Chapter Text
"Ugh, Bucky, can we just go already? It’s getting dark and I’m cold.”
"Just hold on, I’ve almost got it," he told him, hunched over the sidewalk with his skinny arm shoved in between the bars of the drain, reaching as far as he could to try and get their ball back. They had been playing catch, Bucky teaching Steve how to really throw like he meant it, and it had bounced past the blond and fallen into the drain where Bucky was now determined to get it.
The twelve year old’s shirt was dirty and damp and it would probably be stained in a few new places now, but Bucky didn’t care. That ball was the one he’d bought for Steve and himself to play with two years ago and they’d kept it in great condition up until now. It wasn’t just a ball, it was their ball.
"Buckyyy, c’mon! My mama’s gonna be worried if we don’t get back soon!" Ten year old Steve whined, wrapping his arms around his middle to try and keep some of his warmth in. "It’s just a ball, anyway. Can we go?"
Biting his lip and leaning into the drain even further, he finally grasped the curve of the ball and got a hold of it. He didn’t pull it out yet, just adjusted himself and made sure he’d be able to get it out before he turned his head and looked up at Steve.
"You didn’t say the magic word," he told him indignantly, making Steve roll his eyes.
“Please can we go?”
With a flourish, Bucky pulled the ball out and sat up with a grin that practically cracked his face in half. Seeing the ball in his friend’s hand, Steve lit up as well and clapped as Bucky stood and bowed at the waist.
"Yeah, let’s go. I’m starving."
"You going out tonight?" Steve asked, watching as Bucky reached up and fixed his hair as he checked himself over in the dirty mirror they had set up in their bedroom. Their apartment was tiny; one bedroom, a kitchen that was no more than a stove and an icebox, and a living room that was comprised of their ripped up couch, their taped up radio, a well-worn chair, and a coffee table that wobbled.
"Yeah, just got paid from my work down at the docks. Why, you wanna come with?"
"Buck, you know I can’t dance. There’s no point if I can’t dance and no girls even look my way."
"Well, maybe if you knew how, you’d get a dance partner or two every now and then. Hell, maybe you could just dance on your own and attract partners from every which way. Ever think of that?"
"What, like you do?" Steve asked with a laugh, shaking his head as he looked back down to the paper he was sketching on. "Not like it’d happen anyway. Where am I gonna learn how to dance?"
As he sketched absently — his subject was just the dried flowers he’d hung on the wall with a nail, the ones from his ma’s funeral a few years back — Bucky turned on his heel and gave Steve a hard look, hands in his pockets and his tongue swiping at his lower lip as he thought.
"I could teach ya."
"What?" Steve asked, looking up with a smirk, not thinking Bucky was serious. That is, until he saw the way his eyebrows were drawn together, clearly in thought. "Buck, you would teach me?"
"Yeah. Why not?" He grinned and crossed his arms over his chest and nodded at him. "You just gotta ask."
Steve laughed and set his paper aside as he stood up and brushed himself off. “Bucky Barnes, will you teach me how to dance?”
"No," he said shortly, making Steve frown.
"Well, if you’re just gonna be a jerk about it—"
"Steve, you gotta say the magic word. Ask properly.”
With a huff and a roll of his eyes, Steve asked again. “Bucky Barnes, will you please teach me how to dance?”
“Well, if you ask so nicely—” he cut himself off, laughing as he took Steve’s hand and dragged him into the living room and switched on the radio, finding a station that didn’t crackle too badly so that they could dance.
S.H.I.E.L.D was gone. Completely dismantled from the inside out because of the leaked information. They had known that it was going to happen, but it felt like the loss had been worse than even Steve could have predicted.
Hydra, or what was left of it, was even deeper in hiding than they had been before. Which, while it was good that they weren’t directly attacking people anymore, meant that it was hard to find anyone else responsible.
After almost six months after falling into the Patomac, Steve hadn’t seen Bucky even once. Not a glimpse, not the edges of his coat, not the feeling of being watched from a distance. Nothing.
For a while now, it all felt hopeless. He’d been putting all of his time and energy into finding him, but it felt as if there was nothing to find. After all of the whispers about the Winter Soldier being a ghost, now he truly seemed to be one.
"It’s alright, man. He’ll turn up," Sam had reassured him, time and again. It was always the same. "It’ll be okay" or "I’m sure he’s around here somewhere" or "Well, you know what they said about what you’re looking for always being in the last place you’d look." None of it helped, but he appreciated that Sam was even trying. Without Sam being there, Steve was pretty sure that he would have gone off the deep end. For a while, he hadn’t been able to sleep, living off of one cup of coffee to the next.
He could honestly say that he was a mess.
After a few months scouring Europe and all of the Hydra bases that they could find and infiltrate, they went back home. Steve, quite literally, decided to head back to where he had once lived in Brooklyn. Some part of him had always wondered if that was where Bucky would be after all this time.
Their old apartment was gone; most likely torn down before being turned into a new row of apartments that didn’t look like they had been around since 1934.
Bucky wasn’t there.
"I want you to come home now, Buck. I miss you," he spoke to the air around him, his eyes slipping shut as he stood on the corner across from where his old apartment once was. He breathed in the Brooklyn night air and his hands curled into fists at his sides, willing himself not to lose it.
"You forgot the magic word."