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That look, those eyes: the sadness in them, the way they seem to sob and stay perfectly dry, tremble while perfectly steady, like only Steve can see the anguish there—
Those eyes sear into the fibres of his soul as the quantum realm opens to him and all Steve can think before the vortex swallows him is that he doesn’t understand why Bucky looks heartbroken. He’d told him everything, laid everything on the line and Bucky had smiled, and maybe it had been a tight thing, a thin thing but it was late and they were tired—they’d stayed up all night with Steve explaining everything as best he could, drinking in the fact that Bucky was there and alive, still so close to an impossibility, an unfathomable dream that it makes Steve’s pulse flutter every few minutes, from the moment he’d reached out for Bucky’s shoulder and met something solid and warm—because he has to check, every few minutes, that Bucky’s still there, and Steve’s heart shivers in the millisecond it takes to turn and be sure.
Every time.
But he’d told Bucky everything, and if Steve’s honest with himself? He’d been scared to death of what Bucky might say, what he might do; that he wouldn’t understand or would scoff at Steve’s revelations, his plans and his hopes for them, that he'd reject them outright. But he’d sat there, and nodded, and his eyes on Steve were warm, if tense, but it’d been such a whirlwind of days, so much lost as much as gained but oh, what Steve had gained and he probably says more than he needs to, talks more than he should just to keep Bucky near him, focused on him.
Nowhere else.
Bucky had agreed with him, Bucky had encouraged him: take back the Stones. Had been happy for him, when Steve said he knew what he wanted, and he was going to finally go after it, he was going to finally put himself first and be a little selfish and find some of that life Tony was smart enough to fight for; Steve was going to do it this time. He’d seen what it meant to lose and he wasn’t willing to lose anything more, ever again.
And Bucky had reached out, and covered his hand, and he’d said About damn time, punk, and Steve hadn’t been able to hold in the smile, or the relief that suffused his body, because god, yes, Bucky was on his side for this, Bucky understood, they were on the same page and it was okay. Bucky knew and was okay, and that was more than Steve had hoped for, really; and maybe it’d been a little distant, maybe it’d been a bit subdued when Bucky spoke but they were still adjusting, the world was still adjusting, and would be for a long time to come.
So when it comes to it, when Bucky’s eyes are sad, and Steve feels a chill in his veins for it, and he reaches deep into the past, and tells him not to do anything stupid; when Bucky laughs, but it’s hollow, and volleys back the right answer: Steve wonders if maybe it’s fear. It would add up with how strange it had been, Bucky saying he’d miss him: maybe he’s scared of what could happen when Steve makes the jumps, if something goes wrong, if it takes longer than planned. Steve stopped being scared of those sorts of things as soon as he’d had to live through the worst for five years, because he knew nothing could ever be like that, but Bucky hadn’t. Maybe fear was what had stilted the reactions, dampened the smiles. That would make sense.
So Steve tells him it’ll be alright, because he knows it will be. He understands what Bruce wants him to do, remembers every step and coordinate, every time frame and trajectory: it’s going to be fine. Steve’s not sure why Bucky’s so worried, but then again, Steve might know how big and unstable it is in his chest to reconcile Bucky here when he was gone for so long; he doesn’t know what it’s like to realize you’d been in limbo for half a decade and then have the world revealed again like the blink of an eye. Maybe Bucky’s afraid of it all disappearing without even knowing it.
When Steve gets back, they’ll have time. Hopefully, they’ll have more than that, more than enough.
No, not hopefully. They will. They will, but—
It’s with a painful twist of his heart that those eyes haunt him into the timestream, and stay with him through every stop along the way. Those eyes are the last thing he sees before it's all swirling, spiralling chaos, and he can’t unsee them. They wither his bones when he lands on Morag, making his limbs feel weak. They’re what he sees beneath the hood of the Stonekeeper, where he can see nothing else but shadow and doesn’t want to see more; they swim like blood and death in the viscous red he returns to Asgard; they follow his every step around New York—
They replace his own eyes in the photograph on Peggy’s desk, and Steve can’t quite breathe for the way they burn into his chest, and his hands shake for it, a little, when he presses the button to take him home before Peggy herself even enters the room on the other side of the glass.
