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It’s absurdly fitting that Steve eventually finds Bucky right back where they had started.
He and Sam spend the better part of three months chasing leads across Europe, always one step behind the man known as The Winter Soldier. It doesn’t take Steve long to realise what he is doing, what he is chasing. It gives Steve a vein of hope that he’s searching for memories of Bucky; retracing his last steps, right down to the ravine where Steve thought he’d lost him—that had been a harrowing experience for Steve, standing at the bottom of the mountain staring up at the tracks where seventy years ago (for Steve it isn’t that long, but one year or seventy, Steve knows he’d feel the same) Steve hadn’t been able to reach him. It brings up feelings of grief and guilt so strong that Sam sits him down on a nearby rock and tells him to ‘breathe, idiot.’
The hand on his shoulder is soft and supportive though, and when Steve can actually take in a breath without feeling like he’s drowning, he looks up to see Sam watching him with nothing but understanding. Steve scrubs a hand over his face, angrily brushing away the tears that had sprung unbidden. He lets out one last sigh, and stands up, looking out through the forest.
‘He’s out there somewhere,’ Sam says, expression mostly unreadable when Steve looks over at him, but Steve knows what’s hiding behind that particular mask. Steve wishes he could say the same for the man Sam lost, but Bucky’s fate is worse than dying would have been, and he wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
They go to London, and Paris, and Berlin, and Austria, to the camp where Steve and the Howling Commandos had stormed back into after being believed dead. They go to the field where Bucky was captured—he never told Steve, but Steve remembers reading where they were taken, and it’s too deliberate for it to be a random field for the Winter Soldier to turn up at—and then wind up back at Brooklyn for a blip before Steve and Sam are summoned back to DC.
Natasha buzzes them an email telling them to steer clear of both Steve and Sam’s old apartments, and instead gives them an address on the other side of town. There are keys under the mat, and there are two bedrooms made up, and a fridge full of food. Steve is incredibly grateful, but he knows he will sleep no better in the comfortable bed than he had on the ground when he and Sam had camped on their travels.
It’s only eight at night when they get to the apartment, but Sam and Steve have been flying for the better part of a day, and haven’t really stopped for another two. Sam sacks out on the couch the moment they are in the apartment, and by the time Steve comes back out of the room he has claimed in running gear, Sam is snoring on the couch. By all means Steve should also be tired—and he’s exhausted really, in a bone-deep way—but there’s still a thrum buzzing under his skin that he can’t shake, and running will help clear his mind, or if not then exhaust his muscles so much he’ll pass out for an hour or three. He leaves Sam a note and locks the apartment behind him.
He doesn’t really think about where he’s headed. He just lets his feet hit the pavement and focuses on his own breathing and tries not to think about Bucky. It’s futile of course. It always is.
Steve finds himself at the Smithsonian Exhibit before he even truly realises where he is. He stops at the end of the long walkway, catching his breath as he looks up at one of the tall banners of himself that has ‘Captain America Exhibit: three days left!’ at the bottom of it.
His curiosity and sentimentality gets the better of him, even though there’s only an hour left until they shut and he could easily wait until tomorrow his feet guide him on regardless. It’s strange to think it might be the last time he sees these things, but when he goes inside the girl at the desk beams at him and tells him the exhibit is only going on loan to the British Museum as they are commemorating Britain’s allies as part of it’s D-Day Landing exhibition, despite the fact both Cap and Bucky had been long gone before that had happened. The other commandos played their part though, and that is important in its own right.
Steve pays his fee and heads inside.
It’s quiet at this time of night, which isn’t a surprise. There’s an elderly couple a few yards ahead of Steve, and two students sitting on a bench near the Howling Commandos section, one scribbling furiously while the other is scrolling through her phone, occasionally poking her friend in the side to show her something. There’s another few stragglers but there’s one in particular that makes Steve stop in his tracks.
He’s standing over at wall that interchanges between small, skinny pre-serum Steve, and the man he is now. His back is to Steve, but Steve would know those shoulders anywhere, even with the cybernetic arm now. His hair is pulled back in a stubby ponytail, and he has a loose fitting black denim jacket. But Steve knows.
‘Bucky?’ he blurts it without really meaning to.
The man twists, reacting on instinct to a name Steve is certain he’s only heard him speak. There’s recognition there, and Bucky turns to look at him properly.
‘You survived then?’ he says, which Steve knows if he’d really wanted to—deep down—he’d have made sure his mission had been complete, that Steve Rogers—the problem—was dead.
