Work Text:
LOWER EAST SIDE MANHATTAN, NEW YORK STATE
February, 1936
A heartbeat lingers on the fire escape. He sits with his legs dangling over the edge, loose shoelaces reaching for the frozen ground.
Steve knows that this is the time of year where the cold creeps under the door and steals into his lungs, but he can’t find anything within him that cares. His mind feels numb and quiet, and his fingers feel numb in his lap, and his toes feel numb in his shoes, and his face is numb and pale and ice cold to the touch. He doesn’t care for the cold metal railing digging into his knees, or for the fact that the sleepy wheeze that wakes in his throat will rattle his lungs tomorrow. He just sits there silently with tears frozen on his cheeks.
He leans his forehead against the rusting guardrails. His fingers rise from his sides to grasp the cold metal and curls around them into tight fists, the barely healed split knuckles splitting apart again and bleeding stark against his pale skin. The paint crumbles and gathers under his nails like crumbs. Steve doesn’t know what to do other than cling to the railing like it’s the only tether keeping him from climbing the fire escape and stepping off the roof because maybe — maybe if he just was a better son —.
The minutes melt quietly into hours, and splashes of pink and purple light cascade across the sky, reaching far West, as the sun dips below the skyline. If it were any other day, Steve would admire the colours and bathe in the dwindling light, let the colours wash over him like a soothing balm and stain his skin neon with the vivid colours of the rainbow. He’d allow himself to become briefly beautiful in the dying light. But for today, and for many days and weeks and even months from now, he doesn’t care a fucking bit.
The night begins to press in, all-encompassing in the way it crushes him and thins the bitingly cold air.
The window behind Steve slides upwards, a patter of feet meet metal, and moments later a threadbare wool coat is draped over Steve’s shivering shoulders. Bucky crouches beside him, and rests a gentle hand on his elbow. “It’s getting too cold for you to be out, Steve,” he says quietly. “Don’t do this to yourself. Please .” He tugs once on Steve’s elbow, pleading.
“Th’funeral’s tomorrow,” is all Steve can offer as a reply. A hiccup and a sniffle, and suddenly, as if the admission was the trigger, he shatters.
This time around, the tears fall too fast to freeze on his face, instead dripping onto his trousers where they begin to crystallise into ice. Bucky pulls him into his side and, even though they’re sitting on a fire escape where the whole world can see them, he presses a kiss into Steve’s feathery fair hair. Steve releases his death grip on the rails and roughly catches Bucky’s collar, he turns and presses his face to the corner where Bucky’s neck meets his shoulder and tries to breathe.
Steve knows that this is risky, that they’re practically in public, and there could be eyes anywhere and everywhere in each shadowy corner of the slumbering street below them, and in each of their neighbour’s windows. But he doesn’t care. Not now. He prays the night will shield this scene; their love.
It’s not fair; never was.
When night melts into morning and the wan sun stretches above the horizon from the East, Steve is already dressed and ready, flowers — forget-me-nots, his mothers favourite — clutched loosely in his left hand. His jacket sleeve is fraying and the threads are coming loose at the seams, but it’s the only one he has. Bucky is at his side when they walk to the small cemetery chapel, and he sits next to Steve with his hand always resting — like an anchor, a tether, a reminder — on his shoulder while the priest sprinkles Holy Water on the casket.
The small chapel is overflowing, full of people who knew Sarah Rogers and her son. Some were people she healed in the hospital; some were nurses she worked with; some were their neighbours and people from their little community.
They offer Steve soft words and clasp his hands in their own and envelope him in hugs and wipe tears— both his and theirs — and it all passes over him in a distorted daze as if he’s watching and feeling everything through a window made of rippling water.
As they lower his mother into her grave, the only thing he’s distantly aware of is Bucky’s grounding touch on his shoulder. He digs the toes of his only pair of shoes into the damp soil. Bucky stands still and silent like a sentry at Steve’s side, supporting his grief, while the rest of them all murmur the Lord’s prayer.
The pair stand at the graveside, alone, when the other mourners have left.
The sickly pale February sky is blotted out with thick, grey clouds lumbering past each other to find room to watch the tragedy before them, they obscure the sun and cloak the two boys in shadow. A frigid breeze picks up and circles them, dancing morosely, and whistles through the barren branches of a willow that stands guard at the gates.
Steve supposes that, from the moment his mother had solemnly sat him down on their rickety mismatched chairs at the small chipped wooden table in their cramped kitchen and explained, he knew this moment was inevitable; he just didn’t think it would reach him this quickly. It doesn’t feel real. His momma is dead, and it doesn’t feel real because only a week ago, Steve was visiting her in the hospital, a plume of forget-me-nots in hand. It doesn’t feel real, it doesn’t feel real, and yet it’s painful.
