred and seventy pounds, cropped brown hair, blue eyes, square jaw. You started working with Stark in 2014 at 22 years old and lost your arm five years prior. By 2016, you had a fully functional prosthetic, ranked number two in overall success, after a veteran who lost a leg below the kneecap.”

“Ranked number two, huh?”

Steve snorted and Bucky braved a glance. Steve’s sketchpad sat on the ground, his legs stretched out and arms crossed over his chest. He stared openly at Bucky. “I really don’t know anything more. I just,” Steve tapped his skull, “can’t forget information.”

Latching onto that last point, Bucky asked, “Do you really have an eidetic memory?”

Steve smiled at Bucky. He flicked his gaze away, saying, “I don’t know about eidetic, but the Serum improved everything. It’s useful and useless.”

“Do you remember what I wore the day you met me?”

“Bucky, you wore so many layers you waddled like a penguin,” Steve said dryly. When he got a laugh from Bucky, Steve picked up his drawing and started mindlessly dragging a grey crayon back and forth. Bucky got his turn to stare openly as Steve distracted himself. “But yes. You wore cat socks, green with pink faces.”

“Did they look good?”

“Very,” Steve agreed seriously, glancing up at Bucky quickly with teasing eyes.

Bucky went back to his work and they fell into a comfortable lull where Bucky picked Steve’s brain apart, asking for random details. By the time dinner and movie time came, they existed next to each other in a peaceful silence. Bucky watched the movies with the pleasure of not-thinking and the comfort of company.

When the end credits rolled for Deathly Hallows Part Two, Bucky found himself in an introspective, maudlin mood. It wasn’t unpleasant, exactly, but he didn’t want to be left alone like this. With a large blanket, he commanded more than offered Steve to join him out on the back porch bench swing.

Steve followed with a sloppy salute and their warm silence migrated outside with them.

Steve pushed his heels into the floorboards, gently rocking the hanging porch bench. Bucky wrapped the blanket shawl around his shoulders tighter, adjusting his legs so they were tucked to the side rather than underneath him. His feet prickled as they regained blood circulation. Every day, Bucky forgot how fast nighttime descended in the winter. Nine o’clock felt like midnight. Midnight felt like three a.m. Steve continued to rock them and Bucky breathed in the night, feeling the vast darkness of it fill up his lungs and seep into his insides. Knowing Steve experienced the same sensation next to Bucky was a comfort. He wondered what the inhaled darkness poked at inside Steve.

“Can I ask something?” Bucky said.

Steve paused his rocking. The bench swayed slower. “Alright,” he decided.

“Becca and I used to do a question for a question. Or, like, if we had to confess something big then we’d have the other also confess something. Like dumb crushes or if we lied to mom.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, amusement in his low voice. “Just ask.”

Clearing his throat, Bucky said, “You’re, uh, you guys are working on something. Right? To fix this.”

Bucky stared straight ahead. His heart hammered away. Steve reached out and touched Bucky’s shoulder, a brush, brief and grounding.

“Yeah, we are. We’re not in Wakanda because we’re hiding away,” Steve said. He started the rocking again. “Do you like the winter or the summer?”

Though the subject change was timed terribly, the effort Steve obviously put forth in trying to soothe Bucky was enough. The hilarity of it occupied Bucky’s mind—as previously proven, Steve himself liked an instant out of heavy conversations. Bucky didn’t think Steve minded if Bucky wanted to talk in depth emotionally but he let it go for now. Honestly, he’d rather mull that Wakanda statement over later in bed. Since meeting Steve, Bucky had suspicions but to have it confirmed...

Picking up on Steve’s out, Bucky joked, “That’s not an equal question.” He faced Steve, goading him, “Come on. It has to be a big one, remember?”

“Policing my questions, Barnes?” Steve teased. “Maybe seasons are a big deal for me.” Steve leaned his head against the chain holding the bench up. He eyed the porch roof as he asked, “Well...are you moving on or are you waiting?”

The unexpected heaviness of the question hit Bucky harder than Steve’s answer to working on fixing the world. With his question out, Steve focused his gaze on Bucky, unassuming and sharp.

“I’m—” not sure, Bucky wanted to finish. He thought of Steve’s honesty, minus when he omitted truths. “Both,” he amended.

He had been waiting for the world to right itself and a life grew around him in spite of this.

They went back inside an hour later. Before they headed off to their rooms, Steve joined Bucky in a late night glass of milk. Half-way through his drink, Bucky said, “I like Autumn and Spring.”

Steve’s eyebrows went up. He tilted his head to the side and gave one short nod in approval to Bucky’s answer. He finished his glass, washed it, and set it to dry in the rack. “Good night, Buck,” he said.

Barnes and Buck, Bucky thought. There was such a casualness to how both words rolled off Steve’s tongue, a sense of normalcy to this strange world that Bucky craved. He sipped his milk slowly, letting the house’s warmth slowly settle back into his skin.

///

No texts, calls, or Wakanda-tech-Facetime followed through the next week and a half. The complete static silence threw Bucky in rollercoasters of irritation, concern, and relief.

He missed Steve’s presence more than he’d expected. Having a whole week to process that, to press on the breaks of their fast-moving friendship—it came as a welcome retreat.

He even went through home videos without getting wasted for the first time and found solace in the ache of missing Becca. Her absence had filled his lack of social life, his grief keeping him from wallowing in loneliness. It felt horribly terrible to admit how he thought less and less of her lately now that he had a friend. It felt like a warm blanket to go back to his roots of missing her for a week, to look over their last texts and think of all the awful things they’d done to each other in childhood. In retrospect, it was all funny, like the carrots.

Maybe if she was here now, she’d finally be able to laugh about the time he told her crush that she had monkey armpit hair.

Probably not.

Steve said they would fix this, though, so maybe Bucky could be proved wrong.

///

“Hiya, Buck,” Steve said, strolling up Bucky’s driveway. It’d been two weeks since their Harry Potter marathon. While the air stung, March didn’t completely suck ass when going outside.

“Hey,” Bucky said distractedly. He stared at the jeep some new guy brought over this morning. Apparently, rodents had climbed in its hood to nest in warmth and chewed through some wires.

Bucky had absolutely no idea what to do. He’d been staring at the car for so long his flesh hand’s fingers grew numb even inside his gloves. He considered himself and the car to be on an intimate basis by now.

“Can I crash out for a few hours? I’ll make dinner.”

Bucky hummed, not taking his eyes off the jeep.

“Do you still have my footie jammies?”

“In my room,” Bucky mumbled. He couldn’t be bothered for embarrassment over keeping the Care Bear onesie on a chair in the corner of his room because it made him smile.

A hand ruffled Bucky’s hair and Bucky half-heartedly swatted in Steve’s direction.

“How bad is it to duct tape wires together,” Bucky murmured.

A soft laugh sounded before there was the creaking of the front door opening and closing.

///

“You know, I bought you other clothes.”

“Yep.”

“I bought you, like, ten shirts and sweatpants.”

“Yeah.”

“Like, fifty dollars worth of clothes.”

“Thank you,” Steve chirped as he stirred whatever cooked in that giant pot on the stove.

A sound Bucky never knew he was capable of making escaped his mouth. Steve glanced over his shoulder and grinned. Bucky flipped him off.

“I saw you take pictures,” Steve said. He put the wooden spoon down and twisted to face Bucky, leaning his back against the counter, worryingly close to the burner. He raised his eyebrows.

Bucky shrugged shamelessly. “You look ridiculous.”

Steve grinned again. His right cheek dimpled with the strength of it. Steve’s hair looked like someone rubbed a balloon all over his head, hair sticking up in every direction after his five-hour nap. His cheeks were still a rosy red even though the sheet wrinkles had faded within the last thirty minutes. The Care Bear footie pajama dwarfing his large body pulled the soft and ridiculous look together.

Honestly, someone should have warned Bucky that Steve was more often adorable than hot.

Rolling his eyes, Bucky straightened up from where he’d been leaning his elbow against the kitchen island and walked away. He dropped onto the couch in the den attached to the kitchen, pulling up a Netflix house interior show that he could space out to.

In seemingly no time, Steve dropped onto the couch, setting two large plates of orange goo on the coffee table.

“Lentils,” Steve said proudly.

Bucky allowed an appropriately long pause to pass before adding, “And?”

Steve ignored him in favor of dumping the world’s largest portion of salt on his plate. Jesus fuck. Was he getting back at Bucky for the time at the diner with the ketchup? Steve stirred his lentils, mixing the salt in evenly, and took a large bite with a satisfied grin.

“Nothing else? No vegetables?”

Steve swallowed and shoved another spoonful in his mouth. Around the food, Steve said, “Easy to make on the run.”

“Steve. You haven’t been on the run in four years.”

“And?”

Bucky repeated that garbled sound from earlier, dumbfounded with exasperation once again.

He accepted the container of salt when Steve passed it to him, though, and the lentils were delicious.

///

Steve spent the weekend at Bucky’s. He fit into Bucky’s erratic routine seamlessly. Bucky, spurred by his time of reminiscing on home videos, slowly told the story of his family. He talked more about his dad than he would’ve expected. He missed his parents, but it had always been easier to miss Becca. Steve somehow stopped Bucky from ever getting more than choked up, no fallen tears or panic attacks. He sketched and listened attentively, was interested in learning about 21st-century parenting over meals, and prompted Bucky into telling stories without Bucky realizing.

Steve was more tight-lipped, but that was okay. He said a thing or two about his “Ma”. He gave more easily into answering a question about the Howling Commandos than he did about Sam or his modern team. The most he got out of Steve was a passionate rant about Shuri, the Princess of Wakanda and head of the technology department, raving about all the amazing creations and advancements. It gave Bucky the opening to ask a question he’d been dying to know and tease Steve about.

“Wait, so if Shuri can make those Facetime-y beads than why couldn’t she make you a phone that was more secure from hacking than a flip phone?” Bucky asked.

“I know she can and I know she knows that I know she can but I’m not caving first and asking her,” Steve said childishly fierce.

Bucky pressed his face into his hands, laughing. Not that he had expected anything else from his stubborn friend.

///

The following weekdays, Steve never had a full conversation with Bucky but he kept Bucky’s phone buzzing with a steady supply of random texts. Thoughts he wanted to share and pictures of things that reminded him of Bucky.

Bucky stopped himself from running to the mailing shop in town to print out a large picture of Steve in his Care Bear onesie, thinking it to be “too gay”. He wondered why he’d think so stupidly in regards to Steve after he received a fuzzy picture of a small red wildflower.

Thought of you :) !

The added exclamation point gave Bucky the final permission to jump in the car.

///

“Your decor taste is improving,” Steve remarked mildly. He stopped by with an armload of ice cream tubs for a three-hour Sunday Sundae bash like he promised via text.

“Thanks,” Bucky said, going along with the nonchalance.

Bucky purposefully kept pretending to not look at Steve just so he could see the glances Steve kept stealing at the enormous framed photo above the T.V. Maybe Bucky should find it disturbing to have Steve’s mischievous eyes watching him every time Bucky watched Netflix, but Bucky couldn’t really be bothered to care. Even if the immortalized moment of Steve, sleep-tussled by the stove and wearing a shit-eating grin on the night he made lentils, didn’t make Bucky smile (which it 100% did), the way it made Steve preen was more than worth it.

///

They didn’t say anything two days later on the 15th.

They texted a few times, Wakanda-Facetimed for six minutes so Bucky could tell a story about how his neighbor glimpsed Steve on Sunday. The neighbor had jokingly asked Bucky if he was hiding a hoard of hot blonds in his “dungeon”.

On Friday, three days later, Bucky woke up early afternoon to find a note in his kitchen.

I have to go M.I.A. for a week. Pizza and Princess Diaries when I get back? You looked peaceful sleeping. I thought garden beds could be a compromise.

Each unrelated sentence left Bucky with several questions. Next to the note, Steve had placed a framed photo of Bucky’s dad. Bucky knew of the photo. His dad grew up in this house, there were albums full of his dad’s childhood carefully scrapbooked by Bucky’s grandmother. Bucky wasn’t sure where this photo had come from in the house or when Steve had seen it.

Bucky’s dad stared stony-faced in the washed out Polaroid. He’s between a garden bed of vegetables and a garden bed of flowers. There’s a small watering can in his left hand. Most teenage photos of Bucky’s father were laughably stony-faced, for which his dad always shrugged when asked why. It was clear in the photograph that he was relaxed and in his element. Bucky vaguely remembered his grandparents talking about his dad gardening. It brought to mind all the potted plants in Bucky’s childhood apartment and the basil plant that had lived on the windowsill of his parents’ last apartment.

Bucky’s heart picked up and he set the frame down, making his way out to the back porch, pulled by a quivering hope. Out, at the far end of the grass backyard sat three separate garden beds.

Bucky’s rib cage broke open. It was disgustingly embarrassing and he rolled his lower lip in, pressing down with his teeth to keep in his sudden cries. He fell apart at the seams, in a way he hadn’t known he’d needed. He never wanted anything from Steve, Steve didn’t owe him anything—but it felt like this was a test that Steve had passed. And passed with flying colors.

Bucky walked over, barefoot on the dead grass, the emotions crashing like a tide through his broken ribs.

Each raised bed was contained in a box of wood, about four feet by four feet. On the front wood plank of each box, a word was carved in and painted over—a fancier version of the handwriting from the note in the house.

Bucky touched MOM, painted a pale green, and started weeping like the crybaby Becca had always accused Bucky as.

///

I never knew why my mom would get so angry if we didn’t wake her up to say goodbye

I can’t believe you Edward Cullen-ed on me

I stg you better wake me up next time instead of watching

I know you can’t get any of these

But thanks

How long did that take you?

Good luck on whatever you’re doing

Stay safe asshole

///

I never even said anything

How

These are really great

Way better

///

Braving my way to target

Should i get a matching Carebear suit

Jk

Actually maybe not jk

Nvm target is an asshole

All out of seeds???

Here we go to home depot

Got seeds

Thx asshole for abandoning me and leaving me to do all the hardwork

If these dont grow im blaming u

Can u grow seeds at any point

Idk im just gonna pretend strawberry season is every season

Hope u r not dead

///

“Uh.”

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Bucky said, continuing to stretch out the y. After a solid twenty seconds, he finished with a, “yuh.”

Black Widow pushed past him to get in the house and Bucky trailed behind her, watching helplessly as she jumped over the back of the couch and ended in a graceful perch on the armrest.

“Do you have cable?”

“No. Uh. Just Netflix.”

Black Widow hummed. It took about fifteen seconds for Bucky to enter his long-suffering fuck it way of life. He turned and made his way to the garage.

He didn’t know how much time passed when his neck prickled and he knew she stood behind. Casually, he covered up the blueprints for his prosthetic and twisted his neck to raise an eyebrow at her. The heavy door to the garage made it impossible to enter soundlessly and while Bucky knew he could dissociate like a motherfucking champ, he should have heard her enter.

He had the suspicion that she’d been sitting on Steve’s usual stool for a while. A flare of indignation spiked in Bucky—that was Steve’s chair. Widow smirked like she knew Bucky’s thoughts. He watched her gaze drift up to the wall behind Bucky, the dozens of drawings taped above his desk. They were all Steve’s, smudged crayon lines and rough blurs of color.

If she understood any message Steve mindlessly drew, she didn’t show it. She moved right on to asking Bucky, “Kardashians or Real World: D.C.?”

Bucky scoffed. “Real World.”

“Right answer,” Widow said, standing up and beckoning Bucky to follow her.

In the living room den, she had somehow found Bucky’s computer, attached it to the cables connected to the T.V. for watching Netflix with Steve, and brought up an illegal download of the Real World season. The coffee table had five different bowls of popcorn. Bucky only had one large mixing bowl in the house so the other four were just cooking pots.

“Different flavors,” Widow said, perching on the armrest and popping an orange-looking kernel in her mouth. “Your pantry and fridge are shit. I went out and bought groceries.”

“No one recognized you, right?” Bucky regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. He hung his head when Widow threw him a look.

“Watch,” she said.

So, Bucky sat on the couch, popped some garlic flavored popcorn in his mouth, and did.

///

Right when Andrew fell off the balcony, a sharp chirp interrupted the episode. Warmth exploded in Bucky and he half-stood up until he realized the chirp was slightly off. Widow glanced at him curiously before pulling out a bead from her pocket and pausing the show. Bucky was sorely tempted to follow her out into the backyard.

He pressed his palm against the pocket of his long sleeve shirt, feeling the bump of his own bead.

Widow shook her head when she returned a minute later and Bucky closed his mouth with an audible click. His hand went to his shirt pocket again and he quickly aborted the movement as Widow’s eyes tracked the movement.

“Why aren’t you with him?” Bucky asked.

Widow allowed the distraction. “Steve’s a big boy.”

“Except when he’s in a Brooklyn cemetery?”

“Cap knows who the bad guys are. Steve doesn’t.” Widow grabbed a handful of popcorn, saying, “I have to go.” She shoved the handful in her mouth, patted Bucky on the cheek, and sauntered away. “Don’t watch without me.”

///

Did you put her up to this?

///

The Princess Diaries is ready for you

///

Bucky dutifully left Real World: D.C. untouched, even though Black Widow didn’t return. The night after she left, Bucky felt like he should feel wary about going to bed, but instead he slept like a baby. Well, not exactly like a baby—he woke up gasping with nightmares. But falling asleep had been easy, especially considering his recent obsessing about the danger Steve could be in—thoughts that the night made impossible to push away.

Is he okay? What is he doing? Why isn’t Black Widow with him? Is he on a mission? Is he fixing the world?

Bucky dug his fingers into his mom’s garden box soil. He wanted to plant pumpkins, as she had loved Halloween, but Google advised against it. In general, Bucky threw all caution to the wind and planted whatever he wanted, hoping something worked out. However, some things, he knew, would crush his delicate feelings too personally and a failed pumpkin patch surely would.

So, he planted strawberries.

Using his teeth to rip open the seed bag, Bucky let his mind wander to Steve. Was this what it would have been like if Bucky had been friends with Steve before the End, before Steve became an international fugitive? Knowing that at any moment Steve could be called to battle and disappear for whoever-knows-long on missions? Even watching him on live T.V., seeing the battles play-by-play with nothing to do but watch helplessly.

Bucky didn’t like it. He felt like those period dramas Becca used to watch in high school—women waiting home while their lovers were off on battlefields. Staring out a rainy window and writing a letter—when will my husband return from war?

Bucky snorted to himself. A crow sitting on the fence in front of Bucky cawed loudly, sounding like it laughed at him.

“Shut up,” Bucky said. The crow titled its head. Bucky had thrown it a few peanuts the other day and now it kept coming back for more. Yesterday, it even brought a friend. Bucky couldn’t help but love the little fella already. “No peanuts for you.”

Planting the seeds in the holes he prepared, varying in depth because he had no idea what he was doing, Bucky lost himself in a content mood. He wasn’t sure what gardening was providing him coping-wise, and while it didn’t give him a sense of purpose like tinkering with mechanics did, it filled the gaps in the cracks he hadn’t known he had.

What Bucky didn’t need was the scare of his life when he sat back on his heels mid-afternoon and saw a flat bulky figure in his peripheral vision.

“Fucking—what the—Christ, Steve,” Bucky said, his garden-gloved hand pressed to his chest, heart beating rapidly. “I almost shat my pants! How long have you been there?”

Steve, lying on his stomach with his face smushed into the grass, mumbled, “A while.”

Bucky didn’t have a good view of Steve’s face but his voice sounded wrecked. Every couple of breaths had a wheeze-like quality to them. “Fuck,” Bucky said to himself. “Steve,” Bucky tried for a gentle voice, “let’s go inside.”

After several moments, Steve grunted, turning his face fully into the grass.

///

By the time Bucky coerced Steve into coming inside and lying on the couch, Steve’s eyelids were a fraction open. Vehemently, Steve insisted on starting The Princess Diaries, anyway. He promptly fell asleep within minutes and Bucky watched the entire movie as well as the sequel by the time Steve woke up.

“Hey,” Steve mumbled. “Why haven’t you started the movie yet?”

Bucky sighed and went to the DVR, replacing the sequel’s disk with the first movie again. Steve’s glossy eyes stayed open this time, all the way into the second movie.

As Anne Hathaway fell into the fountain, Steve spoke up. “Hey, Bucky?”

“Yeah?”

“I spaced out for a moment. Would you mind rewinding?”

“Sure.” Bucky barely refrained from ruffling Steve’s hair. The greasy sheen to it helped him resist. “What do you last remember?”

“Uh. I think...the reporters just stormed the beach?”

Bucky physically felt a record scratch freeze frame moment in his soul. He stood up and replaced the CD again. As he fast forwarded, he skipped to the end of the scene Steve mentioned, thinking about how Steve had made a despairing sound the first time the scene played. Bucky himself had got caught up in how cruel the paparazzi were, even in his second viewing of it. Perhaps it was silly of Bucky to shield Steve from this scene, but his heart contracted thinking about how the world invaded Steve’s privacy since the defrosting.

Steve dozed but Bucky was prepared for it this time. When he got up to put the sequel disk in for the third time, Steve jerked awake mid-snore but didn’t ask Bucky to restart the first movie. He gave Bucky the warmest, sleepiest grin when Bucky returned to the couch, lifting his feet up so Bucky could slip back into his spot under Steve’s legs. His eyes were red but wide-open this time and he laughed, snorted, and was generally very verbal with a mix of noises throughout.

It was annoying and cute.

About halfway through, Steve started shifting around. Bucky assumed he was trying to get comfortable, which was valid on this awful couch that Steve had been lying on in the same position for several hours. Steve’s restlessness grew and his face twisted in pain.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Steve said. His face pinched together.

“Bullshit. If you have a bullet stuck in you, I will literally murder you, Steve.” Steve shrunk into the pillows and Bucky jerked forward. “Holy shit, do you actually have one in you?”

“No,” Steve said defensively. His shoulders hiked up to his ears. “No,” he repeated. “It’s just—it, uh…”

Steve trailed off and gave Bucky the biggest, saddest eyes, silently pleading for Bucky to drop it. Squaring his shoulders, Bucky crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows.

Steve sighed with his whole body. “It’s like...did you know I can feel my body knit itself back together?” Bucky tried to keep the horror off his face. “Even after it’s over and healed I can still remember that feeling. It’s weird and...unnatural. I’ve been in this body for over a decade now but it doesn’t,” Steve cut off and dug the heels of his palms into his eyes, rubbing his skin. “It’s like my body knows I’m not hurt but my brain doesn’t. I know I’ve healed but, you know, logically, a regular person doesn’t heal that fast and my brain is stuck on that. I still feel which rib broke and where the bullet was…the pain stays.”

Steve dropped his hands and met Bucky’s eyes.

It took a lot for Bucky to push past Steve casually saying broken rib and bullet. Steve looked so resigned, and weak in personality, that Bucky couldn’t be angry from fear right then. Not when what Steve said clicked and Bucky had the power to assure Steve that he made sense. “Like phantom pain?” Bucky kept his voice in careful casual interest.

Steve uncoiled but his face took on a defensive expression. “No. I’m healed. That’s not...I’m fine. ”

Bucky raised his eyebrows. “My arm’s healed and I still get phantom pains.”

“Yeah, but your…” Steve gestured to Bucky awkwardly. “Arm is gone.”

“Really,” Bucky deadpanned.

“Bucky.”

“Calm down, Steve. I said like phantom pain. A mob of people aren’t going to come barging in and beat you up if you agree. I’ll drop it if you want, but I still get days where my...arm throbs like a son of a bitch. I’m not going to judge you.” Bucky paused for a second and then added, “It must feel weird.”

