the star-spangled man with a plan

Steve watches him at a vendor. He picks up a plum with his left hand and gives it a light squeeze. The hand is gloved, hiding the metal away under something that looks smooth and black. Steve can’t tell if Bucky’s got senses in the fingers that fire and tell him it’s a good plum.
Steve has only ever seen the arm cause immeasurable damage, probably caused more than its fair share of nightmares for those who’ve seen it. He knows Bucky is right handed, but Bucky goes through the stall’s fruit with only his left hand, like he’s making a point. Steve watches closely until he gets it.
Bucky is practicing being gentle. He smiles at the vendor, an older lady who smiles back at him with some level of familiarity. He looks. Innocuous.

[Or Steve goes looking for his best friend in Bucharest, he's just not sure if he's found him.]

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

Steve has never been that great at judging how much spaghetti to break and dump in for pasta for one.

His mom used to say two inches in circumference, the internet’s told him the same, but Steve’s at something of a loss trying to figure out how to measure that sort of thing. Even then, somehow between the war and the avenging, nobody’s thought to teach him about the sheer amount of food he has to eat to satisfy his metabolism, four times the rate of anyone else’s. So he just sort of. Goes at it until he’s not hungry anymore.

He ends up cooking half the box anyway, figuring he’ll dump what's leftover in a Tupperware container to eat tomorrow. Waste not, Steve thinks, though he's pretty sure he's got enough money out there somewhere to feed a whole neighborhood four times over without breaking a sweat.

He likes watching cooking videos on YouTube, since he doesn't have any of his mom’s old recipes. He left his stuff with the army before he shipped off to Camp Lehigh and hadn't spared a second thought for them until he woke up out of the ice.

A lot of it is in a museum -- he genuinely has difficulty comprehending his things are in a museum, that somehow his old school notebooks and stray doodles are points of interest to anyone other than him. The rest of it… he's not sure what happened to it. He hasn't asked, half-convinced he doesn't really need that stuff anymore. The other half of him just doesn't want to be told it’s all been thrown away.

He’s got these tomatoes from Clint’s farm he tries to do something with, but the end result looks more like tomatoes that have been stomped on than it does an actual sauce. He settles at his kitchen table with his bowl of pathetic-looking pasta and cracks open his laptop to do the same thing he does every night.

They’ve got a shared folder to contribute to -- things Steve can glean from his trips to the Avengers Facility, other rumblings that Sam hears from the military, the leftovers of SHIELD. Sam’s affectionately titled the folder BuckyWatch2k14. Then 2k15, 2k16.

Steve sighs and clicks on BuckyWatch2k16, opening one document, assessing, then moving onto the next. He’s got to do all of his own research alone, particularly the Avenger-based kind, or he’ll never hear the end of it. Stark’s got this thing that lets him see all of the information at once, swirling in some sort of data cloud around him, and that works for him. But Stark’s a big picture guy. Steve prefers to take his challenges one at a time.

He hasn’t given up. That’s not what moving back to New York means, that’s not what the second generation of Avengers mean. It means the opposite, really, to anyone who’s not looking at Steve too closely. Unlike Nat. She probably reads their new missions for what they are -- a distraction from the hollowness in his chest.

He’s lost so much and gained so much, it’s got his head spinning. He’s lost the loves of his life and seventy years and everyone he’s ever known. He’s gained fiercely loyal companions and what feels like a futuristic fever dream of an era and a renewed purpose.

He still feels like he’s constantly trying to walk through his life stuck in some sort of cyclone that bandies him back and forth between the past and the present, like when he thinks he should have laid something to rest, it comes right back to haunt him. He lost Peggy, then he had her again, then he lost her again two weeks ago. He lost Bucky, then he had him again -- or at least some shadow of what he once was -- and then he lost him again two years ago.

It’s enough to make a normal man quit. Just sit on his hands and refuse to do anything until his head stopped spinning and the world stopped trying to confuse him at every turn.

But he doesn’t know how to do nothing. Stepping aside is not in his nature. And he’s anything but a normal man.

He’s thrown himself into this, into reading and rereading the same intel since the -- the funeral, because he’s somehow unable to leave the house. There’s a part of him that’s missing all over again, and if he could just find something to fill it, if he could just find him --

There’s a brisk knock on the door and Steve tenses for a moment. He clicks over into the security app, the feed having been installed as soon as he moved into his new place. One of the provisions that came with refusing to move into the Avengers Facility with the others. He’s not sure if it’s for monitoring the bad guys or just monitoring him, but Tony’s people swore it was confined to the perimeter and Nat shrugged like she either believed it or didn’t think it was too big a deal.

Speak of the devil.

Steve opens the door to Natasha leaned against the frame, a six pack of some craft thing Steve’s never heard of dangling dangerously loose at her side -- or what would be considered dangerously loose for anyone but Natasha.

“I can’t get drunk,” he says, in lieu of hello, and not for the first time. Or even the thirtieth.

She laughs, something rueful, as she picks herself up off the frame. “These are for me.”

Steve steps aside just as she pushes inside, exercising her open invitation without a hint of self-doubt. She’s even got a key, but she always knocks for Steve. If it were anyone else, he might have a thing or two to say about making him get up when they could come right in. But he senses it’s a thing for her, a way to respect his privacy, considering how much of her life she spends violating everyone else’s.

She looks at the laptop and the bowl of sad pasta and the glass of water. He can see the pity in the line of her shoulders before she drops into the chair next to his, propping her feet up on another chair.

He tosses her a bottle opener that she catches without glancing up and cracks her first beer.

“How are you holding up?” she asks.

“I’m holding up.” It sounds vague, but it’s about as specific as he can manage. That’s just what he’s doing, he’s holding on. Out of necessity. Out of respect.

Steve walks back over to close the laptop and bring his bowl back into the kitchen to pack the spaghetti away. He wasn’t really hungry anyway, just going through the motions because he had to. He pulls a container from the shelf, staring hard at the jumble of lids until he’s identified the correct one.

“The rest of us are not going to pretend our feelings aren’t hurt that you haven’t invited us to your manhunt.”

Steve pauses. The spaghetti makes an ugly flop out of the tipped bowl into the container, splattering red spots of tomato juice on the counter, on Steve’s white shirt. He looks over. “I didn’t think anyone else knew.”

She makes a face at him, utterly unimpressed.

“Everybody knows, don’t they,” Steve says lowly.

He knows she probably figures that’s what he’s doing on his off time. Half of the BuckyWatch2k14 folder are scans from her first files from Kiev. He wonders if she hadn’t thought he’d have given it up by now. This many years without a trace.

“You’re a lot of things, Steve, but subtle isn’t one of them.”

He grins back when she grins at him, but it doesn’t last long on his end. “I’m surprised nobody said anything.”

She watches him carefully, even though she’s taking a pull from her beer. “It’s being allowed. For the time being.”

“Allowed,” Steve says, his voice tight. He swallows anything else he has to say about that.

“They think you’ll bring him in. They don’t know it’s -- personal.”

Steve doesn’t say anything. He turns for the refrigerator to store the spaghetti and looks at it for a long while, for a lack of anything less guilty to do with his eyes.

He doesn’t actually know what he’ll do with Bucky once he finds him. He supposes that’s up to what Bucky does when Steve finds him, what sort of condition he’ll find Bucky in. He doesn’t know if he’s still under Hydra’s thumb, found some other faction to serve that they’ve yet to eradicate. It’s not like he’d see the Winter Soldier on the news, not after all this time.

He hadn’t been fully awake to see Bucky’s face, to read where he was when he pulled Steve ashore. Bucky’s the only one who could have, Steve believes that firmly. He believes there was some recognition in Bucky’s eyes.

He glances at the laptop, feels the itch in his fingers to pull it open and dive in.

“You need a hobby,” Nat says.

Steve raises an eyebrow at her.

“A normal one,” she amends.

“Well, I did learn how to knit a few weeks ago,” he tries to joke, but --

Natasha grins. “That was the truth.”

“One of Sam’s guys knits. He says it keeps him calm, the ritual nature of it all. Reminds him of cleaning his rifle.”

She hums, she understands.

He settles back into his seat and Nat swings her feet up onto his lap instead, a relaxed and trusting position, Steve thinks. He also thinks there’s probably three ways she can kill him from this position.

She tilts her head. “How’s that going?”

Steve scrubs his face with his hands, pressing them hard enough that it’s muffled when he says, “I’m awful at it.”

“Well, look at that. It seems we’ve found Captain America’s one weakness.” She knocks her beer against Steve’s glass of water in a toast and downs the rest of it.

Steve crosses his arms across his chest, feigning judgment.

He gets flashes, still, after however many years it’s been -- he can’t tell if he should only count the awake ones when he considers time -- of what it used to be like, thrown into sharp relief when he realizes what it’s like now. He used to cross his arms over his chest for warmth and receive none. And it was never so much his arms crossing at his chest as it was them across his whole body, clutching at his sides.

He uncrosses his arms.

She taps a booted foot against his chest, not hard enough to do any damage, just to get his attention. He rests a hand on her ankle in response.

The only thing that passes between them is the rumbling of freight cars that pass like clockwork behind Steve’s apartment, providing the ambient noises Steve needs because he can’t stand the silence. The silence reminds him of the ice in a way, though he wasn’t conscious for it. He’s used to noise, he prefers noise.

Natasha breaks first. “When are you going to let me do what I do best?”

Steve blinks at her. “What do you do best?”

It’s her turn to raise an eyebrow at Steve. She doesn’t elaborate. “I’ll need a week, maybe less.”

“A week,” Steve says, flat.

She’s never found him before, but maybe that’s because she wasn’t looking. Because he was meant to be a myth, because they didn’t know who he was. But he’s a person now, someone with a name and a history.

Steve thinks about the scar on her hip as she repeats, “Maybe less.”

In the end, she only needs five days.

Steve gets a passport. It’s wild and maybe irresponsible that SHIELD and the Avengers have been able to cart him around without one, under whatever kind of jurisdiction they have. But Steve knows he wants to do this on his own, so he can pretend some measure of privacy. So he gets a passport.

It’s also wild and maybe irresponsible that he gets a passport just as soon as he asks for one, while Sam fumes and says the last time he got a passport, it took him nearly six months. So Steve’s not entirely averse to working the system.

He asks for a vacation. Now that he knows everyone knows, he’s surprised he gets it, then he wonders if he’s being followed. Passports are tracked. There’s a keen sense of paranoia in his actions that he’s not accustomed to. It’s just if they find Bucky first, he’s not sure what they’ll do with him.

On some level, Steve truly does believe it’s a vacation. It’s time off. It’s something he’s doing for himself, independent of the machine he’s attached himself to for the past seventy-plus years. He’s good at doing things for other people; he wants to do things for other people. Maybe he’s not accustomed to doing things for himself.

Steve feels naked without the shield, or at the very least vulnerable. But it does wonders for a low profile. Sam laughs and claps his shoulder and calls him just a regular old white dude.

He puts some of that money to good use in first class seats -- they’ll need it, Sam had said, to go all the damn way to Romania, never mind that they stop off at Frankfurt in between. Sam’s out like a light, sleep mask on, as soon as they take off, leaving Steve to his thoughts, which aren’t as good at company as Sam is.

He closes his eyes too, like maybe sleep will take him as quick as he needs it to. They can’t strategize on a public plane, can’t even discuss their reason for going, so all that’s left for him is sleep. But he can’t turn his brain off, the insides of his eyelids acting like a projector screen for all the things Steve doesn’t want to think of.

