Chapter Text
Part One: Returning
Bucky can't explain to anyone how strange it is to wake up in Wakanda with five years gone in a blink, in a second. The last thing he remembers was trying to get to Steve, and then General Okoye is telling them—because it's not just Bucky, it's so many people—that five years have passed and the rest of the world went on without them.
He should be used to it, he supposes, but he had really thought that he was done sliding through time, finished missing years. He had promised himself—had promised Steve—after that last time in Wakanda to get rid of the trigger words that it would be the last time, that he wouldn't leave like that again. He had thought it was a promise he could keep.
But there's no time to worry about that because Steve needs him; the Avengers need him. The big purple asshole is back, this time in Jersey, which somehow seems appropriate, and their whole team of wizards is opening portals for them to step through, and just like that, that easy, he's going to be with Steve again, fighting with him, watching his six; it's what Bucky has always been meant to do.
When he steps through the portal, there Steve is, and Bucky's mind shorts out a little bit because he studied up on the Avengers while he was in Wakanda and Steve was out fighting, to find out more about the team that Steve had built around himself, and Steve is holding Thor's hammer. Steve is wielding lightning.
Bucky knows what that means, and he always thought Steve was worthy of any accolade, but now there's proof for the world—for the universe—to see it. His heart swells to see it, a burst of pride that now anyone can look and see what Bucky has seen in Steve all along.
And then there's no time for pride, no time to process what this means for Steve or for him. There's only time to fight. Bucky has his guns and he has his knives, and he fights his way through the killing fields until he can have Steve's six. He doesn't remember everything—his doctors in Wakanda told him that he might never remember everything—but he remembers enough that watching Steve's back through his scope brings actual memories instead of just the sense memory of a gun in his hands. This sensation is not from his time as the Asset, this is from battlefields in Europe, and if it's grim work, it's still work that needs doing, and he wants to be the one to do it.
In the end, they're both still standing, he and Steve, and if Bucky has a lot of feelings about Stark not being there too, he'll have to work through those on his own. After the funeral, there's still work that needs doing. The Infinity Stones have to be returned to the timelines they came from. Steve says he'll do it, because of course he does, and Bucky won't let him go alone. The past might be another country, but it's one that's full of pain, and just because Steve has borne it alone in the past doesn't mean it has to be that way—not on Bucky's watch.
“You don’t have to come with me,” Steve murmurs. As if, Bucky thinks. They each have a backpack of supplies to make their way easier, and Steve’s holding a briefcase that Shuri and Doctor Banner made, that holds the stones, each in its individual shielded case.
“Try and stop me,” Bucky says. He’s still trying to take in all the changes Steve has gone through in the five years that he missed. There’s a tightness around his eyes, and new lines around his mouth, and Bucky can’t get the image of Steve touched by a god’s lightning out of his mind’s eye. He’s not letting him out of his sight.
Steve puts his hand on Bucky’s shoulder, and the familiar grip sends a relieved shiver down Bucky’s spine. “There’s a lot to catch up on. The infrastructure problems, the cults—”
“All of that can wait,” Bucky says.
And it's a good thing Bucky goes with him, because every stop seems like there's a scab waiting to be torn open. The Ancient One isn't so bad, except those old, old eyes look into Bucky's and he sees there the knowledge of all the things he's done. On Vormir, the fucking Red Skull is waiting for them, a harbinger of doom from both of their pasts. Bucky can't look at him without tears pricking his eyes, the remembered terror of thinking that that might happen to his face suddenly clawing at his throat. But he's there for Steve—he's there with Steve—and the two of them stand shoulder to shoulder and the Red Skull only watches when they throw the Soul Stone back into the water. They don't ask for anything, but maybe both of them were wishing, because when the stone disappears beneath the purple waves, Natasha sits up in the shallows of the water, looking around in confusion. The two of them scramble down the cliff after that, the Red Skull ignored if not forgotten, because Natasha is alive . Bucky had gotten to know her, at least a little, in Wakanda; she was Steve's stalwart right hand when he couldn't be. They talked enough to know that they shared similar histories, had scars formed from some of the same pains.
She's standing in shin-deep water by the time they get to her, wobbly on her legs like a newborn foal. They're laughing and crying at the same time, arms wrapped around each other unselfconsciously, and Bucky can see in the way that Steve and Natasha look at each other that they've been each other's right hands in Bucky's missing years this time as well, and he's glad for it even while some part of him hurts that it wasn't him.
Natasha is still wearing her time suit, and they've got enough Pym particles to send her back, if not to take her with them.