He stumbles when he lands back on the platform. Sam is there to steady him, and Steve grasps at him gratefully for the assist, but that’s not who Steve needs to see, because Steve needs to look Bucky in the eyes and know that the heartbreak in them, that Steve couldn’t understand and still can’t grasp, is gone now, because it’s finished. It’s done, and he’s safe, and he’s ready.
They can—
But Steve looks everywhere, turns and tries to seek him out and he’s nowhere, he’s gone and that’s what Steve’s pulse braces for every few minutes, when he has to check that Bucky’s still there, but it’s not built to brace and hold, not like this, not even his heart’s built for what he feels when Bucky’s not there—
“Easy, Cap,” and it’s only then, with Sam’s reassuring, carefully pitched voice, that he notices the way his lungs are heaving.
“He went back inside,” Bruce says, and it’s probably telling, probably just reinforces the general consensus of Steve’s obliviousness that they both know what he needs without him saying a word. “Something was off, so I didn’t bother trying to stop him when you were gonna be right back anyway.”
“You know him better than anyone, to talk him through it, whatever it is,” Sam agrees, before steadying him on sure feet and pushing him at the shoulder toward the house.
“Right,” Steve swallows, and stares at the trail that’ll lead back from the trees, to the house, to the front door, to the room upstairs where Bucky’d touched his hand and told him about time, and Steve had thought they, he, that he—
“Right, he’s,” Steve breathes in deep, squares his shoulders, and reminds himself that he’d been the one to say he was going after what he wanted: that always meant he might have to fight for it, and every fight, he knows now better than ever before, is one he could possibly lose, except that he doesn’t think he’ll survive losing this one, he—
“Right.” Steve gathers himself, thinks like a soldier because it's the only safe haven he can touch to keep sane against the what-ifs. “He’s inside.”
And Steve is finally going after what he wants, so that’s where Steve will go, too.
________________________
His feet take him to the staircase automatically; he doesn’t think to knock on Bucky’s door but it doesn’t matter: he’s not there.
Steve’s heart really isn’t built for what this feeling is doing, this feeling—
He doesn’t remember running back down the stairs, and there’s no noise or reason that he turns left first and not right, trying, praying to catch Bucky in one of the rooms he passed but missed; there’s no reason.
But Steve looks left first, into the kitchen, where Bucky’s leaning against the countertop and staring at the floor until the sound of Steve’s breath catches his attention, and he looks up, and oh god—
Steve’s heart leaps to the point of searing for the stretch, but then it finds its rhythm again, if still too fucking fast; finds its rhythm, because Bucky’s there. Bucky’s there, even—
Even if he looks like he’s seen a goddamn ghost.
“Steve?” he says, pushing off where he leans and his voice is soft, uncertain. His face is ashen, and Steve’s at his side before Bucky can move but it’s Bucky whose hands grab for him, trail over him almost thoughtlessly, like he’s checking by rote that he’s real and that all the pieces of him are intact, are safe, are true. Then he frowns, and meets Steve’s eyes, and that’s, it’s—
They’re the same eyes. Heartbroken. Only before, Steve thought they understood one another.
This time, though, it’s only questions staring at him. This time, those eyes don’t understand anything.
“What are you doing here, Steve?” he asks like it’s painful, and maybe Bucky’s not the only one who doesn’t comprehend what’s happening.
“Buck?”
“Why are you here?” and yes. Yes, it’s painful, Steve can hear it in the tone but he can’t figure out why. He thought that Bucky was okay with it, was okay with what Steve said and was going to do, he—
“I thought,” Bucky starts to speak, and then shakes his head, steels himself but doesn’t meet Steve’s eyes. “I thought you, I mean...”
He breathes heavy for a few seconds, and Steve understands now, if it had been fear before: because a few seconds like this is unbearable.
But Steve’s starting to think it wasn’t fear, or else not just that, in those eyes, because it isn’t gone.
If anything, it seems to spill over into everything Bucky has, everything Bucky is, and the only thing Steve can think about is how to stop it, how to make it still, and then retreat.
“You said you’d figured out what you wanted,” Bucky says, like that’s an answer to why he looks like he’s being gutted and trying not to make a sound while he’s bleeding out.
