Chapter Text
The gathering after the funeral is quiet.
Too quiet, Bucky’s brain keeps supplying, try as he might to shut it up.
It’s just, most of his post-death experiences have been decidedly not quiet.
Funerals don’t really exist in war, and what does exist after is just distraction and terror amplified. Starting with gunfire and explosions (or the threat of one or both).
Missions… well, terror was there always (if buried deep, deep into his subconscious). And there was no formal after, on missions. Funerals don’t exist for killers to mourn. Doubly don’t exist for killers that are subsequently frozen and their minds wiped.
This after, it’s heavy. Creeping.
So he tries to fade into the corners of the house, close to the walls, keeping out of its reach.
Just beyond an appropriate vocal range for someone to call out to him, invite him into their circles of gently simmering grief, without disturbing the too-quiet.
Just beyond the necessary visual range for someone to do a double take, question why the killer of the deceased’s parents is attending his funeral.
Like a lot of other things that have come up since his life stopped getting put on pause by other people – if that particular question were brought to the surface, it might explode all over this polite company. That question has already added weight to the railroad spike that’s been driving slowly through his ribcage over the last 13 hours, tearing up his insides. Only a matter of time before everyone else realizes it’s part of whatever’s tearing up theirs, too.
So he keeps busy. He lingers. Monitors, really.
(Another problem with the too-quiet, and with the damn woods all around them: Any sound emerging from beyond these four walls could herald a very real threat, Stark-designed cabin fortress or not, recent victory in world-ending battle or not.)
His visual sweeps tend to return to one particular corner, where one particular individual has uncharacteristically not moved a single inch.
He’s had many moments to observe Steve over the years they’ve been alive – well, existed in the same place at the same time, anyway. Observe, track, depending on the parts they were both playing at that particular moment of co-existence.
And Steve’s never been a particularly still guy.
Before the serum, he made his presence known with words and spiraling fists and jumping into things without thinking (i.e. being an idiot, as Bucky frequently informed him). Then post-serum, sheer bulk made him impossible to ignore. Not to mention the continuation of the words, fists, being an idiot.
Even without the shield in hand, Steve’s tendency to engage, soothe, comfort usually has him in constant motion.
But Steve – six-foot-tall, super soldier Steve – is fading into the corners, too.
He seems small, and not just in comparison to Banner or Thor. In the last 40 minutes, he’s spoken only once – a one-word answer to a direct question. Doesn’t seem like someone could hear him even if he were speaking, with how low his head is hung.
Too quiet, Bucky thinks.
“Hey, man. You good?”
Bucky’s head swivels to the left, where Sam’s apparently gotten the jump on him. Enough of a jump to startle out of him:
“I don’t– I don’t know what to say to anyone.”
Since his body suddenly started re-existing a little over 48 hours ago, he purposely has tried not to think much about– well, about himself. Certainly hasn’t voiced any self reflections.
So, that was unexpected.
His eyes widen and his mouth snaps shut, and he turns away for another scan. Hopes Sam leaves it be.
Sam nods, shifting his own eyes away for a turn around the room.
“Yeah,” he sighs. “I– Yeah.” He raises a bottle of beer to his lips and takes a drink.
For a few long moments, they stand in a newly-welcome silence.
They’ve become something like friends, despite spending only scant hours alive together. Something about evading global manhunts and fighting for their lives across time and space brings people closer together, Bucky supposes. Not to mention the shared burden of looking out for a reckless, obstinate Steve Rogers.
If he’s come to know anything about Sam in their time together, it’s that Sam would be the one to break said silence, and with frankness and vulnerability.
“I never knew what I wanted people to say to me. When I was the one on the receiving end of the saying, I mean.”
His eyes alight again on the side of Bucky’s face. Bucky drags his own over their primary target – the slump of Steve’s hunched-over shoulders – to meet Sam’s.
“There’s just– there’s no right thing to say to someone grieving, I don’t think.” Sam’s mouth twitches down. “We all try to find the right words, but what the person grieving most wants to hear isn’t something anyone can give them.”
Bucky feels the words get forced out of his cored-out, burning chest, up his throat and off his tongue.