Steve released a shaky breath, almost like laughter and a bit bitter. “Yeah.” He rubbed slow circles over the right side of his ribs. “Thanks, Buck. I just want to watch Julie Andrews mattress slide, though.”

Bucky eyed Steve dubiously before pressing play. Several minutes later, he quietly piped up, “You do know you have PTSD, though, right?”

Steve chuckled. “Yeah, pal.”

///

Bucky’s grandparents on his mom’s side died when he was three-years-old. His mom hardly talked about them, too choked up to. The only thing he really knew was that his grandpa struggled with crippling PTSD, something she confided to Bucky in pieces when he was freshly diagnosed with the disorder. The second thing he knew was that his grandma had been a firecracker who favored fists first, words second.

Bucky's mom was the only one who wasn’t frightened when Bucky developed dissociating symptoms—losing time, confused with his surroundings, falling into a numb apathy. She’d stroke his hair and tell him stories. Her dad frequently had a “thousand-yard stare” and when it got bad, her mom had put a pair of scissors in his hands and demanded he trim her hair.

“Grandma let him use scissors on her when he was like that?” Bucky had asked.

“I know,” his mom always agreed. “I always thought one day he’d accidentally cut her neck but if anyone questioned her, Mama gave them the most severe look. And your grandpa, he cut it perfectly every time. I swear he could have been a hairdresser. All his focus went on every little hair and when he was done, your grandma would say it was passable and he’d laugh a real, genuine laugh.”

Bucky hadn’t really understood. He thought his grandma was badass and insane for letting her shell-shocked husband have scissors near her.

In Bucky’s garage workshop, the old story washed over him. He could almost feel his mother’s fingers carding through his hair, his head resting on her lap. Steve’s unfocused gaze on his sketch pad had moved to stare at the air in front of him—thousand-yard stare. His spine must hate him for sitting so long on the backless stool.

Bucky’s heart broke just looking at him. I’m a stupid, stupid motherfucker, Bucky thought to himself as he opened the work table drawer and pulled out a pair of scissors. Bucky completely accepted his title as an absolute idiot and chucked the scissors in Steve’s direction with no warning. Steve caught it reflexively and he jerked out of his daze.

“I need a haircut,” Bucky said.

Steve stared intently at the scissors in hand, blinking at it like he had no idea how it go there.

“Steve,” Bucky said. At the command, Steve’s head snapped up and Bucky swallowed at having such vulnerable eyes on him. Steve looked at Bucky like whatever came out of Bucky’s mouth was the truth. Whatever Bucky asked him to do, Steve would do it. “Come cut my hair,” Bucky said.

Steve’s eyebrows cinched together, god his little wrinkle, and Bucky could see the stirrings inside Steve that wanted to protest but couldn’t break through the surface of Steve’s hazy mind state.

“Come cut my hair,” Bucky said more than asked this time. Steve stood up, his moves mechanical and slow as he set his sketchbook on the ground and walked over to Bucky. They should go to the bathroom or at least set a towel down for Bucky’s hair to fall onto. Bucky refused to be fussed about it—he could just clean it later. “Not too short,” Bucky said, turning his back to Steve. A calm fierceness pumped in Bucky’s veins. He had no idea how Steve was going to change his hair, had no idea if Steve even knew how to decently cut hair—those scissors were definitely not made for haircuts. Even so, he felt ready to fight anyone who’d try and keep Steve from doing this right now.

The only emotion Bucky had to shove away was the sharp pang for his mother, wishing she could see this.

Steve’s hand, his giant fingers, touched Bucky’s hair and Bucky had to consciously not shiver. Steve touched the top of Bucky’s head, brushed lightly over the middle of his hair, and pressed the bottom strands between his fingers. It was a few more moments and then—snip.

Bucky let himself fall into his own trance, watching his brown hair litter the floor, feeling safe in Steve’s bubble.

“Done,” Steve said quietly, his voice scratchy. His warm hands tenderly brushed the cut hair off Bucky’s neck and shirt, taking several thoughtful minutes to rid Bucky of the itchiness of short hairs prickling his skin.

Bucky stood up and walked over to a box of junk in the corner of the garage. He pulled out a small mirror and gave himself a thorough look-over. Steve layered it—the longest strands were just a little past Bucky’s chin and a few of the shorter strands fell over Bucky’s forehead, touching his eyebrow. Bucky ran a hand through it, smiling. It felt nice. He could either pull the top half of his hair up in a bun or pull the back of his hair in a ponytail with the front strands tucked behind his ears. He could see an old movie-star quality to it. Like a man from the 30s or 40s got a handsome haircut and then grew it out.

Bucky set the mirror down and faced Steve. “It’s passable,” he said with a shrug.

Steve’s eyes flickered around Bucky’s whole face and slowly—ever so slowly—his lips turned up and he laughed. Beautiful was the only word for it.

“Can we watch The Princess Diaries?”

Bucky hadn’t been this patient since Becca’s first heartbreak. Smiling, he led them out of the garage with a roll of his eyes. He was going to have Princess dreams for the rest of the month.

“You’re going to drag your mattress out from your room and we’re going to make a pillow mountain and wear our footie pajamas.”

“My mattress?”

“What? You think I’m gonna sleep on couch cushions?”

Bucky walked out of the garage, leading the way back into the house, acting like nothing unusual was going on. Because of this, he missed out on whatever expression Steve made in response to Bucky’s declaration of a slumber party. He felt Steve’s surprise in the moments before Steve’s heavy footsteps began following Bucky; he heard the pleasantly pleased tone when Steve muttered, “Abusing my super-strength for carrying mattresses.”

“You think too highly of me,” Bucky said. “I’d abuse your strength even if it was nonexistent and you had twig arms.”

///

True to his word, Bucky had the guest room—Steve’s—mattress be dragged into the living room. While Steve showered and changed into his onesie, Bucky gathered all the fuzzy blankets in the house and every pillow, too. Steve blinked owlishly when he saw the nest Bucky had created and Bucky gave him an exasperated eye-roll and told him to sit. A déjà vu feeling rolled over Bucky, reminding him of Black Widow’s visit, except this time he was in the Widow’s place of absurd nonchalance. Huh. Maybe her annoyance had been exaggerated as well.

They devoured pizza again and by the time the T.V. was black and the silence settled to hear bugs clicking and chirping outside, Bucky transitioned into his nighttime reflecting. Steve’s body heat radiated and warmed Bucky. They were separated by two feet and the blankets folded naturally between them. Bucky couldn’t remember the last time someone slept next to him.

Time blurred by and it must have been an hour or more before Bucky spoke up, not even thinking about if Steve had fallen asleep, not even thinking at all, really.

“Steve?”

“Yeah, Bucky?” Steve answered, completely awake.

“I’m gonna say something and you’re not allowed to make it weird. At all. Under any circumstance.”

Bucky saw Steve nod at the ceiling, promising, “Cross my heart.”

It was such a Steve response that Bucky sort of wanted to smother him with a pillow. “You’re my best friend,” Bucky blurted. “And that’s partly because I don’t fucking interact with anyone, the person I’m closest to is probably that gopher I saw in my backyard two months ago but still for the very limited options the world has now in terms of friend opportunities, you’re pretty high above the low standards. And even, like, I don’t know—even if I had my old friends I think you’d still be my best friend. Other than Becks, but she doesn’t count. And yeah. You’re just...my best friend or whatever.”

“Bucky,” Steve said. Bucky exhaled, grateful to be stopped. “You’re my best friend, too. Good night.” Just like that—simple as anything.

“Night,” Bucky heard himself say.

That night, when he woke between dreams, he didn’t go to the bathroom and stare at his reflection—he listened to Steve’s snores and fell back asleep.

///

“How did you sleep?”

“Alright,” Bucky said. The blankets were pulled up to his chin and he refused to roll out of bed. Steve stared down at him with a plate of Eggo waffles.

Face splitting in a smile, Steve said, “Good.”

“No. No. I slept all-right. All right.” Bucky added, “There’s nothing left to say.”

Steve’s bemused expression shifted to unimpressed.

“Come on. S’funny.”

Ignoring the arm jokes, Steve settled on the couch behind Bucky and noisily ate the waffles he had said were for Bucky. Slipping his right arm out of the blankets, Bucky blindly patted the floor until he hit his prosthetic. He’d throw it at Steve if he wasn’t so worried about how fragile it was becoming. He curled the fingers down until only the middle one remained upright and then waved the arm in Steve’s direction.

The half-chuckle he finally earned from Steve woke Bucky up better than a hot cup of coffee.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Steve announced. “Eat your waffles.”

“Oh, now they’re my waffles again.” Steve’s feet entered Bucky’s vision as Steve walked out of the living room. Bucky called out, “Apologies for hurting your delicate sensibilities with my h-armless jokes!”

Steve’s laughter echoed.

Lying in the blankets for a few more minutes, Bucky breathed and collected his tangled feelings into a neatly packed box inside his chest. He took a moment to be grateful for Steve’s thoughtful departure. Bucky had unstrapped his prosthetic when the lights were out and Steve had flipped onto his side facing away from Bucky. Usually, Bucky showered before bed and inspected the few inches of the left arm that he still had. The surgery for it was thirteen years ago and it had healed relatively nicely. But after the End, Bucky had been paranoid about anything wrong going on—he didn’t have his doctors, insurance, or Stark Industries anymore. The first year after the End, Bucky’s prosthetic gave him a rash and he had freaked out. It went away with some special lotion he’d scoured the city for and now he obsessively checked his residual arm for any worrying signs.

With a deep breath, Bucky pressed his right elbow into the mattress and pushed himself up. He stared at the raised middle prosthetic finger in his lap. A loud creaking sound sounded from the wall, the pipes protesting as the downstairs guest shower started.

Steve.

Cradling his prosthetic, Bucky got up and hurried up the stairs, willing his heart back down his throat. Bucky was imagining it, he knew that, his shoulder throbbing, throbbing, throbbing. His residual arm looked fine in the mirror, but he couldn’t look at it for long without imagining sores on it that weren’t there. Opening the mirror cabinet, Bucky dry swallowed two Advil pills and within moments, the throbbing ceased. It was embarrassing—Ibuprofen didn’t work that fast, it was all placebo, his fucked-up brain imagined pain and fake cured it. Why couldn’t it do that when he took pills for actual pain?

Stupid brain. Stupid, stupid, stupid—

Bucky found himself sitting on his bed without remembering walking to it. Bucky didn’t want to wear his prosthetic today. He really, really, really didn’t. It was stupid—Steve had been out of it all weekend and terrifyingly vulnerable with Bucky. Even if he hadn’t, Steve wouldn’t care about the empty space where an arm would be. He never cared about Bucky wearing a prosthetic—Bucky punched Steve when it was hidden in winter layers and Steve hadn’t even been surprised. Steve fought in a war, he probably saw more than his fair share of soldiers who lost a limb—probably saw them as they lost that limb.

Fuck—okay, enough with those thoughts.

Bucky stood up. He pulled his stump Shrinker on, brushed his teeth, put on deodorant, and changed into a new shirt patterned with rainbow-colored ducks.

“Nice shirt,” Steve said when Bucky showed up downstairs. His eyes glanced at Bucky’s empty sleeve for a second before he sniffed the air and wrinkled his nose. “What are you wearing?”

“It’s called deodorant, dumbass,” Bucky said.

“It’s a different one. Usually, you smell like lavender laundry detergent. Now you smell like chemical berries.”

Bucky stared at Steve. “That’s weird.”

“It’s not weird.”

“It kinda is.”

“Is not,” Steve protested hotly. He turned his back to Bucky and pulled two new frozen Eggo waffles out of the freezer. “Can’t believe I’m making waffles for your rude ass.”

A flare of irritation rose in Bucky’s chest before he noticed Steve’s red ears and that he wasn’t making waffles because he thought Bucky couldn’t do things as quickly one armed—he was doing it to distract from his embarrassment over Bucky’s scent. An absurd laugh bubbled from Bucky’s mouth. “Poor you. Having to press buttons on a toaster,” Bucky mocked. “I’ll have to start calling you Steve-erella.”

“That was awful,” Steve said, his back still to Bucky. “I’m starting a house ban against your jokes.”

“You don’t even live here.”

Steve turned and grinned at Bucky, foregoing a response.

///

In April, Bucky came up with his Brilliant with a capital B idea while being cornered by the woman who started the whole forced-into-mechanics business. He was in the middle of dumping large amounts of food into his cart without thinking at the grocery store, listening to a high school CD mix from an ex-boyfriend in his walkman.

“...for dinner!”

Bucky jumped at the face that popped in front of him. Pulling off his headphones, he grunted, “Whuh?”

“That’s a lot of food you’re buying,” Ileen said, fishing for information.

“Yep.” Steve stopped by every weekend now and Bucky joked about needing to buy bales of hay to keep up with Steve’s appetite. Plus, the grocery store had given him discounts for fixing the registers. Stocking up in bulk was ridiculously cheap.

Ileen rocked on her heels. Bucky refused to say anything more—monosyllables was his way of life without Steve. “There’s been rumors about your boy,” Ileen trailed off, no longer holding back her excitement.

“Uh.”

“Oh, don’t be panicked! Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry. There’s nothing wrong with that lifestyle!” Ileen grasped Bucky’s right arm, staring into his eyes so intensely like she wanted to feed him her sincerity. “The neighborhood just wants you to know you don’t have to be so sneaky. As long as, you know, there’s not a lot of PDA in front of the kiddies.”

“Oh,” Bucky said. The anxiety that they caught sight of Captain America and not Steve lingered in his system. “Yes. Steve, my...boy.”

“Steve,” Ileen repeated with a smile. Bucky cringed. “What a handsome name. And from what I’ve heard, he’s quite the hunk! No need to be hiding that when you can flaunt him.” She let go of Bucky’s arm, patting it twice, and giggled.

Brand New Key blasted softly from Bucky’s headphones hanging around his neck, clashing absurdly with his mood. Fuck. Shit. Bucky was digging his grave and Steve’s. Lovely. “Um,” Bucky said. “Well. The thing is...uh, the problem is. Steve…”

“Steve?” Illene prompted.

“Steve,” Bucky agreed. “Yes. Steve! Yes, that’s the problem—um, you see. He looks a lot like Captain America. Like a lot, a lot. So much so that they could be twins.” Ileen clutched her chest, eyes round and eating it up. “Oh, yes, it’s terrible. Awful. And they share the same first name.”

“Oh, dear.”

“I know,” Bucky said, sighing heavily. “It’s been such a nightmare. People have thrown glass bottles at him just for walking down the street.” Ileen gasped. Okay, maybe Bucky should tone it down a bit. “He wears disguises and tries to hide inside, mostly. I just wish we could go outside without people thinking he’s Cap when he’s really just sweet old Steve.”

“Oh, poor dear,” Illeen said. During the sob story, her face had hardened. “Well, you dears don’t need to worry about that anymore! I’ll tell everybody and make sure nobody bothers you. Oh, that poor boy. How unfortunate. ”

“It really is,” Bucky said sadly.

“This time next weekend, feel free to come into town! I’ll clear it up all by then, don’t you worry,” Ileen promised fiercely.

With as straight of a face as he could, Bucky pitifully half-smiled and thanked her.

“Steve, holy shit you’re not going to believe what just happened,” Bucky said as soon as he was in his car. His call went straight to voicemail and Bucky laughed for thirty seconds after it beeped. “You’re my very depressed boyfriend with the sob story of being Captain America’s doppelgänger now and there’s no going back. ‘K hope you’re safe. Bye.”

Bucky pressed his face into the steering wheel. What the fuck. Honestly, the only thing that truly bothered him was being offended for his and Steve’s fake relationship needing to be toned down for children. Bucky saw two twenty-year-olds making out on a bench in public on the drive to the grocery store. But when it’s two boys, apparently PDA was banned.

“Rude,” Bucky muttered under his breath as he pulled out of the parking lot. He congratulated himself on the instant cover story. He was tired of sneaking Steve in and out.

///

Bucky argued with a young man, Daniel, when Steve showed up.

“I’m telling you,” Bucky said, “you need to go to a gas station with an air pump.”

“You’re the mechanic! Why the hell don’t you have an air machine?”

“Yeah, Bucky, where’s your air machine?”

Bucky and his customer spun around to see Steve grinning as he walked up the driveway.

“You broke it when you put all that air in your head,” Bucky replied automatically. He glanced to Daniel, belatedly realizing he’d dropped his gruff stay-away facade.

Daniel looked slack-jawed at Bucky. Steve’s laughter turned into a snort in the background.

“He’s a prickly one,” Steve said and Bucky scowled. Steve stuck his hand out. “I’m Steve. It’s nice to meet you.”

“You think that was prickly?” Daniel asked. Bucky scowled harder. “Wow, you really do look like that sonuvabitch Captain America. I’m Danny.”

Danny, Bucky mouthed—he’d known Daniel for two years now and he’d never been given that nickname.

“Son of a bitch,” Steve repeated, smiling. “Do you mind if I steal Bucky? I need some help moving these boxes.”

Danny let go of Steve’s hand, looking down to Steve’s feet where three boxes sat, filled with heavy looking tools. “Oh, sure. Too bad you don’t have any of that super-strength, huh? I’m just going to the gas station, anyway. And don’t worry—I’ll spread the word that you’re here. Aunt Ileen would kill me if anyone came to harass you.”

With a charming smile, Steve thanked Danny and waited until he drove away before picking up all three boxes with ease. “Hiya, Bucky,” he said.

Bucky shook his head. “I hate you.”

///

Bucky stared at the boxes of shiny new tools and books on mechanics. “Steve.”

“Yes?” Steve said nervously.

“You know friendship isn’t about paying each other back, right?” Bucky thought back to the Princess Diaries, the haircut, and their slumber party.

“Um, yes,” Steve said, clearly lying.

Bucky gave him a flat look. Something about it encouraged Steve because he brightened up and added, “I’ve been learning massage therapy for ampu—”

“Steve, shut up,” Bucky said without heat, too fond and amused.

///

Steve charmed several townspeople with an aw shucks persona—it made Bucky finally believe Steve’s insistence that he did great undercover work.

“Oh, this one is easy. It’s like default survival mode from when I ‘woke up’,” Steve said, rolling his eyes at the phrasing—he preferred to bluntly say defrosting or, when he was feeling particularly like a little shit, his resurrection.

“That’s hella sad,” Bucky said, grabbing the wrench Steve handed over.

Steve laughed heartily. “You won’t believe the wonders that golly gee can let you get away with. People still think that I accidentally fumbled into hacking SHIELD's mainframe in my first month at headquarters.”

“You’re such a menace.”

“Sure, Buck. I bet you never used your PTSD for personal gain.”

Bucky preferred The Great De-Arming than using PTSD as a title to combine the accident for his limb lost as well as the weeks and years after it. He suppressed his eye roll, however, and softened his voice in a who, me? tone. “I can’t believe you’d ever accuse me of, say, using people’s pity to get me my favorite dessert in Manhattan.”

Bucky and Steve shared a mischievous smile, knowing how their trauma greatly affected them more than it was useful and finding this far funnier than people think they should.

“Fuck, that smells foul,” Bucky said. “How are you eating that?”

Steve shrugged. He sat on the front porch steps as Bucky worked on a car. An entire dish of some ungodly casserole brought over by a neighborhood Mom™ laid in Steve’s lap, more than half of it finished. “It tastes way worse than it smells,” Steve said, shoving a huge ass spoon full of the goo in his mouth. He chewed with his mouth open.

Pinching his nose to block out the smell, Bucky’s voice sounded squeaky as he proclaimed, “Absolute menace.”

///

Time passed, rolling by with Steve coming every weekend. Bucky’s life became a blur of Steve drawing in Bucky’s garage, late night talks on the bench swing, movie marathons, mass consumption of food, having townspeople more nosy than Bucky would like, and holding a hologram in his palm of Steve in Wakanda.

They texted, too, though it became less of having conversations and more of sending a random text on a thought or question without needing, or expecting, a response.

The morning that Bucky woke up and the garden beds for his family were no longer just brown dirt, Bucky immediately pulled up his phone’s camera.

He kept the camera view on the ground, of his bare dirty feet. “Are you ready for this?” He asked. It took every ounce of self-control to not bounce around. “I don’t think you are. Okay, prepare yourself. Take a deep breath and—” Bucky swung his phone to show Becca’s garden bed. “AH! LOOK AT MY BABIES!” He couldn’t care less if his neighbors heard his screaming. He dropped to his knees and brought his phone closer to the sprouts. “They are so tiny! And little! And green! Amazing! I am a proud Papa.” Bucky laughed wetly, manically, and pressed the stop button.

Steve replied with thirteen exclamation points at sundown. In the morning, there was a package on Bucky’s porch with chocolate in the shape of a cigar and a note that said Congrats on being a Papa :).

///

The last day of April was pleasantly warm as they ate their mac-and-cheese on the bench swing.

“Question for question?” Bucky asked.

Shoving a mouthful of bright orange pasta in his mouth, Steve waved his hand in a go on gesture.

“Were you and Carter… did you guys…?” Bucky nibbled his lip. Earlier that day, a teenager excitedly remarked that if Bucky did some victory curls, they could pose as the best Captain America and Agent Carter cosplay, ever. (The kid also went on to say too bad they’d probably be killed if they did it, so aloof about the legitimacy of that statement.)

Steve took another bit of his pasta, chewing slowly not because he wanted to hold off on answering, but because he used the time to think it through. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “She actually hit it off with Gabe—Private Jones—way more than me.”  Steve looked off into the backyard, close to a thousand-yard stare, only more amused. Bucky watched Steve visibly come back into his body. He took another two bites of pasta and then set his bowl on the ground. He twisted to face Bucky, saying comfortably, “Pegs was my best friend. I loved her, but we both knew it wasn’t in that way.”

Unable to resist the urge to push, Bucky asked, “But the recording…”

It was one of the only things Bucky found on the internet months ago. Sometime in the 60s, someone leaked Steve and Agent Carter’s last words to each other as Steve crashed the plane.

Steve tilted his head slightly. “Well.” He paused, thoroughly thinking it through again—one of the things Bucky liked best about Steve, even if it made waiting for answers painful. “We thought what we had was special. We cared for each other very much. So, we thought to keep a pause on until the war ended,” Steve talked normal, his words less slow as he got a foothold on his opinion, “and then try and build something. I don’t think it would have worked outside of war, honestly. It was hard to remember that, though—still is, sometimes—after they woke me back up. To not be blinded by regret. It was a nice dream to go down to,” Steve said wistfully, “like a bedtime story. The thought of a dance, just a simple dance with my best friend.”

“Steve,” Bucky said, and it sounded terribly quiet among the insects chirping in the night.

Picking his bowl back up, Steve threw Bucky a half-smile, genuine and amused by Bucky’s despair. He started eating again. Bucky lost his appetite.

“Not that you wouldn’t look good in victory rolls,” Steve piped up, “but I like you how you are.”

Jealousy didn’t drive Bucky to have asked Steve about Carter. Even now, he held no embarrassment for inquiring. He knew that Steve knew that Bucky merely had nosy curiosity. Steve didn’t say he liked Bucky out of obligation, there was no trace of comfort or reassurance in it. No, Steve merely dropped it casually, munching away on his food and using his foot to swing the bench.

“I have no idea what to do with you,” Bucky said.

“I get that a lot.”

Bucky began eating again, talking around his food to say, “If you’re gonna die on me, you better tell me soon. If you die a second time without a dance with your best friend than you’re a dumbass.”

///

Bucky woke up one morning to Black Widow eating grapes on the floral couch. His computer once again hooked up to the T.V. with Real World: DC. He thought it said a lot about his life that he didn’t even startle at someone unexpectedly appearing in his house, not even a lick of paranoia in him.

