Archive of Our Own ^beta

1. All angels are terrifying

Steve made his way down, down, down into the reaches of what had to be the fifth sub-basement level he’d come through in this facility. Thick, oily smoke from the fighting up top had traveled with him, obscuring his vision and stinging his eyes. The piercing, flashing white light of the alarms wasn’t helping him see, just stabbing his eyes and bringing on the sharp pop of a headache; he regretted not taking the goggles Sam had offered him. Of all the Hydra facilities they’d targeted so far, this was the largest and it seemed to go on forever--its labyrinthine layers bigger than could be expected from a building passing as a suburban office.

Methodically, slowly, Steve cleared all the rooms, listening to the chatter on comms from the rest of the team. They each had a floor assigned; Steve always gave himself the toughest detail and the bottom was always where the bad guys hid. At the end of the corridor Steve found a room, in the center of which stood a table with restraints as well as a couple of large cages along the periphery. They’d known this was a biological facility with AIM connections, but it didn’t prepare him for human-sized cages and what he saw next to the table: a series of monitors connected to a large round halo, still sparking and flashing, as if it had been used on someone recently. Exactly like what they’d found in that bank vault in Washington, exactly like what Hydra had used on Bucky. Steve stepped closer to it, nausea burning its way up his esophagus as it always did when he was confronted with what they’d done to Bucky. Were they really still trying to create perfectly controlled supersoldiers, even after all this time?

Blinded by a red rage, Steve kicked the table into the halo equipment, watching it collapse under the weight and shattering in a heap. It was surprisingly flimsy; if those bastards hadn’t so thoroughly dehumanized and broken Bucky, he could have torn the whole thing down with the little finger on his metal hand. For good measure, Steve smashed the monitors with his shield, then removed the hard drive so he could bring it back for Bruce and Tony to analyze. Just as Steve moved toward the hallway, a gun was shoved into the base of his skull.

“You fuckers ruined my work.” Steve could see the fellow’s reflection in the small observation window that looked out on the cages--male, white, middle-aged, a few inches shorter than him.

“Aw, shucks, no gold stars from teacher now?” Steve ran through a mental checklist of the best ways to avoid a bullet in his brain stem and get rid of this guy.

“Walk. You’re getting me out of here.” He punctuated it by shoving the gun forcefully into Steve’s neck, so Steve obliged him by stepping into the corridor.

“You know that pretty much never works,” Steve said, “especially not with the shooters we’ve got,” and the guy began, “Not--” and then there was a gunshot that dropped the man to the ground before he could get his quip out. Steve turned, expecting Natasha or Clint, but it was Bucky, looking down at the guy, quizzical and distanced, as if he was trying to remember the name of somebody he’d been introduced to a long time ago. Bucky strode over and pumped two more bullets into his head. Steve had always admired his sangfroid in the field, his clinical ability to do the really difficult things, but in the Winter Soldier that had been terrifying. This was--something different; this Bucky was yet another person Steve didn’t know.

Blinking, Bucky dragged his eyes up to meet Steve’s. Steve must have been giving away every thought that sped through his mind--it’s you, I’ve been looking for you for months, are you okay? god, you’re really here, you’re beautiful--because Bucky was staring at him with a curious keenness, head cocked to the side. “Bucky,” was all Steve squeaked out, pathetically, hilariously. Months. Months he and Sam had been chasing Bucky, and here he was like it was no big deal.

“Hey, Steve. How are you?” He didn’t sound...well, like himself, but like he was trying hard to sound like himself, maybe for Steve’s benefit, maybe for his own. It wasn’t unfamiliar to Steve--Bucky’d been like this after Steve had found him in the Hydra factory back in ’43, and he knew this part of him, knew the ache that ran deep inside that he tried so hard to mask, the one Steve had always been powerless to soothe. Ghosts haunted blue eyes surrounded by dark circles, his dirty hair was wild and longer than it had been on the helicarrier, and at least three days’ worth of stubble made his face appear gaunt.

He looked like something blooming. He looked like spring.

“Ah, you know, same old, same old.” Steve couldn’t breathe, he might have been that asthmatic little fella again for all the air he could squeeze into his lungs. The alarm lights flashed across Bucky’s face every few seconds, allowing Steve a glimpse of his cuts and bruises more clearly. Had he just gotten those in this op? Or was there something else that had caused them? “Places to go, Hydra to kill. Nothin’ really changes. How about you?”

“The usual. Mind-wiped, tortured, frozen. Tried to kill my best friend.” This, the studied distance Steve knew as well from the war, hiding the way his soul and body were split in two. It was the essence of his being after he’d been tortured, a quiet, tormented fragmentation that he showed only to Steve, and even then not much at all.

“Got it on good authority that your best friend never gave two shits about that.” Bucky shifted from foot to foot, his increasing distress evident in his posture, curved in on himself as if trying not to disturb the space around him. Putting on a good front, but not really there. Not really okay. “Bucky, come home with me. Please come back.”

“I can’t.” He gave Steve a thin smile, and Steve could hear his own heart cracking in two with a giant boom, ice breaking off a floe. Bucky’s pain was a gaping, open wound he was allowing Steve to see, still fresh. It must take everything he had to stand here like this.

“Let me help you. The way you always helped me. I know now what they did to you.” Steve looked down at the body in front of him. “Was he one of them?”

“Sometimes. Here. Not back there.” His eyes never left Steve’s, the blue, blue irises and the fringe of dark lashes and Steve wanted to fold him into his arms, tell him to close his eyes, rest now, it would be all right, and kiss his eyelids and temples and cheeks. “They were always trying to re-create what they did with me.”

Steve swallowed against the lacerating guilt. Bucky would disdain his pitiful apologies. “You’ve been watching us. Me trying to find you. All these missions, you were there, too--the guards in Pittsburgh, the fire in Marseille, that was you. I figured.”

“You still need looking after.” His voice was so gentle, tender in a way that didn’t fit with the face looking back at Steve. Not like the last time he’d heard Bucky speak. “You still live in that apartment. Where I--” A broken, soft sound escaped his throat.

So Bucky remembered shooting Fury, and he was wrecked about it. Best to change the subject. “For the time being. I’m maybe moving to New York again. If you’re following me, I’ll find a way to let you know. Do you have a burner phone, something I could--” Bucky shook his head. “But you could just come with me now.” He stepped forward, holding out his hand. “Please. Come with me.” Bucky flinched backward.

“I can’t. I ain’t ready yet. Not for human beings.” His smile was more like a grimace, and he seemed almost lost in thought, like he was trying to pull back a memory from a dark dusty corner of his mind. “Do you remember that time I went to p--”

There was a noise from the hallway and Steve glanced over to see Sam running toward him. “Cap! You okay?” Sam shouted, and Steve realized he’d taken his earpiece out at some point. Oh. He turned back toward Bucky to tell him it was all right, Sam was a friend, but he was gone.

“Holy shit,” Sam said, staring at the spot Bucky had stood in, face tense and eyes round with fear.

“Yeah. Holy shit.”

Steve ran through Rock Creek Park, listening to the latest Music to Brood Over Your Lost Sergeant By playlist Sam had given him. The first one Sam had offered him--it’s called pining, Steve, and if you don’t think that’s what you’re doing, you’re a moron--Steve had scowled, completely done with the teasing, but he’d grown to accept the shit Sam flipped him about Bucky, even kind of enjoyed the playlists because Sam really did excel at finding the music Steve responded to.

It was much too late for a run--he’d already taken one first thing in the morning, but when he couldn’t stop stewing about Bucky, he knew he had to get out and move. After their mission, Steve had tried to catch glimpses of Bucky, certain that if he really was watching Steve, he’d be able to spot it now that the DoD had removed the primary security detail at Steve’s emphatic request. He was acutely aware that they were still watching him in a less targeted way, but they kept their distance--and Bucky would know that, too.

Tony’d even done a few recons for him and trained a Stark Industries satellite on a wide perimeter with Dupont Circle at its center, but nothing had turned up. Wherever, however Bucky was watching him, Steve didn’t know, and until Bucky wanted him to know, that was the best he could do. Somehow Bucky’d found Nick Fury in his apartment that night and shot him through a goddamn brick wall, so clearly there were capabilities programmed into him that Steve knew nothing about and that had been deliberately kept out of his files. Bucky was the best at everything he did, even messed up, even in pain--Steve had learned that pretty effectively at the other end of a gun and his metal fist.

His route took him through Georgetown, down along the river past the Tidal Basin and back twice, and by the time he’d reached home he was tired, exactly what he’d desperately needed.

There was a voice mail from Natasha he’d ignored, so he listened to it. We broke the encryption on the data you recovered in Atlanta. Most of it’s what you’d expect, but there were some things related to the Winter Soldier project...to be honest, it might be better if you don’t know. How bad could it be if it was worse than that fucking file she’d given him, worse than seeing what they’d done to Bucky with his own eyes?

“Tell me,” he said when she answered, and she sighed.

“They kept a stockpile in Russia of his...uh...body fluids. Mostly blood. So they could try to replicate the formula on new subjects.” Steve remembered all the blood they’d taken from him, over and over. But nothing else, nothing like that, and he thought he would be sick. Well, she’d warned him. “Tissue samples from his arm, too. There was a list of locations that had access to the remnants of it once they gave him to Pierce’s people. Some of it, a little of it, was in the hands of the scientist he killed.”

“I wish Bucky hadn’t shot him, then. So I could have gotten my hands on him.”

“Steve, don’t,” she said softly. “Don’t let this turn you into something you’re not.” He’d wanted to tell her she didn’t know what he was, but he kept his yap shut. She filled him in about the rest of it, nothing he was especially worried about, and they said good night.

When he’d been about ten, Steve had been sent home from school for knocking another boy’s front teeth loose, a boy who had relentlessly picked on him since he’d first started school. Steve had been just as surprised as anyone else that he’d landed such a successful punch on his nemesis--and it was that as much as anything that Steve refused to apologize for, which was what Steve thought he was really being sent home for. He’d endured bullying for so long and never successfully fought back alone, Bucky usually getting stuck with picking up the pieces for him, but the entire time Johnny Wolff and his ilk had never once been sent home for being a bullying shit to Steve. Why should he apologize for sticking up for himself?

When Steve’s mother had come home she’d seemed more resigned than anything, but he knew she was disappointed in him. She’d pulled him into her lap, even though he was really too big for that by then, and stroked his hair and told him that she knew how hard it was to turn the other cheek, she knew how hard he had it with the other boys at school. But violence should be a last resort, she’d warned, and even then maybe not resorted to at all, because look what it made people into. “An eye for an eye until we’re all blind,” she’d said softly.

He knew the story of her early years, how she’d wanted to join some of her friends from nursing school in the Army Nurse Corps; Ma had told him that once when he was even younger. Steve’s father had convinced her to stay home, before anyone knew he’d be signing up soon to go to war himself and die. “I thought the worst of what I could see would be over there, that the violence wouldn’t touch my life the way it did my friends in France and Belgium,” she’d said. “But it was just as bad, those boys who’d shipped home missing limbs and eyes and sometimes faces. Your father had hoped I would escape such things at home, but... There’s a cost you can’t always see, Steve, and it happens inside.” He hadn’t understood then what she’d been saying, but sitting on her lap that day at ten, he’d comprehended how much it had affected her. “I’ll be better, Ma,” he’d promised, and instead of sending him to bed without supper she made him his favorite, pot roast with carrots and potatoes. Over and over in the years to come he broke his promise to her, and he wondered, almost every day after Project Rebirth, how heartbroken she would have been to see her son turned into a weapon. To see that violence had become the locus of his life, not just a last resort. Something you’re not.

Steve shook it off and ate, hit the shower, and took care of some business matters before he went to bed. Like most nights, he paused to look out the window before closing the blinds, wishing he could catch a glimpse of Bucky, just the flash of his metal arm or the pale crescent of his profile.

Since seeing Bucky in Atlanta, sleep came a lot harder, and even when he found it, it didn’t stay. His dreams had shifted, from his plunge into the ice and Bucky’s fall to the helicarriers and the spooked animal look on Bucky’s face when Steve had said he was with him to the end of the line. Steve didn’t dream about the fall into the Potomac, maybe because he’d barely been conscious by then, and maybe because he’d wanted to let go, too. He’d wanted to save his friend and couldn’t complete his mission, so he’d just let go, given up. Sam and Steve had talked about that, a lot.

When they’d been chasing Bucky and were holed up in a creepy rundown hotel near Zagreb with nothing much to do other than eat and talk, Sam had told Steve about his family--he was the middle child of three, and he’d worshipped his older sister, Terry. He’d admired her for everything, especially her work at a domestic abuse shelter and then as a guardian ad litem in the justice system. But she drove a lot for her job, Sam had said, crushed by the memory, and one night she was killed in a car accident, a drunk driver. The loss had sent his parents spiraling into depression and away from each other, sent his younger sister, Janet, into self-medicating, and sent Sam into the Air Force because he didn’t know what else to do with himself.

It was there he’d found out about pararescue, so he signed up immediately, even if he’d doubted his ability to complete the training--everyone knew of their exceedingly high washout rate. It was Terry, Sam had told him, who got him through it, her determination to help people became Sam’s determination to help and every time he wanted to quit, he remembered her strength. After his first rotation in Iraq, he’d come home to find his parents had gotten back together and Janet was finishing school. No one had wanted to fail Terry’s legacy. Sam heard about an experimental, secretive program involving new equipment to get pararescues on the ground in heavy fire situations, so he and his friend Riley signed up.

After Steve had come home from the hospital, something had simmered under Sam’s skin, but Steve had not known him well enough to define it then. It wasn’t till Zagreb, till they’d started talking about Steve giving up on the helicarrier, that he’d realized what was wrong--Steve’s best friend, the most important person in his life, was alive, impossibly returned from the dead, offering a second chance to be with him that Steve had almost thrown away in the hopeless belief he couldn’t save him. Terry and Riley would never return, Sam would never touch their skin or hear their voices again.

They’d talked about it, and talked about it, and Steve had heard his mother’s voice in his head then, felt her smoothing his hair back when he’d been hurt about Bucky being angry with him or spending more time with other kids, and saying to her son gently, “To have a friend, you must be a friend.” He’d felt like all he did was take from Sam, that he hadn’t been his friend at all yet somehow still reaped the benefits of his kindness, and tried to offer Sam an out once again on this quest to find Bucky, but Sam had just fixed him with a stare and said, “Save me from white boys trying to take away my choices and ability to make my own decisions.” It was clear that he meant Riley too, but Steve didn’t know how to ask him about that, not at the time. He reminded Sam that this quixotic attempt to find Bucky and wipe out Hydra was Steve’s own burden, but Sam had just glared at him and said, “I made my choice that day you came to my house, that day in the cemetery.” Sarah Rogers would have loved Sam Wilson, even if Steve doubted she could have loved the man her son had become.

In the wee hours of morning, Steve woke to a memory of London in the war, of drinking in the Whip and Fiddle with the boys and Peggy. He sat up and ran his hands through his hair, wiped sweat from his forehead. It was the first good dream he’d had in a long, long time, but there was something... Bucky had started to ask him a question in that Hydra lab, about the time he went to--Paris. That was it, that’s why he was dreaming about the boys and the pub. Bucky had been telling him about Paris.

At one point in the long, tense months before liberation, OSS and MI-9 had requested assistance extracting one of their most valuable agents, whose cover had been blown, from Paris. Bucky, Jacques, and Monty had gone in with the help of Jacques’s maquis contacts. After parachuting into the countryside, they’d made their way to the city, making use of dead drops for communication and the tools they’d need to find her and get her out. Bucky had been deeply impressed by all the “spy shit” and found it fascinating, while Steve had listened, rapt, to his stories about the mission. They’d been separated on solo missions before, but Bucky was a born storyteller and had a way with words, and Steve could still remember every detail of that night: the low amber lights of the pub, the songs that were played, the way Peggy’s eyes glowed across the table when she looked at him, even the lipstick print on Bucky’s cheek when the agent, Marie, had thanked them and kissed each one of the squad in turn.

It was nearly dawn when he had woken from the dream, so Steve got out of bed and found paper and wrote. Start simple, he thought.

Do you have enough food?
Do you have shelter?
Is there anything you need that I can get for you?

He rooted around for something water-tight to put it in, found one of the evidence tubes in his go-bag that he’d never really used on ops, and stuck a pen inside with extra paper. He dressed, making a point to wear his bright blue t-shirt and jacket for easy spotting in case Bucky was watching. On the Hillyer Street side of the building, where Steve parked his bike, he examined the walls and the trees assessing drop spots, before he leapt up and slipped the tube behind the bend in the downspout, then marked a small slash with an oil pastel just above where he’d tucked the tube.

Then he put his ball cap on and headed up the street for coffee. There was a lot to do today, including meeting with Clint and Natasha to go over the Atlanta intel. When he finished with that, he texted Sam, Late lunch at Martin’s? Remembered something about BFF. Sam had a lot of amusing--and not so amusing--phrases he used to describe Bucky, but that was Steve’s favorite.

Maybe he’d got it all wrong, maybe the dead drops and Paris hadn’t been what Bucky was referring to, but Steve was hopeful for the first time in months. It could be nothing, or it could be everything.

“So you’re going for clandestine as a way to bring him in, instead of appealing to his deep abiding love for you.” Sam shrugged. “That works as well as anything, I guess.”

