Archive of Our Own

Break my soul in two looking for you
But you're right here
If I can't relate to you anymore
Then who am I related to?

And if this is the long haul
How'd we get here so soon?
Did I close my fist around something delicate?
Did I shatter you?

Something breaks inside Steve when the mask falls and Bucky’s face is under it. 

It is unmistakably his face. Suddenly, Steve doesn’t care that the soldier had been trying to kill him just a second ago. This is Bucky and all Steve wants is to wrap his arms around him and make sure that he is real. That he is there. That his face, that didn’t age a day, really is his face. 

The thing is that it isn’t. The beard isn’t. The hair isn’t. The expression, frozen in a forlorn scowl, isn’t. And he cannot even process what it means that he has a mental arm, because it is the man’s eyes what terrify Steve the most. They are the same deep blue eyes that he used to draw all the time, but now he cannot recognize them, and they don’t recognize him back. Bucky’s eyes were always warm and fierce and alive, they were grounding and they were like going home. Instead, the eyes that look back at him when he calls his name are delirious. There is nothing of Bucky to be found in those eyes, and the fear with which he reacts to the name is an animal reaction, just a startle response. An unconscious reflex where there is no human identity left. 

The man that looks back at him like he is lost, the man that asks “Who the hell is Bucky?”, cannot possibly be his Bucky.

His Bucky fell of a train before Steve went in the ice. His Bucky died somewhere in the midst of a German mountain range. And Steve let him go because there was no way he could have survived a fall like that. He would have jumped after him. He’d wanted to. But there was a war to win, and Bucky was dead. That’s what everyone told him. That’s what he’d believed. So how does this man, seventy years later, have a dead man’s face? 

Steve can’t stop staring, pathetically open-mouthed, and then the man runs away. And Steve still cannot move, or close his mouth, or run after him. His blue eyes haunt him, both from the time he last saw Bucky, falling from that train, and the Winter Soldier ones, which reacted to a name that hadn’t been pronounced in years. They mix in his head, both faces, petrified in horror forever. They’ve changed, but they are also the same. Who is the man? How did he steal Bucky’s eyes?

Then, he understands. 

Steve didn’t die in the ice. And Bucky didn’t die in the mountains. They both survived, but one as an American hero, and the other as a weapon. 

Steve quickly arrives to the only conclusion possible. What happened to Bucky is his fault. He did this to his best friend when he let him go, when he left him behind so that they could capture him and destroy him. They didn’t even kill him, they used him. Steve knows what it’s like to be used, and yet he can’t picture what they had to do to Bucky in order to turn him into the Winter Soldier. They still are using him, Steve realizes as he tries once again to find any remains of Bucky in those confused eyes and can’t. They still are using him like they tried to use Steve when he woke from the ice. But Steve is still Steve, and he is still able to fight back. Bucky has been wiped out. 

And the truth is that they could only destroy Bucky like that because Steve didn’t jump after him like he was supposed to. Because Steve never went back to look for him. He should have died fighting before letting anyone have Bucky. They were supposed to be there for each other until the very end. Steve should have done something then. Anything to avoid what they did to him. 

What did they do to him?

Steve cannot think properly. He cannot breathe, and it’s like his asthma is back. He feels small and weak, but it is far more terrible than that. Because when he was small, when he was his feeble, sick self in the past, he could still relate to Bucky. Bucky was always there by his side; not against him, not far from reach, not a ghost of what he once was. 

The Winter Soldier has run away and Steve hasn’t run after him. The Winter Soldier is gone with Bucky’s face and Steve cannot breathe. 

What did they do to him? 

Where did he go? 

He needs to find him. Even if it isn’t him. Even if it’s not his eyes anymore, even if he is no longer Bucky, even if he forgot about Steve and never remembers again. Even if it is too late. 

Steve will never forgive himself for letting him go seventy years ago, but he will find him this time. 

Steve moves. 

And I'm sitting on a bench in Coney Island
Wondering where did my baby go?
The fast times, the bright lights, the merry go
Sorry for not making you my centerfold

It’s been two months since they fought in the helicarrier, and Steve sits on a bench in Coney Island. It’s a stone bench by the sea, on a dock hidden behind the Ferris Wheel. 

He has been looking for Bucky every single day since then, clinging to the fact that Bucky carried him out of the river. 

Before the helicarrier, after he saw his face for the first time, he still called him the Winter Soldier every time, because it hurt to think of him as the one James Buchanan Barnes that finished every fight that Steve started. It hurt too much to remember their time in Brooklyn, their time in Europe, Sergeant and Captain, Steve and Bucky, inseparable. But now, as Steve sits on that bench in Coney Island, as he’s dutifully done every single day for two months now, he cannot avoid feeling that twinge in his stomach; a twinge of anticipation, of hope, that he hasn’t been able to get rid of ever since Bucky pulled him out of that river. 

Before the helicarrier, Sam and Natasha kept insisting that the man couldn’t be helped, only stopped; that Steve had to let him go. Steve knew that Bucky wasn’t the same man. He couldn’t possibly be the same man, just like Steve was not the same man that went into the ice. Steve knew that there was nothing left of his best guy in the brainwashed assassin, but neither Sam nor Natasha understood that he owed him anyways, that he would never be able to let him go again. He could mourn the man he lost and still try to help whatever was left of him. At least, he had to try. Steve knows that Nat and Sam feel sorry for him, for the tragedy that his life is, but they don’t fully understand how finding this man with Bucky’s face, with all the horrifying implications it came with, feels like the only breath of air since he woke up in a world that’s not his. They don’t get how this is a selfish need. He has to find Bucky because Bucky belongs with him. 

Before the helicarrier, when he still called him the Winter Soldier, when he was determined to search for him even though he knew it wasn’t Bucky who he was going to find, there hadn’t been hope. It had been just pain then, pain and regret, and loss, and grief. Sam had sat with him and helped him identify those emotions. Probably because he’d sat with Sam and identified his feelings then, he now knows that the pang in his stomach is not anxiety anymore. This is a warm, positive feeling. It is pretty insignificant compared to the concern, the worry, and the regret that probably will never disappear, but still quite real. It is a feeling of what if. What if this is a second chance for them? 

And so Steve stopped calling him the Winter Soldier after the fight in the helicarrier. The Winter Soldier would have never pulled him out of the river. It was Bucky who did that. It was Bucky that remembered how they were supposed to be there for each other ‘till the end of the line. And this very clearly is not the end of the line. It can’t be the end. 

He hasn’t dared to talk about the hope with Nat or Sam, but he’s let it grow bigger and stronger inside him. Steve knows it probably wasn’t his brightest idea, especially after two months of running after a ghost that doesn’t seem any more willing to be found. And yet, when he sits on their bench in Coney Island, looking at the sea, he smiles. 

Brooklyn looks nothing like he remembered. The place where he lived with Bucky is long gone; the local stores disappeared, substituted by new franchise shops; the buildings are new, and the people are not as poor as they were when Steve and Bucky were kids. Like the rest of the world, Brooklyn is modern now, completely alien to Steve, an undeniable proof of the racing pass of time. Steve thinks that there is a lot to like in the 21 st Century, but he took a hit when he saw what Brooklyn had become. He still feels that ache in his chest whenever he walks down the streets where he grew up with Bucky. It hurts more because Bucky is not there with him to discover what’s changed. But it is precisely because of that pain he feels when he walks around Brooklyn that he smiles now sitting on the bench in Coney Island.  

He still hates not to know where Bucky is. Perhaps he is somewhere in the opposite corner of the world, oblivious to the fact that Brooklyn and that spot by the sea behind the Ferris wheel once meant something for him. Perhaps that bench is long gone from Bucky’s brain. But Steve smiles because he is able to remember for the both of them. 

This is the bench where they ended up most nights after going out, just the two of them. Steve used to love the view, but he hated the cold. Bucky didn’t give a single fuck about the cold, but he always made sure to casually give Steve his jacket and his scarf so that he wouldn’t catch a pneumonia they couldn’t afford. They never made a big deal about how close they sat on that bench. They never made a big deal about how they hold hands sometimes, or about how they leaned in each other. Steve would have never accepted a jacket from anybody else, but he loved the weight of Bucky’s one on his shoulders. And he loved the smell of the scarf. 

He loved Bucky, and now that he is sitting there, on their spot, where they sat seventy years ago, talking about anything and everything, side by side, always very close because it was only natural to seek each other, right there on the bench in Coney Island that survived the years with them, Steve knows that he still loves Bucky, wherever he is. 

Over and over
Lost again with no surprises
Disappointments, close your eyes
And it gets colder and colder
When the sun goes down

Six months pass and Steve goes every single day that he is not in a mission with the Avengers to that spot in Coney Island. He never stops searching. The hope never disappears. It gets more painful every time, though.  

Bucky is as missing as the first day. The Winter Soldier seems to have vanished. Sam says that it is a good sign. It means that he is not back with HYDRA. But Steve already knew that. At least, he suspected it. After they took down most of HYDRA’s operatives the day of the helicarrier, after Pierce was gone, there was no one with enough information left to control the Winter Soldier. So when Bucky flew, he went solo. 