‘Thanks to you,’ Steve says, his smile genuine, desperate to believe Bucky is in there. ‘You went to Europe?’
Bucky looks away from him, he runs the fingers of his metal hand over a glass case with Steve’s belongings in it—a compass, the one before Peggy’s picture, a sketchbook open at a portrait of Dum-Dum and Gabe, a lighter that was actually Bucky’s but had been found among Steve’s things. He moves away, steps across the room to stand in front of the picture of skinny Steve.
Steve starts towards him, puzzled and elated at the same time because Bucky is there, he is, but he’s distancing himself too. It makes Steve’s chest ache at the realisation that Bucky doesn’t feel like he deserves to have Steve back.
‘I think I liked you more before,’ Bucky says, it’s meant to be teasing but Steve knows there is truth there, there’s a lot more of small Steve to remember. Steve steps closer again, carefully, trying not to spook Bucky, and trying not to let his own hopes get the better of him.
‘You remember?’
‘Fragments,’ Bucky says, nodding, he glances over at Steve before he moves onto the next display. ‘The longer I’m out of—’ he stops himself, swallowing hard.
‘What do you remember?’
‘You,’ he says. ‘Sometimes. I remember you got beat up in that alley between Mrs. Richardson’s café and the bookstore. They’re not there any more. Think one’s a Starbucks now.’
For the life him Steve can’t figure out why Bucky has remembered that particular beating over all the others. He’d been fifteen, foolhardy, and had tried to protect a kid who a bunch of kids his age were trying to steal bread from. Steve had gone in, Bucky had pulled him out and chased off the last of the gang. He half remembers Bucky looking at him like he was an idiot before they had walked the younger kid home.
‘I got beat up in a lot of alleys Buck,’ he says.
‘Yeah, but that’s the day I…’ he cuts himself off again, and oh. Oh. Steve feels like his world has shifted on it’s axis because he had thought it one-sided, he thought Bucky had just loved him like a brother and made his peace with that, but now there are things slotting into place and Steve feels like a monumental idiot.
There’s a blush high on Bucky’s neck as he moves away again, coming to a stop in front of the section dedicated to Peggy. Steve follows him, allowing himself to step closer, so he can see Bucky’s face in profile, Bucky’s glance is cool; shuttered.
It’s a look he’s only vaguely familiar with despite the fact they grew up together. When they were younger it was the look he got when someone picked on Steve and he was around to hear it, rather than just making it to the aftermath and sending people on their way.
It’s one he caught brief glimpses of after he’d rescued Bucky from Zola, and the first time he’d brushed it off as Bucky dealing with everything that happened—Steve, his own capture, the war that was too big, too big for anyone—and let Bucky deal with it silently on his own because he respected him enough that he was sure Bucky would talk to him when he was good and ready.
But it’s now, when the two of them are standing in the quiet hall of a memorial commemorating the both of them, in the 21st Century, with seventy years missing, with so much time gone by thinking the other just gone and the mindless consequences that created for both of them, that Steve realises he’s barely scratched the surface.
That look is many things. It’s steely determination in closed off deep blue eyes, and a bunched jaw. It’s Bucky’s almost life-long desire to look after Steve, a need to protect him even after the serum—because people gloss over it, but Steve is stubborn and sometimes acts before he thinks, because he’s always too ready to throw himself into the fray for the betterment of others, his own safety be damned.
It’s brotherhood, and love, and jealousy, and Steve has no idea how he hasn’t noticed it before. How turned on its end the world had been for Bucky from the moment Steve helped Bucky up from that table in Zola’s lab.
Steve suddenly big and strong. Steve with a dame Bucky has never met showing interest. Steve fitting into that role of leader with an ease his smaller, frailer, self had never been able to. Steve moving on—in all respects of the word—without him. He realises then, that perhaps Bucky thought Steve was managing just fine on his own, when the opposite was true. It was Bucky that had driven him to get up and fight, to disobey orders and make a rescue mission of his own. He never really stopped to tell him that.
Steve had wondered, both then and now, if ever Bucky reciprocated his feelings, but tamped that down out of necessity. Now he realises there’s no question.
Bucky looks away, up at the larger than life profile of Peggy Carter from seventy years ago—it’s still jarring to remember her like this like it was yesterday, and know that now she’s old and remembers him in fragments of lucidity. There’s a horrible line of symmetry with Bucky.