“Couldn’t it be both?” Steve shrugged. “Not clandestine, just...I think that’s what he was trying to tell me--that talking face to face was hard for him right now.” Steve finished off his iced tea, and the waiter brought him another immediately. “He was fronting, just like you said, trying to act like his old self. It’s just too hard for him. People, I mean. Even me.”

“Particularly you, probably.”

Even though they were tucked away in the back as far as they could be, Steve still felt exposed these days, even in a restaurant where they adored him and treated him like their favorite son. Uncertainty clouded every aspect of his life after Insight, the government mistrusted him and his motives, and though they had received support from different agencies to continue to flush out Hydra, it wasn’t like having SHIELD at his back at all. Outside of Sam and the Avengers, he was completely alone.

“He’s still dissociating,” Sam continued. “Doesn’t feel like he’s human, like he can be trusted to interact with other humans. Trying to process and put things back together. But the fact that he knows you, pretends he’s like his old self, is a good sign--he recognizes what you might respond to. Did you read that stuff I gave you?” Sam gave him the exasperated stare he always gave Steve when it came to discussing the literature about PTSD and traumatic brain injury and dissociative disorders he’d shared.

“Actually, I have. I’ve even been to the bookstore and found more to read, so I can be prepared when he does finally come in.” Steve made a face, and Sam laughed at him.

“Well, all right then. You are capable of learning.” Sam grabbed the last roll out of the basket, slathered on a ton of butter. “I hope it works for you. I was scared shitless when I saw him in Atlanta, I gotta admit. But if he really was trying to get you to remember something from back in the day, that’s a good sign.”

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know that’s what he was saying, but he was...well, he loved to write. Just little notes he’d leave for me when he went to work or stick in my lunch pail, the notebooks he would write in from time to time when we lived together, schoolwork, or the letters. God, the letters.” He gulped down his water, his throat suddenly dry and tight. “He was gifted. If circumstances had been different, I honestly think he could have been a fiction writer, maybe a poet--like one of those warrior poets from the Great War, Sassoon and Owen. We didn’t grow up in a place and time when he could have had that chance, and he helped me out financially so I could take classes. He was whip-smart, a voracious reader. Taught himself way more than he’d had a chance to learn in school.” He shook his head. “Well, he was a poet, the letters he wrote me were...” Steve trailed off. He’d been so eager for Bucky’s letters from basic, haunting the mailbox, writing back the instant he finished one.

“He’d read to me when I was down with pneumonia once, he’d discovered a whole bunch of poets and he just loved Rilke. I didn’t know any guys in my neighborhood who’d ever admit to liking fucking poetry, you know?” Steve laughed. “You never heard him speak, but he had a wonderful voice.” This time the laugh stuck in his throat, brittle and sharp, and there was that all too familiar ache behind his eyes. “Has a wonderful voice. Jesus. When I came back, it took me so long to accept that he was still gone, and to learn to think of him in the past tense. And now...”

Sam smiled and let him pause to collect himself. “An autodidact. That’s what they call people who teach themselves.” He was quiet, lost in a memory, and Steve thought they were a pair, sometimes, he and Sam, both undone by memories and trying to live up to them. Sam was thinking of Terry or Riley, trying not to let the past pull him down into that undertow. “Riley was like that. He’d go off on some topic and the rest of us’d be sitting there with our mouths open, like whuuuu, or else running to the damn dictionary.” Sam shook his head, then raised his eyebrows, trying to encourage Steve to continue. Steve hadn’t told anyone about this part of Bucky, had never really wanted to or had the chance, outside of Peggy and visiting Bucky’s little sister, Rebecca, after he’d woken up. It wasn’t a pleasant stroll down memory lane. “Did any of his letters survive the war? I don’t remember ever seeing anything about them.”

“Only the ones to his family, and a few he wrote to me from training that I left with his family when I went to Lehigh. They’re in that book about him, the family letters anyway. I was already on tour when most of his letters from Europe to me would have arrived--the early ones found me eventually, but mail was so much spottier then. I found out after--after he’d died, well, I found out that he’d been writing to me in journals. I always knew he was writing the whole time, he kept the notebooks with him on all our ops, I just didn’t know he’d been writing every word to me. I think by then he expected to die and he wanted me to hear it all after he was gone.”

“Jesus Christ,” Sam said softly. Sam’s empathy hadn’t come from his losses, Steve was absolutely certain, it was something he’d been born with, it was intrinsic to his nature. And it made Steve’s throat ache, seeing that doleful look on his face. Not pity, but it had the same effect.

“Yeah. His journals--what I saw of them--were so--heartbreaking and beautiful. He was miserable, but he poured that into his writing, I suppose so he wouldn’t show it to anyone else. I don’t know if he knew how--” Steve couldn’t finish.

“What happened to them?”

“I put everything in my footlocker after he died, and when I went down, Peggy and Jim Morita went through my effects. God bless them, because I hate thinking of those in the hands of collectors, or worse, on display at a museum. That was private. They forwarded everything to Bucky’s sister, Rebecca, eventually. She’s still alive, lives in a retirement center in Philly. She offered them to me, but I wasn’t ready.” Perhaps he was reassuring himself, but Steve thought he might finally be ready.

“I’ve avoided asking this for a long time, and I don’t want to pry, but the way you talk about him sometimes, it makes me wonder. You can tell me to fuck off if this is crossing a line, but were you two involved?” Sam’s face was open and caring, there was never any judgment from him. These days, it was something you could admit without fear of reprisal, for the most part.

Steve smiled. “I think a lot of people wonder that.” He fidgeted with his glass, pushed his fork around on his plate. “I don’t know that either of us really thought of it that way, you know? Or I didn’t, and I just assumed Bucky didn’t. Just that we were everything to each other, and I honestly couldn’t understand why. He was the best student, an athlete, handsome and charming even as a kid, everyone loved him. I could never figure out why he wanted to hang around with this scrawny, sickly, lippy kid with a giant chip on his shoulder. But he did, and that was enough. After I found him at the Hydra factory, things changed. Whatever we’d hidden before was suddenly...uncovered.” Not that it had been instantaneous, but sometimes the things hardest won were the most cherished.

Steve knew this compassionate, solemn face on Sam, it was the one he used at his veterans’ groups. Encouraging. This was entering a dark territory Steve had steadfastly avoided walking into, even with himself. If he could tell anyone, though, he could tell Sam.

“We had a kind of narrow escape, on the way to our last op. The Germans used to leave booby-traps and these sort of half-assed mines in everyday things, take a few people out after they retreated, I guess, make it harder on us. There was an explosion in a home we were hoping to bunk in for the night, I think it was the phonograph.” Sam smiled; he loved it when Steve used old-fashioned words and ribbed him about it endlessly. “It was one of those moments when you’re just keyed up on adrenaline, you’re laughing so you don’t cry kinda things. And he kissed me, or I kissed him--we kissed a lot and...everything changed. Promised to talk about it when we got back to base. A week later he died. A few weeks after that, I kissed Peggy for the first time, right before I died.”

Sam dropped his napkin on the table. “Jesus, Steve. Jesus Christ almighty. I am incredibly sorry for all the shit I’ve flipped you over this dude, I really had no idea.” They were silent for a bit, allowing the waiter to take away their plates, refill their glasses. “I keep forgetting you lost Peggy, too, so soon. That’s...I don’t know what to say.”

As deeply as he’d felt for Peggy, it could have gone a thousand different ways after the war if he’d survived, they might not have worked out at all or it could have been, as people said today, epic. Bucky had been a known quantity, had been the star at the center of his sky for an uncountable history. It was always Bucky, even when he didn’t know it yet, even with Peggy; it was always Bucky.

But Steve hadn’t been able to save Bucky, and Peggy hadn’t been able to save Steve, and wasn’t that just the tragedy of the century. He tried to cover the sorrow with a smile, but Sam said, “You’re allowed to feel like shit about all this. You’re allowed to think about yourself and how much you’ve lost.”

And yet all it resembled to Steve’s eyes was selfishness. He’d always been like that, expecting everyone to go along with him, to see his side, expecting Bucky to be the weapon Steve wielded even as a young man and to fight for him. He’d just assumed. “It helps, being able to talk about it. I never have before. No one ever asked, to be honest, and I’m not the kind of fella to offer that up.”

“No, you ain’t. Maybe this’ll teach you that talking about shit isn’t such a dangerous thing.” Sam had come to that knowledge the hard way, and Steve was grateful for his experience.

Still, Steve fixed him with a look, smirked. “You’re never going to stop trying to get me to go to a meeting, are you?”

“Not until you do.”

Steve put his hands up. “Okay, okay. I give in.”

“So, this dead drop. Just don’t get your hopes up too much, okay? We can’t know what’s going through his mind right now, and if that wasn’t what he was telling you, I don’t want to see you give up.” Again hung there unspoken.

“I’m not giving up. For anything. After he died, I told Peggy I was gonna wipe Hydra off the map, and I fully intend to fulfill my mission. I owe it to Bucky, at the very least.”

“Not gonna lie, I kinda like this pissed off side of you,” Sam said. He pushed his water glass around in the puddle beneath it, and looked up at Steve. “It’s so strange, though, all this. How you were both turned into super fighting machines, yet inside you’re just--wannabe painters and poets.”

Steve barked out a laugh. At Christmastime in ’43 they’d been returning from their first real operation as a squadron, a shakedown mission in northern Italy that was more about testing themselves and their new roles than anything else. They’d met up with some Free French commandos after blowing up a few petrol dumps and taking two wounded Hydra lieutenants prisoner, handing the Germans off to the French--Steve hadn’t been particularly concerned about what would happen to them afterward, which seemed to give Bucky pause. “You know those guys are not gonna see the inside of a camp, right?” he’d asked, quiet and severe, and Steve had just turned away.

The French had pointed them to a monastery where they’d be welcome to bunk down, in a pretty little town full of curious yet fearful people--the Allies were nowhere near there by then and they legitimately feared reprisals--but the monks treated them graciously in the spirit of the season. Steve had been writing up the basis for his report, sitting in a pew, enjoying the quiet in the soft amber light of the chapel when Bucky had touched his shoulder. “C’mon,” he said, “got something to show you,” and Steve had followed him outside to what he’d thought were sleeping quarters but which turned out to be a makeshift storehouse for plundered art. He knew the Nazis had been stealing their way across Europe, he knew they’d murdered people for this stuff, but he’d had no idea he would ever see this sort of thing firsthand, and his mouth dropped open. Bucky tipped his chin up with his fingertips and said, “Close it or you’ll catch flies.”

“We’ve got to tell someone about this.” No wonder the monks had been happy to see them, they probably wanted the stuff out of their hands and returned to their owners, especially the objects that were so blatantly taken from churches.

“We will,” Bucky had said. “But hey, look at this.” He pulled out a crate and held up a bottle of extremely dusty brandy. “Whole crate of this stuff. What do you say, wanna sit here and get tight and admire the art? Merry fuckin’ Christmas.” Steve’s insides roiled at the thought of where all these works had come from, but at the same time he knew he was looking at the kind of art he had dreamed of seeing his whole life, and he didn’t know which way to choose. So Bucky, as usual, chose for him, uncorking the bottle and handing it to Steve, and then he sat down on the cold floor, motioning for Steve to sit. He produced some bread from his ruck and--oh god, was that actually butter?--pulled out his knife, waggling his eyebrows at Steve.

“That’s--that’s almost certainly Tiepolo,” Steve said, pointing at one of the small paintings, all soft, luminous, twilit colors that were stunning even in the low light of their flashlights.

“Monks said that the Nazis will probably be back for this stuff soon, that they got spooked and they’re spread pretty thin up here already. Said they’re hopscotching around, taking the loot to some place up north. I guess Hitler must fancy himself some kind of art lover.” He passed the brandy to Steve with a piece of bread slathered in butter. “We could wait, take ’em out when they come back. Be another good test for the squad.”

“Sure, yeah,” Steve had said, a surge of desire to kill anyone who would do this rushing through him before he calmed down, and then the two of them just sat there for a good couple hours, looking at the art, drinking, talking. The warmth in his chest had nothing to do with the brandy--it was Bucky, golden in the light, his smiling mouth, his captivated eyes. When they finally got up, Bucky had slung his arm around Steve’s shoulders and pulled him close as they walked into the frosty night, reciting some poem about art that Steve couldn’t remember now. It might have been freezing outside but he’d hardly felt it. “We get outta this, I’m gonna make you get back to your painting, Stevie. This ain’t what you’re supposed to be. It ain’t what you were made for.”

They weren’t what they were made for, neither of them. Painters and poets. Just boys from Brooklyn.

“Do you want to come up to Philly with me at some point? I want to get those letters.” Before Sam could answer, the manager came over and clapped Steve on the shoulder, telling him how much they’d missed him, so their conversation was finished. But he shot Sam a grateful smile. All this time without Bucky and he’d forgotten what it was like to have a true friend; now he had Natasha and Sam and soon, hopefully, Bucky once more. A split in the dark cloud that had followed him so long, rays of sun pouring down.

After they left Martin’s, Steve made his way to a camping supply store so he could pick up more waterproof containers of various sizes, just in case Bucky needed something more than words on a page. When he got back to his place it was growing dark, the lights from the restaurants and shops underneath his building brightening in the twilight. On the downspout the pastel mark was still there--his heart sank, because Bucky should have wiped it away if he’d taken the drop. Steve jumped up, grabbed the tube anyway, and it looked completely undisturbed. Steve glanced up toward the rooftops, but didn’t see anything, as usual.

He threw his mail and keys on the counter, then opened the tube. Though the paper was still rolled up exactly as he’d left it, he unrolled it, breath catching when he saw Bucky’d answered, in block capitals that sometimes almost veered into cursive, as if he was trying to remember this distant part of himself, lying unused for so very long.

Do you have enough food? YES
Do you have shelter? SOMETIMES
Is there anything you need that I can get for you? MONEY, MAYBE. I’M RUNNING OUT OF WHAT I TOOK FROM THEM AND THE SAFEHOUSES AND I DON’T WANT TO STEAL ANYTHING (I CAN SEE YOUR DISAPPROVING FACE RIGHT NOW). THAT WILL HELP WITH THE SHELTER THING TOO. ONE OF THOSE BURNER PHONES YOU MENTIONED, JUST IN CASE.

THANKS FOR REMEMBERING ABOUT PARIS. I WASN’T SURE YOU WOULD. WAS YOUR MIND A MESS WHEN YOU WOKE UP? EVERYTHING’S A MESS IN HERE, IT’S LIKE THAT FUNHOUSE AT CONEY ISLAND, DISTORTED AND WARPED AND I SOMETIMES DON’T KNOW IF WHAT I REMEMBER IS MINE OR THEY SHOVED IT INTO ME.

On the back of the paper, in the corner, he’d written completely in cursive this time, “Yours, Bucky.”

Steve sat down hard on a chair, heart thundering in his chest and his breath frozen in his lungs. So, dead drops he could do. Money, phone, writing back and telling him what it had been like he could do. Bucky had been in the wind for way too long but this could work. This could work.

In the morning Steve bought a burner phone and programmed in some numbers, then went to the bank. At some point he would talk Bucky into a secured phone from Stark, but for right now, this should be safe enough.

Bucky:
Here’s a burner phone for you, with my number, Sam’s, and a secure line to Stark Industries, where we’re kind of haphazardly running the Avengers Initiative out of. But memorize the numbers--I’ve made sure you have clearance to reach me at any time if this phone doesn’t work. They have an artificial intelligence that will patch you through.

Enclosed is enough money that you should be able to get a room, food, anything else you need for the foreseeable future. I’ve also set it up so I can give you a credit card and photo ID under an alias. Almost everything is done that way these days, and you can get a better place to stay if you have one. I don’t want you sleeping on rooftops or alleys, okay? Everything should be coming from NY in a day or so.

Forgive me for saying this, but you mentioned you had food, though you looked...not unwell, but pretty ragged, like you hadn’t been eating or sleeping enough. Our metabolisms run so high, and I’m concerned, so I’ve thrown some stuff into another drop, which I’m going to stash on the roof (that little round part). You can take it or leave it, I won’t press.

As for my mind. Where do I even start? There’s so much to tell you, really, and I don’t know how to say it, so maybe I’ll save some of it for when we talk face to face. But I had a hard time, after they woke me up. You had a chance to see the world change, however distorted it was, in the times you were on missions. It was such a shock to me, this modern world, so harsh and glaring and busy and yet somehow so lonely. Almost everyone was gone--Gabe died only a few months after I came back, and Peggy’s memory is not good--so all my links to the past have been taken from me. I looked through file after file marked “deceased.”

And you know, it’s funny, but not one person ever asked me how I was. Not a single person asked me if I was all right, or if I needed to talk about things, or asked me if I was in pain, until I met Sam, just a few days before you came back into my life, and he knew right away I was low. I woke up, and next thing I know I’m fighting an alien army from outer space, just like those science fiction pictures we used to love, and no one ever stopped to see how I was doing until him. I threw myself into operations for SHIELD because I missed you and Peggy and Ma so very much. I never much believed in fate, but now I guess maybe that was the path I had to take, or I would never have encountered you that day.

The loneliness was the hardest thing to deal with, this feeling I didn’t belong here. And I had so many nightmares, most of them about you falling or me crashing into the ice. Now my nightmares seem to be about Peggy finally passing, and losing you again. I don’t say that to make you feel guilty; I know you’re doing what you need to for yourself and I support that.

