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I.
There’s a dream Steve has, sometimes. In it, Bucky’s lean and young, clean-shaven, his hair cut short and handsome: before the war. He’s laughing, a spark in his eyes: C’mon, Steve, you’ve got to dance with them! That’s the whole reason they come out with us — girls want to dance, and we must be men enough to oblige.
You go ahead, Steve would picture himself saying, if this were a memory and not a dream. I’m not much for dancing, and Bucky would shake his head, expression slipping for just an instant, and oblige.
It’s not a memory, though. And this time it’s Steve raising his chin: Teach me, then.
He can’t ever get past what those words do to Bucky’s eyes.
The blue in them turns grayer, somehow; the laugh lines crease tight and then smooth. Bucky’s mouth softens, for a moment, lips parting, and then he purses them like he’s evaluating Steve’s next move.
“All right,” he says, a bit of a drawl to it that says he’s still in hiding; he reaches for Steve’s hands. “You put this one on her hip,” and he does, placing Steve’s fingers over the sharp line of his own hipbone. His skin is warm through the fabric of his shirt. “And this one —”
But Steve doesn’t want that, Bucky playing the girl. “No,” he says, “the other way. Show me how you do it.”
Bucky hesitates.
There’s nothing of laughter in him, when he reverses the position of their hands. His face goes smooth, neutral, the way it does when he’s not pretending to be anything for anyone. “Watch my feet,” he says, quiet, “if you want.”
Steve swallows, and does.
Bucky starts with him slow: a waltz, maybe. Step step step, step step step, and Steve finds that he doesn’t need to watch Bucky’s feet, not really; that everything he needs to know is already in the space between them, the press of Bucky’s fingertips and the stately glide of his hips, the perfect center of him. It’s in his eyes, the way they flick away to check the space he’s steering them next; the way they always return to Steve’s, sober and intent.
I think I could try something faster, Steve thinks, in the dream, but he never says it. Because that’s around when he notices that Bucky’s hands are both warm skin, and that feels wrong; the lines of his body feel wrong, too slim and easy, unbent by pain. That’s when he wakes up, usually, with tears clinging to his eyelashes, reaching across a void that isn’t there — Buck, I’m sorry, Bucky.
Please be out there somewhere. Please come back to me.
II.
Peggy doesn’t always know him. Sometimes, when she doesn’t, her face clouds with fear and confusion, eyes moving restlessly across his features in search for something they can’t find.
The nurses tell him, kindly, that’s just what it’s like. Steve always feels like it’s his fault anyway — he washed with the wrong soap, wore the wrong clothes. I never had this, he wants to scream at them sometimes. No one I loved ever lived long enough to forget my name —
Which is a lie, because now everyone he loves has forgotten his name.
“Hold her hand,” one of the nurses advises him, once, looking in on her nightly rounds. It startles Steve, makes him jump, and she gives him a disarming smile. “Sometimes they don’t remember who you are, but they know you’re a person they love, when you hold their hand.”
Steve’s always been scared to do that, on Peggy’s off days. Like he’s taking something he has no right to. Slowly, he obeys, curling his fingers around her frail ones, laying his palm across the papery skin on the back of her hand.
Her face clears. She settles back in her pillows, closing her eyes. “I’m so very tired,” she murmurs — and then, looking at him again: “Don’t you get fresh now. I’m waiting on a soldier boy; he owes me a dance.”
“I won’t, Peg,” Steve promises, smiling through his tears.
---
“I need you to teach me to dance,” he tells Natasha, two weeks later.
She blinks at him. “Are you trying out for the Russian Ballet?”
He laughs at that. “No. Sorry. Dumb question, I’ll ask someone who —”
Natasha’s smiling. “Relax, Rogers. Fucked up assassin training notwithstanding, I do like to dance for fun.”
She murmurs instructions to his collarbone as they move around the floor of Steve’s apartment, the couch shoved out of the way — “You feel that? When you don’t have to think anymore, because my body and yours both want to go the same way?”
“Yeah,” says Steve, voice rasping, because he can’t help but think of Bucky — of their fight, the give and take of it, knives spinning, his shield in Bucky’s metal hand. Whatever Bucky is now, he still moves with primal grace.
