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Steve was waiting for Bucky when he emerged from the bodega, paper bag in arm. His cheeks were red with cold and he was rubbing his hands for warmth. Immediately, Bucky fished out a warm, foil-wrapped package and tossed it to Steve. He didn’t wait to see Steve catch it—as he knew he would—before taking another out for himself.
“Thanks, Buck,” Steve said.
“Thank me after you try it.” A cloud of fragrant steam escaped the package as Bucky pulled back the wrap to reveal his egg-and-cheese-laden sandwich. He took a too-hot bite and groaned. “I can’t get enough of these.”
There were a half dozen more for the each of them in the paper bag. Their warmth seeped through the bag to Bucky. He took a moment to marvel at it. Simple pleasures. He was allowed those now.
“It was really good,” Steve said, finishing the last of his sandwich.
Bucky tossed him another and started walking. “Remember when I had that job down at the docks and every morning you’d wake up and make me one of these?”
Steve snorted. “You mean my egg and stone sandwiches?”
“I thought I was going to break my teeth on those!”
Bucky gazed down at the sandwich he was currently eating, at the bright egg yolk soaking into the pillowy bread. Bucky couldn’t say he missed Steve’s breakfast sandwiches, scrapped together from whatever they had left in the pantry, but life had been a lot simpler back then.
“I almost forgot about that.”
“Yeah, well, they’ll haunt me for many years to come.”
They ate on the move, hustling through the crowds trudging down the cold, slushy streets.
“You still haven’t told me where we’re going,” Steve said, after following Bucky for a block.
“They keep you too busy saving the world to see anything? How much have you gotten out?”
Steve shrugged. “Some.”
“Have you been back home?”
There was a quiet pause before Steve replied, “No. I didn’t think I’d recognize it.”
It was true, much of the city was nothing like it had been before—build over, carved out, painted over—but the bones were still there. Bucky knew how it felt. He flexed the arm’s fingers, watching the rippling of metal plates.
“Yeah, probably,” Bucky agreed.
Steve bumped his shoulder against Bucky’s. “I’ve been proven wrong before.”
“I guess we’ll have to find out, punk.” Bucky bumped Steve back.
He reached the curb, looked down the street one way, then the other, and crossed.
This was Cranberry Street. Bucky could see Assumption and Plymouth Church staring each other down just as they always had. The smell of curry wafting over from a nearby restaurant was new though.
They continued further south, drawing closer to their old neighborhood with every step. There—that shop was familiar. That was Longo's Pharmacy, only now it was going by Brooklyn Farmacy. That was how it went, for every street corner that was familiar, though just to the left of how Bucky remembered it, there were dozens more that were completely alien to him.
Several blocks more and Bucky began to get nervous. There was a reason he had asked Steve along. It was the same reason he didn’t look up their old address before heading out.
They turned the corner.
“It’s gone.”
Emotion was completely gone from Steve’s voice. Like he was just stating facts. Bucky slowly walked forward.
Their apartment was gone. The entire building. Which yeah, it was falling apart when they were living there. They had to jam things under all of their furniture to offset the slanted floors and remember to empty the buckets they used to catch the water dripping from the ceiling. They could always hear everything that the neighbors were up to, especially when it was something they didn’t want to hear and the windows could barely be opened in the summer, but always let in a draft in the winter. It had been a total wreck. There was no way it would still be standing after all this time.
In its place was a squat building that hardly looked new, it had to be at least a few decades old at this point.
Bucky stared at this, flexing the arm’s fingers in thought. He hadn’t actually decided what he wanted to do when he got here. He hadn’t even known what he’d been looking for really, besides some kind of assurance. Though in regard to what, he again, didn’t know.
The bottom floors of the building housed a pizza shop and a record store. The former was closed, but the latter was open.
Finally, Bucky said, “Let’s go inside.”
The inside was somewhat dim and dingy, with music playing over the speakers. Strange art decorated the walls, though most of the space was reserved for the tows of tables lined with records. There were boxes full of them, with every label imaginable.
To be honest, it was a lot.
Purely in self-defense, Bucky strode forward and started flipping through the vinyl. Steve joined him, choosing to look through a box next to his.
“I think I’ve heard of these guys.” Steve pulled out a record with “Nirvana” in gold letters across a black and blue background. It urged them to “come as you are” in all lowercase letters.
Bucky squinted at the little white things squiggling across the image. “Are those—?”
“What?” Steve glanced down at the record in confusion.
“Never mind. You should get it.” Bucky said, suppressing a laugh. He looked around the store and spotted some tables of older records in the back. “Let’s look over here.”
Taking a closer look, there was a whole table of records from back in the day—songs Bucky head at the dance halls and on the radio—along with a few from the decades after. He started humming a few of them as he flipped through a box of singles.
Steve looked over his shoulder as he pulled out a record jacket covered in blue dots except for a man seen almost in silhouette. It said “Fats Domino Blueberry Hill!” in bright pink letters.
Bucky cocked his head. “Fats Domino? Wasn’t this a Glenn Miller tune?”
“Could it be a cover?” Steve wondered.
“Hmmm.” Bucky tucked it under his arm and kept looking.
Bucky stopped when he had an armful of records, some selected by him, others by Steve, to bring to the register. Once there, he dug out his wallet and paid. They leave with a few hundred dollars worth of records—a mix of old and new.
“I can’t believe you actually paid that much for a few records,” Steve commented, coming out of the shop with Bucky. “You could have at least put mine back.”
Bucky shrugged. “Why not? We’re not exactly starving anymore.”
Steve sighed, probably on principle. “Where to now?”
Looking around their old neighborhood, Bucky saw some places he knew and some he didn’t. He said, “Let’s get home. I want to see if Fats Domino has anything on Glenn Miller and His Orchestra.”