‘You loved her,’ Bucky says, it’s not a question.
‘Yes,’ Steve says quietly. ‘I still do.’ Because it doesn’t matter that he missed her whole life, he loves her in a way he has never loved a woman—and been loved in return—before.
Bucky flicks a glance at him, and ducks his head, nodding to himself more than Steve. Steve realises this is it. If ever there was a moment to tell Bucky how he feels, this is it.
It’s kind of ridiculous how much time it took.
‘I love you too,’ Steve says, fingernails biting into his palms as he clenches his fists. His heart is beating too fast, his mouth dry with words he thought he’d never get to say. Bucky looks up, brief and hopeful again as he had earlier.
‘In a different way?’ Bucky prods, and Steve wonders if Bucky doesn’t trust his own memories anymore—and that causes a pang in Steve’s chest—or if maybe his body language is all wrong; that his fear of Bucky rejecting him is in fact being read as Steve rejecting Bucky.
It strikes him then that words aren’t enough. He crosses the floor, passing the mannequins of himself and Bucky as he goes, and steps up into Bucky’s space. Bucky looks lost, flinches when Steve brings his hands to Bucky’s face. He strokes his fingers over Bucky’s cheeks and jaw—that still-boyish flutter in his chest can’t believe what he’s about to do, after so long—and leans in to press his lips to Bucky’s.
Bucky sucks in a surprised breath before their lips touch, but his hands find Steve’s waist, and he’s pulling him in tight, kissing back like he means it. Like it’s been ninety-odd years for him too—more aware possibly, with those extra months Bucky was kept awake between freezes. It’s messy, and desperate, and filled with so much longing Steve’s dizzy with it. There’s a whine Steve isn’t sure comes from whom, but he moves from Bucky’s lips to press kisses to his jaw, fingers stroking down Bucky’s neck. Bucky is sucking in breaths like he’s drowning, a groan escaping when Steve kisses him in the juncture between his ear and jaw.
‘We should—’ Bucky stars, letting out a small noise of discontent when Steve pulls back to look him in the eye, half-afraid. ‘This is…’ Bucky glances behind them, and Steve twists to look at the pictures and mannequins behind them and huffs a laugh.
‘Weird, right?’
‘Not exactly how I imagined it,’ Bucky breathes, fingers squeezing at Steve’s waist like he’s convincing himself this is real, like he’s allowed to touch. ‘Peggy’s watching.’
Steve looks up at the smiling profile again, then back at Bucky—that closed off look coming back already—and he runs his thumb back and forth over Bucky’s jaw.
‘You’ve got to know, Buck,’ he says, leaning their foreheads together—he pauses to push a stray bit of hair behind Bucky’s ear—breathing him in. ‘Just because I love Peggy, doesn’t mean I love you less. I just thought I couldn—’
Bucky silences him with a kiss, quick and chaste but with equally as much meaning as their frenetic grappling of before.
‘I love you too,’ Bucky breathes. ‘Thought I’d lost you. They told me you’d—I—’
It’s Steve’s turn to silence Bucky with a kiss, Bucky’s lips trembling against his. ‘I know,’ he says when he pulls back. He hadn’t, but it makes sense. It makes sense in the most painful way, because Steve had done the same. Let Bucky’s death make him reckless in regards to his own safety. But Steve had had Peggy left to fight for, to come back for, Bucky… Bucky thought he’d lost everything.
‘I—‘ Bucky stiffens, his jaw taught under Steve’s hand. ‘I’m not the man I was… I’m—I’m broken…’
‘I’m not the skinny kid from Brooklyn I was either,’ Steve insists. ‘Too much has happened, neither of us can go back.’
‘You are where it matters,’ Bucky says, his flesh and bone hand coming to rest over Steve’s heart, his smile soft and affectionate and just so wholly Bucky that Steve puts his hand over Bucky’s and holds it tight.
‘Yeah, well there’s a stubborn punk from Brooklyn hidden in there somewhere too,’ Steve grins, tapping at Bucky’s forehead with a finger.
‘I’m stubborn?’ Bucky barks a laugh, and he looks younger than Steve has seen in a long, long while, even before the ill-fated train journey. Steve really can’t help that he leans in to kiss him again. ‘We should get outta here,’ Bucky breathes against him when they part.
Steve nods, letting Bucky twine their fingers together and pull him in the direction of the exit. The only other people still here are the two students, and the receptionist who is busy filling up brochures. The chilled night air is enough to waken his senses a little bit.
