Chapter Text
Autumn 2014
Outside, the afternoon air was crisp with the promise of winter.
They were back in Brooklyn. On the other side of the window glass, nothing was the same to Steve. Their old neighborhood was different, taller and louder in a way that scared away the feeling of home. Most days, it was hard to believe that he had been in the ice long enough for them to win the war; go to the moon; welcome a new century. But going back home grounded him, reminded him all over again of how much he had missed during all those years spent in that cold, lonely grave in the middle of nowhere.
“I have a hard time seeing him go through security with that arm,” Sam said from across the table. They were at a quiet pizza place on the same street he and Bucky had crossed every day on their way to school. Seventy years ago, this place had been a barber shop.
“He could’ve gone to Canada,” Steve replied, looking back at him. “Or Mexico.”
Sam nodded and raised his drink. “Could’ve,” he said flatly before taking a sip.
For two months they had pulled pointers from Natasha’s file. Problem was, the dossier was as old as it smelled. Many of the places mentioned were either echoing in their wait or overseas, far from their reach. It wasn’t money that stopped Steve from packing a bag and hopping on the next plane, but the expectations tied to his name. They had both paused their lives, but they couldn’t do that forever.
The ice cubes jiggled as Sam put down his glass, concern pulling on his face and voice alike. He leaned back, chair creaking as he crossed his arms over his chest, head cocking to the side. There was a pause and then he asked, “You okay with this?”
Steve nodded slowly as he took off his glasses, reaching down to the hem of his shirt to polish them. “Yeah,” he said.
“You know.” A veil of severity covered Sam’s face, putting the emotion–the sincerity in his voice. “I meant what I said earlier.”
Steve pursed his lips as he rubbed harder on a greasy stain on the glass. He thought about it, weighing the pros and the cons, estimating the risk of letting Sam fly solo and more importantly–was it worth it?
Even though they had reached the end of the dossier several times over, they still had nothing. They had walked into dead end after dead end, backtracked every location twice and now they were just grasping for straws, going back to places Steve thought Bucky might return to if he remembered who he was.
Steve put on his glasses again and looked up at Sam. “You sure?”
“Positive,” Sam said with a nod.
“Okay.” Whatever tension that lined Steve’s lips dissolved and he managed a small smile, head bobbing up and down. “It means a lot, but I need you to be careful though, if he’s anything like—”
“Dude,” Sam cut him off, shaking his head in disbelief, one corner of his lips slightly raised. “I know. I’ll be careful.”
Steve’s smile grew into a lopsided one. “Okay,” he said, gaze already wandering out the window again. “Good.”
Ever since the day on the bridge, Steve had been losing sleep. All the nights spent of twisting and turning in bed appeared on his face: the dark half-moons beneath his eyes, the three-day old stubble, the sunken-in cheeks. It was as if the world had paled into the cold 1944 that he had left behind in anger and pain. Back then, he had crushed more windpipes and broken more bones than any history book had dared to account for, and if the rest of the Howlies had thought it to be a poor, pitiful attempt to retrieve that part of him that never made it off that train, they had never breathed a word about it.
A lifetime later and that piece, forever gone but never forgotten, had found him having ricocheted through time and space. When that mask had come off and their eyes locked, sixty-odd years of momentum had collided with Steve’s chest. The sharp piece had penetrated skin, flesh and bone like a hot knife through butter, lodging itself between his heart and spine. The pressure had sent him curling inwards, all tense muscles and sharp breaths, and that had been enough to hollow him out, leaving a shell of the person he had been the moment before.
Gazing back, Steve had been convinced by the pain for a weak minute that Bucky had actually pulled the trigger. Because what else could the lump in his chest be, if not a big, nasty clot of blood?
“You ready to leave?”
“Huh? Oh—yeah.” Steve blinked back into reality, watching as Sam put down his phone and got up, reaching for his jacket hung on the back of the chair.
“With this traffic, it might take us an hour to get to JFK.”
“Yeah.” Steve took a deep breath as he looked around. The restaurant stood almost forlorn, the staff behind the counter gone. The pizza on the plate before him was cold and half-eaten. “Let’s go.”
