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"Steve, the Smithsonian exhibit consultant called," Natasha said as she sped them away to their latest mission brief. "Check your email, old man."
"Yeah, OK." Steve poked around on his phone until he had the right file open on his screen. As odd as it was to picture a whole Smithsonian exhibit about Steve and his old friends, he enjoyed reading the blurbs they wrote about the various Howling Commandos. By unspoken agreement, they had saved this one for last, except... No. This was just wrong.
"Nat? Would you mind pulling over somewhere for a few minutes?" She gave him a quick side-eye. "Please? I need to think. Just for a minute." He still hadn't gotten the hang of having important thought processes while being zoomed around DC at breakneck speeds. She obliged, finding a convenient parking lot, and Steve started again, reading the whole file from the beginning. And then he looked again at the email and dialed the phone number at the bottom.
Stella Davis answered pleasantly, glad to hear from him until he cut her greeting off.
"He wasn't drafted."
"Captain? Who wasn't?"
"Bucky. He wasn't drafted. He signed up. I was trying to sign up with him and they wouldn't take me."
"Captain Rogers." There was a heavy pause. "We have his original paperwork on file. The notations and his serial number all state that he was inducted."
Steve could feel his eyebrows drawing together into a scowl. "I'll be there in ten minutes."
"Captain?"
"Are you at your office?"
"Yes, but I -"
"We'll be there in ten." Steve hung up the phone and looked at Natasha.
She outdid herself. They made it in seven minutes.
Sure enough, though, there it was in black and aged yellow. One James Buchanan Barnes, inducted into service in Uncle Sam's army.
Steve sat in Stella's office, feeling lost and stunned, remembering. Every time Bucky had strutted around in that uniform, bouncing on his heels. Tilting his cap, cocky as hell and getting every girl he met to dance with him. How proud he had sounded when he told Steve he joined up. And how many pieces Steve's heart had broken into when he realized Bucky was going somewhere Steve could never follow.
He couldn't tell me, could he? He got exactly what I wanted, and I was such an eager starry-eyed idiot then, how could he have been honest with me? He wanted me to be proud of him but he didn't want to go at all, didn't want to leave... anyone he loved... any of us behind. God, how scared was he? And I made him carry all of it alone. Steve had been such a fool, for seventy years. Of course the kindest man in Brooklyn hadn't wanted to cross the Atlantic and kill people. Of course he hadn't wanted to leave Steve alone and half a world away.
Allow Barnes the dignity of his choice, Peggy had told him. Maybe she was right, and Bucky did choose to follow Steve in the end, but he had no choice in any of the rest of it.
"Don't tell them," Steve murmured suddenly into the awkward silence. He felt Natasha put a hand on his shoulder.
"Captain Rogers? How do you mean?" Stella asked.
"He didn't want anyone to know. He was everything I had in the world, we were... we shared a life, Bucky and I, and he never told me. Rewrite your exhibit and tell the world he enlisted." Steve met her eyes. "Please, Ms. Davis. Let me give him this small thing - the choice he deserved and didn't get. No one ever needs to know the difference."
It wasn't enough. Nothing could ever be enough for what Bucky had been to Steve, the family and life they had been for each other when they had no one and nothing. Nothing could make up for being torn out of his life and sent away and captured, tortured. But it was what Steve had to give him.
"OK, Captain Rogers," Stella Davis agreed quietly. "We'll do it your way."