“I did,” Steve nods, but oh, oh god, what if that’s the truth? What if Steve read it all wrong and Bucky was just trying to be kind, what if what Steve wants makes Bucky feel like the world’s ending, makes him sick for it, makes him—
“That it took you so long, and you were sorry,” Bucky says the words like they’re distant, detached things, but he looks like they’re being detached, being ripped from him with every syllable. “And you saw her, and that was the last stop.”
Steve stares at him—yes, those were definitely words he said last night when they spoke, when Steve told him, when he seemed to understand, but Bucky’s version sounds wrong. Steve knows his didn’t sound quite like that, for some reason.
“Her?” Steve tries for the thing that feels out of place just there, just here. “You mean Peggy?”
“Of fucking course I mean Peggy,” and if it was pain in the words, in his face and body before now it’s also anger, but it’s anger borne of anguish, it’s frustration and it’s grief and Steve’s lost for it, but lost in it too: “You said you knew where you belonged, that you finally knew, so why the fuck—”
“You.”
Steve doesn’t realize he’s spoken, until Bucky freezes. Steve doesn’t realize until that moment that there was absolutely no understanding between them last night, and his chest grows tight for it, and there are still things that scare him, apparently, for the way fear surges through him at the thought that Bucky, maybe Bucky doesn’t, couldn’t—
“What?” Bucky’s voice is so low, Steve mostly hears the rumble.
“I,” Steve clears his throat foolishly, as if it’ll keep the strain from his voice; “you thought I was talking about Peggy?”
Bucky scoffs, leans back and crosses his arms and says nothing, and oh, oh fuck, then if that’s what he, if that’s—
“You thought I wasn’t coming back.”
Bucky doesn’t move.
“You thought,” Steve feels like the world is suddenly getting very narrow, his peripheral vision darkening so that it’s only Bucky in his view, and his lungs feel heavy as he replays everything in the last 18 hours in his head with this new lens set in place and fucking hell: “you...”
“Steve?” Bucky looks torn, or else, not torn and aching for that fact: he doesn’t want to react, wants to stay stoic and still but Steve must look as broken as he’s feeling because Bucky’s eyes on him bleed concern, and theres a perennial readiness in him to reach out and make right as soon as he’s needed, no matter what.
Good god—
“Bucky,” Steve says, because the word makes him calm and safe, that name holds the world and he can find himself inside it when he’s lost, and fuck knows he’s lost just now, and he needs firm ground to stand on if he’s going to figure this out.
“Bucky, do you,” Steve realizes he needs to ask the question, has no idea how, and thinks he’s an idiot to have thought it’d be so easy, that the understanding he was so grateful for was really the answer to the one thing he needs to know, the one thing he was swearing up and down he was going to go after and take close in both hands:
“Do you,” his voice cracks a little under the strain; “care about me?”
Bucky is silent, motionless, his eyes blank for a long stretch of seconds—again, so much longer than Steve would ever have dreamed—and Steve feels the little fissures etching in his ribs, then deeper, and he can’t, he can’t—
“What the hell kind of question is that?” Bucky growls, eyes suddenly on fire atop all the haunted despair. “How could you even ask—”
“I mean,” Steve cuts him off instinctually, because something built within him knows that he can’t have Bucky thinking he doesn’t see it, and hold it dear, and know he never deserved the care Bucky gave selflessly, endlessly. Steve would be a hateful fuck if he questioned whether Bucky cared, but that’s not, it’s not like…
“Do you have,” Steve steadies himself, and tries again; still can’t say it outright, do you lo—
“Do you have…feelings for me?”
Bucky blinks at him, and it speaks volumes and says nothing, all at once.
“Even a little,” Steve says, his voice too high, too tight, and there’s a flash of something, a twitch of a muscle and Bucky’s better at this than Steve will ever be but even after everything Steve can read him. Steve knows that twitch, that flash means something, and he’s going to bet everything, going to stake everything on the blind, baseless hope that it’s what he wants, what he said he was ready to finally try and get.
“You were going to let me go,” Steve says slowly, carefully, watching Bucky’s every breath: “because I said I finally realized what I wanted.”
Bucky doesn’t move, doesn’t take his eyes off Steve but his chest stops rising and falling; he’s not holding the air in his lungs. He’s refusing to breathe back in.