After months of nothing, this was it. Steve was at the end of his rope and this was just something he had to do before hitting the play button again; before he could go back and pick up the shield. This was for himself, a way of reminding himself that he had done everything within his powers to find Bucky.
There was something in his gut that told him that Bucky couldn’t have gotten far, not with that shining thing on his arm, but the not knowing sickened Steve to his very core. By now, the inward curl of his shoulders had almost grown permanent. There was a chill in his body that couldn’t be stilled no matter how many layers of clothes he donned; no amount of sleep would wash away the dark bruising beneath his eyes.
This last trip was his way to convince himself that he wasn’t insane. That everything that had gone down with SHIELD, Project Insight, the Winter Soldier – that was what had happened, it was real. It wasn’t the accumulation of years of suppressed grief catching up on him.
This was just something he had to do. But unlike before, Steve didn’t have any expectations for where they were going – not like when they had approached every location drawn from Natasha’s file. He had been a fool and hoped for the impossible, only to leave with his knuckles white, ready to fight for someone who wasn’t there.
Three hours later, when Steve rubbed shoulders with Sam who fussed over economy class, Steve told himself that this wasn’t the end of the line–he would find Bucky, just maybe not today or tomorrow or even next week.
A flight, a sleepless night and a six-hour bike ride later, and they were there. In the middle of nowhere, accompanied by nothing but the brisk autumn wind, the grey sky and the tall alps. It was just the two of them, breathing fresh air and drinking in a view that was postcard worthy.
“So this is the place?” Sam asked after they had killed the engines and climbed off their bikes. The track beneath their boots was overgrown, the wooden planks of the rail green and slippery after today’s downfall.
“Yeah,” Steve replied as he hung the helmet on the bike’s handle and approached the steep edge in a few long, measured steps. He ignored the way his stomach rolled. “This is the place.”
Sam shuffled closer to the edge, weight kept on the foot farthest from the edge as he slightly leaned forward before leaning back just as quick, shaking his head with a whistle. “That’s a long-ass fall.”
Steve nodded stiffly, throat cording from the sheer effort to not huff out a sob. Because that was what he felt like doing, crying until he was nothing but a puddle left on the ground.
Below them was a sea of red and black, the river running like a dark vein through the color.
“I always planned on coming back,” Steve confessed after the wind stopped howling; the hard lines on his face betraying the neutral tone of his voice. The tense jaw; the heavy frown. He looked at Sam, who looked at him. “I couldn’t stand the thought of him rotting here, in the middle of nowhere.”
Sam laid a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. He smiled a smile of sympathy, small and wary. “It might be in the middle of nowhere,” he agreed wistfully. “But it’s damn pretty.”
There was snow on the mountain tops poking through the grey above their heads. The last time he had been here, Steve hadn’t given the view any thought. It had been cold and miserable, the thick snow blurring everything into one giant entity. Had they come a month later and in the blossom of winter, everything would probably have looked like it did seventy years ago.
Muted by the agony of being back at the place where it all started, Steve gave another terse nod. He stepped back with a sigh, fingers carding back his hair before he picked up the helmet from the handlebar. He cleared his throat said, “We should hurry. See if we can get down there before it gets dark.”
“Alright.” Sam gave him a look and then turned back to the view. “Imagine if I had my wings though,” he said, spreading his arms like in that romantic movie Steve had seen on the flight there. “It would be a nice drop.”
“You’ll have to boot Stark’s ass,” Steve said with a small smile. “Have him change his priorities.”
“I should do that,” Sam agreed with a grin, stepping away from the edge and toward his bike, picking up the helmet. “What does that dude even do all day? Pick bellybutton lint?”
Steve snorted and shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him.”
They buckled up and continued down the abandoned tracks, pacing their speed and keeping an eye out for a way down the valley below. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, they found a place where the edge wasn’t a dead steep, but had a nice gradual slope down to the river below. They parked their bikes, left their helmets and descended down the slant, zigzagging their way down the hill, always keeping a hand on a tree.