It’s just that I often think I have my head on straight, and then the modern world comes up and punches me straight in the kisser, and I’m back there, struggling with wondering why and if I could just let go. But it’s better now. You made it better. So that’s where my head is. And now I want to hear about yours, okay? Please tell me whatever you need to.

Yours,
Steve

In the same spot as the day before, Steve stashed the drop with the letter and phone, then took the food up to the roof. When he was done, he took off for a run and to the gym, enjoying the early fall sunshine on his face. The leaves were only just changing, and though it was warm, he could sense the air getting less humid and heavy. This was when he liked DC best, when it felt less like the swamp it had originally been. There were fewer tourists as well, which made running along the Mall less of an obstacle course.

There was nothing waiting for him when he returned, but both containers were gone, and Steve smiled. Bucky would never show himself while Steve waited around, he knew that somehow, so Steve showered and changed, then went out to the VA. He’d promised Sam he would attend a meeting, and this was one of his group days.

It was good, as much as something like that could be good, though he sat in the back and didn’t participate himself. People had changed, the way they handled combat fatigue had changed--Steve much preferred the modern term of post-traumatic stress disorder, in fact--but it would still be a long time before he felt comfortable talking with people he didn’t know. His mind had wandered a few times, considering: what would it have been like for Bucky back then, after the Hydra factory, to have had even paltry institutional support for his trauma? Steve had never known what to do for him, had failed him spectacularly in that regard because he’d been so wrapped up in learning his new role, in his infatuation with Peggy. Shortly after they’d returned to London, Steve had tried coercing Bucky into taking R&R unsuccessfully--“Don’t you dare send me away like some unfit embarrassment”--but it wasn’t till he’d had Monty strong-arm Bucky into accompanying him on a visit to family on the Dorset coast that Bucky was willing to go. He’d sent Steve a sarcastic picture postcard from someplace called Durdle Door, but when he’d returned he actually did seem to be moderately improved, though he had less to say about the R&R than about the fortifications along the coast. Enough improved that Steve could ignore what he shouldn’t have.

When Steve returned from the meeting, the pastel mark had been rubbed away, and the tube was back behind the bend in the downspout. Steve waited for a young couple to walk past before he jumped up to retrieve it--living in such an active neighborhood and one block from one of the best art collections in the city didn’t exactly set you up for perfectly private dead drop locations.

This time, Bucky hadn’t written in block capitals, or rather, most of it was a mix of block capitals and a shaky printing, as if he was still trying to figure out how to use his hand to write again. He’d probably needed to write on only the rarest of occasions, and Steve was overcome with that familiar sharp, suffocating anguish at what they’d inflicted on his dearest friend.

Steve--
Many thanks for everything. You’re right, I wasn’t eating as well as I should. I’ll do better with the money now.

You’re also right, that the modern world doesn’t shock me the way it did you. I had to learn it all over again each time they sent me out, but it was nothing like what would have happened to you. That’s rough for me to hear, that you’ve suffered so much. I’ve been hoping these past months watching you that what I saw was a happier man, someone who’d found friendship and love. Even saw you with a couple of lady friends, and I thought, well, good for him, that’s my boy. But I guess I misunderstood that. Wouldn’t be the first time, eh?

I remember a lot more now. Every day some new old thing comes back to me, which is why my head feels like a bag of snakes. At first, too, I remembered things I learned weren’t real--they planted ideas in me, I suppose to make me believe that the world I used to know was a terrible one, so I wouldn’t return to it. And like I didn’t know I was wicked enough as it was, to teach me I was beyond saving. I don’t want to tell you what they were, because I know it’ll make you lower, but let’s just say some of them were pretty bad.

I know there are some things you want to ask me, about what they did and what happened to me after the train. I can’t promise to answer--there’s a lot I would rather not talk about, not now anyway, and a lot I still don’t remember. But it’s okay if you want to ask.

I got loose a long time ago, in New York, because I remembered enough to know that was my city and I didn’t belong to them. For a few weeks, I was free, and more and more things returned to me without their control. They caught me, and then they decided that I would be wiped before they put me back into cryofreeze, and again when I woke up. But for a few weeks there, I remembered us, as kids, and I was almost happy, thinking I’d once had such a friend. Couldn’t even recall your name, but I believed the memories were real.

All this is by way of telling you how much I appreciate this. Don’t give up on me, pal, all right? Don’t give up on me yet.

Yours always,
Bucky

Shaking, Steve collapsed hard onto the nearest chair. The intel he’d gleaned from that awful Soviet file and the Hydra technicians they’d interrogated hadn’t prepared him for hearing these things in Bucky’s own words, but how could it? It was the tip of the iceberg, and understanding that only made it more horrible. Steve shoved the back of his hand against his eyes to stem the tears. Bucky might be watching him from nearby and Steve didn’t want to risk breaking down where he could see. He went into the kitchen, pressing his forehead to the cold refrigerator door.

One night, shortly after Steve had got the squad quartered in the hotel the SSR had taken over, he’d awakened to see Bucky sitting on the edge of his bed, in perspiration-soaked undershirt and shorts, dog tags clinking with his shivers, face a blank pale moon with craters for eyes. As he stared at the far wall his mouth moved in some silent dialogue; when Steve got close enough to hear it was soft pleas--not begging, not really, rather just the meekest “please, stop, please, please” over and over, and then “it burns, stop, please.” Steve had nearly gagged, but he put his arms around Bucky and tucked his head into his shoulder, rubbing his sweaty back. Eventually Bucky had scraped out a huge, wracking sob and then pulled back, wiping his face with his hand. “I’m all right, Stevie. Go back to sleep,” he said and fell back into bed, as if nothing had happened. Steve sat on his haunches, waiting for Bucky to fall asleep again, thinking: this is what Ma was talking about. This is the cost, right here inside his dearest friend, and it swelled up inside him and threatened to burst out of his skin like some hungry animal, the need to hurt everyone who had ever hurt Bucky.

Seventy years hadn’t changed that, not even a particle of it. He wanted to burn the world down for this crime, despite everything he knew his mother would say about it, he wanted to slowly murder everyone who’d ever hurt Bucky this way, yet there was nothing to be done about it and his fists curled and his nails carved crescent moons into the heels of his hands as he choked against the helplessness.

Steve looked around his apartment. There were so many bullshit things he needed to do, but instead he pulled out some paper and sat down at the table with a beer.

Buck--
Thanks so much for your long note. It hurts to read it, but at the same time I’m so glad of the chance to hear your voice again I can’t tell you. You were always such a good writer.

Since you’ve done your homework, I’m sure you know that Rebecca is still alive and lives in Philadelphia, though both your little brothers have passed on, one about 20 years ago and one only a few years ago. She married and had three children, and a few of them have had children, so there are quite a few grandkids and now great-grandkids with the passel from your brothers. She was such a hellion but she grew up pretty wonderful, and she believed the sun rose and set on you then and still does.

She knows. I called her after I got out of the hospital, and I’ve visited her quite a few times since I got out of the ice. Sometimes her mind is a little scattered, but for the most part she’s doing good, and keeps active (she introduced me to Wii bowling and tennis, I’ll explain that later), and she’s read all the books about us and laughs over how much they got wrong. She said no one ever talks about the roughneck you were and how much trouble I got you into. I warned her that you might or might not come back to us, so she’s prepared.

But what I really wanted to mention was that she has all the letters and journals you wrote. Maybe not all the letters, just the ones that reached me, but definitely the journals. I didn’t know until after you’d fallen that you’d been writing them to me. I was pretty broken up and at the time I couldn’t read through everything, I was just too wrecked, but I read a lot of them. I’m going up to Philly one of these days to visit her and get them. You could come with me if you want. But I’ll understand if you don’t.

I know a little of that feeling, of being outside yourself and not knowing who you are anymore. In the back of my mind, I never really thought I’d reach this place in life, and I still see myself as that sickly boy sometimes, the one who would probably die young and had few prospects. For the war, I did what I needed to, what I felt I had to--for a lot of reasons, many I know were hard for you to understand, would have been impossible for Ma to understand. But now here I am in the future and I can’t give this body back. I have to figure out how exactly to go forward and learn who I am. Maybe we can learn together.

I dream about you, all the time, falling away from me, the sound of your scream. My hand in the air, empty, as I reached for you. That’s the one thing I never stop thinking about, and I wonder sometimes if you remember what it was like to fall, the way I remember the crash and the icy water filling up my lungs, my body being broken like the plane.

I’m so glad you wanted to write to me, I remember how well you wrote. How you found so much beauty in words, the way I found in paintings. I can remember you reading to me, poetry and fiction and sometimes just the news, when I was sick and even when I wasn’t. And it is so good to hear your voice again.

Yours forever,
Steve

He wondered if the surveillance detail that checked in on him from time to time had seen any of the dead drop stuff; he feared the government getting their hands on Bucky, or Hydra for that matter, once someone of any importance found out the Winter Soldier was still active. But Bucky would know if anyone was surveilling their drop location. Bucky was the best at what he did.

He walked up the street to Kramerbooks and searched through the travel guides section, choosing a couple of small guidebooks so that he could circle some of the restaurants Bucky might like and find him places to stay--he’d want to move locations frequently, stay hard to find. Bucky had loved going into Manhattan to meet Steve after classes, saving his pennies so they could eat wherever they pleased--Bucky had loved the most appalling food, things Steve turned his nose up at, but to Bucky it had all been part of the adventure.

He took the guidebooks up the block to Starbucks and snagged the table by the back door. In the margins Steve wrote notes--“Really! It’s a place devoted to just grilled cheese sandwiches, you’ll love it” or “This has Korean dishes, and you should try the beef be bim bap, I’m sure you’ll like it.” Had Bucky ever been in Korea, Steve wondered, or Vietnam or any of those places he’d been briefed about after being awakened? If they took him out for political assassinations, he surely must have.

After he’d seen Bucky again, Steve had visited Peggy to tell her about the Winter Soldier and soften the blow about SHIELD. She’d said, “I loathed Zola, positively loathed him and fought like hell to keep him out. Not simply because he’d been Hydra but because of what he’d done to Barnes. He used to make these detestable little jokes about the SSR, all of you. And there was always something that--occasionally intelligence crossed my desk about this mythical Soviet assassin and it made me think of his remarks, made me shudder as if someone had walked across my grave. Dear god. Why didn’t I realize?” Steve had touched her cheek and said, “No one could have.”

When Steve returned home, the tube with his letter had been removed. After searching all around the block for a signal for a different dead drop site, Steve went up to the roof, but it was empty too. It was ludicrous to have his hopes dashed like this--it was just one day, it was just one letter--yet he felt the world closing in on him, crushing him down just like the old days.

Maybe Bucky was too fragile, maybe he’d overstepped Bucky’s tenuous boundaries, failing him the same damn way he had when he looked the other way in the war. Failed him in a way Bucky had never once failed Steve.

Before he went to bed, Steve looked out the window, wondering if Bucky was out there in the cold watching him. He pressed his hand up to the glass and held it there, hoping Bucky might see him, before he closed the blinds and went to sleep. There was still nothing from Bucky the next day.

The morning of the third day, Steve spied a chalk mark on the sidewalk, a broken arrow and a small circle, the symbol the squad had used when they were split up and pointing the way for each other, and when he glanced up there was the tube tucked into the branches of a tree. He raced upstairs with it, only to get waylaid by a delivery guy with the package from Maria Hill containing Bucky’s credit cards and ID. Steve signed for everything with shaking hands. Bucky’s writing seemed slightly more certain, but it was still a messy mix of capitals and printing and cursive.

Steve--
I guess you and me are opposites these days--it’s easier for you to talk face to face, but for me this is the less painful option. I hope I’m not trying your patience, not that you ever had much of that. (One of the things I loved, though, was watching you go off like a roman candle on people who tried what little patience you had.)

Sorry for the delay. It was a tough one, with you telling me about Becca. I knew she was still alive, found that out when I went to that exhibit about you at the Smithsonian. But hearing the rest of it...it was kind of rough. I try not to think too much about this stuff, because my rage is dangerous. To everyone. I want to kill them, but I can’t exactly dig up their cold dead corpses and kill them one more time, can I? God, but I wish I could.

Does that make me as evil as they are? I wrestle with that. I don’t know enough about who I was before. What I remember is so mixed up that I can’t tell if I was already that way, but I know you cared for me, so I guess I couldn’t be all bad.

So I’m sitting here and it’s 3 a.m. and I’m writing this because I don’t want to try to sleep, to dream about what was and wasn’t. Sometimes I don’t even know if this is real and happening to me, or if it’s all another dream I’m having in cryo that they’ll wipe from my mind when they wake me up. Did it really happen, Steve, that you told me my name and you said I was your friend? Did I really almost kill you? I don’t know if I can forgive myself for that, even if you did.

I hurt you so much. When I close my eyes I can see your face swelling, the bruises and the skin splitting apart, hear your bones breaking. See the blood that covered your uniform. All so I wouldn’t have to feel the pain of what they’d do to me if I did know you.

I didn’t understand what it meant when you said to the end of the line. I just knew it meant something and I was so afraid of it. But now I’m left wondering if that really happened or it’s all just my messed up mind. Because when I was in that Hydra lab in ’43, I dreamed about you, about seeing your sweet face and that sad smile you got, and then there you were calling my name, but I had the hardest time believing you were really there, especially since you looked so different. I know what I wish was real, but they never let me keep that.

I remembered you after our first fight. I knew I knew you. It’s funny now, how I couldn’t see what was happening. I was out in the open, in public where people could take those videos of me on the street, both the time I hit Fury and the time we hit you on the bridge. They were getting ready to burn me, they didn’t care if the public saw me take someone out. They might have even wanted that. Pierce said, “I need you to do it one more time,” and I have to laugh because it was right there in front of my face. Once I finished that last mission, I would have been a waste of meat. They wouldn’t have to worry any more about my instability or the memories that seeped in like water through a crack.

So you see how much you saved me. In every possible way, you gave me my life back. But it hurts. I can’t lie about that to you, my dearest friend, who’s suffered as well in your own way. There’s this deep, black hole inside me, Stevie, and I don’t know that even you, with your goodness and your light, can fill it up. I don’t want to lay that blackness on your doorstep, or Becca’s.

You asked what I remembered about falling. It’s like images from a movie. I remember the snow, the jagged walls of the cliffs, the dark river, my shadow as I fell. Trees, green and dark. I remember red and white and the sound of a scream echoing through the canyon. Yours or mine? I don’t know. And falling. Slowly, endlessly.

Well, this got long and pathetic, didn’t it? I’m afraid if I keep writing to you, this is what they’re all going to be like. But it feels good, too, in a way, feels like I’m talking to you again in the dark at night, the way we used to on the roof in summer, planning all our plans, scheming all our schemes. Telling you secrets I’d never tell anyone else.

Yours, to the end of the line,
Bucky

Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it. Natasha had warned Steve he might not want to pull on that thread, she had fucking warned him. The grief grew so large inside him he thought it might split his skin and gush out, blood from a gaping wound. The slap of the words was as sharp and brutal as Colonel Phillips telling him Bucky was dead, as watching Bucky fall down that chasm, as the blankness of the Winter Soldier’s face across the gangway of the helicarrier.

He slammed back against the wall, sliding down, shoving his head into his hands. He had to be tough for Bucky’s sake, it was on Steve to be every bit as strong a caretaker as Bucky had been for him a thousand years ago, but he wasn’t convinced he had the inner resources. He’d been useless to Bucky in the war. But he couldn’t let him down now. Amends had to be made. Steve pressed the heel of his hand into his eyes. Get your ass off the floor and get your shit together.

There was work to attend to, after all. Pepper and Maria had set him up with a business and public relations manager ages ago, someone to field calls and schedule him and do all the public-persona bullshit he generally hated to do and resented even more right now. He tried not to take his bad moods and self-doubts out on Allie, who was usually pretty forgiving of his short fuse but lately had the look of a cat after a bath every time she saw him.

He was meeting Sam for a basketball game in the evening, so he killed time just walking around neighborhoods he didn’t usually visit until he could jump on the Metro to the arena. Basketball was Sam’s favorite sport, not particularly interesting to Steve though he was starting to see some of the appeal. Yet Sam humored him when he ranted about the Dodgers fucking moving away to California and designated hitters and artificial turf every time they went to a baseball game, so it was an equitable trade.

After the game they stopped for a late dinner at one of their favorite restaurants. Steve always enjoyed the images from the National Portrait Gallery, located across the street, playing on the monitors over the bar. Portraits of old dead white guys, mostly, and that had never been his thing, but the restaurant rotated through some of the more interesting choices of portraiture styles and it was kind of a cool gimmick for atmosphere while you were eating. Still, he nearly choked on his food when a staged photograph of himself suddenly appeared, one he remembered being annoyed by having to pose for. They’d made him stand heroically in the fading twilight, a burning Hydra outpost behind him, when he could have been actually doing something useful, while Bucky and the boys had stood off to the side snickering the whole time. The public image of himself, even after the five or so years he’d had one, never failed to make his brain squirm at the sheer bizarreness of it all, especially when it popped up in front of Steve Rogers just living his life. Sam glanced behind him to see what Steve was staring at, cackling at his discomfort; he pretended to stab Sam with his fork.