"We'll be back before you know it," Steve says, smiling. Beaming, really, at the gift of her return.
"You won't even have time to miss us," Bucky offers quietly, and he knows there's not much to miss about him, but he thinks—he hopes—that given time they might be friends.
"I'll be expecting you." Natasha wipes her eyes, smiling as broadly as Steve is. "So don't dawdle."
They take the Mind Stone back after that, both heartened by the unexpected joy on Vormir, and find 2012 easy enough to slip into. The Mind Stone isn't in the scepter anymore, which is somewhat problematic, but frankly, Steve say—and Bucky agrees—SHIELD in 2012 is not who they want to have the stone or the scepter anyway.
Of course that leaves the problem of who they want to have the stone after all. It's hard to know who to trust when Bucky in this world is still trapped and Steve is only barely free, and everyone they might trust in the future is still trapped in spiderweb layers of lies. But after some impassioned discussion, they both agree that Natasha is perfect. She isn't yet the person that Steve leaned on so heavily in the future, but the seeds of that person are there, and who knows—maybe this sign of trust will help the part of her that's always thinking about what she owes, the debt she can never repay. Bucky understands that, only all too well.
And she's only just recovered Barton; and after his experience with Loki, she'll be careful with it.
They manage to corner her by herself in the Tower. The Avengers are still meeting, trying to figure out damage control when Loki has vanished with the Tesseract and the scepter is gone—also stolen by Loki, they believe, but in reality taken by Steve to the future. They’re in a conference room in the Tower, and Steve calls Natasha’s phone and asks her to come to Tony’s bar at the top of the Tower, the floor still smashed from the earlier fight with Loki.
She steps out of the elevator armed and ready for a fight. Her eyes go wide as she takes in Steve, her gaze darting around his face, taking in the changes that a dozen years have wrought between the man she just left talking with the other Avengers and the man standing in front of her. Bucky hangs back, both hands and arms safely covered by his time suit. He feels the urge to tuck his hand in his pocket anyway; he can never forget that he shot her.
But while she's doubtless aware of his every movement, most of her attention is focused on Steve. "It wasn't Loki, was it," she says, in a studiedly casual voice. “Who took the scepter from Rogers.”
"No, it wasn't," Steve agrees. Her wariness is plain in the way she holds herself, in the way she's taking in bits and pieces of information from his face and their suits. The contrast between this Natasha and the one they pulled from the waters at Vormir couldn't be clearer.
"Why would Loki make you older?" she says.
"He wouldn't." Steve spreads his hand wide, offering up himself, no weapons. "Time did that."
"You're from the future?"
"A future," Steve amends. "One that I hope won't come to pass."
Her eyes dart to Bucky, doubtless cataloguing every detail. But fortunately for him, he guesses, Hydra didn't often send him out without the mask, so she won't know his face.
"Who's this?"
"A friend," Steve says.
Bucky rolls his eyes. "Someone else with red in his ledger," he says quietly. "A ghost who came in from the cold."
Natasha's hand twitches, like she wants to fire, but she pts away her firearm in the end. She just looks at him with a piercing gaze as though she could delve into his secrets. But she can’t—not here, not now.
"There's something we need you to keep for us," Steve says. "This doesn't go to SHIELD—SHIELD is compromised."
Natasha makes a strangled noise in her throat, the terrible sound of someone's belief being ripped away.
"You can trust Fury," Steve says, "and Hill, and the Avengers. But Alexander Pierce is Hydra, and he's got tendrils all through the organization." Natasha looks as close to screaming as Bucky's ever seen her, her face bloodless, that perfect mask of composure barely held in place.
"In our future," Steve goes on, "there are more aliens coming. They’re more like the Chitauri, and less like Thor. In our future, the Avengers were divided when Thanos came to collect the Infinity Stones. We belong together."
"The Infinity Stones." Natasha looks from one to the other of them like she's not sure she can trust her own eyes.
Steve pulls the Mind Stone out of his belt in the shielded container Shuri give them. He opens it, and some of that unearthly light leaks through. Natasha's eyes go wide.
"This was in the scepter that Loki used on Clint," Steve tells her. "This was what gave it its power."
"And you're giving it to me?" Natasha's face is controlled again, but she can't keep the incredulity from her voice.
"There's no one I would trust with it more," Steve tells her and Bucky is certain that, like him, Natasha can hear the deep sincerity in his voice. "Maybe you'll decide that the Avengers need to know about it. Maybe Thor will be able to help you with it, because he at least will have heard of the stones. But it's for you to decide."
