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Once the quietness of the wake has dissolved into the clatter of dishes over the buffet and then, later, from tentative murmurs into the chatter of reminiscence, Steve follows Bucky outside, where he is waiting by the lake, looking out at the water softening in the evening light.
Bucky doesn't turn around when Steve approaches. He still recognizes Steve by the measure of his steps alone. Or maybe, Steve thinks, he knows that with Natasha gone, Steve is the last person left to consider what it'd mean for Bucky Barnes of all people to show up at Tony Stark's wake. Paying his respects at the funeral is one thing, but it'd take more than an explicit invitation from Pepper Potts for him to mingle with those who have lost a friend, a father, a lover in Tony.
Down by the lake, with the sun setting, Steve can see that part of the tension has dissolved from Bucky's shoulders, like he has shed part of the weight.
“How was it?” Bucky asks, facing the water, before Steve has even reached him.
“Yours was more fun.”
“You had a wake for me?” Bucky turns around to Steve, his eyebrows raised.
“Scheduled from 3 to 3:15 pm on a Tuesday. We toasted. There were nibbles. It was nice.”
“Gee, a whole fifteen minutes?”
“We had a lot of wakes to get through. And besides, if I had a party every time you died on me, I wouldn't get anything done.”
Bucky laughs. “Fair.”
Their shoulders bump into each other. Bucky raises his arm and puts his heavy hand on Steve's neck. It gets easier every time, Steve thinks, not the losing part, but finding him again. It's like they inch closer together every time they get separated.
“No really,” Bucky says, serious now. “Are you okay?”
Steve nods, and it's not even a lie. “It was his choice. He knew what he was doing.” He thinks for a moment. “It's what I would've done.”
Bucky looks at him. “Is it?”
And Steve laughs quietly, because he knows exactly what Bucky means. He's been spending every waking moment thinking about it, ever since Banner told them they needed a volunteer to return the stones. What Tony did is – he put the proverbial plane full of explosives into the proverbial Arctic. For once, Steve really isn't in a position to judge. Steve has been in Tony's shoes enough. Tony wouldn't want anyone to feel guilty about his choice, and for once Steve's heart complies.
His choice, Steve thinks, and knows at the same time that for people cut from their cloth it's not really a choice at all. If they have one shot at saving the world, they will take it, whatever the cost. It's crazy how he had to be on the other side of it – on the actual losing side, with Tony and Natasha gone – to understand that. And how the choice he faces now, with a time machine hidden under a tarp in Tony Stark's lakeside backyard, is a completely different beast.
Bucky's warm hand on his neck eases the tenseness from his shoulder, stills his breathing and his beating heart. For the better part of his adolescence the mere idea would've given him a hard-on and an asthma attack. Now it's just calm. Quiet. A balance that has taken them a hundred years to reach, and all the more precious for it.
“Would you do it?” Steve asks.
Bucky's finger tighten on his neck, a reassuring squeeze. Steve doesn't have to explain. He knows Bucky has seen the time machine, and they have been through enough of the same things to know exactly what kind of road an idea like that leads down.
Back before the snap, in Wakanda, in Bucky's hut out by the water at night, their legs still tangled, their sweat still drying on their skins, they had had a whispered conversation about it. The heat of their skins and breaths had eased the heartbreak from it, had made it a thrilling hypothesis. If you could, would you go back and fix it? It was an easy promise to make, knowing that time travel was one of the few impossibilities left in their ever-expanding universe. Perhaps they should've known.
“Where would we even start?” Bucky asks.
“At the beginning,” Steve says. “With neither of us going into the ice. We'd survive the war. We'd settle down. Live a life. We'd get married when you're 97.”
“We could get married now.”
Steve looks at Bucky and knows that, despite the glint of laughter in Bucky's eyes, they picture the exact same thing: the life they were supposed to have, in their own time. Their story that was supposed to be history now. A life lived, not one reconstructed, fantasized, hypothesized about. It's within their grasp.
“We wouldn't even know,” Steve says, quietly. “We'd just go on like we were supposed to. Grow old, like we were supposed to. Together.”
He doesn't say it, but that's the idea that thrills him most: Giving himself the chance to live a life that doesn't ask What if? at every turn, a life that's not about trying to catch up with what they could've been, that's just about what they are.
“How would it even work?” Bucky asks.
“I'd go back to '43. Keep you from going on that mission on the train.”
“Good luck with that.”
“I'll pull rank if I have to, Sargent Barnes. Prevent myself from getting onto that plane – kill Schmidt myself if all else fails. Make sure we survive. And let it run its course.”
“You think we'd figure it out by ourselves?” Bucky asks.
“Maybe I'll give you a nudge,” Steve says.