It made him consider again what his ma would have thought of her son the weapon, the boy she’d adored who’d been so dissatisfied with himself he let mad scientists remake him and courted death, just for the chance to go to war. That desperate decision had helped him rescue Bucky, though, and Steve hoped his mother would have told him it was worth it in that case, that she would have weighed what he’d gained against what he’d lost and told him it was enough. He’d asked Bucky about that once, lying in the grass of Hyde Park with their jackets off and collars open on a summer day when they were standing down for a short time, back in London at last. Bucky had considered it for a while, his head tilted toward the sun that gleamed on his dark hair, on his exposed throat, and then said, “I think you’re only questioning that because you miss her so much. There’s nothing you could want she wouldn’t want for you too.” The memory of Sarah Rogers had been lost to time and to everyone but Steve and Bucky and maybe Rebecca, and it made his throat ache and his eyes sting. What kind of memorial was he to her?

Sam was kind enough at dinner to listen to him talk about the letters Bucky had written so far, kind enough not to prod for more when Steve faltered. They stayed long after the kitchen had closed, just talking, Steve buying Sam enough really good wine to endure his rambling--Steve had found out early on in their friendship that Sam was a real wine lover, which definitely made it easy to give him gifts. Eventually Steve put Sam in a cab when he realized how completely legless he’d gotten. “You’re a good bro,” Sam muttered sleepily when Steve handed the cabbie enough for at least three fares, and Steve laughed harshly, knowing he wasn’t a good bro to anyone, but somehow people still forgave him for that.

It was a nice night to walk home, a chance to get his head around what he wanted to say to Bucky that wouldn’t sound as broken up as he felt. After a few blocks he sensed the tail on him; Steve had always assumed Hydra wouldn’t bother with a tail, that they’d simply take advantage of him being without his shield or a sidearm and hit him outright, but he reached for his phone so he could tap the Avengers’ emergency signal. As he turned, moving his arms up in a fighting stance, he saw Bucky in the wedge of shadow at the corner of a building.

“That’s a relief,” Steve said and smiled in a way he hoped didn’t betray the fact that he wanted to throw himself down on the ground and wrap his arms around Bucky’s ankles to hobble him so he couldn’t run away. He wore a denim jacket with a black hoodie underneath it, dark jeans, and a dark t-shirt, and his face was slightly hidden by a ball cap, yet somehow he still appeared luminous, dazzling. With a slight nod of his head, Bucky told Steve to keep walking, so he did as Bucky fell in step beside him.

“Have you been waiting all this time for me?”

Bucky shrugged. “Wasn’t that long.”

Suddenly Steve thought of all the times Bucky had followed them to the different Hydra facilities they’d hit. “How have you managed to beat us to the Hydra bases? We’ve been on planes. Have you bugged me somehow?”

“Tradecraft. It’s what I’m good at.” He just stared straight ahead when he said it, but there was a ghost of a smile.

“Yeah, you always were,” Steve laughed. Even with the horrors he’d seen, Bucky was still a smug son of a bitch, too. They remained silent for the rest of the long walk, though Steve occasionally glanced over at him, just to admire his profile. He was hit with a dizzying joy to see that Bucky was chewing gum, just as he had back in the day, a habit he’d picked up playing ball and kept throughout the war. He’d swap his cigarette rations for more gum, doling himself out sticks like he was using up precious gold, chewing it into oblivion. Often when chaos erupted, Bucky would stand there calmly assessing the situation, cracking his gum and doing some sort of logistical magic in his head, and then tell Steve what he thought they should do. Maybe if he hadn’t had to avoid smoking for Steve’s asthma, he’d have been a chain smoker.

They wouldn’t have let him have habits as the Winter Soldier, Steve thought bitterly. They wouldn’t have allowed him anything human, so every little choice now was a nice big fuck you, I win.

Near the Dupont Circle Metro, a few steps from home, Steve finally broke the silence. “I was thinking tonight of what I could say to you. Mostly I wanted you to know that you aren’t what you think you are now, not wicked, or evil, or bad. That was never what you would have chosen to do. All of us do these things in war, but that doesn’t make us killers at heart. I’m responsible for a lot of people dying that day on Project Insight. It gives me nightmares and I’ve been thinking of it a lot lately, too, what I am as a weapon. Wondering if this was always who I really was.”

Bucky tilted his head, as if listening to what Steve was saying but not really hearing it. Steve said, “Wait here. Please, just wait for a minute. I didn’t get a note written but I have some things for you.” Bucky nodded and stuffed his hands into his pockets as Steve raced upstairs, grabbed the guidebooks and food and extra clothing he’d been intending for him. Steve took a page out of his sketchbook, a drawing he’d made of Bucky after he’d got out of the hospital. He expected him to be gone when he got back downstairs, but there he was, scanning the streets with a marksman’s eye, clearly agitated, chewing faster.

Steve handed him the gym bag. “The ID and credit cards are in here with the info you’ll need, and some other stuff I just wanted you to have.” They stared at each other for a moment, and then Steve reached toward Bucky, who took his hand, twining his fingers with Steve’s.

His hand shook--Christ, his whole body was practically vibrating--but at least he didn’t flinch this time, some small measure of progress. With a miserable, dark smile, he squeezed Steve’s fingers and let go, slipping folded-up paper into his hand. “Gotta go.”

Steve watched him walk away, then went upstairs to read what Bucky’d written on small, frayed pages from the pocket notebook Steve had given him earlier.

I know it’s not my turn, Steve, but I saw you break down in your apartment when you read my last letter. I feel so bad for making you hurt like that, I can’t tell you. I know you want to know about me, what I went through and what I’m going through, but I don’t want it to make you feel that way. I’m sitting here outside this arena where you and your friend are, and wondering if I should even write to you anymore, if this isn’t a bad idea after all. You have enough of your own sadness to have to add mine on top.

But then I think about how I feel as if I’m treading water, desperately trying to keep my head above the waves but I’m gasping for breath, and then a swell comes and fills my nose and mouth and I’ll drown, I’ll drown, and I’m so tired of trying to keep my head up. There’s nowhere to swim to on the horizon, but there’s you, holding out a hand to help me up, if I can just stay strong enough to reach you.

And I have another memory that I don’t know if it’s true, but I think it is, because I know now with absolute certainty that I loved you like no one else so it must be true. I think we kissed, on that last mission, before I died. (Let’s call a spade a spade, OK, Stevie? Because I did die that day, even though my body lived on. The old Bucky Barnes is long gone now and while I don’t know who this new one is, I can tell you he’s not the same.) Did that really happen, or was it just more of my wishful thinking?

I know that you loved Peggy, and I know I was a little jealous because she could live a life with you that I would never have, even if you felt the same for me. But I also know I loved you for a long, long time before that happened, so maybe I’m dreaming a kiss because it’s what I wanted. It seemed we only grew closer after you pulled me out of that Hydra factory, even with Peggy a part of your life.

Tell me what is really true. Tell me if I belong to you the way I think I do, if these are not just lies someone put inside me to warp my mind. Tell me this pounding in my chest is what I feel for you and not fear.

Yours,
Bucky

There was no way Steve was going to wait to answer Bucky, so he pulled out his phone and sent him a text: Yes, it’s true. Letter tomorrow behind building. Heading to Philly on train mid-day.

After a few minutes, he got a reply: Good. Steve didn’t know which part that referred to, but it didn’t matter. Then a few minutes later: Tell her hello.

Bucky--
You do belong to me, every bit as much as I belong to you. We never had the chance to talk the way we’d planned to once we returned from that mission, but we kissed, a lot. The house we were trying to bunk down in for the night had been booby-trapped, and when we were clearing rooms one of them exploded. Dum Dum was slightly injured, you and I both had some cuts and scrapes, but fortunately the rest of the boys were outside on perimeter and weren’t hurt. We were alone for a few minutes and I think we knew then, knew what we’d been pretending we didn’t know for a very long time. I wanted it to go on forever, to feel your heart beating inside my chest, to feel your breath in my lungs.

I wished, every day after you were gone, that I had followed you down. I know you will tell me I can’t feel guilty about that, but I do. Probably always will, because you have suffered so much for so very long. And you didn’t hesitate, even without really knowing me and what we meant to each other, to jump in after me and pull me out of the river. I wanted to search for you, too, once we got Zola in custody, but I allowed myself to be convinced there was no way you could have survived. I can never really forgive myself for that.

Because, truly, it was my fault. You stayed to fight with me. You should have gone home, or at least taken a rear assignment, after what you went through. You would have been safe if not for me. And that last op was my foolish idea. It was insane, and I should never have put you in the position in the first place. I made a series of missteps all along the way that a better man would not have made, and you paid the price. All because you cared for me, which was the problem right there. I was your CO and I should have made objective decisions.

I want to destroy everyone who hurt you. I was made to be a weapon and what use is that now--like you said, we can’t exactly dig up their corpses and kill them all over again. This helplessness is terrible.

How do we live with this?

You always made fun of me for being so sentimental, yet you were the one who loved me in spite of all the obstacles. You loved me even when I was ignorant of your feelings and mine. You kept these memories even after the horror of what’s been done to you. I’m not certain I could have been half so strong as you.

I will always remember something you wrote to me in those letters: You were the compass I steered by, the sun that showed me light when it was too dark to see.

With everything I am, yours,
Steve

Becca was looking lovely when she greeted Steve and Sam at the door, her blue eyes sparkling, so much like Bucky’s even yet that it took Steve’s breath away. She made them coffee while telling them about a trip to Charlotte she’d taken recently to visit her grandkids there before sitting down across from them, fixing Steve with a hard stare and asking, “Well, how is he?”

“He’s getting better. He told me to tell you hello.” Steve had given her a mostly sanitized version of Bucky’s history, light on the torture and experimentation and emphasizing the brainwashing and traumatic amnesia. Plenty of boys had come home missing limbs; she could understand that part much easier.

She didn’t exactly relax, but she did shuffle back a bit into her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “You wouldn’t lie to an old lady, would you, Stevie Rogers? You might have been a little shit but you learned some manners from your sainted mother.” That made Sam laugh out loud, but he had the good grace to apologize immediately and stare at Steve with wide eyes.

“Hey,” Steve said sharply and jerked a thumb in Becca’s direction. “I’ll have you know that this one had the biggest crush on me for years.”

Sam eyebrowed Becca. “Is this just his bloated ego talking?”

She shook her head and tightened her mouth, fighting back a smile. “Oh, when I was young and stupid, I thought he hung the moon with those skinny little bird arms of his. But I learned pretty quick what he was really like.” She trained her razor-sharp gaze on him again. “So, anyways, you were saying. You really aren’t just trying to pull one over on me about him?” It was as if she’d been trained to expect the worst, and he supposed in a place like this you began to get that way about death, about the fragility of memory. All these people in her--their--age group were dropping like flies, and he thought of Mrs. Turner’s elderly father, the last known Civil War veteran in their area, and how much he belonged to a past so distant Steve couldn’t even comprehend it back then. Becca and Peggy were in the thick of what it meant to have lived so long--and he was acutely conscious of how far apart he was from them and how far apart from the modern world at the same time.

“No, really, he did. He’s been writing me letters, Becca. And I can see him change, just a little bit, with each one. Last night, I was coming back from a game and he walked with me to my place. We didn’t really talk much, but he made contact. That’s a big step.”

“Well, that’s something, then.” She thought for a bit. “Hold on.” She went to her bedroom, rummaging around in a wardrobe.

She had a nice place here at the retirement center; if Steve remembered correctly one of her kids was a successful advertising guy so they could afford a good apartment like this. Sam had whistled when they were in the lobby and said it was nicer than his place and he wanted to move in immediately. Steve had warned him that Becca always made him stay for dinner to show off to her friends that Captain America was family--and Sam wouldn’t be so keen on living here once he got a taste of what was most definitely food for old people. Sam laughed so hard he had to sit down, tears streaming from his eyes. “You know you’re ninety-fucking-five years old, right? You remember one of the first things you said to me was how you grew up on boiled everything?”

“Chronologically maybe, but I’m still a red-blooded young man, thank you very much.”

“Right, right, that’s why you fall asleep by eight thirty, and yell at the TV, and love butterscotch candies, and bitch and moan about the terrible prices of things these days. I know why you like visiting here. These are your people.” Steve had laughed, but it also made him wonder, once again, about the image people had of him, how easy it was to see him as a relic of the past instead of a living, breathing guy.

Becca returned with a large shoebox and handed it to Steve. “I’m glad you’re finally ready for them. I was afraid I might die before you pulled yourself together.” Her sideways grin was the mirror image of Bucky’s, and it made his heart spin inside his chest.

“You’re going to live forever.”

She scoffed. “I never read ’em,” she said carefully. “I started the first letter, and I realized it wasn’t for me to see. Or other people, and when the museum folks came, I kept these back. They got enough stuff from us, they didn’t need something this private. He loved you so much. I was a naive young girl and I didn’t really know what it meant, but I understood it years later.”

The stinging prickle of tears crept up behind his eyes. Everyone else noticed how much Bucky’d loved him, but he’d been blind until it was too late. “Thanks, Becca. You have no idea what this means to me, and I think it’ll mean a lot to him. Maybe not soon, but eventually.” He took her hand and she snorted and rolled her eyes.

“Oh, you are such a flatterer. How you managed to make it to the war without a trail of broken hearts behind you, I’ll never know. Just because you were small. Those gals didn’t know what they were missing.” Bucky used to say that too, just so.

They stayed for dinner, Steve fulfilling his duty to charm everyone in the dining hall, swapping stories with the WWII and Korea vets, and Sam hitting it off with pretty much everyone but especially the ladies. Afterward they opened the bottle of wine Sam had brought for her, telling stories about Bucky, before Steve and Sam caught a late train back to DC.

The train was one of the few features of modern life that felt just enough like it had back in his day. Sure, today they were faster and the seats were more comfortable--especially in the business car, where he usually rode so he could have privacy--but the basics were largely the same. Tonight, though, he was lost in melancholy, staring out the window while Sam dozed next to him, his own reflection staring back in the low light. The box of letters and notebooks sat like weights on his lap, simple pieces of paper nonetheless heavy with history and grief.

Once, when they’d been pushing through the Massif Central, Dernier had shown them a hot springs no one seemed to know about, and they’d all stripped down and leapt inside the steaming pool. They were instantly transformed into boys again, splashing and dunking each other, roughhousing as though they’d forgotten everything they’d been through, and when he and Bucky were like that and their guard was down, something hidden within their bond revealed itself.

Steve had been aware of Bucky’s soft penis against his thigh, the texture of Bucky’s chest hair under his pruning fingertips, Bucky’s rough stubble against the back of his shoulder as Bucky shoved Steve under the water, arms around him. They’d come up sputtering, stared at each other, time unbroken, infinite, until one of the boys caught their attention and Bucky climbed out, watching them with what seemed like amusement on his face but what Steve now realized was fear. By the time the boys had finished and were drying off Bucky was scribbling in his notebook, sitting away from them. Giddy from the horseplay, Steve snatched it from him to see what he was writing, but Bucky had grabbed it back, anger snapping in his eyes, almost lighting up the darkness. Steve wouldn’t have to look for the entry to know what Bucky had been writing about then.

When Steve and Sam pulled into Union Station, Steve had started nodding off himself, but the bright lights and the stop announcement cut into his consciousness. In that brief hazy moment he saw a dark train moving past theirs, and he jerked awake. Bucky was falling back, back away from him, down into a white chasm, his hand outstretched, and Steve couldn’t pull him back as the train sped away from Bucky forever. Steve was hyperventilating, filled with dread that threatened to smother him, until Sam’s voice came quietly in his left ear, “Hey, hey man, you okay?” He’d almost upended the box and Steve clutched at it superstitiously, like a talisman he needed to stay alive, nodding his head.

“Just got lost in a memory,” he said, because Sam didn’t deserve to have him lie the way he usually did and insist he was fine.

“I hear that,” Sam said, but nothing else because he was Sam and he understood, and they went to the parking lot to get Steve’s bike. Sam was quiet as Steve drove him home, not even giving Steve the customary shit about flouting the helmet law by riding without one. Steve wondered how often his comments about losing Bucky reminded Sam of losing Riley, but he didn’t want to ask in case--in case it did to Sam what remembering Bucky dying in front of him did to Steve. The world was not meant for people to feel as much as Steve did about everything. He’d wanted to save his mother and he couldn’t, he’d wanted to save Bucky and he hadn’t, and he wasn’t sure what that made him but it didn’t make him a hero.

When he got back to his apartment, Steve saw the tube was up behind the downspout and he took it upstairs with him.

First things first: Let’s get one thing straight. You know damn well that no one ever made me do anything I didn’t want to do. How in hell could you think that I’d have suffered a rear desk job or gone home, knowing you were out there?

That’s why they could make me what I became, don’t you see? I didn’t know who I was, where I was, when they found me. My mind was a perfect blank slate for them. I was in a hospital for a long time after they took off the rest of my arm. I only began piecing things back together after they had worked on me. Something about the conditioning would start to fail if they left me out for long periods of time. So the only time anyone made me do something I didn’t want to was when I wasn’t me, when I couldn’t even remember me.

Steve, you need to understand this: I knew you before I knew myself. I remembered you. You kept trying to remind me who I was, but it wasn’t until you said something that reminded me who you were to me that I could really understand.

After I hurt you, I tried to put it all together, and it wasn’t me I could really get a hold on. It was only you. I’d pass by a window and see you behind me, the little you, in the reflection. I’d hear your voice in the sounds of the city. I’d close my eyes and feel your hair as I ran my fingers through it, trying to get you to sleep when you were sick.