He hadn’t needed a passport to fly to London for the funeral. It had been official Avengers business. He feels the phantom weight of her coffin on his shoulder, hardly enough to strain him with five other pallbearers. He hears Sharon’s eulogy still ringing in his ear, a call to action like she could read the emptiness on Steve’s face.

He wonders if Peggy would be proud of him, if this is the life she truly wanted him to lead. He always wanted to do the most good, he always acted with the intention of doing the most good. He believe he’s done good, he has to, in spite of what had come to light about SHIELD.

He was never sure if anyone had told Peggy about Hydra’s infiltration of SHIELD. He didn’t ever tell her himself, didn’t want to disrespect her memory and all that she’s worked for. He didn’t want to tell her that everything she’d helped build was poisoned by everything she wanted to destroy.

He didn’t know who to trust after SHIELD fell. He’d trusted Tony, who entrusted them in turn to another council -- trading one group of overseers for another, this one larger, this one just as faceless to Steve as the last. He took his orders from them, he trusted they were right, because that’s what a soldier does best.

He trusted Peggy, he trusted her when she said he needed to trust Stark Senior. He trusted her through all his time with the Howling Commandos. He trusted her when he thought she was the last voice he was going to hear on this earth.

If she was still here, maybe he’d have asked her. He’s never asked for permission, not when he thought the path was clear and his intentions are true. But he’d have still asked her now, if she thought he needed to be on this plane. If she thought recovering the last piece of his past was a noble cause. If she thought Bucky was worth saving.

She thought he was worth saving once before, him and the 107th. But maybe not now, if she’d seen what Bucky had become.

Sam’s good and rested by the time they touch down in Bucharest, and Steve doesn't often feel dead on his feet, but maybe it's more an emotional exhaustion than a physical one.

“Did you get any sleep?” Sam asks. “I forget -- do you sleep, or do you just sort of power down?” He makes some robotic sounding noises before his face shutters closed and his head drops.

Steve laughs gamely. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what it looks like.”

Bucharest is beautiful and utterly foreign and he finds it’s far more difficult to navigate somewhere he doesn't know without a team relaying instructions, without some sort of tactical map. A true tourist.

When he was a kid, he'd always dreamed of traveling and when he was an adult, he knew the only way that’d happen would be on an army plane.

Their motel is in what Nat had identified as Bucky’s part of the city, with old stains on the wallpaper, a single end table with its drawer half falling out, a furnace in the corner that rattles even though it’s summer, and two single beds that feel harder than the ground. Steve doesn't mind it one bit, never had high standards, could always make a home out of anywhere. He suspects Sam is the same way. Used to sleeping on the ground.

Steve pays for it with a credit card he’d been issued a while back. He’s decided he’s not overly concerned by the paper trail. He’s sure Natasha will do something to keep anyone from going after them right away; he doesn’t want to be off the grid completely. It’s something of an insurance plan, whether Steve likes to think of it that way or not. Worst comes to worst, she’ll know how to find him, quick and easy. And in the meantime, he can pretend he’s got some semblance of agency here.

They've still got a full day ahead of them with the time change, there’s no hesitation. They take to the streets immediately, in ball caps and sunglasses, trying to look as inconspicuous as they can manage.

Bucky lives in walking distance to a market, a nightmare for casing the area. It’s sort of weird to consider he lives here, he’s gotta have some sort of life now that he’s put down roots. It could never have been Brooklyn. Steve knows that, he knows better than to have hoped for that, to have thought Bucky would find some sort of reason to tie himself back home.

Instead he’s picked Bucharest, which Steve couldn’t even find on a map a week ago, a place he hadn’t even known Bucky had been before. But there’s seventy years unaccounted for, any number of places he’s been.

Sam’s got eyes on the door and the one street-facing window with a balcony and a threadbare piece of fabric not providing anyone inside Bucky’s place much privacy.

They stay for hours. Enough that Steve starts to think Natasha’s intel has already become irrelevant in the three days it took for them to muster. Steve’s on his third bottle of mineral water and getting antsy, Sam’s on his third mineral water and theorizing where to take a piss, when Bucky arrives.

“Sam,” Steve mutters, though they’re too far away and there’s too much of a crowd to really be heard by Bucky.

Bucky’s got a cap pulled low too, but Steve recognizes him, the shape of his jaw, the curve of his shoulders.

Steve watches him at a vendor. He picks up a plum with his left hand and gives it a light squeeze. The hand is gloved, hiding the metal away under something that looks smooth and black. Steve can’t tell if Bucky’s got senses in the fingers that fire and tell him it’s a good plum.

Steve has only ever seen the arm cause immeasurable damage, probably caused more than its fair share of nightmares for those who’ve seen it. He knows Bucky is right handed, but Bucky goes through the stall’s fruit with only his left hand, like he’s making a point. Steve watches closely until he gets it.

Bucky is practicing being gentle. He smiles at the vendor, an older lady who smiles back at him with some level of familiarity. He looks. Innocuous.

Steve has to go to him, has to follow the rough tug like he’s got a rope tied around his chest and Bucky’s reeling him in. His heart thunders away as it normally does when the adrenaline starts pumping, and the rest of the world falls away until all Steve sees his friend. Not the Winter Soldier, not a myth, but someone who could have belonged to Steve. Someone who’s just buying fresh fruit.

Steve is gripped with longing, hard and fast and maybe something wistful in it, but he’s not sure what kind of longing it is. For his best friend, for things to be like they were, for things to be completely different but better.

“Not today,” Sam says. Steve barely registers it until Sam gets puts a hand on his arm, squeezes. “Steve.”

He looks over. Sam’s eyes are hidden by the sunglasses, but there’s enough in the rest of his face to know they’d read with compassion. Sam gets it. And Sam’s being gentle too, when he repeats, “Not today.”

Steve starts to nod slowly, sense gradually trickling back into his brain. There are too many variables, too many unknowns. He can’t go bounding after Bucky, he could scare him away.

He must be too transparent about Bucky for Sam to clock his intentions before he’d even moved.

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, his eyes still trained to Bucky’s every movement. He watches him disappear into his building, and only once he’s completely out of sight does Steve let out a breath of tension he’d been holding.

“You okay?” Sam asks.

“I’m okay,” Steve confirms, but he’s not sure it’s the truth.

It takes three days of Sam following Bucky at dawn, down several miles into the city to the construction site where he appears to work, before Steve gets up the courage to agree to go through Bucky’s apartment.

He’s somehow still no stranger to picking a lock, leftover from locking himself out of the house as a kid during those times where the key under the mat would mysteriously go missing. These days, he’s more of a brute force kind of guy, but the last thing he wants to do is destroy Bucky’s door.

His apartment is sparse, but that’s pretty much what Steve expected of it. It’s a single room apartment -- not like a one room apartment, a literal single room. There’s a chest of drawers and a mattress on the floor on one side and a kitchen on the other. The only other door in the place is to the bathroom and even then it’s got a hinge undone. There’s a bowl of fresh fruit on scrap of wood Steve very generously calls a kitchen table.

It all looks stunningly normal. It isn’t quiet, not with the humming of the street below coming in through the cracked window that Steve’s spent three days studying or the refrigerator humming like it’s on its last legs.

On top of the drawers sits a radio that looks like it’s seen better days and a battered black notebook and pen.

Steve pauses like he’s paralyzed at the sight of it. Bucky used to keep journals when he was a kid. He’d write down everything and Steve was always asking him what about their lives was worth putting into words. Bucky used to guard those things with his life, until he seemed to grow out of it suddenly. Until by the time he was shipping off to war, he’d never write anything down.

He didn’t see any of Bucky’s journals in the Smithsonian. They’re probably gone. Maybe they thought nobody would want to read the thoughts of Captain America’s best friend. Steve finds himself somewhat desperate for them.

Steve keeps journals now, writing everything he’s learned in it, but nothing he’s felt. He wonders if Bucky’s done the same. He lifts the cover of the journal like he never would have when they were kids, and he startles. Tucked between the cover and the first page is a picture of Steve.

It’s an old one, sepia and yellowed, of him in his dress uniform, smiling at something in the distance, which leads him to believe it’s not an official shot, not part of his file.

His international phone buzzes in his back pocket, the only one with the number is Sam. Steve lets go of the cover of the journal like it’s burned him.

“Yeah?” Steve answers.

“Cap, I lost him.”

Steve doesn’t even have to hear the click to know what’s coming for him. He turns slowly, finds Bucky at the door with a knife in his left hand. It’s not a tactical knife, it looks like it belongs in a kitchen. Not a weapon, but a tool.

“I’ll call you back,” Steve says, hanging up the phone and pocketing it before Sam can say anything.

They somehow manage to be both calm and tense at the same time. Neither of them are in a hurry to move, neither of them breathe erratically or let their heart pound double time. They only watch each other.

Bucky looks how Steve had anticipated. Bone tired. Intense. Bucky looks how Steve had hoped. Human.

“Do you know me?” Steve asks.

Bucky winces. It’s not a big enough movement that anyone who didn’t know him like Steve knows him would even notice he’d done it. But he winces.

“You’re Steve. I read about you in a museum,” Bucky answers, rote, like he’s reciting the information. “Denied enlistment due to poor health, Steven Rogers was chosen for a program unique in the annals of American warfare. One that would transform him into the world’s first super soldier -- ”

Steve shakes his head, doesn’t buy it for a second. “You’re lying,” he says, a statement of fact more than it is an accusation.

“Get out,” he responds, his tone strained.

“Buck -- ”

“Don’t,” he says. “Get out.”

Steve’s hands hover in front of him, fingers flexed, clearly in a gesture of submission. He takes a risk. “You’re not gonna hurt me, Bucky.”

“You don’t know that.”

“If you were gonna, you’d have done it when my back was turned.”

His face flickers. He doesn’t drop the knife, but Steve already knows he’s won that part of the battle.

“I’m not here with anyone, it’s just me.”

Bucky narrows his eyes. “And the other one.”

“Sam. Yeah, it’s me and Sam, but I just wanna talk.”

He hates the idea of treating Bucky like a cornered animal, like something dangerous that could pounce at any moment. The Winter Soldier experienced no hesitation. The Winter Soldier acted with almost mindless adherence to his mission. The Winter Soldier was non-stop.

But Steve knows he’s right -- the fact that Bucky hasn’t pounced yet means all the difference.

“Why?” Bucky asks, like he can’t fathom the possibility of Steve wanting to recover his friendship. Honestly, Steve feels like he’s been pretty transparent on his part -- from their limited conversation in the helicarrier at the very least.

“I didn’t get to say thank you.”

Bucky tilts his head. “Say it.”

“Thank you. You saved my life.”

Bucky grunts; Steve takes it some sort of acceptance. “You saved mine. Get out.” He shifts to his right, taking careful steps he expects Steve to counter with until Bucky’s back is to the rest of the apartment and Steve is at the door.

The knife drops then, thunking heavily onto the floor, along with the look on Bucky’s face. Steve tries to puzzle it out before he leaves the room, thinks for a second it’s relief when he takes one last glance and realizes it’s fear.

Steve stomps down the stairs, out of the building and onto the street. He’s got his phone up to his ear in the next second, waiting for Sam to answer before he says, “I saw him, he showed up at the apartment.”

“I figured. How is he?”

Steve takes a big exhale, releasing whatever of the tension he can. “I don’t know.”

Bucky doesn’t skip town, not like Steve expects him to.

They can’t monitor all the exits at all hours of the day, not like they should. They don’t have the resources. But Bucky is still there in the morning, still leaves for the construction site, still comes back when the whistle blows.

