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Your blood is pounding so hard that you can feel the thrum of your pulse in your teeth, the thrill of the fight sharpening your senses and quickening your movements. You feel more alive than you have in years - or maybe it’s decades; you get confused, time doesn’t carry quite the same meaning anymore.
The Soldier’s movements seem familiar somehow, like a half-forgotten dance or a half-remembered dream.
You slip into defence rather than offence, and for a moment you can almost hear his approval.
“Why you always gotta be startin’ fights Stevie?” he huffs, dabbing at the scrape on your cheek.
You mumble something incoherent about fairness or the like, it doesn’t matter what, you both know every possible version of this speech by heart.
He rolls his eyes and pulls you out the chair, “If you’re gonna keep it up, you got to at least learn how the block a punch.” He does this every time, right after he’s sat you in the seat by the window so he can see to clean up the worst of your scrapes. You know exactly what he’ll say, but it feels wrong somehow to disturb this routine you’ve established between yourselves.
Knives are harder to block than punches, of course, and the Soldier is faster than anyone you’ve ever faced before.
Your blood continues to pound.
*
Here’s the thing: you’re both ninety six years old, and thirty. You feel too old and too young at the same time. You don’t even have thirty years’ worth of memories, days and weeks lost to childhood illness and the monotony of war. You've faced down death too many times for someone your age (either of your ages) and the thing that no one ever says is that, after a while, even the promise of death loses its sting. When you’re constantly surrounded by it, like anything, it kind of loses its edge.
Some might call your apathy towards death battle fatigue - no, it's PTSD now, the SHIELD counsellor said, through trauma suggests an event rather than the relentless grind of life on the front line - but it’s been in your bones for far longer than war has (had?) been in Europe. It’s not just you either. In the loosest of terms, it’s a generational thing. You learnt how to cope with loss on the streets of Brooklyn when war was just a cloud on the horizon in countries you’d never visit; you know how to pay your respects, even mourn, and then move on. Just another part of life.
Usually.
But the point you’re trying to make is that you see death differently to other people in this century. You think Natasha might be able to understand, that Sam might be able to at least empathise, but no one really gets it. People in this century see death as some huge event that blots out everything else, and they don’t see how it can just fade into the monochrome of your memories of the past.
For many people these days, it seems that loss becomes some sort of defining moment, a milestone of sorts. In lives not surrounded by death, people don’t understand that for a kid in a long gone Brooklyn, it’s the moments when you really feel alive that stick.
*
You remember running and running and running, and feeling like your lungs were going to give out and your legs were going to drop off. Bucky’s laugh carries in the breeze and you feel like you’re right at his heels as you clamber up the rickety fire escape after him.
In reality, you’ve only really run round the block, but you’re seven years old and you feel like you could cross state-lines with Bucky at your side. The pair of you watch the sun dip below the horizon and nibble on your stale, stolen bread. As prizes go, it’s not much, but with your pulse still just too quick, and the wind lifting your hair, it could be manna for all you know.
You sit with your feet hanging off the edge of the fire escape and tip yourself forwards to look down, down, down. People pass below your feet, tiny as ants, and you swing your feet slightly, trying to line your toes up with each passer-by. “Hey, Buck,” you say, nudging him with your elbow where he sits, head tipped back and eyes screwed shut.
“Mmm?”
“Do you think this is how God feels when he looks down at us?”
He tips his head to look at you, opens one eye. “What do you mean?”
You lean forwards further, probably further than is really safe, but you are young and untouchable. “So big?”
*
You remember being nineteen and trudging back from work. Your shoes rub painfully where the toes are stuffed with old newspapers, and the heavens have just opened and you’re soaked to the bone. In a moment of serendipity, you turn on your heel and turn and turn. You could be in a dance hall somewhere, or on the Cyclone at Coney Island, or on a street corner drenched to the bone. You spin (and spin and spin) until you’re so dizzy you don’t even feel human any more.
*
You grin through bloody teeth as Bucky punches your assailant. (You’re thirteen, and seventeen, and twenty four, and every age in between). You don’t know how much longer he’ll keep picking your ass up off the floor.