"Why me?" she asks, her voice small.
"Because I know you." Steve puts the pouch with the stone in her hand, and closes her fingers around it. "And I believe in you. There’s no one I trust more in this timeline, and no one with your moral code."
Natasha gapes at him, her mouth dropping open. Bucky’s never seen her this thrown, and from the slight smile on his face, neither has Steve.
"There are two children in Sokovia," Bucky says. Her mouth closes as her focus shifts to him. "Twins. Wanda and Pietro Maximoff. In our timeline, Baron von Strucker used the power of the scepter to enhance their powers. With the scepter gone, I don't know what will happen to them, but they could use help, some kind of guidance so they don't offer themselves up to Hydra to be science experiments."
"And the other Infinity Stones," Steve says, "let me tell you about them and where they are." He keeps talking, but after a second, Bucky doesn't hear him. He feels eyes on him, hears a tiny sound just on the edge of hearing, and when he turns, there he is, standing in the elevator doorway, his eyes wide—Steve, but younger.
Steve without the burdens of the last dozen years. And yeah, this Steve has burdens and wounds of his own to carry, but Bucky is not one of them.
Bucky never beat this man to a pulp. Bucky never went into cryo against his wishes, never hid from him for two years. This Steve never saw the Winter Soldier's empty shell asking who either of them were. All the pains that Bucky has inflicted on the man at his side, whether he meant to or not, this Steve is completely free of.
Their eyes meet, and young Steve makes a sound like he's been punched. Steve and Natasha turn as one and Steve frowns.
"You tell Nat what she needs to know," Bucky says. "I'll talk to him."
Steve looks at him, the furrow between his eyebrows even deeper than it usually is. "Are you sure?"
"Yeah, let me do this."
His Steve nods, and Bucky crosses the room to young Steve, who's looking at him with something between joy and terror. Bucky knows he must be cataloguing the differences between the man he remembers and the man in front of him now—the long hair, the beard, the lines that weren't scribed across his face the last time this Steve saw him; and of course there's the fact that he's alive at all, resurrected from what Steve must have thought was his unmarked grave in the Alps.
"It's really you," Steve breathes. He looks across the room to the other Steve, who is watching them closely, even while he's still talking to Natasha. "And that's…that's really me."
"It really is," Bucky says, and then because he can see that Steve is nearly vibrating out of his skin, he opens his arms. Steve falls into them like there's nothing in the world he wants more, and from what his Steve has said about this point of his life, Bucky suspects that it's true. He clings to Steve and lets Steve cling to him, their arms wrapped around each other. Steve clutches at his shoulders, and Bucky can tell the second that he notices one of the arms under his grip isn't flesh and blood because he tenses up.
"It's okay," Bucky says. "I went through some shit but I'm all right."
"I thought you were dead," Steve says. "I should've looked for you."
"I didn't die, but Hydra found me." Steve pushes back a little bit so he can look Bucky in the eye, but he doesn't let go of Bucky's arms and Bucky is grateful. His eyes are watery and red-rimmed, and Bucky is sure he's no better. It's hard to look at this young Steve and tell him these things. "I'm out there, somewhere, in this timeline. In a couple of years, Hydra is going to use me to attack you, but you can find me first."
"Did they—?" His hand tightens around Bucky's metal bicep, and he's grateful to Shuri for the sensors that let him feel it.
"Yeah, but that's not the worst of it. I'm—he's going to need your help when you find him."
"Anything, Buck, you know that."
Bucky makes himself take a deep breath. This is surprisingly hard to say to this Steve, who's suffered so much already, but not nearly as much as he could. "They brainwashed me. Turned me into a weapon for Hydra. I won't remember you, when you find me. I won't remember myself."
He hears an indrawn hiss of breath from across the room, and sees Natasha's eyes widen in understanding, her hand clenched around his Steve's arm. "The Winter Soldier," she says. His Steve leans in closer and starts murmuring to her, explaining, maybe.
"Ask Nat," Bucky says. "She knows what it's like." He glances back at his Steve. "He might not want help at first, but you'll be the only thing he remembers. And if you can get to Wakanda, the doctors there can really help." There's so much else he wants to say, but he doesn't want to overwhelm either young Steve or Natasha, although with Steve's memory, it doesn't matter if he understands it now, as long as he remembers it later.