“Took you long enough,” Widow said. She went back three episodes to where she had left off with Bucky—the guy falling off the porch. “Idiot,” she said. Bucky sat on the couch, not minding that he didn’t know if she directed that comment to him or the character.

///

May bulldozed through in a heat wave. Mom and Becca’s birthdays were in May, and the fourth anniversary of the End. Steve built Bucky a big sign for the front driveway saying that Bucky’s unofficial drop-in mechanic business was closed for the month and he drove with Bucky up to New York on Mother’s day. It was the first time they visited the cemetery in months and Bucky couldn’t help but keep fiddling with the petals on Steve’s white lily flowers. Steve didn’t mind Bucky touching them; he didn’t fuss over how they wilted in the overheated truck.

In comparison, Bucky refused to let Steve into the flower shop where Bucky bought pansies and he hid them by his side while they walked to the graves.

The drive back was much better—Bucky drove this time to occupy his mind, pulling out the CD walkman since the radio was broken, and shared earphones with Steve.

“This is monumentally unfair,” Bucky said, cringing as his free ear heard how loud he talked.

Steve grinned and tapped his head, referencing his memory that took only one listen to a song to know all its lyrics whereas Bucky messed up half the stanzas of songs he listened to over and over in his youth.

“I like the way you are,” Steve shouts and points to Bucky, “when we’re drivin’ in your car,” he finished by tapping the dashboard.

“Goddammit, Steve! It wasn’t funny the first time around and it still isn’t the fifteenth time!”

“Bring more than one CD next time, then.” Steve rolled down the window and stuck his feet out, stretching his legs. Their shoulders had to be pressed together to keep the shared earbuds in. Steve continued singing to Avril, his initially smooth baritone changing into a teasing off-key shout.

Usually, bringing a single CD helped slip Bucky into a safe mindless state to get him through until he got back to Indiana. Listening on repeat with Steve, on the other hand, grounded Bucky in the present.

When Complicated circled back, Steve yelled, “I LIKE THE WAY YOU ARE WHEN YOU’RE DRIVIN’ YOUR CAR AND YOU’RE TALKIN’ TO ME ONE ON ONE.”

The car in the lane next to them blared their horn and sped past them, sticking their middle finger out the window.

Bucky chuckled, each rumble of laughter pushed out by the airy lightness in his chest.

Really, it was impossible to not join in and sing, “You look like a fool to me,” while poking at Steve’s disguise of an ill-fitted long flannel and black jeans with more rips in them than jean material. He looked like a goth lumberjack.

Pressing his shoulder into Bucky, Steve laughed so fully that Bucky’s body vibrated with it.

///

With Bucky’s all-in-one self-pity day at the cemetery done, he spent the rest of the weeks weeding the garden beds, planting seeds in places where previous seeds never flourished, and just lying in that part of the yard in general.

Steve befriended the crows, moving to lie in different patches of sun throughout the days he hung out with Bucky. The crows loved Steve far more than Bucky as Steve brought them a variety of snacks other than peanuts.

“You guys look after Bucky while I’m gone, right?” Steve talked to the crows as he was prone to do.

Bucky ate one of the strawberries from his mom’s garden and threw the stem at Steve. One of the crows cawed.

“That wasn’t a very nice thing to say,” Steve lightly scolded the one that cawed. “Bucky, stop saying swear words around the flock. They’re very impressionable and remember.”

“They’re called a murder, which is exactly what I’ll do to you if you keep conspiring with them as if you know what they’re saying.”

The crows—all nine now with Steve’s incentive of food—erupted into calls that sounded like barking laughter. It was the kind of call that made the skin around Steve’s eye crinkle.

“I know,” Steve said. “He needs to read fairy tales.”

Bucky threw a whole strawberry at Steve and he caught it in his mouth, swallowing it stem and all. Bucky wrinkled his nose.

He didn’t know if Steve meant Grimm-like fairy tales or Irish folklore, two things Bucky knew little to nothing about. Sometimes, when Steve became drowsy from lying in the sun, he sang. Mostly lazy, without much tune. Often, the lyrics sounded like poems and, a lot of the time, he sang in Gaelic. One time Bucky asked if Steve’s mom passed the songs down to him and Steve lied silently for a long time and then subtly shifted directions by saying that after he defrosted, he used to look up Irish ballads on Youtube.

Bucky strained his ears as today Steve mumbled in English, I'll sell my rock, I'll sell my reel. I'll sell my only spinning wheel. To buy my love a sword of steel.

Sitting back on his heels, Bucky looked over. “Are you sad?”

“Do I get to have a strawberry?”

“No.”

Steve hummed. “I guess I’ll live.” He smiled, arm tucked behind his head and eyes closed, freckles newly dark across his nose.

///

In June, Steve went all Noah Calhoun and repaired Bucky’s house. Bit by bit he fixed things Bucky didn’t know needed fixing, replacing floorboards and doing something to the rooftop that had Bucky anxiously scolding him every time he caught Steve walking on the slanted roof. He painted the whole house with a new coat of paint—eggshell white or something. Steve had been the most serious Bucky had ever seen him—even more so than when they first met—about which shade to choose and even more serious about the hue of blue for the window shutters and porch railings.

Bucky didn’t need the perfect house nor wanted one but it looked gorgeous and it made Steve happy to do it. Soon, Bucky’s neighbors and customers knocked on the door, requesting Steve’s help for painting their house.

“I think they run towns meetings about who to harass next into an unwanted business,” Bucky said.

In Bucky’s palm, Steve acted offended. “My house painting is excellent and very business worthy.”

“I’m sure you love being wanted,” Bucky teased.

“Roasted.”

“For fuck’s sake—Steve, stop saying roasted in that White-Frat-Boy voice when it’s about yourself!”

///

When Steve asked for the skateboard Bucky used when sliding under cars, Bucky never expected to emerge from the house post-depression nap to discover Steve doing flip tricks on it with neighborhood kids. One afternoon—Bucky let Steve out of his vision for one afternoon and somehow he’d found a fan club.

“Heel flip, heel flip, heel flip!” Four kids chanted. The fifth kid was only a toddler. She sucked her thumb and egged Steve on by excitedly jumping.

Steve and the board moved in a short arch in the air.

“Steve, that’s an ollie, not a heel flip!”

Bucky soaked in Steve’s purposefully exaggerated comical confusion and leaned against the blue porch railing, wondering when this became his life.

///

“When did this become my life,” Bucky muttered.

“In my defense—” Steve hissed as Bucky pressed the washcloth against Steve’s bleeding lip. It already started healing itself but the blood doesn’t disappear on its own, Steven, so Bucky insisted on washing it off.

“No more skateboarding,” Bucky said sternly.

“Buck. ”

“No.”

“You sound like my Ma.”

“Poor woman. Rest her soul.”

“Hey! I’ll have you know I only ever started a fight once as a kid. All the rest were on behalf of others being picked on.”

“When did we start talking about fights? You’re a bleeding heart, Rogers.”

“Birds of a feather flock together.”

Bucky threw the washcloth in Steve’s face.

///

Bucky didn’t know what to think when he overheard a kid saying to Steve, “Mr. Barnes said no more skateboarding so we brought a bat!”

Bucky didn’t expect for a child to be sitting on his shoulders an hour later, either. The toddler—Valentina—burst Bucky’s eardrums cheering for the boys playing against one-man-team Steve at baseball.

Bucky boo-ed with her when Steve stole second base.

///

Natasha started popping by every two or three weeks, always when Steve wasn’t there. It was Natasha, now, not Black Widow.

“Start thinking of me as Natasha in your head,” she had said to him on her second visit, which, quite frankly, was terrifying.

“What about Nat?”

Natasha had eyed him. “No.” It sounded more like, not yet.

///

By the time summer hit, Bucky needed to swat Steve away from the sweet peas in his dad’s garden and beat people with broomsticks to get time with his Steve.

///

“I want to go to Pride.”

“Like a Pride parade?”

“No, Bucky,” Steve’s sarcasm came through loud and clear through his projection from the Wakanda bead, “I meant like a lion pride.”

“Okay. I mean...I’m sure New York still has one going by now?”

Steve perked up, pleased by Bucky’s easy rolling with the punches.

///

“Awfully gay of you to do push-ups shirtless.”

“Awfully gay of you to have a blown-up picture of me above your T.V.”

“I love July.”

“Gay.”

“Gay of you to say gay.”

“Gay of you to eat rainbow cereal.”

“Shut the fuck up. Fruity Pebbles are a classic and you’re not allowed to mock them when you eat all of it every goddamn weekend!”

Steve ignored Bucky in favor of noisily clapping between every push-up.

///

“Are you gay for Mr. Barnes?” the kid playing catch with Steve asked. Bucky watched covertly from a front window. “My mom says you’re boyfriends.”

“I’m bisexual,” Steve said, gently tossing the baseball back.

“What’s that mean?”

“I like anyone. Not just boys.”

“There was a pretty girl but she got dusted and then her mom and dad moved away. Her parents let me have her dog,” the kid rambled.

“What’s her name?” Steve asked.

“Rosie. She had a brother doggie but he dusted, too. She was really sad but now she’s okay. She can jump super high.”

“I always wanted a dog,” Steve said.

“You can come see Rosie. She likes people. You can bring Mr. Barnes! He always seems grumpy. Mom says he likes quiet. I don’t like quiet. It’s a lot more quiet now after the dust happened. But if people didn’t get dusted, Mr. Barnes never would have come here and he fixed my Pop’s car. And he has a cool arm. Sometimes he doesn’t wear his arm but that’s cool, too. My grandpop only has one leg. He didn’t lose it in the dust, he was born like that. Do you think Mr. Barnes is pretty?”

“Sure.”

“Is he like your Rosie?”

“I think I’m more like Rosie.”

“You’d make a good dog,” the kid agreed.

///

Bucky grimaced. “It’s still too Captain America.”

“Shuri said it looks good.”

“Princess Shuri also convinced you to dye your beard blue, pink, and purple.”

Steve stared at Bucky challengingly. “And?”

“When I say it looks awfully gay, I truly mean awful.” Bucky rubbed his chin, staring at Steve’s outfit. “We have to make it slutty, Steve.”

“I think that term is offensive.”

“Gay of you to be progressive,” Bucky said. Steve crossed his arms and his shirt needed to be cut to emphasize his bulging biceps. “Fine, is skimpy better? The S in Steve stands fo skimpy. You are now Skimpy Rogers.”

Steve scowled.

///

“Barnes...what happened to my suit.”

“You’re a heavy sleeper.”

Steve sat on the motel bed—a nice one this time, a few blocks from where the parade would be. His newly improved outfit was laid out before him. Steve scoffed at Bucky’s accusation. “Of course I am, I’m not in danger.” Bucky thought that should offend him but his heart took it as the greatest compliment. “And I slept closest to the door so if someone was coming after you, I’d still wake up no matter how heavy and be first line of defense.”

“Holy sh—it! Where the hell where you hiding that knife?”

Steve flipped said knife in his hand. “Where the hell is my costume?”

“You’re looking at it, Skimpy Rogers.” Bucky pulled out the pair of scissors behind his back and snipped the air.

///

Steve walked out of the bathroom, looking like he floated on air. “You know what? I like it.”

Bucky had cut the sleeves off of Steve’s weird long-sleeve leotard and cut through the collar to make a deep V-neck that went all the way down to where his pants began, showing off a generous strip of muscled abs. After a trim, Steve’s tight leggings now looked closer to spandex or underwear than pants.

Bucky let Steve keep the dumb cape because as skimpy as they needed Steve to look to ensure that no one would ever consider him to be Traditional Uptight Captain America, he wanted Steve to keep his dorkiness.

He was a mess of bright colors—predominantly blue, pink, and purple—and while in the bathroom he slathered on sparkling glitter down his chest and created an elaborate face-paint pink mask over his eyes.

“Hottest dork I’ve ever seen,” Bucky complimented.

Steve beamed. “You’re not too bad yourself.”

Bucky shrugged in his rainbow crop top and jean cut-off shorts. He hadn’t felt the need to dress up spectacularly but it was nice to get a compliment.

///

When Steve carried Bucky piggy-back style through the crowds, Bucky was pretty sure he saw Nat between a hoard of drunk people, there for a split second, gone in the blink of the eye—the purple wig with bangs, gray shirt, white pants, and black high-tops.

///

The next time Natasha broke into Bucky’s house, Bucky remarked, “Pretty ace-stounding of you to show up.”

“I will murder you. Steve has filled the gay pun quota of the year and I will murder you.”

“Sorry.”

“I gracefully accept your apology.” Natasha side-eyed Bucky the moment he realized the puns, a teasing smirk on the corners of her lips.

///

“Mrph.”

“Sorry, you made me promise to wake you up if I was leaving.”

“Ugh.”

“I have to go. Nakia needs backup and I’m closest.”

“What? No kiss goodbye?”

Something soft pressed to Bucky’s lips.

“Did you just kiss me?”

Steve answered Bucky’s question with another one. “I think we’ve been dating for three months?”

Bucky groaned into his pillow. “I’m with an asshole. I shacked up with an asshole who gives me a goodbye kiss instead of hello. I’m gonna break up with you.”

“You like me too much.”

“I do.”

“Go back to sleep.”

“‘M kiss the hell out of you when you’re back.”

“I look forward to it.”

“Damn straight.”

“Gay,” Steve softly corrected and kissed Bucky’s forehead. “Sleep well.”

///

Nakia didn’t even need my help

I’m dating a loser

:(

Stop it

U r not cute

:(((

Thats what u get when u drop a bomb right as u r leAVING

Good bomb?

Yes you idiot

Idk if u noticed but i like ur dumb face

Ur personality could use some work

<3 <3 <3 <3

:* boyfriend

no

:))))

Bucky’s lover

Oh my god

Ttyl got a meeting

~ i kiss goodbye, u kiss hello ~

Get your signatures

and damn beatles lyrics out of here

Dumbass

Have a good meeting i guess

<3

///

Bucky made sure on his promise to kiss the hell out of Steve upon his return. Other than that, nothing really changed.

Well, Steve moved up into Bucky’s bedroom and they showered together now, but it all felt natural and the newness had a comfortability that made Bucky often forget they only just officially were together.

“We’re grossly domestic,” Bucky said.

Steve massaged shampoo into Bucky’s hair. “Grossly,” he agreed.

///

He didn’t let Steve massage his residual arm, but he let Steve place his hand over the scar tissue where his arm ended just below his shoulder, battling the poor blood circulation with Steve’s constantly overheated body. Bucky didn’t wear his prosthetic less, either—it wasn’t an insecurity—but he didn’t object to Steve helping take it off at night.

///

Steve dropped off the map for two weeks in September. He’d been acting jittery for weeks, just small moments where he’d jump if his bead trilled or he checked his phone for texts with his eyebrow wrinkle deep set.

“M’sorry, go back to sleep, sweetheart,” Steve said, running his hand down Bucky’s back in the middle of the night. Steve sat up, bent over his phone, and Bucky rolled to face him, blinking blearily up at him. “They just might need me soon.”

“Why?” Bucky croaked, his voice muffled as he pressed his face into Steve’s thigh.

“Because I’m Captain America.”

“No, you’re Steve.”

“Maybe now,” Steve said quietly. Bucky already slipped into sleep, but he made an effort to pat Steve’s leg in reassurance.

The conversation stuck in Bucky’s mind, yet too dream-like to bring up. The fuzzy edges of it became sharp when weeks later he woke up alone.

///

Nat stayed with Bucky the entire time, moving into the guest room that used to be Steve’s. She prowled through the house multiple times a day, checking for bugs—the electronic spy kind.

Natasha threw him a look that gave off the impression of a raised eyebrow without actually moving her facial features. “You think Steve doesn’t do the same? He’s a paranoid asshole. I just don’t care to hide it from you.”

She put up a dartboard in the garage and endlessly threw darts at it for however many hours Bucky hung out in there.

“I sat in the same position for seventy-two hours on a stake-out.”

“This isn’t a stake-out.”

“It would be better it there’s actual steak.”

“Do you eat steak?”

Natasha stared at Bucky, head turned away from the dart board, and said, “Depends.” She threw the dart, hitting center while continuing to stare into Bucky’s soul.

It took two days before Bucky asked her why she wasn’t with Steve.

“He’s Captain America,” she said, clicking through Bucky’s Netflix and judging his recently watched.

“You don’t believe that,” Bucky said. He put his legs up on the coffee table and crossed his arms. Above the T.V., Steve from six months ago smiled in his Care Bear onesie, stirring lentils, neck turned, soft, teasing.

Natasha glanced at Bucky, smirking briefly. She looked away, and with casual somberness, said, “Sometimes, he’s the only one that can be.”

///

On the second Tuesday since Steve’s departure, Bucky assumed Natasha left. None of her lingering presence soaked in the house and Bucky fussed over the one little pumpkin that grew in his mother’s garden. Heat prickled along his neck and his metal arm over-heated, long past its expiration of being able to control its temperature. He couldn’t care to use sunscreen or take off his prosthetic.

When he returned to the house, the back door screen swinging shut, he was sweaty, grumpy, and exhausted. Natasha sat on the kitchen counter with two bags—one from the grocery store and one from the taqueria in town.

Bucky audibly groaned. “I’m napping. Go away.”

Natasha grinned with sharp teeth—unlike the smirks Bucky was used to. “Tequila,” she pulled out the liquor bottle and slammed it on the counter, “and tacos,” she shook the taqueria bag, “Tuesdays.”

“Is that a thing?”

She shrugged. “It is now. Tequila, Tacos, trashy T.V., Tuesdays.”

“I’m going to shower.”

“Take your prosthetic off before you come back down here.” Bucky held up his middle finger as he walked past her. “It’s bothering you!” she shouted as he walked up the stairs to his bedroom.

///

“Where’s the salsa?”

“You finished it ten minutes ago.”

“Why—in—the—hell. Did you not get more salsa?”

“Fuck off, Barnes.”

“Fuck off, Salsa Widow.”

It wasn’t funny at all—it was the kind of dumb nonsensical jokes Bucky made with Steve—but Natasha laughed, short but there. He received his first real smirk-less smile. “Call me Nat.”

///

Bucky woke up on the couch and gently pushed his face into the couch armrest, whining, “Kill the sun.”

“If you were Steve, I’d dump a bucket of water on you.”

“Good,” Bucky said into the pillow. “Steve’s a piece of shit.”

He heard a snort. “Fine, I’ll give you Advil. Everything else you can do on your own.”

Bucky gratefully accepted the pills. Natasha—Nat was serious about Bucky doing everything else on his own, not even bringing him a glass of water. He dry swallowed and grimaced. As wicked as his hangover felt physically, disappointment overwhelmed him more. He’d forgotten and expected to hear roasted! after bad-mouthing Steve.

///

Nat and i are roasting u

So u r missing out

U r not allowed to die bc we haven’t danced yet

///

Bucky woke up to a loud bang. He moved from lying down in deep sleep to standing downstairs with his detached prosthetic held as a bat in his right hand.

“The door wouldn’t close.”

“It’s been jammed,” Bucky explained automatically. His brain worked like a lethargic over-excited dog—st..e...ve? Ste...ve? Steve? Steve? Steve Steve Steve?

The light flicked on and Steve hunched his shoulders in sheepishly. It was Steve, it was Bucky’s Steve, but he also...felt different. Awkward in his body and looking like he wanted to fade back into the shadows.

“Your...beard,” Bucky finally said.

Steve ran a hand over his baby-smooth face, looking years younger. He didn’t have a quip for Bucky, no dumb joke, only observing.

“Was this a prank?” Bucky asked, half-convinced he was still dreaming. Steve’s hair was cropped much shorter, too. “Did Stark do this?”

Steve laughed, short and surprised. “Actually—yeah, in a way,” he said cryptically. “What do you think?”

Bucky sighed heavily, pretending to sound put-out. “It’s not a deal breaker but…”

Steve laughed fully this time, his eyes lighting up and his cheeks dusting pink. Bucky ached with it all the way deep into his bones. He’d missed Steve so much it was unbelievable.

“I’m angry at you but you’re sad and weird and it’s making me sad, so let’s go to bed.” Bucky held his hand out. “Come on, before I wake up and give you the cold shoulder.”

Tentatively, Steve took Bucky’s hand and allowed Bucky to tug him up to their bedroom.

“Sorry,” Steve said into Bucky’s skin when they tangled their limbs together under the blankets. “I don’t want to make you sad.”

“I yelled at you when we first met, so let’s call it even,” Bucky said. “Go to sleep, Steve.”

“Say my name again.”

“Steve.” Bucky bit Steve’s neck, earning a surprised laugh. “Now, let me sleep.”

“Don’t be too mad in the morning.”

“Mm. No promises.”

///

“STEVE. YOU BEARD-LESS ASSHOLE WHERE’S MY ARM?”

“You threw it at me last night by the door.”

“Well. Good. You deserved it.”

///

Beard-less Steve was all the rage with the neighborhood kids. Everyone demanded to touch his cheeks to the point that Bucky wanted to lock Steve inside and keep Steve to himself. He liked nuzzling into Steve’s face despite Steve calling him annoying cat names for it.

Steve’s blush looked more prominent and Bucky spent all his time trying to bring a flush up Steve’s neck and face. While it proved more difficult than Bucky anticipated, the game of it helped keep Steve from falling into depressive funks, so Bucky learned fast. Startling Steve was the best route to go about it. Cheesy pet names worked at first, though Steve quickly became used to them and even perked up at being called sweetheart. Randomly throwing in doll face one day gave Bucky the light-bulb idea to look up outdated terminology.

“You’re cute as a bug’s ear,” Bucky crooned.

“What—Bucky!” The blood rushed so fast to Steve’s face that Bucky doubled over laughing. “Don’t say things my mom used to say right before we shower!”

“I like making your face red,” Bucky said unapologetically as he stepped into the hot water.

Steve followed, grabbing onto Bucky and saying, “You’re lucky I like you.”

“Oh, don’t be so off the cob, Stevie.”

Steve pushed Bucky’s face into the water stream.

///

A week into Steve returning, Natasha showed up on the back porch swing, drinking lemonade. Bucky had completely forgotten about her and she gave him that flat expression that felt like a raised eyebrow. Bucky saw the amusement at the very edges of her lips.

Steve looked back and forth between Nat and Bucky, a slow smile working up his face.

Nat rolled her eyes. “Time to go, loser.” She pointed at Bucky, “T.T.T. Tuesday next week. You guys have 15 minutes to suck face before I drag Steve’s ass out.” Raising her lemonade in a sarcastic cheers, she stalked away to the front of the house.

///

“Steve.”

“It’s a cat,” Steve said.

“That is a cat,” Bucky agreed, staring at the fat white cat sitting unhappily in Steve’s big arms. Bucky flicked his gaze to Steve’s soft expression. “Why is that a cat?”

“I thought that would be rude to ask,” Steve said. Tipping his head down, he asked the cat, “Why are you a cat?”

It growled back.

“You’re such a smartass—what the fuck, are you sure it’s not a dog?” Bucky asked as the growling grew louder.

“Aw, Buck, don’t be mean.” Steve jostled the cat as if to rock it in his arms like a baby. It hissed and swiped at Steve’s shirt, one of its nails getting stuck in the material. “She’s been doing that since I saw her. The cat shelter wouldn’t take her in, saying they don’t have enough room and she’s too old. Can you believe that?”

Bucky eyed the cat violently yanking its front paw back, trying to get its nail out of Steve’s shirt. “How do you know it’s a girl?”

Steve shrugged, the movement stretching his shirt and dislodging the cat’s nail. “I guessed. What’s it matter anyway?”

