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They’re at the Mexican restaurant three blocks from Sam’s house because it’s Tuesday and tacos are two-for-one. It’s a semi-regular occurrence for them these days; Steve has never been one to turn away from the idea of more food for less money. There are lots of things to like about the twenty-first century, and while it’s certainly no internet or polio vaccine, the concept of Taco Tuesday is undoubtedly one of them.
(“They’re just on sale because it’s a Tuesday?” he’d asked the first time Sam suggested getting lunch there.
“People will do anything if they can give it an alliterative name, man, what can I say. It started as a social media thing, I think? Taco Tuesday, Follow Friday, Throwback Thursday, you know.”
“My entire life is a Throwback Thursday,” Steve had muttered, staring right into Sam’s eyes and taking in his momentarily horrified expression before laughing and shaking his head. “I’m fucking with you. Yes, let’s go get some tacos.”)
So: this is a thing they do now.
Usually they sit outside, but today they’re moving indoors because D.C. may be politically and historically important, but it is also a humid swamp town that swarms with mosquitos in the summer. Steve has discovered that while it may be true that mosquitos are more attracted to certain blood types than others, what they really like is super soldier serum.
He is still, after all these years, learning all the idiosyncrasies of his enhanced body. He stares at a cluster of bug bites on his arm, which turn red and swollen more quickly than they would on a normal human, but have already started to fade during the walk from the patio to the inside of the restaurant. It’s just a mundane little quirk of chemistry but he fixates on everything it represents, like he always does with these things. Steve thinks a lot about what would have happened if Erskine hadn’t been murdered and his research had continued. How precisely could that formula have been fine-tuned? How many of its glitches could have been resolved? Would he have been just a quickly obsolete first step in a long line of men who were like him in some ways, but better? Men who would have been stronger and more agile, but not hungry all the time? And just maybe, he thinks ruefully as he glances at a blackboard advertising happy hour with a green chalk drawing of a margarita glass, still capable of getting drunk?
Well. There’s no direction that train of thought can take that doesn’t make him sad.
“STEVE.”
He realizes then that he’s staring into space, and that Sam has clearly tried to get his attention several times already.
“What? Oh, sorry.”
“What is going on with you today?”
He thinks: Nothing a completely ordinary everyday occurrence definitely did not just throw me into a spiral of guilt and shame about people who died or maybe never even existed because of me oh also funny story remember how one of them wasn’t actually dead but that was somehow way worse and he tried to kill me and then disappeared and we still don’t know where he is and weird small things make me think about him all the time and most days are okay but today just kind of isn’t.
He says: “Nothing.”
“Uh-huh. Is it a nothing you want to talk about?”
“It’s nothi-” Sam raises an eyebrow at him. “It’s not anything you haven’t heard from me before.”
“Okay. Whatever you say.” He pauses. “Natasha said it seemed like you were having a rough week, thought I’d ask.”
“Wait, when did you see Nat? She’s in...Ukraine, I thought? Maybe? Wait, when did she see me?”
Sam laughs. “Don’t worry about when and why I see Nat.”
“Do I want to know?”
“Probably not. She worries about what you get up to, though.”
“Yeah, well. I did call Sharon since the last time I saw her, so. Following orders.”
“For once in your life,” Sam smirks.
“Hey now. Is that how you talk to national icons?”
“It’s how I talk to stubborn, ridiculous people.”
“Fair enough,” Steve says, then diverts his eyes towards the basket of chips and salsa a waitress has just set down on their table. The silence isn’t awkward, exactly - Sam has an extraordinary gift for never really making anyone feel awkward - but there’s too much potential it in, too many conversations they’ve had countless times and questions that still have no solutions. He pops a chip in his mouth and surveys his surroundings instead of saying anything else.
It’s too late for lunch but not quite dinner time; only about half of the other tables in the restaurant are occupied. The lull in his conversation makes Steve realize that he can hear pretty much everyone else’s: a young woman behind him telling her boyfriend about a job she wants to interview for, a couple of high school kids in marching band t-shirts whisper-yelling about an unfair teacher, a guy to his left explaining to a waiter that he’s twenty-one, man, really, I just don’t have my ID on me.
Sam must be listening to that one too, because he looks up at Steve with an amused little half smile and says “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Does your ID have your real birthday on it?”
Steve laughs. “I mean, I don’t really get asked for it too often but yeah, it does. The ‘July 4th’ throws people more than the ‘1918’ if they know who I am, I think. And if they don’t I can just say it’s a misprint that’s actually supposed to be 1981.”
“I still can’t believe you were actually born on the fourth of July. That does sound like some propaganda nonsense.”
“You can’t make stuff like that up. But yeah, a little on-the-nose. It annoyed me when I was a kid, even before I was, you know, whatever I am now, because you want your birthday to be about you and then everyone else is just talking about stupid history.”
Sam laughs for real this time, a little too loudly; one of the high schoolers glances in their direction. “That is hilarious, but please do not ever say that to the people who built a giant shrine to you in the Smithsonian.”
Steve shrugs. “That’s how kids are. Bucky used to whistle ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ at me, the asshole.”
He hadn’t thought about that in years, but there it is, as clear as when he was twelve. He smiles, and can see from Sam’s face that it must come out looking sad but he’s not sad right now, not really. The thing about Bucky reappearing in this century (and that was Bucky, Steve knows; he believes down in his bones that no matter how much of James Barnes had been drained and tortured away, there was a part of the Winter Soldier who recognized him) is that he gets more frequent little flashes of memories like that. When he thought that Bucky had been dead for decades, everything he remembered was broader, duller. But something about seeing Bucky in person - his real face, his actual body, no matter how damaged - sharpened those memories. They come in bright bursts now, triggered by anything and everything. More often than not they hurt, make Steve want to cry or punch something in frustration, but sometimes they’re nice. Sometimes they’re just what he needs.
Sam’s watching him carefully, like he’s not sure how to approach the rest of this conversation.
“It’s fine,” Steve says quietly. “It’s okay, I like remembering things like that.”
“I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
“You didn’t. Well, a little. But that comes with the territory. I don’t want to not remember stuff about him just because not everything connected to it is good, you know?”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t want to Eternal Sunshine that away, even if it’s tempting sometimes.”
Steve blinks. Sam sighs and waves vaguely with one hand.
“Sorry. It’s a movie that came out like ten years ago. But it’s...don’t put that on your list. It would be the very definition of ‘too soon’ for you right now, probably.” He shakes his head. “Nevermind. It doesn’t matter. What I mean is that those memories are there, and they’re yours, and all of them are important.”
Steve just nods and eats another tortilla chip.
“And,” Sam begins hesitantly, “He’s not gone. Look, I have no idea what you’re going through, no one in the history of the world has ever been in your situation, but just because we haven’t found him yet doesn’t mean we’re never going to. And when we do we’ll go from there.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Sam.”
“Any time, man. But preferably a time when there are tacos.”
“Oh yeah, we still haven’t even ordered, have we? Sorry,” Steve says, and tries to get their waitress’s attention.
So they order an absurd number of tacos, Steve specifies that he wants the hottest variety of salsa on his (enhanced healing, it turns out, also means enhanced spice tolerance), and that’s that. They make plans to meet tomorrow to actually go over some mission-related information that Natasha may have dug up, and he feels like things have been realigned a bit.
As he’s walking home, having said goodbye to Sam, his phone buzzes. He doesn’t recognize the number, but he knows it’s from Nat: “Seems like things are better with you, then.”
No, he doesn’t want to know.