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“He really lived a whole-ass life without us, huh?”
Sam tries to keep the incredulity out of his voice, but Bucky must hear it, because his mouth quirks at the side the way it always does when Sam’s getting kind of cranky.
“He really did,” Bucky says. His voice is low, sympathetic, and it eases something hard and tight in Sam's gut, a little knot of anger and confusion that’s been tangling since he saw the back of Steve’s head, silver in the summer sun.
He flops down next to Bucky, grass tickling his head. They’re laying under a tree overlooking the lake. Somewhere in Stark’s cabin is a small, sad family, an assortment of semi-aimless superheroes, and a very old man who is sitting patiently under the fascinated attention of the giant green dude in the corner.
Out here though, it’s just the two best friends of that same very old man, left behind not an hour ago. Or maybe seventy years ago. Sam’s not sure anymore - of anything.
He blinks, overwhelmed, emotion suddenly stinging at his eyes. “He gave me -” he starts, then stops. “When I said I would miss living in a world without Captain America, I meant him. I didn’t mean he had to give me-”
Sam stops again, wipes a hand over his face. Bucky snorts, not unkindly.
“Sam,” he says, “Steve’s probably been planning on giving you that shield since the day he met you.”
Bucky’s leg is a long line of pressure, solid and reassuring. It anchors Sam in the midst of that dizzying proposition.
“Say what?” he asks, eyebrow furrowed. “Why? How. Me?”
Bucky knocks a boot against Sam’s foot. “You’re the best person he’s known since...I dunno, himself. You’re the best person I know. It just makes sense.”
Sam blows out a long, gusty breath. He feels, faintly, a flush of pleasure at the words, but mostly he feels bewildered and blindsided.
“Not to me,” he says. “None of it makes any damn sense to me. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m not exactly in the type of condition where I can jump out of planes, actin’ all crazy on account of my super strength and World War II-era death wish.”
Bucky’s voice is deadpan when he says, “Why not? You got wings, don’t you?”
Sam rolls his eyes, feeling overwhelmed and cross. “I’m just a human, man,” he says. “When it was me and him, I followed his lead. It felt right to watch his six - to help. To be there to help. But things are different. There’s no team anymore. We’re not - Steve’s gone, and people are dead. Nat-”
He stops, can’t bring himself to continue. Bucky’s breath is slow and steady, and Sam tries to sync his own, tries not to start that spiral of disbelief again, tries not to think of enormity of what happened and what was lost and what little is left in its wake.
“I’m not - I don’t really know if I can do this on my own.”
There. The confession. And here comes the stinging again. Sam sniffs, tries for manly but mainly gets despairing. It ought to be allowed, he reasons; it’s been years since he’s fallen apart. After fighting fascists and world governments and megalomaniac aliens, after being on the run and upending his life, after losing five years due to, oh, being dust, after losing so much else and not being allowed to stop and process it at all, Sam thinks he’s owed a freak out. Just one.
Beside him, Bucky’s hand grabs at his wrist, metal curling around bone, a comforting weight.
“He followed your lead,” Bucky says quietly. “When he didn’t know which way was up, what to do next, he listened for your voice in his ear. He told me that. He knows you can do it because you’ve been doing it. You don’t have to have super powers to be Captain America. You just have to be a good man even when it’s hardest. Especially when it’s hardest. And you’ve done that. Better than anyone could’ve, I think. Even Steve.”
Sam closes his eyes, lets Bucky’s words wash over him. They settle the fizz in Sam’s blood, the itch under his skin. They slow the hammer of his heart. They sit sweet in Sam’s belly, spreading something hot through his veins - a little like pain, a little like pleasure, bittersweet. Something he might call affection. Something he definitely won’t call longing.
“Thanks, man,” he says, when he can speak. “I - thank you.”
Bucky ignores the thickness in Sam’s voice and squeezes his wrist. “Besides,” he says. “You won’t be on your own.”
Sam doesn’t open his eyes, but he does go still.
“Yeah?” he asks carefully. “I know Steve’s a super soldier and all, but I got a strict policy against geriatrics in my airspace. I don’t think he’s comin’ along on this one.”
Damn if it doesn’t hurt to say it out loud, mourning someone who isn’t quite a ghost so much as a memory. It’s like watching Riley fall again, helpless to do anything to change what is already in motion. Except it's worse somehow, knowing Steve chose to go, and all Sam could do was watch. He stood at the side of that time machine and his best friend blinked out of existence before coming back with wrinkles and a ring, a stranger with a shield and an offer that even now, Sam can't quite believe.
And it does mean something that Steve gave him this. It does. It means something to be honored this way, to be trusted this way. But what does Sam do now with the knowledge that the Steve he knew is gone, and he's alone for the first time in years, and he's also, uh, get this: Captain America? Who is supposed to show him the ropes when the only person who could, the person who pretty much invented taking a hit, would kind of break a hip if he stood up too fast? There's missing Steve and missing Cap, and Sam feels, for one brief second, the duality of both, an equal press of grief and anxiety in his throat.
“I’m not talkin’ about Steve,” Bucky says. His voice is even and calm, and it snatches Sam from his rapidly panicked musings, pushes him forcibly into the present. “I’m talking about me.”
Sam does open his eyes then, surprised. He looks over and sees another pair of blue eyes, different than the ones he knows so well, a little darker, a little greyer, and a little more distant. A little more cautious. But warmer, too, somehow. More willing to be pulled into the present, almost desperate to settle.
