Chapter Text
His mouth’s been dry with this, his chest’s been tight with this, his heart’s been heavy and his eyes have stung with this for weeks.
For the longest time, he’d been able to shrug it away, been able to sweep it under the rugs, behind the doors in his mind that get easier to close with every passing day, month, year: he’d been able to compartmentalize. He’d been able to focus on the feeling of Steve in his arms and the taste of Steve on his lips and the warmth of Steve in his world, in their bed, around his soul: he’d be able to pretend it was irrelevant.
For the longest fucking time.
But the numbers on the calendar keep changing. The faces of their friends are changing. Hairs are greying, skin is wrinkling, knees are getting weak.
Just not theirs.
The mirror doesn’t lie.
It’s been ten years since Washington. He’d be talking out his ass if he said nothing was different, that they look exactly the same: they’ve both got shadows behind their eyes that shift. They’ve both got joys that spark and shine.
But their bodies haven’t worn like the selves of them have. Bucky’s spent hours searching for a lighter strand of hair that wasn’t there before the table, before the serum. Bucky’s tried his damnedest to imagine a new crease in the flesh around his eyes, proof of worry or laughter or anything.
No dice.
And his mouth’s been dry with this; his chest’s been tight.
He can’t shrug it off anymore.
“So, um,” and there’s a little voice in the back of Bucky’s head—sounds like his ma, sounds like Steve with his voice cracking at thirteen, sounds like Sam when he’d been getting his foot again in the beginning, in those first days: time and place, Barnes, time and place; and maybe Bucky should listen. Maybe.
Except he can’t. He can’t listen because there’s no good time or place for this. To say this. To make this known and to get it off his chest and to risk what comes of this one agony, this singular dagger in his heart because he’s not stupid. Once he says the words, they can’t be taken back. Once he sheds light, Steve will notice. Steve will think on it harder, maybe, than he has before. Steve will remember what Bucky is, what he’s done, who he’s always been and how he was always less than Steve deserved.
Steve will notice. Steve will stop pretending not to notice.
And once Bucky says it, Steve won’t feel obligated anymore. Steve won’t feel like he has to stay beyond his wants. Won’t feel chained down for an eternity that neither of them had signed up for. Not really.
There’s no good time and place for this. Over cereal at the kitchen table’ll have to do.
“Look,” Bucky sighs out, shoulders heaving with the breath. It takes everything in him to keep his hand steady as he sets his spoon back into the bowl and moves to fold his hands, to force himself not to shake, not to back out.
“Stevie, I—”
“You alright, Buck?” Steve’s face is contorted with the concern that Bucky’s seen too much of in his life—he swore, once he got his mind right again, that he’d keep that look from Steve’s face, keep that stress from Steve’s body at all costs.
He’s always failing, somehow.
“Fine, yeah,” Bucky brushes off the worry, waves his hand and inadvertently avoids the arm Steve reaches across the table to rest on Bucky’s knuckles; he notices too late, with the widening of Steve’s eyes, the way he bites at his lower lip: rejected, somehow, and Bucky hadn’t even noticed, hadn’t even meant, hadn’t even seen—
Fuck.
“I just,” he falters, but reminds himself that it’s for the best, that he can’t keep running from this thing in the back of his mind, not now that it’s at the front of his mind and he can’t escape its bitterness even in the sweetness of moments, can’t pretend he doesn’t feel it at the back of every breath.
“I been thinkin’, y’know? And,” he shakes his head against the flood of memories—once those pictures, those things he’d known and felt; once the pathways in his brain had started to heal, the serum made them crystal clear in ways that had Bucky in bed for days with the way his head seared, with the way his stomach churned: he’s blessed and cursed it, in the years since.
He curses it, now.
“We made promises, you and I,” Bucky speaks to the fold of his fingers together on the tabletop; yes. They’d made promises: in the grass, in the pews, on their fire escape, in the alleyways, at the docks, in their room. In their bed.
Crystal fucking clear.
“We made our own vows, didn’t we?” Bucky has to force his voice not to catch, not to tear out too rough. “Way back when?”
“Yeah, we did, Buck,” Steve’s smile is tight; he’s confused. “We did.”
“To the end of the line.” There’s no amount of force that Bucky can show or give that can keep his voice from catching; not on that.
His mouth is dry; his chest is tight.
“I meant ‘em, y’know,” Steve murmurs, jolting Bucky from the miasma, the dark fucking tide of where his mind goes. “Bucky, I meant that.”
