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Counting down now, counting the seconds, each of them passing slowly, leaving Bucky’s palms wet and his throat dry; his heart beating against his ribs heavily, like it’s about to break through them and escape. Four more seconds to go. Three more.
Two.
One.
Silence, then; the confusion of the others, the wind blowing through the woods around them, leaves ruffling and branches rattling in its trail. A voice, someone saying something about Steve being late, about him missing the time slot, about him not being back and about them being fucked; this one last thing, the voice doesn’t say.
The voice is wrong, though, whoever it belongs to, and Bucky’s pretty sure he’s the only one who knows that. Not about the being fucked thing, no; he feels like he’s fucked all right. He’s felt like this for longer than either of the men next to him would think. He’s felt like this since Steve told him about his plan. Since he told Steve he knew about his plan, that is; Steve wouldn’t have had the heart to discuss it with him otherwise.
The thing the voice is wrong about is Steve not being back.
Bucky turns around slowly, eyes taking in the sight of the woods. The clearing they’re standing in, the trees surrounding the clearing, the bench half-hidden behind the trees, waiting for the occasional tourist to notice it and sit down to rest. There are gasps around him when the others realize what he’s staring at, and begin to stare at it, too. There’s someone sitting down to rest on the bench.
Not someone; Steve, Bucky reminds himself. Not to rest; not yet.
Something’s strange, though, and he can’t help but keep his eyes on the bench and the figure on it, only turning his gaze away for a second, to nod to Sam, to tell him to go ahead; but then his focus is back on Steve, on the brightness of his hair in the sun, on the broadness of his shoulders in the shadows, and suddenly he’s reminded at another time, another century, another goddamned country where he saw Steve for the first time in a long time, and, for whatever reason, felt the same.
I thought you were smaller, he thinks. I thought you’d be smaller. And yes, that’s it, that’s what seems so off about his appearance, even from this distance, even from behind. Bucky honestly believed that the years would change him. Turn the solid muscles into fragile bones, turn the stiff line of the spine into tired curves, turn the shining blondness of the hair into a sallow white.
But now, as he stares harder and harder, he can’t help but wonder if age is yet another enemy Steve couldn’t be defeated by.
Sam is gaping at Steve now, the right side of his face turned towards Bucky, and he can hear that Bruce is, too; he can hear their breath hitch in their throats when they both see Steve lean forward and unzip his bag. The shield he takes from it is gleaming, gleaming bright in the afternoon sunlight, and Sam holds it like he’s holding a baby he’s afraid he might drop, then he holds Steve’s hand and he’s squeezing it like his very life depends on it, and Bucky braces himself for the sight of that hand, he braces himself for the sight of the ring finger, and he feels almost disappointed when there’s no flash of light on metal, no golden shimmer, no sting in his eyes and no sting in his chest; and Steve’s turning his head to look into Sam’s eyes now, and his skin is as smooth as Bucky’s always known it to be and there are no creases around his eyes and in the corners of his mouth like it used to be on his mother’s face.
Bucky’s not sure what’s going on. Bucky’s not sure he’s going to be able to figure it out because he’s too busy looking, gaze running up and down Steve’s fingers, his left hand, his right hand, because he’s gripping Sam with both of them now; and he’s still searching for the ring, still expecting to find it, and he still doesn’t.
He’s imagined the ring to be thin and slender, something very simple and very golden; rose gold, maybe, like the one Steve once pointed at in a store window back in the time of the Howling Commandos. He never bought that one, not that Bucky was aware of, at least; but he was going to buy one similar to it. He was going to propose to Peggy, he was going to do it back then, and he wasn’t going to tell Bucky, he wasn’t going to tell him back then like he wasn’t going to tell him this time.
Back then, he did at least show him the ring. Without words, but with a very clear meaning. Bucky told him he loved it, even though Steve didn’t ask, and wished him and Peggy a long and happy life with their rings on their fingers.
This time, Bucky had to guess from the mournful, lingering glances cast at everything Steve saw; at the people, at the buildings, at the mobile phone he left at home before they came here, totally by accident. This time, Bucky told him he knew, and he didn’t wish him anything.
But Steve’s back, Steve’s here, and Steve must have taken off the ring because it’s nowhere to be seen. He’s also standing up now, pulling Sam into a warm hug and patting his back, and shit, it still doesn’t look like anything about him has changed. Not even his clothes, for that matter.
He lets go of Sam and turns to Bucky, and Bucky watches with his mouth fallen open as they both begin to walk towards him. He doesn’t bother closing it.
“Hey,” Steve says. Bucky, finally, closes his mouth, only to open it again a second later.
“Hey,” he manages. “This took shorter than I expected,” he adds then, and Steve’s nodding in response when he gets interrupted by Bruce.