I’m not even going to try to tell you not to feel guilty, because I know that’s a waste of ink. Only a stubborn shit like you would allow someone to shoot and beat him to death while telling them he loved them. But you listen to me. One way or another, I was going into that river. If it hadn’t been to pull you out, it would have been with a lot of burning metal and fire and I’d have certainly been killed. I didn’t know why, but I knew I needed to help you, and really, doing that saved my life, too.

Jumping after me when I fell into a canyon? That’s just suicide, plain and simple. That’s insane. None of us knew I could have survived--I knew something was wrong with me, but I’d never have guessed it would have helped me stay alive after falling into a fucking canyon. So stop this nonsense. If you hadn’t survived after I was gone, no one else who mattered would have either, because they’d have won the war. Do you realize that? Peggy, my family, everyone who ever mattered to us, they’d all be gone.

Kids like us, we cut our teeth on hardship and deprivation, but we’d never have thought of it that way then--it was just life. The world we lived in. Everybody we knew had it that way too. But what we saw in the war was real suffering, real deprivation. Do we even recognize all that we’ve lost, what they turned us into?

Maybe we were so accustomed to it that we look at the horrors we’ve endured, you and I, and we just think, ah, I’ve seen worse.

What they had the hardest time killing in me was you. Do you remember the Sonnets to Orpheus? I think about that: They made that bellow, shriek, and roar small within me, but they could never completely strip away the knowledge of you, the tiny spark that lit some small corner of my mind and only needed to be reignited.

As for the other things. You can’t know what it means to know that these memories are real. That I knew the heat of your skin and the taste of your lips. I can feel it inside me, sometimes, even when I know nothing else around me, this knowledge of you, and if nothing else will keep me going, that will. It’s like a deep well, our history together, I can dip my hand into and drink from.

Be patient with me. I wish I could say all this to your face, but it saves me giving you a shaking and a slap upside the head. I’m not ready yet, but I will be.

With all my love,
Bucky

For the first time since he’d started corresponding with Bucky, Steve slept through the night without bad dreams. There was a lot of crap he had to do with Allie, sort out some public appearances he’d been avoiding, and she was making the first pass through all the real estate listings in New York, bless her inhumanly patient heart. Somehow Pepper had found him someone exactly like she was, knowing that’s what Steve needed, and he thought, not for the first time, how much like his ma both those ladies were. He threw an iPod, the photos Becca had given him, and some of his recent sketches into one of the containers, and then dashed off a quick note.

Bucky--
I almost don’t know what to say about your last letter, so all I’ll say is that I will wait for you forever. Nothing could make me turn away now. I love you, and I’ve loved you through being frozen for 70 years, so yeah, I guess I can wait some more. This is nothing. Believe it or not, I love writing with you. It’s really a lost art these days, like so many things, and I can hear your rich voice in my head when I read these.

I have your letters from the war, and the notebooks. Becca is well, and happy to hear you are all right. If and when you want to see them, let me know.

I think that you are right about a lot of things you said. This is what I’ve missed the most--your friendship, your wisdom. And I guess I’m realizing now that everything we were so scared of in that war happened, so maybe we don’t have to be scared anymore. We just have to figure out how to march forward.

I’ve included a bunch of items in this drop--an iPod with music for you, because you loved music so much. Sam’s been helping me get acquainted with all the styles that came after us, and these are some of your favorites from our generation, moving up along the decades, curated by him. There’s some videos too that I think you’ll find funny. Some of my recent sketches, just because I wanted to share them with you. I never much cared about what I drew until I’d had the chance to show them to you. Some photos from Becca, of your family and the one she made later. I hope they will make you happy instead of sad. And just some more things to eat that I like and I think you might like too.

More later, my friend,
Yours,
Steve

In the evening, Steve sat at the table and opened the box. The contents surprised him, he’d thought it was just letters and journals. But Becca had included the pocketknife Steve had given Bucky before he left for Camp McCoy, Bucky’s initials engraved on the side; a Captain America comic book that Bucky had asked Steve to autograph, which Steve had thought at the time was Bucky being a shit, but Bucky had actually been serious about it because he was proud of him; and one of the little Armed Services Edition books Bucky had loved, this one of Sandburg’s poetry, of course, but Steve also remembered with a smile how he had loved the steamy romance books, too. Underneath those was the letter Steve had written to Bucky’s parents after he’d fallen. His hands shook as he put it to the side. It had been printed in countless books, so he’d assumed the original was archived somewhere and lost to him, but here it was.

He sorted the letters and notebooks by date. Each one was battered and foxed around the edges and stained from coffee cups and the ink that ran after they were exposed to rain or snow. The letters were fragile, the onionskin paper almost transparent and brown with age, musty-smelling and powdery.

They started out familiar enough, the first one detailing the journey on the troop ship over and Bucky’s hope that Steve was well. Steve had flown over to Europe, so he’d never experienced the squalor of a crowded hold, trying to sleep in swaying hammocks with seasick young men packed around you sweating and vomiting, a picture Bucky painted all too vividly.

He remembered, as if it was only yesterday, the sharp, wrenching sickness that had torn through his guts when he’d seen Bucky’s military acceptance and the instructions of where and when to report for processing. Steve had rushed out of their apartment and through streets soggy with cold rain, wearing just a thin jacket, and he ran and ran until he’d been stopped by the knife-thrusts deep into his lungs and between his ribs, just when he’d reached the bridge. He stared at the water, trying to pull air into his chest that didn’t burn white-hot, sweat mingling with the rain and his hair dripping down underneath his collar. Jealousy or fear, he hadn’t been sure at the time, maybe both, he only knew that he wouldn’t get the chance to serve but Bucky would go, Bucky would get to go and then he would be gone, perhaps never to return. Steve was shivering and wobbly by the time Bucky’d found him; it was dark but the rain had stopped and moonlight seemed to make Bucky’s pale skin luminous.

Bucky had just shaken his head and handed Steve his heavy coat--which he’d carried all that way for him--and then put his hand to the side of Steve’s face. “We both knew I was gonna have to go somewhere you couldn’t follow, someday.” He seemed to understand that Steve didn’t even know what was wrong, just the way Ma would, he accepted whatever was wrong, threw his arm around Steve’s shoulders. “You jackass, going off like this half-cocked, now you’ll catch your death,” and Steve had almost answered with “good.” He couldn’t tell Bucky that he was crying for his ma too, that she would have known what to say to him, she could have helped him through this, and he couldn’t ask Bucky, he couldn’t because Bucky would never know what it was like, to be denied anything, to be less than. Bucky was perfect and luminous. But he’d pulled Steve close to him and kissed the top of his forehead.

It was not unlike what his mother would have done and that made Steve break down completely, hiccupping sobs that wracked his body as they walked slowly back home and Steve had whispered, “I don’t want to miss you like I miss Ma,” but Bucky hadn’t heard him over the traffic noise, or if he did, he didn’t show it. Bucky had put him to bed with a little weak tea and some soda crackers, stroked his forehead until he fell asleep, and they had never spoken about it again.

Steve turned the letter over in his hand, swallowing against the ache in his throat, and read the last paragraph. There was the sentiment that tinted all of Bucky’s letters before he saw combat, and it came flooding back, that colossal need Bucky had to protect him.

This is what I’m desperate for you to understand. You said tonight that your need to enlist wasn’t about you, that it was about laying down your life the way other men were allowed to. For your country, for them. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t, I won’t presume to debate that in this letter or future letters. But you have to understand that this is about me--that I can’t do what I will need to do in combat if I have no certainty of your safety. So I beg you not to keep attempting to enlist. You are a mule and as intractable as any human could be when it comes to doing what you think is right. In most circumstances I can admire that while shaking my head and picking up the pieces should you let them drop. But if you aren’t safe at home, taking care of your health, it will destroy me. I’m saying this because I love you and I want what’s best for you, even if you don’t understand what that is. I’m begging because I love you.

The crazy-expensive bottle of Scotch Tony had given him as a birthday present was now a necessity; even if he couldn’t get drunk, Steve was going to need alcohol for this. Something fell from the second envelope when he picked it up, a strip of pictures of him and Bucky from a photo booth at the Expo, taken before their dates had shown up. They were both making goofy faces in the first three; the bottom picture was cut off, the one where Bucky had kissed him, laughing, on the cheek. On the back Bucky’d written, “Keep these safe for me.” He ran his fingers over the ancient paper, its faded blue ink. Bucky’s mouth against his skin had been startling, not because it was unusual for him to kiss or touch him, but because of the length of time his lips had lingered against Steve’s skin. Another kiss he’d thought was just Bucky being Bucky, always so handsy and expressive of his feelings in a way Steve had learned not to be in the world.

The second letter was more of the same, his impressions of Tunisia after they’d landed, the people he’d met, and as always, his fears about whether he could be a good sergeant and whether Steve was safe at home. The date on that one was the day Steve had arrived at the antiques shop in Brooklyn to be transformed into a weapon.

His letters in return had not survived--Bucky had kept them, and his journal at the time, in his ruck, so they’d been lost in his capture by Schmidt’s forces. After their escape he’d been furious about that, as if once he was freed from that hellhole, there was nothing left to be furious at so he targeted all his rage on the fact that they took his stuff, and Steve had teased him about being ungrateful. But now Steve got it, saw what those letters meant to him in a way he couldn’t have back then, the precious fragments of home and friendship and love that reminded you: this isn’t all that’s left of you. His own letters had been so false, Steve had kept them sunny and light, lying to Bucky about what he was doing at home. He’d convinced himself he’d been sparing Bucky the worry, but that’s what he’d done--lied to his best friend and the shame of it clutched coldly at his gut.

On the cusp of the Italian invasion, Bucky mentioned that mail was getting spottier, to be expected of course, but he was sad and missed his friend’s communication.

I hope I can be the best NCO to them that I’m capable of being. But I feel far too young for this and at the same time so very old, as though I’ve aged about fifty years since the day I left the port of embarkation. That was a lifetime ago, and even longer since I saw your face.

I wish sometimes I hadn’t sent you back the photo booth picture. It’s been only a few weeks, and yet you’re swiftly fading from my slowly fading heart. I miss the sound of your voice, calling me names and spoiling for a fight. Your terrible jokes and your hopeful dreams for the future.

In New York, it’s morning as I write this, and you’ll be getting ready for work. I imagine you awakening from sleep with your hair standing up in a hundred different directions from all those cowlicks, and your blue eyes still blurry with the cobwebs of sleep. I like to think of you stepping out on the fire escape with your coffee warm between your hands, waking up and readying for the day. Your keen eyes as they watch the street below, taking in the scene that you can sketch later on, moved by everything that stirs your artist’s heart.

And then things got dark, as Bucky went into combat. The last few letters were short, but each line carried his hardship and gloom. At the time Bucky wrote them Steve had probably been in the Midwest, flirting with gals after a show or learning to drive with Eleanor and Doris from the USO. Maybe sitting down to a nice dinner with the senator, or going out for drinks with the cast.

There’s a fellow in my outfit, a little older and a bit of a lush, but a good mug. He’s from New York, so we talk about home a lot, and he used to be a circus strongman, which just goes to prove you meet all kinds once you’re in the army. You see what people are made of in combat, where they crack, when they come together. What we can be when things are at their worst, what we should be when things are at their best. All these thoughts sprout in my head like a garden too overgrown with weeds. I value these friendships I’ve formed, but I miss you, my friend, I miss your courage and your heart and your humor.

There was a lull between letters, probably no time for Bucky to have written in that push through to Italy, just about the time Steve was heading to Europe.

I wish the ground would open up beneath my feet, pull me down into fire and lava, because then at least I would be warm and I’m in hell anyway here without you. It’s freezing at night and my fatigues never dry out. We live in mud and half-frozen water and shit and blood. You were so jealous of me, being able to serve, and I can say now Stevie, you can’t envy this bleakness, this grim survival.

I saw one of the men from another company break down with combat fatigue, and the major in his outfit backhanded him across the face. I fear becoming something like that, hardened to another’s suffering because my own eats at my soul. It would be simple to say that these men start out either good or bad, and show their true colors, but it changes us in ways we can’t see. The war might make us all into monsters by the end, or maybe we were monsters all along, before it even began.

We jump out of our holes to piss or take a shit, hope we don’t step in someone else’s frozen shit, and jump back in. Our clothes could probably stand up on their own. We’ve lost so many men I can’t count. This is what I wanted you never to know, why I am relieved to think of you safe at home, huddled over your sketchbook with your creased brow, biting your lower lip, the way you did when you were wrapped up in your drawing. Or coming out of sleep in the morning, the light slanted across your face, so carefree. And all these places you dwelled in my life that you have gone from ache for you.

Steve put his head down on his arms, closing his eyes. He thought he’d had the heart for this, now that he knew Bucky was alive, now that Bucky was here, a part of Steve’s life once more, as much as he could be. But he wasn’t sure which hurt most--what Bucky went through or his own obliviousness the first time he’d read them.

It’s been so long since I heard your voice. We haven’t been getting mail regularly out here. I wonder how you’re doing, now that it’s getting toward winter and you’ll be having more trouble breathing.

The farther we go, the more hellish it seems to be, as the Krauts hold on to keep what they have. It’s not all just on the ground where we are. The artillery fire at night could be beautiful if you were watching it from far away and couldn’t hear the terrible thunder, tracers like stars that shoot across the sky, arcing through the air. The horizon is lit scarlet and orange like a painting as everything burns. I’ve watched the airplanes drop their bombs, like angel warriors flying through the sky with support for us on the ground. I suppose both sides believe heaven and the angels are on their side in this. All I see is heaven opening up to rain hell down on us.

Well. As my favorite poet said, all Angels are terrifying.

The letters ended there, and Steve picked up the two surviving notebooks with trembling hands. After Bucky had fallen, Steve had tried to read them completely but never succeeded, undone by his bottomless grief. No one could afford for Steve to curl up in a ball and hide in his quarters while they tried to plan their assault on Schmidt’s stronghold, so he’d put them away for another time. Now he found no more strength to read them than he’d had then, a different kind of grief welling up inside him, deep and cold and stained with his guilt. He’d left Bucky to be tortured and broken for seventy years, and how did you ever, ever make up for that?

He flipped through the first journal, recalling dates at the top of each entry--that was when... Oh, and that was the time that... Steve shook his head. Bucky would be so fucking annoyed with him for wallowing and blaming himself, but he was right, that was a part of Steve’s nature that wasn’t going to change now.

His first entry came shortly after Steve and Bucky had returned to camp with the rest of the prisoners; he must have snagged a notebook from an orderly when Steve was off making reports. That, at least, gave him a smile, thinking of Bucky, still seething about the loss of his letters and notebooks, hunting down pen and paper and cussing furiously even though he should have been seeing to other things.

I am still trying to accept all the things that happened to me, and to accept you in this new body. When you first came into my field of vision, I thought for sure I was really dead--I’d wanted to die, many times, especially when they pumped those chemicals into my veins and it burned like they’d poured acid inside me. It was you, but not you. Didn’t know what to make of that, but the sound of your voice, the way you smiled at me, I knew it really was you in there. It’s funny, everyone now thinks you’re perfect. But here I was, always thinking you were perfect before.

Funny too, isn’t it, what we cling to. You seem now so serene, so confident, maybe...content is the word. Those were things that probably applied more to my character than yours before. A part of me wants to hold on to that old you, the one who needed me, who I rescued sometimes and protected. You won’t need that anymore, will you? And I’m just as changed, after that factory. I’m a wreck of a human being and I wish I had a way to ask you to help me find myself again, to rescue me, but I can’t. I don’t know the words.

In the chaos after getting everyone out of the factory, Steve had found Bucky in a copse of trees, shivering and looking half-mad, his too-wide eyes glimmering and wet, breath a dry rattle in his lungs. He’d looked at Steve then, really looked at him, seen the torn jacket and smudges of ash and dirt and blood, and laid into him. “Jesus fucking Christ, do you have any idea how hard it is to love you? You’re a fucking suicidal idiot, doing this, doing all of this, I can’t believe you. Why would you come here? You idiot.” He’d jerked his shoulders out of Steve’s hands, smacking at him, sullen. “Do you know what it’s like to care about you? You’re insane. You’re a fucking lunatic.” Eventually Bucky had stopped, defeated, and allowed Steve to put his arms around him and hold him there, the two of them shaking against the darkness, the deeper meaning of it all far outside of Steve’s understanding.

You can be an artist in whichever medium you are gifted in, you said something like that once. I’ve come to realize that my art is not writing but dealing death. Maybe this war is my masterpiece. I don’t think I was always gifted this way, but I wonder, sometimes, when it’s dark and quiet. Whatever this gift is I have, for marksmanship, for killing, I don’t want it. I feel like I’ve failed you, all I bring is this darkness against your light.

The entries in the second notebook became shorter, grimmer as they went along, most of them focused on specifics about the missions but also Bucky’s thoughts about Steve as a CO, about their work. Bucky had gone on a number of operations without Steve and vice versa, and Steve read the details now about those solo ops, recalling the stories Bucky had told him later in the darkness just like when they’d been boys, lying on the roof and talking about their days. So full of vivid detail, sounds and tastes and smells, the catch of someone’s voice or the light in their eyes, like a dream he’d just awakened from.

And there it was, the last page, a little over two-thirds of the way through the notebook.

I have a bad feeling about this mission, but I don’t know if it’s simply that superstition all soldiers have the night before a big operation or if it’s based on my fear of our target.