“I know,” Bucky whispers back. “Me too.”
More than anything. More than fucking anything.
“But,” Bucky starts, and he wonders if maybe he was wrong, maybe this won’t stop the dryness in his throat, the pressure in his chest. “But I, we, Stevie,” and it’s everything he can do not to look up and plead with his eyes in that way that Steve knows, in that way that Steve’ll come and rescue him from every time, every goddamn time.
No. No, he’s gotta get this out.
“We never could have imagined this,” he finally forms the words. “We never could have even dreamed we’d end up like this. Here. Now.”
And when the memories started streaming back, all technicolor and unforgiving, he can’t bite back the laughs-turned-sobs that wrack him hard when he thinks of that last night in New York: the Future.
Jesus, but the irony.
“How many years, Steve?” Bucky asked, and maybe it’s a question of how many between them, how many before, how many frozen, suffering, how many years did they die a little inside, did they yearn before now, before this—he’s not sure what he means.
It doesn’t matter. The fact remains.
“We haven’t aged. Not a fuckin’ day.”
Steve lifts old eyes in that young face. Bright and clear as ever; first cracks of heartbreak in the blue—and that kills Bucky, that kills him.
But he owes this to Steve. He owes everything to Steve.
He gave his heart to Steve a century ago. Everything else is fucking filler.
“Bucky—”
And Bucky can’t stand the strain in that voice, the conflict that tries to pull it apart and leave the frays to collect the blood and feeling that spills out from the wreckage: Bucky can’t fucking stand it, because he’s the cause of it on all sides, that’s the whole point, that’s why he’s gotta lay it out, full and honest, cards on the table between them and maybe it’s all hearts to fold and spades to call but Buck can’t stand the thought of Steve hurting, of Steve settling, of Steve rotting when all Steve’s ever been meant for was more.
So he breathes in, and he steadies for what he’s meant for: the hurting, the settling.
Bucky digs in and readies his own soul to rot.
“What if the end of the line’s decades off, still?” he asks, and that’s the thing, the unknown spectre that haunts them both. “Fuck, or centuries?” He leans in a little, and doesn’t fight the desire to cover Steve’s hands between them, to meet his eyes as his voice gets low: “More?”
Steve’s eyes are cast down, so Bucky can’t read them. He can, however, read the red that grows at the center of Steve’s lower lip, where he’s worrying that pout to swelling, to tearing, and Bucky knows how that feels.
Bucky knows.
“What if there’s no,” he starts, and averts his own eyes when Steve doesn’t look up. “I mean, I know it sounds crazy, I know, and maybe it’s stupid, it’s probably just stupid but we’ve been living crazy almost as long as you been livin’ stupid,” his eyes flicker up to see if Steve responds to that, and his heart jumps to see the quirk of his lips, only just, but real, and this is going to kill Bucky.
It is going to absolutely kill him to let Steve go.
“But, just, what if,” and what if is what stalks him in the night, what if makes his blood race and his skin crawl and makes him feel wrong under Steve’s hands in the dark because what if it was only ever convenient, a promise of necessity; what if they’d both recognized and never said that the end of the line would be just a handful of years if they were lucky, with the way Steve lived, with the way Steve fought on all fronts; what if Steve was fucking Steve, righteous as ever, and held to that oath that Bucky’d never asked to be returned but never cast aside when it was—couldn’t, for the way it burrowed in around his weary heart; and fuck, fuck, but what if Steve held this like a talisman, an obligation, a debt to be paid? What if that was braided into the way Steve took him in, and nursed him back, and held him close and whispered love? And fuck, but—
“What if there’s no end to this thing?” Bucky whispers. “What if we’re, what if we—”
Bucky clears his throat to cover the way his voice catches; the way his heart wants to spill through the cracks. Because the truth is, whether they had seven years then, or seventy now, or seven fucking hundred in this serum-hazed future, Bucky’s always known that Steve deserved better. He was never inclined to push, before: too selfish.
But Bucky’ll be damned, fucking damned, if he’s kept Steve tethered this long, weighed by duty and a vow made young and punch-drunk and so fucking naive: he’ll be damned if he holds Steve back any longer from what he’s goddamned earned.
“When we made those promises,” Bucky collects himself, says his piece as straight and steady as he can; “we never could have seen, never could have understood,” he gestures aimlessly between them, around them: “this.”