Steve would have expected to hear from him, though, he would have expected him to seek the familiarity Steve longed for in an unknown world. But Bucky had not given any signs. Not to him, not to anybody else. Both Natasha and Tony had tried to track him down after three months. They both had failed. 

Steve keeps going to all the places that Bucky loved in New York. Sam says that he shouldn’t, that that’s only self-torturing. Sam wants him to go back with him to DC, just for a while so that he can clear out his head, but Steve cannot leave New York until he finds Bucky. 

For all he knows, Bucky could still be anywhere in the world, so it might be totally irrational, but Steve keeps searching for Bucky in Brooklyn, waiting for him in Coney Island. He knows that if Bucky doesn’t want to be tracked down, he won’t be, so Steve can let himself be found. He creates a routine, always follows predictable paths, and always ends up in the bench of Coney Island, so that if Bucky wants, he knows where to meet him. Sometimes, he gets the feeling that Bucky follows his steps. Sometimes he catches glances of suspicious long-haired individuals or black shadows on the top of buildings but, after a blink, they are always gone, so Steve is almost certain that it’s just his hope messing with his head.

When Steve is not running after ghosts, he stays in the Avengers Tower, brooding. Tony is always inviting him to dinner or trying to distract him with the most extravagant plans, and Pepper is a sweetheart to talk to when they both can’t sleep. Bruce is around too, and Steve has found that he quite enjoys sitting with him, listening to classical music in silence. However, Steve never stops thinking about Bucky. He cannot. 

He’s even told Peggy about him a couple of times. Her head is messier every time, and it breaks Steve’s heart, because as much as he still loves Bucky, he still loves Peggy like he loved her seventy years ago. The last time she’d been rational when they talked, Peggy told him that Bucky would come to him eventually. “You will find each other, Steve. No one that’s ever met you would be able to forget you, and your friend didn’t forget. I haven’t forgotten, not even now.” Steve wants to believe her even when she goes blank in the middle of the conversation. He holds on to her words because it’s all he has. “He will find you because you need him, and you will find him because he needs you,” Peggy had said, but Steve wonders whether it’s too late. 

Maybe he missed his chance when Bucky fell from that train. He needed him then and Steve didn’t find him. Maybe that’s when he lost him forever, and now he has to live with the fact that he will never get him back. Maybe he has to live with it without ever being able to stop looking for him. 

Maybe this is his penitence, what he deserves for leaving him behind that one time, to know he is out there on his own, prisoner of his own head where Steve can’t reach him. 

The question pounds my head
What's a lifetime of achievement
If I pushed you to the edge?
But you were too polite to leave me

The first time that Steve realizes that Bucky must hate him, it knocks him out. 

His chest breaks when he understands that, at some point, Bucky understood that Steve had left him behind and that he was never going to come for him. And Steve knows he hated him then and hasn’t stopped ever since. 

It took Steve some time to open the file on the Winter Soldier, and it took him longer to actually read it. Now it’s been a year since he last saw him and he knows the file by heart. Sam keeps saying that everything that happened to Bucky is not his fault, and that he should not insist on memorizing every gruesome detail just so that he can never stop blaming himself. 

But Steve knows that Bucky waited for him. He knows that maybe Bucky didn’t actually want Steve to go and put himself in stupid and unnecessary danger, but he still knew that Steve didn’t work like that. Bucky must have been certain that Steve would arrive with his fucking Captain America suit and rescue him, like the dumb hero he’d always been. 

Steve knows that Bucky resisted till the very end, and that he could only do that because he was waiting for him to arrive, because he was giving him some time. Steve always arrived, Steve always did stupid shit for him, Steve was his goddamn prince charming, and he would save him from the evil monsters. 

But Steve never came. 

Reading that file, Steve knows that they were only able to break Bucky when he lost faith in that Steve would come for him. Bucky was resilient and he would have died before betraying himself. But they never killed him. They injected a serum on him so that he couldn’t die. They tortured him until he yielded. The serum killed the others, but not Bucky, because Bucky still hoped that Steve would arrive like he arrived in Germany, with new muscles but the same face. 

Those were the only options. Be killed or be rescued. 

None of it happened. 

And Steve knows that Bucky hated him while they tortured him. That Bucky hated having ever known him, that he hated stupid Captain America for not being able to save the most important thing. And maybe it is not a conscious hate anymore, because Bucky doesn’t even remember Steve, but Steve realizes that what’s left of Bucky will forever viscerally hate him. Bucky will never seek Steve again because he betrayed him. 

And of course Steve cannot blame him for hating him, but that doesn’t make it better. Knowing why Bucky hates him doesn’t make it better. It’s only fair that Bucky finally understood how Steve was not as good as everyone thought. Bucky had to forget about him when Steve left him behind, he had to eventually give up on Steve as he should have done the moment they first met. It is only natural that Bucky hates him at last. But knowing that he would have been better off without Steve really doesn’t make it better. 

Now he seats in Coney Island and the pain engulfs the hope. Steve cannot stand how Bucky was too good for him, he always was. Bucky had his back every single time, and he never left him alone even when he was the most difficult, angry, stupid, and scrawny kid in Brooklyn. Bucky was the coolest, best person ever. He only had to smile to get whatever he wanted. And even if all the girls were after him, even if he had a million friends, he always put little Steve first. Every single time. And no one understood what Bucky saw in Steve, especially not Steve, but Bucky wouldn’t care about what people said. And now Bucky is gone because Steve betrayed him in return for his undying loyalty. Steve didn’t have his back when it was most necessary to have it. What does that say of him? What does that say of goddamn Captain America?

Steve would have never become Captain America if he’d known that by doing that, he’d drag Bucky to hell. He should have waited for Bucky to come back from the War and live the simple life that Bucky told him about. Together. There had to be someone better than him to take the serum, they just didn’t search enough. Steve was too ambitious, too senseless, too stupid, and he destroyed too much in the way. Someone else could have been Captain America, someone without the anger issues, without the righteousness, someone brighter. 

Someone like Sam. 

Someone like Bucky.  

Bucky would have been a much better Captain America. Maybe he could have if Steve hadn’t been in the picture. 

And do you miss the rogue
Who coaxed you into paradise and left you there?
Will you forgive my soul
When you're too wise to trust me and too old to care?

New York is precious. There is a warm sensation in the body when he walks around New York. The lights are too bright, too difficult to hide from. But the noise is good, and the people provide good hiding. Nobody stops to stare at him. He gets lost in the crowd, and it feels good. 

New York has a routine. It is hard to distinguish, because the city is always buzzing awake, but it is obvious once you see it. He follows New York’s routine. 

He also follows the routine of Captain S.G. Rogers. 

He learnt the name at the exposition in the Smithsonian. He also knows the name that corresponds to his own face: Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. It sounds good. He likes it. However, Captain Rogers called him “Bucky”, and the body prefers that on a primitive, intimate level. The body feels warm when he thinks of himself as a Bucky. He also knows other names for the body. He is more used to those: the Winter Soldier, the Asset. They are not bad names. But the body doesn’t like them much. Those other names are far more associated with pain than “Bucky” or “Sergeant Barnes”. 

He sticks to the routines. Sometimes he kills some HYDRA agents that attempt to annoy Captain Rogers and his friends. The body has fun.

He takes some money from Captain Rogers. He thinks that it is alright. It is only natural to share money with him. Also, the Captain does not miss it and it’s not like he needs it to buy those absurdly small T-shirts. Also, he doesn’t notice because Captain Rogers is a dumbass, apparently. He would give Captain Rogers his money too if he had some, but HYDRA didn’t pay much. He is trying to hack the bank accounts he used for HYDRA, but he will need more time. 

He knows Captain Rogers, which is why he follows him around Brooklyn. He also knows Brooklyn. But it is weird. He doesn’t explicitly remember them. It is more like an instinctive sense of familiarity, an implicit knowing that feels good. Like New York’s noise, it is a familiarity that makes him want to stay close by. Also, he needs to protect Captain Rogers, even if Captain Rogers has perfectly functional muscles and should be able to protect himself. What he doesn’t have are many functional brain cells, because he keeps putting himself in unnecessarily dangerous situations. It makes the body mad and itchy. 

He wants an explanation for the knowing . That is why he keeps going to the Smithsonian. He also checked some historical archives. They have a lot of information on Captain S.G. Rogers and Sergeant J.B. Barnes, but it is not very useful information. He doesn’t care much about the war, or about the serum they injected on Captain Rogers, or about the clothes that they wore then. 

He cares about the footage where a less rugged version of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes are looking at each other and laughing as if they were each other’s best persons. He cares about the Howling Commandos, and about the pain he feels when he tracks them down and finds that they all passed away. He cares about the pencil drawings, even if there’s so many missing, like the ones with the details of Bucky’s face that Captain Rogers keeps in his nightstand. Those are the glimpses of the past that get him to remember . They are the ones that leave nostalgia behind and make him want to contact Captain Rogers and touch him to make sure that he is not a hallucination. 

