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None of the Avengers-- of Steve’s friends-- get a funeral. There’s no dinner at the tower because there’s no way to get back to the tower. Tony is God knows where and those of them remain on Wakanda are left, literally, in the dust. The tower-- the world they knew, might not even exist anymore. This wouldn’t be the first time Steve has had to deal with such a thing. At this point, rebuilding is no longer sorrowful. It has become a nuisance at best.
Steve retires to Bucky’s Wakandan hut; a place so full of his best friend, his lover, that he fears it’ll make him sick to his stomach. He stays, though, because this is the closest thing he has to a home now. Brooklyn, for all he knows, is just as decimated as Wakanda is and there’s no home for him to go back to there. There hasn’t been since he got shipped off and found Bucky in combat, strapped down to a bed and pumped full of a bastardized version of the serum that Steve himself had been given.
Now, though, there is no serum to bring Bucky back from the grave. No magic trick or finale of a vanishing act to bring him back. There are only ruins.
Steve retires to Bucky’s Wakandan hut and spends his days tending to what little order Bucky had established inside his home. He tends to the flowers every morning, cooks breakfast for the goats and feeds them, keeping those that survived-- only half-- alive. Natasha comes and visits him every morning, rapping on the door, trying to coax Steve out, asking if he wants to join the others of them who had survived. He declines. She never breaches the door and Steve is thankful for that. He supposes that she understands just as well as Steve what it is like to lose the only thing that keeps you hanging onto this life.
He wonders if there is another life.
He wonders that, maybe in another timeline or universe, somewhere far away from himself, if Bucky is alive and it is he who has landed in the grave. He swears that he would give anything for that right now; anything to see Bucky alive.
Or maybe, he often daydreams, though dreams are somewhat futile without Bucky to partake in them, if there is a possibility that somewhere, anywhere, they are still two kids in Brooklyn, running around the city and are up to no good and Bucky is always there to pull Steve out of fights and his punches never miss and he always brings Steve home at the end of the night.
And everything is okay again.
Steve tries not to think about that too often, though.
Steve retires to Bucky’s Wakandan hut and keeps himself busy during the day, always setting aside time to venture to where he and Bucky had sat countless times, watching the sunset while encircled in each other’s arms. It was the future together-- with some modifications-- that they had always dreamed of and thought they would be denied of. And they were, eventually, but only after the world gave them both a taste of what exactly they would be missing.
He honors their ritual and watches the Wakandan sunset every night. It was different than the ones they had watched in Brooklyn; no less beautiful, though. Just different.
Steve sits outside alone, waiting until the setting sun pulls a cover of darkness and stars over him before heading back into Bucky’s home. The dark consumes him even with the little dim lights that illuminate the small space, and he sits. And sits. And sits, trying to find Bucky again, trying to will him back to life even if it means that he himself will turn to dust. It would be a worthy sacrifice, he decides.
But Bucky never comes.
So Steve, in his new traditions-- one of the few he has made without Bucky-- sits down at the desk opposite at the big-enough-for-two bed and pulls out one of Bucky’s hardly-filled journals. He had a few that he used constantly-- ones that had followed him from Romania and God-knows wherever else and beyond, all the way back to Wakanda, where he and Steve had spent long, often tearful nights, with Bucky recounting all the horror stories as he could muster, explaining to Steve how he tried to find himself again after being left with nothing but a shell.
Steve doesn’t touch those ones anymore.
Steve doesn’t touch Bucky’s pages in the less-filled ones, either. He only touches the pages in the back of the notebook. It is filled with the remains of perforated edges now-- the torn off, forgotten corners and edges of paper that Steve keeps stealing from Bucky’s notebook. He takes another few, trying to carefully remove them.
He sets the paper in front of him, the blank, daunting stack that will not doubt be filled by the end of the night and--
He remembers Peggy’s funeral.
Steve got to say goodbye to Peggy-- she had a beginning and an end in Steve’s life and on this Earth. She had a funeral, too. All the people who loved her, admired her, or even barely knew her, came to pay their respects and grieve her passing.