He crouches, folds his legs beneath him to kneel and cradles his face between his palms, presses his fingers hard into his eyes until colour explodes behind his eyelids, and he finally sinks beneath the grief after days of feeling numb.
To lose a person like his mother is agony. It’s not fair; never was.
Bucky kneels beside him, and curls around his back, reeling Steve into him. Steve kneels, petrified, in his best friend’s hold; already dreading the day Bucky’s name will be engraved in cold stone too. Steve swears he’ll die before that happens; he will not, refuses , to be alone in this world.
They fall asleep like that, holding each other close. Steve clutches at Bucky with a desperation that gives away how much he is afraid of waking up the next morning to find the last remaining person who ever truly loved him gone as well— and he’ll be alone. Steve drops into fitful sleep with Bucky pressing soothing touches to the freckles of his shoulder, humming lowly, and stroking the sharp ridges of his spine.
He promises himself that he’ll die before losing Bucky too. He will. He will.
ARLINGTON CEMETERY, VIRGINIA
November, 2012
The ground beneath his feet cradles an empty casket.
It’s autumn, and the trees that enclose this area of the cemetery are embroidered with soft oranges and golds and ochre reds. The ground is damp, and he digs his shoes — the ones SHIELD provided him — into the soil.
There’s a strange heavy feeling sitting just below his diaphragm to finally see his 75 year old nightmare fulfilled. The heaviness in him grows and spreads and grows, until his knees are buckling under the weight of a broken promise and the grief he’s just only allowed himself to feel. He kneels before the headstone, lays the bouquet of daffodils on the soil.
His heart lurches in his ribcage, beating tremulously when he studies every detail of the gravestone. Under an engraved Star of David, the name James Buchanan Barnes lays plainly in the alabaster marble, the light catches on the edges of the engraved letters and almost sparkles in the autumn cold.
It’s been many chaotic months, close to a year in fact, since he woke up, and only now has Steve managed to force himself to witness his fear brought to reality.
He supposes he’s been avoiding this moment for 67 years.
He was in London when Winnifred Barnes and her daughters received a telegram and an empty casket. He was back in Austria when the funeral took place. He plummeted into the Arctic ice when grass began to sprout on the grave’s turned soil.
Now, he is here, standing on an empty grave and he can no longer pretend. No longer ignore the fact that the last person he loved and who loved him in return is now gone. The world had buried Sgt. James Barnes 67 years ago and moved on, but Steve’s lover — Bucky — has only been dead for just over a year. And he’s only just allowed himself to begin mourning. It doesn’t feel real. It can’t be real.
The window of rippling water begins to cloud his mind and Steve turns on his heel to leave before he breaks into tears. Though, just as he reaches the cemetery gates, Steve thinks of an icy ravine and a scream, and finds himself shattering with tears trailing down his cheeks anyway.
It’s not fair; never was.
The morning after finds Steve standing over the sink with his head bowed low and his knuckles bloodless with how tightly his fingers are clutching the sink’s porcelain edge. His chest is heaving as he tries to regain control of his lungs. He tries, and fails, to breathe, and he swipes the tears gathering on his cheeks before they can fall. He clamps a hand over his mouth to silence the worst of his sobs, but it just makes breathing more difficult.
He can’t breathe, and he can’t walk through a world without a Bucky Barnes in it. Not after promising himself that he wouldn’t. Steve finds himself sobbing harder when memories of Bucky sweeping a warm hand over his back to soothe his asthma attacks swims into the forefront of his mind.
But then, he remembers Bucky and his Pulp Fiction comics, and his smile melting around the words “holy cow” on a distant summer day at the Stark Expo.
He thinks of the years Bucky could have lived if he hadn’t followed Steve into war.
He could have lived to see Rebecca graduate from Julliard, and Alice from Nursing school. He would have raged for the boys being sent to Vietnam on the draft. He would have loved to see the moon landing. He would have screamed in glee at the sight of the helicarriers. How many science fiction books would he have to catch up on if he could miraculously appear by Steve’s side, right now, alive and well.
Point is, Bucky would have loved being alive, and with this realisation sinking in, Steve finds himself calm and knowing exactly what he must do next.
He straightens and wipes the last of his tears, he pulls on his trainers and throws the pair SHIELD gave him into a bag for donation. Half an hour later, he finds himself at the nearest library with a new pocket notebook and a stack of history books sitting beside him. He opens the first page of the notebook, and begins with a list.
1950’s
- Elvis Presley —> copied Sister Rosetta Tharpe?
- Japanese internment camps
- Gen/Pres. Eisenhower (what did he do since the war?)
- Korea -> proxy war(?) and division?
- Montgomery Bus Boycott
- Sputnik
- McCarthy trials/person?
- …
Bucky would have loved to be alive, and, for that reason, Steve begins to walk this world for him.