Work Text:
“Don't go far off, not even for a day,
because I don't know how to say it - a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in
an empty station when the trains are
parked off somewhere else, asleep.
Pablo Neruda
_ _
Time really is such a strange thing. Inevitable, unstoppable, tangled, and messy. Seventy years or a few hours? Months and months spent returning Infinity Stones or five seconds? 1945, 1970, 2012, 2014, 2023 - they can all exist at once and not. It makes his head spin, and that isn’t even getting into talking raccoons and trees and an entire universe stretching out beyond Earth, teeming with other planets and life. In comparison, 1945 seems small. This tree-lined street feels almost rendered in miniature, like one of those developmental models he remembers seeing in a museum - new housing projects going up after the war.
The house looks like something out of a picture, right down to the white clapboard siding and the front porch and the flowers along the pathway. And he can see it: a timeline where he walks up the steps and knocks. Takes the woman inside into his arms and just … stays. It could be this timeline, if he moves his feet. It would take him less than fifteen steps, and he could have everything he dreamed of.
But standing here, on this immaculate sidewalk, he’s realizing that this dream belongs to someone else. To the man who put a plane in the Arctic six months or seventy-eight years ago, the man that Peggy Carter metaphorically buried, the man whose memory she carried with her as she went on to live an incredible life. If his fuzzy timeline’s right, that life is just starting. Soon there will be Howard, and S.H.I.E.L.D, and then there will be a man she marries and children, and finally a ghost in her hospital room in 2014. The one that she’ll tell to move on.
Time is a funny thing, but some pieces of it should remain set in stone. He’s realizing that now. Some chapters close forever, and they aren’t meant to be reopened.
He isn’t the man who went into the ice and she isn’t the woman on the other end of the radio. He’d love to dance with her one more time, but perhaps it is enough, knowing all the life she’s got ahead of her. So much wonderful life. He’d be selfish, he thinks, to rob her of it. Even for love.
His timer is beeping a countdown on his wrist. He doesn’t have much left before he needs to go back. Or forward. Or however the hell this works.
So he takes one last look at her, sitting by the window with a book in her lap, and he thinks goodbye and I love you and you’re going to be amazing, because that is one gift time has given him: getting to see even a glimpse of that. Being able to hold on to the knowledge of everything Peggy Carter will become without him, of the years and years and years stretching out in front of her. No sudden deaths, no time cut short, no sad and terrible endings.
He wishes he could tell her that. Could assure her in her grief that things are going to be difficult, but maybe they’ll be okay, in the end. He wishes he could tell Peggy in 2016 that he’s moved on, just like she wanted him to. He wishes he could tell Tony seventy-eight years from now or a week ago that they won. That for once the future stretching out in front of them isn’t dark or cold or plagued by terrible visions of destruction.
But he thinks Tony knows that. Thinks Natasha does, too. A part of him wishes, both times, that it could have been him instead. The part that still wants to correct the sacrifice made in 1945 that ended up not feeling like much of a sacrifice at all. Let me, he wanted to beg them, I ran out of time decades ago. The rest of him, though, knows that they wouldn’t have had it any other way.
They were brave enough to look death in the eye and choose it, and he wants to honor that sacrifice with whatever years he has left.
So he forces himself to turn away, to press the device on his wrist, sucking in a breath before the world blurs around him - a kaleidoscope of color - and then he’s standing back on the platform in the forest and Bucky is looking at him in shock.
Bucky.
Time is such a strange thing and he can see it all, in this moment:
- 1936: a rundown apartment in Brooklyn, heating that never works and a cough that stays all through winter. Bucky, sleeping on his couch - determined not to leave him alone.
- 1943: a tent at the World Expo and Bucky, shadows already in his eyes, saying you’re taking all the stupid with you.
- 1945: a train and ice and Bucky screaming as he fell - him unable to but feeling a chasm open in his chest that he didn’t think would ever close.
- 2014: a bridge, in the middle of chaos and destruction, and the roar of his heart as a ghost turns its head and looks him in the eye; a plane not long after that, the acrid taste of blood in his mouth and the screech of breaking metal ringing in his hears as he rasps I’m with you to the end of the line and means it with every pulse of his slowing heart.
- 2016: a rundown apartment in Bucharest and recognition in Bucky’s eyes for the first time in years, the hope inside his own chest that refuses to die.
- 2018: a distant jungle and the broken Steve? spilling from Bucky’s mouth right before he dissolves into ash, and Steve loses him a second time, a third time - however many times it's been to make the chasm yawn, threatening to swallow him whole.
- 2023: a forest by a lake, and you’re taking all the stupid with you and sadness in Bucky’s eyes that means more than a five-second departure, a goodbye that's meant to be permanent.
And now. Right now.
(Five seconds, a hundred years - him and Bucky through all of it.)
“Steve,” Bucky says as Sam helps him off the platform, takes the empty case from his hands. He sounds helpless, adrift - he wasn’t expecting this to be Steve’s choice.
Steve almost wants to laugh. He thinks too little of himself, he always has.
“Hey, Buck,” he says, wholly inadequate. Sam is staring at them, brow furrowed, and there is a talk that Steve needs to have with him - a mantle he needs to pass on - but it can wait a moment. Everything can wait for just a little bit longer. Time, he thinks, owes them at least this. “Come sit with me?”