“What if we have to take her—them—it? To a vet?”

Steve’s face lit up. “So we’re keeping her.”

“Steve, we’re not having a cat.”

“I named her Spuds. She’s got gray spots like potatoes.” Steve adjusted the cat to show one of the lumpy gray spots in her white fur coat.

Bucky struggled to keep a straight face. “No cat,” he said seriously.

///

They had a cat.

///

“You have a cat?”

“We have a cat,” Bucky said. “Nice to see you, too, Nat.”

Natasha ignored Bucky in favor of holding her hand out for Spuds to sniff. Spuds gave the obligatory no-nails smack to Natasha’s hand. Natasha waited and Spuds smashed her face into Nat’s wrist, giving a loud purr.

“Aren’t you handsome?” Nat asked. “I’m surprised such ugly men could have such a pretty cat.”

Natasha’s half-smirk had enough personality to take up a whole room when it was one of her real ones. Bucky picked up one of Steve’s socks from the ground and threw it in her direction. Spuds growled.

“I’ll defend you from the mean man,” Nat said.

///

Spuds loved Steve, but Steve arguably loved her a thousand times more. He constantly texted Bucky requests for pictures and changed his phone signature to spuds papa <3.

///

Spuds and Bucky tolerated each other. There was an unspoken love between them over their mutual adoration of Steve. He bought a brush to groom her with and she slept on his workshop desk in the garage.

///

The kids seemed to sniff out whenever Steve turned up for a visit, knocking on Bucky’s door and demanding for Steve to come play catch. One kid even invited Steve and Bucky to his birthday party at a man-made lake a half hour drive away. The kids, of course, cajoled Steve into coming into the water and Bucky swore Steve shined brighter than the sun when he resurfaced from a cannonball jump, water dripping down his forehead, his eyes immediately finding Bucky. He smiled and waved. Kids scrambled up his back and he held their hands to help their balance as they’d stand up on his shoulders and jump off him like a diving board.

They waited until everyone left and then Steve dragged Bucky into the lake, splashing and kissing him. Bucky swam around carrying Steve bridal style in his arms, both of them weightless in the water.

///

Neither of them were sure about how they wordlessly agreed to dress for Halloween—but here they both were, equally smugly satisfied and long-suffering about their couple costume as if they had argued about it. Ileen convinced them to come to the town Halloween party in the park and they agreed because Steve had said yes and Bucky wanted free candy.

Honestly, it was a win all around because they both found enormous gain in the other’s outfit. Bucky, for example, had never laughed so hard nor had so many blackmail jokes at Steve’s expense.

“Steve. Steve. Steven. Did you. Did you really. Rip off the Avengers logo on the arm?”

Steve stood in Bucky’s backyard, arriving fresh off his mystery invisible vehicle on October 31st in his real Superhero uniform.

Chagrined, Steve glared at Bucky and placed his hands on his hips. “Yeah.”

“Oh my god.”

“I didn’t stand for what the Avengers were anymore! I had to take it off.”

“Oh my god. You are such an edgy teen. Oh my god. This is so emo. Steve Rogers is a punk.”

Steve shoved Bucky and Bucky easily fell to the grass, laughing.

“How,” Bucky blurted between laughs, “is it so dark?’

Steve scowled. “It got dirty. Didn’t exactly have Stark tech to build me new suits when I was on the run.”

“No way. It did not get that dark by dirt.” Bucky viciously bit down on his lip to stop giggling long enough to call Steve out on his bullshit.

With a heavy sigh, Steve mumbled, “Sam helped me dye it.”

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

Steve pulled his shoulders back and said louder, “Sam helped me dye it.”

Bucky lied flat on his back, crying. “And you ripped the star off!”

That wasn’t to say he didn’t look hot—the outfit looked really, really good on Steve. Custom-made as fuck. Bucky half-wished that Steve’s beard was there to complete the look, so Bucky could see the full picture of what he had looked like on the run. Before seeing the dark navy-blue and dirtied red-and-white striped battle outfit, Bucky had thought the classic brightly colored Captain America outfit would have been better. The edgy cool aesthetic to this one was perfect for Halloween and—goddamn. Bucky wondered what Wakanda-made suit Steve used now, if it looked as good on Steve as this one—so worn-out it molded itself to Steve’s body.

Bucky held no guilt in his heart for how he ogled Steve because Steve absolutely could not keep his hands to himself when Bucky changed into his costume. It felt a little—a lot—problematic to be wearing his grandfather’s dark green World War Two dress uniform, something that should be respected, but Bucky didn’t want to dress up as Peggy or an Avenger.

“Stop it,” Bucky snapped, swatting at Steve’s hand. “There are a million bobby pins in my hair to keep it tucked into this hat and you’re not going to mess it up!”

“Are you saying this is a strictly below the waist rule?”

Bucky fake glared. “Below the head, but yes.” He did a little spin, a small pool of worry in his stomach. “So, is it worth me laughing at your emo suit?”

“My only regret is how difficult it’s going to be getting out of our costumes tonight.”

Huffing, Bucky wrapped a hand around Steve’s neck and pulled him down for a searing kiss, carefully tilting his head around Bucky’s hat.

///

They won the couple’s costume contest—everyone thought it was the greatest hoot there ever was. An appropriately “defaced” Captain America costume and Bucky matching the theme as Steve’s “cute” WWII soldier lover. All the kids wanted to climb up Steve or have him pick them up and swing them around so that they “flew”.

Illeen told Bucky, “Your Steve almost makes me forget about the real Captain America.”

Bucky choked on the ghost cookie he was chowing down on.

“Too bad that bastard isn’t more like your Steve.”

Bucky meant to relay the conversation to Steve, ready for another good laugh, but Danny told them to leave before the bedroom eyes they were making got more sappy, and that was a much better note to leave the night on.

///

“I’m glad he found you,” Nat said. She came every Tuesday for Tacos, Tequila, and Trashy T.V. More and more, she came every time Steve did, as well. She liked to kidnap Spuds and sit on the back porch.

“I’m glad he didn’t lose you,” Bucky replied.

Nat gave him a sly look from the side, the corner of her lips turning up. “Stay,” she said.

“I’m planning on it.”

Turning to face Bucky, Natasha cupped his cheek and looked deeply into his eyes. “Good.” After a cheek pat, she let go and called out with a wave, “Bye, Soldier!”

Steve’s smile beamed right into Bucky’s heart as he saluted Nat from the garden. “Seeya, Comrade!”

“You guys are so weird,” Bucky said.

“You love it.”

“I do,” Bucky admitted easily.

///

“BUCKY.”

Opening the garage door, Bucky shouted, “WHAT?”

“I’m going to pick up milk, do you need anything?”

“Gummy worms, please!”

“‘Kay. Love you!”

///

Steve gently bit the heads off two gummy worms, letting the rest of their long bodies hang out of his mouth.

Bucky rolled his eyes and pulled on one of Steve’s big shirts to sleep in. He crawled into bed and Steve leaned over him, shaking his head to swing the gummy worms side-to-side.

“W—rus,” Steve mumbled without dislodging the candy.

“I can’t believe I love such a dumbass. Oh my god, get your dumbass walrus face away from me!”

It took roughly an hour later when Bucky half-slept and Steve sketched beside him in the low lamplight.

“Steve,” Bucky said.

Steve made a distracted, questioning sound.

“I love you.”

“Well, yeah.” Steve frowned as he erased something. “We say it all the time.”

“We do?”

Steve paused his drawing to stare down at Bucky. “Am I going to have to tell you every time we hit a milestone?”

“Hey, I knew when we had sex.”

Steve leaned back into the pillows, holding his sketchbook to his chest as he laughed. Grinning triumphantly, Bucky pressed his face into Steve’s thigh.

Bucky bit Steve’s thigh and pulled back to say, “I’ve been in love with you for awhile.”

Steve raised a mocking eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

“Yeah. Not since I yelled at you at the graveyard. I think maybe when I saw you in that hideous shoulder pad jacket my heart sort of knew.”

Steve’s made the sappiest, mushiest eyes ever. “That’s awfully gay, Bucky.”

“You followed a stranger that openly told you he hated you to a musty hotel room and drank shitty coffee. Only an insane man in love would do that,” Bucky deadpanned.

“I think we’re just lonely idiots.”

“True,” Bucky said. Yawning, he added, “Goodnight. Love you.”

Steve hummed, back to the sound of pencil scratching paper.

///

STEVE KEEP SPUDS OUT OF MY GARDENS GODDAMMIT

:(((( she’s just playful

///

Bucky dreamt terrible things—years before the End and years after. He never woke up screaming or cried in his sleep—always frozen or quiet shaking. Sometimes he cried when he finally became conscious, sometimes he fell right back to sleep, and sometimes he entered a dissociative state immediately and went to the mirror.

Bucky definitely had some of those nightmares since he and Steve started sleeping in the same bed. Steve whimpered in his sleep and kicked out violently, too. Neither of them addressed it and that suited them just fine.

In November, Bucky dreamt of Steve smoking a cigarette. An unrealistic amount of ashes fell off the butt’s end and the piles of ash morphed into Bucky’s family. It was one of the shortest dreams Bucky’s ever had and he woke up with tears already down his face.

He roughly shoved Steve away—embarrassed that of the two of them, Bucky was the first to need comfort after a nightmare. Wrapping his arms around his legs, Bucky rocked back and forth, crying. Steve talked through the panic attack and when Bucky’s hyperventilating faded to hiccuping breaths, he heard the words Steve said for the first time.

He let go of a leg to wipe at his nose with the back of his hand. In Steve’s lap, Where The Wild Things Are was opened up to the page of the little kid sailing.

“Where did you get that?” Bucky croaked.

“Found it in the attic. I really like the art.” Steve leaned over and grabbed his sketchbook, flipping it open and handing it to Bucky. “Flip through.”

The first page was a large drawing of the kid—Max, Steve had scrawled on top of the page—in his cat costume with lightly drawn half-faces of the Wild Things in the bottom corner. The next few pages were character studies of each Wild Thing, different faces—snarling, smiling, sticking a tongue out. Serious poses and silly ones. Then Steve started making his original Wild Things. It was just hands with claws, an eye with scales around it, horns twisted unnaturally. It took a few pages of random features for Bucky to realize Steve was drawing his friends. Natasha, Princess Shuri—Bucky guessed the one with the spear was Okoye, the one with horns shaped like a crown must be King T’Challa, if Thor had lost an eye then the flying one must be the God, and then...Sam, Wanda. Those pages inked with sadness, half-finished, burned with eraser marks, smudged, re-drawn over and over. They were in a little sail boat and Steve and Natasha’s Wild Things had speech bubbles that said—Please don’t go! We’ll eat you up we love you so!

Bucky looked up at Steve, a small sad sound stuck in his throat. Steve’s lips turned slightly upward and he nodded his head in a go on gesture.

Then there was Bucky. Sometimes with a feathered left arm and sometimes with no arm at all. Steve showed up, too. Features and bodies become scenes and little comics.

“This house needs murals,” Bucky rasped.

“Yeah?”

Bucky wiped his nose, decidedly saying, “Yes.”

///

The next night, half a drawing of a Steve-original Wild Thing was penciled on the living room wall opposite to the T.V. The outline of the Wild Thing had crazy long hair and his left arm was a giant garden hoe. His horns were enormous and curved inward until they touched each other, almost a halo, with vines wrapped around them.

///

A car backfired next weekend and Steve shoved Bucky to the ground, draping his body on top of Bucky.

Luckily, they fell on carpet so Bucky’s skull didn’t crack open. Steve turned beet red and pulled Bucky up, apologizing and checking him all over. It took minutes for Bucky to realize Steve thought it had been a gunshot.

Bucky led Steve up to their bedroom and he spooned Steve until they fell asleep in a nap—it was the start to a wonderful tradition of lazy afternoon comforting naps.

///

September’s heat never chilled and the humid warmth still lingered in late November. Steve encouraged Bucky’s clueless gardening of planting seeds whenever. His other plants hadn’t died yet like Google said they would—hibernating or whatever in the winter.

///

In December, Steve wore his Care Bear onesie again, even though it made him sweat a lake and turned his cheeks rosy. Bucky suspected it had to do with how obviously giddy it made Bucky whenever he saw Steve in it.

They texted nearly every second of the week in between Steve’s visits and Steve explicitly told Bucky over and over this time that he might disappear suddenly. Bucky couldn’t help the dread building in his stomach—Steve would be gone for a month—but he focused on celebrating New Year’s and having his mouth on every part of Steve and requesting Gaelic songs before bed.

///

“There’s only one Black Widow,” Nat said to Bucky on the last day of January, ominously referencing her comment about Captain America back in September.

He took her hand and held it, wondering if Steve knew he’d be leaving tomorrow, wondering if Natasha would be with him. She wouldn’t be here to babysit Bucky this time, that much was clear.

///

Steve shook Bucky awake in the morning. His breath smelled and he burned like a furnace. “Morning sunshine,” he teased, rubbing his cheek against Bucky’s.

Bucky grunted. He drew the energy to move his arms, tugging on Steve’s hips to press closer together because he knew the next words.

“I have to go,” Steve said.

Yep.

“No,” Bucky whined half-heartedly. He was grateful for Nat’s hinting last night, giving Bucky the time to recover from despairing shock. Well, to chip a little bit away at the shock. Eyes closed, Bucky pursed his lips expectantly. Steve chuckled, pressing his lips to Bucky’s. He kissed Bucky again and again and again and then his forehead and cheek and nose and eyelid and lips once more.

“You have to go,” Bucky forced himself to say.

Steve kissed Bucky’s neck. “No.”

Opening his eyes, Bucky stared at the beauty that was Steve in the morning—all soft edges. He brushed a hand through Steve’s wild hair. “Come back safe.”

Steve tilted his head to capture Bucky’s palm for a kiss. “I will,” he promised.

///

A snowstorm hit a few days later, which felt fitting. And nice, giving Bucky a valid excuse to lie in bed.

///

Bought every can of paint color for your murals

Jk i didn’t get “sunshine”

so u’ll have to do with Maple Yellow

///

Kids showed up on Bucky’s porch, some of them shoveling snow off his driveway for free and some of them requesting Bucky to help build toy planes and trains and submarines. They didn’t ask about Steve’s whereabouts but they sighed along with Bucky at random moments. Steve must have told them he’d been gone, felt obligated to prepare the kids for loss.

Stupid bleeding heart motherfucker.

///

How the fuck do u get the fire place to work?

///

Spuds might have been the second unhappiest about Steve’s absence and she took every opportunity to let Bucky know. At this rate, she was going to double in size because food was the only thing that shut up her hours of yowling.

When she got through the first bag of food, Bucky tugged the giant bag out from the miscellaneous cupboard and discovered a small painting of a star-chested Wild Thing bowing down to a cat in a cat costume.

///

Spuds is my new sleeping buddy

She may sleep on my head and suffocate me

But at least she doesn’t snore

#roasted

///

Bucky watched the Princess Diaries and cried.

///

You’re dumb and I miss you

///

Bucky woke up on March 1st, sweating and his heart went into overdrive as he blinked his bleary eyes. Except it wasn’t cold sweats that woke him, he realized, no nightmares. Actually, he slept fairly well. His limbs felt heavier, but instead of depression blanketing him, Bucky found a real blanket weighing him down, one more than he had curled up in last night.

Stumbling out of bed, tripping and tangled in the sheets, Bucky raced out of his bedroom, down the stairs, checking the kitchen and living room and then the back porch.

It was high noon, the grass wet with melted snow, and Steve was home. He was on his knees in a reverent, almost desperate prayer. His shirt clung to his skin, dirty and soaked with sweat, his hands digging deep in Becca’s garden, carefully and fastly ridding it of all the decaying plants that died in February’s big snow storm.

Bucky dropped the blanket he had curled over his shoulders, walking slowly and collapsing onto the ground behind Steve, wrapping his arms around Steve’s torso. Wetness seeped through his pajama bottoms, chilling his knees and shins.

“I know,” Bucky murmured as Steve’s whole body wracked with ugly sobs. “It’s okay. I know.”

He didn’t know anything, not really, not at all. His mom used to say that, especially during Bucky’s crying frustration at learning to use only one arm. Oh, I know, she’d say, over and over as she rubbed his back, no matter how old Bucky was, no matter what he sobbed over.

“I know,” Bucky whispered, allowing his own grief to swell up but not swallow him whole, and pressed his forehead into Steve’s back.

///

Steve finished painting the mural on the living room wall. He painted more Wild Things—in the guest bathroom, kitchen, hallways, front entry foyer, the door to the backyard. He painted over his paintings—Bucky never asked why, but he suspected that Steve went into episodes while painting and when he came out at the end, he saw how twisted he turned the Wild Things into.

They hardly interacted except for nighttime spooning and moments where Steve smiled and they pretended as if nothing wrong was going on in Steve’s head.

“There’s an art store in the center across from Target,” Bucky said when Steve sat at the edge of bed for fifteen minutes, unmoving, in the morning. He took Steve’s hand and pressed the truck keys into his palm, helping to curl Steve’s fingers over them. Kissing Steve’s forehead, Bucky said, “I love you.”

Bucky brought his laptop into the garage, pretending that he was working on some project all day when really he just watched random Youtube videos. At six p.m., he crept back into the house and heard Steve’s low, scratchy voice.

“You think I got the blue right?” Steve asked, holding Spuds up with both hands to support her flabby weight. She laid comatose in his arms. “You’re right, not enough blue.” The easel they stood in front had a canvas painted all blue—every shade of the spectrum.

Bucky smiled and leaned against the doorway. “I guess the Junk Room is now your Studio?”

“I moved the junk to the attic.”

“Can I come in?”

Steve leaned down to ever-so-carefully set Spuds on the floor. He turned to face Bucky with a quizzical expression like he didn’t understand what Bucky asked. “Of course, Buck.”

Bucky stepped in. There were already seven canvases completely painted—two unfinished ones with only a few strokes—and a few of them looked painted over several times. They were all wet. Bucky had no idea how long it would take for them dry, or if they’d dry before Steve painted over them again.

Howling Commandos, greenery streaked with red, a tiny silhouette in the middle of swirling misty red, faces overlapping each other, mechanical wings in the sky, streaks of color, a pale portrait of a blonde haired woman, limbs scraped red and bandaged—all of it littered around the room.

The one Steve showed Spuds was a work-in-progress of blue. Anything and everything blue could be—ice and snow and water and glass and eyes and metal. Bucky stood behind Steve, looping his hands around Steve’s waist and pressing into his back. He pressed a kiss between Steve’s shoulder blades.

“Thanks,” Steve said.

Bucky didn’t know how to respond, but that was okay because Spuds yowled unhappily for her dinner wet food.

///

The Wild Things around the house transformed into the tone of their original creations in Steve’s sketchbook—silly caricatures. Steve’s studio was a whole other world, but the tightness of his shoulders left, his silences changed into fond smiles, and he flipped from cautious touches to giving into his touch-starvation. They even held hands while eating.

///

Steve had to leave for a night—which Bucky pouted dramatically at to get as many fond smiles as he could—and when he returned at five a.m., he woke Bucky up by asking, “Can we go to the ocean?”

And that was how Bucky finally boarded the invisible vehicle Steve and Nat traveled by—a Quinjet. Bucky slept in the pilot seat next to Steve and when they arrived at a deserted beach, Steve carried Bucky bridal style to the shore. Bucky had no idea where they were or the time—the sky too overcast to guess.

“My Ma used to talk about Ireland’s coast,” Steve said. They sat side-pressed-into-side. Steve’s knees were pulled up and he looped his arms protectively around his shins like a child. “Many forget that Cap is the son of an Irish immigrant.”

Bucky fought the sleep-hazy urge to say something silly and light-heartedly distracting. How they must look like poetic cinema, morose and cliché by the sea.

But.

Steve truly looked like something straight out of a movie. Some Sundance Film Festival or depressing Oscar-winning movie. A close up shot of Steve’s face staring out into the far stretch of dark sea. His face closed and blank but so telling of something, a wealth of emotion and turmoil hidden and seen and unknown and deeply provoking. The faint roar of the ocean waves, all consuming and a white noise in the movie’s audio.

He looked fragile. He looked like a statue the sea carved from sharp rock. He looked like he belonged to the sea but the sea wouldn’t take him back. He looked lonely. He looked like he belonged. He looked lost, at the cusp of peace but never getting there.

Bucky couldn’t stop staring just like he couldn’t stop his heart aching.

Steve turned to look at Bucky, his face melting into a smile. Bucky could imagine the new camera angle, Steve staring at the viewer and capturing their breath.

Steve chose Bucky to be that viewer—Bucky was the one Steve’s dark eyes were drawn to.

“I love you,” Bucky said.

“What?” Steve tilted his head closer. The sea’s crashes overwhelmed everything.

“I said fuck you,” Bucky said louder.

“The only thing bigger than the ocean is your forehead.”

“Asshole!”

Bucky had a moment’s notice of Steve leaning in before the most intense and gentle kiss was pressed to his lips. “I love you, too,” Steve said as he drew back.

“Is it as deep as the ocean?” Bucky asked dryly, breathlessly.

“Deeper, actually.”

And you know what? Fuck those eyes. Fuck those muted blue eyes with green that were matter-of-fact and open and murky like the sea when you waded in deep and tried to see the ocean floor in fear of stingrays or whatever the hell else you could step on. “Your eyes are stupid,” Bucky said. “And I love you so, so fucking much.”

///

Bucky’s first sprouts popped up at the same time as Steve did emotionally.

“Steve, this is like seven years old.”

Steve was all smiles today, and not one to be shamed. “Havana is ageless, you fat head.” He swayed his hips and murmured got me feelin’ like ooh-ooh-ooh while spreading mustard on a sandwich. “You know Wanda used to hack the Comms with her powers—you get really bored as shit while on the run, you know that? We used to see the dumbest things we could do. But anyway,” Steve slid the sandwich to Bucky and started making another, “Wanda would play music to go along with our fighting. Sam used to conspire with her—they always played Toxic whenever I did hand-to-hand.” Steve laughed. “Yeah,” he said, an exhale. “She use to play Kelly Clarkson for Sam, always skipping to I’ll spread my wings and learn how to fly. ”

Bucky never heard Steve genuinely giggle until that moment.

///

The next day, Bucky came back from the grocery store to find Marvin Gaye blasting as Steve danced with an unhappy Spuds in his arms.

///

“They really don’t need you for three months?” Bucky asked skeptically. Steve had been here a month, which seemed reasonable if odd, considering Steve’s slow recovery.

Steve half-shrugged. “We’re finished and they don’t exactly need me there. There’s nothing much I can do until the end.”

“And they don’t mind?” Bucky pressed. “Stark doesn’t mind?”

Steve made a complicated face. They didn’t talk about Steve’s missions other than the vague recognition that it had to do with fixing what happened during the End, whatever that meant. There was an assumed lingering tension over the 2016 Avengers break-up between Steve and Stark. “They all pushed this, actually,” Steve confessed. “But I chose beforehand. I want to be with you. I just needed their extra push, you know?”

Bucky eyed Steve. “Okay.”

“What? Finally tired of this old lug?”

Bucky threw a clump of dirt at Steve’s face.

At night, curled in Bucky’s chest as they watched The Little Mermaid, Steve added, “Nat’s gonna be visiting a lot.”

Bucky hummed, caught up in the sleepy warm notion that Steve would be staying here every night.

///

“You guys are going to give me an anxiety complex!” Bucky shouted.

Natasha pulled her sunglasses down to turn her laser eyes on him. She stood on the roof, having vaulted off Steve’s shoulders for the thousandth time. She set her beach towel down by the roof’s edge. “You already have anxiety.”