It has been two hundred forty-five days since he dragged Captain Rogers out of the river. Two hundred forty-five days that he’s been following him around and discovering new pieces of information about the body’s past. Two hundred forty-five days of not understanding why Captain Rogers dedicates his days to walk around Brooklyn or why he seems so unhappy. 

He didn’t trust Captain Rogers’ friends at first. He still doesn’t trust them, but they seem to be positive for him. Natasha Romanov, the Black Widow, is red-code dangerous, but makes Rogers laugh, and she protects him. Sam Wilson, the Falcon, is annoying, but he takes care of Rogers’ feelings, and tells him when he is being stupid –which is often. Tony Stark, the Iron Man, is unbearable, but he awakens the spark in Rogers, the spark that means that he is alive even if he is gloomy and sad most of the time. Captain Rogers doesn’t notice his friends’ attempts to love him, and that must be why he feels alone and sad. Rogers is not very good at noticing, or he would have noticed that he is following him around.

Thinking about Captain Rogers’ friends makes him feel longing, makes him want to talk to Captain Rogers, but he still does not understand why. He wouldn’t know what to say . 

He also doesn’t understand why, as time passes, he wants to be closer and closer to Captain Rogers. He is close enough. He sees him every day. This allows him to discover that Captain Rogers has a heart of gold. And a heart of gold is no match for him. He has done too many terrible things, and even if Rogers knew the body once, he would not be able to recognize the body now. It is not only the metal arm or the scars. It is more the reactions of the body what would bother him. The reflexes to kill. The lingering memories of torture and blood. The remains of how they forced him to destroy people’s lives over and over again. He isn’t sure about how well did Captain Rogers know the body of his Bucky, but he is certain that he would not recognize what is left inside the body now. 

He never stops following Rogers, though. He alternates Captain Rogers’s surveillance with visits to the Smithsonian to keep up with the 21 st Century, with sleeping and eating to keep the body strong and ready to protect the Captain. 

He also follows him to the bench in Coney Island every time he goes. He likes that bench like he likes Brooklyn. He knows the bench like he knows Brooklyn. He has been there enough times to know the little marks of the passing of time, but he doesn’t actually remember any of those times. It frustrates him.

But it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t remember or that he doesn’t understand. The best thing of the bench is that Captain Rogers shines when he sits there and looks at the sea. Captain Rogers always shines. He knows that Captain Rogers has always shined, even when he was not a Captain yet. Steve Rogers has given so much to the world, has protected so many people, and has inspired so much good that the body’s heart gloats with pride as he observes him from the shadows. It also hurts the body to see how much Rogers shines, because it means that he can’t get closer and sit there with him. 

Sitting there with him would entail asking for forgiveness, and he cannot ask him to absolve a soul that is so destroyed and far gone to deserve it. He also thinks that maybe Captain Rogers, with his golden heart, would forgive him, but only because he is too stupid to understand what he has done. 

Sitting there with him would mean that he wants Captain Rogers to care, but Captain Rogers is not his Steve anymore, and they are no longer small kids with big dreams to live and die together.   

'Cause we were like the mall before the internet
It was the one place to be
The mischief, the gift-wrapped suburban dreams
Sorry for not winning you an arcade ring

For a brainwashed assassin that lives alone, he thinks he is doing alright. He is staying in an empty apartment at a three minutes and twenty-one seconds fast-walking distance from the Avengers Tower. 

After one year and a half of his surveillance, Captain Rogers is voluntarily leaving New York for the first time. The other times he has left, it has been with the Avengers for short missions, never longer than three days. Now he is leaving for Christmas at Sam Wilson’s house, in Washington, DC. 

He has deliberated with himself that it is more practical for him to stay in New York. Anyway, he is in contact with Jarvis, the artificial intelligence in the Avengers Tower, which has agreed to discretely inform him immediately if something were to happen to Captain Rogers. 

When Rogers gets in the jet to fly to DC, it takes a lot of effort not to shoot and ruin the jet’s motor so that it can’t leave New York. He does some breathing exercises to control his stress response to Rogers going away. The breathing exercises work well enough. Well enough for him not to have a cardiac arrest and die the moment the jet disappears in the sky. 

Rogers is out of reach. 

He breathes. 

Rogers is safe in the jet. 

He breathes. 

Rogers will arrive to DC in twenty-seven minutes, and Jarvis will confirm that he joins Sam Wilson at the airport. 

He breathes. 

He can trust Captain Rogers with Sam Wilson. 

He breathes in deeply four times. 

Captain Rogers will be back in New York in seven days and thirteen hours. He will be counting the seconds. 

He breathes eight more times and walks away from Tony Stark’s private airport. 

Captain Rogers will be okay. 

This is the first time in one year and a half that he loses track of where Captain Rogers is. It is the first time that he is far enough to not be able to reach him in time if something happened to him. 

He has followed Captain Rogers in his missions with the Avengers because Rogers keeps running to the middle of the danger without a second thought, and he doesn’t trust the Avengers to be able to protect him from himself. It is not surprising: Rogers’ brain works worse than his own tortured, broken one. But this is Christmas. Rogers should be fine with Wilson and without his constant surveillance. 

He carefully breathes regularly a couple more times. 

He has his own plan for the holidays. He will sit on the bench in Coney Island for the first time. He knows that it won’t be the first time for the body, but it will be the first time for him. It is the one and only advantage of Rogers leaving town. If he is gone, Rogers will not catch him invading his private place, and he will get a chance to maybe remember why the body feels so connected to that spot. 

It has worked before. If he stands in places where he knows that the body has been before, he sometimes remembers . Once, Captain Rogers stopped at an old bar to have a beer. He stayed there for forty-three minutes, which seemed too long considering he didn’t talk to anybody. So the following day, he also went into the same bar and had a pint in the same table. And then he remembered teenage Bucky and Steve sitting there and talking about how they were going to find a place together. Steve was sure that Bucky would get a job at Stark Industries, because he was so infatuated with future technology and flying cars (and Howard Stark). Bucky accepted the possibility, because it was a good way of earning enough money for Steve to study Arts. Steve, because he was a menace even at fifteen, laughed and proposed some illegal ways of getting that kind of money already. They were joking, but he was right that they were never going to be able to afford college. 

Another time, he found a chip in the ground. He was not following Rogers that time, he was just walking around Brooklyn on his own, and he stumbled upon this chip that was familiar. A dirty blue plastic thing. He carried it around for days. And then he remembered . It was a casino chip. Exactly like the ones they had back in Bucky’s days. He remembered saving some bucks with Steve so that they could try their luck when they both turned eighteen. In total, it was enough for five of those blue chips each. Bucky was adamant that he had to win Steve an ugly-ass arcade ring, and that’s how he lost it all. Steve was very tragic about it, but then he lost his own money betting against a man that had the audacity to mock him. Bucky punched that man later in the night, and he and Steve were both banned from the casino forever. 

Over and over
Lost again with no surprises
Disappointments, close your eyes
And it gets colder and colder
When the sun goes down

The body recognizes the feel of the stone of the bench in Coney Island when he sits down. 

They sat there one Christmas. Steve and Bucky. When they still were each other’s. Bucky laughed a lot that night. It was Christmas Eve, and they were young and drunk. Steve was wearing a huge ass jersey that he detested but his mom had forced him to wear. Bucky loved it. It was red, and Steve was red too because of the booze and because Bucky kept finding excuses for touching him, and grabbing him, and hugging him. Steve looked hot with his big red jersey, okay? Steve was always hot, but that time Bucky was drunk and couldn’t keep his hands to himself. 

It was a happy night. They’d both worked extra hours that day, and the night was icy cold, but they didn’t mind at all. Bucky got Steve some fancy pencils he’d bought in Manhattan. They’d agreed not to do presents that year, but Bucky had seen Steve eyeing all the pretty art supplies one time, and he hadn’t been able not to save up a bit to get some quality pencils for him. Steve deserved the best pencils in the world, and his eyes lighting up were worth all the insults Bucky got for breaking their no-present promise. 

Bucky didn’t see a problem with being a corny sap as long as his Stevie smiled like he did when they sat there in Coney Island, just the two of them, drinking together, and jokingly punching each other because they were out of excuses to keep touching each other. Bucky loved that night, and the body feels tingly when he remembers. He also remembers how the smaller version of Steve shined with happiness, as if he wanted to show to the world what Christmas was supposed to feel like. 

It was the Christmas before Steve’s mom, Sarah, passed away. Five years before Bucky was recruited and Steve became Captain America.

He also remembers that Bucky went back to that bench years later. He already had a metal arm, but there were still reminiscences of James Barnes in the Winter Soldier. It was the day he discovered that Captain America had died. 