I wish I could be half as brave as you. Your ma once told me that each time you were ill as a baby, the doctors would tell her to brace herself, that you were going to die, but you never did. They never saw your strength. All your life, everyone looked at you and saw only a tiny, helpless bird, hollow bones and fluttering wings. But I knew the truth of you, that you were made of steel and concrete.

You thought I sometimes finished a fight for you or protected you from bullies because I was the brave one. But it was never that, Steve, never. I was terrified that someone would hurt you too much, that a punch might stop your heart or you would fall the wrong way, your head hitting something hard and like a light, you would go out. I was terrified of losing you.

And I’m terrified still.

He’d found the journals when they brought Zola back, so staggered and numb he wasn’t able to work up any more shock at their contents. All that time and Bucky had been writing to him, all that time and Steve had just taken his voice for granted. When his tears had slowed, Steve had written underneath Bucky’s entry, as if somehow Bucky would hear his apology and know his mourning and forgive him.

I keep thinking about our last moments together. How the last words you heard me say were just smartass jokes. What I should have said was this is our most dangerous mission yet, stay close to me, don’t take any risks. I should have said I love you, be careful, I’m right beside you.

Steve was back in that pub, the air raid sirens shrieking, not caring at all if he was blown to pieces. Wiping tears from his eyes, the light leeched out of the world around him, Peggy insisting he had to continue without Bucky to honor his sacrifice. He closed the notebook and pushed it to the side.

Even though he’d promised Bucky he wouldn’t intrude on him unless necessary, Steve pulled out his phone and dialed. He heard the line click on, though Bucky didn’t say anything.

“I just needed to hear your voice.”

“Yeah, okay,” Bucky said, a rustle of sheets as he probably sat up in bed, and Steve could imagine him rubbing the sleep from his blue eyes and yawning. He heard a sound he couldn’t identify; after a few seconds he realized it was Bucky’s metal hand rubbing against the stubble on his face, and Steve smiled. That grotesque arm might have been new, but the rest of it, oh, it was so familiar Steve could draw it perfectly. “What’s wrong?”

“I read through your letters home. And some of the journal entries.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know why I--why I didn’t realize how miserable you were. How much you were suffering. How you felt.”

“Steve. We talked about this.” Bucky sighed. Steve wanted to see his face, but he knew Bucky wouldn’t enable the view screen even if he asked.

He went over to the couch and curled up on his side. “I don’t know how you can forgive me.”

Bucky grunted. “There’s nothing to forgive. I told you a thousand times. I wanted that, I was willing to follow you into hell if you asked me to.”

“It’s not lost on you, I trust, that that’s basically what you did?”

Bucky laughed fondly, and there had never been such a sweet sound. “What is it you’re not telling me?”

“Jesus. Seventy years of brainwashing and mind-wiping and you can still do that.”

“You were always good at putting on a front for other people, but you could never pull that shit on me or your ma.”

“Why was that?” But Steve knew the answer and he knew Bucky was not in any shape to say it, so he added quietly, “We never talked about that night. The kiss, any of it. There are so many things I still need to say to you.”

“Then say them.”

“Okay.” He nodded, as if somehow Bucky could see him. “Can do. Letter tomorrow.”

“Good night, Steve,” Bucky said softly, and then the screen of his phone went dark. Steve knocked the phone on the floor and shoved his face into the pillow.

In the morning, he was calm enough to write back to Bucky, less worried he’d amp up Bucky’s own issues with his. Sam would remind him he had to put his feet on solid ground if he wanted to help Bucky, and Sam was always right.

Buck--
I’m sorry if I overwhelmed you last night. I just really needed to hear your voice, to remind myself that you are alive and here. You’re going to keep telling me I can’t feel guilty for things, and I’ll keep feeling guilty. I guess some things never change. I truly don’t know how I could have been so blind to how miserable you were back then, but the thing that hurts the most is reading that last entry once more, even though I never really forgot what it said. I always wondered why you left your ruck with the boys when we went on that operation--I thought maybe it was to keep you light, the same reason we didn’t carry enough ammo. Another time where I planned badly.

After you fell and we got back to camp, I went through your things. That was when I realized you had been writing to me in those journals. All that time I’d thought you were writing observations, recording events, like a journalist would. You could have been another Ernie Pyle, you were always so good at that sort of thing, and I bet the papers would have loved to have dispatches from the field from Sergeant James Barnes of the Howling Commandos.

But then there I was, sitting on your cot and staring at your handwriting, and I saw that last entry, and I was so broken up I wasn’t sure how I could carry on. It feels as sharp and painful as if it were yesterday to me, just the raw agony of it, but I don’t know if you remember what you said. You had a bad feeling about the op, you were afraid of something, possibly seeing Zola again, possibly just the basic superstitions soldiers have the night before. And you were right to feel that way. You were so much wiser than I was, had such a depth of experience and none of the reckless disregard for life and limb I did.

Every one of your doubts about that mission were valid. I remember Monty, when we got to the summit above the train tracks, asking you and Gabe in his droll way if your lives weren't flashing before your eyes. I thought it was funny and laughed it off. God. What kind of friend, what kind of CO, does something like that?

Sometimes I got so carried away by what I could do in this new body, what it was like to be nearly unlimited and strong after a lifetime of battling limitations and weakness. It was a ridiculous plan, I was always ignoring the fact that the rest of you guys couldn’t do the things I did, and I should never have expected you to go on such a fucking insane mission. You paid the price for my arrogance.

You fell, and all at once I knew what I really was. I was not a good friend, a good commanding officer, a good man like Dr. Erskine believed. Not even a good son. I was selfish and reckless and stupid and thoughtless. I was not the hero everyone wanted me to be.

And I don’t know if you know this, because it’s not in the history books and it’s not in the exhibit, but I almost killed Zola. If Gabe hadn’t been there, I would have.

I wrote something to you then in my grief, I’d almost forgotten it, and seeing both of those paragraphs on the page tonight just really did me in, you know? I would have screamed what I said to the sky if I’d thought you could hear me, but all I could do was write it in your book and pray that if I saw you in the afterlife, you’d forgive me. I said:

“I keep thinking about our last moments together. How the last words you heard me say were just smartass jokes. What I should have said was this is our most dangerous mission yet, stay close to me, don’t take any risks. I should have said I love you, be careful, I’m right beside you.”

I know you believe I don’t need forgiveness. You’re more generous to me than I could ever be. It just takes the smallest thing, you know? The tiniest little mistake to hurl a human being into a place where everything loses its meaning--life and love and belief. Even with Peggy still there at my side, I found myself struggling to keep meaning, to keep going, and I kept thinking of what Ma would have thought of me.

We were just little kids when we met, but I think I knew even then that my whole world had been completely upended and would never be the same. Losing you, I felt the same way, and now that I have you back, I’ll never risk it happening again.

Which isn’t to say that I’m impatient, that I won’t wait for you to come in when you’re ready. From everything I know, the fact that you’re even willing to talk to me and write letters and be out in the world is pretty amazing. But you always were that.

Steve

Allie had a list of potential places in New York for Steve to look at, and there was a ton of stuff on his calendar he needed to do. But he wanted none of it. All he wanted to do was read more of the journals, wait to hear from Bucky, and wallow in his guilt while brooding. Or brood while wallowing, they were both good options. Natasha had told him that once, that a good wallow could be more beneficial than a week of therapy--he’d laughed then, because he wasn’t that sort of guy.

Hey Steve--
Probably a good thing I can’t handle being around people right now, or you’d be right, I’d be beating you about the head for wallowing in all that guilt. And we both know how that went last time--so I guess we both have something terrible to feel guilty about.

You are wrong. I have nothing else to say to that other than you are wrong, you are good. If that’s not enough, think of it this way: do you believe I made those decisions willingly, to kill people, to try to kill you? We both know the answer to that.

Listen. I won’t lie to you and tell you I didn’t have a million different kinds of rage burning through me after it all started coming back. And it still runs through me even now, sometimes the current is so strong it carries me away and I lose time, my mind goes somewhere I can’t even follow, or sometimes it feels like I’m rushing over the edge of a waterfall and I can’t see what’s down below once I go over. Maybe some of that rage was for both of us, for being so arrogant about our own lives and for taking risks we shouldn’t have. But those are fleeting thoughts, and I believe we would simply do it all again if given half a chance, because we were young and foolish and couldn’t have imagined in our wildest fears the very things that happened to us.

That rage is a very specific kind of rage--it’s not anger at you as a person, it’s not hatred or disappointment or mistrust. It could never be those things for you--hating someone’s behavior or choices is not the same thing as hating them, you of all people know that. And I think I hated myself, my own choices, as much if not more when I began to piece those final days back together.

I’ve struggled with something since you cut through the noise in my mind. I remember more and more of those first months, when they were still making him out of the various parts left of me. Did I fight back as hard as I could? Was that much of me gone that I just let them do it all to me? Was that much of you gone? I don’t know if I can ever get those pieces of my past back, and it eats at me sometimes in the small hours of the night, wondering if the loss of you was enough that I just gave up and became what they wanted. As if the blank space of my mind at that point knew the emptiness was unnatural, and told me to give up. You occupied so much of my mind, my life, that your absence left me weak to their control.

I was always so alone--alone in my mind when they put me on ice. Alone on missions, because even if I had a team or a spotter with me, I didn’t interact with them. It’s hard to explain the overwhelming emptiness of that, especially in those long years when they forgot about me. And yet I have never been as alone as I was when I left you on that riverbank, because you gave me a name and a history to show me how abandoned I was. There was no solitude in it, just a gnawing loneliness I didn’t understand. That’s what I’m struggling against every time my head gets above water. I don’t know how to make this all make sense. But I feel that somehow you’ll understand what I’m saying.

They saw me as some kind of triumph against you, against the US and the Allies. They laughed about it and for the longest time they called me the American, even though I didn’t understand that then because I wasn’t sure who I was. It’s that belief, that my home was the enemy, that you were a target to eliminate, that makes me angrier than almost anything else. I know I should just hold on to the fact that I know you now, that we’re here and we’re alive, together. But I can’t yet.

All the lives I’ve taken, and only one I ever saved. I’m broken, Steve, and I doubt I can be fixed.

At first I wondered if writing to you was simply writing a series of extended suicide notes. Like I could finally stop, just end it all and you’d be okay because I told you what I needed to and now I could go. But I also think that maybe you have suffered for longer than I have, being back in the world alone and lonely, and I have no right to take myself out and leave you to face that again.

Just writing this down helps me so much, you can’t even know. Being able to form these thoughts helps me move toward you again. And I am moving toward you, Steve. Don’t doubt that, even if I do sometimes.

Yours, always,
Bucky

2. Sing me to sleep

Steve was staring at his phone when Nat came up behind him and poked him in the ass. “Watching porn, or cat videos?”

“Hah.” He tossed her a couple magazines for her extra Sig Sauers, and she handed him some comm devices. Steve enjoyed setting gear for ops and doing mission prep with Nat, she was efficient but always made it more fun than it had any right to be. “I was wondering if I should text Bucky and offer him transport with us. I doubt he’d take it, but there’s a chance...and then he wouldn’t have to try to follow me.”

She thought for a while. “Do you think he enjoys the following part? It can’t hurt to just ask, you know. Unless you don’t want to hear ‘no.’” There was a soft, fond look in her eyes.

He smiled in response. “Well, that’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question--is that the figure?” She shrugged. “I worry about everything when it comes to him.” He nodded, mostly to himself. “I think I will. Offer him the entire back of the plane, we can keep our distance. He has the coordinates, but...” He kept the message brief and businesslike, then turned back to the task at hand, and she was watching him, her eyes flicking over his face, assessing.

“So when are you moving?” she asked. It wasn’t the best timing for an operation, considering he’d just signed the paperwork for a brownstone in Brooklyn--over Tony’s squawking protests because he wasn’t moving into Stark Tower--but as soon as Natasha and Clint verified their intel, they had to move on this base before Hydra got word.

“Guess I’ll start packing as soon as we get back.” He left unsaid his concern that it might send Bucky spiraling away. Home was a different place for Steve than for Bucky--what comforted Steve could trigger memories or a stress response in Bucky that undid all the progress he’d made. You didn’t just write your way back from seventy years of torture and dehumanization to become predictably, fully functional.

“You never really set down roots here. Shouldn’t be hard for you to go this time, especially with the Super Friends Moving Company to help you. The obligatory reward for help moving these days is pizza and beer, by the way. For Sam, a really nice bottle of wine.” She set a couple dozen blocks of Semtex inside a crate.

“I liked it here, sometimes. Once I met Sam.”

That was greeted with peal of laughter. “You met Sam only a couple days before blowing up your entire existence. That hardly counts.”

Grinning, he admitted, “Yeah, I suppose. I don’t know. Even home doesn’t feel like home anymore.”

The calm waters of her face betrayed nothing, but there was a flicker in her eyes as she sat on a crate, pulling her hair out of the tie and letting it fall around her face. She’d cut it again and the curls were taking over today. Steve reached out and pushed one behind her ear. “It’s hard for people like us to ever feel like we have a home. And you have the disadvantage of being a time-traveler, where only the tiniest pieces of your world survived.”

“It’ll be more like home if Bucky comes along. If he gets...better.” He could feel it in the air, though, what everyone didn’t want to say to him whenever he talked about Bucky--don’t get your hopes up.

Whatever she’d been trying to figure out before clicked now, her eyes sharply focused. “You want to ask me how Clint got through to me, don’t you?”

He shook his head. “I just--I can’t ever really understand what he went through. What he could be going through now, even though he describes things very well in his letters. And I--I want to understand, but the best I can do is just--hang on, offer him support. I don’t know if that’s enough. I don’t know if he can get better. The things they--what they did to both of you.”

“Yes, Steve. The answer is yes.” She smiled. “He’s on a road he can travel a lot easier with someone beside him, though.” Natasha and Clint’s relationship was so mysterious to him, but he admired the easy harmony, the obvious love and friendship. He wanted to achieve that.

“Like Clint did for you.”

“And Nick. What Barnes went through is so much worse than what I experienced, but I can tell you that it’s possible to remake yourself yet again. The path he’s on--it’s why he’s fighting so hard against Hydra. It’s not revenge, it’s not anger, it’s--redemption.” She shrugged. I’ve got red in my ledger, she’d told Loki. Hadn’t they all.

“I think it’s more than that. I think it’s a reckoning.” He’s not the kind you save, he’s the kind you stop. Accounts had to be settled.

“For you as much as for him.”

His mouth opened but all he could do was stare at her. Finally he laughed and said, “You’re scary.”

She jumped off the crate and patted his arm. “You have no idea. I think we’re finished. Taking me for ice cream now?” Over the months they’d been on this campaign, he’d learned so many things about Natasha: that she loved chocolate soft ice cream cones and musicals and tons of milk in her coffee or tea but no sugar. She had at least three different Instagram accounts that he knew of where she posted pictures of other people’s dogs (especially Lucky) and cute cats and stunning, moody shots of whatever city she was in. She liked baking when she was stressed, especially with fellow stress baker Pepper Potts when they were in the same city. She went with him to live theatre when they could, they especially loved the Shakespeare Theatre Company productions, but she’d never go to the ballet or symphony with him and wouldn’t explain why. In his wildest dreams Steve had never imagined being friends with Natasha Romanov, and now he couldn’t imagine not being friends with her.

“It’s tradition,” he said, and pulled her in for a hug. That was another thing he’d learned--she pretended to be adamantly opposed to hugs, but once he put his arms around her, she was never the first to let go.

Thanks to mission prep, Steve only had time to fire off a quick note to Bucky. His letters read hollow to him most of the time, and he thought Bucky must be able to see the self-doubt in every word, but as long as Bucky wrote to him he’d write back.

Bucky--
Heading out tomorrow 0500 for the coordinates I gave you. You need anything, use this secured phone--might be better to use this one from now on for operational security, in fact. I left you a message on the other phone that there’s space on the plane if you need it. But I understand if you don’t want to.

Also, bigger news: I’ve found a brownstone in Brooklyn and will be moving up there after this op. You’ll laugh, I know, but I ended up rolling in dough once I got declared not-MIA. Turns out neither of us were ever listed KIA thanks to Howard, Peggy, Col. Phillips, and a cadre of other government people who resisted every effort to take us off the books over the decades we were gone. We have a lot of back pay.

So I’ll be a property owner and it’s all very surreal, but I’m kind of looking forward to it, too. Keeping my feet on the ground, making someplace a home. I never imagined that, not in my wildest dreams.

But it won’t be home without you. The door will always be open, whenever you want it. We can put the couch cushions on the floor, like when we were kids. I hope that brings a smile to your face.

I don’t believe you’re broken, Buck. I know you’re not. If you can insist I’m good, I can insist you’re good, too. Pistols at dawn if you say otherwise.

Love you,
Steve

Bucky hadn’t responded to his text message about the plane, but he did leave Steve a letter to read on the way to Denver. He must have written it before Steve wrote his, because he was aiming for a head start on setting up an overwatch. He’d been doing that all this time without any help from Steve; now that he had help and plenty of time to get set up, Steve imagined things would be well in hand when they arrived.