Steve’s waiting for him, sitting on the floor outside his apartment door when Bucky comes back. He figures it’s gotta mean something, that Bucky didn’t shoot, that he’s still here. That there was fear in his eyes.

They watch each other. Neither of them are stupid about it. Steve’s put himself in a vulnerable position on the floor, another way to set Bucky at ease, to keep him from getting on edge. And Steve’s got Sam hidden, poised, ready for the signal to jump in, in case what they’d seen was wrong. In case somehow the Winter Soldier has learned a new trick.

“Your mom’s name was Sarah,” Bucky says. “You used to wear newspapers in your shoes.”

It feels like Steve’s blood freezes right in his veins, the truth of it shaking him to the core. “You can’t read that in a museum.” It’s almost like a relief.

Bucky looks away, unlocks his apartment door, and enters, leaving the door open behind him in an invitation. Steve scrambles off the floor, slipping into the apartment to watch Bucky rest his ball cap on his dresser, shed his jacket and toss it on the bed.

He stands near the door, not to observe like some sort of scientist -- the habitat of the former Winter Soldier -- but to be respectful of Bucky’s space, his ritual.

Bucky makes a microwavable frozen dinner, and Steve almost has to laugh. It seems weirdly anachronistic to watch Bucky stand in front of the microwave expectantly, to do something neither of them had been taught in their previous lives to do but somehow picked up in this future.

He imagines Bucky watching people or watching television, soaking in information as Steve has, trying to learn the way the world is now. He thinks about that journal, the one with Steve’s face in it, and wonders what rests in those pages.

He wonders if Bucky has felt the same exasperation with the present Steve has -- to be pulled straight from one war to the next. To learn Hitler wasn’t the biggest bad guy they had to worry for, to know there’s always someone waiting in the wings to do what the last guy couldn’t.

Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.

Steve has heard more than his fair share of rhetoric about it, from Fury, from the senators who’ve run his team. They all say the same sort of thing. Freedom isn’t a fight you only have to win once.

The microwave dings and Bucky looks between Steve and his frozen dinner and back at Steve. He sets an apple down on the table from the fruit basket. Follows it with a knife that hits the table with the weight of a weapon, even though it’s a simple kitchen utensil. In Steve’s hands it’s dangerous, in Bucky’s hands it’s dangerous.

Steve nods his thanks and sits at the table. He cuts into the apple, mindful of the juice. It’s not enough to be a whole dinner for Steve, but it used to be.

The silence threatens to swallow them up. They’re playing house like they’re living a dream. Maybe it is Steve’s dream, to come home to Bucky after a long day at the office, share a meal, and just be together.

It’s a pipe dream. They don’t live that kind of life.

“I’m glad you’re still here,” Steve says.

Bucky pushes around a soggy piece of meatloaf in the little container. It takes him a long time to say anything, but when he does, it’s soft. It’s still not the Bucky he knows, nothing confident, nothing passionate about it. But it’s not rough, cold.

“I think I wanted you to find me. I think I hoped you would.”

Steve’s hand slips, but his reflexes are too good for the knife to cause any damage.

Bucky wasn’t looking for him, but he wanted to be found. The knife was a hell of a way to show it, but Steve remembers the fear in his eyes. That he got the benefit of the doubt at all means something.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I hoped I would too.”

He waits for Bucky to set the tone, to open them up to conversation, to provide the boundaries. It’s not like they can lean on a knowledge for small talk. Not how wild must the 60’s have been, am I right. Not remember that time in freshman year when you patched up my arm so mom wouldn’t have to take me to the hospital either.

He knows Bucky can chat -- he’s seen him do it at the market, Sam’s seen him do it at the construction site. It’s a Steve-sourced silence that overwhelms them, and he can’t be the one to break it.

After dinner, Bucky cranks on the radio to a channel that chats away in Romanian, basically nonsense to Steve, but he figures it’s the news. He doesn’t translate for Steve, but Steve isn’t too concerned with the rest of the world right now, not when what’s left of the world he knew best is sitting in front of him.

Bucky sits against the wall on one end of his bed, his legs folded up like a table to write in his journal against. Or like he’s leaving room for Steve to take the other side. He’s not unaccustomed to sharing a bed with Bucky, but it wasn’t even this separated. No that’s my side, this is your side, not when they read comics by flashlight, not when they huddled together when the harsher winters broke into one of their rooms without asking.

Steve sits on the other side with his feet dangling off the bed, respectful of the distance, respectful of his shoes and Bucky’s sheets. Taking off his shoes seemed too familiar, too here to stay, when he should be ready to leave at any moment.

He lets his eyes drift shut, lets the quiet scratch of Bucky’s pen and the distant chatter from the market outside wash over him. He wonders how long it’s been since he’s taken a breath.

“Here,” Bucky says. Steve opens his eyes to find another journal, this one unused, and a pen sitting by his thigh. Bucky’s still staring at his journal, but the single brief peek he makes at Steve’s face is enough to have him reaching for it.

“Thanks.”

He stares at the journal, uncertain what to fill it with. He leaves it open for some time, finding his pen makes the decision for him, sketching out an outline of a man. The man curls in on himself, slowly defining and defining until he turns into Bucky. Bucky with his hair covering part of his concentrated face. In the picture, just as in life, there’s no noticeable difference between his hands, other than the glove.

He flips a page and sketches the single window next, the one Steve’s been watching Bucky’s life through. Works on the delicate way the curtain flutters in the light breeze, shades and patterns until he’s got something lifelike on the page. Until Bucky’s snoring beside him.

Steve blinks, unaware he was drowsy until he startles away at the sound. He remembers the snoring -- he remembers teasing Bucky about it, remembers Bucky teasing him back about the wheezing Steve had been prone to. Between the two of them, they’d made enough noise in their sleep to wake a neighborhood, they’d joke.

Steve doesn’t wheeze anymore, and he’s never been so happy to know Bucky still snores.

He wants to drape a blanket over him, to spread him out on the bed, to gently sweep the hair from his face. But he doesn’t have permission. With the old Bucky, he wouldn’t need it, wouldn’t dream of asking. It was just understood.

“Good night, Buck,” he says quietly, switches off the radio, and makes his way out of the apartment.

He could go for an entire grill full of meat, just the thought of it has the phantom scent of it drifting through the air even though the market tents have been packed up hours ago. The walk he takes to the motel is leisurely anyway.

This part of Bucharest is picturesque at night, somehow perpetually lit in a haze by soft streetlamps, like an impressionist painting. He’d had an argument once, about whether things should look like they look, or whether just the general idea of something is enough to get the job done.

As much as he’d like life to be in black and white, drawn with thick, unquestionable strokes of the pen, it’s not. It’s blurred.

Steve sees the impression of life around him, and it’s up to him to sharpen his focus, to choose which parts are worth focusing on. And even then, it’s only his perspective he’s got. Someone else looks at the same impression of life, they see an entirely different painting.

He’d like to say this is bad, this is good, they are my friend, they are not, this is what I should do, this is what I shouldn’t. He hasn’t thought life was that simple since the day Erskine picked him up in New York.

He’d said he didn’t like bullies, and he stands by that. But it’s getting a lot harder to pick out the bullies. Especially when they’re dressed in a friend’s clothing, in the clothing of an innocent.

Sam’s watching some sort of Romanian drama in their hotel room, lying on top of the bedding on his sheets because it’s somehow hotter in their room than it is outside.

“I didn’t finish,” Sam says, gesturing to the food on the table between them. Looks like he hasn’t even cracked it open, which means Sam is full of shit and ordered him a dinner even though Steve told him not to. He’s grateful. And starving.

Sam asks him how it went. Steve’s careful with his story as he is eating the food on his bed. Sam listens just as carefully and with kind eyes.

“You’re a good friend,” Steve tells him, because he’s never sure he’s told anyone as much as he should.

He expects Sam to crack a joke, to diffuse the situation by making everything seem like it means less than it does. But Sam says, “You’re a good friend too, Steve,” firmly, like he wants Steve to remember that.

Steve nods and shovels in a mouthful so he has a reason not to answer. He uses what little of his international phone’s data remains to connect to the rest of the world, for just one moment.

Natasha’s sent him an email letting him know his flowers are fine and she’s left some water out for the cat that sometimes sits on the fire escape. It’s her way of checking in. He sends her back thanks, his way of checking in. Of letting her know the work isn’t done.

The next day, Bucky finds him.

He’d noticed before he left, Bucky’s bowl of fruit is empty, the last of it offered up to Steve. Steve’s first stop is the fresh fruit vendor he’d first spotted Bucky at. The lady attending it says something to him he doesn’t understand.

“English? Français?” he tries. She says something else, and the shake of her head tells him no. “How much?” He pulls out the money first and holds it out for her, then picks up two plums with his other hand. She plucks some amount from him, returns some other amount, and moves onto the next customer.

Steve blinks down at the pile of bills, wondering if he should trust anyone with that sort of behavior, considering how many kids in Brooklyn tried to run that game on as many unsuspecting foreign tourists as they can.

“They’re honest,” Bucky says from behind him.

Steve doesn’t startle, not anymore, but he hadn’t anticipated it. It doesn’t exactly put him on edge, but his heart beats a little faster until he turns to look at Bucky.

“They’re just trying to make a living,” he continues. “Don’t much care who you are or how much money you’ve got, so long as you can pay a fair price.”

Steve doesn’t think it’s fair that after all this time, Bucky’s got an uncanny knack for reading his mind. And he’s ashamed, a little, to have jumped straight to mistrust, when he should give the benefit of the doubt.

“This for me?” Bucky asks, plucking the plum from Steve’s hand without waiting for a response. He moves onto the next vendor.

He grins after Bucky instinctively, something like muscle memory working its magic.

They move through the market, looking over the grills, fruit stands, and stalls of clothing and trinkets. If Steve tries hard enough, he can almost imagine them on vacation together. It feels a little less like work, a little less serious, when all they have to concern themselves with are smoked sausages.

They turn when they get to the end of the market to wander the other side, and there’s an immediate shift in the tone. Bucky looks like he’s getting ready to say something as he stretches a hand out to trail it down the length of a silk scarf.

Bucky clear his throat and says, “I’m sorry -- to hear about, uh. Agent Carter?”

Steve startles this time, but locks it down quickly. It was very public news, especially considering the fall of SHIELD. He remembers the wild speculations leading up to her death, the accusations that would get him hot and ready to fight. She was defenseless from her own hospital bed. She’d have hated that. To know she couldn’t defend herself on her own --

Steve blinks. “Thank you.”

“She was a good person.” It almost sounds like a question.

“Yeah, she was the best.”

“She took care of you.” That wasn’t a question.

“She did.”

She took care of him because Bucky wasn’t there to. Because Bucky had gone off to war and left Steve behind for safety. Bucky had been there from the start, through the very worst of it, and Bucky had always been there to take care of him. To patch his wounds, to finish his fights, to feed him when money got tight after his mom died.

Bucky was trying to take care of him on the train too, willing to throw himself into danger because Steve was there. And he’d paid the price for it.

“It’s good to apologize,” Bucky says.

Steve flushes. “No, you didn’t -- Peggy just -- ”

“I know,” he says, turning from the stall to look at him. “But I’m sorry, Steve.”

“Nothing anyone could do,” Steve admits.

She was paralyzed by time, by a disease that slowly took what she had of their time together until, towards the end, she didn’t remember him at all. She’d look at him without recognition, but with the cordial politeness of greeting a stranger. It wasn’t the way Bucky had looked at him as the Winter Soldier. He didn’t recognize Steve either, because that was taken from him too, against his will.