He was on some kind of mission in New York. Usually, he remembers the missions of the Winter Soldier in full detail, and it’s everything else that is mixed up and broken in his head, but he doesn’t remember this one. Now that he is sitting on the bench, though, he can clearly recall the last time Bucky was alive and whole in the body. The world had lost Steve, and only then did Bucky stop seeing a point in fighting back. He remembers that Bucky ended up on that bench, instead of completing the mission he was supposed to complete. He sat there, alone with the screams in his head, and everything that had happened to him since he fell off that train and was captured plummeted on his shoulders. He cried the tears he hadn’t shed when they ripped his arm from his body and his sanity from his brain. 

He sat there for hours –so many hours-, not feeling the cold, not feeling anything beyond the numbness that came after the tears. He believes that was the first and last failed mission of the Winter Soldier. They made sure it never happened again, and they could only do it because Bucky had lost Steve. Of course, it was the last time he failed a mission until Steve came back from the dead. And then the Winter Soldier failed again, every single time after fighting Rogers. 

Did the Winter Soldier fail because Bucky was still somewhere inside? Or had the Winter Soldier become obsessed with Captain Rogers as Bucky had been obsessed with Steve? He doesn’t know. 

He also doesn’t know if there is a point for the Bucky in him to keep fighting back the madness if Steve is still not sitting there with him. What is the point of sitting on the bench where he mourned him and gave up. What is the point of surviving to still be alone with his head. 

Truth is he doesn’t deserve Steve to be sitting there with him. Steve’s done enough. He saved him again; he rescued him from the depths where he was buried in his own head. Only he is not sure he is Bucky anymore. He’s done so many things Steve’s Bucky would have preferred to die before doing. 

But Steve rescued someone . He is someone now, someone with a will, someone that doesn’t have to follow orders or kill people. (He still kills HYDRA agents once in a while, but those are not really people, he figures. More like cockroaches.) 

Still, for a second, he looks to the sea, searching for the same thing that Rogers is always searching for when he sits there, even if he doesn’t know what that is. 

And then he wishes they could go back to the life where happiness was giving Steve some pencils and get beaming insults in return. 

Were you waiting at our old spot
In the tree line
By the gold clock
Did I leave you hanging every single day?

Steve returns to New York. He had fun at Sam’s. His mom is lovely, and she cooks some of the best food Steve’s tasted since he woke up in the 21 st Century. 

He didn’t think too much about Bucky during the holidays. He did talk about him with Sam. He did not tell him how he thinks that Bucky hates him, because it is too painful and because he doesn’t want to admit to Sam that he is the worst person ever. Christmas is not the time for such disclosures. But he told him about the hope, and about the sweet memories. Sam keeps joking about how in love he is. Steve choked on his hot chocolate the first time he said it, but then he realized that it was okay . It was a joke. And not that he is in love with Bucky, but Sam would be okay if he were, because the world has changed in some surprisingly good ways too. 

Sam is a great listener, even if he jokes all the time. He also cares, and he’s heard all the stories: from when they were kids, from their time in the army, from the fights against bullies in the back of the alleys. Steve also tells him about Peggy. He tells him about the girls in general, and about how Bucky was always chasing skirts and bringing him to terribly awkward double dates. Steve doesn’t blame the girls for not having fun. He wasn’t having fun either, but Bucky insisted in dragging him along every time. Sam makes the corresponding jokes about how that says a lot about their relationship . Steve doesn’t think too much about it. It’s just how things were. 

Sam shares some stories too. He tells Steve about Riley, and it’s the only time during the holidays that he stops smiling. Steve also gets to meet Sam’s family and he loves them all. Apparently, Sam had to convince them all that Captain America wasn’t some stinky bigoted old man. Steve makes sure to state clearly in the corresponding Christmas politics discussion that he fought the Nazis, that he punched Hitler in the face, mind you, and that the only acceptable way of being is antifascist. That seems to win Sam’s fifteen year old niece over. The girl is lovely, and starts telling him about BLM, LGBT activism and the #MeToo campaign. They end up passionately agreeing on the advantages of socialism, the imperious need of reforming the judicial penitentiary system, and the importance of redistributing wealth and power. Sam’s family welcomes Steve with open arms after the young lady approves of him, and Steve feels the most at home he’s felt ever since he was found in the ice. 

And then he goes back to New York, to reality, and Sam stays in DC.

That very first night, after leaving his stuff at the Avengers Tower, he runs to the bench in Coney Island, suddenly terrified that it’s been moved or taken away. 

The bench is still there. But there is someone else sitting on it.  

Steve doesn’t recognize him at first because he’s got his back against him, a black hoodie on and his shoulders look relaxed . Then Bucky turns and Steve still cannot see his face properly but his heart stops, because it’s undeniably him. It’s Bucky. 

Steve wants to say something; he wants to hold on to him so that he can never leave again. It’s only been one year and a half, which isn’t supposed to be a lot when they’ve been apart for seventy fucking years, but apparently, Steve is extremely slow for a super soldier, and Bucky disappears like a shadow before he is able to blink. 

Steve’s head is racing. 

Bucky was there. He saw Bucky. Bucky is in New York. He was sitting on their bench. Bucky ran away again. But he is around. Like really around. Like Brooklyn around. Steve wants to ask him why the hell he ran away, the complete asshole. He also wants to handcuff himself to Bucky if that’s what it takes not to lose him again. He has to remind himself that Bucky probably doesn’t want him nearby. 

Steve just needs to talk to him once and make sure that he is doing okay, offer him all the help he can, and respect Bucky enough to let him go, properly this time. 

But he’d also like Bucky to meet Sam’s family. He’d like Bucky to know that they can create a home for themselves if he wanted to. Steve loved spending Christmas at Sam’s, but he’d also like to spend Christmas with Bucky again. Get drunk with him on that bench, side by side. Never leave him hanging again. 

Were you standing in the hallway
With a big cake, happy birthday
Did I paint your bluest skies the darkest grey
A universe away
And when I got into the accident
The sight that flashed before me was your face

But when I walked up to the podium I think that I forgot to say your name

Captain Rogers caught him invading his private place. 

He was caught. He dedicates a minute to scold himself. Get your shit together, Jesus Christ. You are an ex professional super assassin, for fuck’s sake, you are not supposed to get caught. And even more so, not get caught by Captain Steve Fucking Rogers, who never notices a shit of what is going on around him. 

To be fair, he thought Captain Rogers would stay at the Avengers Tower, celebrating New Year’s Eve with his friends, like any sane person that arrives from a trip at 22.24 on the 31 st of December would do. 

He just wanted to seat on the bench one last time. And he’d let his guard down. Captain Rogers had caught him off guard.

He doesn’t go far after he is caught, though. He stays at a prudential fifty meter distance from the bench, in the shadows, watching how Captain Rogers drops on the bench and stares at the sea dramatically. 

He can’t see Rogers’ face, but he wishes he could, to know if he is smiling or if he looks sad. He wishes he could ask if he had fun at Sam’s. When he hears the cheering of people celebrating the New Year, he wishes he could sit with Rogers and wish him the best, cheer with him and celebrate that they are both still around. Close enough. When he hears the cheering, Captain Rogers sighs and looks around a couple times with a puppy expression that makes him want to run to him and pet his pathetically gorgeous face. 

It occurs to him for the first time that Captain Rogers goes to that bench to feel close to the Bucky he lost. Maybe he expects to find him there every time. Maybe he just likes to get lost in the past because he prefers it to the future. Maybe he expects that’ll make him happier. It’s so sentimental and so irrational that the idea hadn’t crossed his head. He’d thought that the bench was special for the Captain, but maybe it is special because it was special for Bucky too. 

Good way to move on, Rogers, avoid your new friends to cry over lost ones. 

The body feels tingly though, because the body is a sentimental and irrational bastard too. And he smiles, because hell, whatever is left of him may also be a sentimental and irrational wreck. 

And then he sees that Rogers starts moving his hands and shaking his shoulders from time to time. He realizes that Rogers is speaking out loud. He can’t hear, and it is not very sensible to get closer and get caught again, but he needs to know what on Earth he is saying. So he gets closer, enough to see his lips moving and read them. 

“… and suddenly, you arrive with this complete exaggeration of a cake. You don’t get it, I thought you were not going to come. And it was fine. Maybe I was a bit worried, because it was not like you to miss my birthday. But when I thought you’d forgotten or somethin’, I see you comin’ from there,” Rogers points at the path right next to where he is hiding, but he doesn’t see him, “… and you were carryin’ this stupidly huge box, and I laughed so much, ‘cause I was so happy you’d arrived, and I didn’t need a cake, but you’d gotten one anyways. It was nonsense to spend so much money on a cake, Buck. I told you that, remember? But it was so good , I swear to God. Best quality in Brooklyn. It was so big, we ate from that cake for a week. It went a bit rancid in the end. We shouln’t’ve eaten that, but there was no way we were throwin’ it away, y’know how it was…” 

He knows . He doesn’t remember the cake, or the box, and he wishes he could remember Steve’s face when he finally made it to their bench with the birthday cake, but he knows it happened. 

“You always did the nicest stuff for me, Buck. I never knew how to thank you. I don’t think you ever understood how much I appreciated it, that you were always there for me.” 