This time, there is no casket to carry. There is nothing that can carry this sorrow.
Half the time, Steve feels like he is the only person who remembers how to grieve for Bucky.
Steve doesn’t speak at Peggy’s funeral because there is nothing to say. He has no words for the loss of the only person alive-- so he thought-- who connected him back to his life before the ice. There were no words for carrying Peggy’s casket down the isle of the church in hands that, for once, felt as though they were unable to carry the weight they had been burdened with.
Now, Bucky has slipped away from him twice, both without a single trace. There is no closure, no final moment to lay his memory to rest.
This time, Steve doesn't want to let the pain lay locked inside of his chest. He doesn’t want to let Bucky slip away from him a second time without a single chance of being remembered.
He shakes his head, looking down at the stack of papers before him, almost painfully picking up a pencil, slowly tracing out the words that come to mind.
---
Bucky.
It’s strange to think of you now.
Long-haired and muscular, but I am taller than you and could probably outrun you if we raced around our old neighborhood in Brooklyn. We could bound up the stairs neck and neck, you wouldn’t have to stop to ask if I could still breathe. Though, just like I did then, I would still see my life flash before my eyes when I look at you.
I can still place you in all of our pasts-- the one where you are lying next to me in bed, holding me to your chest with pressing a cold cloth to my forehead, begging me to stay with you. The one where you are buttoned into your sergeant's uniform, rifle held to your side as we trudge through forest.
The one where our fingers touch for the last time and I watch you fall to the Earth, powerless to will you back at my side, or exchange your fate with mine. The one where you hardly, if it all, remember me and my face is little more than a ghost of a friend turned enemy; the one where you are trying to kill me, and I almost let you.
The one where you are at my side again, hands shaking and you doubt if you are worth any sacrifices I have made for you. After all you have sacrificed for me, I don’t know how much I would have to do to thank you for resuscitating me back into life so many times.
I try to trace the distance from where we began, to where we are now. From two kids bumming around Brooklyn, hardly able to afford our apartment yet you still manage to pay for all the medicine I need. Putting you back there-- both of us smaller and you more lean, with a gal on each arm as I watch you from a distance; a time when our love could only live under the cover of night.
Remembering you, shroud in the shadows of our apartment, peeling paint reflecting the little light that illuminated our skin, you always said mine shone like that; you told me that you were glad that we were hidden, that you were thankful to have the sight of me like that to yourself and only yourself.
The old apartment is still for sale; no one wants a rotting relic of the past. Maybe, I will become a ghost story, too, like you once had been. Maybe we don’t have to live in technicolor to be seen. Maybe we don’t have to be seen at all.
You never followed my name or what I was supposed to represent. Captain America hardly ever did much good for us. But you followed me, and I got you in a hell of a lot of trouble for it, but we found our way back together.
Maybe that’s how it will go this time.
When the cryo was turned off and you headed for Wakanda, we did not how our futures would intertwine again or if we could try to rebuild what we had fought so hard for in years past. You asked me to follow you, to escape the worlds we were thrown into and lives we never asked for.
We cried that night, realizing we hadn’t shared a bed in so long. Since the war, at least.
It was safe, that time, though. We did not take turns sleeping so the other could stay up and listen for footsteps, fearing that we might be caught, despite being in the comfort of that old apartment.
It was warm, this time, too. I remember how familiar your skin felt on mine after having gone through so much without me.
This time, though, you have left and I have made no promise not to follow you.
Twice, now, I have been forced to watch you slip from my grasp.
You, the only consistency in my life.
Maybe this time you might come back and whatever spell you are under, we can try and break. I fear it won’t be that easy and in my sensibilities, I know this isn’t something I can undo.
I have made no promise to follow, and, it is so tempting this time, to jump off of the train with you. To let myself be taken again. Maybe we'll find each other in a peace where only we exist.
I don’t know if it is harder to watch your body fall from the sky, slipping out of my grasp and crumble into the earth, or if it is harder to watch you disappear and be left with your remains.