“I was finally going to go after it, try to find a life,” Steve picks the words out from their conversation, the ones that did matter. “You were going to let me go, so I could be happy.”
Bucky doesn’t do anything but swallow, but it’s hard, and that’s more than a hundred words could say.
“And you weren’t going to say a goddamn word, were you?” Steve marvels at it; feels sick with it.
“What d’ya want me to say, Steve? If anyone deserves it, happiness, a life,” Bucky says a little desperately, voice barely a rasp, and it unlocks something in Steve that he realizes now wasn’t opened like he thought it was, wasn’t clear and bold and bright like it should have been, like it is in Steve’s heart and soul and like it had glowed when he finally admitted it, finally saw it in stark contrast and was flying too high on the assumption that Bucky had seen it too when Steve hadn’t said it out loud.
“You’re what I want,” Steve spells it out, unequivocally, and tries not to tremble for how much he got wrong, and how much he could still lose.
“Here, with you, is the life I want to try and find,” he says it, and there’s an undeniable note of begging, of pleading with Bucky to see it, to understand it and believe; “I was going to go after you, and see if you’d be willing, if you’d ever thought, or felt, anything like what I feel for you and—”
“Steve,” Bucky shakes his head; “you said you saw Peggy, you said—”
“I saw Peggy living her goddamn life, with a ring on her finger and a future I had no place in, a life I wouldn’t fit in anymore even if I wanted to, if I tried,” Steve counters fiercely, because he can’t let them have these crossed wires any longer; the sparks they send flying are going to get them burned if he doesn’t set it right.
“And maybe it hurt a little, to know that wasn’t my life, that I’d lost that chance,” Steve admits, though in no small part because he never wants there to be anything between them that’s hidden, or half-given with everything that they are.
“But I lost other chances that hurt a hell of a lot more,” and he meets Bucky’s eyes and tries to impress upon him what those losses were, what they did, how he was no one worth knowing, no one worth the name when he’d been in the throes of those losses—
“And then I got them back and I’ve been such an ungrateful bastard that I keep letting the most important of those chances be lost,” Steve's voice doesn’t crack, just breaks clean in two on that because Bucky is staring at him like he still doesn’t understand. Like he can’t bring himself to understand because it’s something that makes no sense and Steve hurts for that: this, feeling like this for Bucky is something that’s always been there, and in recognizing it for what it was, for what it meant?
That was the only thing that still made sense to Steve, without wavering, without question.
“I wasn’t going back for my life, Buck,” Steve leans in, and closer now to Bucky so he can feel the heat of his body, he sees the way Bucky’s trembling, too fine for even Steve’s eyes to catch at any greater distance.
“I was coming back to it, and, just, hoping that you’d—”
For all the stillness, when Bucky does move it’s faster than Steve can follow or anticipate. His hands frame Steve’s face and draw him close but only just, his eyes so fucking big and Steve’s breath so fucking shallow and he leans into that touch like he was born for it.
“This.” Bucky says it like a statement, but it’s a question. Steve licks his lips without meaning too, but that probably says exactly what it should.
“Everything,” he mouths, because that’s the only answer. Bucky studies him, like he can read Steve's heart and soul if he holds his gaze long enough, strong enough.
“With me,” Bucky says again; asks again. “You want, that. With me.”
Bucky’s hand moves almost imperceptibly, but the way his fingers slide ever-so-slightly against Steve’s cheek is like the most intimate caress and Steve wants to believe it can be, might be, could become that and more.
“God, yes.” It’s more of a gasp, a whimper than Steve means it to be, but in truth, he just means it, the words, he means them with all that he is. “If you do,” he says, softer, just a little hesitant and steeped entirely in hope and now it’s Steve trying to read Bucky’s heart and soul inside his eyes, and Steve used to know the language there, but he’d never been looking for these words. He’s not sure if what he sees is what he wants, what he knows inside his own chest, what lives joyously and recklessly in his blood and his bones—
He’s not sure, until Bucky leans in and captures his lips, and draws the breath from his lungs with the way he tongues into Steve’s mouth, and brings Steve close to him, chest to chest and his heartbeat’s fast like Steve’s but set to the same rhythm and yes.
Yes.