By the time they were down by the river, both of them were a bit rosy on the cheeks. Judging by the distance as Steve looked up from where they came, they must have covered at least a few hundred meters of slippery terrain. The mud stains on their pants were enough evidence of any close calls.
“It’s this way,” Steve said and nodded upstream. Around them, the sound of rushing water sang with the yowl of the wind, the rustle of the dying leaves. The vegetation was thick, the ground beneath their boots wet and uneven. So they walked slowly, minding their steps and kept as close to the river as the nature willed.
“You know,” Sam began, his breath slightly labored. “I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Yeah?”
“You and Bucky, you must have been pretty close.”
Steve dodged a low-hanging branch, holding it in place so it wouldn’t swat Sam in the face as he passed. “Yeah—I mean, we grew up together,” Steve said easily. “It was a tough time to be a kid.”
“I can imagine,” Sam said, grabbing the branch and went on. “But what I mean is… How close were you?”
“I had Peggy,” Steve replied, shrugging as he continued, rounding a big block. “And Bucky had his dames.”
“Dames, huh?” Sam snorted and from the sound of it, he was grinning like a fool.
“Yeah… but Bucky and I we were—we were still pretty close.”
“You’re being very cryptic man, give me something solid.” Steve didn’t even have to glance over his shoulder to see Sam’s growing smile, he heard it; the light tone of his voice.
“We you know…” Steve felt his heart hammer up all the blood to his face. There was a part of him that recognized the need for honesty, because this was Sam asking and he deserved the truth after these last few crazy months of ghost hunting. But then there was the fear—irrelevant at best and silly at worst, out of time and out of place; just there, tempting him with the lie.
But this was Sam, he would understand.
“You what?”
“We were—” Steve made a small, helpless gesture to the greenery before him, tongue darting out to wet his dry lips. “— intimate .” He glanced back at Sam, who looked at him with a smug expression, eyebrows curiously raised; smile so, so wide like he had figured it out long ago.
“First off, I’m not judging you. Remember, this is the future,” Sam countered and Steve couldn’t help but to chuckle, a tiny bit of tension easing off his shoulders. “Second, so you were fuck buddies during the war? Now it’s starting to make a lot more sense as to why you so desperately want to find this metal armed maniac.”
Steve beamed, feeling the way the heat reached all the way up to the tips of his ears. “We didn’t get together during the war because it was lonely behind enemy lines, it started before that.”
“Really? When?”
Steve inhaled a big breath, attempting to suppress that smile that made his cheeks hurt, only to fail. “I was fourteen, he was fifteen and we got piss drunk one summer night,” he said, chuckling at the end. “We stole his dad’s whiskey and sat down on the roof of my apartment building because it was the only place in the entire city where the wind was still blowing.”
“So you needed some Dutch courage to do the deed?” Sam mused.
“Yeah—or no, not like that — I mean,” Steve fuddled, smile growing sheepish. “I just kissed him, and that was just… it.”
“That was it?” Sam asked, eyebrows probably battling his hairline judging from his voice. “No hands down each others pants, nothing like that?”
Steve snorted, feeling the heat come over his face once more. “Okay,” he confessed. “Maybe there was a little bit of that as well.” His smile calmed, settling into a tame curve. “But both us knew there wasn’t a chance in hell that we could grow old together though, so we didn’t really talk about what we were doing. I just told him that I liked him, and he said the same thing to me.”
“At least that was something, right?”
“Yeah.” Steve looked over and saw how Sam’s smile had weaned into an rueful line. “I was happy with what we had, and I think he was, too. You know, being together when we weren’t dating others—or more like… when Bucky dated others. I wasn’t exactly someone the girls chased after back in the days.”
“That must have been like hell,” Sam said, sounding almost sorry. “To see him with others.”
“I won’t lie,” Steve said, “I was pretty jealous. And looking back, I think I always envied Bucky. He had it all, you know?”
Four days later, and they were stateside again.
Steve wasn’t disappointed – he told himself that he wasn’t; that he was okay with finding nothing yet again. He had gone back, fulfilled a promise that had been left hanging for seventy years and that was fine. Returning to the place where it had all started had been like cleaning out an infected wound. It had hurt, but soon it would heal. Only to leave a nasty scar.