Rogers is smiling fondly, and he is so glad he can see his face from his new hiding spot. But then his expression breaks.

“M’so sorry, Bucky. I’m so sorry I didn’t come for you. I’d kill them all for what they did to you, y’know I would. Fuck Captain America’s virtue, I’d tear them apart if they were still around, I’d reap them into a million pieces. But who’d that help anyways? They already touched you while I was… doing what? Pretending to be a goddamn hero?” 

He feels his chest compressing, and he knows it’s anxiety. Rogers is devastated and the thick fool blames himself. As if he could’ve done anything to prevent what happened to him. He wants to go and punch him, break his pretty nose for being such a downright moron. He doesn’t, because he doesn’t know what he’d do after punching him. Instead, he breathes slowly, quietly. The sad-puppy version of Captain Rogers destroys his heart and he hates that he doesn’t know how to fix it. 

“I thought you were dead, Buck. I thought you died. I swear to God I wouldn’t’ve let you go if I hadn’t been so fuckin’ sure you were dead.” 

And that’s when he understands that that’s why Captain Rogers went in the ice. 

When Bucky fell of that train, Steve didn’t have anything left that could’ve prevented him to become the suicidal hero that the world needed from him. Not even Carter was enough to put some sense into him, to stop him from being the full selfless and brainless douche he’d been born to be. 

Bucky would have never let him go in the ice. Bucky would have told him to jump into the water before the plane crushed, because he was a goddamn super soldier and he was not supposed to die in the most idiotic, foolish way there was to die, Jesus Fucking Christ. But Bucky was not there. So every inch of good judgment was gone from Rogers’ brains.  

If he’d thought for a second that there was a possibility that Bucky was alive, Steve would have dedicated all his stupidly inflated sense of abnegation to find Bucky. And he may have managed, because he was a bullheaded asshole that did whatever he set his mind to. 

But what Rogers doesn’t get, because his two neurons are shortcutting, is that if he’d gone for Bucky’s rescue mission and the war had ended with a bomb in New York, it would have been far, far worse. So if he has to blame himself for something, then it better be for just one tortured person, and not the whole population of 1945’s New York. 

“I miss you, Bucky. I miss you so much.” 

Captain Rogers is a dumb self –torturing idiot, but he would like to be the Bucky that Captain Rogers misses. 

He would like to go and tell him that there is nothing to be sorry about because nothing that happened to his Bucky could remotely be his fault. If anything, Steve is the reason why there are remains of Bucky in the body. Steve is the reason why he has memories that feel right. 

But he cannot go and pretend to be the person Captain Rogers wants. He wishes he could, but he cannot. 

He walks away and leaves Rogers talking out loud on the bench. 

His whole body screams for days after he does that. 

I'm on a bench in Coney Island
Wondering where did my baby go
The fast times, the bright lights, the merry go
Sorry for not making you my centerfold

Captain Rogers is an insensible son of a bitch. 

Apparently, seeing him again has encouraged Rogers to never move on from his past. He is sure that Sam must have lectured him on toxic coping mechanisms, but of course Steve doesn’t listen to anyone that is not Steve. Because he has highly worrying attachment issues, Captain Rogers starts going to the bench all the time . He sits there with the air, and the sea, and the random bystanders that somehow never recognize him, and he talks. He talks a lot. Always to Bucky. 

And because he is also a self-deprecating and self-flagellating asshole, he follows him and listens to what Rogers has to say every single time. It doesn’t feel completely right because the monologues are intended for Steve’s version of Bucky. But he doesn’t have a Sam to tell him that his actions are harmful and that he should engage in behaviors with more positive consequences.

Instead, the actual consequences of listening to Rogers’ monologues are disturbing.

For instance, the body is not very fond of talking. His throat gets irritated when he has to say something. Since he stopped working as the Winter Soldier, he hasn’t talk much. He greets the lady in the bakery where he buys bread and thanks her for the warm loafs she always has ready for him. And the two times that he crushed with someone in the street because he was too focused on not losing Rogers in the middle of the crowd, he said sorry. That’s pretty much all he’s talked in almost two years. And yet, when Captain Rogers starts telling his stories on the bench, he notices this urge to reply to him. Which is terribly annoying. Why on Earth would he want to talk to him? Okay, they have a past, a connection, if you will, but is that a good reason to talk to someone? He doesn’t think. 

Rogers also says some shit that makes the body mad and on edge. “Remember when you made me ride the Cyclone in Coney Island? There at the other side of the Ferris wheel? And then we came here because I wasn’t feeling so good?” he says once, and it stirs all kinds of dirt inside the body, because he knows that that used to be one of Bucky’s favorite memories to make fun of Steve, but he doesn’t really remember, so he wants to ask . He wants to sit with him on the bench where apparently Steve threw up everything he’d eaten in the past week, and laugh with him. Maybe tell him that even if he doesn’t actually remember the Cyclone or what came next, he does remember that Steve had to stand on his toes to be able to get in. 

He also wants to tell him to shut the fuck up when he starts apologizing. After weeks of monologues, he keeps finding new stuff to beat himself up with. Now it’s not just that he supposedly abandoned Bucky and that all the tortures and the brainwashing are somehow his fault –even though that keeps coming up. After a few weeks, Steve also starts apologizing for what happened before he became Captain America. And it’s embarrassing and extremely annoying to hear so much shit together without being able to tell him that he should indeed be sorry. He should be sorry for being such a mortified self-indulgent wimp. 

It also hurts that Steve ever thought that he was a burden for Bucky, but he decides to be angry about it. 

He is not going to accept Steve’s garbage. He knows Steve was some kind of godly being for Bucky, both before and after he became Captain America. He knows that Bucky adored Steve and he never really cared about the women that Steve seems to think were so important for him. Bucky liked the gals, who wouldn’t, but there is no one he liked more than Steve. No one ever compared. So when Rogers actually says something like “you probably got sick of me sometimes, didn’t you? Wanted to enjoy the ladies by yourself? Perks of being the only one who put up with me, I guess”, he wants to yell at him. Not just talk, yell . And yelling is not very secret-ghost-assassin-like. 

Rogers’ stupidity aside, he is also confused with how much he wants to touch the Captain. Ever since touching was equal to torturing, he hasn’t been keen of touching. There are some parts of his body, like his neck, that would trigger very ugly outcomes if they were ever touched. Other parts would hurt, like the place where the metal arm is stuck to his body. But he can imagine that there are other parts that he would allow Captain Rogers to touch if he ever let him touch him back. He would want Captain Rogers to touch him. Sometimes, when he is not able to keep track of what he is thinking, he looks at Rogers and knows that he would feel better if they were close enough to touch. 

It’s confusing to want proximity with someone when he knows that having some interpersonal distance is always the safer option –in order to have more time to react, to avoid injure, to have a better overall look of someone, etc. But the body seems to think that in Rogers case, it is far better to be the closest possible. Sometimes he has the itch to be as close as to be able to see the details that are not visible from a maximum of a five meter distance. For instance, there’s the mole that he suspects Rogers has in the collarbone, or the green sparks in his baby blue eyes. 

There is one problem with the touching drive, though, which is that it affects him more than the other stupid urges to make contact. It affects him in very obvious ways, too. And he is even more confused about it (compared to all the other stuff that he is confused about) because in the same way as he knows a lot of stuff that Bucky did with Steve even if he doesn’t remember precisely, he doesn’t know if they actually touched in the way his body wants to touch Rogers.  If he suddenly lost his mind and the little principles that he has left, and decided to chat with Rogers, he knows that it wouldn’t be too weird. Rogers would freak out, because he freaks out with everything where Bucky is concerned, but it wouldn’t be too weird. However, if he suddenly lost his mind and the little control he has over his life, and made contact with Rogers to immediately undress him and make sure that the mole in the collarbone (and the one in his stomach, if he’s already at it) are still there, he doesn’t know if it would be okay with Rogers. And disturbingly enough, he thinks it is more likely that he loses his mind over the touching urge than over the talking urge. 

The weather is also getting hotter, and the jerk seems to be wearing less and more fitted clothes every day. One time Rogers arrives to the bench in Coney Island with the tiniest white shirt he could find, so thin that it’s basically see-through, and he starts doing some push-ups right there, in the middle of a public place. That makes him remember very clearly that Rogers is a shameless and blatant whore , which really doesn’t help with the yearning for touching.

But not even the pointlessly good looks of Rogers or his troubling cravings are able to distract him from the fact that Captain Rogers is sad. 

He barely smiles, not even if Sam or the other Avengers are around. And he doesn’t know what to do to make it better. It’s even worse because he knows that what he wants to do –touch him, talk to him, be with him-, would mess him up more than he already is. 

Over and over
Lost again with no surprises
Disappointments, close your eyes
And it gets colder and colder
When the sun goes down

It’s been more than two years since he first saw Bucky on that bridge. More than two years without being able to let the image of the Winter Soldier’s shocked eyes disappear from his head. 