Bucky scowled and shook his gardening hoe in the air. “You guys aren’t invincible, you know!”

Natasha tossed her head back as she laughed. “You picked the right one, Steve,” she said.

Bucky grumbled, pretending like he was not giddy at Natasha’s rare outward affection, and chucked sun lotion at her. Her hand stuck out, lazily so, and waited for the bottle to come to her, catching it.

Steve kissed Bucky’s cheek. “Picked the perfect pumpkin.”

“I’m not a pumpkin.”

Steve shrugged. “Squash, then.”

“Rogers!”

Steve and Nat laughed. Bucky had never felt such a sense of family since the End and he’d never missed Becca more than he did now, both of which were unbeatable feats.

///

Bucky didn’t know when, but at some point Steve—that sneaky bastard—planted carrots.

“What the fuck,” Bucky said out loud as he pulled a small skinny carrot out from the dirt.

The crows cawed at him in laughter. Spuds hissed at Bucky when he pulled her off Steve’s lap and placed her on the ground so he could kiss the life out of Steve on the floral couch.

///

“Question for a question?” Steve asked.

Bucky laughed. “Woah. Yeah, sure Steve.”

“Can I bring Shuri your blueprints for your arm? She’s going to kill me if I don’t let her make you a new one.”

“I’m doing just fine with this one. I’ve figured out how to make the straps better and what to do when the circuits—” Steve placed a hand on Bucky’s thigh and Bucky cut off. He released a big breath, trying to keep the stubborn defensiveness from strangling him.

“Just a question, Buck. I just want to warn you that she’s going to send a prosthetic whether you want it or not, so you might as well send your notes and designs.”

Bucky wanted to snap that a prosthetic was more complicated than just having a random one sent—a “one size fits all”. But from the snippets Steve spoke of Wakanda, Bucky didn’t dare underestimate the fantastical technology they were capable of.

Thinking about when Steve pushed Bucky to the ground from the car backfire—to when Natasha told Bucky she knew his prosthetic hurt him, when she said Steve checked for bugs, too. “Do you check the house for bugs?” Bucky asked, cashing his question in immediately.

For all he hid the act, Steve admitted to it unashamedly. “Yes.”

Bucky scowled at the easy honesty. “Fine. She can have it—but that does not mean I’ll wear it.”

///

Bucky wore it. It was fucking incredible. Wakanda was fucking incredible. It was black and gold and light and out of a science fictional novel.

“Hey,” Steve called downstairs while Bucky did small motor skills to get used to the new arm. The transition from his silver one to this was so smooth it made Bucky suspicious. “Okoye is on! She wants to know how the prosthetic is.”

Okoye was more frightening, badass, and intense than Steve had described—she made Bucky starry eyed with awe. She asked Bucky questions about the prosthetic, listening intently. One of her fighters lost an arm, below the elbow, and she wanted to know how Princess Shuri’s prosthetics worked, if it was strong enough, reacted fast enough for fighting.

At the end, she said, “Good luck with this one,” her projection nodding to Steve—it was a grumble, but clearly fond and Bucky loved her for it. He’d been worried when Steve would show up in bruises from training with her—but it was clear that she cared for Steve, a sense of loyalty between them, a sense of something Bucky didn’t understand—of being a warrior and soldier.

///

Steve’s prediction from 2021 finally came true as flowers blossomed in May. The grass grew crazy tall from April showers and Bucky pulled out a non-electric mower with blades that spun when pushed. It collected the chopped grass in a little black bag at the back.

Bucky planned on getting one of the kids to use it but Steve found it first and had a hell of a laugh over it.

“This is fun,” he said as he jogged with it in circles, creating weird grass patterns.

“Steve, you truly are the most boring person I’ve ever met.”

“Thank you.”

///

Bucky finally, finally, finally, finally finished his grandma’s motorcycle. He pushed it out of the garage and straddled the seat once on the street. It purred to life and Bucky grinned at Steve who watched from the freshly cut front lawn.

Steve pretending to be shot, pressing his hand to his chest and slowly falling backward.

“You’re so dumb,” Bucky said. “Please get up. God, my boyfriend is a dork.”

“So gorgeous,” Steve wheezed dramatically from the ground.

///

They sat nightly on the porch swing, question for question turning into soft confessions spilling from their lips.

The high school hiking trip, the avalanche, the frostbite, the snow. Dropping out of school, lying on the couch, getting his GED two years past his should-have-been graduation. Living with one arm, living with the prosthetic. Columbia.

Steve let his story out night by night—how he never processed anything. It was all boom-boom-boom. New body? Chase down a Hydra agent and be thrown into a circus act and war. Freeze and come back alive while everyone he knew was dead? Alien invasion. Fighting was his numbness, his way to dissociation.

They both let trauma consume them until they couldn’t breathe—only Steve tortured himself by holding it in while Bucky let it envelop him completely.

Bucky revealed his regrets—his classmates, the subjects he loved, his passion for learning, his degree.

Steve eventually broke the dam of Sam and Wanda. Sam, Sam, Sam—Christ, Steve missed him so much that Bucky couldn’t understand how Steve could keep going over all the loss he lived through. Wanda, he missed in a much different way, his grief tainted with failure, how she was a little sister, how he missed her humor unbearably. His bond with Nat didn’t need words but he alluded to how it was hard for them to be together, how afterwards they couldn’t stand the huge gap in their life together. How they felt the immense loss of their little war criminal team.

“Did you and Sam ever?” This time, Bucky couldn’t help the selfish tint of jealousy.

Steve’s face softened. “No. We thought about it and it was,” Steve made hand gestures, “there when we met but...wrong timing, I guess? It just wouldn’t have worked with Avenging together and Sam still mourned the partner he lost in war and I still mourned Peggy...I’m kinda always mourning, huh?” Steve half-smiled, running a hand through Bucky’s hair. He pressed a kiss to Bucky’s temple. “With Peg, it was like...we were on hold, waiting for the war to end. And wars never end now, Sam and I...it would’ve been too hard. We don’t have any of those feelings now—or we didn’t,” he corrected his verb tense, more as a fact and less of a reassurance, which Bucky appreciated. “But he was my very best friend in the world. He’s dumb and just as stupidly reckless like me but a better man and you would have loved him.”

“I’m sure I would,” Bucky said and he meant it. “I do. Just from hearing your stories, I already know he’s a little shit.”

Bucky talked about his flowers, how he knew their meanings were most likely wrong. How he desperately needed to always remember them or else he couldn't live with himself. Steve explained how he never really knew his father, but honoring his mother was important. He admitted to actually having glass bottles thrown at him when visiting NYC and how he refused to hurt civilians—how the glass embedded in his back and his skin grew over it and Nat had to tear him open to pick it out. That was what sewed them back together, her deciding afterwards to watch his six when he visited cemeteries; she joined him in visiting Sam’s grave in Harlem. The cemetery in Queens that Steve let Bucky tag along to that one time was for another Superhero, someone who Steve called kid in that same quiet voice he used for Wanda.

They talked light-heartedly—Bucky had two short term boyfriends before the End. Steve had a few hookups with boys and a kiss from Peggy in the 40s, a few meaningless dates in the future. Bucky loved space and constellations; Steve was an artist before the war. Bucky wanted to be a fireman growing up, he only spoke in sign language when he was ten because his best friend was deaf, he had a hard case of nostalgia that had him hoarding more boxes of childhood things than NYC tiny ass apartments had spaces for. Steve’s mom taught him how to fight and stitch a wound, the Howling Commandos were and are forever his brothers, he liked watching ballets and plays.

Steve felt hopelessly young and ageless. Bucky felt old.

They loved each other regardless of everything, loved each other intimately and vulnerably, swinging on the porch bench, wrapped in a blanket.

///

“Steve!” Bucky called out.

A distant, “What?” came from the back of the house and then the sound of padding feet getting closer. Steve blinked rapidly as he padded into the kitchen, coming out of the art craze he’d been in for hours, blaring Kelly Clarkson on repeat in his studio. Something fond and warm vibrated in Bucky’s chest at Steve’s confused face.

“Does this cantaloupe smell weird?” Bucky asked.

Steve took the offered melon and brought it to his face, sniffing the blossom end. Bucky watched Steve cock his head, eyebrows cinching together as he stared at the cantaloupe with an unreadable expression.

“What?” Bucky asked nervously.

Steve hummed, taking a long, audible whiff this time. “It smells…” Bucky waited in suspense. “...like the European battlefields.”

A little pit of horror settled in Bucky’s stomach and he thought back to Steve’s nightmares from this morning. Snatching the melon back, Bucky sniffed it—it had a little bit a mothball scent and he guessed he could see how the melon smelled like war—

Small chuckles escaped Steve and Bucky glanced up to see Steve shaking with silent laughter. “It just smells like dirt, Buck.”

“What?”

Steve laughed louder. It wasn’t his full body laugh but it was genuine and relaxed for the first time all day.

///

Bucky knew when to let sleeping dogs lie. Of course he noticed Steve’s breakneck sprinting in the mornings and evenings. Of course he knew that it was a far call from running and a closer call to a not particularly healthy coping mechanism. It was Steve’s version of sobbing, of breaking apart, of reaching the place beyond pain that allowed you to keep moving again.

He noticed and he let Steve have his sprinting; never asking, never prying.

It was almost noon and Steve wasn’t back from his run and Spuds was nowhere to be seen. Bucky wasn’t sure which he should freak out about more. Honestly, his trust in self-preservation between the two was a toss up.

“Hey!” he heard Steve’s shout and a door slam. Bucky froze in the kitchen, eyes wide. Spuds usually came running and meowing when Steve came back from his run. Shit, shit, shit. Bucky tried to look natural and looked anything but. “Guess what happened this morning.”

“What?” Bucky blurted.

At the same time, Steve entered the kitchen. “What?”

They both did double-takes.

“Why are you holding Spuds?”

“Why do you look so suspicious? What did you do?”

Bucky made a protesting sound—he had done nothing but sleep. “I was freaking out about Spuds, who you are holding.” Bucky raised his eyebrows.

Spuds perked up at the mention of her name being said twice and Steve set her fat form on the kitchen counter—Bucky made another ignored protesting sound. “Yeah,” Steve said, giving Spuds a pet and grinning. “I went to go on my run and Spuds slipped out the door and refused to leave my side. I’m sorry I was out longer than usual but she kept meowing when I ran so I had to do my route at her pace and then when she got too tired I had to carry her home.”

A rumbling purr filled up the kitchen from Steve’s continuous petting.

“Oh,” Bucky said, his brain still not operating post-waking up. He imagined Spuds and Steve walking side-by-side. “Do you want to go on your run now?”

“Why? I already went on my run.” Steve walked to the fridge and pulled the orange juice out. Spuds strutted over to Bucky, looking at him expectantly as her new Petter. “Unless you want more alone time?” Steve asked.

Bucky shook his head automatically. Scratching Spuds’ ears, Bucky watched Steve fill a glass up and drink it, fill it up again and drink. He smiled at Bucky when he finished, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Honestly, he looked more relaxed than when he went on his sprinting runs alone. Bucky eyed him for any signs of twitchiness, restless energy under the skin, but nothing was there. Tentatively, Bucky smiled back.

“You have an official running club now, huh,” Bucky said. “Not gonna lie, I’m experiencing some serious FOMO.”

Steve laughed, coming forward to pull Bucky against him and kiss the side of Bucky’s head. “I was thinking maybe we could get a baby carrier I could put her in.”

“The concerning thing,” Bucky said, pushing himself into Steve’s embrace, “is that I don’t know if that’s a joke or not.”

“I love you,” Steve said, simple as anything in the world. The world felt simple as anything this morning. “Want to go out for brunch?”

///

“I don’t really know how to make pancakes.”

Bucky paused at end of the stairs.

“It can’t be that hard, though, right? And it’s the thought that counts.”

Bucky covered his mouth with his hand. Steve propping a mixing bowl on his hip and talking animatedly to Spuds was the best thing he’d ever seen in his life.

Slowly, quietly, Bucky sat on the last step and listened to Steve putter around the kitchen and chat with Spuds. Sitting on top of the fridge, Spuds tracked Steve with her big yellow eyes and gave an occasional meow.

As Steve waited to flip a pancake, he turned to face Spuds and tilted his head at her. “You know, Spuds, you really are a swell gal. Thanks for coming on my walk again. If it was the 30s and you were a dame, I’d definitely take you out dancing.” Steve reached up and scratched Spuds chin.

///

“Would you take me dancing?”

“Of course. Why?”

“I mean back in the 30s. You told Spuds you would.”

Steve, the insane man, had no shame in being called out for talking to a cat. He hummed and said, “No.” He grinned at Bucky’s scowl and continued, “I didn’t start going to gay bars until ‘41. I would have had a real big crush on you, though. I would’ve gone to the dance halls just to watch you dance with girls and pretend that was me.”

“Oh,” Bucky said, cocking an eyebrow. His chest filled with warmth, the kind that comes from fairy laughter. “Would you be jealous?”

“No. I’d just get to live vicariously.”

Bucky couldn’t imagine that. He’d be burning jealous to watch Steve dance with girls and live in a time where he could be killed for dancing with Steve. “Would I be waltzing?”

Steve walked to Bucky as he talked, one big stride at a time. His seriousness left and he joined Bucky’s playful amusement. “No,” he shakes his head, “you’d be flipping women over your back and moving so fast your feet blurred.”

“Oh, Lindy hop? Fox trot?”

Steve laughed, reaching Bucky and placing a hand on Bucky’s cheek. “Sure, Buck.” His eyes crinkled. “You could do the Lindy.”

“Well,” Bucky said, making his eyes wide as can be. “We’re not at a dance hall now. The shades are drawn. I don’t think we’ll get in trouble.”

Steve nodded gravely. “I suppose it would be okay. We’ll have to play some loud music in case the neighbors hear anything.”

“Hear anything? You seem awfully confident in there being loud noises tonight.”

Steve shrugged and Bucky laughed.

There were a lot of loud noises that night—mostly laughter as they stayed up until midnight dancing. They even pulled out Bucky’s great-grandparents dusty old record player and found jazz music records to step on each other’s toes to.

When they finally tumbled into bed, Bucky straddled Steve and said, “Just because we danced, doesn’t mean you can die.”

Steve pulled Bucky down and kissed him slowly. “Never,” he whispered in Bucky’s ear.

“Never,” he said when Bucky sucked on his neck.

“Never,” he murmured once more, breaths slow and steady as Bucky fell asleep on his chest.

///

A long time ago, Bucky stopped wondering about anything in regards to Nat. The next time she visited, she had a box containing a front facing baby carrier.

Neither of them had any contact with her for a whole week due to some secret spy stuff not even Steve knew about—no way of knowing Steve’s random comment about wanting a Spuds carrier for his morning walks.

“Do you guys have a telepathic wavelength,” Bucky said under his breath to Steve.

Both Superheroes laughed. Bucky knew the Serum gave Steve super-hearing but Nat shouldn’t have been able to hear his comment from across the room.

Sometimes, Bucky thought about how everyone idolized the Avengers and envied them. He thought of how now they were hated and the world saw them as symbols with no regard for the everyday humans.

Bucky people-watched. He couldn’t help it. He retreated so far into himself after the End that he took up observing as socialization.

Nat’s hugs with Steve were brief but she leaned into him with all her weight. She took long showers and emerged with rubbed-clean red skin. In the mornings, she held a cup of coffee without drinking it and laid her head on Steve’s shoulder as they watched the sunrise, so quiet she hardly breathed. At night, she went to bed early and as soon as Steve and Bucky left the porch, she snuck outside and took their place. Steve pulled back his strength when they sparred and they laughed and they fought with intensity—professional, harsh, on certain days even sloppy. When Bucky watched, she asked him to throw her his prosthetic so she could use it as a weapon. Twice, Bucky washed dishes and secretly watched them from the window. He saw a fast progression in Nat’s fighting that wasn’t normally there and saw Steve’s face change as he adjusted his strength and style to match hers. The clear struggle on his face to keep holding back his strength and fight off Natasha at the same time resonated with an aching feeling in Bucky’s chest. Both times the spar ended exactly the same in a flurry of movement where one moment Natasha wrapped her legs around Steve and brought him down and in the next Steve had her in a tight headlock.

Bucky was a terrible lip-reader and he felt invasive watching but he couldn’t look away as Nat struggled for minutes to get out and fail as Steve said something to her—it seemed like he repeated the same thing over and over.

Both times, Nat fled for a week afterward.

Natasha knew all of Bucky’s modern references and sometimes she understood Steve’s past references surprisingly well—sometimes she made references neither of them understood. She did a few ballet movements, sliding in socks in the kitchen on Tequila Taco Tuesdays but she said no, her parents didn’t sign her up for dance. She didn’t speak of parents—no graves she wanted to visit, no memorials she wanted to create. She didn’t speak of childhood. Sometimes she made flippant comments with another girl’s name, someone who didn’t sound like a childhood friend and also wasn’t a co-worker Steve knew.

Nat kissed Bucky and Steve’s cheeks; she didn’t say I love you. She mentioned Sam challengingly to Steve, bringing him up casually—creating thick tension in the differences in how she and Steve grieved. She never brought Wanda up the same way. She mumbled to herself sometimes about moves and tricks she forgot to teach Wanda. Steve and Nat joked about Hydra in a truthful, bitter way—the only grateful thing we have for those fuckers is meeting Wanda, Nat said one night and then pulled a twenty dollar bill out from a couch cushion and went to buy vodka (she came back from the store with Cheez-its and soda).

“We’re actual secret werewolves with a pack mind-link,” Nat said, tossing the baby carrier box to Steve. While Steve opened it, Bucky waited for Nat to come over. She stood across the room, smirking but not moving, her gaze focused on Steve opening the present, waiting for his reaction.

When Steve pulled it out excitedly and said thanks to Nat, she huffed and walked over with a roll of her shoulders, her posture becoming languid.

When Steve went on his nightly walk with Spuds, Nat dug her feet into Bucky’s thigh as they watched a cooking show. “What’s the hot goss?” she asked. Her head rested against the couch cushion, her neck lolling to look Bucky in the eye. The top half of her bob dried but her bottoms strands were still damp from the shower—she looked soft and fluffy. Her face was slack and relaxed, her eyes bright and teasing. “The hot gossip, James,” she demanded, digging her toes harder into his thigh.

Bucky missed Becca so fucking much and he loved Nat so fucking much he considered her a sister, another best friend.

///

Steve didn’t invite Bucky into the art studio often; he forgot that it was something Bucky always wanted permission for without asking.

The first week of June, Steve brought Bucky in everyday, shared his sketchbooks, showing drawing after drawing after painting after painting of Bucky in every form, every emotion, in comics, in portraits, in scenes like gardening or lying in bed, his facial features, his feet, his prosthetics, his messy hair.

///

By Sunday evening, Bucky couldn’t take it anymore. He paused their movie and gently pushed Steve off his chest. Sitting up, he crossed his legs on the couch cushion and leaned in to cup Steve’s cheek. “Babe,” Bucky said. Genuine anguish crossed Steve’s face. His heart racing in his throat, Bucky said, “Steve. What aren’t you telling me?”

“Um,” Steve stalled. He bit his lip and it was the first time Bucky witnessed Steve’s screaming urge to lie. Bucky let go of Steve’s face and pressed his palm over Steve’s heart, a wordless plea. “We did it,” Steve’s voice cracked. He took a deep breath and his smile was both faker and more sincere than ever. “It’s happening today. Soon. You’re...you’re gonna see your family, Buck,” Steve said.

Bucky’s fingers curled into Steve’s shirt material. Steve’s heart galloped underneath. “What?”

“You’re going to see Becca,” Steve said. “Your mom, dad. We fixed it. We’re done.”

Bucky retracted his hand, pressing it over his mouth. A wild, wet laugh escaped. He couldn’t believe that Steve kept this secret to himself—how close they were to the solution. He figured Steve, his lovely Steve, worried too much of plans falling through and giving Bucky false hope. Fuck—that must really mean this was happening. Steve wouldn’t have confessed otherwise. “I can’t wait for them to meet you,” Bucky said as he thought of it. It was going to be so weird explaining this all to them and—Captain America!—but he was going to see Becca and Steve was going to meet her and his parents, too. “Shit—will they be right here? Or will they be where they last were? That’s going to be awkward. I don’t know who owns my parents apartment.”

Steve shook his head. Bucky’s shoulders relaxed—good, they’d appear right here in the cozy little home he and Steve created. Steve’s eyes danced around Bucky’s face, taking in his expression. “Buck…” He shook his head again. He scrubbed his face with his hands. “We’re rewinding time.” He dropped his hands, revealing his red eyes. “Everyone will go back to the beginning of the day. I’ll be back there, fighting.”

“I…don’t understand.”

“That’s how we did it, Buck,” Steve explained softly. “Time. Time travel. Time rewinding. We’re going back five years.”

Bucky sat up straighter, reaching his hands out for Steve. Steve caught them both, cradling Bucky’s hands to his chest. The memory of a conversation Bucky had eavesdropped on between Steve and Nat surfaced in his memory, helping to slam the truth of what Steve was implying. Every line of Steve’s face was etched with pity. “You’ll come back to me, right after. As soon as you can,” Bucky choked out. “Promise me.” Bucky dug his nails into Steve’s palms. “Promise me,” he demands, desperate and fierce.

“Bucky,” Steve pleaded. “You won’t remember any of this. It will all be gone.”

Bucky half-expected for Spuds to appear, to let out a screeching meow like she always did at the most inconvenient moments. She broke intimate moments and tension. Her absence brought everything home to Bucky—realizing how Steve loved that cat and how every morning and evening his walks with her had grown longer and longer.

Acid climbed up Bucky’s throat. “We won’t remember each other?”

“No civilians will remember any of this. I’ll remember you. I will never,” Steve’s voice cracked, “forget you, Bucky Barnes. I will always love you and I will always remember.” He squeezed his love into Bucky’s hands, holding them tightly. Looking deeply into Bucky’s eyes, he swore with every ounce of sincerity in the world, “I am so thankful to have found you. Loving you is the greatest thing Steve Rogers has ever done and being loved by you has been the greatest honor.”

Bucky openly wept, broke when Steve said Steve Rogers. “Shut up,” he said. “Don’t talk like that. You’ll come find me and tell me. Make me remember, Steve! Don’t you dare fucking leave me!”

“I’m so tired, Buck,” Steve said and Bucky could see it in the sag of his shoulders, how he carried the world on them. He saw how death carried him. “And if I live, I’m gonna be nothing. You’ll be in the middle of classes, working on your degree. I’ll still be thirty-six in heart and in my mind, but you. You’re reverting back to twenty-six, Bucky.” And fuck, did that make Bucky’s head swim, to be that young again. “I won’t fit you. You won’t fit me,” Steve said softly. “You won’t be grieving and I won’t know anything about how to be with someone who doesn’t understand. You need freedom and to work on a life. I’m so sorry. But—I’m so happy for you, Buck. I’m so happy, sweetheart.”

Steve pulled Bucky into his lap and Bucky struggled, smacking and shoving at him like he was already a snooty mid-twenty-year-old again, blubbering and calling Steve names. Steve ran his hand from the base of Bucky’s skull and all the way down his back, pushing with a little pressure, and all the fight left Bucky at the achingly familiar comfort. Sliding an arm under Bucky’s legs, Steve scooped Bucky properly into his lap, using his other hand to cradle Bucky’s back.

“Don’t leave me,” Bucky cried, burying his head into Steve’s neck and clutching his hands tightly in Steve’s shirt. “Don’t let me forget.”