*
He stumbles home blind drunk the day you see the enlistment letter lying on the table; the 1A reads like a promise, or a threat, or a threat of a promise. You hold his hair back as he empties his stomach, and later brush it back from his face as he curls himself around you in a rare role-reversal and whimpers.
In the dead of night, long after he’s finally succumbed to sleep, you continue brushing back his hair. Fear and something else knot your stomach, and you think maybe, maybe.
*
You are seventeen and watching baseballs fly around the pitch, so far away you imagine that all you can see are white blurs, but in reality you can’t even see that. Your seats are so high you can practically touch the clouds, and for a moment you think back to a conversation about God you once had when you were seven.
You turn back to your hot dog, and listen to Bucky jabbering on excitedly in that way he only does around you; God doesn’t care about people like you.
*
You step out of the machine and all you can think about is that fact that everyone suddenly seems so much smaller. Small and fragile, and maybe how everyone used to see you. This isn’t how you imagined the world would seem if you were bigger, how the world would seem to God.
*
You remember one evening sitting round a fire that you probably shouldn’t have lit. You’re somewhere near the Bulge, but none of you can remember which side of it you’re on, and you’re (they’re) all cold, and riding high on another successful mission. So you probably shouldn’t have lit the fire, but for once, you think, what’s the worst that can happen?
Monty’s laughing so much he can hardly finish the joke he’s trying to tell, something he heard off some chap called Miller or something, and everyone’s staring at him in bemusement. You glance at Bucky, and for once these days he’s actually looking back at you, looking something more like the person you knew back home. He narrows his eyes slightly, and glances back at Monty, who’s apparently just finished his joke.
There’s a beat of silence where no quite knows what to say.
“Yes?” asks Dugan, voicing what everyone else seems to be thinking.
“Well, that’s it?” Monty responds, looking confused.
“But where’s the punchline?”
“There, isn’t one? It’s, well, it’s up to… The audience?” Monty tries weakly, “Because of, uh, regulations?”
There’s another pause, slightly more awkward.
“Pfft,” Denier scoffs, “Vous êtes faibles Anglais.”
Bucky glances back at you, and you’re not sure if it’s Frenchie’s tone, or the look of helplessness on Bucky’s face, or the absurdity of the whole situation, but you laugh and laugh until you can hardly breathe. You’re in the middle of the woods, and the last time you showered was somewhere near Luxembourg, and think you might have snow in your boots, and there are tears streaming down your face and you haven’t felt more like that boy from Brooklyn in over a year.
*
Bucky falls. He shrinks and shrinks into nothingness right before your eyes, and there’s nothing you can do. And all of a sudden, you’re seven and at the top of a rickety fire escape that you’re not sure is even there anymore, and if this is how God feels then He’s a bastard. If this is how God feels, then He ain’t worth shit.
*
You angle the plane down and Peggy’s voice is desperate in your ear. You’re sorry for a lot of things, but not for this.
It’s like that day in the Alps, only in reverse, the ice growing bigger before your eyes. You’re not sure if you’re killing yourself, or killing God, or both or neither. But it’s one less threat in a world you don’t recognise any more, and you think maybe, maybe.
*
Natasha props her feet up on the dash, and smirks at you, and just for a second it’s such a familiar expression that your brain stops working. But it’s there and gone in the blink of an eye, and a minute later you think you might have imagined it in the first place.
(In a few years’ time, as you and Natasha sit huddled in a bombed out warehouse awaiting your extraction after a disaster of a mission, she’ll tell you her story. Only her story mind, but in something such as a life, it’s difficult to keep the details of other people from creeping in. Enough of it you already know, pieced together from fragments of memory, and moments when there’s just a little too much recognition. But she’ll tell you enough, and you’ll think about that smirk, and how easy it would be to learn pressed together beneath bed sheets.)
And the fact is, there’s something so comforting in that maybe-real expression, and you don’t really know them at all, but in all the ways that count, maybe you do. You’re not sure you’ll ever trust anyone else to cover your six, but you think that between them, you might let Natasha and Sam cover your four and eight.
*
You let yourself fall from the Insight helicarrier, and in the moment before you lose consciousness, you wonder how much time normal people spend falling.
*
The Soldier’s movements are quick, and somewhat familiar, and it’s like trying to catch air. There’s something there, urgent, begging to be recognised, remembered, but you can’t. A part of you thinks that this must be how Peggy feels.