“I don’t think anyone would want to hear anything I’d have to say anyway.” He swallows. “I don’t think anyone even wants me to be here.”
Sam’s head cocks curiously.
“I mean, you know that’s not true. That’s just– factually incorrect.”
Bucky narrows his eyes. Sam lifts his briefly skyward.
“Lord, save me from these dumbasses who wouldn’t know an emotion if it hit them upside the head.”
He looks back at Bucky. “Hearing anything you have to say is literally the one thing Steve’s wanted since 1945. You coming back from the dead gave him that.”
The spike flares.
With a disbelieving forced breath – almost a laugh, if such things were allowed in the after – Sam continues:
“And then the blip…” He shakes his head. “Say anything, say nothing, I guarantee just staying in the same vicinity is exactly where he wants you to be.”
Bucky looks back to Steve’s corner.
His now empty corner.
Bucky’s head darts left and right. No visual.
“Try the dock,” Sam intones, gesturing with the bottle in his hand to the front door. Bucky’s slipping out of it 4 seconds later.
As he reaches the slatted wood that juts over the lake’s edge, Bucky tries to telegraph his approach, letting his boots fall heavily. It still takes a few clunking steps until the figure at the other end raises their head.
Steve twists to look over his shoulder, and Bucky catches the moment a carefully smoothed-out brow crumples into something etched and carved, shadowing the eyes underneath it. It’s a look he suspects he’s been allowed to see more often than those assembled 100 yards away, if still only occasionally over nearly 100 years of shared poverty, illness, death, and other traumas.
By the time Bucky is lowering his body down beside Steve’s, that haunted look is turned back upon the tranquil scene before them, as if disapproving of calm waters and empty woods.
The shoulders are less hunched though, and Bucky considers that progress.
For all that the too-quiet and the last few minutes with Sam had wound him up, the tight coil of Bucky’s body also loosens a touch as it settles into their shared stillness.
A couple quiet minutes later, Steve pipes up.
“I wanted to stay inside.”
Bucky thinks about say nothing. Decides say anything is worth a try.
“Why didn’t you?”
Steve sighs. “I didn’t know what to say to Pepper.”
Bucky glances over, but Steve’s gaze is trained far away. Still, he adds:
“About the trip. Returning the stones.”
The last time The Trip was discussed, it was late at night in a dark, near-empty Manhattan apartment Steve brought them to. It was 35 hours into their less-than-48-hour interlude, to clean up and rest up post-battle and pre-funeral.
The Trip was the last in a laundry list of status updates they had attempted to get through over those 35 hours, Steve and Bucky and Sam, slumped uncomfortably into the harsh lines of minimalistic furniture. A surreal resting place to attempt sleep in stops and starts (still managing it for longer than any of them had in probably decades) after a near-apocalypse.
Said laundry list included, “Five years? ” and Sam dialing a landline in the kitchen with shaking fingers, dropping to the floor like his strings were cut when a female voice sounded from the receiver.
(The only words exchanged for the next couple of hours were about the logistics of a food and alcohol delivery, after Sam returned to the couches with red eyes and barely got out, “That– That was my sister–” before his chest heaved and his hands came up to cover his face. Steve had immediately joined him on his couch, Bucky joining a beat after, Steve’s arm tight around Sam’s shoulders and Bucky simply staying close.)
It also included a stony-faced Steve, waving away a tentative query from Bucky about his past five years with a light swipe of his hand and “Another time” and “There’s not much to share.” The last in a tone clearly meant to punctuate the conversation, paired with a long pull of the glass half-full of whisky in his hand (like that would do any good).
After detailing the world-saving antics of his recent time travel experiment – Bucky found his eyebrows still managed to creep up his forehead at that story, even with all they’d experienced together and apart since seventy-plus years ago (time travel…) – Steve had said, “I’m going to have to return the Infinity Stones to where – well, when – we got them.”
This statement had lodged itself with a pinch in the center of Bucky’s chest, which he hadn’t let himself examine too closely in the moment.
Of course, it was sometime since adjourning that night, and traveling back upstate this morning, and the too-quiet, that the pinch had worsened into the pain he’s been trying to breathe through all day. No more so than this very moment, damned stones and fucking time travel rearing their ugly heads again.
“Oh.”