And he’s stopped dead mid-step, Natasha staring up at him in annoyance. “Rogers. Earth to Steven Grant.”
“I’ve been dead for so long,” he rasps, surprising both of them. “And now he’s out there and he might be dead too and I can’t —”
Natasha dips him, suddenly, and he cuts himself off with a yelp. She’s stronger than she looks, Natasha; still, it’s only a last-minute pivot for balance that stops them both from tumbling to the floor. “You’re not dead, Steve,” she says quietly, hair brushing his face.
He blinks. “I know. I just —”
“It doesn’t ever stop. You don’t ever go back to feeling like you think you used to be. But it gets better. I swear to God, Steve, it gets better.”
There’s a bead of water on her eyelashes. Her stare is iron. Her arms are shaking, now, with his weight.
“Thank you,” Steve says, quiet, and lets her pull him back to his feet.
---
He dances with Peggy. Everyone in the nursing home watches, and applauds; the staff are beaming at him, and Peggy’s beaming brightest of all. Then the other old ladies all want a turn too, and Steve makes the rounds, thinking, Buck, if you could see me now.
“You need to go find him,” Peggy tells him, after. “Back to that cliff. I always wanted to tell you. But then — oh, I was scared. You were broken then, and I knew you’d be even more broken with his body in your arms, and the war —”
Steve laces their hands together; both of them. He realizes he’s smiling. “You don’t need to apologize, Peg.”
“I’m not apologizing,” she retorts, crisp and stern. “I’m telling you. Go find him. Howard will help; he has a plane.”
---
She goes not long after that. In her sleep, the message says, and Steve wonders if she ever dreamed of dancing.
---
Bearing a casket is its own kind of dance. Step, step, in time with the others; it isn’t hard to follow the leaden beat. Peg is heavy on his shoulder: the weight of all the years they could have had. The weight of Bucky, his fruitless search; another promise he couldn’t keep.
Step, step. He feels his heartbeat linger with each pew they pass. His blood is going sluggish within him, icing up all over again. His hands where they grip the wood look white and cold.
It turns out to be easy, talking about her once she’s gone. He skates over the ice inside him; the stories and the smiles are there when he looks for them. It’s only when Natasha finds him in the empty church that the quiet in him cracks, a little. “What are you doing here?” he asks, and she says, “I didn’t want you to be alone.”
He doesn’t deserve Natasha. He pulls her close and can smell her hair. He wishes — an anemic sort of wish, like the heart in him is about as small and sickly as the body he used to live in — that he had more for her. That he could date one of the girls she’s always suggesting; that he could sign the accords. His ribcage judders once, like a reluctant engine, and goes still.
Later, at the hotel, Sharon tells him about being Peggy’s niece. An ache of longing passes through Steve like a snow-shadow; he wants these stories. He wants to want them, to pull life from the world he’s lucky enough to live in. Every word about Peggy’s long decades is a treasure, to be polished and hoarded, and he can’t — he can’t —
He wants those decades. He doesn’t want to honor and preserve them, he wants to live them, and instead he’s foundered in a world he doesn’t know and there’s no going back —
If Sharon sees the abrupt grief that tears through him, she gives no sign. Because Sam is there, pointing to the television, and Sharon’s already got her phone out of her pocket — already speaking rapidly into it, Who’s coordinating? — Good. They’re solid. Forensics? —
“At least twelve are dead,” the newscaster is saying, “including Wakanda's King T'Chaka. Officials have released a video of a suspect who they have identified as James Buchanan Barnes, the Winter Soldier.”
“I have to go to work,” Sharon says.
Steve doesn’t answer. He can’t. His heart is racing, blood pounding his ears. Hands shaking, thoughts spinning, electric.
Sam glances between them. Distantly, Steve registers the resigned look on his face.
Sam tells Sharon, “We’ll come with you.”
---
“You’re Steve,” says Bucky. The apartment walls are shaking. Newspaper crackles in the windows. In Steve’s earpiece, Sam is counting down. “I read about you in a museum.”
III.