Steve is lost. For the first time since the night that it occurred to him to speak to the void hoping that the void would speak back, he sits down on the bench in Coney Island and doesn’t know what to say.

He hasn’t come in a week. It has been a tough week. 

However, today is the longest day of the year, Summer Solstice, the prettiest sunset in the year, as Bucky always said, and Steve desperately wants to feel closer to him. It’s not regret anymore. He just misses him. He misses Bucky, and he misses Peggy, and he misses his mom. He misses his old life. He even misses his small aching body. 

He is going to Sam’s for a couple of weeks for support, and he is getting mentally prepared to face one of Nat’s dating proposals. He is going to try to get a life beyond beating bad guy asses and obsessing over what he’s lost. He’s also won a bunch of things, and there is a complex and fascinating world out there to explore and be part of. He has found a family with the Avengers. It is a big family and sometimes it overwhelms him a bit, but it is a family, and Steve loves them. So he is going to try and live. 

But not today. Today it still hurts too much. So he eventually says the only thing there is to say. 

“Peggy’s dead, Buck.” 

Nothing happens, as always. He always talks and no one ever replies. But especially today, he wishes he would. Steve is not a patient person, but he’s persistent. He’s been coming to their bench every day, at least twice, and every time he imagines Bucky in the shadows, listening. It is hard not to think that he’s gone completely nuts, speaking with ghosts that never answer, but he cannot let go. He never will. Sam says that, as long as he doesn’t let it swallow up the rest of his life, it’s okay. But it would be easier if they could talk at least once.

“You are an asshole, you know that? You are an absolute jerk, Barnes! Why the fuck did you come here in New Years, uh? Why the fuck would you let me know that you’re around and then leave again?! Honestly, fuck you! FUCK! YOU!” 

Good. He’s crying now. He deserves to cry, for fuck’s sake. The woman that could have been the love of his life died. And the only person that could be of any comfort to him is gone. So he is going to cry all he wants.

“Peggy told me we would find each other. She told me that you couldn’t have forgotten me. But now she is dead, so whatever. Who cares what she said? How could she know, anyway? She was the wisest woman alive, but now she is dead. She couldn’t have known. Because it’s been two years, you asshole! And you are as gone as ever! So fuck it! And fuck you!” 

The knot in his chest aches like hell. Steve’s confessed all kind of things ever since he started coming to the bench to talk alone. But he still hasn’t said the worst, the most hidden shit he has inside. 

“I hated going to the hospital. I hated to see her like that, weak and alone. Her husband died before she started getting sick, you know? It was him she wanted there, not me. Why would she want me? I was just a piece of her past, an old memory. It’s not old memories what people want by their side when they are dying.” 

Steve thinks that he’d want Bucky by his side if he was dying. 

“You met her, Buck. She was the most amazing woman. She deserved the world. And I hated to see her last bits. I hated watching as she lost her mind. It was so hard to enter that room and face her dementia. It smelled like death, that fucking room. I hated it. I hated that I didn’t have the Peggy Carter that I met, the one that still had all her life ahead. I would have liked to grow old with her, to live my life with her, and not to start over seventy years later. What does that make me? I’m repulsive. Why can’t I fucking accept that the world moves on? That it moved on without me?” 

Steve is trembling. He wants to punch something, so he punches the stone on the bench. His fist bleeds just enough for a drop of blood to fall to the ground, and then it’s as if nothing happened. Stupid accelerated healing. He can’t get hurt. He can’t get drunk. Right now, he’d give anything to get wasted. No one should have to deal with death sober. 

“I don’t want to move on, that’s my fucking problem. I had it all. I had you. I had Peggy. I proved to everyone that they were wrong about me. I had a body that I could punch bullies with. I had it all, Buck. And now I don’t have anything but a stupid legend to leave up to. And this view people have of Captain America? It’s nothing like me. I’m their nationalist hero, Buck. It’s fucking revolting. Should’ve guessed, right? Captain America, how can I be surprised? Jesus, they’ve used my face for neoliberal, racist propaganda. And they expect me not to swear?! Fuck them. It’s like nobody knows me here. Even Sam and Natasha, that know that I’m fucked up, still think of me as this out of this world paradigm of morality and justice. Me! Maybe I want to be like Tony and do whatever the fuck I want without taking into consideration what people expect. That’d be sweet. Maybe tomorrow I go to some public schools and incite some rioting against the government. That’d be something.” 

Steve is delirious. He’s done with the world, he’s done with Captain America and he’s done with himself. 

“You know what? Fuck it.”

He stands up and jumps straight into the water. 

He comes out barely thirty seconds later, drenched in dirty sea water. 

 “Well, that’s disgusting. It’s exactly what I needed,” he laughs a bit, because he is screwed up.   “If you were here, you’d’ve jumped with me.” 

Steve sits on the bench again, looking at the horizon. He shivers in his wet clothes. The sun is starting to set and the sky is full of oranges and pinks and reds. It’s beautiful. He’d like to paint it.

“We came here every Summer Solstice, remember? You loved the view, Buck, but I loved looking at you when the sun went down.” 

Steve closes his eyes because he feels too awful to watch something that beautiful. He feels to bad to remember how good Bucky looked when he still had him.

When the sun goes down
The sight that flashed before me was your face

“You’re a punk, y’know that?” 

It escapes from his lips. His voice sounds rusted. He wanted to leave, run away again. Escape from the pain of listening to Rogers. But the body can’t handle that kind of heartbreak. The itch to approach overpowers every sense of rationality he has left. Rogers is in too much pain for him to keep doing nothing about it. Also, Rogers just jumped into the water like a fool and he is still trying to bring the rhythm of his heart rate down from the complete shock of having seen him jump off the dock. 

“Bucky?” 

He is still in his hiding spot, which is ridiculous, because he’s spoken already, and Rogers may be extraordinarily dumb, but he will find him in the next thirty seconds. He can hear him standing up and walking towards him. He panics and attempts a last minute escape.

“Don’t even think about it, pal. No fucking way you are running away this time.” 

Rogers grabs him by the flesh arm. Rogers is holding him and the body has the most preposterous reaction to his touch. He blushes. He keeps his murderous look, though, which makes Rogers drop his arm like it burns. Rogers is soaked in sea water. His blond hair shines with the last lights of the day. Jesus Christ. 

“M’sorry ‘bout Carter,” he mutters. 

Steve stares, open mouthed like the first time he saw his face after seventy years. He looks so silly. But his mouth is very distracting.  

“Bucky,” Rogers says again, as if he doesn’t believe it. 

“Maybe not,” he replies carefully. 

Rogers shakes his head, as if to wake up. Then, he raises his hands as if he wants to touch his face. The body steps back automatically. Not that he doesn’t want to touch Rogers too, but he thinks they should talk first. 

“Can I call you Bucky, though?” 

“Yes,” Bucky accepts. If Rogers thinks he deserves the name, he’ll take it. 

“Do you know who I am?” Rogers asks slowly and Bucky wants to punch him. 

“A punk, I just told you.” 

Rogers smiles. Not just with the mouth. He smiles with his eyes too. 

“So you remember?” Rogers shines so much it annoys Bucky’s eyes, but it’s not as if he is going to look away. Why didn’t he talk to Rogers before, he wonders. 

“Not much. You’ve told me a lot, though. I’m trying to keep up.” 

“You were listening?” 

Bucky nods and he knows Rogers was crying fifteen minutes ago, but he is having a tiny bit of fun with how shocked he looks. 

“Everything?” Rogers also seems slightly angry now. 

“You were talking to me, weren’t you?”

“I didn’t think you’d let me talk forever, jackass. Why haven’t you said anything earlier?” 

Bucky swallows. He’s terrified. He’s made contact now and it feels too good to ever leave his side again. However, now is the moment when Rogers may discover that he is not the Bucky he wants. 

 “How long have you been following me around? Where have you been living? You’ve hidden here the whole time?” Rogers cannot control the questions out of his mouth, and Bucky does something without thinking, like everything he’s doing today. 

He holds Rogers’ shoulders and looks at him straight in the eyes. He knows that works for grounding Steve. 

“I wanted to understand first,” he tells him.  

Rogers looks overwhelmed, but he holds on to Bucky’s arms firmly, as if to make sure that he really is there. Bucky feels the touch in the metal arm, and it’s not as weird as he thought it would be. If someone’s allowed to touch the metal arm, that’s Rogers. 

“You could have asked, I only wanted to help, I just-”

“I’m not your Bucky, Rogers. I barely remember what happened to him. My actual memories are far darker and uglier, and that’s not something you have to deal with.” 

“But-”

“Oh, shut up,” he says, and it feels awesome. At last. Now it’s his turn to talk. “I don’t know who the fuck I am. I don’t dwell on it because I’d go crazy. But somehow I still haven’t managed to understand, I know you. And I know Brooklyn, and I know this bench. All the stories that you’ve told me, I know they happened. I know how your Bucky felt about you. I know how much he loved you and how furious he’d be if he’d heard some of the shit you’ve said these past months. He would have told you to drop the abnegated self-blaming act and stop talking shit. Hell, I wanted to tell you. But I can’t pretend to be someone that I’m not, even if you need me to be.”