“It took exactly the calculated amount of time,” he says. He sounds like he’s wrinkling his forehead, but Bucky isn’t interested enough to look at him and check. He’s sort of forgotten about his presence anyway.
“It did,” Steve says, and it seems like he’s trying to agree with both Bucky and Bruce at the same time. He does a good job at that; Bruce sniffs self-confidently, and Bucky—well, Bucky’s not sure what he’s supposed to be doing, but he also feels like he’s been told he was right.
Steve steps closer to him, and Bucky thinks about hugging him because hell, there are very few things he wants more than to hug him right now; but he’d also find it great to know who he’ll be hugging in a second, so he doesn’t move forward just yet.
“What happened?” he asks instead. Steve huffs out a smile, a smile that looks both contented and exhausted, a smile that makes things warm up somewhere inside Bucky’s chest.
“I went back,” he says. “Ran a few errands with the stones, it took me quite some time to get them all back to their rightful owners. Then I found Peggy.”
The warmth is gone now; there’s a familiar stiffness to Bucky’s muscles instead.
“Surprise, surprise,” Sam says, grinning softly. He wouldn’t be grinning if he knew how little of a help that is to Bucky right now, Bucky’s sure about that; but he hasn’t really told Sam anything about him and Steve and the things going on inside his chest so far, so Sam doesn’t have a reason not to grin. And, to be honest, that doesn’t feel all that great.
“And?” Bucky blurts out. Steve is still smiling, his expression becoming softer and softer as he goes on.
“She was like she’s always been,” he says. “Kind, and witty, and beautiful, and still interested in talking to me, for some reason.”
Bucky would just love to slap him on the back of his neck at that.
I couldn’t even list all the reasons, dumbass.
“Yeah, and?” Sam asks. Bucky can hear a quiet, scratching sound from behind his back, the sound of nails against skin, most likely the sound of Bruce rubbing his neck awkwardly, unsure how to back away from the conversation he’s just found himself in the middle of.
Bucky wishes he found a way, so he could follow his example, too.
“I managed to ask her out on a date,” Steve goes on. Bucky’s muscles tense up some more. “A couple of dates, actually. I told her I was going to ask her to marry me, and she told me she was going to say yes, but she wanted to discuss a few things at first.” Bucky’s gaze drops to the ground, to his own feet standing on it, avoiding eye contact masterfully when Steve tries to create it. There’s a short pause after that, but it only lasts a second and then Steve continues speaking. His voice is, somehow, quieter now. “She’s not stupid, you know. She found out I’d seen more than I was telling her. She told me she wanted to marry a man she actually knew.”
Bucky swallows, hard. This whole marriage thing isn't doing anything nice to his peace of mind, if the sweaty palms and the drumming ears are anything to go by, not when it's coming from Steve's mouth.
"So I told her,” is what’s coming from Steve’s mouth now. Bucky reminds himself to pay attention because it would be really rude not to pay attention, even though he doesn’t exactly feel like it. “I told her everything. Being frozen, being unfrozen, the Avengers, the Infinity Stones, the reason I could go back and be with her. Even her death, when she asked if she ever lived to see all this.”
Her death. Bucky remembers that day—maybe not the exact day, his sense of time wasn’t at its finest at that point, but the week for sure—he remembers sitting in the back of a car he hadn’t been in before and exchanging tense glances with a Sam he hadn’t talked to before, and he remembers looking at the contented smile on his face while Steve was kissing some woman, not even Peggy but, from what Sam had told him, a close relative of her, something Bucky never really knew what to make of, not back then and not since then, and thinking about how he should have been smiling the same way. It was a weird day, to say the least. Most days have been weird since that one.
“Buck.”
Bucky’s head snaps up when he hears his name, and he’s suddenly faced with a mildly concerned Steve and a deeply confused Sam, if their expressions are anything to go by. Sam is lifting an eyebrow at him. Steve’s brows are furrowed. Bucky averts his gaze again.
“Yeah, I’m listening, sorry. What were you saying?”
“I was saying that I realized two things halfway through the story.” Steve’s feet are moving now—no, it’s only one foot, and it’s not as much moving as hesitantly sliding an inch closer to Bucky, but it’s definitely doing something. Bucky observes that closely, with his gaze still fixed on the ground.
“Mhm,” he says in a tone that he hopes will come across as both inquiring and encouraging. Steve’s other foot catches up with the first one. It looks like he’s trying to get a little closer to Bucky, but for no apparent reason at all, because they’re not greeting each other now and they’re not saying goodbye to each other now, so he can’t possibly be going in for a hug; it sets Bucky’s entire being on fire anyway.
“One of those things was that Peggy had a family when I found her again,” Steve says. He really is close now and so is his voice; it has to be because Bucky can hear it clearly, even though it’s turned even quieter. “After they took me from the ice, I mean. This century. And I knew I could have just not told that to her, but that would have been a lie. I would have been taking a life from her; the life she built for herself without me in it. So I told her that, too. Then I apologized, which she accepted, and came back right away.”