But the mask comes away, and it’s Bucky, and this can’t be real, this isn’t how the world works, what is happening, and why why why, and you can’t breathe and this feels more like falling than crashing that plane did and-
And it’s ridiculous, but that damn show flashes through your mind, the one you once watched expecting there to be more Disney characters than you actually got, and all you can think is “I will always find you”.
*
In the winter of 1938, you get sick. Really sick. Bucky loses his job to look after you, and you have a fever that just won’t break. In your rare lucid moments, you swear you’ll never be warm again.
It’s in one of these moments that you sit propped up against Bucky, back to chest like he always insists on to stop anything from settling in your lungs.
“Bucky,” you murmur, and if you were anyone else you might wonder how it is that you can always manage to make your mouth form the sounds for his name when you can scarcely make your lungs, your heart, cooperate. But you’re not anyone else, and this is who the two of you are, two lone souls against the world.
“Yeah, Stevie?” You feel him shifting, pulling you closer so that you’re more upright. It occurs to you that he might have thought you were sleeping, that he stayed anyway, despite the fact that you know you must be burning to the touch.
“I want you to promise,” you start, but break off. Promise what exactly? You’re not sure, you’re not sure what you’re even trying to say. Maybe you can just stop, and blame it on the fever if he ever asks about it. But he’s quiet, patiently waiting for you, and you think this might be important, more important than both of you.
“You shouldn’t waste your time with me,” you manage, barely more than a whisper, “You should go and live your own life.”
“No,” he responds, short and final.
“You should though,” you insist. “You could do so much better than living day to day. Worrying about whether I’m going to get sick again.”
You’re both silent for a long time. You don’t know why you’re pushing this so hard, you’ve had this conversation a million times before, the both of you to stubborn to say what you really mean.
“People don’t understand why you spend so much time with me. Why you don’t go your own way.”
“No.”
You close your eyes, breathe heavily. This conversation is too much exertion for you, and you both know it, but neither of you will stop it, can stop it. Like a boulder rolling downhill, it’s gathered too much momentum to stop now, and the conclusion looms big, and significant.
“You mustn’t make me the centre of your world,” you manage before you lose your battle with sleep.
“No,” he says, the whisper of it registering somewhere in your unconscious, “But I have anyway.”
*
Some when, in the vast, vague future, you return home. It could be in months, in years, you’re not sure which, time doesn’t mean much to you any more. But you return home, and as you hang you coat by the door, you can smell chilli bubbling on the stovetop, and you’re struck by how very much this does, actually, feel like home.
In the living room, you find that the game has been paused on the television, waiting for you to get back. You can hear Natasha and Sam bickering quietly in the kitchen, and you know that everyone else will be here soon enough. Moving into the tower had worried you initially, worried that it would be too different, that you wouldn’t be able to cope. But it’s not so bad. It’s nice to have friends around, and they’re generally (bar Tony of course) pretty good at respecting your privacy.
So it’s different, but it’s nice.
And you’re not alone any more, of course.
You find Bucky curled up in his chair, the chair next to bookcase and the wide, wide window which looks out at the skyline. New York has changed over the years, scarcely recognisable as the city you grew up in, but at its heart, it’s the same. Full of the same old resilient people, who adapt to anything, even if the threats are a little different these days. You can still find the skeleton of the city it once was, if you know where to look, which buildings to pick out. And it’s the same for the two of you, you suppose; you’ve changed of course, but at the heart, underneath all the layers of time, you’re still just Steve and Bucky, two rag-tag kids who used to haunt the streets of Brooklyn. Two rag-tag kids that not even time, or war, or God, could tear apart.
You watch as Bucky balances his mug on the arm of the chair, and turns the page of his book, concentration creasing his brow.
“What are you reading?”
He glances up and smiles at you, lifts the book so you can see the cover. It looks old, a biography by the look of the cover; you lean closer and read the name Max Miller. Bucky’s lip curves as you look back up at him.
“Turns out Monty was kind of right about the punchline thing,” he murmurs.
You laugh and laugh and laugh, and when his lips finally curve up into a proper smile, you think maybe, maybe.