“He told me he was going,” Bucky says. “I told him he should tell you, too, but he said he had a plan. That he wanted to make sure he could pull it off. And he’s not...the best at explaining himself, not when he thinks he’s doing the right thing even if it’s a stupid thing, not when someone with half a brain might try and talk him out of it.”
Sam breathes in, the sharp cut of hurt a quick little slice through his breastbone and then gone, because he’s nothing if not pragmatic.
“Man, I wouldn’t have,” he says. “If anyone deserves a chance to do what they want with the time they got left, it’s Steve. All I’d ever want is for him to be good. To be happy. I meant what I said - I’m glad for him, truly. I just wish he would’ve said, I dunno. Something. Goodbye.” Sam looks away. “It sounds crazy, because he's right here, but. I’m gonna miss him. You know?”
"I know," Bucky says, and there's a me too that goes unsaid but not unheard in the melancholy of his voice. “He said something to me, though. Before he left. Something that might help.”
Sam turns, shifting so he’s facing Bucky, propping his head on his hand and staring down at the man now staring up at the canopy of trees overhead. "The man does know his way around a good speech."
Bucky scratches at his beard, lips twitching. "Yeah, well. That's what you get when you grow up four foot nothing. A big mouth."
Sam can’t help but grin in response. "I bet," he says.
For a moment, Bucky looks at the cloudless sky with a studious gaze, plucking at the grass beneath him. "He said that he was lucky. To have had us as friends. And that he hoped - that he knew when he was wasn't here, we’d - let ourselves be lucky, too. That we’d be friends. That we’d watch out for each other the way we did for him.” Bucky shakes his head, hair falling in his eyes. “He said, uh. You run slow and I can’t fly, and we’re both pretty decent shots, so together, we stand half a chance. But. Only together.”
Sam feels a wistful tug at the center of his chest; he can hear Steve in those words, the Brooklyn accent edging into the suggestion, the insinuation. The serious tone evened out by a sparkle in his eye, a tilt of his eyebrow.
“So, what?" Sam asks. "Was that his answer? You and I share the shield? Two Caps for the price of one?"
Bucky goes an interesting shade of red and Sam can't help but discreetly follow the line of the blush where it disappears under the collar of his bomber jacket, intrigued in spite of himself.
“No, I think he just meant -“
Sam reaches over and flicks Bucky’s ear, momentarily distracted by the hilarity of riling him up. “I was kidding,” he says. “If we’re gonna be hanging out more, you gotta know that I’m going to make fun of you for literally everything. Starting with that jacket.”
“It’s leather!” Bucky says, outraged.
“It’s one ‘Frose All Day ’ embroidered patch from bein’ sold at Forever 21,” Sam says, and rolls over, cackling as Bucky tries ineffectively to hit him.
“Hey, Barnes,” Sam says. Bucky stops batting at him immediately, face open and expectant, patient. That unnameable feeling swamps Sam again, that thing that feels like affection but also yearning, just a little bit.
“You really with me on this?” He feels suddenly unaccountably nervous, like he’s asking something crazy, something huge. “I know Steve wanted us to be besties and all, but I...wouldn’t be mad if you went back to goat-herding in Wakanda. I’d get it.”
Bucky cocks his head. “Do you want me to go back to goat herding?” he asks gently.
“No,” Sam says, and is shocked to realize he means it. “I'm lost as hell and you've seen a lot of shit. I think you and me - I think if we did this, if you stayed, I’d have something to work with. I think wecould work, maybe. I wanna try.”
Bucky’s grin is kind, and shy. “So what’s the issue?” he asks. In a fluid motion, he’s rolling to his knees, then pushing to his feet. He extends a hand for Sam to grab.
Sam firms his jaw. “I’m making it up as I go along,” he says. “I want you to know that. I don’t have a goddamn clue what’s coming, or how I’ll handle it. I got a shield and a wing and a prayer, man, and that’s it.”
Bucky wiggles his fingers expectantly. “And you got me,” he says patiently.
Sam rocks back a little, thunderstruck by the simplicity of the words and how they’re like an arrow through his heart, a shaft of pure light that expands, filling him to the brim, spilling in trembles that race up and down his arms, shivers that ripple down his back. They feel important, and Sam makes himself squint up at Bucky, take in the way he’s limned by morning sky, the shape of his hand as it offers him -
What? A partner? A teammate? A friend?
Maybe all of it. Maybe none of it. Maybe something else altogether.
Maybe a future, however murky, however uncertain.
Maybe a place to land, till he figures it all out.
“And I got you,” Sam echoes, faintly, as he reaches up and slides his hand into Bucky’s, as their palms connect and Bucky bears Sam’s weight until he’s standing tall, both of them shoulder to shoulder, staring ahead across the lake into the horizon.
“You know,” Sam says, words carried in the wind, for Bucky’s ears only, “I’m not Steve. There’s gonna be a learning curve.”
Bucky’s pinkie finger grazes Sam’s, the slightest touch. A point of contact, reassuring but not overbearing. A signal that he’s there.
“We got time,” Bucky says. He pauses. “And contrary to what you might think just lookin’ at him, he didn’t come outta the womb knowing how to piss bad guys off. It was a learned trait.”
Sam laughs. “Must have been catching,” he says. It still hurts a tiny bit, joking about Steve, knowing he’s not Steve the way Sam wants him to be. Knowing that nothing is the way Sam wants it to be.
But it hurts a tiny bit less, too, already, and that’s…
Something.
“Okay, Barnes,” he says. “How ‘bout we live a whole-ass life of our own, huh?”
A grin, like the dawn breaking over water, bright and dazzling and the slightest bit wondrous, and that's the start of it.
Moving forward, moving on.
Life, just like that.