‘Where are we going?’ Steve asks, and Bucky shoots him a look that is sheepish.
‘Your old apartment,’ he says. ‘Crashed out there last night.’
‘Oh,’ Steve says, fingers tightening around Bucky’s.
He can’t help wondering if Natasha knew.
* * *
Steve wakes up in a bed that is both familiar and not. It’s been a long four months since he slept in his own apartment, and it takes his brain a moment to catch up with the fact that he wasn’t meant to be here, neither of them are meant to be here. Bucky’s a warm length of flesh beside him, their legs brushing, their hips side by side, and Bucky’s cybernetic arm surprisingly cool despite being pressed against Steve’s side all night.
A quick glance at the clock tells him it has indeed been all night—half seven the alarm clock tells him—and it’s the longest, and well-rested sleep Steve has had in a while. Steve’s arm is still under Bucky’s head, Bucky’s hair pulled free from its ponytail and spread messily over Steve’s arm and the pillow. Steve wants to hold onto the image forever.
Bucky blinks slowly, twisting to look at Steve now he’s realised Steve is awake. His smile is small and sad, and Steve feels his heart lurch in his chest. Steve rolls onto his side, leaning in to brush his lips against the marred flesh where metal meets skin on Bucky’s shoulder.
‘What?’ Steve asks, pushing himself down the bed a bit and half pinning Bucky underneath him like that will make him stay, he hooks his leg between Bucky’s, drapes his free arm over his middle, and rests his head against Bucky’s metal shoulder. It’s not half as uncomfortable as it probably should be.
‘I should go,’ Bucky says, letting out a long breath. He pushes his nose into Steve’s hair and just breathes him in.
‘Where?’
‘I dunno,’ he admits with a huff of a laugh. ‘Barely stayed in one place this long since…’ he trails off but Steve knows what he means. ‘I wanna do good, I wanna—’
Atone for his sins, Steve realises. He pulls back from where he’s effectively been caging Bucky in, he has no right to stop Bucky, even if he just got him back after all this time. He would never ask Bucky to stay, he knows his best friend well enough to know how much this means to him. And he knows, deep down, that Bucky is punishing himself for allowing himself to be used as an instrument of chaos and destruction and death, and that he needs to make amends to be at peace with himself.
‘You’re a good man, Buck,’ Steve says, and Bucky looks at him sharply, his eyes are filled with too many things, disbelief and pain and retribution.
‘They made me do awful things,’ Bucky says quietly. ‘I didn’t even care, they just wiped and started over.’
‘I read your file,’ Steve says, Bucky raises his head at that, rolling onto his side so he’s closer again, he looks confused.
‘And you don’t hate me?’
‘No! What?’ Steve exclaims. ‘Come on, Buck, they used you as a weapon with no remorse.’
They stare at one another for a long moment, Bucky’s gaze imploring and sad at the same time. Steve wants to say a hundred things, selfish things, inspiring things, the kinds of things you say when you’re trying to set someone free. He finds he can’t say any of them.
‘I have to,’ Bucky says, breaking the silence. ‘You get that, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do,’ Steve says, he tangles his fingers in Bucky’s hair and pulls him down for a kiss, morning breath be damned. ‘You’re gonna come back, right?’
‘Yes,’ then, ‘Yeah,’ he adds, softer this time as he leans down to brush his lips against Steve’s. ‘Someone’s got to make sure you don’t get in trouble.’
‘You’re running a little late on that,’ Steve says.
‘Well,’ Bucky says, sliding across the bed until he’s lying over Steve, Steve makes space between his legs, a gasp hitching in his throat when their groins slide together. Bucky smirks at him. ‘Do you think you can survive another month without destroying another major city?’
‘I make no promises,’ Steve says, grinning back at him. ‘Have you seen the crowd I’ve got to keep in check?’
‘Ah yes,’ Bucky says, pressing a brief, firm kiss to Steve’s mouth. ‘The Avengers. Apt.’
‘Maybe some day you can join us,’ Steve says, and Bucky rolls his eyes.
‘Yeah we’ll work up to that,’ Bucky says, and he rolls his hips against Steve’s, eliciting a groan from Steve’s throat. This smile he gives him is equal parts cocky and gleeful. ‘Hows about one more round for good luck?’
‘One more round for good luck,’ Steve repeats, leaning up to kiss Bucky with everything he has.
And it’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough, but it will do.
For now.