“It's not me you'd have to be nudging, buddy,” Bucky says. “I wasn't the one about to marry Agent Carter.”
“Like you had it all figured out.”
“Oh, I did. I knew. Boy, did I know.”
They look at each other, grinning, and Steve knows the choice is already made. Like with the explosives in the back of the HYDRA plane, there really isn't a choice to make anymore. It's when Bucky says stuff like that, looks at him like that, that still gets him more than the casual touches. He would do anything for Bucky, even if it's a selfish choice. Even if it's not for him.
Because, of course, the way Banner's time machine works, he would be the agent, the one setting it up and leaving them alone afterwards. Bucky would be none the wiser for it, he'd just keep living his life, a future he never even knew about erased from his path. A version of Steve, impossibly young, would follow that path with him. The man he is looking at now, Bucky with his scars and his metal arm, with his long hair and his ancient eyes, would never exist. And he, the traveler? He would go to rest somewhere in the past. Stay out of their way and breathe easier knowing the pain he prevented.
“It's not the knowing I'm concerned about,” Steve says, trying hard to keep his tone light, “It's the doing something about it.”
Bucky shoves his elbow into Steve's side in response. “Cool it, punk.”
And Steve catches his bright, laughing face with both hands and kisses him, to prove a point and to shut him up, as long as he still can.
If Bucky figures it out in the few days before the jump, he doesn't tells Steve. Steve prepares alone. He writes a letter to Sam that he leaves with his things in Tony's guest room. He writes a second letter, infinitely more complicated, that contains the location of Tony's lake house and a time only hours from now. If it doesn't work, Steve thinks, and his choice scrambles the timeline he has lived into something unrecognizable, at least they'll never know. The letter will be mysterious at best, gibberish at worst, and the stranger who wrote it won't be remembered. Steve will make sure of that.
Sam's chatter fills the quietness between them as they walk down the meadow towards the lake side, where Banner has pulled the tarp off the time machine.
“You ready?” Bucky asks, when Sam goes to help Banner with the setup.
Steve nods. It's hard to find words that won't give him away. All the things he wants to say are too big for a what, to Bucky, is still only a five seconds absence.
“For what it's worth,” Bucky says, before Steve can even try to put something together, “I love you like this, too.”
Steve swallows, looks at him, taken aback, his throat tight.
“Selfish, I mean,” Bucky says. “Not the righteous kid from Brooklyn, but I'll take it. Also, the beard,” he adds, gently nudging Steve's clean-shaven chin. “We should have a talk about that in the future. Or the past. Whichever happens first.”
Steve tries a smile that fails miserably. There's something in Bucky's eyes that makes Steve believe he sees right past his poor show of a facade.
“Ready, Cap?” Sam and Banner have finished setting up the machine. This is a routine jump, Steve reminds himself. If he makes this into a goodbye, they'll only get suspicious.
“See you on the other side,” he says, and Sam grins at him. Steve is glad he wrote the letter. If he had attempted to talk to Sam, he's sure Sam would've been able to talk him out of it. His hand finds his suit pocket, where he has the second letter safely tucked away.
“I'll miss you, buddy,” is the last thing Bucky says to him, and that's how Steve knows he knows: there is nothing routine about this, except them being torn apart again. It's like their universe has made a habit out of it. Only this time, Steve will make sure it's the last time.
The words, softly spoken, ring in Steve's ears when the machine gears up around him, swallowing him whole. If this works, Steve thinks before the machine zaps him out of time and consciousness, at least Bucky won't exist to feel it. The Bucky who is alive, the Bucky who will live a full life devoid of pain, will not miss Steve ever again.
***
“Are you going to tell me about her?” the stranger asks Steve when he spots the ring on his finger. Everything is exactly like the letter said. The time and place, the meadow, the lake. A pain in the ass to get onto the Stark Property, but even after almost 90 years, the name Steve Rogers still opens doors.
“No,” Steve says, and smiles.
Steve holds out the shield to him, but before he takes it, the man looks around, as if he was looking for someone to endorse him. But the meadow is empty aside from the green giant fiddling with the machine by the lake side – one of the mentions in the letter that made Steve doubt it, until he saw him. The man in front of him shakes his head, as if trying to rid himself of an invasive thought, and takes the shield.
The moment he fits it onto his arm, Steve knows that whoever made provisions for him in the past did good. The man wears it well, and with a glint of both pride and sadness in his eyes that makes Steve believe he knows more about its history than the mysterious letter by a stranger back in 1943 let on.
It's been a long, long time since their world has needed a Captain America. But if it needs one today, this is what he'd look like. Lighter, with the weight of the shield he's carried for almost 90 years off his shoulders, Steve leaves Stark's property that night, gets into his car and drives, calm, without hurry, home.