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The thing people tended to forget about Steve was that he was a solider long before he was an Avenger.
And sure, it’s obvious. His name is plastered on every piece of military propaganda there is. He went on a war tour in the 40s, there are loads of videos as proof. But they don’t know, they can’t possibly remember that he has an army mentality at heart.
Steve had never been in a battalion but he had been among them. You never give up, you never give in. You fight down to your last man. And when your last man is down you leave behind the body and move on.
But god, it was never supposed to be Bucky.
If Steve closed his eyes and scrunched up his face he could still see it. The two of them, running around in a sprinkler during a day to hot to go to school, playing street hockey with the high schools boys and getting their asses handed to them. Bucky, looking at him helpless, beginning to break apart and slowly drift into the wind.
No, no, no.
He could still hear Okoye wailing behind him. She had lost her King, Shuri her brother. What had he lost, to deserve to be kneeling on the ground next to a lack of a body?
The love of your life, the traitorous voice inside his head provided.
“Shut up,” he muttered under his breath, because it wasn’t anything new. He had wanted to sign up for the army to protect Bucky. He risked his life to protect Bucky, after earning a place of national honor. And then when he had thought Bucky was dead, as he well should have been seventy years into the future— It’s weird to still think of it like that, Steve recognized, you’ve been in the future for about eight years now— he went berserk. When he found out Bucky was alive he finally realized why. Fury, in one of their many “let’s catch Steve up” sessions had told him about how different the world was, socially. Example number one; Nick Fury, notable black man, leading a government agency.
Example number two: Sometimes men married men now, and most of the country was okay with it.
And oh, how that was music to Steve’s ears. He remembered one of those cold nights, the kind of bitter cold it only gets when you’re poor in New York, that he and Bucky had slept in the same bed, and wrapped themselves around each other for the extra heat. They were barely teens, but it’s still one of his happiest memories.
He hopes it’s one of Bucky’s too.
Or was, because now everything about Bucky has to be past tense, because now Bucky is… gone.
Steve likes that word, gone. It’s less scary than missing in action, less insidious than dead.
Because Bucky isn’t dead, he isn’t, he can’t be.
Not after everything Steve gave up for him. His work, to chase Bucky around the globe, his job defending the world and the universe to keep Bucky safe. Hell, he even gave up Buck himself a year and a half before, letting him stay in Wakanda to regain himself while Steve was left to run around the world, never staying in a city for more than a week at a time.
“God damn it, Barnes,” he hissed, looking at some of the ashes, some of the Bucky left in his hands. “You can’t do this to me.”
He felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned his head to see Thor behind him. The two of them had always had something of an understanding, feeling confused and out of place in Earth, having a loyalty to something besides the Avengers higher than themselves.
It seems odd almost, that they were joking around with each other not ten minutes before. They were the Avengers, after all. They had never met a battle which they couldn’t win.
Thor gave him a look, one that said I know. I know what it’s like to lose a brother. I just lost him, and I know.
It made Steve want to scream, because Bucky sure as hell wasn’t his brother. Bucky was his best friend, his partner in crime, his everything.
Bucky was the reason he had taken up the Captain America mantle in the first place. More war bonds meant more money for the US Army. More money for the US Army meant they could spend more bringing Sergeant James Buchannan Barnes home safely. All of it had always been for Bucky.
Steve held his free hand close to his face. Wanda, Sam, and T’Challa were all… disappeared. Tony was god knows where. Vision was dead.
And Bucky, well, Bucky was the one thing he was going to get right.
He stood, back still to the remainder of his team. He was almost afraid to look behind him, worried someone else would have drifted. “We’re going to get them back,” he said. He could hear the slight moving of heads in nods behind him, could still hear Okoye’s crying. “All of them. We’re going to get all of them back.”
And he meant it too. If we had to strangle Thanos with his bare hands he was going to get them back. If he had to crash his plane into the arctic again, he was going to get them back. If he had to turn himself in to the American government, or betray them again, he was going to get him back.
Oh.
How easily them became he. Because he cared about the rest of them, he truly did. But it was always about Bucky, it would always be about Bucky.
If he had to walk through the gates of hell and drag Bucky out he would, because Bucky at least owed him that much.
Steve Rogers was a soldier. Soldiers never give up, never give in. They fight down to their last man, and when that man is down they movie on.
But for Bucky, Steve was going to be an Avenger.