Young Steve looks shaken by everything that Bucky has said—but why wouldn't he be? Bucky understood what it feels like to get your heart's desire but only in the way you never wanted it when Steve showed up to save him at that factory at Kreischberg, heartbeat steady as a metronome with lungs like a bellows, in the middle of the most horrific place that war had yet offered up to James Buchanan Barnes. He's never talked about it with his Steve, but he sees that same tension between a wish and a nightmare in young Steve's face; Bucky, back from the dead, but with everything that made him Bucky erased.
"It's okay," Bucky says to him in a near whisper, not that Steve at least won't be able to hear. "It'll be okay, Steve."
Steve takes a deep, shuddering breath, holding onto Bucky like he might fall over if he lets go. Bucky knows the feeling. He and his Steve have started hugging more, but at first he couldn't. He wanted to, but it just wasn't possible. His awareness of all the ways their bodies could be used to break each other was too honed, what he remembered of affection too piecemeal. It was only after he'd spent time in Wakanda that he'd been able to put his arms around Steve the way he thought Steve had always wanted. It was only after years of trauma and a lot of time in therapy in Wakanda that he'd been able to hug Steve when either or both of them wanted it.
But he's glad he can now—glad he can give the human comfort of an embrace to this Steve, because even if everything goes as well as it possibly can, it will be years before the Bucky of this timeline, trapped in a vault somewhere and knowing nothing but violence, will be able to give him this; but at least this way, Steve will have the memory of it, know that the endpoint can be reached.
"There's a bank vault in DC where they kept me between missions." Bucky tells him the address. "A lot of the STRIKE teams are Hydra." He glances back at Natasha. "Rumlow. Rollins. Some of the others."
Her mouth drops a little, just for a second, but then her chin firms. Bucky doesn't know how he'd have gotten through this if he didn't know that they had already pulled her out of the water at Vormir, and when he looks at his Steve, his expression makes Bucky think that he might be feeling the same way.
"Anything else you want to know—need to know, just ask" Bucky says softly.
Young Steve's eyes flick to old Steve and then back to Bucky. "You make it to okay, though, even if it takes a while. Right?"
"Yes," Bucky says. "I do, and you help me. I wouldn't have done it without you."
"Buck," his Steve says, but Bucky can't quite tear his gaze away from the Steve he never hurt. He makes himself turn his head, and Steve's eyes are as steadfast as they always are.
"We can tell you all the details," Bucky's Steve says.
"Yes," Natasha says, and gives a funny laugh. "There's no rush, is there?"
In the end, they're there for nearly a week, giving Steve and Natasha the information they need. They don't bring in the other Avengers, for reasons that Bucky doesn't entirely want to dive into. Steve doesn't want to, and that's enough for him. He's not sorry to miss out on meeting Tony Stark again, anyway. He would have liked to try to make amends to the man that existed in his own timeline, but he doesn't think he can bear another confrontation with Howard's son.
Once, he takes young Steve aside—well, he takes young Steve aside many times; he both loves and can't stand the way that this timeline's Steve looks at him with so much hope in his eyes. He's told him everything he can remember about what his recovery was like. He's tried to explain how there was nothing in his mind except the missions, until Steve was there.
"He'll know you, but he won't know how or why, and there's so much of your history that he won't remember," Bucky has said to him.
But this time, he wants to tell him something else.
"You'll have to tell Tony," he begins and then has to stop and swallow hard against the swell of emotion that's stuck in his throat. "One of my missions, in the nineties…I killed his parents." Steve just watches Bucky with that bone-deep stillness that he can have, that steadfastness of both purpose and heart. Bucky makes himself take a deep breath. "You need to tell him, before you go looking to find…other me. He needs to have time to think it through, needs to know what was done to me, and that it wasn't my choice."
"He told me," young Steve says quietly, looking at Bucky's Steve. "He said the same thing." Young Steve takes a deep breath. "But you think if he has time to get used to the idea, it won't go that way this time."
"I never knew him, not the way you did. The only time we met, it didn't go well." Bucky wishes he had a better answer, but he doesn't.
Steve meets his gaze with eyes that are clear, but troubled. "Maybe it will be different this time."
"I hope so."
Young Steve never really seems to feel fully comfortable with his older counterpart, but he talks easily to Bucky, and to Natasha. Bucky can practically see the thread of friendship between the two of them getting stronger as he watches, and he smiles to see it, the two of them building the rapport that he's seen between their future selves. He knows his time is limited, but he wishes he could somehow stay to see the end of the story, the story that is his and Steve's but different. Better, he hopes.
"I'll take care of him," Natasha says quietly while the two Steves are conferring over some of the information and young Steve's possible plans about it.