Steve gently rocked him. “I’m so happy for you, sweetheart. You’re going to have your family back and get your degree. You’re going to have such a good life.” Steve’s voice cracked.

“Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up—”

Steve buried his face in Bucky’s hair, keeping his mouth shut. Bucky cried and cried. The terrible thing of it all was he knew Steve was right—Bucky was so young before half the world died, naïve despite the trauma of losing his arm. He couldn’t carry on college if Steve came into his life this broken and—Bucky heaved a great shuddering breath—Steve would be broken down even more after having to fight all over again. And Bucky was far too selfish to refuse having his family back. His traitorous heart, even in this monumental grief, raced at the thought of a clean slate, a re-do, all the wonderful things that were about to happen.

Steve talked Bucky through breathing evenly. As he came down, Bucky realized Steve’s arms trembled, his whole body shivering minutely. He thought of guiding Steve to bed and curling up in each other as they’ve done so often. He thought of sitting outside by the garden, looking up at the night sky and breathing in fresh air that forced them to recognize their realness with the chill of the wind.

“I don’t want to forget,” Bucky said wetly. He didn’t want to forget flowers and the cemetery and the garden and Steve’s dumb disguises and—Steve.

Steve feeding crows, the line of Steve’s neck when he threw it back in laughter, the freckles on Steve’s shoulders while he weeded the garden, his hair wet and silly and his smile infectious as he surfaced from the lake, Steve playing catch with the neighborhood kids, Steve singing Havana and Kelly Clarkson songs and playing old sappy music while teaching Bucky the Lindy Hop, Steve painting and getting faces wrong and Steve drawing and creating gorgeous haunting battlefields, the little line between Steve’s eyebrows, his hands holding a tomato too hard and exploding it all over his face, his careful strength when handling Bucky, Steve’s long legs tangled in boxers, the taste of Bucky’s toothpaste on Steve’s tongue, Steve hearing a loud sound and pushing Bucky to the ground, Steve shaking from nightmares, Steve holding Bucky shaking from nightmares, Steve talking to Spuds like she was a human, Steve’s ridiculous full-body laughter at a precisely placed comment from Nat and Steve hiking Nat onto his shoulder so she could vault onto Bucky’s roof to sunbathe—Nat, Nat, Nat—and Steve’s sleep-creased face and Steve’s cowlick and Steve’s humor and Steve’s reading voice and Steve’s muted blue-green eyes—

“I love you,” Bucky gasped, “I’m so in love with you, you dumb fucking Brooklyn boy punk.”

Steve shuddered harder and Bucky mistook it for sobs until he heard quiet chuckles. “I,” Steve started, then chuckled and found composure. “‘Please don’t go,’” he quoted quietly, “‘I’ll eat you up, I love you so.’” He gently clamped his teeth over Bucky’s shoulder, earning a tiny, tiny laugh.

“Don’t sail home,” Bucky rasped.

“I’m not the one sailing,” Steve said, rearranging Bucky so that he could clean Bucky’s terribly snotty face. He smiled. “I have my wild rumpus to get to, don’t I?”

Bucky scowled, ready to tell Steve off and not to joke about this anymore. All his words dried up as a numbing sensation started in his toes and fingertips, spreading quickly and into random patches of his body. He sucked in a breath, dizzy and nauseous and confused. He thought he heard a cat meow. Panic should have gripped at him but everything happened so fast that he fell into a concern so soft he didn’t have time to think of anything but one word as his vision went blurry.

“Steve?”
 

Chapter Text

Interlude

It’s the winter of ‘36 and Steve Rogers isn’t ready to die. Truth be told, he never is ready to die. Not at birth as premature, not at six with scarlet fever, not at ten from his first deadly asthma attack, and not at any bouts of winter pneumonia.

Death holds over him, closer than any friend he could have. He finds solace in his acceptance that death waits for him. He isn’t ready but he is never afraid, and that gets him far in life.

But the winter of his nineteenth year, pneumonia comes barging down his door again, right at the end of the season, cruelly. His mother doesn’t have the money for medicine and she can’t skip her shifts at the hospital to take care of him.

So, Steve coughs and coughs and his breaths whistle and stutter and his immune system struggles and struggles. All the while, death watches over.

As he slips into days of incoherence, Steve thinks, I am not ready, the dark creeps at the edges of his vision, but okay.

He wakes up in his mother’s bed, sticky with feverish sweat, days later. A friend of his mother’s, also an Irish immigrant, sat by Steve’s bedside. His heart stutters, not due to his heart issues for once, when she tells him Ma had picked up extra shifts in the TB ward to scrape together more money.

Filling in the blanks is easy.

Steve doesn’t remember the days overcome with illness, but he remembers his mother, his beautiful and selfless Ma wiping his forehead with a wet cloth, forcing him to sip water. He remembers tears, which is strange because Sarah Rogers isn’t one to cry. He remembers her wet face looming over his, blurry and loving.

My sunshine boy, she said. Before slipping back into muddled dreams, he heard, Forgive me if you remember.

It is the winter of ‘36 and Steve is not ready for his mother to die.

Months of Sarah Rogers kept in a sanatorium pass and soon Steve stands in front of a simple grave. He clutches a carefully drawn picture of black stems and carefully outlined white petals. It is the spring of ‘36 and Steve knows death more intimately than ever. He knows death can take something more precious than your own life. He knows he doesn’t want to die but he knows he is ready when time comes.

He knows sacrifice.

Chapter Text

Part Two

The Avengers, or whatever they called themselves since the 2016 Superhero Break-up, keep everything tight-lipped. A mass phenomenon happens, people everywhere having strange dreams and misplaced memories of a life that never existed. It takes six months before a press conference reveals that initially, they hadn’t won.

The world lost. The Superheroes lost.

Half the world lived and then lost five years. The others were dead for five years and came back to life.

Five years.

A man stands in front of a grave, in Bucky’s dreams. His body is blurry and a strange soft dirty blue aura surrounds him. Some type of white flowers are in his hands—Bucky can see that. But the man’s face is obscured and Bucky calls out, or he silently steps forward, and the man’s neck turns. Right as his face comes into view, Bucky wakes up.

He doesn’t know what it means. It’s easy to shake off until Becca talks to him about her new girlfriend refusing sleepovers after sex—TMI, Becca—because her girlfriend has nightmares of cemeteries where she wakes up screaming.

“I think she’s one of them,” Becca confesses.

She and Bucky sit facing each other, on opposite ends of the couch, with their knees pulled up. New Year’s Eve is tomorrow—or today, considering it’s two a.m.—and they’ve spent the past week at home. Bucky’s just finished another semester at Columbia and Becca can work on her freelance graphic art anywhere. A carton of Ben and Jerry’s slowly melts on the coffee table and some old sitcom plays at the lowest volume on the T.V. in the apartment’s main room. The soft light the sitcom casts on Becca’s face is blueish and Bucky’s heart twists.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

Becca gives Bucky a look. “You know. I think she...lived. During.”

Outside the window, snow falls, barely seeable. The skin around Bucky’s right thumb throbs. Along with grinding his teeth, picking viciously at his cuticles is one of the many stress habits Bucky picked up out of nowhere in the last several months.

“Do you really believe in that?” Bucky asks, looking back to Becca.

Becca tongues at the inside of her cheek—the skin of her cheek rippling with the movement. If she was closer, Bucky would smack at it and she’d kill him. “I mean, yeah,” she finally says. “I definitely died.” Swallowing a strangled sound, Bucky goes dizzy with an uproar of nausea. “It must suck to have lived,” she muses.

“I don’t think I could have lived if any of you had,” Bucky trails off, unable to even say it. He’d rather go into the details of losing his arm than think about his family dying.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Becca said. “You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for.”

An ad plays on the T.V., something with a ridiculously blue background and it lights up Becca’s face in a fuzzy way that hurts Bucky’s brain. Small blips of panic are a constant in his life, but there is something terrifyingly unfamiliar in this anxiety. A small hand slips into his metal hand and Bucky holds onto it as he squeezes his eyes closed, waiting for the ice in his lungs to melt.

///

The Avengers keep away. No one explains it, though questions are demanded and theories spin out of control. Some of the teammates integrate back into public—Black Panther is the first. Scarlet Witch and Falcon are spotted in Peru a few weeks later.

Where are the core Avengers, everyone asks. The OG six—Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Hawkeye, Black Widow, and Captain America.

Bucky doesn’t think about it. He figures they deserve a hard-earned vacation from the public. Besides, half of the Avengers haven’t been seen for two years as they’ve run from the government. Hell, Hulk hasn’t been sighted since Sokovia, right? It isn’t new news.

///

Someone’s graffitied Captain America’s face on the building across from Bucky’s bus stop.

Kid from Brooklyn, someone sprayed in red under it.

Relief washes over Bucky, oddly. He expected it to be more vulgar, hateful, which makes no sense now that the world has taken to loving Superheroes once more. Brooklyn came to life all over again with blissful love for Captain America, just like how Brooklyn reclaimed him as theirs after the 2012 alien invasion. Merchandise, hipster drinks with clever Cap puns, selfies in front of his statue in Prospect Park, the whole shebang.

The phrase circles Bucky’s mind throughout his classes that day—Kid from Brooklyn. He knows that phrase. How does he know that phrase? What the fuck does it even mean?

He forgets about it until the weekend. The miserably cloudy sky drizzles as he steps out of the subway staircase. White flowers swarm in his vision until someone bumps into him roughly and the hallucination dissipates. Ducking his head, Bucky hurries forth to find shelter, trying not to think about white flowers and why he feels unfounded déjà vu guilt and why when he tastes rain on his upper lip he thinks of a too-big yellow raincoat and—Just a kid from Brooklyn.

Two months later, Brooklyn Boy explodes into a popular hit on the radio—some girl having written and sang it on Youtube months earlier. Bucky writes off his weird experience as having overheard someone playing the original video at some point.

Kid from Brooklyn

Where did you go

When will you return

Kid from Brooklyn

What did you do

What did we do to you

Blue and red and white

Oh what a sight

You fight and fight and

I have to know

Do you sleep at night

Kid from Brooklyn

Oh, you kid from Brooklyn

What did we do to you

What did we make of you

Come home, come home

You fought the fight

And the fight and the fight

Oh, oh, Brooklyn boy

Brooklyn Baby

It’s time to rest

You’re just a boy, oh Brooklyn boy

Brooklyn boy, oh boy oh boy

Oh Brooklyn baby, where did you go

The music video released includes the singer’s inspiration—grainy old footage of a young 1940s Captain Steve Rogers mouthing the words, I’m just a kid from Brooklyn. He’s dressed in a standard army uniform with several medals pinned on, not in his battle costume. The quirk of his lips is sardonic and silly, probably shooting down someone asking what made him so special. For only being seconds long, it tells a lot, repeating in the video’s background over and over. Roger’s eyes shift to the side, looking like he’d rather be anywhere but there. His eyes rest on whoever is behind the camera for a moment, and as much as he went for defiance, the second before he looks away, his eyes hold so much sadness, a veteran-type haunting.

Bucky hates it. People start saying Brooklyn boy and Bucky doesn’t know why, but it’s wrong. This song shines a light to how people don’t deserve to demand so much from Captain America, that he was just a kid when he signed up for war, but then the world goes and takes this personal grief from him. It strips the Super Soldier of his private life, arguably the last thing he has left to himself after waking up to the curated objectification of his name in the 21st century. It doesn’t humanize Cap, it basically makes him into a new symbol, marketed better for the modern generation that loved to pity.

“You’ve always hated fair-weather fans,” Bucky’s father points out and shovels eggs into his mouth.

“I heard people were out to kill that poor boy,” his mom says, waving a spoon. “The whole lot of ‘em were hated before they fixed everything.”

Bucky grunts and wishes Becca hadn’t canceled on brunch. He waits a few minutes to seem less ridiculous for being so invested in the subject. “It’s not that. I don’t know. I just—doesn’t it bother you? The world made him up into this whole symbol and now they’re stealing this, this—intimate part of his life. Like how personal it is. They should just leave him alone.”

His father hums. “No wonder he doesn’t want to come back.”

“Want some of my corn muffin?” His mom asks.

///

It’s Bucky’s last semester before graduating. In his fear that PTSD had made him an underachiever, Bucky had pushed himself in meeting all his degree requirements since day one of college, leaving him to fill in the gaps of credits from other subjects in his final year.

“You’re taking a Russian class?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re what, again?”

“Taking a Russian class.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m taking a Russian class.”

Becca kicks Bucky’s leg under the small coffee shop’s table. “Why in the fuck? First an art class, now this...who are trying to impress? This must be one helluva cute Russian dude.”

“There’s no dude. Haven’t you heard of being cultured?”

“So, it’s a girl then?”

“No—”

“Ha! That was a hesitation, you—”

“It wasn’t,” Bucky snapped. “There’s no girl, okay? I haven’t dated a girl since I came out as gay, Becca. There’s no one. Jesus fuck.”

“Wow. Okay, James,” Becca said, pushing back in her chair. “When did you become such a grumpy asshole?”

Before Bucky can reply, Charlotte, Becca’s girlfriend, swoops in the coffee shop, drenched from the rain. It’s easy for Bucky to slip away to the bathroom. Charlotte’s the girlfriend with the cemetery nightmares and she’s always made Bucky feel uneasy. It’s been two years since the Fight and no even cares anymore that Captain America, Black Widow, and Iron Man have yet to be seen. Still, Charlotte casually brings up the five years that she lived before the time-reversal—as if it matters.

///

She has blonde hair. She has black hair. She has brown hair. She has purple hair. It is long. It is short. It is wavy. It is straight.

“You know,” she always says before Bucky can ask who she is.

“Please,” he says.

Her mouth moves and it’s garbled, a language Bucky doesn’t understand. Maybe Russian. Her body shimmers after his plea and her hair turns short and red. She cocks her head at him, her gaze pitiful.

Bucky wakes up immediately every time.

///

The man in front of the grave—Bucky never wakes up after. It fades into another dream and another and so on until Bucky wakes up, the memory of the man in a blue halo still resting on his tongue, but fading far too fast.

It is sweet. It is bitter.

///

fuckin poser

jk thats legit really good

im shook

thanks.

its a compliment  

srsly its really good

Bucky scrolls up their messages and taps the photo he sent Becca. The lighting makes the white look more yellow in the picture. Glancing to his desk, Bucky checks to make sure it looks better than his old StarkPhone made it out to be.

“I’m not a fan of the song,” Bucky’s art professor says the next day in class, amused. “But your interpretation is a pleasant surprise. Good work, Barnes.”

“My interpretation?” Bucky had just gone with the whole art bullshit of feel, don’t think.

“But of course. My grandparents immigrated from Ireland. The Easter lily is very symbolic, very peaceful. Respecting those who died fighting for Ireland. A very interesting and odd choice,” she appraises. “It fits.”

Bucky nods a quiet thanks, his mind reeling. Taking refuge in the single unisex bathroom, Bucky washes his hands raw. It had been a mindless idea, his painting. The assignment was to take something that gave you mixed feelings and use it as your muse. Brooklyn Boy.

He thinks, not many people remember Steve Rogers is the son of an Irish immigrant. He thinks, devotion and rebirth. He thinks, Sarah. He thinks, nice flowers. I brought pink ones.

“I think I’m one of them,” Bucky blurts out in the school counselor’s office and starts crying.

///

They say it’s delayed-onset PTSD.

With his arm, the PTSD descended upon him instantly and took up his whole world.

It’s been years since the Fight and Bucky feels like a fake. He could be making this all up, his imagination gone wild after hearing so many stories from people who lived those five years. He is a poser, just like Becca joked about his painting.

“It’s not uncommon for the brain to protect itself like this,” the psychiatrist says. She’s different from his usual psychiatrist, specializing in this Five-year topic. She has a kind voice and a heart-shaped face, but more importantly, she works at a free-of-charge nonprofit. “I’ve seen people who have had delayed symptoms from enduring an especially traumatic time in those five years. I’m sure if you think about it, you’ll see you’ve been experiencing some things all along.”

“I...I’ve had weird dreams,” Bucky admits. “And I used to hear a voice in the beginning. I thought maybe I was schizophrenic or something.”

She shakes her head. “You don’t exhibit any major signs of schizophrenia. Auditory hallucinations have always been a usual experience with the people I see. Repression is a powerful coping mechanism. You must have met someone who became very important to you and your brain couldn’t process the sudden loss.”

“I think they loved Captain America,” Bucky jokes weakly.

She laughs. “Now that is rare, from what I’ve heard of that lifetime.”

“I hated him—Cap,” Bucky admits, and it tastes like truth and lies.

///

He doesn’t tell his family about his epiphany.

///

Someone took the idea of Craigslist’s Missed Connections and created a whole website specifically for people who lived those five years and connected with someone. Bucky types Captain America in the search bar. The first post talks of a woman who met someone while graffiting Avengers faces in Manhattan. The other posts revolve around Cap-hate first meetings. Bucky slowly types in Steve Rogers. Thirty posts come up, only one of them being about the Steve Rogers Bucky means. It’s someone saying they met a girl while dressed up as Captain Steve Rogers for Halloween with the HYDRA symbol stamped over the costume’s star.

“Fuck,” Bucky says, slamming his laptop shut and chucking a couch pillow across the room. Six days of courage to finally bring up this webpage. What a fucking waste. What did he even expect? “Fuck,” he repeats, pressing his face into his hands.

///

Bucky has weird dreams of the grandfather he never met talking about WWII and suddenly changing into Captain America. He dreams of being a kid who collected Howling Commando cards and having random bullies steal them—they throw the cards into a river and Bucky jumps in, only to discover he can’t swim. He dreams of there being an Avenger Land amusement park and he goes on all the Captain America rides and he buys a Black Widow figurine and when he comes home he opens his shopping bag to find all his memorabilia replaced with carrots.

He lives through months of mashed up stress dreams and spends his days wracking his brain for any memory of someone gushing about Captain America. On his graduation day, Bucky’s dad crushes his him in a hug and says he’s so proud of Bucky.

I’m so proud of you, a deeper voice echoes in Bucky’s head. It’s terrifying.

After that, Bucky buries it all, stops searching his mind and the internet, and cancels his appointments with the special psychiatrist.

///

Bucky takes a job at a toy store, telling himself it is just temporary while he applies for “real” jobs. Seven months later, Bucky blesses whatever universal power made the holiday rush nearly disappear as he rubs his temples. Hopefully, the Advil will kick in before more parents demand to know why the store doesn’t have some special toy in stock.

“Excuse me,” a warm, professional voice says.

Bucky’s eyes snap open and he swallows his tongue at the sight of Pepper Potts standing in the stuffed animal aisle. “Uh,” he says.

She has a nice smile—small and amused. “Could you help me find a toy for my niece? She’s into trains and giraffes.”

Adjusting his Santa hat, Bucky nods. “Of course.” He throws her his most charming smile and beckons her to follow him to the mechanical toy section. They narrow it down to two toys within a few minutes, but they talk for another thirty.

No wonder Potts is one of the most respected and powerful CEOs. The closer he gets to his twenty-ninth birthday, the less outgoing and social Bucky becomes. He’s not depressed, he genuinely prefers hanging at home more, feeling more introspective. Yet, Potts unravels Bucky into this talkative, gut-spilling personality he didn’t know he still possessed.

“Have you looked into internships?” Potts asks him.

Bucky sighs. “Anything without a wage is not in the picture for me, right now. It’s okay. I’m sure I’ll put my degree to use someday.”

Potts’ eyebrow raise calls him out on his bullshit reassurance. “Have you considered S.I.?”

Bucky blushes for the long pause it takes for him to connect S.I. to Stark Industries. “I don’t know.”

“I’ve heard it has great pay and benefits,” Potts teases.

Bucky laughs and rubs the back of his neck. “Well, it’s...the competition, you know,” he says. Very eloquent, Bucky. “And I don’t have a Masters or PhD.”

Potts doesn’t look disappointed in him, she hardly knows him, but there’s something personally disapproving in her expression. “You know, I don’t take you as one to give up easily.”

She looks at Bucky challengingly and he bristles. He wants to snap at her, but it’s true. She shouldn’t be able to get a read off of him so quickly but she cut him to the core. Never giving up has always been something he prided himself on.

“It was very nice to meet you, Bucky,” Potts says, holding her hand out. He shakes it, still thinking about what she said and a little dumbfounded that she sounds earnest in meeting a random toy store employee. She buys both toys.

The morning after Bucky’s birthday, an email from a college professor pops up in his inbox. He reads it again and again and again. One of his college professors suggested Bucky for an opening in the R&D department of Stark Industries.

Bucky will have to fill out an application and go through a rigorous interviewing process. If hired, he’d intern for a year, only being paid after the first three months, and he’d have the chance of getting an official job only at the very end of the internship.

Staring at the link to the S.I. application, Bucky takes a deep breath and puts his mental boxing gloves on. A fire he had forgotten fills him up and for some reason, he thinks, don’t let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game. He laughs to himself, not knowing where a baseball quote, of all things, came from. He clicks on the link.

///

Bucky thought interning at S.I. would trigger flashbacks to his lost five-years, or at least aggravate his emotional state. Stark’s name is on nearly everything—a constant reminder of Superheroes. However, Bucky hardly has a moment to breathe without running numbers and ideas through his head and cramming his head full of knowledge. He spends the whole first week staying up most of the night solely for memorizing the schematics of the R&D floor plan.

Bucky still manages to frequently get lost during his first month. Thank god for FRIDAY, who seems to have a strange soft spot for Bucky and helps redirect him. The A.I. rarely speaks to the other staff and only speaks to Bucky when he’s relatively alone. He tries not to question it—maybe FRIDAY has data transferred from JARVIS, the A.I. Bucky briefly knew when he got fitted with his prosthetic years ago.

are you Adulting if u still eat cup o nudes

Becca’s response comes in instantly, even at 2:34 a.m.

Stop calling noodles nudes!!!!!!

Bucky bites his lip, smiling. He’s so fucking exhausted but things almost feel...right. Like his bones settled into his body instead of vibrating with a restlessness he doesn’t understand. Loneliness clings to him with less tenacity than it has in the past few years. Longing for something tugs at his heart, but work gives him a purpose he can’t help but be proud of.

He fears cracking under the immense stress, the long hours, the pressure to do this right to secure a job next year. Bucky has cried in the shower a fair few times over the past months. But ever since he lost his arm and spent the following months, years, sitting around numbly and watching time pass him as a teenager, he started carrying this heaviness without realizing. The dread that he’d be stagnant forever.

And now?

He physically feels himself grow—it’s more adjusting than changing, and it’s scary and refreshing and so, so welcome. It’s like there’d been a shadow that was always a few steps ahead of him and now he’s finally reached it, stepped into this outline of his future self. He doesn’t fit it perfectly, but it’s well-worn and warm as if a future version of him had just taken off a jacket to hand over to present-him.

Bucky blinks at his noodles, reconfiguring himself into the real world, reeling himself in from his spiral of nonsensical thoughts.

“Yep. Time for bed. And I’m talking out loud to myself.” He muses, “Maybe I should get a cat.”

///

Right when the world goes round in a way that makes sense, life smashes through Bucky’s figurative glass house.

“On your right,” a voice shouts.

It’s a dumbass warning as less than a second later, Bucky’s hotdog is snatched out of his hands before he registers the words.

Bucky stares, open-mouthed, as Falcon-the-Superhero swoops past him. Twisting backward while still flying, Falcon takes a giant bite and, the absolute bastard, shouts, “Too much ketchup!”

///

Bucky would think Falcon is flirting with him if Bucky wasn’t explicitly told he isn’t.

“I’m not hitting on you,” Falcon says, once again stealing Bucky’s hot dog during his lunch walk. This time, however, Falcon is dressed in civilian clothing.