He’s going to get Bucky back. He doesn’t know how he’s going to do it, but he won’t stop. He’s lost Bucky too many times before. He lost him to the draft and feared he wouldn’t come home, he was either too weak or too busy being a puppet to serve beside him. When Hydra had taken him the first time, Steve had dropped himself into a Hydra base to go get him. When he’d fallen, officially labeled killed in action -- the only loss in the Howling Commandos -- Steve couldn’t do a thing about it.

Steve has run the day on the train through his head over and over. A hundred different scenarios, a hundred different outcomes, a hundred different reasons Bucky didn’t have to die. There’s nothing he could have done about it, not two minutes after it happened, not seventy years after it happened. There’s no changing the past, but there’s everything to change in the future.

Sam glances down at Steve’s phone and says, “I didn’t give her your number, I swear.”

“A likely story,” Steve answers, serving a dual purpose -- the joke and, honestly, he believes Sam wouldn’t. He puts it on speaker. She’s the only one he’d answer for now, they must know it.

“Good morning, Natasha,” he says, counts on his fingers to confirm that it is in fact morning in New York, while he’s on the other side of it. He’s got a few minutes before he makes his way to Bucky’s apartment, something of an unspoken agreement on their part. They let Bucky do what he does during the day, he spends his evenings with Steve.

“Good evening, Steve,” she answers. “We don’t need to small talk, do we? I’m kind of exhausted.”

“Please.” He gives a gesture she can’t see, go on.

“The update accounts are thirsty. We had a high profile mission yesterday and you weren’t on it.”

Sam raises his eyebrows, but Steve isn’t interested in that.

“Well, if the update accounts are thirsty,” Steve says, not a little unkindly.

“You know what I mean. People are going to notice.”

“Nobody’s missing the Falcon?” Sam interjects to pull the heat off him.

“I always miss the Falcon,” she purrs.

“Shit,” he laughs, swiping his thumb along his lip and fixing Steve with an amused look.

Steve isn’t really in the mood, not for Sam to take a dive on his behalf, not to justify his actions. He’s given every piece of himself in service of his country, he’s going to take this one thing for himself. He’s not saying anyone owes it to him -- he’s never asked for payment.

But soldiers get a furlough. He’s pretty sure he’s heard rumors, even though he’s never seen a soldier get one.

“Tell them I’m on vacation,” Steve says.

“Do you know how often people’s homes get robbed while they advertise they’re on vacation?” Nat deadpans.

“My apartment’s got security cameras, I’m sure you remember that.”

“Not the home I was referring to.”

He runs a hand over his face before anchoring it on his waist. He can’t be the sole savior of a nation. He’s done that before -- as a symbol and useless in almost everything. As a leader of the Commandos, the Avengers, and losing almost everything.

It’s an honor to serve, but Steve knows where he stands. Captain America, emphasis on the America. There’s not a lot of use in Steve Rogers, just what he represents.

Steve Rogers, he’s got a sense of duty too. To his family, to the only one left of it.

She takes his silence for what it is, says, “Don’t shoot the messenger. Not that you’d hit.”

He gives her a chuckle to let her know they’re good. “Good night, Nat.”

“Good morning, Steve, Sam.”

He throws his phone on the bed, looks over to Sam because he looks like he’s got something to say. His hands are already up, pacifying, something reminiscent of Steve when he met Bucky just a few days ago. The wariness shown to a cornered animal.

“Look, I’m doing what you’re doing. Whatever you need, okay?” Sam starts and waits for confirmation.

“But?” Steve prompts.

“She’s not wrong. What’s your endgame here, Cap?”

He’s asked himself that, nearly every minute of every day. He’s got Bucky talking to him now, he’s got some level of comfort. He can’t decide what comes next, if Bucky stays here indefinitely, if he tries to bring him back to the States.

“I don’t know,” he admits.

Sam inclines his head like he gets it. “There’s only so much lonely touristing a man can do on his own, you know.”

“Some people actually enjoy solo vacations. Or so I hear.”

He grins easily. “I guess I’m just too damn sociable for that, Steve.”

“I get it.” He nods to himself, mind buzzing faster than he cares to keep up with. “I’ll think of something.”

Steve knocks. There’s that brief moment between Steve knocking and Bucky pulling open the door where he thinks maybe Bucky’s done it this time. Maybe he’s decided it’s too much, he doesn’t want it, and he’s disappeared again. Steve doesn’t ask himself if he’d go chasing after him again.

“Open,” Bucky says from inside, English, which means he knows it’s Steve.

Steve isn’t sure he’s comfortable with the door being unlocked, but he lets himself in.

Bucky’s slumped at the kitchen table, his posture lacking the rigidity that comes with training to be on alert at all times. He looks tired, the circles under his eyes darker than they usually are. So far as Steve knows, there’s been no difference -- no irregularities in his sleep schedule, no difference in his work commitments.

He looks beaten, though he’s not bruised. It just looks like the weight of the world hits him particularly hard today.

Steve nods at the bottle in front of him. “What’s that?”

“Țuică.” He carefully pours himself a healthy serving into the chipped glass tumbler next to it. “It’s made from plums. They say it helps.”

He can smell it from across the room, says, even though he only sees the one glass, “I can’t get drunk.”

Bucky makes an amused noise, the ghost of a smile finding its way onto his face. There’s no mirth in it, it looks wrong on his face. “You used to be a lightweight.”

Steve shrugs, aiming for casual, but it still feels loaded. “Either way, I can’t hold my liquor.”

Bucky picks up the glass, which has Steve edging forward further into the room. To take the glass from him, to hug him, to just be near him -- Steve doesn’t know.

It doesn’t help, Steve does know that. It didn’t help Mr. Peterson next door stop sending his son to school the morning after with a shiner on his jaw and a weak story about falling down the stairs. It doesn’t help Tony, who settles into a long silence and a thousand yard stare when he thinks no one’s watching him. It’s not going to help Bucky, who has such a tenuous hold on his own mind.

Bucky stares long and hard at the glass before he sets it back down. A little bit of the tightness in Steve’s chest loosens. “Haven’t had a drink since that night in the Alps. You remember that?”

Steve knows exactly. “Yeah, with the Commandos.”

A last hoorah. Before they got on the train. It was seventy years ago or just a few years ago, and Steve remembers the dim bar. He remembers watching Bucky take more drinks than he should for the early morning that they had. He doesn’t remember watching Bucky sway like the rest of them, whiskey soft and sleepy.

Bucky never talked about what Zola did to him, not the first time. He’s always trying to protect Steve, from more than just getting beat up behind a movie theatre.

It hadn’t occurred to Steve that maybe they were trying to do to Bucky what was done to him. Maybe Bucky was testing his limits, drinking to see when he would get drunk and never finding that point. Maybe even then he knew something was wrong with him -- different about him, Steve corrects himself -- but he died before ever getting to find out what.

“Dum Dum and Jim had eyes on that French broad with the kiss me lips,” Bucky says, something mocking in his tone. It doesn’t sound like someone reminiscing about good times. “I remember that. Like a slide viewer in my mind. Slide - we’re at the bar. Slide - she’s got mile-long legs. Slide - the snow outside. Slide - the frown on your face.”

Bucky looks up at him, fixing him with a paralyzing stare. “I don’t remember why you were frowning.”

“Neither do I.”

It’s true enough. It could have been a number of things -- the number of drinks, the way Steve felt separated from them, a product of command. The way Bucky sat with them and not him, building on the camaraderie they’d established without Steve, before Steve. Maybe Steve was disappointed in himself, in that tug of selfishness he’d felt, thinking he’s my friend, he’s been my friend my whole life, you don’t know him the way I do.

Bucky slides a journal across the table for him. Steve expects it to be the one he drew in a few days ago, one he’d left behind on Bucky’s bed, but it’s not.

“What is this?” Steve asks as he flips through it, but he thinks he knows anyway. A list of names, places, dates, facts, like mission reports.

“It’s how you destroy me,” Bucky says. “It’s how you let them lock me up.”

Steve tosses the journal on the table like it’s burned him. “I won’t do that.”

“I’m sure they already know I’m here. I haven’t left yet.”

Steve gets it. He gets it in an instant. Bucky hasn’t stayed for him. Bucky hoped Steve would find him so Steve would hold him accountable. To make Bucky responsible.

“You want me to bring you in,” Steve guesses, the pain of the realization stinging his chest the way it used to when he wasn’t able to catch his breath. “You think you deserve it.”

“They’ve tried to wipe me, they’ve tried to make me forget, but it always comes back. I remember everything. I see their faces in people at the market, when I close my eyes to sleep. It’s hard to remember the good things, but it’s so so easy to remember the bad.”

Bucky says it factually, not like he’s on the verge of collapse, but like it’s something he’s grappled with just to be able to put into words.

Steve almost thinks that’s worse.

“That wasn’t you. You weren’t in control.”

Bucky makes a face, like he doesn’t exactly believe that even though it’s the truth. “Sometimes it feels like. You wake up from a nightmare and you think you’re safe. You think it was all a dream, but the longer you sit there in the dark, the more you realize it wasn’t a nightmare. It was all real. And you can’t change that. You can’t change what you’ve done, you were powerless to stop it.”

He stops himself, puffing out a breath like he’s lost steam, like this is the admission that’s taken everything out of him.

He wants to say, Bucky I’m so sorry, but sorry doesn’t even begin to cover it.

And Bucky turns it on him first. “You remember that, Steve? You remember feeling powerless?”

“Yeah,” Steve whispers because his voice has lost its strength.

He knows just what it’s like, either to lose control or to never have had control in the first place. As a kid, to feel like no matter how much he wanted to stand up for what’s right, his body always stood in his way. As a puppet, he knew the importance of bonds but knew he was meant for something greater. That he finally got to a point where he could make the difference he always wanted to make and was shackled to the song and dance.

Steve made the decision to drive his plane into the ice, to save his city, to make the sacrifice, but even then he was a pawn in someone else’s game. Pieces are moved by someone else, whoever’s in charge this week, and Steve’s been a pawn for so long.

Bucky stands before Steve realizes it, lost in his own self-pity. There’s fear in Bucky’s eyes again, but also flashes of curiosity. Steve waits as he always does for Bucky to define what they can do in this moment. He’s a piece in Bucky’s game.

He reaches for Steve’s face with his left hand. The glove is gone, there’s just a dull silver, something that should be the stuff of nightmares. Bucky slowly moves forward and Steve carefully sits still. It’s cold against his cheek, smooth like it’s well polished.

He cups Steve’s jaw, a different level of intimacy than Steve is used to. Steve wonders if he closes his eyes, he can convince himself it’s real -- it’s not another exercise, it’s not another test. It’s just Bucky wanting to touch him in a way he hasn’t done before, to move somewhere they could have gone if they had more time.

Steve opens his eyes, unaware that he had in fact closed them, when Bucky’s hand leaves his face, slides slowly down his neck, where he’s vulnerable, until it rests over his chest, rising and falling with Steve’s steady breathing.

“I’m so tired, Steve,” Bucky whispers, a confession.

Steve nods and whispers back, “Let’s go to bed.”

Bucky’s bed isn’t large enough to have sides, but there’s still a distance between them, a line that won’t be crossed. Bucky sleeps like he’s trying to take up as little space possible. Like he’s mindful of Steve’s presence, or like he’s too used to minimizing his own presence, Steve’s not sure.

