Chapter Text
Prologue
They get married in the courthouse closest to the hospital. It’s a day where the rain never stops coming down and the puddles pile up and overflow down greasy streets.
The marriage license has been sitting on Steve's old desk for almost two months. It's a little creased and water stained, battered. They'd gotten it back in January when the doctors had still been hopeful about Sarah’s diagnosis, back when they were still saying things like, "this is a fight you can win, Mrs. Rogers."
Sarah had smiled when she'd seen it, so thin even then, and immediately started planning their wedding and honeymoon in Cancun or Barbados or Hawaii. "Somewhere warm," she'd said, blue eyes that were so much like Steve's cutting to the ice covering her bedroom window. "Over your spring break - a little pre graduation present from me. I'll be done with chemo by then and I have a lovely swimsuit I want to wear."
Steve had laughed and Bucky had gripped her hand. She was all the parent they had left. Steve's dad died in Desert Storm and Bucky's parents had died when he was 20 in a car wreck. Sarah was it.
She'd gone to the hospital a week later with pneumonia. Steve had tried to drop all of his classes at NYU, even though it would mean delaying his graduation at least a semester until Sarah had cried herself into a coughing fit. The compromise was a lightened load so Steve could still walk in May and make up two classes over the summer.
Steve had spent every moment not at school with Sarah, bent over her. She'd been a nurse at this very hospital and Steve had sweet-talked his way into sitting with her almost round the clock. Bucky brought his pre-med books to her room and studied quietly in the corner while Sarah went from bad to worse to comatose. He’d felt helpless in the face of her decline, watching the two people left alive in the world who he loved most suffer. It broke his heart in ways that he knew he would never recover from.
In that quiet room, he'd stared down at his books on anatomy and biology and felt rage at his own inability. He wasn't even officially a med student yet. There was nothing he could do but wring his hands.
Sarah died in the night, just before spring would break over New York. Her heart gave out while Bucky was catching a few hours of sleep at home before a midterm and he’d come back to Steve, curled in the waiting room chair like he wasn't six feet tall. He had been pale and his eyes were dry and he’d clung to Bucky like a drowning man.
"I don't know what to do," Steve said. So Bucky did his best. He sent Steve home to change his clothes and shower and started filling out the endless forms the hospital needed, his own chest hurting like a heart attack.
He was on the last form, words blurring and pulsing like a living thing, when he'd heard determined footsteps approaching.
Steve was there, striding toward him in his best suit, the one he'd gotten for the funeral of Bucky's parents. It’s just a little small now, pants ending a bit higher on his ankles than they should. He'd combed his hair and he was holding the marriage license in one hand, face set like he was about to fight.
There, in the hospital corridor, in front of the nurse's station, he went to one knee, even though Bucky had been the one to propose to him months ago. "Marry me. I know this isn't what we'd planned, Buck," he'd said, voice a little loud so he could be heard over the loudspeaker. "But, marry me today. Please." His eyes were shining, tears and fierce determination. His skin was flushed like he'd run all the way up just for this moment.
Bucky couldn't stop his hands from shaking as he said yes.
By the time they get to the courthouse, Steve's hair is plastered across his forehead and Bucky can feel water soaked through his sweatshirt to his t-shirt beneath. Neither one of them can stop shivering and Bucky doesn't know if it's the cold or nerves.
Steve insists they dry off a little in the bathroom, using paper towels and the hand drier. He's just a little taller than Bucky now (after being shorter all through their childhood) and he kisses his forehead as he soaks up the water from his hair. "I love you," he says under the glaring bathroom lights.
The words make a sob form and bubble up Bucky's throat and he stuffs his own fist in his mouth to squelch the noise. A few tears come out, mingling with the cold rain on his cheeks.
"Hey, hey." Steve wraps his arms around him, holding him close so that the rainwater heats up between them. "We don't have to do this. We can wait."
"No - I'm okay." Bucky takes a deep breath and leans into Steve's resolve, depending on Steve's heart to know the right thing just as he's done his whole life. Steve is a force of nature. "There's nothing I want more."
They appear before the judge, hand in hand, and kiss even before the judge finishes the ceremony. Steve presses too hard, lips dry, like he's trying to keep Bucky present in the poorly lit room - afraid that Bucky is going to leave him too.
Both of them smell like a hospital and Bucky's eyes are blurry and painful from the tamped down tears, but they're both smiling when they walk back into the court lobby. It's mostly empty and smells of the downpour and street oil. There’s so much to do. Sarah’s funeral needs to be planned and her medicines still sit on the counter. The real world is just feet away, but this moment is theirs.
"I said, I do, right?" Steve asks, sounding a little dazed.
"Yep, pal, you did. No take backs," Bucky says, something like joy fizzing in his stomach.
Steve pauses, staring out at the rain. "Thank you, Buck," he says. "For marrying me.”
Bucky smiles. Outside, the clouds are heavy but Bucky can feel the sun in his own chest, bright warm and glowing.
It feels like a happy ending.