"I know you will," Bucky says, and pulls up a smile for her. "You did in my time too."
She laughs, a quiet sound. He's pleased to have gotten it out of her. "Well, of course I'll help take care of Steve. But I was talking about you. Other you."
He feels touched. Honored—and really glad that his younger, broken self will have someone like her in his corner. "Thank you," he says.
They'll never see the end of this particular story, but he hopes it ends well, for all of them. Him and Steve, but her too.
When they've done all they can do, it's time to move on. They've given Steve and Natasha all the information they possibly could, and maybe more than they should have, but really, neither one of them has ever been the type to just sit and let a wrong go on when they have the chance to right it.
And they both still have wrongs to right, stones to return to their proper timelines.
It's hard to say goodbye to this Steve and this Natasha, but they do it. He can already see the burning purpose in Steve's eyes, the drive that has him antsy to move on and take action. And Natasha has her secret, the Mind Stone to guard. Bucky knows that she will keep it safe. It's with a clear conscience—but not without regret—that Bucky gets into his suit and gets ready for their next stop.
Bucky doesn't have a lot of memories of the seventies. All of the ones that he does have are of jungles and deserts, hot places. It's not so easy to break into a military base when you're not supposed to be there, but they didn't come unprepared. Steve has a backpack with two uniforms folded up inside it.
They change, hiding the time suits inside the backpack, and Bucky tucks his hair up underneath his hat. The uniform feels strange, rings faint memories in the back of his mind. It doesn't fit exactly like the one he wore in the war, but it's similar. He has to resist the urge to tilt his cover—he can always put his hair back up if it falls out, but they'd be in trouble if he does it in front of anyone else.
He and Steve navigate the base; or really, he just follows Steve, but that's nothing new. He's been following Steve all his life, and he'd follow him anywhere. Shuri was able to synthesize Pym particles based on the ones they had in 2023, so they don't need to go to the lab that Steve had told Bucky about. They don't see Howard Stark, and Bucky is relieved. He has no wish to dwell on what he can't change…unless he can change it.
But for the moment, he puts the thought out of his mind, and follows Steve.
"Where do we need to replace the stone?" Bucky says quietly. "We can't exactly put it back where the Tesseract was."
"No," Steve says. "I think it belongs in safer hands."
And then Bucky sees the name on the door, and he knows.
They push through the door into Agent Carter's office, and Bucky is so mad he could spit. He wonders how much Steve omitted from his little narrative about coming here the first time. How can he want to give the stone to her? It's not that Peggy wasn't incredible and incredibly trustworthy—in the nineteen-forties. But in the time since then, the time that the SSR are has been turning into SHIELD, she's had to make compromises that they know nothing about. It's not that Bucky doesn't trust her, but—well, he guesses he doesn't trust her. He doesn't know how involved she was in Operation Paperclip, doesn't know how dirty her hands have gotten, and more to the point, Steve doesn't either.
But then, Steve has always had the knack for seeing the best in people. The anger in his chest deflates. Steve sees the best in him, after all, and the terrible things that he's done are an ocean that could swallow whatever teardrops of sin Margaret Carter might carry.
"Are you sure?" Bucky says. It's much gentler than anything he might have said two minutes before, but Steve turns to look at him, one eyebrow raised.
"She's the only person I trust with it," Steve says, stubborn, like he's expecting Bucky to put up a fight.
"All right," Bucky says, exhausted by his own emotional response. Who else would they give it to, he guesses. The only people he knows of in the 1970s are the people who tortured him or the people he was sent to kill, so he's not exactly a source of good ideas himself. Besides, there's a look in Steve's eyes that Bucky can't quite interpret, and he's half afraid that the real reason Steve wants to see her is because there's been no one else like her. He's afraid that Steve wants the past more than the present—because when it comes down to it, Steve fought hard for him, but what did he get? A man full of broken memories and nightmares, not the friend that he fought for, not the person he remembered. And what Bucky wants—
Well. That's impossible.
"What are you gonna tell her?" Bucky says.
"To watch out for what she's building," Steve says quietly.
They can see her desk through the glass before they see the woman herself. There's a picture of Steve on one corner, and it makes Bucky smile, because it's Steve before the serum. It reminds him that whatever else she did with her life, she had the good taste to see who Steve Rogers was even before he got big.