“That was it,” Sam said from the driver seat. He killed the engine and pulled the handbrake.
Steve sighed, nodding softly as he agreed, “That was it.”
Sam put a hand on his shoulder and gave it a good, comforting squeeze. “He’s gonna turn up, you know, sooner or later.”
“I hope so,” Steve said as he turned to Sam, looking him in the eye. He managed a small smile, only to watch Sam mirror it perfectly. “Thank you for coming along; for everything.”
“Anytime man, anytime.”
Wherever Bucky was, he was living up to his ghost story.
After SHIELD, there was the Avengers and the curious case of Loki’s missing staff. Steve packed a bag, left the DC apartment in a jungle of moving boxes and went back to his roots. He allowed himself to be collected into Stark’s tower of superheroes, because why not? To be among friends again did him good, to be around people who cared about why he hadn’t shaved for a few days or commented on why the hell he looked like death warmed over. Friends who distracted him in the best of ways: muffins for breakfast at noon after a long morning full of digging their way through intel; friends who liked to celebrate even the slightest of progress with movies, pizza and on the rare occasion, by going clubbing.
A month of that, Steve was getting better and in the meantime, Sam stayed true to his word; pulling on all kinds of strings, calling hospitals for John Does, checking police reports, reading the dossier from back to front, doing what they had done for two months straight. He texted daily, called every other day and on the weekends, he made the four-hour drive to New York and updated Steve in person.
In the end, Steve was certain that Tony took pity on Sam for chasing after a lost cause, which was probably why he worked his rapid-fire magic and offered free lodgings in exchange for some bragging rights.
Not even a week after Tony had started calling himself exotic bird collector, Stark had finally put the finishing touches on the new wings and together they presented them to Sam with an invitation to join the family.
“Do you want to head up to DC later today?” Sam asked one day after their morning run. “I have to pick up a few more boxes at my house, thought you’d like to do the same.”
“Sure,” Steve said, wiping sweat from his brow. “I can come along.”
It was Sunday and while superheroes technically didn’t have days off, they had days where there wasn’t particularly much to do. Days where there was enough time to deal with personal priorities for once.
They ate an early dinner in the car consisting of ridiculously expensive coffee and glazed donuts. They talked about anything but Bucky during the ride and instead Sam talked eagerly about everything Steve had missed out on, anything from sports to historic events to movies; about Stark and Natasha and how he had been longing to move back to New York. About how he was scared and excited all at the same time about everything and what it meant to be an Avenger. In the end, Steve clapped him on the shoulder and told him he would do fine, because he would.
“I’ve actually watched Game of Thrones,” Steve said as they climbed the stairs in his apartment building, continuing their chat started in the car.
“Really?”
“Yeah, the first season.”
“And did you like it?”
“Yeah,” Steve said, shrugging. “There’s just a lot of…”
“Boobs?” Sam suggested with an amused quirk of his brow.
Steve suppressed a smile as he pulled out his keys. “That, yeah. But I was going to say political play.”
“Politics and boobs sell,” Sam said, coming up behind him as Steve slid the key in place. He opened the door, held it open for Sam before heading in himself. The hallway was dark, narrowed by the moving boxes stacked high.
“You know, what you’re—”
Steve quickly raised his hand, shutting Sam up. A cold breeze travelled down the hallway, raising the hair on the back of Steve’s neck. From where they were standing on the doormat, they stared right into the shadows of the living room and right before them, the window was wide open; the night breeze toying with the pale curtain.
He looked at Sam, who gave him a terse nod and a look that said, I’m right behind you.
Steve moved first, taking a few quiet steps down the hallway, scouting the shadows ahead and as he neared the kitchen to his right, he leaned forward just enough to peek inside. There was water on the floor and—
— there was a moment where it felt as if the stars aligned, the planets convened and the skies opened. A moment where Steve let all the tension drain from his shoulders, because that was Bucky on his kitchen floor, sitting by the open freezer, looking back at him like a deer caught in the headlights. A little thicker than back in the days, hair long and matted, chin and cheek covered in a week worth of scruff, but still the same kid that had lived just down the street.