He stops talking because he’s said too much. He could learn how to have boundaries. How can he not talk to Rogers in two years and then drop this on him? Rogers is a sensible flower, and his ex-girlfriend just died, for fuck’s sake. He can’t deal with this shit right now. Also, his throat is itchy. And Rogers has his mouth open again. He looks like he wants to run away. Or maybe that’s what the body wants Bucky to do. Then Rogers licks his lips, and Bucky has a minor myocardial infarction. Any imminent escape plan is aborted.  

“You keep saying ‘your Bucky’…”

“He was yours. I also know that.” 

“What?” 

“What do you mean ‘ what’ ?”

“What does it mean that there was such a thing as my Bucky?” 

Sometimes he forgets that Rogers is a fairly stupid individual. Thank the Lord he is cute.

“I told you that I don’t remember the details. I just know . S’how things were. He was your Bucky, you were his Steve.” 

Rogers is as red as an apple now. Bucky’s fingers move without asking and he lightly touches his blushed cheeks. Then he steps back because Rogers’ looks alarmed. Okay, so touching is weird. Touching is off limits. Okay. He can adapt. 

“So what happens now?” Rogers asks. He is nervous. Bucky feels tense in the stomach. He doesn’t know how to make Rogers relax.

“I do want to be around, even if I’m not your Bucky.” There, he said it. “But you can think of what I told you. You can discuss it with Sam Wilson. He has good judgment.” 

“How do you- Okay, doesn’t matter. I don’t wanna know. Will you be okay, though? Where’re you staying?” 

“In an apartment. Not too far from the Avenger’s Tower.” 

“How did you find- Do I not want to know that either?”

He shrugs. He is renting the apartment with HYDRA’s money, but it’s in line with his dangerous assassin reputation to pretend that there is something sneaky about it. 

“You’ve been alone this whole time?” Rogers asks with his puppy face. 

“I was not alone. I’ve been following you around.”

“That’s still being alone,” Rogers reprimands him stubbornly. It’s adorable. 

 “I was close enough.” 

“You weren’t. I prefer it when you answer.” Okay, Rogers, be a sap. He shrugs again. He also prefers it when he can answer, but he is not sure if that’s the best option in the long term. “S’okay, Buck. Now you’re here. That’s what’s important.” 

Rogers smiles again, and he doesn’t look as nervous. Bucky attempts a very tiny smile too, which feels weird, but it makes Rogers beam more widely. Bucky’s face heats up again, which is outrageous for a person that has been trained to control his facial expressions. 

Rogers has the courtesy of pretending he doesn’t notice, and then he goes back to serious. 

“Will you be here tomorrow, Buck?” 

He hates that Rogers has to ask. But he understands. The body won’t allow him to stay too far from Rogers now that they’ve talked and even touched . But he understands that Rogers doesn’t know that yet. 

“I will.” 

“You promise?” 

There is something almost pleading in Rogers’ voice. Bucky really hates it. He wants to tell him that maybe they don’t have to meet tomorrow. Maybe they don’t have to meet tomorrow because they are not going separate ways today. Maybe he can go with Rogers to his apartment in the Avengers Tower and never let anyone separate them ever again. He’s been there before. It is a wonderful apartment, and it would be even better if he didn’t have to hide. 

But Rogers just lost Carter, and he is not his most stable self to make this kind of decisions. After all, he must be freezing because he’s still drenched in sea water. Which Bucky is deliberately ignoring because he wants to avoid staring creepily. 

It’s okay. They will meet tomorrow. And the day after that. And then they will decide together what to do next. 

“It is our bench, isn’t it? It’s a shared spot, Rogers. You’ve hoarded it for too long.” 

When the sun goes down
But I think that I forgot to say your name

Steve is terrified.

It has happened enough times now not to expect it to happen again. 

Steve will arrive to the bench and he will sit there alone once more. Bucky will be gone again. And he won’t know if he made everything up in his head. He will never know if it was his grief for Peggy that made him invent the whole thing. He will never know if he actually ever talked to Bucky. He probably didn’t. It was too unreal to be true. 

Sam told him that it is unlikely that he is getting such vivid hallucinations out of nowhere. He also told him to try to lower his expectations because it is possible that Bucky got scared and changed his mind. He was at the phone with Sam for like five hours analyzing every word of their conversation and planning what do next, but Steve still feels lost in the middle of a fantasy. 

The closer he gets to the bench, the more he wants to turn back and run away. He won’t be able to deal with Bucky not being there. He won’t be able to handle that kind of abandonment. Not now that he’s also lost Peggy. 

But when he gets to the bench, Bucky is sitting there with his black hoodie, and Steve has to breathe in and out ten times for his heart to stop racing. 

“Hey, Buck.” 

Bucky greets him with a nod and a gentle glimpse, but doesn’t really stop to look back at him. Steve wants to ask him when did he become this shy, but he realizes how inappropriate that would be. He also wants to touch his face to get more sensory proof that he is there. Maybe he can take a picture, would that be weird? Jesus, he is a bit nervous. 

Bucky looks breathtaking. Steve couldn’t appreciate how good he looks last night, so now he lingers on every detail of his face. There are some new wrinkles on his forehead, maybe because he frowns too much, and he still has a beard and long hair, but his eyes look more familiar than they looked that first time on the bridge. He looks alive and human. Steve wants to cry. 

He takes a seat next to Bucky, leaving a prudential distance between them. Sam said that Bucky might have very serious sequels from what he’s gone through. He also said that it is important to ask him what he wants and offer help in a non-coercive manner. Steve is desperate at this point; he will do anything not to scare Bucky away, but he knows he is prone to fuck everything up. 

Sitting like that, with some distance but still side by side, looking at the sea, is comfortable. They’ve cooled down from the rush of emotions compared to the previous day, so it’s easier to talk without facing each other. They sit in silence for a while. Steve practiced what to say with Sam, but now his mind is blank. However, the silence is unexpectedly calming. It’s reassuring to sit with Bucky on that bench. 

But then he speaks, because he doesn’t think Bucky will speak first, and he really wants to hear from him. 

“How are you doing?” he asks, and he knows it is a stupid question, but what is he supposed to say to his best friend from childhood. It’s not like there’s a manual. 

Bucky quickly glances at him with the corner of his eyes and gives him the teeniest mocking smile. 

“I’m okay. You?” 

Steve can’t do this. He always hates chit chatting, but this? This makes no sense. This is Bucky and he’s been hearing his intense monologues for months. They know each other. He can say what he came to say. 

“I also want you to stay around, Bucky,” he starts, and Bucky gives him a quick glance. Steve wants to think that the flicker in his blue eyes is relief, but Bucky turns to face the sea again and he can’t be sure. He used to be able to read Bucky’s eyes with total ease. He guesses he’ll have to rediscover how to do that now. “If that’s what you want, of course, then I’d like that. And ‘around’ can be anything you are comfortable with. You can come to the Avengers Tower. We can share an apartment. You can stay at your place and we can meet here from time to time. I’m good with anything, but I would like to be in contact.” 

“But I’m not your Bucky,” he says brusquely, as if he wants to remind Steve and himself, as if he wants to bring both their hopes down before it’s too late. Steve’s heart aches. He wants to sit closer. He wants to hug him. 

“It’s okay, Buck. I don’t mind. I want you to be around, not the Bucky of the past. I know I said yesterday that I don’t want to move on, but it’s not true. I’m not going to renounce to the Avengers. And if you agree, I’d like you to meet Sam, and Nat, and all the rest of them. There’s also Wanda, you’ll like her, and the kid from Queens. At your own time, of course, but they are my people now. They are my family. The thing is, you are my family too.”

“I killed Stark’s parents,” Bucky says again and he looks defensive. Maybe he thinks that there is something that he can say that will make Steve reconsider, but he won’t find it.  

“It wasn’t you.” 

“But that’s what you’ve got to understand before you make any decision. It was. I remember doing it. I might have been following orders, but I remember accepting them. It was me who pulled the trigger. It was me who strangled Mrs. Stark.” 

Steve suppresses a shudder. Bucky’s voice is cold, as if he doesn’t care, as if he’s informing him of the results of a mechanical experiment. Steve realizes that’s probably how it was. That’s probably how he had to report on the missions of the Winter Soldier. Steve feels the fury boiling up his neck. All he wants is to hold Bucky between his arms and protect him from the world forever evermore. 

“I know, Buck. And Tony also knows. But you didn’t have a choice. It is awful that you have to live with the memory, but they made you do it. They controlled your brain. And that matters, because it means that the totality of the blame is on them. Maybe Tony doesn’t like you much in the beginning. Probably you won’t like him either. But he knows that nothing of what the Winter Soldier did was because he wanted. And you know that as well.” 

Bucky doesn’t react. He is staring at the horizon and he is rigid everywhere. Steve would like to rub his shoulders and release some of that tension. He wonders when was the last time someone touched him to make him feel better.  