On the other side of her desk are more framed pictures: Peggy in a white dress with a handsome man, Peggy with children at different ages, Peggy with, Bucky is suddenly shocked to recognize, some of the Howling Commandos, older now but still recognizable. It makes him happy to think of all these lives being lived, not stopped the way his and Steve's were. Steve is looking at the pictures too, and Bucky desperately wants to ask if he regrets, but at the same time, he doesn't want to know.
And then Peggy walks in, and Steve's breath audibly catches. She's older, of course, but then again, they are too. But she's passed through time the usual way, not sleeping or frozen in fits and starts. Her lipstick is still bright, but her face wears the years, and he sees both laughter and sorrow in the lines on her face. Her dark hair is still perfectly set, but now liberally threaded through with silver. She's beautiful, but she's not the same young woman he vaguely recalls. She's been forged in fires he can't imagine, transforming the SSR into SHIELD, and the more domestic flames of building a life.
Bucky tries not to sigh. He still doesn't like it, but he doesn't see who else they could give it to in this timeline.
Steve pulls out an envelope marked with Peggy's name, and the device Shuri made to hold the stone. "We'll wait till she steps out, then we can leave this on her desk."
"You don't want to talk to her about it? Like we did with Nat?" Bucky feels astonishment flood him, astonishment and—something else, something he's not quite ready to put a name to.
"No." Steve's gaze flickers over Bucky's face, then back down to the stone and the letter in his hand. "She told me, in the future, that she lived her life and I needed to live mine. You can see that she did, and there." He jerks his chin toward the desk with all its photographs. Then he smiles and taps the envelope again. It looks thick with paper. "I may have told her a thing or two to watch out for, but I don't see how talking to her here will do anything but bring us both pain."
Bucky takes a deep breath and tries to resettle himself. He looks at Steve and thinks, again, of the years he's missed. The years since Steve woke up, which he was still Hydra's asset, of course, but also the years that Thanos stole from them. Before, when he was recovering and Wakanda and Steve was visiting him every few weeks or months, he'd thought that they were getting to know each other again, rebuilding the friendship that once they'd had, that he remembered at least the most important parts of. They had been becoming close again, they had been close again; but the man next to him—what this Steve is thinking, he couldn't begin to guess.
"Okay, Steve," he says, and while Steve watches Peggy, waiting for her to leave, Bucky watches Steve. If he's thinking of loss, if he's thinking of regrets, Bucky can't tell.
Eventually, a man comes to tell Peggy something and the two of them leave the room. Steve and Bucky slip in and leave the envelope and the stone on her desk. They wait until she comes back in and picks it up, so they can be certain that it's Peggy who got it, but they don't wait to watch her read it.
"Come on," Steve says softly. "Let's go."
~o~
After that, there's only one stone left to retrieve, and somehow Bucky thinks it will be the easiest, or at least, the least emotionally fraught. They have to take the stone back to Asgard, to Thor's home—before it was destroyed.
Bucky hasn't spent much time with the Asgardian—a literal god, if the information Bucky read about him is true. After his time as a super soldier—and hell, his time in Wakanda, where he'd seen things from the temple of Bast that made him terribly thoughtful—he's much less likely to discount the thought of gods that walk among men than he used to be. It still doesn't mean it's a comfortable thought.
"How are we going to return it?" Bucky asks Steve, more to keep his mind off his thoughts then because he's really burning for the knowledge. But Banner did say something about how this stone had been inside a person somehow, and Bucky wants no part of returning it that way. "Who do we give it to?"
"Thor's mother," Steve says, shooting a glance at Bucky. "He said she'll know what to do."
They were aiming for the coordinates of the Royal Palace, but where they actually show up is in a small, strange room with a tall, dark skinned, golden eyed man staring at them. "Steve Rogers," he says, "and Bucky Barnes, of Midgard." His gaze rests on the hammer that Steve is holding, pulled out of his bag of tricks now that they need it.
"We're here to return a few things," Steve says, "I need to give them to Thor's mother."
"Of course," the man says. "My name is Heimdall. Follow me."
Bucky has seen a hell of a lot of things over the course of his life, but so many of them have been bound up in blood and suffering. For every wonder that he's seen, he's seen uncountable horrors, and it's only in the last few years that the former have outweighed the latter in any given week. But this—this is amazing, and while he doesn't doubt Asgard has its own share of brutality, right now all he can see is the rainbow bridge and the golden city in the distance, and all of it is beautiful. Bucky doesn't bother trying to pretend he's not rubbernecking like a hayseed in Times Square, craning his neck trying to take it all in and as he and Steve walk behind Heimdall. There's something new and something wondrous to take in in every inch his eyes fall upon.