As Steve saw the surprise bloom on Bucky’s face, with the way his eyebrows sluggishly stretched toward his hairline, widening his eyes as his mouth fell open, Steve thought he saw recognition. The possibility of Bucky remembering everything – anything tugged on the knot in his chest, the bittersweet ache anchoring him in the moment.
Stunned into a long, aimless silence, Steve let out a breath he didn’t even know he was holding as he took a step forward, over the threshold and into the kitchen. The back of his eyes stung, the weight in his chest expanding. He only noticed Sam when a hand landed heavy on his shoulder, grounding him. But not even his touch was enough for Steve to look away.
“Buck,” Steve said, somehow managing a calm, even tone. “We’ve been looking for you.”
Bucky nodded, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down before his lips parted and— “I know,” he whispered.
He sat with his knees under him, his denim trousers dark with damp, the front of his torso exposed in the cold kitchen air by the unzipped hoodie. Even in the poor, stale lighting spilling from the freezer, Steve saw that the last two months had been equally cruel to Bucky. From where he sat, with his right side facing them and his left arm shoved in the freezer, he looked broken.
Two months ago, Steve had waged a war and as always, war taught you things. Knowledge transformed you, tinkered with the way you viewed the world, altered the way you moved – and change, change wasn’t always for the better. The old Steve, who had literally killed for HYDRA since being defrosted like a piece of Thanksgiving turkey, would have walked right up to Bucky. But getting shot in the gut made you wary and because of that, Steve stayed in the doorway as if rooted to the floor.
Before the bridge, before the helicarrier, Steve knew that Bucky would never hurt him. If it wasn’t for the Russians—Hydra pulled him apart and put him together wrong, Steve knew that would never have changed. When he looked at Bucky – Bucky who looked right back at him with a fever stricken gaze, forehead glistening as much as his eyes – Steve wanted to believe that this was the same man he had always leaned on for support; for love.
Back in the days, Winifred Barnes used to say that they would be joined by the hip until death did them apart. And funny enough, that was exactly what had happened. Fate dealing them a shitty hand, cleaving the whole into a half.
Between the two of them, Bucky had always been the first to do everything. The first of them to learn how to ride a bike, the first of them to break a bone, the first of them to kiss a girl. Bucky had always told him everything about anything and because of that, Steve always knew what to expect out of life. Things had always seemed a little more bearable and simple at the thought of Bucky doing something first. Because if Bucky could do it, why couldn’t Steve?
Up until a few months ago, Bucky had been the first of them to kick the bucket. In some sick, twisted way, Steve had thought of that, of how Bucky had been the first of them to die, as he crashed the Valkyrie into the Antarctic. Back then, the thought had almost been comforting, the idea of never making it to the age of twenty-seven didn’t seem so daunting knowing that Bucky had already blown out his last birthday candle.
“Are you hurt?” Steve asked. His heart thundered in his chest.
Bucky blinked once, eyebrows sinking to their normal longitude, resetting his face into something blank and unreadable.
“My… my arm,” Bucky began, sounding so small and weak and so tired . He looked like a horse rode hard and put away wet, sweat pouring through his pores and his lips blue in the pale freezer light. “It feels like it’s burning up.”
Steve sucked in a shaky breath and looked away, down at the floor and the way the water had made the joints swell. He felt awful for stalling, for not rushing to Bucky’s side, caution be damned. Because when Steve looked at Bucky, he saw the man whose worst fear had been that the army would get desperate enough to enlist Steve.
Steve saw his best friend, but he also saw someone who could seriously hurt him. The phantom pain lingering in his thigh, in his abdomen reminded him of that.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” Bucky whispered, pleading in a way that only twisted the knife in Steve’s chest.
Steve braced himself, glancing over his shoulder at Sam, who stood behind him like a shadow, silent; guarding.
“You sure about this?” asked Sam, quiet like a whisper.
“Yeah,” Steve said, his nod as frail as the breath he exhaled.
A moment passed and then he walked over, the sound of his footsteps seemed like the loudest thing in the world. He slowly sank down to his knees beside Bucky, allowing himself to be devoured by his orbit, to let the cold water on the floor soak into his jeans. The last time Steve had been this close, he had almost felt the molecules tremble around him. How Bucky had been drawn tight, much like a bowstring ready to launch an arrow.