A whip-poor-will starts up, and Bucky twitches. He scans right, left, back over his shoulder, forward again. No visual threat.
Steve’s next words are barely audible.
“I can’t– When I go, I can’t bring him back. It’s the only thing I can think when I’m within five feet of her. And she wouldn’t ask, she knows I can’t. I know I can’t.” A deep inhale. “But I’d want to. I wanted to, even though I knew I couldn’t, the last time.”
The last time. When Steve and co. had jumped into the slipstream of decades past to try to right some wrongs. Well, one wrong.
It had worked, Bucky sitting here is proof enough of that.
But some other wrongs…
Flashes of his own past decades, shortened and scattered around as they are, slip through his mind.
Steve’s looking at him again, and when he speaks, it’s not the first time in their acquaintance that Bucky’s wondered if Steve can read his thoughts.
“If I could have found you from– from before, and brought you here…”
Bucky’s head jerks to face his. Steve trails off, but he doesn’t look away for a good 5 seconds.
Neither does Bucky.
Then Bucky’s chest seizes. He blinks, and the tension breaks.
A long moment later Steve starts up again, voice back to normal volume.
“I was thinking of finding a new place.”
Bucky waits.
And waits.
Then realizes that was a full stop, and takes the bait.
“A place where?”
The left side of Steve’s mouth quirks up. Bucky’ll take it as a smile, for the given value of a smile right now.
“Not sure. Gotta find it first.”
Captain America is known for being a serious man, all mission and purpose. Crisp consonants, clear commands.
Bucky knows Steve Rogers, on the other hand, has a predilection for falling into his Brooklyn drawl to crack dumb jokes at the worst of times. Often before a fight, not uncommonly as the precursor to one. Sometimes just to take the edge off, light sparring against an emerging darkness (real or imagined).
He rolls his eyes and knocks his knee into Steve’s, but his mouth twitches, too.
“It might end up being DC or New York again, but maybe–” The furrow is back. “There’s a lot I haven’t– seen yet.”
Bucky considers. “Yeah.”
A pause.
“Maybe, would you– Would you want to come with? To, you know, see stuff, when I’m back.”
Bucky can’t help himself. He parries: “‘Stuff’...?”
Steve huffs.
“You know what I mean, jerk.”
Bucky hums, all feigned confusion, and Steve knocks Bucky’s knee – harder than Bucky had, rude. It turns into a gentle shoving match, limbs tangling, graced with wisps of the after almost-laughter that seem to surprise them both.
With a last nudge, Bucky says, “Yeah, I’ll come ‘see stuff’ with you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Better be some good stuff, Rogers.”
“It will be.”
And then–
“And once I find a place– If you want, you could– stay? With me?”
Bucky sucks in a breath. Their eyes meet and hold.
“Yeah?” More exhale than speech.
“Yeah.” Steve’s response is stronger. More sure.
“Yeah, I’d like that.”
Bucky’s eyes drop lower, where Steve’s lips curve into something even better than before. His first real smile of the last 48 hours.
Bucky finds his own spreading wide of their own accord, into a smile to rival the one he can’t look away from.
When he lifts his gaze from Steve’s mouth, he finds the newly-brightened blue eyes a second behind his, traveling the same path on Bucky’s face.
Another couple of seconds, and the distance between their faces is suddenly much less.
“Guys– Oh, sorry.”
Their heads spring apart and twist to find the source of the broken silence.
“Sorry, didn’t realize– didn’t mean to startle you.”
Sam’s hand is half raised in apology where he stands at the end of the dock. Banner is a step behind, broad shoulders square in their direction but eyes studiously examining the wooden post to his left.
“We wanted– We’re going to head back to the guest house. Early start tomorrow.”
Banner finally looks over, too. His green face has a pink tinge to it.
“And Steve, we should go over the–”
“Right. Of course.” The clipped tone of Captain America is back.
Bucky clutches at the renewed stab between his ribs, making him stumble, as they both clamber to their feet. Steve is fast to clasp his arm for stability, but drops it almost as quickly.
Still, by the time they reach the shoreline, their bodies are close enough for their shoulders to brush.
Two sets of eyes briefly lift at the touch, meet, and fall away again.