"Steve," he whispers more than once, "look at this."
Steve might be older and more serious now, and the missing years might be another gap between them, but his eyes still crinkle up in a smile when Bucky calls him to look at something amazing, and he still turns to the sound of Bucky's voice, so Bucky makes even more of a point of telling Steve what exactly he finds beautiful, what exactly makes him gasp.
By the time Heimdall has taken them across the rainbow bridge, Bucky is more often than not just grabbing Steve's arm and pointing, to the smiles of their golden-eyed guide.
Heimdall walks them through the streets, ignoring the curious stares of Asgardians who watch them progress. But then again, Bucky supposes, they are used to far more interesting sights than two—what had Heimdall called them?—two Midgardians.
He takes them through streets that winds from side to side, none leading directly to the palace at the center of the city. Bucky approves of the defensibility, although he can't help but note that the streets are wide even if they do curve, and he could easily lead a team or two to strike at the heart of the city. He's resigned to that voice in his head by now, not so much a voice as a series of observations he's incapable of turning off, of how he would destroy things—a city, a palace, a life—if he needed to. He's more or less made his peace with it. General Okoye helped him, spending more time talking to him than he thought he deserved, but conversations with Steve—the Steve of five years ago, before the snap—had helped a lot too, and he tries not to hold it against himself that he has these thoughts. Heimdall shoots him the occasional shrewd glance as they walk, and Bucky would not be surprised if those golden eyes could see his thoughts like Wanda had been able to.
They get to the palace and Heimdall leaves them in an antechamber, telling them to wait until he brings Frigga to them. Steve's got Thor's hammer and the stone in his hands, and looking at them, Bucky would not be able to guess which weighs heavier on him.
The chamber in which they wait is an opulent room, similar and yet completely unlike some of the rooms in the palace at Wakanda. The aesthetic is completely different, and yet the richness and grandeur of the rooms themselves remind Bucky of one another. Perhaps it's something about royalty. Where the rooms in the Wakandan palace were brightly colored with geometric patterns, this room is all gold and tile mosaics depicting, Bucky supposes, the royalty or the gods or something. There's statuary, and everything is decorated with gold and bronze. It's beautiful, like all of Asgard that Bucky has seen so far, and meant, he thinks, to impress a visitor with the wealth and power of Asgard. He can't say it's not working.
Much sooner than Bucky would have thought for a queen and a goddess, the click of heels in the marble corridor heralds the return of Heimdall, accompanied this time by a statuesque woman in a green gown and armor. Her hair is gold, threaded here and there with silver, twisted in a crown around her head and bound in a braid as thick as her wrist, studded with gold-set jewels that sparkle as they catch the light. Her face is stern but kind, and Bucky sees the tracks of years spent smiling in the lines by her eyes and mouth. Her gaze goes immediately to the hammer in Steve's hand.
"Did my son give that to you?" she asks. In her voice is the certainty of someone who already knows the answer to the question they ask.
"Yes ma'am," Steve says.
A complicated set of emotions crosses her face, and Bucky can't read any of them, and wouldn't presume to guess what they are. "Then you must have had good reason to use it, and he to let you."
"We thought so, ma'am," Steve says. "There was a threat bigger than Midgard."
She nods and looks from the hammer to his other hand, fingers closed tightly around the stone in its case. "And what else have you brought me?"
"This was part of Jane Foster when we borrowed it to take to our timeline," Steve says. "But I wouldn't feel right about giving it back to her, not the way she had it."
"But you would give it to me," she says, and there's no question in her tone of voice, but Bucky thinks he hears one all the same.
"She is mortal, and you aren't," he says. She turns her gaze on him, and it sharpens as she takes him in: whatever his expression is doing, the arm, whatever tells she might see that speak of the violence of his history.
"These are dangerous gifts," she observes. "And yet, I will do my best keep them safe." She holds out her hand and Steve puts the stone and it, but when he tries to give her the hammer, she shakes her head. "I have my own worth, but it's not the sort that Mjölnir judges."
Bucky has to turn that over in his head, suddenly, because he knew—he was proud—that the hammer had judged Steve worthy, but what does it mean that she can't hold it and Steve can? She's a goddess, an alien, and Steve is just a human man. Or is he?
"Heimdall," she says, and stretches out the hand holding the stone in an imperious gesture. "There is no one I judge safer to keep this." She furrows her brow and looks at Heimdall, and some look that Bucky doesn't understand passes between them. "And it may be that you have longer than I would to hold it and keep it safe."