He sends a quick text to Sam so he doesn’t worry, wary of the way his phone lights up in the dark room. But as soon as Bucky hits the sheets, an arm curled under his head so Steve gets the lone pillow, he seems dead the world.

There’s a level of vulnerability, of trust, in letting Steve see him like this. Something that gives Steve hope as his eyes drift shut, giving Bucky that same trust too.

Steve’s hand rests in front of him on the bed, like maybe it had been resting on something else in his sleep. He’s usually a compact sleeper too, curls around himself to limit how big of a target he is when he can’t defend himself. Drowsiness makes it a slow realization, like lights gradually lighting up the path ahead of him. Bucky was sleeping there last night.

He turns. By the streetlamps shining through Bucky’s thin curtains, he catches sight of Bucky standing next to the bed, tugging the shirt he slept in off to replace it with another. He looks about as empty as last night, tired even with a full night’s rest. Bucky pauses at Steve’s movement, looking down at him with a level of trepidation Steve wishes he didn’t have such quick access to.

Steve’s stomach shifts at the angry red scars around the connection to his metal arm, looking about as violent as they probably had when they did this to him. After all this time, Bucky doesn’t look like he’s healed. Maybe he’s not going to.

“Good morning,” Steve says, his voice rough with sleep.

“Morning.” Bucky slides a clean shirt on and clears his throat.

“Do you want to go for a run?” Steve offers. He starts all of his mornings with a run, even here. He wonders if Bucky knows that. If he’s been watching them as much as they’ve been watching him.

Bucky nods. He holds a shirt out for Steve. Steve slips out of his and into Bucky’s quickly, finding it roomy enough to fit and finding Bucky watching him.

He was watching Bucky just the same, but still says carefully, “What?”

Bucky shrugs and tosses a pair of boxers at his face.

Steve catches them just before they connect. “These better be clean.”

“You trust me?” Bucky asks, light finding his eyes as he leans casually against the dresser.

“Always,” Steve answers, which seems to be the wrong thing to say.

Bucky tenses, but says nothing, doesn’t move. The lightness in his face starts to look more like a picture of a feeling than an actual feeling. He keeps watching Steve, even as he strips to change.

They’ve seen each other’s bare asses more times than they can count, in any failed attempt of Steve’s to join Bucky on a sports team at school, any number of Steve’s medical appointments when his mom couldn’t come. They couldn’t afford to be shy. But it’s different now. Bucky’s seen him use this body, but he hasn’t seen what it looks like.

He’s reminded of the way Bucky had touched him last night, mapping him gently, discovering Steve as much as he was discovering himself.

Bucky’s never looked at him the way he’s looked at his girls. But Steve never wanted him to.

His look now so direct it’s almost calculating, scientific in the way Steve’s body has been studied before. He’d rather Bucky’s look be soft. He’d rather Bucky look at him in that particular way he reserves for Steve alone.

Eventually Bucky turns away and they separate to prepare. Steve laces up his shoes as Bucky slides on his glove and slips a hoodie on over his t-shirt. It seems weirdly too intimate to use Bucky’s toothbrush, red and plastic and sitting on the edge of his chipped sink. Steve swishes around some water and splashes his face. He hadn’t ever expected them to take their game of house to the next level.

Things like this are meant to be mundane, pedestrian, not charged or weighty. He thinks they need this. This is the next step in the plan, to normalize his presence in Bucky’s life. To get to a point where this is all mundane.

They run together, chasing the daybreak down streets that slowly brighten as the sun does. It’s nothing like the laughing, competitive runs he shares with Sam at the Avengers facility. He slows his pace enough to let Bucky lead -- although maybe Bucky doesn’t need him to go slow -- mostly because he doesn’t know the area well enough to stray beyond his normal route.

Steve tries to imagine Bucky here, tries to make sense of seeing him on a street corner, sitting at the window table of a cafe, doing things civilians can afford to do. Bucky leads him through the part of Bucharest they’d put on a postcard like they’re touring, like this is the next Thing to Do on Steve’s vacation.

It’s beautiful. He keeps thinking that. He sees this town and he thinks it’s beautiful, but it never, in a hundred-plus years, would have occurred to him to put roots down here.

They pause at a streetlight where anyone else would need to stop and take a breath. Neither of them are winded.

“Why Romania?” Steve asks. “Out of curiosity.”

“It’s familiar,” Bucky says, then appears to think better of his answer. “It didn’t remind me of you.”

Steve figures that’s just about right. America is off limits, him and the Commandos crashed over half of Europe like a wave. There are only so many places where he might not see Steve’s face, where he might feel just a little closer to where he’s been and who he’s been for the last seventy years.

He doesn’t really like that, the thought of Bucky thinking anywhere else but Brooklyn was home.

Maybe that’s why Bucky was hiding from him, like he thought Steve would be disappointed in him. Steve can’t even imagine he’s capable of being disappointed in Bucky, he knows him too well. Even beneath the layers of damage wrought by Hydra, Bucky’s just Bucky. Steve sees him for what he is, what he can be.

Bucky picked a place Steve never would have thought to look for him, and then he waited for Steve to find him.

The rest of the run all the way back to Bucky’s place is in silence. Steve isn’t disheartened by it. Bucky doesn’t talk much. Sometimes it’s like he runs out of steam. Like he’s got a finite number of things he can manage to say a day and once he’s said it, he’s done.

Steve likes to pretend he’s not seeing Bucky go through a physical effort to speak to him that he doesn’t have with anyone he speaks to on the street. They don’t know who he is, so he can be anything. But Steve knows so much, maybe too much.

Bucky doesn’t have a limit today, but only because he looks like he hasn’t replenished his well from yesterday. Steve gets it. He hasn’t heard Bucky talk that much since the war, and it looked like it took everything out of him just to confess what he had last night, to let Steve know where he is.

Steve appreciates that. He has to let Bucky know it’s okay to keep stepping forward. He knows his endgame. He has to trust that Bucky is willing to let Steve take the reins now.

The bottle of Țuică still sits by the sink.

“I have a friend, who’s trained in this sort of thing,” Steve says, sitting down gently and slowly at the kitchen table. “He works with soldiers who have PTSD, I think he could help you.”

Bucky tenses where he washes an apple at the sink for a moment before he turns off the faucet. “What’s PTSD?”

“It’s -- uh, it’s a condition that people get when they’ve been through trauma. Who have some trouble dealing with it.” It’s a simple explanation, watered down so he doesn’t scare Bucky off, and Bucky calls him on it with a twitch of his lips and a furrow of his brow.

“I think I’ve been through a lot more than trauma.”

“I know. I know, Buck,” Steve says with a nod, tries to keep his voice level, from sounding too much like a plea, “but I think you have to start somewhere. If you’re interested.”

Bucky looks over at him, his eyes shining with something Steve can’t read. Maybe he’s calculating again, running a risk analysis based on the information Steve’s provided him, the opportunity Steve’s affording him. They can break open the dam, but that sort of thing doesn’t come without consequences.

“I’ll think about it,” Bucky says finally.

“Thank you.”

Steve lets it go. That’s all he can do, that’s all Sam would let him do. Put the offer out there, let him know what it means, then let him decide to take it or leave it.

Sam doesn’t take it as well as Steve expects.

He’s actually sort of angry.

“Steve, I can’t do that.”

Steve blinks at him. “Why not?”

“I’m too close,” Sam says like it’s obvious.

“You don’t know him.”

“But I know you. This is the textbook definition of a conflict of interest. I’m actually considering rewriting the entry myself to include a picture of us, just so everyone knows what the hell not to do.”

Steve pauses. He didn’t think Sam would say no, he hadn’t considered the possibility of this part of the plan falling through. There’s no one who knows better, who can speak to it better. Guilt. Regret. Doing what it takes to leave behind the baggage you can’t carry to keep only what baggage you can.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Sam asks.

“He wants to talk,” Steve answers, but he’s not sure that’s true. He’s banking on the fact that Bucky wants to talk, he just can’t. Not to Steve, who’s too close. But Steve would never be ashamed.

“There’s not another person on this planet who can do it, there’s no one else who’ll understand,” Steve says quietly. “Sam.”

Sam winces. “Don’t say I’m your only hope.”

“You’re my only hope,” Steve says anyway, but there’s too much emotion in his voice for Sam to play it off like it’s a joke. There’s no one Steve trusts more than Sam, not with something this important, this precious.

Sam doesn’t get mad often, definitely not at Steve, and the critical look he gives could melt ice with the heat of it. But then he says, “It has to be his decision.”

“I told him to tell me when he’s ready,” Steve answers quickly. “Not a moment before.”

Sam nods, but seems unconvinced. “We can’t wait forever, man. I want you to have this, but Nat’s worried about the explosion yesterday. She thinks more’s coming.”

Steve’s stomach drops, guilt creeping in far faster than it has in the weeks he’s been here. He knows they’ve gone on missions without him, he knows the world still turns. “What explosion?”

“It’s all over the news.”

“Bucky’s radio is in Romanian.”

Sam sighs at him. “A guy targeting buildings that are high priority for reasons we don’t know. Think he’s looking for something. This kinda stuff happens every day, but nobody on our end gets twitchy until they see he’s wearing a mask, calling himself a funny name, and doing things no one can explain.”

Steve nods. They’re practically calling his name. He wonders if they’re leaving a message for him. He remembers what Nat said about your house being robbed when the thief knows you’re not home.

The other Avengers are more than capable of taking care of the world, but Steve’s not so much their leader as he is their public representative. He was made for the merchandise, he was made to be the face of hope.

“I’m not saying you have to go home,” Sam adds. “But I’m just saying, think real hard about what you’re missing.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, the word less deflated than he feels.

“We’re gonna have a talk about the appropriate uses of my counseling services later.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to Herăstrău Park. Look at nature or some shit.” He slides his sunglasses on and claps Steve’s shoulder. “Go get your boy.”

“I’m ready,” Bucky tells him, that night, like he knows there’s an hour glass slowly running out of sand to pour.

He takes Sam with him the next day, hovers at the door awkwardly, watching Bucky watch Sam with hesitation. Sam seems calm, sliding easily into his professional mindset, with the compassion and patience Steve’s never been more grateful for.

He hasn’t pressured Bucky, he knows that much, he hopes that much.

“Hey, brother, I’m Sam,” Sam introduces himself, offering his hand, giving Bucky the choice to come for it if he wants.

“Bucky,” he responds, something deliberate in it, like it’s a conscious decision to define himself this way. It’s the first time Steve’s heard him say his name.

The look on his face must say just that, because Sam turns to him.

“Maybe get lost a little,” Sam suggests, but it’s more like a command.

Steve raises an eyebrow. “That’s how it is?”

“Yeah, that’s how it is.” Sam grins to let them know they’re good.

Steve’s eyes flick to Bucky’s to find the same permission in them. Bucky nods and Steve goes for a walk.

There’s no hurry in healing, there’s no standing over someone to see if they’re ready to move on yet. It takes time and patience and care, and Steve is willing to provide that. He’s just not sure he has the luxury of doing so.

He’s pulled in two different directions, not because he wants to be in both directions. He couldn’t honestly say he’d rather be with Bucky than out doing what he can to save the world. He has a responsibility, even after everything he’s been through, and he wears that weight on his shoulders because he must.

He gets a flash of something he’d told Fury, stood in the headquarters of SHIELD before it came crashing down around them.

For as long as I can remember I just wanted to do what was right. I guess I'm not quite sure what that is anymore. And I thought I could throw myself back in and follow orders, serve. It's just not the same.