“Jesus Christ, Steve.” Bucky, finally, looks up at that, if only to glare at Steve in pure confusion. “When I said you’d be taking the stupid, I didn’t mean you should use it all up, too.”
“No, I’m pretty sure I used it up when I left.”
Bucky opens his mouth to say something, but he realizes quickly enough that he hasn’t thought out what to say just yet, and he closes it again without getting a single word out.
“Because,” Steve goes on, and then he’s taking a deep breath while he furrows his brows some more; he looks like he’s concentrating really hard on what he’s about to say, and when he says it, Bucky’s mouth falls open again and he doesn’t even close it this time, “I left behind the guy I went into the ice for. The same guy I fought half of my friends for. The same guy who remembered my mother’s name when he didn’t remember his own.” Steve stops there and steps closer again, reaching for Bucky’s good hand, no, for both of his hands, and squeezing them gently. “I forgot about the end of the line,” he says, “and I should’ve realized a hell of a lot sooner how much of a prick I was for that.”
Bucky’s mouth goes dry but his eyes seem to be doing the exact opposite.
“There’s something else I did back there,” Steve adds now, determination in his eyes and something like a soft tremble in his fingers as he lets Bucky’s right hand slip free. “I may have gone to this shop and—alright, I know you’ve been planning on going with Sam and defending the world, and you might not want a pensioner holding you back, but I thought I’d ask.” He lifts his hand until it’s between their faces, and the thing shining between his fingers is more golden than rosy and more heavy than slender, and he clears his throat while Bucky’s busy trying to figure out what the hell is going on and failing at it miserably. “It’s the twenty-first century, Buck,” Steve says, and his eyes look anxious but his lips are smiling, “and it seems like I’ve got a wedding ring to give to someone.”
It takes a couple more seconds for that to settle in; seconds that Bucky spends staring at Steve without managing, or daring, to answer.
“Yeah?” he finally asks, and Steve nods, swinging the ring around a little in front of him.
“Yeah,” he says. “And just to be clear, I’d really like to give it to you.”
To Bucky’s credit, he’s laughing before he’s crying.
“Yeah,” he says then, blinking away the tears he hasn’t been able to wipe off with the back of his hand, “yeah, okay, let’s do this.” And now it seems like it’s Steve’s turn to process things way slower than what would seem necessary, because the face he makes tells Bucky that he has, in fact, been caught off guard by that.
“What, really?” he asks, and Bucky nods before he knows what he’s doing.
“Yeah, I mean, unless you don’t want to,” he stammers, and Steve is shaking his head now, then he’s nodding, too, then he’s lifting Bucky’s left hand until it’s level with the ring.
“No, I want to, I just didn’t think you would.” And, before Bucky could tell him off for being so goddamn stupid, he slides the ring on Bucky’s finger and it clicks into place with a tiny sound that makes Bucky forget every insult he was going to lovingly throw at Steve and stare at his own hand instead. He twists it around a little, eyes wide and lips parted.
It’s not that the ring fits his finger. It’s that the ring looks like it was specifically designed to be a part of his finger; another hoop of metal brazed to the others.
“How?” he asks, and Steve fails to suppress a self-satisfied smile.
“I had literal generations of Wakandans to help me.”
“Oh.” Bucky looks at the ring again, then back up at Steve—Steve, who’s all flushed cheeks and flashing teeth and shining eyes and smug smiles—and this time it’s him who inches closer. He has to take a deep breath first, though. “So how do we do this?” he asks when their chests are almost touching, his left hand trapped between them at first, then slowly coming up to rest on Steve’s shoulder. “Do I kiss you now?”
And that’s the moment Sam bursts into laughter and makes them both turn towards him in an instant.
“Come on, man, that’s just rude,” Steve says with a scowl, and Sam begins to laugh even harder, even though that didn’t seem humanly possible just a second ago.
“Yeah, sorry, congratulations,” he says, pressing a palm against his stomach to demonstrate how much it’s hurting from all the laughter, “but did you just ask him to marry you before you two even kissed?”
Steve blushes some more, and that might be the reason Bucky finds himself able to speak at all; it might very well be the reason because it’s adorable and it’s beautiful and it’s funny as hell, and it reminds him of another place and another time entirely.
“Well,” he begins, “we sure haven’t done that in a long time.”
He grins up at Steve and Steve grins down at him, and when he does, Bucky somehow feels like he’s, once more, that sixteen year old boy who kissed his best friend on the lips in a back alley in Brooklyn, two corners and a five minute walk away from their home, and then never found the courage to mention it again.
He has to stand on the tip of his toes when he finds it now.