Bucky’d been an exceptional sergeant, despite the qualms that riddled his letters from the front. Steve had wanted to model the squad a bit on Popski’s Private Army--reduce rank significance, quarter and mess them all together, no drills or saluting--but it had been Bucky who advised maintaining the status quo, reminding Steve that they didn’t exactly have clear support from the brass as it was to run around Europe with hardly anyone to answer to, and they could just do as they pleased when they were out of regular army oversight. He’d never been anything less than encouraging about Steve’s strategic capabilities--he’d seen the military history and tactical books Steve devoured before the U.S. even entered the war--but he was just as capable of leading operations on his own, and frequently did at Col. Phillips’s request. If things hadn’t ended the way they did--if things hadn’t ended, Steve was planning to pressure the colonel for a battlefield commission for Bucky.

Whatever else they’d done to Bucky in the Winter Soldier program, they hadn’t needed to implant tactical capabilities. That was one hundred percent James Barnes, and he was tremendously comforted that Bucky still had his back.

Bad night last night, Stevie. Been thinking a lot about you reading those journals. About what I remember from the war, and what you’d have seen in those pages. They remade you into something bright and strong and true, those scientists of yours, and the ones who had me remade me into its opposite. And you know, it’s a lot easier to drag someone down into the darkness than it is to bring them up from it into light. Maybe I was the perfect candidate for that.

I wonder, too, if I might have survived the first experiments if you hadn’t found me. If I would have already been on the way down to the darkness. There was something wrong with me, I knew it, but I couldn’t tell you--I was so afraid of losing you. I’m still afraid.

I’ve been reading Rilke again (as if you hadn’t noticed by my mention of the Sonnets to Orpheus before), and I’m just as astonished now as I was then by his ability to find beauty in the most mundane of things, like fountains and hydrangeas and windows, for Christ’s sake. But I started thinking that that’s what separates me from the world, right now, what I’m trying to get back to--what makes you human, I guess. What might make me human again. To see the world not as some kind of punishment that I have to live through, but something I want to be part of. That’s what happened to you when you woke up, wasn’t it?

Tell me what you love. Tell me what you’ve found that makes this worth stepping through, worth the journey to be human again. I’m fumbling, I’m losing the thread and I’m terrified I can’t do this after all.

When he looked up from reading the letter, Sam was watching him, silent, gave him a “you good?” head jerk in their familiar shorthand. Steve nodded, the lump in his throat choking him, and Sam closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall of the jet.

The rest of the trip he napped through waking dreams of Bucky falling from the train, of his metal fist driving over and over again into Steve’s face, the agonizing recognition in Bucky’s eyes when Steve’s words had cut through his damaged self. They fused together in his mind, the scream of the fall and the fist coming for his face, until he couldn’t sleep anymore.

There was no sign of Bucky when they got to the outpost at the far edge of the Pike National Forest, deep in the mountains and away from any population center. That was unusual for the U.S.-based Hydra installations, which were often smack dab in the middle of an office park, for instance, or small cells like that horrific bank vault where they’d kept Bucky. In Europe, this was exactly the sort of place they’d hide, but blending in had been their primary strategy in the States since they’d infiltrated SHIELD. Anomalies left Steve unsettled, and the rest of the team seemed uneasy too. It didn’t help that he had a strong sense of déjà vu.

That eerie quiet, however, didn’t mean it was unoccupied--right from the start Steve saw that they were in for a bigger fight than usual. The sheer size of the place had warranted extra precautions; he had never been so glad to have all hands on deck, with Bruce waiting in the wings in case shit got real bad. Like the Atlanta base, this one hid a seemingly endless number of levels that, once they’d cleared most of the upper floors and the fighting had died down to a whimper, Steve and the others had split up to investigate.

There was no room like he’d found before, no mind-wipe chairs or cells, but the level he was on looked to his untrained eye exactly like--like surgical rooms, he thought, operating theatres, and it made his gorge rise. They were clean, spotless in fact, but it spooked him thoroughly. The air felt sterile and it was uncannily silent--outside of the muffled chatter on the comms as the team continued to work the rest of the complex--not even a hum of air-conditioning or computers. If they hadn’t had such a fierce battle getting in here, he’d have thought that someone knew they were coming and scrammed days ago.

When he hit the end of the corridor, he turned a corner into a large room and there was Bucky, that huge Barrett rifle he favored in his metal hand. Steve couldn’t stop himself from grinning--Bucky was poking around, looking for all the world as if he was shopping, picking stuff up and putting it down. He turned to Steve and smiled.

“Hey,” Steve said, stepping toward him. “Been waiting long?”

“I’m always waiting on your slow ass. You stop for takeout on the way or something? Run some errands? Get your hair done?” There was such affection warming Bucky’s voice that Steve’s heart did a little pirouette inside his chest; he wasn’t fronting this time, just genuinely happy to see him. “Sorry I went ahead of you guys, I didn’t feel like waiting. My blood’s up, all this remembering lately. I’m rarin’ to go.” He flexed his metal fingers for emphasis.

“Hey, I’m happy to have you clear the stage for us. Not that there wasn’t enough to keep us busy.” As if in punctuation there was the muffled sound of a large explosion a few floors above them. Steve laughed.

Bucky came toward him and Steve tried, he really tried to stay cool, but the room tilted, his heart rate shot up. “Our letters crossed,” Steve said, mouth dry. “I read your last one on the plane.” He sighed. “You’re not broken. Not any more than I am.” Bucky was so close he could see the pulsing line of his heartbeat along this throat. Steve hooked his shield onto his back.

“We might have words about that. But I’ll save ’em for later.” He reached for Steve’s hand, wrapping his fingers around Steve’s. “Also sorry I didn’t respond to your message. I was already on the way. Kinda wanted to get here and scope everything out, and I don’t think I’m ready for that. It was nice of you to offer though.”

With a smile, Steve said, “No worries. I figured I’d be seeing you one way or another, or at least I hoped. This place is weird, isn’t it? It’s not like the others we’ve hit. It’s...creepy.”

“This was--it isn’t familiar to me. But they didn’t much want me in the States if they could help it, before Insight. It’s been giving me the heebie-jeebies since I got here.” Steve had seen the notes in the file, cold clinical detail about the Asset’s disappearance in New York, how they should avoid deploying him within the U.S. in future. And how simple it would have been to dispose of him after Insight had given them complete control and the Winter Soldier was no longer required. The heat of rage licked up along his neck to his face, and Bucky tilted his head, narrowed his eyes.

“What is it?”

“I just--God, Buck, I get so fucking angry when I--”

“Don’t. Just don’t think about it. You’ll lose focus.”

“I know.”

“You wanna head back up and help your pals?”

“Rather stay here a minute with you.” Something flickered across Bucky’s face. Steve said, “Or we could go, if that’s what you want. If this is too--”

“No, this is good, I’m--unless you--”

“I don’t.”

“Sorry I keep putting you in this position, keeping you away from your friends. Making you wait for me to get my shit together.” But Bucky stepped even closer to him, pulled Steve’s hand to his chest.

Steve smiled. “I’m gonna wait for a long, long time. However long it takes. I love you.”

“You’ve said.”

“A time or two.” The blood crashed in his ears, heartbeat hammering in his throat, and he took his helmet off. “Could I--”

Bucky bit his lower lip, then nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

Steve put his arms around Bucky, pulling him close, burying his face against his neck and into his hair. He smelled like cheap hotel shampoo and soap, and it was the most exotic perfume Steve had ever smelled. Underneath that Steve caught Bucky’s scent, it hit him like a freight train, so familiar and vital and missed. His stubble scratched the side of Steve’s neck, the fingers of his metal hand were painfully hard as he clutched Steve’s hip fiercely and he was dizzy with it all, the room tilting further, whirling around him as though they were on a carnival ride.

As changed as their bodies were they still fit together, cupped to one another the way it always had been, and Steve drank him in like water to a parched throat. He expected Bucky to pull back but he held fast, a tremble in his arms and legs the only proof of his state of mind. Then he drew his head back and offered his lips to Steve, the benediction Steve had been seeking since he came back to life.

Steve pressed his mouth to Bucky’s, opening to him, joy and fear at war inside--if this provoked Bucky into fleeing Steve would never get him back. But in the circle of his arms Bucky seemed to surge to life, unfolding what he’d kept so close after decades of trying not to disturb the air around him, of not being present. Releasing himself to the world, to Steve. Steve licked and bit at his soft sweet lips, tasted them, laughing as Bucky smiled indulgently against his mouth. “Steve,” Bucky said, a shiver in his voice. Steve held his hands to Bucky’s face, thumbs rubbing back and forth along the blade of Bucky’s jaw as he kissed him.

Eventually Bucky pulled his mouth away, eyes fluttering open to gaze at Steve like he saw him for the first time. Steve grew dimly aware of a tinny sound coming from somewhere around his waist. Oh shit. Sam was shouting into comms, frantic and angry; Steve had taken his earbud out without realizing it and stuffed it in his utility belt when he’d seen Bucky. “Cap! Cap! Report! Where are you?” He put it back in and said, “I’m okay, Sam. Just took a little detour.” Sam swore a blue streak at him, furious at Steve for breaking protocol, while Steve grimaced at Bucky. “Stay where you are, we’re coming to you,” Sam said.

“Back to work, loverboy,” Bucky said and pressed his face to Steve’s cheek, his mouth open in a grin. “I found some hidden rooms around the place, might be panic rooms. Need to check them out before we can call this cleared.”

“Yeah.” He shook his head and came slowly back to himself, to the job at hand. He pressed his fingers to his ear. “Sam, Buck’s here with me, everything’s fine,” he reported as he put his helmet back on. Bucky had--had held him, kissed him. Everything was more than fine. But they had work to do. “Show me where you found ’em.” Then he remembered. “Oh! Oh. Since our letters crossed, I wanted you to know, I bought a place in Brooklyn. I’ll be moving up there after we get home.”

That was pride that swept across Bucky’s face, kindling a hope that he might just be willing to come with Steve. “Good for you, Stevie,” he said. “Good for you.”

Bucky shouldered his rifle again and moved toward the corridor, the familiar stalking pace that signaled hunting mode was turned on. Steve had always marveled at that, the sure-footed, slow lope of Bucky walking point, his keen eyes never stopping in their search for quarry. A night-prowling animal’s walk, a panther’s walk, and Steve shivered a little at the memory of the last time he’d seen Bucky do that before the fall, before he’d been turned into the Winter Soldier. It was terrifying and beautiful.

Out of the corner of his eye, Steve spotted a blinking red light at the base of a wall panel. “Hold up,” he said, and Bucky turned toward him. The wall panel slid to the right, the blinking light rolled forward, a small metal sphere about the size of a golf ball with lines and runnels that reminded him of Bucky’s metal arm. Heading straight for Bucky. Steve had focused so much on the tiny red lights flickering across its surface that he only belatedly realized it was some type of grenade, but Bucky clearly knew exactly what it was. He charged for it, swinging his rifle out, just as Steve hurled himself in Bucky’s direction, shoving Bucky back and swiping down with the shield so he could scoop it toward the back of the room. He was too late, the grenade went off just as he brought his shield forward.

The impact was soundless, or at least Steve heard no sound, all he felt was hot, intense pressure along his left side, the shield too badly angled to absorb much of the impact. Shrapnel and debris from the room--bits of tables, the sheets, the flooring, monitors--flew like confetti all around him as he was blown backwards and he hit something sharp, folding over like a piece of paper. At least he was between Bucky and the grenade, he thought as he crashed to the floor. When Steve opened his eyes again he was on his back, Bucky’s face looming above him, charred and gashed and his hair swinging in front of his eyes. Bucky’s beautiful mouth was moving, soundless, all Steve could hear was some kind of distant buzzing, his head full of yellowjackets. He thought he was on fire, he was certain he was on fire, so he tried to beat at the flames with his hands but the left one wouldn’t even move and the right one was hanging down, palm facing the opposite direction from where it should be and blood pulsing from the wrist. He tried to say Bucky’s name through a mouth sooty and coppery with ash and blood.

Slowly sound worked its way past the buzz, Bucky’s words filtering through the hollow echo of a tube--Bucky had his comms and was shouting “Man down! Cap’s hit.” There was something else Steve couldn’t catch, except he didn't care, he just wanted to reach out and pet Bucky’s hair and tell him it was okay, don’t get so upset. Bucky looked not unlike he had on the helicarrier--horrified, barely in control, his mouth open and sucking in air with panting breaths, staring at Steve with too much white in his eyes.

There was no air left in Steve’s lungs, his chest refused to work, but he eked out an “it’s okay, Buck, it’s okay.” Liquid bubbled along his lips, his words sounding wet. Bucky placed pressure on Steve’s chest--fuck but it hurt--he must have a serious wound, and Bucky alternated between biting his lip and muttering, “Don’t you die on me. Don’t you fucking dare die on me now, Rogers, goddammit to fucking hell.”

Sam came into view behind Bucky, followed by a weird clanking sound, oh right, Tony and Rhodey were here. That was okay, that meant they could fly him out of here and they wouldn’t have to drive to the jet or wait for a helo out in the middle of Bumfuck, Colorado, so he tried to smile at them but he wasn’t entirely sure his mouth worked. Steve still felt like he was on fire, but the fact that no one was trying to smother flames meant he must be mistaken--and he worried that the uniform would be melted into his skin. He caught a few words of Bucky’s report to Sam as Sam bent to work on him, grenade and compound fractures and chest--shit, he probably had thoracic trauma and that was never good even when you were a supersoldier. “You’ve got to get him to a hospital, please,” Bucky said, Steve heard that very clearly. That sounded so familiar, but when had Bucky ever begged anyone for anything? Oh yeah, Steve remembered now, please and stop and it burns, his thousand-yard stare and the sob torn from his throat as he trembled in Steve’s arms. Poor Bucky.

Time seemed to stretch out on a long, fiery line as he lay there listening to their frantic discussion, but then Bucky nodded at something Sam said. It was nice, the two of them on either side of Steve, communicating, his best buddies. Bucky picked Steve up in his arms and began rushing him out of the room. Steve said, hoarse and wet, “Hey, this time I saved you,” but Bucky only glared at him as he ran. He wouldn’t want to be the person who’d thrown the grenade once the rest of the team got hold of them; he laughed--at least in his head--at the thought of pissed off Avengers together just like when they’d got hold of Loki. All at once Tony’s faceplate filled his vision and then Steve was soaring through the cloudless blue Rocky Mountain sky before passing out completely.

There was no music this time when Steve woke up, but Sam was sitting by his bed as before, only on his right this time. On his left Natasha was curled into a chair with her head in the crook of her arm, asleep. Sam stared at him, thunderous, eyes as dark as Steve had ever seen them.

Everything hurt, even his eyelashes, and he still felt like he was on fire--that meant burns, oh joy--but he checked the bed and saw only a lot of tubes and wires and monitors. Right arm fully casted to the shoulder, left arm swathed entirely in gauze. It was too hilarious--Bucky’d blown him off the freeway with a grenade right into a fucking bus and he’d jumped back into battle; the urge to laugh was overwhelming but then he remembered his hand just hanging there and Bucky’s frantic shouts. His stomach roiled, he was desperately thirsty, and his face felt like he’d been splashed with acid. Steve tried to sit up in the bed but that, apparently, wasn’t happening. “Bucky,” he tried to say out of a mouth that wasn’t cooperating.

Sam said quietly, to avoid waking Natasha, “He stayed for as long as he could, he’s okay, though.” That was enough. Steve closed his eyes and when he opened them again, Sam was still scowling so he couldn’t have been out that long. Nat was gone, however, and when he focused he realized he was in an entirely different room, probably no longer intensive care, and oh, Sam’s clothes were different too.

“I cannot keep doing this with your sorry, stupid ass,” Sam said between gritted teeth. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” How many times had Bucky asked him the same question? He was such a bad friend, look how much he always put them through. This had to be horrible for Sam, he’d be seeing Terry on a morgue table again and watching Riley vanish from the sky right next to him. There was something wet on Steve’s face and he tried to wipe it away; Sam was abruptly out of the chair and sitting at the edge of the bed, muttering “Aw, hell,” as he yanked tissues out of the box and pressed them gently to Steve’s eyes.

“I’m sorry, Sam, I’m sorry,” Steve said and his jaw seemed to be working better this time. “I’m just--I’m not a good person. I’m not what everyone thinks I am. I keep expecting everyone to--”

“Shut up, Steve,” Sam said. “Just--shut up. You are a ridiculous human being.” There was no fondness in it at all. Sam let him cry until he was done, and then wiped off his face and stared at him. “What in hell makes you think you’re not a good person?” He held his hands out, palms up.

“All I do is take from people, or let people down, or get them--”

“Oh my god, if you say get them killed I will end you myself. Or let Barnes do it for me, because you know he will once I tell him what you said.” He heaved a beleaguered sigh. “I’m just pissed at the chances you keep taking. Barnes told me you jumped on a grenade once before. You’re--it’s hard to care about you sometimes, the things you do. You forget that there are people who love you and don’t want to lose you.”

Steve motioned to the little pink pitcher of water on the table and Sam poured him some, helped him get the bendy straw in his mouth. “I just wanted to save him this time,” Steve said softly, and the tears came all over again.

“Well, see, you did,” Sam said, and dabbed at his eyes once more. “You’re still human, Steve, you still stumble just like the rest of us. But--you think you inspire someone like Barnes to keep going in the face of everything he’s endured because you’re a shitty guy? You think the rest of us run around risking our lives to take down your weird Nazi nemeses because we lack for better things to do with our time? I kinda like my life, I like my work and where I live and I’ve given a lot of it up because I believe in you. I care about you because you actually in fact are a good guy. So shut the hell up.”

Steve heard his mother’s voice, the tenderness with which she’d said “to have a friend, you must be a friend.” He missed her so much right now he could choke. He focused on the here and now and asked weakly, “Got a sitrep?”