“You’ve heard how much I miss you,” Steve keeps telling him, because he needs him to understand and because once he starts with his fiery speeches, he never stops. “You’ve heard how sorry I am for everything that happened to you. But I didn’t say the most important thing, Buck. Truth is it doesn’t matter how I feel. I understand if you hate me, if you don’t want to be around and if this is the last time we see each other. It will also be okay if you change your mind from whatever you want now. You are your own person, and I will accept and live with whatever you want to do next. You just have to know that I am offering anything. As much or as little as you can think of.” 

Bucky keeps staring at the sea and Steve doesn’t know if he heard him. 

“Drop the drama, Rogers,” he says after a while, as if he is reconnecting to the situation. It sounds a bit forced, but Steve snorts in response. 

“I’m trying to be serious here, Barnes.” 

“I already told you that I want to be around,” he tells him, and looks at him in the eye for the first time in the day. “And there is nothing to be sorry about, stop trying to singlehandedly take the blame for every tragedy in the world. It’s pitiful, and I know you don’t like people pitying you.” 

Steve feels the smile creeping into his face. He stretches and flexes his fingers a couple times not to throw himself over Bucky and hug him until they are both dead. 

“What did Wilson say?” he asks. “Does he think I’m dangerous?” 

“You can ask him personally. But for what’s worth, he’s impressed that after decades of being used as a weapon and having people messing with your head and telling you what to do, you’ve just spent two years chilling around New York without being noticed.” 

Bucky nods, as if Sam’s approval is vital. Steve wants to hug him more than ever.

“Okay, right. Okay,” says Steve in order to control his impulses. He pulls out a small box from his pocket. “So I brought you a phone. We can be in contact with this. Here, look. My number is here. And I have your number too. Anything you need, just call.”

He hands it over and their fingers touch. And Steve feels the touch too much.

Bucky takes the phone and examines it without realizing that Steve is losing his mind. Then he looks at Steve in the eye again and Steve doesn't understand what Bucky's eyes are telling him, so he panics. He doesn’t know what else there is to say. But if he doesn't get some distance, he is going to have to hug Bucky, and he'll scare him, and Bucky'll run away again and he cannot fuck this up now that they are finally talking.

He stands up without thinking. He feels like a schoolgirl. What the fuck. This is Bucky. They’ve been friends forever. What the fuck is that tingling in the stomach.

Maybe he is going to be sick. He can't throw up on Bucky.

“So… I’m gonna get going. There’s this Avengers thing soon, I have to prepare. But we can meet here tomorrow at the same time?” 

It’s such a stupid excuse and he can hear Sam calling him pathetic in the back of his head. He is being ridiculous and he knows it. But he's a mess and at this point better get away than screw it all up.

He does everything to avoid Bucky’s gaze, to avoid staring at him, but then Bucky calls him.  

“Rogers.” 

Bucky is watching him as if he’s trying to decipher something. Steve’s skin is itchy. He wants to peel it off. But Bucky doesn’t say anything else. He just stares at him with his gorgeous eyes squinted in concentration. Steve is two seconds away from sending everything he holds dear to hell and bury himself in Bucky’s arms.

 “Can I hug you?” 

It’s Bucky who asks that, and Steve almost obliterates right there.

Steve is paralyzed and looks at him in utter shock. Bucky is still sitting on the bench and, because Steve is so shocked, he seems to doubt. Thank God some reflex in Steve’s brain activates before Bucky can take it back. 

“Sure. Sure, pal.” 

Later in the day, Steve will want to punch himself to death for going for “sure, pal”, but right now he doesn’t even realize how stupid it sounds. He doesn’t really have time to process anything that is happening because, suddenly, Bucky has stood up and is pulling him into his arms.

Bucky squeezes him with the exact amount of strength for it to hurt in the right places. For Steve to know that it’s real.

This is Bucky, all arms and body around him. 

And Steve loves this man. It might be a different Bucky, an older and more damaged version, but he is the same guy he grew up with and will never stop loving. 

Steve hugs him back tightly, and the bench in Coney Island witnesses how they find each other once again and to the end of the line. 

(Over and over
Sorry for not making you my, making you my
Making you my centerfold)

“You want us to sleep in the same bed but you won’t stop calling me Rogers?” 

He nods. It’s their first night together in their new shared apartment. It’s been one month of meeting at Coney Island every day, which according to every one of Steve’s friends, has been a month too long for them to confess that this is what they both wanted all along. 

“Suck it up, Rogers,” he says, and removes his pants. 

He has limited the fulfillment of his touching urge to hugging, because that’s what Rogers seems most comfortable with. Rogers also seeks his hugs constantly, which he is awesome. But he's been careful of not asking for too much not to overwhelm him. If it were for him, he'd be constantly touching Rogers skin-to-skin, which Rogers would accept because he doesn't know how to say no to him, but he'd be uncomfortable with. So, in order to protect Rogers innocence, normally he is okay with just hugging. However, yesterday, when they agreed on sharing an apartment, Bucky couldn’t control his mouth from asking Rogers that if they were going to share a home, they could also sleep together and cuddle . Cuddling is like hugging, just longer and lying down so, even if he didn’t plan to ask so bluntly, he still thinks it is an acceptable request. Rogers accepted anyway, so.   

“So no pants?” Rogers asks. 

Bucky squints at him. 

Rogers’s questions often confuse him. It always seems like he asks them expecting a specific answer. It’s annoying. And he didn’t think there would be a problem with removing his pants. He knows Bucky slept with Steve without pants back in their days.

“Is it weird?”

Rogers gets all flustered, but he tries to act casual. 

He always pretends that everything’s cool when Bucky does something unexpected. It’s hilarious how he fails every time. Good. Bucky prefers to be able to read him without masks. Also, it’s fair that Rogers is flustered. He is without pants and his legs are pretty nice. 

“No, no. ‘s okay, I guess,” he murmurs, beautifully red in the face and in the neck, and who knows how far the blush goes. 

Wait. I guess? What does that mean? 

“Do you want me to put my pants back on, Rogers?” 

“No, no. ‘s fine.” 

Then Rogers removes his own pants, and Bucky begins to understand why it could potentially be a problem to sleep together without pants. Rogers lifts an eyebrow at him, which is a definitely-not-that-innocent move on his part.

He stares at Rogers’ legs while he gets under the covers, because he is only human.

Rogers turns the lights off and also gets inside the bed. 

The lack of light makes everything more intimate and the idea of touching Rogers is suddenly scarier. The bed is soft and he can feel the warmth of Rogers’ body by his side, but none of them move. They are not able to joke anymore. If he listens in carefully, he can hear both their hearts pumping wildly, almost aggressively. For fuck’s sake, this is supposed to be a soothing experience.

“This is stupid," Rogers mumbles impatiently, voicing Bucky's thoughts outloud. Bless him. "C’mere, Buck."

He heaves a relieved sigh and crawls into Rogers’ arms. Their legs entangle automatically, and the no pants idea is confirmed as one of the best ideas they've ever had. Cuddling with Rogers is spectacular. This should be the only allowed way of lying down, to be curled against Rogers, to feel him everywhere. 

“This is new, you know?” Rogers says.

This is their thing now. It started with him asking about the stuff he knew about but didn’t really remember , but then Rogers began to offer information without needing to be asked. This way, he explains things from Steve’s and Bucky’s past, but he also tells him about what he is thinking now, about new things that he’s discovered about himself or about the future. Because he keeps worrying that he is not the Bucky that Steve would want, Rogers specially likes to emphasize on the new aspects of their relationship.

“What’s new?” Bucky asks.

“We used to sleep together all the time. But it was never like this,” Steve explains.

He doesn’t really know what to do with that information, so he hugs himself closer to Steve and hides his head in the gap of his shoulder. He smells like paradise. He smells like home. 

“Did you ever want it to be like this?”

Steve doesn’t answer immediately, but he buries one of his big hands on Bucky’s hair. Bucky wants to purr in response. 

“I never thought it could work. Not then. Not with me.” 

He wants to protest. He wants to punch Steve for insulting himself like that on his watch. But he’s come to realize that if he wants him to shut up, it works much better to tell him all the things his Bucky never dared to. 

“Your Bucky totally wanted to.” 

Steve swallows loudly and it does all kinds of terrible things to the body. 

“And what about you? Is this fine with you?” 

He doesn’t think it’s possible, but he gets closer, showing him how fine it is.

“Steve,” he says, because he feels great and Steve is great and he never thought he was going to feel this great again but he does because Steve is there. It’s not just the body that feels fantastic, it’s also him. There is nothing else he can say to express how good this is for him. Just. “Steve.” 

Rogers tugs his hair in the softest of ways so that their eyes meet in the dark. Bucky wants to sob with delight. Their faces are so close that their breaths intertwine. 

“Stevie.” 

He doesn’t know who kisses the other first, but their mouths find each other, and it’s only natural.

It’s the only thing that makes sense.