"As you wish," he says, but he sounds troubled.
"As for you, Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes." Bucky twitches, just a little bit, because he's not sure how she knows that title. They never gave their ranks to Heimdall, did they? Bucky would not have—he doesn't think of himself as Sergeant Barnes, and isn't sure that he did even when he answered to it when people called. But they trail after her regardless, Steve still with the hammer, and Bucky following Steve into whatever fresh trouble he's found, just like always.
Frigga leads them through a maze of corridors to a room—well, to a suite of rooms. It's pretty obvious that it's Thor's; there's a distinct lightning motif in the decor. Steve's face softens looking around the room—a sitting room furnished with oversized chairs and tables in a golden wood, plush rugs thrown across the tile floor, tapestries hanging from the walls. There are large, arched windows that look out over the palace grounds and beyond to the city, bustling with life. A pang shoots through Bucky's heart; as beautiful as this is, as lively as it seems, in his own timeline, most of the people are dead and the city is in ruins.
But for now, he reminds himself, in this timeline, the city and its people—and its queen—live. Frigga is watching him when he turns from the window, and again, her eyes are shrewd, assessing. Bucky looks away, unable to bear the weight of her gaze.
"There," she says, pointing to a rack on the wall. "That's where he keeps it."
It's an armor rack and there are swords and axes and knives that Bucky might otherwise be quite interested in, but at the moment, his eyes are drawn to the decorative space at the apex where a place is clearly left for a missing weapon. It's the highest and the most decorative, knotwork swirling over metal prongs that curve gently upward to hold what isn't there.
"Mjölnir came when you called," Frigga whispers.
Steve hesitates in the act of raising the hammer and turns to her. He holds Mjölnir up and lets the lightning fill his eyes, not calling the power forth for use, but merely—holding it, to show Frigga.
And Bucky sees it too, sees what he can only think of as divinity, even if that would have his mother and Steve's alike smacking his hand for blasphemy, reflected across his best friend's face.
Steve holds the hammer out to Frigga, sparks dancing down his arms, blue lightning flickering over his eyes. The smile she turns on them is sad, full of grief, but also full of benediction.
"Thank you," she says.
Steve turns and places Mjölnir on the rack, in the place waiting for it. It settles in and tiny bolts of electricity dart down the metal then dissipate. The blue light fades from Steve's eyes, leaving behind only the familiar, human blue that Bucky knows as well as—better than—his own reflection.
But Bucky knows better now then to think that what's left in its wake is also only human. Steve's more than that, and maybe he has been for a long time, or maybe he always was, but Bucky knows it now in a way he can't forget—and he wonders how he ever did, from the moment he emerged from that portal that bridged the distance between Wakanda and the Avengers facility. He had let himself forget, because he was selfish, and because Steve's his friend, but the ache in his throat now only serves to remind him of just how selfish he's been.
Steve turns to him and smiles, though, the weight visibly lifted off his shoulders, and Bucky makes himself smile back because this is it. They did it; the two of them have returned the stones that it took so many Avengers to collect. The timelines won't explode, or unravel, or whatever it is that all of them were so worried they would do. And if they've done their share of meddling, he's only sorry that they don't have a blueprint for Frigga to avoid her horrors the way they did for Natasha and Peggy.
"Thank you," Frigga says again. "My son will be grateful to have his hammer back, and we will take care of the stone for you—for all of us."
"Thank you, ma'am," Steve says. "If there's anything we can do to help—"
But Frigga is already shaking her head. "See yourselves back safely to your home." She takes Steve's hand between her own. "It is good to have met you, Steven Rogers of Midgard. I begin to understand what my son sees in your world."
Steve turns red and stammers, of course, because he was never very good at taking a compliment, much less from a beautiful woman.
"I am glad to have met you as well, James Barnes." Somewhat to his surprise, she takes his hand as well, and he feels a subtle power lapping at him, a friendly touch like the warmth of a candle flame. "All will be well," she tells him, and he finds, when she says it, he could almost believe it.
They say their farewells, and Heimdall leads them back across the rainbow bridge to the room where they first entered Asgard. The briefcase full of stones they brought with them is empty; the mission is complete. "We did it, Bucky." Steve sounds almost surprised, and Bucky can't blame him. He hopes Steve feels only the satisfaction of a job well done, impossible odds overcome yet again, not this hollow ache that settles into Bucky's breast.
"Let's go home," Bucky says, aware even as he says it that there's hardly a home for them to return to.
But Steve smiles at him, and that smile is worth any number of white lies.
~o~