Bucky’s eyes flick to Steve, just then, and it settles rough in his gut to see that gaze so fixed, so blank, because Bucky knows Steve again—learned him like a heartbeat and the truth of the stars in the sky as close as he’d ever known him before, and to be unable to read him, to be unable to see: it’s glass in his chest, it draws blood.
You gotta do this, he tells himself. He won’t go without permission, he won’t save himself unless he knows it’s okay.
“And so,” Bucky breathes out, folds his hands on the table and fixes his stare on the soggy flakes in his cereal bowl: pathetic. There’s a twinge beneath his ribs; he empathizes. “We shouldn’t be held to it, the things we said, the things we meant, even with all our hearts, maybe, then. Before we could ever fathom where we’d be. That we’d be, at all.”
Steve doesn’t say a thing. Not a goddamned thing. Bucky’s chest tightens. Steve’s breath is slow: inhale, exhale. Barely a sound.
“We shouldn’t feel like we have to,” Bucky falters, but regroups quick: “like we have to be bound by that. We shouldn’t feel like we have to honor those things if,” he swallows hard; doesn’t do him any fucking good. “If the rules have changed, there’s no guilt or shame in it, in, in…”
He tries, stumbles, and he knows he’s gonna trip, knows he can’t pick himself back up and make it smooth, make it sure, because his heart is goddamned breaking for all that it knows this is right, this is what has to be done, Steve deserves to have whatever he wants without any caveats, without any loose fucking ends snagging him along the way, and in this century there’s a new sky that’s their limit, and even that means so little to people like them, and Jesus, but Steve deserves heaven and earth on a platter and Bucky will not stand in the way of that. He won’t.
Not any longer.
“No,” Steve cuts in, expression placid almost. Lost in thought. “No, you’re,” Steve licks his lips, and it takes all that Bucky has in him not to lean in and kiss him senseless, take the heart on his sleeve where it’s dying, just a little, and offer up into Steve’s open mouth, it takes everything—
“You’re right.”
Bucky’s straightens, fingers clenched at the edge of the table, making dents, and his heart keeps at the hurting, then; keeps at the breaking. Keeps at the rotting inside, straight through to the out.
“You’re right,” Steve says it again, and it doesn’t get any better, any easier with repetition; of course it doesn’t. “God, we never,” he shakes his head, and his lips twist into something vile, something sad, humor soured into hate.
“We never could have dreamt this shit,” Steve exhales, and it almost sounds like it’s a relief for him to say it; and that’s what Bucky’s always wanted. That’s most important: that Steve breathes easy, breathes free. “It’s impossible, we,” his eyes glance up, sear upon contact, blue to shade of blue.
“We’re impossible. The life we live,” his voice drops; “the way we are.”
Bucky can’t make the sob in his throat form into a word, and so he nods. He nods, because that’s true.
“Shoulda died before I hit twenty,” Steve muses, just this side of bitter; “definitely before I hit thirty.”
“Don’t,” Bucky can say that, because the sob’s already formed that way, to make that plea; and Steve speaks truths now, too, but Bucky can’t stand to hear them.
“You know it,” Steve pushes, and Bucky can’t figure why; wonders if Steve knows how much it cuts.
“I shoulda died on that table,” he snaps back. “On a cliffside. In that ravine.”
Steve looks gut-punched, lips parted, eyes-wide: he didn’t know how much it cut.
He knows now.
“We were just kids,” Bucky sums up, the hoarse rasp of it demanding blood money from the sides of his throat.
“Less than, hell,” Steve agrees, marvels in a way that damns the thing that’s witnessed: damns them both; “compared to now.”
And fuck, but they were kids. Brothers; tiny souls that made a promise and Bucky thinks they both meant it. Bucky believes they both mean it, even now.
But the world’s nothing like they’d dreamed of. Life isn’t so simple.
Sometimes promises have to fade, if you can’t bear just to break them. Sometimes the world opens up in ways you’d never imagined, and what you had isn’t a goddamned thing compared to what awaits.
Bucky always wanted Steve to have the world. And Bucky—
Bucky is not the world.
“So,” Bucky makes himself say it. “That’s, we,” he clears his voice, and shakes off the outer vestiges of the pain it causes to give the one point of purpose in his world the permission to move on. “We’re good?”
“Yeah, of course.” Steve gives that smile of his that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Of course we’re good.”
Bucky mirrors the smile right back, and forces himself to eat the milk-soaked Raisin Bran; unsavory—well deserved, maybe, for waiting so long. For clinging too tight. For being so selfish; for wanting. Needing.
Some kind of penance.