“Well, you look like shit. That’s the first page.” Sam scratched his chin, then went down the somewhat terrifying list of Steve’s injuries. He’d never been so grateful for blissful unconsciousness and his amazing friends. As soon as he was able to move--which wasn’t going to be anytime soon, Sam warned--they would take him back to Bethesda, but for now Sam, Natasha, and Clint were staying with him in Denver and minding him in shifts. There had apparently been plenty of intel still left to sort through that the others had taken back to New York once they’d been assured Steve wasn’t going to die on them. “That place was creepy. Like they gave up the plan to try to make more of you two and just started building--ugh, it was Borg creepy, like Island of Dr. Moreau creepy. We blew it to kingdom come.”

“And Bucky?” Steve asked once more.

“I was surprised he lasted as long as he did. He was...he was excellent, Steve, he really was. Switched into soldier mode instantly, but not the scary soldier, just absolutely competent and take-charge. It wasn’t till it was all over and you were out of surgery that he started to unravel, and I think that was mostly because there were so many people around. The whole team met him, by the way. Didn’t say much to us that wasn’t about you, but he was good, especially with Banner.”

Of course he’d been amazing, Steve knew that side of him by heart, had benefited from it plenty. Not that any of the squad were prone to losing their heads, but Bucky had always been at his best when things were worst, seemed to find some calm center when shit was blowing up around them. It had all been a mask, one he’d worn because Steve needed him to, hiding the parts of him that were falling to pieces inside.

Should he tell Sam that Bucky kissed him? It was a weird thing to talk about with other people, but, yeah, he told Sam everything, so--“He kissed me. He let me hug him and then he kissed me.”

Sam’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, the plot thickens. So while we were getting our asses kicked, you were macking on your boyfriend.”

“The fighting was over, I thought?”

“Once we thought we’d cleared the levels and were on our way down to you because you hadn’t reported in, they started coming out of the freaking woodwork. Literally.” Panic rooms, Bucky had said. That wall panel sliding open. “Stark got pinned down in what he called Satan’s R&D, and then next thing we knew...I was trying to warn you but you weren’t responding and then Barnes said you were down.” The shame of it warmed his skin. Like when he’d first seen Bucky again, risen from the dead--if Natasha hadn’t fired that grenade Bucky would have taken Steve down with a headshot and she and Sam would have been killed. He’d been so stunned by Bucky’s unmasking, so paralyzed with shock that he’d failed his most basic duty, scarcely aware of Rumlow shouting at him and the helo circling above. What would have happened if Maria hadn’t picked up the ball he’d dropped so spectacularly? Steve was irrational when it came to Bucky, he’d always been that way and it led him to jump out of planes into enemy territory and go after grenades he should run from. Sam shook his head. “Now all this suicidal heroism makes sense.”

“Fuck you,” Steve said, smiling, and it hurt his face but it also felt like he and Sam were okay now. It felt like forgiveness.

“It’s lucky for you that you’ve got such a good day job as Captain fucking America, because you’re kind of an asshole, you know.” Sam fished in his jacket pocket and brought out an envelope. “He left this for you.”

“Yeah. Cap is definitely not an asshole but Steve Rogers sure can be.” The exhaustion had been creeping up on him, so he put Bucky’s note on his chest and rested his hand over it. “I’ll read it later,” he said and Sam nodded. “Now go get some rest. You look like shit.”

Sam wouldn’t leave until Nat arrived to take over, so Steve slept for a while with Sam on watch. The burns were especially painful and he had trouble getting comfortable without the copious quantity of painkillers the doctors had cocktailed up to manage him--thanks to his previous hospital stay, where they’d kept good records of what actually worked on a supersoldier. The next time he woke, Nat helped him get a little solid food in his belly, sat talking with him until Steve asked for some time alone--she stared at him for a while, as if she didn’t trust him to stay in bed, before telling him she could do with some caffeine and sugar and wandered off to the family lounge.

Steve--
I tried to stay as long as I could, but I guess I’m not as strong as I make myself out to be. I met your pals and they seem like decent people, especially Sam. How do I ever make it up, what I did to him and to Romanov? I wish I knew.

I hate to abandon you, even though I know you’re in good hands. I can’t believe you did such a damn fool thing. You make it so hard to love you sometimes, these harebrained things you do. I could have gotten to that grenade faster than you and spared us both. You only had to put your shield up and crouch down, something you’ve done hundreds of times before. All because you thought you had to save me by getting your stupid ass killed. I’d rather take anything Hydra could throw at me than see you like that again.

I hope you don’t regret what happened yesterday, before you were an idiot and blew yourself up. If you wonder that I might, I can tell you that I never could. I will bear you through all my blood. Get better.

Yours,
Bucky

“Someone left you a surprise,” Natasha said as she and Sam walked with Steve slowly up the stairs to his apartment. Most of his mobility had returned, but he still moved as if through water, way too slow for his tastes. Steve was eternally grateful that Tony hadn’t been able to stick around for any of this and forced Steve to listen while he and Nat traded tired jokes about Steve’s age catching up to him. Sam opened the door and said, “Voila.”

Inside, almost all his stuff was packed into boxes and black plastic bags, each carefully marked with very specific labels like BOOKS: HISTORY A-F or RECORD ALBUMS: PRE-WAR or DISHES: DRINKING GLASSES/MUGS, all in Bucky’s precise capitals. Much of his furniture appeared to be gone, leaving only the TV and the sofa and one small table. Steve huffed out a laugh and shook his head.

“This whole time I’ve been invalided he’s been packing me up?”

“I think he enjoyed having something normal to do,” Nat said and guided him to the sofa. “I saw him once and he seemed way less agitated.” There was a plate, a glass, a mug, and a bowl plus silverware on the counter, and he could see that in the bedroom there were two small piles of clothing, including one pair of boots and one pair of sneakers. Bucky had left him exactly as much as he needed for the next couple days before he left for New York. This was how Bucky’s brain worked these days, and Steve found it so endearing his heart hurt. Bucky was so apprehensive that Steve wouldn’t love the new him, but this was just as much a part of him--a really adorable part--as the PTSD and the metal arm.

They’d had to keep Steve in the hospital for only a few more days once he’d returned to DC. He’d been itchy to get going despite Sam’s protests that he needed care for longer, but he’d promised to keep physical therapy appointments like a good boy and home care was arranged.

The first night at Walter Reed, alone without Sam or Natasha or Clint by his bed, he’d awakened to a shadow in the corner of the room, heart thundering in his chest, until Bucky slid out of the darkness. “Hey. Didn’t mean to scare you,” he’d said, pointing at the spiking monitor readouts, and Steve breathed in and out to get his heart rate back down.

“I was just kinda foggy. Startle easily these days, I guess,” Steve had said, reaching out toward Bucky to reassure him. “I’m so glad you felt like you could come here. Hospitals can’t be easy for you.”

“Can’t trust you to behave yourself.” He didn’t seem exactly calm, Steve thought, not like he’d been when they were holding each other, but he wasn’t vibrating, either. “Sam went home and arranged with the staff to let me stay.”

There was a soft whirring noise coming from Bucky’s general direction. “Is something wrong with your arm? I’ve never noticed the sound before.” Bucky pulled a chair up next to the bed and sat, leaning down by his hip. Steve had been exhausted from the traveling, but he fiercely wanted to keep his eyes open so he could drink in the sight of Bucky until he either got creeped out or exasperated with Steve’s besotted stares and left.

“Been weird since the explosion. Sometimes it overheats a little when I get--”

He didn’t finish, and Steve smiled. Oh, he was embarrassed. “Stimulated?”

“Shut up, jackass.”

“Make me.”

Bucky shook his head, but there was a hint of a smile. “Guess you finally saved me, huh?”

“Better late than never?”

Bucky snorted. “Go back to sleep. You need your rest.” He’d stroked Steve’s forehead with his thumb, just like he did when they were young and Steve was bottomed out with some illness or other.

“That’s nice, Buck.” His own voice sounded dreamy and soft, his eyelids drooped, heavy under Bucky’s caring touch.

“I know. Now go back to sleep.” A low hum in his throat, just a soft affectionate noise, accompanied the soothing motions of his hands, and then he said quietly:

“I’d like to sing someone to sleep,
sit beside someone and be there
I’d like to rock you and sing softly
and go with you to and from sleep.”

It was one of the poems Steve remembered best, recalled Bucky reading it to him the year he’d had pleurisy that transitioned to pneumonia, after his ma had died and Steve had often thought about just giving up and letting an illness take him, so tired of fighting. Bucky’d been frantic much of the time, paying for a doctor twice to come and tell them there was nothing much to do besides keep Steve doped up on potent medicine to quell the coughing and stay in bed. Most of the poems Bucky had read to him were now lost to the blur of time, but this--this he did remember with stunning clarity: those words in Bucky’s soft-scratchy voice, the gleam in Bucky’s blue eyes as he looked up from the pages.

“I’d like to be the one in the house
who knew: the night was cold.
And I’d like to hear every little stirring
in you, in the world.”

Steve said, because he knew the last lines but not the ones in the middle and he needed Bucky to know he remembered, “I have laid my eyes upon you wide; and they hold you—gently?" —Bucky nodded— "gently and they let you go, when a thing moves in the dark.” Bucky smiled at him, murmured “yeah,” and kissed his temple. Steve closed his eyes, just for a little while because he wasn’t going to sleep with Bucky nearby, but when he opened them again it was daylight and Sam was sitting next to him and Bucky was gone. If Bucky had come back the second night of his hospital stay, Steve didn’t know, but he assumed that he had.

Steve liked this, though--Bucky occupying himself with the packing, sifting through Steve’s things and knowing what was worth keeping. Bucky would be back, he would come home to him, all the things they had lost now found here with each other.

Sam and Natasha bookended him on the sofa. “I know you’re sick of being in bed, but I think you should rest, at least a nap or something. We can hang around, download a movie to watch later on if you’re up for it,” Natasha said. “We’ll get Thai.” Steve had resented being fussed over when he was young, the implication that he couldn’t take care of himself burning under his skin, but now it was--sweet and comforting, maybe. Like having a family.

“Okay.” Steve hobbled into the bedroom and closed the door, took off his shoes and t-shirt and crawled beneath the covers. There was a weird crackling noise under his pillow; he looked underneath it and found a piece of paper.

Steve--
Got your letter that crossed with mine. All right, we’ll declare a truce--we can call each other good, we can insist the other is whole, and live a pleasant little fiction for each other, all right? Wouldn’t be the first time.

I’ve taken the liberty of packing your stuff up. Sam texted me your moving plans, and although they’ve been set back a bit by you insisting on blowing yourself up like the numskull that you are, you can stick to your schedule if you get a little help. You were always so disorganized, so messy and distracted, that I don’t trust you to pack yourself up anyway.

I always loved that about you, though. The times I’d find you with paint splotched in your hair, or charcoal fingerprints on your face, or gun oil staining your uniform shirt. Reading your field reports was a nightmare, with words written in the margins or between lines and the arrows to new sentences you’d scribbled elsewhere on the page. But I always thought it was just the price of a creative mind, of a great mind.

This place never seemed like much of a home--the first time I came in here, it didn’t feel like you really lived here. Just occupying space, I suppose, because you were so lonely. I understand that.

You might notice the journals and the letters are missing, I took them. Don’t know if I can read them, don’t know if I have the strength, but they are with me for safekeeping and we’ll see how it goes. Definitely don’t want to read the letter you wrote to the folks. I took the pocketknife and the Little Book, but left you the comic. When you get a chance, text me your new address. How strange to think of having one place to stay. How strange to think of you making us a home again after all this time. We were the missing for so long.

Build me a castle, a fortress, a citadel. With high walls of stone and sturdy mortar. Make it a place where I can lay my head down and sleep, finally. Safe inside, safe with you. Wherever you are is home to me now.

Love always,
Bucky

Steve folded the letter up and put it back under his pillow. In a few days he’d be home, eventually with Bucky when he could handle it. No longer the missing.

Steve threw his keys on the table inside the foyer and sorted through his mail to see if there was anything that required attention. Tony had balked at Steve’s demand for good old-fashioned keys, but he’d relented when Steve let him put JARVIS into the elaborate security system he’d built for the house before he arrived. It had been strange negotiating with an artificial intelligence about surveillance and security parameters, but he and JARVIS had come to an understanding of just how much Steve was willing to be monitored. He knew the DoD and the remnants of SHIELD still maintained minimal surveillance on him too, but at least with JARVIS around everyone could keep their distance, so it seemed a worthy compromise. And JARVIS would let him know when Bucky wanted to communicate by dead drop or in person, if and when Bucky reached that point.

The previous owners had done a great job of maintaining the classic qualities of the building, the things that sold Steve on the place, while modernizing it to just the right degree. Pepper had helped him pick out all the furnishings--transitional, she called it--so he’d feel like he was less of a relic from a past century but it was relatable enough that both he and Bucky would feel at home. To have Bucky slip inside this life, to have him feel safe--Steve wanted nothing more than to give him that fortress, that citadel. No matter how long it took for Bucky to come to it.

He pulled some Recharge from the fancy refrigerator and drank half the bottle; physical therapy was kicking his ass. When they first woke him up from the ice, he’d read with morbid curiosity the report detailing what happened to his body by being frozen and the difficulties they’d had defrosting him, hugely thankful he never experienced a single goddamn moment of it. He’d awakened and he’d been fine and he wished to fuck that was the case this time, wished he could have just lain there in a bed until his body completely healed, no participation necessary. As he leaned against the counter, JARVIS said, so softly he almost didn’t hear him, “Captain, the visitor you asked me to allow entry is here. He arrived late this afternoon and I believe he left you a communication.”

Steve’s heart plummeted to his feet like a crashing elevator car, he was weightless and hollow, air rushing out of his lungs. “Thanks, J,” Steve wheezed out, setting the bottle down with shaking hands. He scanned the room, saw a slip of paper on the table.

The note read simply “Come upstairs.”

Was he presentable? Should he change clothes? He was sweaty and disgusting and his hair was probably a mess, and he glanced in the mirror, smoothing his hair back, before laughing at his idiocy--as if Bucky would give a shit what his hair looked like, what he smelled like. Steve took the stairs two at a time, left knee burning at the strain.

In Steve’s bed Bucky lay on his stomach, his head pillowed on his forearm, face curtained by his dark hair. He’d cut it, not short like it had been before but definitely shorter. His shirt was off, the sheet and duvet down by his hips, exposing a little bit of the boxer briefs Steve had given him in that gym bag full of stuff so many weeks ago, and Steve smiled at the gesture. Bucky was fast asleep, really truly asleep, the gentle rise and fall of his back as he breathed proof of his trust. Build me a castle...where I can lay my head down and sleep. A sound escaped Steve’s mouth, somewhere between a sigh and a sob.

All the words they had said to each other in their letters tumbled through his mind like stones in a rushing river as he watched Bucky sleep: I want to feel your heart beat inside my chest, feel your breath inside my lungs.

Silvery light slanted across his pale skin, gleamed on the metal arm; Steve struggled not to stare at the tortured flesh of his shoulder, to focus instead on the dark hair that curled against the nape of his neck. To think about the fact that now he would know what it was like to press his fingertips to Bucky’s lips as they parted, to slide his hands through Bucky’s hair and pull him close with his grip, to know the soft swell of Bucky’s chest rising and falling with quiet breath underneath his cheek.

Stripping down to his underwear, Steve slid into the bed as Bucky stirred, turning over to face him, rubbing his cheek with his metal hand.

“I like this place,” Bucky said and smiled.

“I do too, now.” He didn’t know what to do with his hands, they were clumsy and awkward all of a sudden, as if they belonged to someone else. He didn’t want to spook Bucky by touching him if he wasn’t ready for it. Perhaps Bucky sensed that, because he kissed Steve, gentle and sleep-warm, and Steve pressed his fingers to Bucky’s mouth to trace its outline as he curled his other hand around the back of his neck, stroking his hair. “I wasn’t sure if you were here, you hadn’t written.” He kissed Bucky again, longer, deeper. “But I thought somehow I could feel your presence, at times.”

“Had some things to work out,” Bucky said. “But yeah, been keeping an eye on you.”

As Bucky shifted above him, Steve threaded his fingers through Bucky’s hair and pulled him down, kissing his mouth, his cheek, the spot behind his ear that tickled when Steve had kissed him there seventy years ago. “I’m glad,” Steve said, stroking his hand up and down Bucky’s back.

“I can’t stay. Not yet. For tonight I’m here, but I’ll be gone by morning.”

“You’re here now, that’s all that matters.” Sing someone to sleep, he thought, and smiled against Bucky’s mouth. “I told you I’ll wait.” Bucky slid his arms around Steve’s neck and moved his hips against him, his erection swelling against Steve’s own.

“I just want you to know that, ’cause I don’t want to hurt you. It’s--just for tonight, but I do want to stay here with you. I do.”

“It’s all right.” Steve pushed Bucky onto his back and rose up on his elbows, kissing his collarbone, his neck, his lips. They didn’t need any words of apology or explanation now, they had this and it transcended language, even Bucky’s beautiful poetry. They had this tonight, and Bucky wouldn’t always be gone by the time light hit the window.

But in the morning when sunlight stole across his face to wake him, Steve found Bucky still there, asleep, his hand resting on Steve’s chest and his face peaceful, safe within Steve’s arms.