“Okay,” Bucky says.

“Not that I’m not into men,” Falcon says, easily matching Bucky’s fast pace.

“Okay,” Bucky says.

“Just wanted to be clear,” Falcon goes on.

“To be clear,” Bucky says, “if you take my hot dog one more time, you’ll become real familiar with my left arm, pal.” Bucky shifts his shoulder, making sure his arm makes the ominous whir sound as its metal plates shift.

Falcon gives Bucky a shit-eating grin and says, “I can’t believe you say pal.” He disappears into a surge of walkers with such ease that it’s dizzying.

Bucky texts Becca the gif of Kermit the frog jumping out of a building and buys another hot dog. He shrugs off interacting with a Superhero like it’s second nature. He’s more caught up in why he’d ever call someone pal, though he fully intends to go through with his threat of using his metal arm if his food is taken hostage one more time.

There’s a bouncing ball of excitement fluttering all over Bucky’s organs, an emotion that’s not entirely his. Bucky doesn’t place the removed feeling until later that night when he wakes up to pee and stares at his reflection, sleepily searching for answers to unknown questions.

It slams into him—for fuck’s sake he has to stop these existential dates with his mirror—that it’s the—the fucking symptoms—flashbacks—the five-year-whatever-bullshit.

His person—his Captain America fanatic that apparently loved Falcon just as much, maybe even more.

Bucky falls back asleep and dreams of sending the Kermit gif to his sister again but instead of Kermit, it’s Falcon jumping out of a building and Bucky accidentally texts the gif to some faceless important person. He wakes up with a sharp breath. The dream anxiety about sending a text to the wrong person lingers for the rest of the morning.

///

He sees Falcon once more.

Falcon shoves him from behind. “Watch out, Weiner Soldier.”

Bucky turns to face the Falcon, glaring at him and pointing at his hot dog on the ground.

“Weiner-less Soldier, then,” Falcon says, shrugging. Bucky stares at him blankly. “Get it—like the Winter Soldier? C’mon, you either live under a rock or have no sense of humor. No manners, neither, after I graciously saved you from bird poop.”

“Thanks,” Bucky says dryly. Seeing the blob of bird shit right next to where he’d been standing, he is genuinely grateful. “I really should be thanking your mother for putting up with your dumb ass all these years.”

Falcon grins widely. “At least my mom didn’t have to deal with birthing your ugly face. See if I ever save you from animal shit again.”

“Oh, how ever will I survive?”

“Is this how you treat all your friends?”

“If they don’t use their magic time-rewinding powers to go back and save my hot dog, then yes.” It’s the first Fight joke he’s made.

“I was dead for all that shit,” Falcon says breezily. He shrugs, gives Bucky that secretive smile he always gives before taking off, and says, “It must have been real hard mourning the loss of my brilliance.”

///

Does Falcon know Bucky lived during that five-year timeline?

///

No, that’s ridiculous. It was a flippant comment. A throw-in-the-dark assumption.

///

It’s been three and a half years since what people called “the Fight”. Three years since the Avengers revealed the time-reversal.

This is old news. It doesn’t matter. Three years is more than half of five years. Bucky’s basically made up for that lost time—if he did, in fact, live during that timeline. His dreams of a cemetery man are probably just some twisted fantasy. Bucky probably died like Falcon had.

Even if—even if Bucky had lived...it’s long past the point of relevance.

///

Sometimes, Bucky feels like he’s being watched.

///

Everyone goes wild in December. The original leak source is unknown, taken down so quickly, but hundreds of copies are already made and all over the internet.

The camera view is focused on a bland white background. Off-screen, a quiet conversation can be heard. Subtitles are made at the bottom of the screen for those who can’t hear.

“What’s the point of this again?”

“We need proof.”

“This will just be erased if we can fix time.”

“ When we fix, and you greatly underestimate my technology.”

“Why me?”

There’s a long pause. Probably a look exchanged between the two talkers.

“Besides, don’t you want to leave a message?”

There’s a commotion and laughing. A figure moves from the corner of the camera shot, coming to stand just a little to the left of the frame’s center. Captain America has his elbows bent, hands on his belt buckle, in his dirtied-black uniform. He stands rod-straight, nods to someone off camera and schools his face into a serious but calm expression.

“Hi. This is Captain America and the year is 2023. Five years ago, we fought against Thanos and his army. We lost. Half of all living things turned to dust, including our own teammates.

“It’s been a hard five years, I know. There has been grief and hardship that feels impossible to live with. It seems as if we, my remaining teammates, have turned a blind eye to the world’s suffering.

“I’m sorry.

“We have been working every day to undo everything that has been lost and it took years, a lot of years, but we have managed to figure out a way. In a few months time, no civilians should remember any of this. Time will reset to 2018, we will fight again, and we will win.

“For reasons, we have decided to keep this information classified. If you’re watching this then someone must have slipped up. My bet’s on Princess Shuri.

“As someone who has lost a life taken for granted and been thrust into a new timeline before, I say the impossible is sometimes the easiest explanation. It’s hard to trust the world but I’ll tell you the truth.

“The world lost. My teammates re-wound time. We won. Half of the world came back to life and the other half lost a five-year timeline.

“That’s the truth. There are sacrifices that must have been made, and unplanned things must happen, but as long as there is one person to stand between the world and a threat, we will always win. No matter who, no matter what, no matter how.

“You may not know it, but you have a clean slate. Make of it what you will. There are worse things than coming back to life or losing five years. I trust the world what to make of this re-do as it will.

“These five years have been difficult, but I don’t have any regrets. I won’t apologize for anything that happened, but I can promise to do my best to bring your loved ones back.

“Hi, 2018. This is Captain Rogers, signing off.”

steeb_b: um, hello??? Where was this when they did the press release?? It’s been 4 yrs bitch. This would’ve helped me so much in recovery

Gay4gabe: ok but how cute is his little smile as he says hi to 2018? THIS MAN

getw0ke: this is a fucking conspiracy where r they hiding him away i bet they made this today how do u even explain a video kept from the past even tho they “claim” to rewind time?????

               le-stem-bian: Princess Shuri, bitch

Bro0k7ynboii: is anyone one crying someone bring wine and ice cream to my house pls I can’t handle him talking to shuri and all the sacrifice insinuations

                      Bro0k7ynboii: “don’t you want to leave a message?” “there are sacrifices that must have been made” the whole hesitance before adding “I don’t have regrets and I won’t apologize” spiel...guys if this doesn’t reek of imma die then idk what does!!!!

the-t-in-thor-stands-for-thot: I’m freaking out did cap meet someone?? Princess Shuri’s voice when she asks him if he wants to leave a message like,,, you can FEEL her grin

                                                 caplives: omg shut up if he met someone they probably forgot all about him this is so sad alexa play mad world

                                                               ThatVodkaMood: it’s better that the person forgot bc cap’s dead lol

CaptainBrooklyn: 1) thank u whoever leaked this 2) PLS LEAK CAP’s LOCATION NEXT

Spidey-is-Gen Z: my bet is on Shuri LMAO why don’t we ever get to see this side of cap 

                           ShuriStan: ikr he sounds like a whiny baby talking to her im dyyyying

¯\_(⊙_ʖ⊙)_/¯: boi he dead as shit

howlies-own-my-ass: is anyone else heartbroken over Cap doubting that they’ll fix time but then when he comes on screen he puts on a brave face and says they’ll always win for us

                                 sjw-dont-interact: no it just goes to show how he and superheros are liars

u-s-a-4: this is propaganda! This is propaganda! This is propaganda!

proudsokovian: lol “hi my name is steve rogers and you all died or all your loved ones died but it’s ok i fixed it carry on!!”

///

After that, people come out of the fucking woodworks to post pictures, videos, stories of Captain America, Falcon, Black Widow, and Scarlet Witch on the run before the Fight, before Thanos ever came to earth. Hundreds of sightings and stories of the “war criminal” gang from 2016 right up until 2018’s Fight. People gush about their disguises, how they’ve never spoken a word of their run-ins with superheroes just because Captain America had asked them not to.

“I closed my eyes and when I opened them, Wanda—um, Scarlet Witch stood in the alleyway and all the men were knocked unconscious. She brought me to a diner and bought me pancakes. When I calmed down, she walked me home.” The young woman talking to the morning News station blushes. “Captain America was waiting at my doorstep and he—he was so polite and kind. He offered to check my house for intruders, just to humor me, and he felt really bad that he couldn’t stay the night but he said the Falcon was the greatest person he knew and if I didn’t mind, Falcon would wait on my doorstep all night, making sure no one came by.

“It was so silly and no intruders came by. I wasn’t in any danger, but they still helped me feel safe,” the woman says. She takes a moment to smile softly. “They asked me to not saying anything about their help—they said they took care of the men from the alley and I was safe but they asked that I keep their identities safe. And of course I did, they were so kind.”

“Did Captain America really have a full beard?” the reporter asks.

Bucky turns his parents' T.V. off. He opens his computer, hoping to distract his mind, completely forgetting what the last article he had pulled up was.

Why Now? How Cap Inspired People To Keep His Crime-Fighting A Secret For More Than Four Years

Bucky stares at the blurry photo of Captain America under the headline—the shocking long hair and full beard that had the world losing its mind. The wrongness that squirms in Bucky’s stomach every time he sees a picture of clean-cut Captain America is absent for the first time in years—this photo of the shittiest quality feels so right that Bucky cries. He doesn’t realize until his dad sits on the couch next to him, woken up by his sobs.

///

How do you tell someone you think that you were—used to be—in a relationship with Captain Goddamn America?

///

“I think I was in a relationship with Captain America,” Bucky blurts out to Charlotte.

“That explains a lot, actually. I ship it.”

Bucky stands in the hallway, eyes wide and wild, clutching his work bag to his chest. He called in sick the second he stepped out of his apartment, immediately changing his route to Becca’s apartment.

Charlotte gives Bucky a pitying smile and steps out of the doorway to the apartment. “Sorry,” she says, “come in. I need coffee. Becca’s out.”

“I know,” Bucky says, stepping in and slamming the door shut behind him. He cringes at the loud bang! He’s unreasonably paranoid that someone will listen in on their conversation.

Charlotte does a sincere, but comedic, doubletake. “I really need coffee. I think you just implied you want to see me. ”

“I did,” Bucky says stiffly.

Charlotte blinks a few times and accepts Bucky’s newfound interest in forging a bond between them. They’ve hardly spoken more than a few sentences to each other despite how close Becca and Bucky are and how long Becca has been dating Charlotte.

Fifteen minutes later, Charlotte studies Bucky as she finishes her first cup of coffee. The kitchen breakfast bar separates them, Bucky sitting in one of the high chairs and Charlotte leaning her hip against the counter in the kitchen area.

“So,” Charlotte draws out the word with a quiet softness. “Is this why you’ve always avoided me?”

Bucky shifts his eyes away. It’s strange, Charlotte’s gentle confrontation in comparison to Becca’s brashness. He shrugs. Looking into his coffee mug, he feels like he’s been here before—gross coffee and stilted awkwardness with someone he knows but doesn’t actually know.

“What flowers did you bring when you visited your family’s graves?”

“Depended on my mood,” Bucky says. “Why—wait,” Charlotte smiles at Bucky’s panic, “how do I know that?”

“Bucky, it’s okay.” Charlotte laughs lightly. She sips her coffee. “Just think of it as a game. A quiz. It’s weird but it helps, doesn’t it? Your brain just knows. You can’t make up or fake this stuff.”

Charlotte putters about the kitchen after a minute of Bucky’s silence, unlike Becca who would’ve bugged Bucky into spilling his guts. Eventually, Bucky picks up his mug, chugs it in three gulps, and squares his shoulders. “Get your computer and look up flower meanings.” A little sheepish, Bucky adds, “Please.”

Charlotte grins, the first sharpness Bucky sees in her. “Man on a mission. I like it.”

///

“Chrysanthemums.”

“Uh, not a burden,” Bucky says as fast as he can. Charlotte half-purses her lips, making her nose scrunch slightly in what he is quickly learning is her you’re wrong face. “Won’t forget. Love?”

“Close,” Charlotte says. “Friendship, joy, love.” She turns the computer to show him.

“No, I know that’s wrong.” Bucky runs a hand through his hair and thinks. “Not a burden. Not a burden. Easy—easy to care for. Easy to care for!”

Charlotte’s catches Bucky’s excitement and doubles it, giving a triumphant whoop when she adds “easy to care for” in the Google search of Chrysanthemums. A link pops up with that exact phrase bolded.

Bucky laughs and reaches over to high-five Charlotte’s hand, clapping it hard and falling off the couch.

They’re both still laughing when Becca’s incredulous voice rings out. “What, pray tell, the absolute fuck?”

“Becca,” Bucky says cheerfully. He pushes himself off the ground.

“Bucky,” Becca says suspiciously. She looks to her girlfriend. “Lettie.”

“Hey, babe,” Charlotte says, smiling dopily. She’s promised not to tell Becca that Bucky lived those five years and that there’s a real chance that Bucky dated Captain America.

Becca holds her arms up in annoyance, shopping bags swinging from her hands. “What’s going on?”

“You’re easy to care for,” Bucky says and Charlotte bursts into giggles, which causes Bucky to drown back in laughter.

///

Bucky thanks the Lyft driver and runs up the stairs to Becca’s building. He pushes her buzzer over and over and over, the panic rising in him—

“Who the fuck?”

“Becca,” Bucky says.

The building’s door buzzes immediately and Bucky pushes through them, taking the stairs because he can’t fathom standing still in an elevator. He walks two stairs at a time with shuddering half-sob breaths, his nightmare fresh in his mind.

Becca, wrapped up in a fuzzy blue bathrobe, stands in the apartment hallway, waiting for him.

He catapults himself into her arms, dropping all of his weight on her. Becca always jokes self-deprecatingly about her weight, but her fat truly does hide impressive muscles—she catches and holds Bucky up easily. Collecting Bucky into her arms, Becca hooks her chin over Bucky’s neck, letting him cry into her shoulder.

“It was me—it was me, you were dead, you and Mom and Dad and I—I was the only one who lived, it was me, it was me.” The words are razor blades in Bucky’s throat and he’s choking on blood, choking on the nightmare that everyone was dead again but instead of them turning to dust, blood began pouring out from everywhere—their ears and eyes and mouth and nose and—

“Oh, Bucky. Let’s go inside. I’ll get you a glass of milk. Everything’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay.”

///

Bucky starts seeing Becca and Charlotte every weekend as well as getting nearly constant texts from Becca. A large part of it is from Becca’s excessive worry about Bucky falling back into a major depressive episode, but the other part of it is that Bucky can’t stop spilling his guts about his dreams and weird experiences.

“Stop stealing my girlfriend!” Becca scolds Bucky more than once over the next few months. He can see how her eyes light up, however, and he feels guilty for how much his avoidance of Charlotte—Lettie—hurt Becca over the years.

It’s fun being quizzed about flowers and later other random things. Knowing the answer to almost every question is the strangest thing in the best way—entirely unlike his amnesia after the avalanche accident. It’s two months later that he lets on to his insane knowledge on Captain America facts, which drives Becca into giggles.

“You are in love with him,” she taunts.

Bucky’s cheeks heat up. “I am not!”

“You so are—you are, you are, you are. Bucky loves Captain America!”

“It’s Steve,” Bucky snaps with a ferocity so great that Becca rears her body back in fear. They both stare at each other in surprise. Lettie has kept her promise to not let on to Becca that Bucky saw someone during the five years, let alone loved someone so deeply that his brain couldn’t cope with the loss and erased him entirely.

Becca raises her hands and lets the issue go—for a whole week even. She looks at Bucky with squinting eyes and purses her lips when Bucky refuses to answer any questions about dating.

///

Wut is cap’s fav uniform

Its couples nite trivia

Bucky

Buck

Bucky wucky bear

Bucky!!!!!!!

I saw the typing bubble pop up ik u red this!!

Im gonna get cot txting hurry up i need to win this

Fuck u ik u kno the answer

Bucky does know, oddly enough. (Or maybe not oddly, at all). He mutes his phone and takes his meds for phantom pain. His residual arm has been driving him crazy the past day. It probably doesn’t help that he keeps rubbing the shoulder his prosthetic is attached to, but he can’t shake this weird feeling that his prosthetic isn’t working right. He’d had a weird dream of his metal arm in black and gold and working even better than his metal one—so realistic that Bucky has obsessed over all the faults of his Stark prosthetic that’s top of the line. His metal prosthetic feels dull. The aches it causes feel greater and more frustrating.

He’s not in the mood to deal with knowing that Captain America loved his navy blue stealth suit best. Knowing that is—too much. Weird. He hasn’t had to face his suspicions of who he dated since he confessed to Lettie because Becca’s always around. Lettie gives him knowing looks when she can and Bucky steadily ignores them, glad for Becca’s secret-blocking interference.

But Becca isn’t dumb and she’s catching on to something. She’s willing to push Bucky to the brink for him to admit to whatever he hides.

Three hours later, he sighs when he checks his phone before bed and prepares himself for her vulgar cursing. His stomach drops to his feet when he reads the texts. Becca and Lettie lost trivia night like he expected, but—

You dated captain america and it’s pissing me off

Or should I say “Steve”

///

“I’m sorry,” Becca says as soon as Bucky opens the door. They haven’t spoken in four days. With her apology out, Becca pushes her way in, not caring for Bucky to respond with forgiveness or not.

“Hi,” Bucky says dryly and shuts the door with a little more force than necessary.

Becca’s on the couch with Bucky’s computer, already having Netflix pulled up. “I’m not going to say anything but you’re throwing away a great thing and I think you’re being really dumb.”

“Fuck off.”

“That’s what you said to Steve. ”

“That doesn’t even make sense! And you said you weren’t going to say anything!”

“Fine. We’ll watch a stupid documentary because I’m being nice but I just want to say you totally just admitted to dating Cap.”

///

When Lettie whispers that she’s going to ask for “Becca’s hand in marriage”, Bucky nearly laughs in her face. Two days prior, Becca had texted boi!!! Im gonna put a ring on this woman!!! She texted Bucky that fairly often, but this time she had followed it up with questions on how to buy a ring as if Bucky knew that stuff.

He’s still curbing in his amusement when Lettie takes his hand and says, “I don’t want to marry her without Steve at the wedding.”

It’s far worse than Becca’s freak out about Steve and her increasingly relentless pressuring for Bucky to stop denying the “obvious” truth.

///

Becca’s furious when Lettie beats her to proposing.

“And I was going to have the perfect proposal,” Becca rants at dinner with their parents. “If Bucky would’ve warned me to do it earlier!”

Bucky grabs Becca’s half-eaten breadstick and shoves it in his mouth. “Let it go,” he says around the food.

“Face it, Bucko,” Bucky’s Mom says. “It’s a fight you won’t live down.” She shares a long-suffering look with Lettie and mutters, “Children.”

Bucky’s dad, ever practical, asks, “Do you have any plans set?”

“Soon as we can,” Becca answers. Her blinding smile to Lettie makes Bucky fake barfing sounds. She picks a pea off her plate and throws it at Bucky’s head, hitting his ear.

“Children,” Bucky’s mom repeats.

“Actually,” Lettie pipes up, “I want to wait a little. Get things in order.”

“Like what?”

Lettie shrugs innocently to Becca’s question, glancing Bucky’s way when she says, “Just things.”

///

Youre being a baby

Leave me alone

The black widow speaks russian

Cap was an artist b4 the war

They were friends

????

Stop googling shit!!

You took an art and russian class

Like your brain Knows bucky

You work at Superhero Industries

Just ask Potts where your bf is

We dont know hes my bf!!!

wow

Cap has pepper potts check up on you at a toy store

And you wont even accept hes your bf??

LOSER

He wouldn’t have Potts check on me

I dont think they really knew each other well

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Shut up!! becca!!

HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING he PROBABLY didnt know her

(╯ಠ_ಠ) ╯︵ ┻━┻

Bucky types out and it’s steve NOT cap and goes back and deletes it. Lettie hasn’t even told Becca that the reason she’s postponing the wedding is because of Bucky. Becca’s just this annoyingly persistent about Steve because she’s an annoying piece of shit. Thank fuck he never told her about Falcon.

///

Someone invites Bucky out to drinks with other co-workers. Bucky figures that he should try and get out more; Becca has gone from Sibling Best Friend to actual Best Friend. As nice as that is, Bucky’s not going to lie—it’s a little sad. His college friends have drifted away and Bucky’s not quite sure when that happened. He’s not sure if he misses them, really.

The more he imagines a life with Steve, the more he hurts with loneliness. He hopes drinking a beer surrounded by people might feel better than drinking a beer on his couch.

So far, not so much. Everything’s loud and there are so many people and Bucky feels like he can’t just be himself—he feels like he’s performing, trading in his workplace mask for a social one.

“I was in a relationship,” a girl says to Bucky abruptly, the first person to speak directly to him in the past thirty minutes.

“What?” he asks. They’re sitting at a cramped table. She’s a co-worker of one of Bucky’s co-workers who works in a separate branch at Stark Engineering. Bucky only knows three of the fifteen or so people here.

“Some people have a look, you know? The ones who Lived with a capital L,” she says. Bucky’s face heats up—he doesn’t—she can’t—what. She’s very Lettie-like in how unperturbed she discusses the five-year timeline. “I moved to California, isn’t that wild? Met this guy, Ryan. Guess we dated happily for three years before that rewind bullshit. He found me after the Fight. Showed up on my doorstep with a suitcase in hand and every detail of my life in his mouth.”

Bucky wants to vomit and he’s only half-way through his first beer. “What—can I ask what happened?”

She shrugs. “It didn’t work out. We’re such different people, now, you know? I felt really bad, he moved all the way out here and I even remembered him a bit, after a while. I really tried for a few months but it just didn’t...click, I guess.” There’s not a trace of sadness in her, she seems at peace with it. She grins crookedly. “We had dated for three years, though. Crazy, isn’t it?”

“Crazy,” Bucky echoes.

“Hey, Angela!”

The girl—Angela—turns her head and promptly forgets about Bucky in favor of another colleague. He can’t say he minds or is offended—the fact that she took one look at him and knew as well as her story has him shaking in his boots.

We’ll be different people. Bucky jolts, sloshing his beer. He hasn’t heard that voice so clearly since his graduation.

“Hey man,” someone says, “you okay?”

“Yeah, I—” you won’t fit me “—I’m, I gotta,” Bucky babbles, throwing his coat on and booking it out of there.

The hot gust of late summer air outside the bar hits him like a hand closing around his throat—humid and suffocating. “Fuck.” Oh my god, Bucky thinks. The person—the man from his dreams, he knew—he must have known everyone would forget.

Only very few people could have known that.

“Oh my god,” Bucky says, the last remains of his denial scattering in the warm breeze.

///

Pack your bags nerd

Bucky stares at the text, sent six hours ago at one a.m. Becca has been radio silence for a week and a half, working on some big deadline for some hotshot project. It worked in Bucky’s favor—he got to avoid telling her about his new memory. Fragments of the painful conversation that Bucky can’t bear to accept. Thoughts with memories attached that he can’t reach or make out—a lake, a children’s book, things Bucky doesn’t remember other than Five-Year-Bucky wishing so desperately to not forget.

Bucky presses on Becca’s contact, about to press Call. Before he does, he hears his front door open. Speak—think—of the Devil and the Devil shall appear.

“Your bags better be packed, loser! We’re going to Disneyland!” Becca appears in Bucky’s bedroom doorway. “Why the hell are you in bed?”

“We’re going to Disneyland?”