He wonders how many times he has to have a crisis of confidence before something sticks.

Steve finds an internet cafe and watches videos of the aftermath of the explosion, waiting for something to stick. He feels that stirring in his gut, the one that tells him he might have been able to stop it, he might have been able to help if he was there. Never mind that Natasha and the crew weren’t alerted to the threat until after the explosion happened.

There’s always been a singular mission. The SSR referred to Captain America, to the Commandos, as a bullet. The SSR puts them in a gun, aims, shoots, and they took care of the rest. The bullet doesn’t aim the gun. Steve wonders if it should.

He’d wondered the most in the aftermath, in the future, seventy years after being able to do something, what might have happened if they’d found the camps and targeted those instead of Hydra bases. Whether the exchange of lives would have been equal or if Steve faced the greater threat.

He closes the browser and leaves the cafe. He keeps his mind carefully empty and walks and walks until Sam texts him to come home. To come back to Bucky’s, that is.

He finds Sam leaned against the wall outside Bucky’s apartment building, his sunglasses folded and resting on his chest.

Steve puts his hands in his pockets and leans against the wall next to him. “How’d it go?”

Sam keeps his face passive, blinking out at the city as it starts to fade darker alongside the sun. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“He okay?”

“Can’t tell you that either, Cap.”

Steve chuckles at himself, mirthless and embarrassed, and reaches up to drag a hand over the back of his neck. “Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.”

He should go up to Bucky, he should see for himself, but he can’t get his feet to move. He’s not sure what he’ll find.

Sam stays still, and Steve thinks for a moment he’s waiting to be dismissed. In reality, he seems to be ramping up to say, “I don’t think I can keep talking to him.”

“I know he’s been through a lot -- ”

“It’s not that. It’s you,” Sam says, finally looking over at him. “He can’t talk to me about you, if he even needs to. I’ve got some buddies, a couple of psychologists, I can make you some connections you can trust, but. Not in Romania. Y’know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” The words taste like defeat in his mouth.

His mind races quickly through any sort of argument he might be able to give to get Bucky to leave this place. Any sort of argument he might give to stave off a potential manhunt. Natasha released so much information a few years ago that they’re still sorting through it. He knows Bucky must be in there, labeled a threat.

“He wants to talk to you, but. Be careful.”

“He’s not going to hurt me.” He’ll say it a hundred times if he has to, to everyone who asks him. To anyone who needs to know where Steve stands. It’s firm, beside Bucky, trusting in his own safety.

Sam just looks at him, doesn’t refute it and he doesn’t have to for Steve to know that the warning should be flipped. But Steve would never hurt Bucky either.

He finds Bucky standing at the sink in front of enough dishes for two, rinsing and scrubbing and rinsing the same cup until he threatens to wear a hole in it.

“Hey, Bucky.”

“Hey, Steve.”

He lets the familiarity wash over him. Then he goes for Bucky, gently removes the cup from his hand to set it aside, and turns off the water. He leans with his back against the sink, watching Bucky for what he wants, what he needs.

“Why’d you come find me?” Bucky asks.

“Because you’re my friend.” Because he believed Bucky needed him. Because he can't lose this one. Because he thinks he can do the most good. “Why'd you leave me by the river?”

Bucky ducks his head, something like shame in the action. “I didn't want to see fear in your eyes.”

“You're not going to hurt me,” Steve repeats. He’s going to say it a thousand times until someone finally believes him. Until they realize that what they are now, that’s something Hydra hasn’t programmed into them, that’s something SHIELD couldn’t break. It’s Steve and Bucky, and maybe nobody else understands what that means, but Steve does.

Bucky looks unconvinced, as unconvinced as he was the first time Steve said that to him. “There's more than one way to hurt. More than one meaning of fear.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Promise?” He sounds small, and he shouldn’t. Bucky’s never been small, not even when they were kids.

“Yeah, Buck,” Steve says softly, instead of fiercely, because they’ve had enough of that. This is the time to be gentle. “I promise.”

He slides his arms around Bucky’s waist, pulling him in for what could be a hug, but feels like something more. Maybe there’s something desperate about it, his hands pressing into Bucky’s back like he’s signaling his intention to never let go.

He’s held Bucky before, after funerals when they were just kids, while rescuing him. Always for support.

It’s warm and firm now, when Bucky’s arms slowly find their way around Steve’s to press back. He doesn’t feel the difference between Bucky’s arms, he only feels strength and safety and the idea that they might just be on the same level.

Steve rests his chin on Bucky’s shoulder, over where the scars might be, though that doesn’t occur to him until Bucky makes a gentle noise. It almost sounds like pain, which has Steve pulling back just a little to study Bucky’s face.

But then Bucky kisses him. It’s softer than Steve expects, a curious thing, but not exploratory. Steve still somehow manages to feel like the world’s been turned upside down, it feels like everything that’s ever been said about gravity was wrong, it feels perfect for a moment until it feels wrong.

Steve turns away slowly, fights the urge to gasp for breath like he’s just resurfaced from nearly drowning instead of a kiss light enough it might as well have been on his forehead. He’s reeling, stumbling, but somehow standing still.

“I’m sorry -- I shouldn’t -- ” Bucky cuts himself off. He looks stricken and Steve wants to comfort him, but he seems incapable.

“We didn’t -- we never -- You and me, we weren’t -- ” Steve stutters, lost for words for the first time in a long time, kiss drunk and mortified.

“I know. I remember,” Bucky says lowly. There’s something on his face that suggests just that, and if Steve wanted to kid himself, he’d think Bucky was showing regret.

Steve never wanted it like this -- he can’t remember if he wanted it at all back then, but the want now surfaces so quickly he must have felt it before. He doesn’t want it to be a product of Bucky’s rediscovery, something he thinks he has to do in order to heal instead of something he wants to do because Steve’s… Steve.

He gave Bucky this kiss, but won’t give another, not when the price is breaking his own heart.

There’s one less barrier between them after that, one less part of Bucky he doesn’t know. Steve’s not going to regret it, he’s not going to ask Bucky to take it back or explain. Steve knows what it is, a stolen kiss, one born from a craving for intimacy, to try to comprehend what Bucky’s learned in the last two years as he’s taken his life back, to try to make up for what’s been stolen from him for seventy years.

Steve has kissed people. It’s not the same for him. He’s had a date or two when he’s found the right girl, he’s kissed Nat technically -- one time he gave Thor an ugly wet cheek kiss when Stark accused him of having something up his ass and not in a good way. There have been kisses.

The last kiss he gave was for Peggy, the last time he saw her. Gently, on her forehead, wishing her the peace she deserved and mourning the life they might have had together.

He’s not dead, he’s not a celibate old man by any means. He hasn’t replaced want with the unfettered desire for freedom and justice.

Admittedly, freedom and justice do get in the way more than it should. Admittedly, Steve uses freedom and justice as a crutch to literally jump out of helicopters instead of agreeing to go on a date with anyone Natasha asks him to.

It’s about finding the right partner. He’s still got the rest of his life ahead of him to figure it all out. But they all expect him to have the answers, old and wise as he is. Steve’s never known how to admit that he doesn’t.

There’s something about the tender way Bucky’s ready to listen to him that has Steve spilling thoughts he’s had for years, bottled up because no one would understand, not even Peggy. Being a man out of time.

“How old do you think you are?” Steve asks.

“Ninety-nine.”

“No, I mean. How old are you? How do you -- count? The days you were awake?”

Bucky tilts his head in consideration. “Bucky Barnes was born in 1917. He’s ninety-nine years old.”

“But we haven’t lived ninety-nine years.” Steve sighs, rubbing his face like he can wipe the stress off it, but he can’t. “I don’t. Feel old. Almost a hundred years, and everyone expects that from me. But just. It feels like I’m still a kid. I’m still a kid and I still have no idea what I’m doing.”

He never knows what he’s doing, but he figures he hasn’t had to, not for a long time. Not when he’s a soldier and he serves, and someone’s got an eye on the big picture, on the higher purpose. A pawn, he can’t stop thinking, he’s a pawn, and they knew they could take advantage of him, and he let them take advantage of him.

They called it the deadliest military conflict in history, responsible for wiping out an entire generation.

There were kids who didn’t have the choice. Steve chased after the war, went out of his way to jump into it, and there were kids who were dragged to the front lines, conscripted, kicking and screaming.

“You know we were kids, right? We were just kids and they put the weight of the world on our shoulders.”

“I never felt like a kid,” Bucky admits.

Steve gets that too, kids those days, they had to grow up quick. They had to be fathers because their fathers weren’t around. They learned stuff on the streets while their mothers were working long shifts just to put some bread and soup on the table. How do you explain to a kid what a ration is? Why every letter could be the last one?

“I thought it was the adult thing to do,” Bucky says. “Thought I had to do it. My dad, your dad, you know, I thought maybe I could do something they couldn’t. Come out on the other side of the war, go home, stay with my family. Grow old. I thought it was just something I was supposed to do.”

“I never thought I’d get old.” Steve has never said it out loud, never so definitively.

When he was a kid, he’d pretended he couldn’t hear the doctor tell his mom he’d be lucky to live past age thirty-five, not with the growing list of ailments and more threatening to add to the list. Now he’s past ninety -- or maybe just edging closer to thirty-five, depending on how he looks at it.

If his heart didn’t get him, the war would. It just felt inevitable.

“You are old,” Bucky says, his tone light like it used to be whenever Steve used to get serious about his health.

Steve cracks back quickly, that old routine, Bucky’s a whole year older than him. “Well, if I’m old, you’re ancient.”

“Punk,” Bucky says, narrowing his eyes.

“Jerk,” Steve answers reflexively before his whole body shudders. He can’t help but feel like it’s a breakthrough, that something passes between them that’s familiar and right.

Seems like Bucky goes to work a lot less, not when Steve’s there. They spend more time sitting on Bucky’s balcony, listening to the market rumble like Steve listens to the trains behind his apartment and watching the way the sunset affects the rest of the sky, because Bucky’s apartment faces east.

“Have you talked to someone?” Bucky asks, in that careful way that Steve asks him questions sometimes. It feels… weird being on the receiving end of it. “About how you feel.”

He wants to say, yeah, I’m talking to you, but he knows what Bucky means. “No.”

Bucky nods, like he’s confirming what he already knew, and says, with the exasperation that comes with familiarity, “You’re not good at asking for help.”

Steve looks at him, an invitation to elaborate, which Bucky takes.

“You get it in your head that you can fix a problem that you can’t on your own, and then when you’re up to your knees in trouble and you can’t get out, that’s when -- ”

“You come for me,” Steve supplies. It had been the best thing about Bucky, the most frustrating thing about Bucky. He was always by Steve’s side, ready to fight for him when Steve couldn’t fight for himself. ‘Til the end of the line.

Bucky looks pained, which isn’t the reaction Steve was expecting. Steve meant to uplift him, to reaffirm his own importance in Steve’s life, to tell him he’s not just wanted, he’s needed.

“It’s not like that anymore.”

Steve shakes his head. “It can be.”

Bucky switches from pained to angry like a flip is switched, and Steve almost considers taking a step back with the force of it. “I’m not the same person, I’m not that Bucky Barnes.”

He says his name again, the full name like it’s foreign to him, the words passing his lips like they’re rusted over from disuse.

“I know -- ”

“I don’t think you do,” Bucky says like an accusation. “You call me by his name, you do it without even asking.”

“What do you want me to call you?”

“I don’t have a name,” he bites, like it’s a reflex.