“Do you remember me?”
Bucky nodded once, jaw set tight. “I remember.”
“Buck, I—”
“We stormed the beach of Normandy together,” Bucky interrupted quickly, his lower lip trembling. A few dark tresses fell before his face. “June 6th, 1944.”
Steve let out a shaky breath. His tongue felt big and dry in his mouth. “We– I— you, yeah.”
“I remember you being angry at me,” Bucky’s lips curled with the shadow of a smile, sluggish and small, but as he spoke it grew wide enough to show his teeth; enough to reach those gleaming blue eyes. Large enough until it wasn’t a shadow anymore. “The night before we were supposed to ship out.”
Steve saw that there was something crisp in the way Bucky moved, the way he talked. Up-close and through the front of the unzipped hoodie, Steve saw the bruising stretching from the myriad of scars were skin etched into metal; the black, scorched plates by his shoulder. No wonder there was no ice left in the freezer, only the bare racks and a whole lot of water ruining the parquet floor.
“You were angry because… I had been drinking so much that I could barely stand.”
“Yeah,” Steve breathed. His stomach dropped when the memory came galloping back, hitting him like a freight train. The smell of whiskey, the feel of warmth through fabric, the taste of tobacco—
“You called me stupid.”
“Because you were, getting hammered before a big day like that,” Steve said as he raised his hand to brush away a few dark curls from Bucky’s face. Fingers combing through the bird’s nest, fingernails scratching the warm scalp down toward his neck where his hand settled. Beneath his palm, Bucky was clammy and much like a cat, he arched into his touch, unraveling with a quiet whimper.
For a moment, the silence settled between them, their eyes locking. Steve breathed him in, ogling the matured lines of Bucky’s face. The smell of old sweat and dried blood and burnt electronics all tickled his nose as he sat this close to the man he had been ready to die for back in 1944. In a way, he had died for Bucky, leaving the life and love of that century the day he had crashed that plane.
Bucky breathed in and then out. “… I want to make things right.”
“You will,” Steve promised, thumb rubbing soothing circles on Bucky’s neck. “I’ll help you make everything right again, but I can’t do it here. Not with you having defrosted my entire freezer.”
Bucky took on a perplexed look, eyebrows crawling up as he looked back into the empty shelves of the freezer and then back at Steve. “Sorry,” he said, not sounding all too sure.
“Don’t be,” Steve said, smiling gently. “You can defrost my freezer anytime you want.”
Bucky huffed a breath, and smiled a tired smile as he closed his eyes. “Anytime?”
“Anytime,” Steve promised. He looked back over his shoulder toward Sam. “Could you grab a towel?”
“Yeah,” Sam said with a hard nod. He left and came back within a minute, a fresh towel in hand, handing it over to Steve. “We should call Tony.”
Steve’s knuckles whitened around the cloth as he looked Sam in the eye, jaw going tense. He turned back to Bucky, eyes skimming over the arm resting on the freezer rack. The sleeve of the hoodie was rolled up, exposing the charred, dented plates.
“How bad is it?” asked Steve.
“Bad.”
“Can you get up?”
Bucky shook his head weakly.
Steve swallowed with a nod before he looked back at Sam. “We should call Tony.”
Later in the car, Bucky was well and truly wrapped up like a Christmas present. In the rearview mirror, Steve saw Sam’s measured gaze looking back at them.
“I’ve texted Stark; he’s waiting for us at Dulles.”
Bucky perked up, brows furrowing like he suddenly didn’t understand. “Stark?” he asked, thinly.
There was a pregnant pause before Steve finally filled in the blank, heart beating in his throat. “Tony Stark,” he said and looked at Bucky, who looked back at him with his head tilted to the side, chapped lips parted, worry digging the hard line between his eyebrows deeper.
“Is he...” Bucky wetted his lips, swallowing as he took on a pinched look, “related to Howard Stark?”
“Yeah,” Steve said as if the wind had been punched out of him. “Yeah, he is.”