Becca throws Bucky a look that clearly says, no, you dipshit. Briefly, Bucky wonders if he’s thirteen again. “We’re going to Indiana,” Becca says. No, seriously, is Bucky thirteen again? Becca pulls the covers off Bucky. “I packed granola bars and Red Vines for you. Come on.”

Thoughtlessly, Bucky mocks in a high voice, “I packed you granola bars and Red Vines.” He rolls out of bed and opens his closet. “We’re going to Indiana, Bucky. Pack your bags, Bucky. I’m going to just storm right into your apartment and kidnap you for no reason, Bucky. ”

“You’re such a child,” Becca says.

“You’re such a child,” Bucky says.

“Hurry up, Lettie’s circling the block with her sister’s minivan. Chop, chop.”

Grumbling, Bucky grabs a handful of assorted clothes and shoves it in his old school backpack. He runs on autopilot, reverting to the childhood way of following his sister with sarcasm first, questions later. It’s labor day weekend and he won’t be missing work, so that’s all that matters, really.

Well, that’s all that matters until Bucky straps into the backseat of the car and sees on Lettie’s phone that Indiana is a twelve-hour drive.

“No way,” Bucky says, surfacing into full consciousness and unbuckling his seat.

“Yes way,” Becca says. “Lettie, floor it.”

Lettie carefully pulls away from the curb. The doors, Bucky learns, are child-locked.

“Why are we going to Indiana?”

“To Daddy’s house.”

“Daddy’s—” Bucky starts, half because Becca only calls Dad that when she’s really low or really happy and half because he has no idea what she’s talking about. A two-story white house flashes in Bucky’s mind and he works the words out, “Gran and Gramp’s house?”

Becca catches Bucky’s eye in the rearview mirror and takes a massive bite of a Red Vine. Lettie steadily acts like a chauffeur pretending to not notice her girlfriend and girlfriend’s brother reverting from thirty-two and thirty year olds to twelve and ten year olds.

“You said you’ve been having weird dreams of it. It’ll help you get memories back.”

Bucky kicks the back of Becca’s seat. He has more than enough memories—THANK YOU VERY MUCH. Refusing to talk anymore, he turns his back to her, pushing his body into the car door and staring out the window. He hates when Becca talks like that—it’ll help you get your memories back. No ifs, never any ifs. It’s like she thinks she can twist the world’s hand behind its back until the world works the way she wants it to. She’s acted that way all through Bucky’s recovery from losing his arm, decisively knowing what things would work and how soon. It was the only time in their childhood when he sincerely meant I hate you when he had said it.

Bucky huffs loudly and presses his right shoulder into the door—harder, grounding. It’s eight a.m. and Bucky has no clue to what’s going on. He never even considered the Indiana house as part of his five-year timeline. He simply thought they were weird dreams, which is why he mentioned it to Becca weeks ago. Why would Bucky’s fucking great-grandparents’ house in rural Indiana have anything to do with those five years? He hasn’t even visited there since he was fifteen when his grandparents were still alive. Since then, his dad kept the house—he grew up in it—but rents it out to a stream of people.

Probably didn’t even check to see if it’s empty, Bucky thinks snidely, despite knowing full well that Becca’s one of the most messily prepared people to exist. She most likely knows off-hand if people are renting the house or not just for the hell of knowing random information.

“Stop pouting,” Becca says.

///

“It’s…” Bucky stands stock-still in front of the house. “Are you sure this is the right place?”

He hears Becca grunt, the rustling of a bag being picked up. “Yeah. Why?”

“It’s not white.” Yellowing paint chips off the house. “The shutters aren’t blue.”

Becca stalks past Bucky, juggling three duffle bags. Her lips tug upward as she says, “It’s always been like this.”

Bucky frowns at the house, knowing in his heart that it’s wrong even in the barely seeable night, and hating how Becca’s right.

///

Something obviously went wrong with Becca’s big business project and something obviously happened with Bucky about the five-year timeline. They both refuse to talk to each other about it and it makes for a very strange day and a half where their normal needling questions are absent. Lettie just makes lemonade and spends her time on this cute little swinging bench on the back porch.

It’s a sweet house and Bucky sleeps dreamlessly. Sunday evening, Bucky sorely wants to call and cancel the next week of work. He’s only now started to relax and tomorrow he’ll have to leave while Lettie and Becca spend two weeks in this haven.

No memories resurface for Bucky—it must be clear because Becca’s eyes are always sad when she looks at him. But he knows this place deep in his bones. It’s the same brand of strangeness as knowing bullshit meanings to very specific flowers from certain flower webpages.

He knows the fourth step when going upstairs squeaks no matter where you step. The second from the top creaks only when stepping on the left half. On the front deck, there is a floorboard nail that sticks straight up, ready to make anyone a victim if they come near. It should be nailed back down, Bucky knows, but it isn’t. Same as how the house isn’t “eggshell white” and the shutters aren’t “robin blue”.

“Remember when Daddy used to make strawberry shortcake when we’d visit here as kids?” Becca asks over breakfast on Monday morning.

“Too late to grow strawberries here,” Bucky says absent-mindedly, pushing the peas on his plate around. “It gets too cold in September. Well, usually it gets too cold. Not always.”

Becca, ever the dramatic, drops her fork. The loud clatter it makes on the plate causes Bucky to look up.

“What?” He grunts at her wide-eyed gaze. “What—oh. Oh.”

“You know,” Becca says, “we only took one car up. You’ll have to drive back and pick us up in two weeks. You should come on a Friday and stay another weekend.”

“If you want,” Lettie adds in.

Bucky thinks about when he hid in the garage the first day here, how he knew how to pick the lock to get in there. Pulling off the sheet over his grandma’s motorcycle, the feel of the seat when Bucky’s fingers ghosted it. Sitting on the stool in the far corner and it being unfamiliar but comforting.

“Maybe,” Bucky says.

They all know it’s a firm yes.

///

Bucky arrives early morning—three a.m.—on the Saturday two weeks later. He sleeps in until noon and has a feeling that he woke up earlier at some point.

“Do we have Fruit Loops?”

“No, but the town store had Fruity Pebbles.”

Bucky grumbles and makes himself a bowl of cereal. Becca comes and sits at the table with him. Something nibbles at the back of his brain. “Hey. Did someone come to the door this morning?”

“What?” Becca’s voice raises two octaves. “No. Why—why would you think that?”

Bucky squints at Becca’s classic panic face. “I thought I heard someone knocking.” Bucky’s eyebrows furrow. “It was really annoying. I thought I heard someone shouting my name.”

“Nope! Must have been a dream, ha ha!” Becca literally says the words ha ha out loud.

“...Piss off if you’re going to be weird.”

Later that night, Bucky leans against the fence at the end of the property’s backyard. A murder of crows sits on top of the fence and they squawk at him occasionally. He likes how they sound like they’re cackling at him—it makes him smile.

“We just want to play catch!” Bucky hears a little voice shout.

Becca’s voice rings out in the dusky night and Bucky perks up.

“I told you this morning, he’s not here. I’m so sorry.”

Bucky’s eyebrows shoot up in interest.

“You’re lying! I just want to play catch.” Whatever kid is harassing Becca repeats, with so much defeat that Bucky’s heart hurts, “I just want to play catch.”

Bucky stands up, dusting dirt off the back of his pants. Becca never handled saying no to people well, especially children. “Becca?” he calls out as he walks around the house.

“Bucky,” Becca says, her voice filled with panic, far more serious than this morning. “Bucky, go inside.”

The little kid on the porch, a skinny little thing with a red face screwed up in a bleeding wound of emotion, whips their head toward Bucky. “Bucky!”

“Uh,” Bucky says, not sure how to ask this random kid why they’re bugging Becca to play catch and why they echoed Becca, shouting Bucky’s name as well.

At Bucky’s palpable confusion, the kid yells, “Not you, too!” and lets out a terrible, ragged cry before turning and running down the street.

///

“Stay away from the neighbors,” Becca tells Bucky.

“Why?”

“They’re just strange,” Lettie interjects smoothly.

Bucky can’t be bothered with their lies, he isn’t planning on being social with townspeople, anyway. He looks at them flatly and returns outside.

He lies in the grass and brings up Irish ballads on Youtube with his phone, setting it next to his head and listening to the haunting tunes.

He feels old and ancient, with a distinctly person-shaped hole in his heart.

///

They watch The Notebook together. Becca and Lettie aren’t subtle when they look at Bucky during Noah’s crazy obsession with fixing up the house. The movie leaves a distasteful emotion in Bucky’s stomach, sitting there heavily. He doesn’t find it cute how Noah basically forces Allie into going on a date with them or how much they fight (even though they kiss passionately after) or that Allie slaps the hell out of Noah the last time they see each other as teens. Bucky can’t stomach Allie falling in love with someone else, Noah seeing her on the bus and chasing after her only to see her kiss another man, Noah basically heartless to the widowed woman he has sex with. The romance is too harsh and dramatic—it doesn’t feel safe and warm.

Noah’s beard stings in a different way.

Bucky excuses himself to bed immediately after and sneaks out onto the porch swing at one a.m.

Becca finds him not long after. “Confession for confession?”

Bucky laughs. “I don’t know. Sure.”

They sit and Becca starts to push her feet into the floorboards until the bench swings backwards. She keeps it rocking, silent, for a long time. “I’m worried,” she finally says, “that Lettie can’t pick a wedding date because she has cold feet.”

Bucky closes his eyes. He’s an absolute asshole. It’s the only reason why he willing says, “I think—I love someone I don’t even remember.”

///

“I’m going to do something,” Bucky says to the crows before leaving. “I swear.”

One of them cocks its head at Bucky.

“I promise.”

It caws and spreads its wings, the other two crows following suit and flying away.

///

Bucky loves the S.I. cafeterias. Not only do they have actual edible food and are open 24/7 for late workers like him, but the conversations he overhears are also amazing. He has a note on his phone filled with snippets that he happens to eavesdrop on. Personally, his favorite is the one about if a T-Rex’s roars sounded like a cat’s meow.

The only downside is that it can be cramped. Even Bucky, the beginnings of a social hermit, overlooks this unfortunate reality once all food became free with his official job title. There are worse things than sharing a table with two Epitome-of-Nerd-and-Hipster-Culture guys that are debating something so passionately it’s cringey watching their dramatic gesticulating.

“No, dude, I’m totally saying he’s dead!”

Okay, well this just turned interesting. Bucky opens up his Notes app, preparing to quote word-by-word.

“Oh, please. If Captain Goddamn America died, they’d be throwing a whole fit over it, massive funeral and shit. If anything, I think they sent him into the past or de-Serumed him.”

Bucky’s thumb freezes.

The other guy sneers at his friend. “De-Serumed?”

“You know, like, made him back into the tiny little kid he used to be. Like, before Project Rebirth.”

“Oh, come on. If that even happened, they’d have figured out a solution by now. And why make him small when he could just be killed? No, I think they had to sacrifice him for the Soul Stone.”

“The Stones are just dumb theories. And why is he the sacrifice? How do we know he’s the heart of the Avengers? Stark hated him.”

“He did not—”

“Excuse me,” Bucky interrupts. “What, uh, what are you talking about.”

The two exchange a look. “Cap’s been in hiding for four years, dude,” the one with square glasses says, going for a gentle tone. “Others have been sighted—”

“—allegedly,” his friend interjects, harsher and to the point.

“—but Cap has been sealed away.” Square Glasses guy gives Bucky a condescending look. “Do you really think every Avenger survived the fight?”

“I mean, almost five years of hiding is a hell of a lot of time, dude,” Mr. Unsympathetic Friend says. “He could have died before the second fight. Time rewind isn’t a quick fix-it. Who knows what sacrifices were made?”

“And who better to sacrifice themselves for humanity than him?”

They won’t need me until the end.

It takes Bucky a moment to figure out that neither of the guys said that—it’s the voice. The two guys take Bucky’s lapse in attention as a chance to go right back in their bubble of arguing.

They all pushed this—it’s not Steve’s voice this time, it’s Bucky’s own thought in his head, the sentence surfacing in his mind, which is weird, weird, weird. It’s a remembrance, a line from a memory—Steve...Steve had said that.

Red hair—it’s more like the letters of those two words than a distinct image, just the notion that dark red hair exists. The dream-woman whose hair shrinks to red flashes in Bucky’s mind. Sucking in a sharp breath, Bucky stands up and exits the cafeteria, not even grabbing his tray of food to put away. One of the guys shouts asshole at him for leaving his trash, but Bucky doesn’t have the time, can’t feel guilt, he has to hold onto red hair, he has to, has to, has to.

Taking the elevator to the bottom floor is the longest two minutes of Bucky’s life. He should run, he should go as fast as he can, but he can’t feel his legs, can’t feel his body or the cold wind or the people’s shoulders that bump into him. He takes out his MetroCard and holds onto those two words. Red hair, red hair, red hair.

When he finally gets home, he sinks into his couch and closes his eyes. He’s never had a memory before, not like Lettie or people who speak about their experiences on the internet. Even after nearly five years, it’s only been snippets of conversations and dreams. It isn’t even like he saw red hair in his mind, it’s the knowledge of it just being...there. It’s like thinking of a favorite food and not tasting it exactly but having the impression of it there on your tongue.

It is the weirdest goddamn thing.

Scrunching his closed eyes tighter, Bucky chants red hair in his mind, trying to pull something forward. The woman from his dreams—the blurry image of her at the end of the dream, no disguise, just her natural look.

Bucky woke up shivering. He rolled onto his side, searching out Steve for warmth, but only found empty bed space. It took a minute to understand and an onslaught of emotions hit Bucky, his heart beating in his throat.

Please don’t be gone, please don’t be gone, he prayed in his head.

Slipping out quietly, he crept down the stairs. Both fear and relief sparked in his chest when he heard the low murmur of voices. Glutton for eavesdropping, and needing to hear that everything was okay, Bucky continued toward the source of Steve’s voice. He slid softly on his socks down the hallway, coming to a stop at the end, keeping out of view from the kitchen.

Nat sat on the counter and Steve leaned against it, both their backs to Bucky. While Nat looked casual popping some small fruits into her mouth, Steve’s shoulders were drawn tight. The darkness of the house was offset with the night’s navy light shining dimly through the wide windows.

They looked like a painting in hues of blue that left an echo of tragedy.

Steve’s low murmur came slow, the way he sounded when he thought his way through a sentence. Bucky strained his ears, holding his breath, leaning forward on his tiptoes. Nat responded and a frustrating silence followed.

Selfish, Bucky heard—Steve said, “I’m so selfish.”

Steve turned his head toward Nat, his jawline softened in the moonlight.

Nat’s voice was louder than Steve’s. “Love is for children, Steve. And children are selfish.” Her face tilted toward Steve and then she shifted to the right like Steve’s head had, facing the window. “If that’s the sacrifice for having love, then be a child.”

Steve’s shoulders pulled up to his ears and lowered, his back muscles moving with the big breath he took. His voice lost the edge of a whisper as he joked, “Love wasn’t made for us, though.” Nat looked back to him. He said, “Was it?”

“No. Occu—”

“—pational hazard,” Steve finished saying with her, chuckling. It was rumbly and bright. “God,” Steve said and Bucky ached as he watched Steve shake his head and hang it low, the back of his neck arched downward. Bucky imagined Steve’s patented follow up half-smile, almost a smirk, almost sardonic, but too soft and true.

It became too real for Bucky, the guilt at eavesdropping rearing its ugly head inside Bucky’s stomach and—

Bucky brings a hand to his mouth. Some of the memory comes in pieces, some of it as strong images like a movie playing, and other parts running through his mind as imageless facts. It’s like a painting with voices. It’s like grasping at the strongest moments in a fading dream upon waking up and trying to fill the spaces in between. It has already begun slipping away and Bucky is lost and drowning and stranded.

///

Bucky holds off his grief until the next morning when he knows Becca is visiting their mom and has left her apartment. As soon as Lettie answers Bucky’s call, he’s blubbering. He admits the conversation that came to him months ago—we don’t fit—and how he couldn’t speak of it, he couldn’t think about it, the fact that Steve hasn’t come to him because he doesn’t want Bucky anymore, doesn’t want this version of Bucky. He sobs through it and then finds his breath to curse and say how, in his self-pity, he never let himself even think of Steve not being here—of Steve being, being—of having died. It was supposed to be like Brooklyn Boy! Steve was supposed to be an alluring mystery of hiding away somewhere. But before the End reversed and was renamed the Fight—and Bucky remembered that now, it used to be called the End, the End—Steve stayed with Bucky in Indiana, in that house they made into a home and that Steve made beautiful, Steve stayed with Bucky for three whole months. He had said his teammates pushed him to stay with Bucky, that even Tony pushed Steve to go to Bucky, and it was so clear now. How had that version of Bucky been so willingly blind? He had to have known Steve was going to make a sacrifice or his teammates already planned for him to, and they wanted to give him a few last moments with Bucky, a sad indulgence for Steve before death, a goodbye Steve never got the first time around. A dance. He had said Nat would visit a lot, and she did, she visited often enough that sometimes it annoyed Bucky, and it was because she needed to say goodbye to Steve, too, it was her last moments of indulgence of his wonderful existence. Steve, her closest friend—she could’ve kept Steve for herself but she sacrificed it all to Bucky because she loved Bucky, too. They were best friends, too, and she wanted them to be children.

“He can’t be gone,” Bucky sobs. He’s unintelligible. “He can’t be, he can’t, he can’t, not when I’ve just gotten him back. He’s alive. He is! I know it. There can’t be any other way. He can’t be gone.”

“Prove it.”

Bucky sniffles and presses the side of his phone to a higher the volume. He croaks, “What?”

“Prove,” Lettie says slowly, “it.”

Bucky’s phone beeps twice and he pulls back to see the call ended.

Lettie hung up on him.

///

The all-consuming eruption of Bucky’s—irrational—anger at Lettie keeps him from falling into a pit of despair.

///

“Cute, right?”

“Oh, sorry—I didn’t mean to snoop—”

“No, no,” Alice—Bucky thinks her name is Alice—says. She places a hand on her growing belly. “I need some space, too. I get it.”

Bucky nods. His mom dragged him to her friend’s daughter’s baby shower as her plus one. Becca and Dad both have convenient obstacles in the way of coming. Bucky has spent the entire time stuffing his face with cheese puffs and hiding in corners. Hiding away in the nursery room is not one of his brightest ideas, Bucky reflects as he awkwardly puts his hand filled with cheese puffs behind his back.

“Uh. You’re right,” Bucky says. “It’s a, uh, very cute room.”

Alice beams. “Thanks! My partner painted the walls. Isn’t The Wild Things just the cutest?”

Bucky vaguely remembers reading Where the Wild Things Are as a kid and they definitely weren’t cute. A great story, interesting monsters, but not anything along the lines of adorable. Looking at the yellow walls decorated in book characters, Bucky suddenly sees that the animals with horns are Wild Things. The artistic liberties taken with re-creating the monsters is extensive, to say the least. It’s the most cutesie version possible.

“They’re great,” Bucky lies.

“Well! I have to get back.” Alice nods to the door and smiles sympathetically at Bucky.

“Oh!” She thinks she needs to be a good host by keeping Bucky company. “Yes, of course. Yes. Yeah.” Bucky sags when she leaves the room and shoves the rest of the cheese puffs in his mouth. Chewing, he steps closer to the nursery mural, looking at it thoughtfully.

Two sickeningly cute monsters hold a baby dressed in the classic cat costume. Above their heads it says, Let The Wild Rumpus Start!

Bucky bites down hard on his tongue, spluttering up his cheese puffs.

///

“You know, Dad and I always wondered.” Bucky’s mom grabs his hand across the table. She dragged him out of his stupor in the nursery and off to a little coffee shop bakery a few blocks away, excusing them from the party early. “There was something different about you after the big Fight and time travel scandal.”

Bucky frowns. “What’s that mean?”

She gives his hand a squeeze and lets go, patting the top of his hand twice before pulling her arm back. “You just seemed to grow up so fast! It was like…” she smiles wetly, “when you lost your arm. You had this look of being so...lost. Your moods were back and you threw yourself into schoolwork, distraction. But then, you evened out so fast. It was strange. Like you zoomed ahead to a more mature you.”

“Zoomed ahead,” Bucky repeats. His mom laughs, swatting at the air with her hand. He smiles, glad to have brought comic relief.

“I just wish you had told us, James.” His mom sighs. “I swear, I have to pull your teeth out even though you’re in your thirties. Every day I’m thankful that if I had to have a stupid child, at least I had two. If you and Becca didn’t confess all your dumb secrets to each other, I don’t know how I’d deal.”

Bucky makes a mix between a sound of great offense and a bark of laughter. He hasn’t even told her about Steve, yet.

“Oh, shush! It’s a serious issue for a mother! You’ve been holding this in for five years, you bad boy!” Bucky’s mom slaps Bucky’s hand. “Now, I’m going to get a cookie and you’re going to have one, too.”

Bucky rolls his eyes and his mom fixes a fierce gaze on him as she walks backwards to the register.

Life sure is on Lettie’s side today—some angry spirit throwing signs at Bucky until he swallows his pride—because his mom returns with a red, white, and blue cookie cut in the shape of a certain Superhero’s face.

“I know there’s all that,” Bucky’s mom waves her hand flippantly, “going on about what he’s doing now but I remembered how much you loved him as a kid! Look at his sweet smile, Bucky. If he knew you, he’d be proud of you.”

It’s already too much having an unexpected Captain America cookie come out of nowhere. Combined with his mom’s commentary, Bucky can’t help but laugh.

“Bucky?” His mom asks, concerned.

He puts a hand over his mouth, trying to calm down, but the giggles don’t stop—his eyes water from laughing so hard while trying to suppress it at the same time. He’s being hysterical and loud and scaring his mother but—

I’ll eat you up, I love you so.

///

Bucky rubs the pink petals of the lilies he bought. He feels the beat of his heart in every organ, every blood vessel. He pounds and pounds and pounds. He likes to think he’s romantic and that his heart desperately calls out for his lost lover, but really all he can think about is puking and oncoming disappointment.

It’s her birthday. He’ll be there. He has to. A part of Bucky that startles him thinks, even if he’s not there, it’s worth it to wish her a happy birthday.

Bucky hopes he’s not noticeably less selfless in this timeline than he was during those five years. Because in this timeline, honoring Mrs. Rogers is in no way worth it if her son isn’t there.

Bucky presses his fingernail into the petal, looking at the crescent moon it creates. There’s a chill in the air, a mere light breeze, Spring creeping closer. Bucky looks at the pink of his flowers, looks at the new green growth of trees on the sidewalk, thinks of endless dreams.

He walks into the cemetery and swallows the surging emotions at the empty sight. Bucky makes good on his promise and walks to Mrs. Rogers’ grave. He awkwardly nods at Steve’s dad’s grave in acknowledgment. God, he really feels dumb talking to graves.

“Hey, Sarah,” Bucky says and her first name feels right on his tongue. This is worth it. Of course it’s worth it. “Happy birthday.” Bucky holds on to the flowers, not having anything more to say but not ready to set them down, not ready to leave. Bucky blinks rapidly—he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to leave now that he’s here.

He stares up at the sky and thinks, don’t cry.

A loud meow startles Bucky out of his maudlin thoughts. He turns slowly, craning his neck to look for an unhappy stray cat and—

A man walks toward Bucky. He wears a thin jacket, jeans, and a baseball cap. White flowers are tucked in the crook of his elbow. His arms are full of a fat white cat in a blue harness. Bucky knows grey spots are under it.

It’s the reversal of Bucky’s dream—he’s the one at the grave, the one whose head slowly turns to look. Warmth spreads in his toes.

“Bucky?”