Steve smarts, doesn’t want to think about what they told him to make him that way, to make him think he was nothing, to make him into a shell. “Yes, you do.”

“You can’t get him back. You get this. You get whatever this is.”

Bucky looks like he doesn’t think a whole lot of what he is now. He must still think of himself as the tool they made him into. Nothing without an order to guide him. He’s dissociated from Bucky. He has to have dissociated with the Winter Soldier. He couldn’t have done the things he’s done if he were still the Winter Soldier.

Steve knows Bucky is different, because his Bucky, the one he grew up with, he’d never have kissed Steve. Steve doesn’t honestly know what to do with this Bucky but keep him, hold onto him until he settles somewhere.

“I know that. That’s okay with me,” Steve says. He notes the way that does the opposite of what Steve wants it to do, makes Bucky’s face darken. So he adds, “Is that okay with you?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky admits, his voice low. “Are you the same Steve Rogers that Bucky Barnes knew? Are you the same person as when you had asthma, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, sinusitis, heart trouble -- ”

Steve starts to answer, but hesitates. He doesn’t actually -- know.

“You see things, you do things, and it makes you a different person,” Bucky says, landing what feels like devastating blows. “It’s not ever going to be like it was.”

Steve’s heard Sam say as much, in his meetings, which means Bucky was listening to him yesterday. Which means Bucky wasn’t heartened by it.

“It’s not just what I’ve been through as the Winter Soldier, it started with the war. The things you did to survive, the things you did to fight for me. How can you be Steve Rogers?”

It's true. Steve has changed everything about himself, even before he went to war. It’s not supposed to matter that when he looks in the mirror, he doesn’t see himself. That who he is now is a far sight from what he thought he’d be when he was thirty. He hasn’t tried to imagine that life Bucky talked about -- the one where he stays home and has a family -- he doesn’t think that’s ever been possible for him.

He tries to say he’s Steve Rogers, he does try.

“You can be Bucky Barnes if you want to. You get to decide who he is. And I can be Steve Rogers. I am,” he corrects himself. “I am Steve Rogers.”

Bucky almost looks disappointed in him. “Why haven’t you talked to someone?”

“Buck,” he says, stopping up, but he can’t take it back now that it’s out there. “I’m fine.”

He can’t afford not to be fine, not when everything he’s become is by his own design, as much as it could be. It’s in the nature of the soldier to do what you’re told, to take the weight of the world when they give it to you. Steve asked for that. As much as it worries him now, he asked for that. He asked so much he committed fraud. He wanted this. He did.

Bucky doesn’t believe him, looks incredulous with it. “Are you?”

Steve shrugs. “Yeah, I don’t need -- ”

“What? Fixing?”

“I didn’t say that,” Steve argues, but he doesn’t know what he was actually going to say. It’s not about him, the focus shouldn’t ever be on him, it should be on others, and how they need help more than Steve does.

“You have no idea, do you?” he says, but Steve can’t tell if it’s another accusation or just pity.

Bucky gets up and leaves Steve on the balcony.

Steve isn't supposed to know how to give up, how to do nothing. But he doesn’t know what to do when Bucky leaves him cracked open and exposed. Asks him questions Steve doesn’t know the answer to. Complicates things a little further into the grey, far far away from the black and white that’d make Steve’s life that much easier to live by.

He sits on the balcony until he can’t anymore, until maybe Bucky’s cooled off, but not until Steve’s thought of something to say to him. He’s not broken, he doesn’t think he is.

Bucky has a laptop on the table, Steve didn’t even know he had one. There’s a long wire strung across the room, plugged into the wall by the dresser that Steve has to step over to get to him. Whatever he’s watching sounds brutal, rumbling like the earth is shaking, people screaming in terror. It’s a sound Steve recognizes, has heard too often in his life, but it always surrounds him, like an occupational hazard.

“Do you know what happens when you type Steve Rogers into the internet?” Bucky asks, his voice a dangerous sort of low that Steve hasn’t heard from him, not even as the Winter Soldier. “When you type Captain America?”

He turns his screen around. It’s footage of Sokovia. Steve looks away from it, to Bucky’s face, but the image there isn’t much better. It’s pain, it’s grief. Everywhere Steve looks, that’s what he sees.

“Do you see what you’ve done?” Bucky looks down at the screen. “More people died that day than I killed as the Winter Soldier.”

Steve knows, he’s seen post-mission briefs. He’s seen the Sokovian efforts to erase what the Avengers had done to them. He’s held Wanda so she didn’t try to go back home, so she didn’t fall apart. He’s seen the way the country has crumbled, unable to rebuild, unable to repopulate, to heal.

Steve knows just what he’s done, what he could have done to stop it.

“I can say that definitively,” Bucky says, something empty in it. Steve expects him to get angry, to cry, to show something, and it’s unnerving when he shows nothing. “I remember every one of them, I can see their faces. I know what it looked like when I took the light from their eyes. It wasn’t like this.”

“I didn’t,” Steve starts, but stops when he realizes the end of that sentence is kill those people. “I tried to help those people.”

“Is that what makes you better than me? That these people were just collateral damage? That you didn’t see the whites of their eyes as they lost their lives?”

“There’s no comparison, Bucky, you didn’t have a choice.” He doesn’t believe Bucky killed the people he did -- the Winter Soldier did, Hydra did. The distinction is everything.

“I am responsible. I could have fought them until they killed me. Die rather than to be Hydra’s tool. Don’t tell me I didn’t have a choice.” Bucky tears his eyes away from the screen, fixes Steve with a look that cuts right through him. “We were on the same side, you just didn’t know it.”

Steve can’t argue, not even for a moment.

He thinks of the shame rising to color his face as he kept the secret from Peggy. He didn’t want all of her work to be for nothing. He didn’t want any of his own work to have been for nothing. He didn’t want to have lost everything for nothing.

It makes Steve sick, his mouth twisting like he’s threatening to vomit, reminding him all over again why he doesn’t want to linger on it. He could chant over and over in his head, we didn’t do anything wrong, we didn’t do anything wrong. He could do that. He’s just not sure if it’s right.

Leaving the Avengers is supposed to be a benign concern -- there, but not acted upon, not threatening to rupture or metastasize. But the way Bucky keeps nudging him, the way he challenges Steve on every reason why he hasn’t quit so far. The concern is starting to become a threat instead.

“Then help me,” Steve says.

Bucky laughs, unimpressed. “What’s that? The blind leading the blind.”

“You’re not blind.”

Bucky slaps the laptop shut. “How did you think this was going to go? A couple of hugs and talks and plums and runs, and then I'd be ready? I could just let it all go?”

Steve startles. “Of course not.”

“You can’t solve this in a week.”

“Bucky, I know.”

Only it hasn’t been a week, it’s been years, of Bucky assimilating himself into a world he knows nothing about, of Steve out destroying what was left of Hydra. There’s been a lifetime between now and the last time they truly saw each other, and somehow also a lifetime between the Winter Soldier and today. That’s gotta mean something.

“I just wanted to help, I just wanted to help you move on,” Steve says like a plea. “It doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to be -- ”

“Broken?”

“Powerless,” Steve counters. But he does feel powerless again, sliced open and vulnerable, even as he wants Bucky to feel anything but. “Bucky.”

It doesn't end with an explosion, they don't go at each other’s throats. Bucky shutters closed, his face pressed into his hands, like he’s suddenly reached his limit for the day. Minutes pass and nothing happens, no shift between them, no hint the next jab is coming. It’s like Bucky’s given up, or maybe it’s more like he’s decided he didn’t want Steve at all.

Steve takes that as his dismissal. He leaves feeling wounded, exhausted in that way he does after a fight, when all he wants is a respite. To go home and lick his wounds. And ideally get ready to fight another day. Only he’s not sure he’s got another one of these in him.

Nobody makes him feel more like a kid than Bucky. Nobody takes him back to feeling like he’s seventeen, got five cents in his pocket, holes in his shoes, itching for a fight or something to prove he’s worth the space he takes up on this earth.

Nobody can hurt him like Bucky, could hit him where he’s weakest because nobody knows him like Bucky. Could target his doubt with precision and twist the knife until he crumbles to the ground.

There’s more than one way to hurt.

Sam opens the door to the motel before Steve can even the key out of his pocket.

“You’re back early,” he says. He crosses his arms as he leans against the frame instead of letting Steve through.

“We fought.”

Sam tenses, steeling his jaw.

“Verbally,” Steve clarifies, which seems to be the password to getting into the room.

He was so bolstered by one of the first things Bucky said to him, I think I wanted you to find me, I think I hoped you would. He never stopped to think the fact that he did would get thrown back in his face. He never stopped to think maybe Bucky wasn’t trying to find himself.

“I don’t -- I don’t know what I’m doing,” Steve admits, feeling like he should have said that an hour ago, when Bucky wanted him to. It’s too little too late, but he’s trying to ask for help.

Sam nods like that’s fair enough and says, “That doesn’t surprise me.”

That gets as much of a wry bark of laughter from Steve before he sinks down onto the edge of his bed, focusing on the familiar way it creaks as he puts his head in his hands.

He wanted Bucky to talk to him, he wanted to know what was going on inside him, he wanted to comb through what was left and find the good. He didn’t want the Bucky that comes laced with acid.

He tells Sam everything the way that he wishes Bucky would tell him everything. The way Bucky wanted him to reach out for help. He stumbles through trying to explain the kiss, trying to put into words what it’s like being a man out of his own time. He’s nearly desperate with it, this one plea for help.

“You know they used to call me the Star-Spangled Man with a Plan,” Steve says. “Ironic, considering I never had any clue what the hell I was doing.”

He never knows what the hell he’s doing. Not when he finds himself in the middle of a fight in the alley behind the movie theater, not when he signs up to be a science experiment, not when he dives thirty miles behind enemy lines to save the best friend he’s ever had in the world. He’s done it first, thought about it second, and only by some sort of luck, he’s made it out alive.

Maybe that luck has ran out.

The bed dips beside Steve as Sam sits down next to him, a solid presence for Steve in the way Steve somehow can’t be for Bucky. “You’re grieving, Steve. Did you know that?”

Steve’s heart lurches at the thought, at the realization that maybe this is what it feels like. He doubts he’s had the luxury of grief before. Not when his mom died, because he’d had to fend for himself, be strong enough so he didn’t drown. Not when Bucky died, because there was still work to be done. Not when he woke up from the ice to find everything he’s ever known to be gone, because he was brought back for a purpose.

And now he’s trying to fill the void Peggy’s death left in him with this, with whatever this is. He’s known her death threw into sharp relief everything else he’s lost, everything else he could have but doesn’t. But he’s not filling the hole Peggy left inside him, he’s just remembered the one Bucky left there is still wide open.

He’s still so desperate to fill it, with hope, promise, comfort, love, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t have a damn clue.

“I’m grieving,” Steve admits.

“Nobody who’s grieving knows what the hell they’re doing,” Sam says, with a gentle hand to Steve’s back. “And to be fair about the rest of it, nobody has ever done what you do before. There’s gonna be a learning curve.”

Steve pulls his hands away from his face to smile weakly over at him. “If this is the grace period, I’d hate to see what it looks like when they stop forgiving me.”

“I know we’re talking the big picture here too, and we’ll get to that eventually, trust me,” he says with a firm point of his finger. “But let me say something about Bucky.”

“Yeah?”

“He’s gonna get angry, Steve. He’s gonna shout at you, he’s gonna blame everything on you, because you’re the only one here who’ll listen. Because you’re the only one who’s asking. Because he’s grieving too.”