I never thought I would have to bury you. Yet I imagined the possibility of you having to carry the burden of burying me.
Writing this to you, now, is not something I’d ever imagine having to do, and still something I cannot fathom to do, twice now. I wonder if you might have written to me once, or, as I lay, sleeping and sick, my body wracked with fever and shaking in your arms, if you might have held me close, whispering to me all things that you wanted me to know before I was gone.
That is that catch with this. I have never imagined outliving you, rather, I anticipated you burying me, likely next to my mother and father, and leaving me there. I know you better than to think that you would let my memory die there, but, you were young enough to move on. We were still kids back then, and with every girl in Brooklyn vying for a date with you, you still chose me.
I could have imagined you on your wedding day, a day I never thought I would be witness to, dressed up in the nicest suit you could afford, carrying your new bride across the threshold of your new home. A new chapter in your life in which I am already gone. But it would have never compared, I know, to when you lifted me, carrying me through the door of our old apartment like it was nice nicest place in the world. No matter what, I was always your first, but I never thought I would be your last.
Do you remember the night we thought I might die?
The chill in Brooklyn bit us through even the closed windows and you didn’t know it if it would be better to put the blankets on me or over the windows to keep out the cold. Your warmth is the only warmth I remember that night, despite the fact that you told me I had a fever higher than the doctor thought was possible. I was so damn contagious, too, but you held my face to your chest as though if you just kept me close enough, life would stay in my body.
I heard how you cried, trying to keep it to yourself, scared to let me see how terrified you were of losing me. I wonder if you had written to me, then.
I had not prepared myself at all to lose you the first time, and now, after the second, I do not know if I want to live long enough to watch you die again.
Because we never imagined that I would have to watch you die.
Yet, here I am, your ashes remain on my glove and still, Bucky, James , I am finding it so hard not to follow you.
Because I suppose I always have.
When I crashed my plane into the arctic all those years ago, there was enough time for me, alone, to accept the impending crash that I was sure would ultimately kill me. The only thought on my mind, Bucky, was you.
Do you remember when you promised me forever?
I was eighteen at the time-- newly orphaned (a position you had been in for too long) and you promised me, even in my stubborn determination, that you would be with me forever.
Till the end of the line, you promised me.
The thought reads like wedding vows, now.
As I waited for the Valkyrie to crash, there was one thing on my mind: you.
Because the thing is: you had already gotten off the train, and I was late for my stop. I wasn’t about to keep my best guy waiting for me.
Now, such as I did then, I welcome whatever inevitable doom that will eventually overtake me, just for the sake of seeing you again.
You never lost me.
When every illness, every damn condition, threatening to pull me from the constraints of this world, it was you who kept me tethered to this world and from floating away into the next. Yet now, again, you are not here and I am finding it so painfully hard not to follow you into whatever fate you had been protecting me from for so long.
Do you remember when you promised me forever?
I am so sorry we could not fulfill my end of that promise.
---
The joke is that there is no funeral.
Steve rips the pages from the desk, crumpling them in angry fists and throwing them to the ground, the impact of them kissing another pile of paper that had been last night’s writing, and the night before then, and the night before then.
He never stops writing, but Natasha stops visiting. She stops trying to coax him out of Bucky’s home and into the world around them.
Maybe she knows that without Bucky, Steve no longer has a world.
The funny part is that Steve doesn’t leave Bucky’s former home for another two weeks, letting the routines he had kept up so diligently all go to hell as he sits and he waits, staring at the door hoping that by some act of magic, his words have breathed life back into Bucky or even better yet, this has all been a bad dream and at any moment, he too will disintegrate into dust and find himself sitting in the old apartment with Bucky at his side, their arms curled around each other as they finally find solace in one another, no longer at the will of all the threats that seemed to constantly loomed over them for their whole lives.
The punchline is that Steve begins to feel as though he has already died. His skin begins to turn grey and fingers begin to crack at the seams that meet his nails and he is sure that he no longer has a body that is supposed to be able to do this.
None of the Avengers get a funeral, and Steve doubts that he will, either.