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Steve always thought he would die first.
It’s practically a given; chronic colds, high blood pressure, heart palpitations, asthma, nervousness, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever… the list goes on and on. Each time he coughs, a wave of cold washes over him and he thinks this is the end.
Bucky is a picture of health; a sturdy, strong kid raised on good Shabbat dinners and Sarah Rogers’ Irish soda bread. He runs and jumps and fights and plays baseball without a rattle in his lungs. Hell, he can pick Steve up without a thought. When he enlists, Steve thinks good, thinks strong, thinks worthy. He doesn’t think maybe now he’ll be the one to die first.
He will die first. He will die a sickly Irish-Catholic boy with dead parents and a sketchbook filled with drawings of the places he’d never gotten to see.
And then he gets injected with a super-serum that makes him perfectly healthy and he finally allows himself to think well, maybe I’ll live to see thirty-five. But he will die first. He’ll have to—when he looks at his future, imagines himself without Bucky, there is only blankness.
Where do you come from? Who do you come from? What sticks with you—the loneliness of illness? The charcoal smudged on your fingertips? Your first fight, your nose bloody and lip swollen, watching your best friend punch a bully harder than you’ll ever be able to?
When Steve sees Bucky go down the first time, he stares and stares. He clings to the train with every muscle in his body because that’s instinct, see, but when he thinks back to it he thinks what if I’d jumped after him. I would have lived. Would he have lived, if I had jumped? And after, as he crashes, he closes his eyes and prepares to die like a person, like Bucky had weeks earlier, falling into the ice.
Steve comes back. He tests his hands, flexing the fingers one by one, watching the bones shift white under the skin. A person, he thinks. Am I even a person? Or am I something else, something made out of ice and bone and memory? The corner store where Bucky bought penny candy and hair gel and Lucky Strikes that Steve wasn’t allowed to smoke is gone, replaced by a credit union. Tony gives him a cell phone, the newest technology, and Steve squints at the flat little buttons, preferring to listen to his music on vinyl; Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, and something called The Clash that he rather likes. He thinks of dancing, of his hand in another warm hand, cigarette smoke floating through the air and wreathing around their bodies.
What are we without the people we came from? Where do we go when there’s nothing left of who we used to be?
“He was like my brother,” Steve says at first, to reporters, to historians, to Sam and Nat and Tony, but the words don’t sound right in his mouth. “He was family,” he starts to say instead, and yes, that is true, those words are right and true and honest. Bucky was his family, someone constant, someone at his back when his back was skinny and in danger of snapping like an old tree branch.
Peggy’s hand is fragile in his, skin like old paper, and she asks him if he’s happy. Happy, in this strange new world, happy in his too-clean apartment with gleaming steel appliances and tasteful eggshell walls bare of art. Happy, with one of his best friends dying in a hospital and the other— He kisses her wrinkled cheek without answering.
Bucky comes back. Bucky always comes back, even if it’s not James Buchanan Barnes, even if it’s the Winter Soldier with Bucky’s face. It’s a scrap of him. It’s a beautiful, precious remnant. Steve refuses to believe it’s a shell. And he thinks he didn’t die. He isn’t dead. The walking is different, the cold eyes, the stringy hair—but it’s Bucky’s face. It’s the quick flash of confusion after Steve breathes “Bucky,” and the Winter Soldier takes a breath, too, a flash of— It’s how Steve finds himself on the bank of a river instead of drowning in the river, because Bucky would die rather than let anything happen to Steve, would die, would die for him, would die for me. He has died for me. He is dying for me.
Sometimes, when Steve flips through old sketchbooks and photo albums, or if he’s up much too late, memories from before float into his mind, unbidden. He and Bucky used to fool around. Like the pretty boys hanging around the back of seedy clubs did, making eyes at one another and lingering a little too long. Bucky did it first. It was sunset, and they were sitting on the fire escape outside their rickety little place, and Steve was drawing a funny cartoon about the Kovalski sisters downstairs—they fought like cats and dogs, and the whole building would hear every word. Bucky had leaned over and stolen the pencil from Steve’s thin hand, hiding it in the pocket of his raggedy jacket. Try and take it, cowboy he’d crowed, and Steve’s hand deftly found its way into that pocket, scrabbling through a big hole in the jacket to the skin of Bucky’s stomach. He’d immediately stopped, frozen still, and looked up at Bucky’s face. His heart was pounding, and he felt oddly nervous, excited even. To his surprise, Bucky’s eyes were wide, big dark pools of blue. They stayed like that for a second, Steve’s fingers resting lightly on Bucky’s stomach, the pencil forgotten. A taxi honked impatiently in the street below. And then Bucky leaned in.
The Winter Soldier is pacing around his hideout in Bucharest. His hair is long, unkempt; his eyes are shadowed and his human hand shakes almost uncontrollably. The metal arm is folded into his sweatshirt, sleek and deadly and cold, a physical reminder that this man is not your Bucky. Steve is in full gear, feeling a little ridiculous and kind of horribly depressed. This man does not remember him. This man is not Bucky. This man—and then he speaks, a little gravelly, a little uncertain. There’s an unfamiliar cadence to his voice, a hint of Eastern Europe in the vowels. But it’s him. And Steve vows then and there that he will never let Tony Stark get his hands on James Buchanan Barnes.
Wakanda is beautiful. Steve fills his eyes to the brim with flying cars, sleek steel, elaborate inscriptions, the vibrant city marketplace. Shuri takes him to her lab, rambling excitedly about a new invention he can barely understand. She’s a genius, that kid, and he feels old, so old next to her. Look how old we’ve gotten, Buck, a real pair of Brooklyn geezers. He visits Bucky as much as he can, and he thinks you are alive. He insists it. He repeats it to himself over and over. You are alive.