They sit together at Nakia and T’Challa’s wedding, at least until Shuri comes laughing over and hauls Bucky to his feet. After that, Steve lounges back, Sam on one side and Natasha on the other, to watch. Bucky keeps trying to fade backward off the dance floor, through the Dora Milaje, but Shuri stops him every time. Eventually, she gets him out in the middle of it all, and a clapping perimeter forms around them. They dance a circle, hands crossed palm to palm like a bird in flight.
Queen Ramonda claims Bucky’s next dance, then the bride herself. That earns Bucky some respite, and he’s almost made his way back to Steve’s bench, laughing and shaking his head, when Shuri grabs his arm. “You can’t leave! You promised you’d teach me how they dance in Brooklyn.” She delivers the word in an exaggerated accent, like always, and Steve smiles at Bucky’s helpless shrug as he’s towed away.
Natasha’s stretched out on the bench, a little awkwardly; she’s nursing a cracked rib. “He seems happy,” she murmurs, contemplative, which is just about enough to make the bubble in Steve’s chest swell until he bursts.
“You seem happy,” Sam amends, elbowing Steve in the side. It comes in hard, and Steve lets out an oof that turns into a brief tussle while Natasha rolls her eyes as if to say: Boys. When they emerge, Bucky and Shuri are out on the dance floor, performing a credible rendition of a lindy hop.
Several minutes pass like that, all three of them watching. Then Steve says, so quietly he’s not sure they’ll hear him past the music: “You were right. It’s never what you thought you were trying to get back to. But it’s —”
He runs out of words, throat closing up as Bucky’s head tips back in a laugh. “Something else,” Sam finishes on his behalf.
The lights all around them are gold and dappled through the leaves of the trees. Steve could watch Bucky like this forever, his body moving easily, sweat beginning to gleam on his upper lip, on the hollows of his neck.
“All right, Rogers,” says Sam after a while, elbowing him again. “I know this lady taught you to dance. So, we’re gonna dance.”
“I don’t want to —” Steve protests, turning automatically toward Natasha, who blinks at him catlike out of one eye.
“I’m going to take a nap,” she says, with authority. “I’m recovering.” And she closes both eyes and turns her nose up to the sky.
They wind up swaying on the sidelines, mostly. Bucky whirls by sometimes, and once Shuri releases him long enough that he slides in next to Steve, arm winding loose and affectionate around his hips. “Thought you’d hide all night,” he says, half-shouting, into the warm skin where Steve’s shoulder meets his neck; “gonna dance with me?”
But Bucky’s languid and tired, and the music’s winding down; everyone stopping one more time to hug their king and queen. T’Challa and Nakia look weary and sweaty and radiant, bodies curving toward each other by instinct, and Steve thinks suddenly: that’s how we look. Me and Bucky, that’s how we look.
They have rooms at the palace, but they stumble home anyway, saying their goodnights to Nat and Sam and tripping up the path over the hill. It’s rocky underfoot, but the full moon lights their way, and Bucky’s still laughing and loose with beer and happiness, lets Steve catch him when he stumbles. But he can’t be as drunk as all that, because he glances sharply at Steve when Steve draws up short, eyes lingering, for a moment, on the westering moon.
It’s that, more than anything, that makes Steve say: “I used to have this dream sometimes. Where you taught me to waltz.”
Bucky snorts, but he sways closer. “You think I know how to waltz? Swing, I can do. Lindy hop —”
It’s bullshit, Steve knows; Bucky can do anything. But it doesn’t stop him from tipping his head closer and saying, into Bucky’s ear: “Let me show you, then.”
The moon is bright above them. There’s no music, except for the sounds of a few night birds, the call of a faraway frog; the breeze carries strains of distant laughter, some late-night-early-morning afterparty down in the city. Once, Steve thinks he hears a goat muttering to itself from its pen, hidden somewhere in the dark acacias.
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, either, that both of them are yawning, stumbling from time to time on clumps of grass and each other’s feet.
They’ve got a lot of time to make up. And they dance together, warm and whole in the night air, until the moon sinks into the hills, and the sun begins to finally paint the whole sky pink.