He nods to the bench on the shore and walks, feeling a little ridiculous in his white suit, but that’s a small detail. He sits and Bucky sits next to him, and the lake reminds him of the shores of the Potomac, of Bucky pulling him out of that burning wreckage.
“You came back,” Bucky says after the silence has stretched between them, his tone careful, uncertain.
Steve wants to say of course I came back, but he doesn’t think it was as much of a guarantee as he wants it to be now.
“I did.”
Bucky’s brow furrows. “Why?”
Steve closes his eyes and thinks of time like a tree, branches extending out through decades, across the cosmos. He can see them so clearly. One where he walked up those porch steps in 1945 and stayed. One where he told Peggy what happened and a version of him got pulled out of the ice decades sooner. One where he found Bucky first, where he saved him before Hydra sunk its claws in too deep. Further back, to one where he kissed Bucky in 1934 like his teenage self wanted so desperately to. One where he didn’t give up on that love as an impossibility and bury it. So many possibilities, infinite ones, worlds upon worlds upon worlds, but he thinks that he’s stuck with the right one.
He got to have Peggy in his life, if only briefly, and now here is Bucky, and a future spread out like an ocean before them.
Impossibilities, both of them. Maybe love that’s been buried can be dug back up again.
“Because she’s gone,” he tells Bucky quietly. “Because I already buried her, years ago. She’s gone … and you aren’t and she told me I should move on.” Cautiously, he reaches over and puts a hand on top of Bucky’s metal one, clenched into a fist against his thigh. “We’ve lost each other enough times, don’t you think? And besides, I made a promise.”
Bucky laughs then, disbelieving. His eyes are teary. Steve squeezes his hand tight, enough to feel metal grooves dig into the skin of his palm. “It’s not the end of the line yet.”
“I thought it would be,” Bucky admits. “But I guess not even ancient alien beings or the death of half the known universe are enough to slow you down.”
Steve shrugs, because he doesn’t want to think about Wakanda and watching Bucky turn to ash. The give of the earth as his knees hit it and the bitterness of failure stabbing him right in the gut and twisting the knife. Of the despair on Clint's face when he returned without Natasha. Of Tony snapping his fingers and everything going so terribly silent.
“I missed you,” he says now, and thinks that it’s been true for seventy-eight years, even the ones he doesn’t remember.
Bucky blows out a quiet breath and his hand flips underneath Steve’s - mental fingers twining with his flesh ones. “It’s funny,” he says in a tone that suggests it really isn’t funny at all, “we’ve always had too much time and not enough of it.”
“Walking paradoxes, we are,” Steve agrees and shares a smile with Bucky, sad around the edges, but full of hope, too. “I didn’t want to erase it,” he adds. “Everything that happened, as much as it hurt. You and me.”
“I wouldn't have held it against you,” Bucky says, smile fading. “If anyone deserves a happy ending it’s you, Stevie.”
Steve makes a sound of agreement in his throat, feels his smile widen. “You know what, Buck, I think I’m still gonna get it. Think we both are.”
Bucky arches a questioning eyebrow at him. “How do you figure that?”
“We’ve got time, haven’t we? And I don’t know about you, but I think I’m done with ancient alien beings and reality-bending stones and the potential destruction of the known universe.”
Bucky laughs, then, and it sounds genuine, like it used to back in the 30s, before all this. “But you’re keeping the outfit, right?”
“Nah,” Steve says, glancing back to where Sam and Bruce are conversing. “I think it’s about time someone else had a turn.”
Bucky follows his gaze and laughs again. “He’s gonna make a way better Captain America than you.”
“He is,” Steve agrees easily, then glances back at Bucky. “So how about it, Barnes? Want to spend some of this great big future with me?”
“Doing what, Rogers?” Bucky asks, but his voice is light and there is a gleam creeping back into his eyes that Steve has missed desperately.
“Living,” he says simply and leans in, pressing his forehead against Bucky’s. He isn’t sure what they’ll become, what this love he’s resurrecting is going to turn into. Maybe this is a timeline where he says marry me and Bucky says yes and they’ll be together until they’re finally old and gray and the world has passed them by because they’ve let it. And maybe it isn’t.
Either way, he wants the chance to find out.
Bucky’s arm comes up to wrap around him, holding him close, and his eyes slip closed.
“Come live with me,” Steve repeats, gripping Bucky’s waist in turn. “Don’t you think it’s about damn time?”
Bucky laughs, wet, and nods as he pulls back. “Yeah, I reckon it is.”
Steve reaches up and wipes the tears from Bucky’s cheek, his own vision blurred. So much death, so much loss, so much failure, but what Thanos could never understand is this: life is so much more than mere existence. It is heartbreaking and painful and devastating and so, so very beautiful, and it endures. Will keep enduring.
We’re stubborn like that, Tony said, and nothing's ever been truer.
And they’re going to make it, Steve thinks as Bucky smiles at him, raw and loving and full of the same hope he can feel taking root in his own chest, sprouting leaves that wind up his ribcage to his heart.
They finally have enough time.