A little apartment in Brooklyn with Bucky sleeping beside him, walls covered with photos, a sketchbook tossed haphazardly on the nightstand. Maybe a few plants in clay pots by the window; fresh rosemary, velvet-petaled geraniums, mint. And nothing too fancy, no touchscreen refrigerator or expensive television he can’t seem to figure out. Just good honest mornings, making scrambled eggs while Bucky swears filthily at the baseball scores in the paper. Yeah. That’s all he ever wanted. To do his duty and go home.
“He’s looking after the goats,” T’challa says when he asks, a hint of sympathy in his voice. “He’s as much at peace as he can be right now.”
Steve understands. He can’t visit Bucky in Wakanda anymore; there are trackers, HYDRA agents who monitor his activity, and he can’t risk the safety of Bucky or Wakanda itself. But he listens to T’challa’s reports and can’t help but smile. Bucky looking after goats. If someone told either of them that this is what would become of their lives, Steve would have punched and Bucky would have laughed.
Fighting together again, Bucky at his back. I’m with you until the end of the line. There is no time to talk, but Bucky snarls at the invaders and it almost feels like old times. Picking fights with bullies much bigger and stronger than him, Bucky coming in at the last second with a killer right hook.
What did they leave behind, those two Brooklyn kids who shared egg creams and hand-me-downs and scrapes and fire-escape dreams? They went to war to fight. They fell into the ice to die. They emerged from the ice reborn: Captain America and the Winter Soldier. Two friends, two enemies, two people who were no longer people. What did they become? What did they leave behind?
Thanos snaps. Bucky collapses into dust. He bleeds away into the Wakandan sunset, scattering on the forest floor, and Steve can barely even shout. Dust. He drops to his knees.
Ecclesiastes 3:20. From dust I came and to dust I will return. He remembers the verses, the familiar cadence of his mother’s lilting accent, the itchy church clothing she forced him into every Sunday. From dust, to dust, and it’s not Bucky, not this pile of—he scrubs a hand over his face.
“Fuck,” he whispers, the sound echoing into the forest, still beautiful even through the slowly clearing smoke.
Natasha puts her hand on his shoulder. He can’t cry. He can’t cry yet. For now, though, Steve touches what used to be Bucky—once, just lightly. He gets up, brushes the dirt off his knees. There is work to be done.
Steve doesn’t go home, after it’s over. He doesn’t have much time; saving the world really is the biggest priority. The scraps of their remaining team gather in what’s left of the palace, under a gorgeous woven tapestry that, miraculously, remains completely intact (later, Okoye tells them that every art piece and artifact is surrounded by some sort of an ionic forcefield. Shuri developed the technology—and here her voice breaks.) Sam is gone, and that registers dully in Steve’s abdomen; another loss to add to the list.
“Cap.”
He realizes that he’s been standing in one spot, staring at the floor, for a minute too long.
Natasha’s face is drawn, pale. There is a trickle of blood making its way down her forehead, and her nose is badly bruised, maybe broken. “Cap, what should we do?”
He stares at her. “What should we do,” he repeats blankly. There is a faint buzzing noise in one ear, and he shakes his head, trying to clear it.
“Hey,” Nat says, her voice softening. “Shit, I—hey. Steve.”
He walks outside, among the rubble. He walks, the palace growing smaller in the distance, until he’s back in the forest. The air smells cleaner out here, like earth and moss and sunlight. Out here, he can almost pretend nothing else exists beyond the rustling leaves, the soft dirt under his feet.
“Bucky,” he says quietly. He doesn’t feel like praying—to God, to Jesus, to anyone. Saying a fucking Hail Mary would feel as useless as throwing a paper airplane at Thanos.
Mostly, he just wants a moment with Bucky.
“Bucky,” he tries again. “I failed, Buck, we all did. We all failed the world, each other, ourselves.” He breathes in as that hits him, a sharp, painful inhale. “And now you’re gone, too. Again. Jesus, you and Sam and Shuri and T’challa and Fury and Peggy and—” He exhales. “The list keeps growing, and I’m still here. I’m so— So I’m supposed to—what, Buck. Live? Live without you, again?” His voice sounds flat and static in the empty room, and he passes his hand over his face. “You’ve never had to do that, you know, even though we both thought you would, once upon a time. You’re the one who keeps dying and leaving me alone.” He barks out a laugh. “I started thinking, I just have to wait for you to come back, like you always do. But this time…” he shakes his head. “There’s no coming back, Buck. For either one of us.”
What happens when there’s only one boy left? What happens to that boy, so old and so tired, heavy from all he’s lost?
He walks back, hands in his pockets. Piles of gray dust litter the battleground, gently scattering in the breeze. So many dead soldiers. So many dead.
An image floats into his mind, unbidden, as they so often are. Bucky is sitting on the steps of Steve’s apartment building. It’s sometime in early spring, when the snow has almost melted and the sun is finally breaking free of the clouds. His hair is long, but clean and well-groomed. He is wearing a soft, blue shirt that brings out his eyes, and he is smiling. He is smiling at Steve like there’s nothing he’d rather be doing. The metal arm shines from his side, but it’s not a warning in this world, or something to hide. Bucky’s hand is on Steve’s, and their fingers are twined together. The smell of fresh bread drifts from down the street, and there is a pack of Lucky Strikes sticking out of Bucky’s front pocket. It’s a memory. It's a little bit of the past and a little bit of the future. It's a wish without any of the hope that makes them come true.
Steve looks up at the midday sky, the smoke filtering into the bright blue of it. In the distance, a goat brays. He exhales. Without you, Buck. I’ll have to do this without you.