“How do you deal with that?”

“You treat it with patience, with compassion and empathy. You let him be right when he’s right, even if it hurts. And you coach him when he’s wrong. He’s had two years alone with his thoughts and nobody to come knocking.”

Steve isn’t so sure he believes that. It’s been two years, and maybe somebody’s tried to talk to Bucky before and maybe somebody’s failed. But he also isn’t so sure he can separate the fact that he’s Steve and that Bucky’s Bucky, and what’s passed between them tonight isn’t directly related to their past, to who they are and what they’ve done.

“So I shouldn’t have come knocking?”

Sam crooks an eyebrow at him and says, flatly, “I wouldn’t have followed you half way around the world if I didn’t think you were supposed to come knocking. The question is, why did you?”

Steve has been so fixated, all his waking hours outside of the Avengers devoted to this one thing, to find Bucky. He thought he’d had a plan, an idea what to do, but Bucky was right. He didn’t think through how it was supposed to go. He didn’t think about any of it, other than the all-encompassing need to be with Bucky. Not to bring him in, not to bring him home. Just to be with him.

It sounds stupid, when he puts it into words, and that’s what keeps him from spilling them out of his mouth. He has no right, no claim on Bucky, not when the man who left him by the river was guaranteed to be anyone other than the Winter Soldier.

He was practically obsessive about it. He wonders what the cost was. He remembers the look on Natasha’s face when she finally called him on it.

“I have you. I have Nat. I have the rest of them. I have so much. But I’ve lost so much.” He remembers how Bucky had explained it. It’s so easy to focus on the bad. He’s not in a hurry to discredit the good. The people who have been his life, who’ve saved it. “If I could just -- I didn’t want to lose all of it. I can’t lose him again, not when he’s standing right there. I don’t know what to do.”

Sam claps a hand on his shoulder. “I can’t tell you what to do, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m happy to be the one rational person in your life, ‘cause god knows you’ve got more than your fair share of personalities. But you have to learn how to extrapolate.”

“Extrapolate,” Steve repeats.

“Yeah, it means take my brilliant wisdom and apply it on a broader scale to your own problems. Extrapolate. Ideally in the form of a plan.”

“Right now it feels like I’m supposed to extrapolate it back to the States and leave him in peace.”

“Okay. You gonna do that?”

“I can’t leave him.”

“Why not?”

Steve knows as soon as he said it, it’s not what he wants. But it might be what he has to do. He couldn’t explain to the world why he’d throw it all away, why Bucky’s worth any of it when he can’t even tell if Bucky would have him. He wants more than anything for Bucky to have him.

He wants for himself, for the first time in a long time, if not ever, driven by selfishness that manages to taste both bitter and sweet on his tongue. The more he thinks about it, the less murky everything seems to become with the more thought he puts into it.

“You love him?” Sam guesses.

And Steve’s first thought is yes, but his second is, “Am I allowed to?”

“I don’t know, Cap, are you?”

In the end Steve’s answer, related or not, comes as a phone call, another mission, but this one isn’t some faceless threat, another enemy Steve didn’t know was an enemy until some council told him so. This one Steve knows, this one Steve’s responsible for.

“It’s Rumlow,” Natasha says. Then, “Steve.”

He only has a single word for her. “Okay.”

He’s always going to go back. He’s always going to serve. He doesn’t have a choice. It’s never been a choice. It’s been a duty, a responsibility. Just because it’s easier to live without it doesn’t mean he should.

He asked for this. He asked Erskine for a chance, he asked Peggy for her help, he asked Colonel Phillips for his men, he asked Sam for his support, he asked the Avengers for their loyalty.

There are moments when he’s Steve Rogers, the sick kid from Brooklyn, and Steve Rogers, Captain America, and he doesn’t know how to reconcile that. But there are always going to be things he’s firm on, things that don’t change about him no matter who or what he is. It’s going to be that responsibility. It’s going to be the idea that being stagnant could mean death. It’s the idea that he’s got the ability to help, so he’s going to help.

And Bucky was right too, about the collateral damage, about all of it. But the destruction that his fights leave in their wake doesn’t mean the bad guys won anyway. It’s giving up the next fight that means the bad guys won. Steve can try to save as many people as he can, he can do the most good, knowing he can’t do it all. He knows he can’t save them all.

But if he doesn’t find a way to live with that, if he doesn’t make peace with the fact that he’s trying his best, and the fact that he’s trying at all means something… then next time maybe nobody gets saved. That’s part of Steve’s plan.

Sam confirms, “Going home?”

Maybe that also means leaving Bucky this time, with the thought that if he had found Bucky once, he’d do it again. Or if Bucky wanted to find him, it’s no secret where he’ll be or what he’s doing. He tries to be okay with that, but it hurts him to say, “Yeah, we’re going home.”

There’s a knock on the door when they have half of their bags packed. They tense, fingers slowly curling into fists, primed for action, until they hear Bucky’s muffled voice on the other side, “Steve?”

Steve doesn’t know how to explain it other than crushing relief when he finds Bucky on the other side of the door. He wants to launch at Bucky, hold him close and apologize for spending the last hour or two convincing himself he could leave. He doesn’t spare a thought for how Bucky found him, other than a small throwback to when he wondered whether Bucky was watching him too.

“Hey, Steve,” Bucky says. Steve wonders if it’s possible to get addicted to the sound of his name in someone else’s voice.

“Hey, Buck.” He opens the door further, steps aside to let Bucky further in.

“I’m just gonna,” Sam starts, trailing off until he follows it with, “not be in the room.” He slides past the two of them, raising his eyebrows at Steve for confirmation, and Steve gives him a short nod. Sam shuts the door behind himself.

When Steve turns back to him, Bucky has eyes on the open suitcases on Steve’s bed. “You going somewhere?”

“Duty calls.” Steve doesn’t follow it up with but I didn’t want it to. Not without seeing this through, not without knowing.

Bucky doesn’t look happy about it, but resigned. Like maybe he always knew they’d reach this point. Steve wonders what he thought would happen next. As much as Steve didn’t have a plan, he wonders if Bucky had one. When he’d hoped Steve would find him, he had to have imagined what would have happened.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky says, “about earlier today.”

“I’m sorry too.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow like he doesn’t think Steve has anything to apologize about, but he does.

“It’s good to apologize,” Steve says. If Bucky felt pressured, frustrated, powerless, unworthy. If Steve made him feel that way. “You weren’t wrong. About me, about the job.”

“I didn’t want to be right.”

Steve throws up a hand to stop him, a wry smile on his face. “You’re not right about everything.”

Bucky chances a smile back to him. “Yeah?”

“Not about you,” Steve says, quick to follow it up when Bucky’s face drops as he expects it to. “Whoever you end up being, I still want that.”

“How do you know?”

“Because there’s more of my Bucky in it than you think. I see him in your smile, I feel him when you touch me, I hear him when you talk to me. Maybe it’s not all Bucky in there, but you’ve got all the things I loved about my best friend. That’s enough for me. He was a good man.”

Bucky’s voice shakes when he says, not asks, “He took care of you.”

“He did.” He’d ask that of Bucky again and again, that whatever else Bucky decided to be, he’d hopefully still want to be there for him, ‘til the end of the line, with his uncanny knack for knowing when Steve needs him most, even when Steve doesn’t ask for him. Everything else is up for the taking.

“I knew it wasn’t going to be the same,” Steve says. “I knew this was going to be different. And if I had any doubt about that, it got erased when you kissed me.”

Bucky winces. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

Steve wishes Bucky didn’t have to take it back. He wishes that he’d dedicated more time to memorizing how the press of their lips felt, because he’s afraid that it won’t happen again.

Bucky clears his throat and adds, “I should have taken you to dinner first.”

But then again, Bucky has always been full of surprises. He gets Steve’s heart pounding a different way than adrenaline does. He doesn’t want to be joking when he tells Bucky, “I know a place. In Brooklyn. They do a meatball special there Saturday nights. Twice the size of my mom’s.”

“Brooklyn,” Bucky says, like he’s trying the word out, his face nearly going wistful with it. “There are things I feel, Steve, sometimes they feel like echoes, sometimes they feel like someone’s shouting in my ear. And so much of it is about you.”

Steve almost lets hope knock him over like a strong wave. That it’s not just cleverness that’s got Bucky offering to take him to dinner, that there’s something genuine that Bucky’s constructed just for himself, whether Steve wanted him or not.

“I don’t know how much of what I hear I want to hold onto,” Bucky continues, “but I’d hold onto every whisper of you I get. It’s gotten me through a lot, and I’d be stupid to say I didn’t think I needed it. That it didn’t get me this far. That it wouldn’t keep me going when the rest of it hurts too much.”

Steve would give that to him, whatever he needed, whatever whispers of the past, whatever promises of the future he needs. He asks, “Do you want to forget the rest of it?”

Bucky’s eyes flash dangerously, his body goes tense just with the thought. “No. I won’t forget anything else. Don’t take anything from me.”

“I won’t. I wouldn’t.” He wants to touch Bucky somewhere, to press his sincerity into Bucky’s skin, to hold him as Bucky’s held him before. He settles for a hand high on his chest, above his heart, just out of reach of the pulse point of his neck. Bucky doesn’t shy away.

“What do you want?” Steve asks.

It seems to take a lot out of Bucky to admit, “Absolution.” He presses against Steve’s hand like he’s flagging, like he’s threatening to collapse at any moment.

Steve wants to help him find it, he knows instantly the next part of the plan. “Come back to New York with me.”

Bucky frowns at him, something like disbelief there too. “And do what you do?”

“Yes,” he answers firmly.

Bucky takes a step back, the videos he’s seen clearly passing in front of his eyes, twisting the look on his face into something close to horror. Steve hadn’t expected that from him. Bucky should know, better than anyone, that Steve doesn’t know how to give up the good fight.

“You trust them?” Bucky asks. “When they tell you your mission? Do you ask questions? Or do you comply?”

“I have to do what’s right.”

“How do you tell what’s right?”

“You trust,” Steve says gently, as much for himself as he does for Bucky. “And you take the blame when it all goes wrong.”

He gets it then, why Bucky isn’t comfortable shifting the blame from himself to Hydra. He gets why Bucky wants to keep his tragedies, to be held accountable. “You don’t want to erase it. Don’t. You can learn to live with the things you feel responsible for, even if it was out of your hands. So will I.”

He can tell the moment Bucky cracks, when he sees reason blooming instead of fear, or maybe hope instead of fear. Steve keeps at it, until the cracks give way and all of Bucky’s fear shatters.

“You wanted me to find you, and I did. You want me to take you home, then I will. You want absolution, then I will give you the chance to get it. And I’ll stand beside you as you do. I’m not losing you again.” He goes for Bucky again, both hands on his chest this time until Bucky softens under him.

“So come with me.”

Bucky’s eyes are wet when he finally comes to his decision. Together they formulate a plan.

They’ll leave all of it behind. They’ll leave his fading clothes and his furnishings. Leave the journal full of reasons to lock Bucky up behind -- although, realistically, he’ll probably ask Natasha to recover it eventually, just so Steve can bury it.

They’ll take with them over ninety years of history, known and unknown, to work through. They’ll make a home again in the same place they started, but that home will be whatever they need it to be now. He’ll guard Bucky with his life, ensure his homecoming’s safety, no matter who he has to fight, until they all see what Steve sees, until Bucky sees what Steve sees. Until they find something like peace.

~~----~~

Notes:

Thank you very much for reading.

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