Chapter Text
Steve knocks at the door to their hotel room and waits at the entrance, shuffling his feet. He hears the door chain slide open, a lock clicks, and the door opens silently. Bucky gestures him inside and Steve follows him, sitting next to him on the bed.
“I’m sorry,” Steve says, looking at Bucky. “I shouldn’t have pushed you…” he takes in a breath, “you didn’t do anything wrong. I thought I was helping you, but I couldn’t take a step back and listen to you.”
Bucky sucks in his bottom lip as he thinks.
“I don’t wanna be like this,” he says eventually, sounding out the words like he’s not sure they’re true. “You think it’s hard being around me for a day? I’m stuck with…I’m stuck like this.” He folds his hands in his lap. “I’m trying. I promise, I’m trying so hard it’s killing me.”
“I know,” Steve says weakly.
Silence passes between them. Bucky doesn’t appear to mind it, and Steve wants to rip his own skin off with every passing second that drags on.
“I just want them to leave me alone,” Bucky breaks the silence.
“Me too,” Steve mutters. “They never do.”
Bucky huffs out a humorless laugh. “Great.
“You’d think everyone’d get bored of watching me at some point. I never do anything.”
“You know, I once found my picture in one of those tabloids at the grocery store. ‘Captain America: losing a love life,’ that’s what the headline said.”
Bucky’s stares at him, wide-eyed. “You’re not gonna believe this,” He says before grabbing his backpack, sifting through its contents, pulling out a notebook, and flipping through the pages. He finds the one he was looking for and hands it to Steve expectantly.
There, staring him right in the face, is the awkward paparazzi photo of him plastered over the aforementioned headline, clipped to the notebook page messily. “Where’d you even find this?” Steve asks.
“No idea. I wasn’t…thinking, really.” It’s then that Steve’s eyes fall on the page next to the tabloid ad, which has been crammed full of several different languages’ worth of rambling that Steve probably wouldn’t be able to piece together even if it was written in English. Words overlap each other haphazardly; an edge of the page has been torn off.
“I have one of those too,” Steve mentions offhandedly as he hands him back the notebook. “Helped me catch up on everything. I had this list of…movies, mostly.”
“Were they any good?”
“I think so. I’d like to say I remember them, but…I guess they weren’t really my top priority.”
“I don’t remember any of this,” Bucky says, tossing the book in the air with one hand and catching it in the other. “Helped keep my head on straight when HYDRA lost me, so it was good for something, I guess.”
With that, he tucks it back in his bag carefully. He lays back, hands folded in his lap, and stares at the ceiling.
There never used to be these many breaks in their conversations, not before the war.
Wakanda was different, in every perceivable way. Steve can barely string together the memories from that period of his life if he tries; so much was going on at once, with no time to rest aside from his occasional visits with Bucky. There’d been plenty of silence then, too. Steve took on most of the responsibility of carrying conversations, something he’d never done before.
Bucky took to staring off into space, trailing off mid-sentence, pausing before every response. It wasn’t that he couldn’t talk. The quiet just didn’t bother him, even when it stretched on for minutes.
So Steve trained himself to accept it, even on the days when all he wanted to do was grill Bucky and figure out exactly what was bothering him, do whatever he could to fix it.
He’s beginning to think he can’t fix much of anything. But he can stick around him, as long as Bucky doesn’t shut him out.
He’ll keep trying. He’s never going to give up on him, doesn’t matter what happens.
Hopefully Bucky will catch onto that at some point.
“You got anywhere you need to be?” Steve asks, hopeful.
“Nope.”
“Wanna stay in for the day?”
Bucky eyes him skeptically, but doesn’t protest. “Sure.”
Steve doesn’t let his excitement show on his face.
-
They stay inside all day. Steve runs downstairs every 3 hours to grab them food, and Bucky never leaves the hotel room. Mid-afternoon he decides to open the window, but that’s as far as he gets.
They sit around without saying a word. Steve catches up on checking his emails, a tedious process he normally avoids until he has nothing else to do, while Bucky parses through a magazine someone left in the drawer of their bedside table. Steve maps out his next run while Bucky polishes a few scuffs on his arm.
Later, they talk. They gripe about modern music, and Steve argues that it’s not all that bad, and Bucky asserts that it absolutely is. They joke back and forth, not with the same energy that they used to be able to muster up, but Steve feels himself growing nostalgic for conversations he’d done his best to forget after he lost Bucky the first time.
Eventually the conversation shifts to their respective times waking up in the 21st century. Bucky doesn’t do much of the talking, especially at first.
“I thought I’d lost my mind when I ran out into Times Square and saw all those billboards. I thought I must’ve been in purgatory. It was weeks before I was able to get it through my head that I was stuck here,” Steve says.
“I hate all the noise. I was…I mean, it was always loud in Brooklyn. That was fine. But all the speakers, the cars, the subway, the goddamn ads…feels like my brain’s exploding,” Bucky chimes in.
“And it never stops, doesn’t matter how late it is,” Steve adds. “Took me a while to get used to that. It used to scare me, you know that? The colors, the lights, the noise, everyone moving so fast. Couldn’t tell anyone, either, ‘cause then I’d look like a crazy old geezer.”
“You are a crazy old geezer,” Bucky says, shrugging. “Think we both are.”
Another period of quiet settles over them.
“I missed you,” Steve tells him. It hits him pretty quickly that that was probably the wrong thing to say, but he doesn’t take it back.
Bucky doesn’t say anything. He picks at the edge of the comforter and stares at the ground.
Carefully, Steve shifts his weight so he’s sitting right next to Bucky and rests a hand on his shoulder. And he thinks.
He thinks about waking up alone, unaware of any living person from his past. He thinks about how he never visited Bucky’s family, because they were so far-removed from Steve that he figured he couldn’t connect with any of them. He thinks about visiting Peggy, her memories fading so quickly Steve could do nothing to help.
He thinks about seeing Bucky on the overpass in D.C., wanting nothing more than to grab him and shake out whatever HYDRA had shoved into his head. Wishing for years that he could catch a glimpse of him, just to know he was alive , but losing him again. And again. And again.
And he stops thinking. He pulls Bucky in with both arms, barely clocking the startled noise he makes. He rests his chin on Bucky’s shoulder, twisted sideways in a position awkward enough that he really should move, but he doesn’t.
It takes a moment, but Bucky returns the embrace tentatively. He’s calm - calmer than Steve by a mile, but that isn’t saying much, since Steve is about to fall apart at the seams. He’s gripping Bucky’s back like he’ll wither away if he lets go, but he can’t bring himself to do anything else.
“You okay?” Bucky asks, and Steve really doesn’t know how to answer that.
“I just missed you,” Steve says, his voice muffled by Bucky’s shoulder.
“Me too,” Bucky replies quietly.
Steve squeezes him tight, one last time, and lets him go.
And he doesn’t leave. He doesn’t run. He doesn’t disappear.
He tilts his head to the side, studying Steve like he’s something curious, and he smiles.