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The radio dies and takes Steve with it.
Bucky feels like he's drowning, static crashing like waves in his ears and filling him with a mounting, furious despair that escapes in a hot flood from behind his eyes. He’s angry at himself, and at Steve, and—and at Peggy, who's crying in her seat like Steve was ever hers to mourn, and his vision swims red. Except Steve was never his. And Steve was certainly never hers. He stumbles from the room, deaf to the soft calls of his name from over his shoulder. He doesn't know where he ends up, but later that night she finds him—an empty husk with an equally empty bottle of liquor—and kisses him, and Bucky’s anger washes away.
They seek solace in one another, exchanging looks over tables that lead to trysts in cramped quarters that lead to something that they're not sure how to define. They both loved Steve, and the realization is a surprise in different ways for both of them. They fall into a strange, easy camaraderie, sharing food and drink and memories, and Bucky beings to understand why Steve loved her. Because oh, Steve had loved her. A week after the incident a nameless officer hands him Steve’s effects, and the old photostrip of the two of them—a whole war younger—squeezed into the photobooth at Coney Island slips out of Steve’s SSR file into Bucky’s shaky fingers. He can feel the open sympathy of Peggy’s gaze burning into the back of his neck, and his heart skips a beat and he realizes that… Maybe Steve had loved him, too. They don’t quite talk about it. But that night when they fall into bed with each other, he knows they’re both imagining the same someone else.
Duty calls and they help lead the allies to victory. VE Day comes with a wild and raucous celebration in the streets and Bucky feels relief and joy for the first time since shipping out of Brooklyn. He’s surrounded by the Commandos. Dugan’s bowler hat is lost somewhere in the street, and Bucky laughs aloud when Jones promises no one else would want to touch the filthy thing anyway. He grins at Peggy and on an impulse dips her into a kiss, but when he pulls back and looks into brown eyes instead of blue, he doesn't feel much like celebrating anymore.
Their photo is famous within the week. Phillips tosses the front page at them and gives them a look Bucky can't quite read, but looks an awful lot like pity. The papers fabricate wild stories about a torrid affair, and they roll with it because they’re not sure what else to do. They rapidly become the poster children for the American dream, and after six months, when it hasn't died, Bucky jokingly suggests that at this rate they’re going to have to get married. Peggy sighs and says, “Yes, I suppose we are.”
They marry, and spend their honeymoon getting shot at in a hotel somewhere in Eastern Europe. They throw themselves into SHIELD instead of settling down and they don’t talk about it. They’re careful not to have children, because it’s easier that way. Papers speculate but they smile at the cameras and tell bloodthirsty reporters that they’re still recovering, that the time isn’t right, that they both have duties to uphold before they can settle down. Their list of excuses is longer than a New York winter, and Bucky knows those better than anyone.
But then the little Stark boy is born, brown haired and beautiful and every bit as brilliant as his father. Tony, Howard calls him proudly as the nannies carry the squalling bundle off to his luxurious nursery, and Bucky thinks that this has gotta be the luckiest kid in the world. Except Howard is distant, and Maria spends countless days off in Italy and Bucky watches as the little slip of a boy—who has everything Bucky and Steve never even dreamed of—crumples at the neglect of a father who pushes him thoughtlessly away.
When Tony runs away a hysterical nanny comes to Bucky first, and his blood turns to ice. He calls in over a dozen agents and wills his heart to calm, because panicking isn't an option and New York is a big city. They search for six hours and in the end Bucky finds Tony shivering on the fire escape out the window of his own apartment. He's fuming at himself and at Tony, but one look at the kid's face and Bucky has him in his arms, wrapped in a blanket with a steaming mug of that English tea Peggy's mother sends them from overseas. He doesn't ask why Tony ran, and when he finally takes him home Howard hadn't even known he was gone.
Bucky spends more time than he ought to with Tony. The years pass and Tony grows and his genius only grows with him and by the time he’s ten, Bucky can barely keep up with him. He’s so proud it aches. But Tony isn’t the only marker of time passed. Peggy frowns and plucks at grey hairs in the mirror, and pokes at the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. She’s still beautiful, of course she is, but Bucky looks in the mirror one day and realizes he doesn’t look a day over twenty seven, and they don’t talk about that either. Fear like he hasn’t felt since the war bites at his viscera and he starts taking missions to block out the cold echo of Zola’s voice in his memory. Except the Commandos are older now too, so SHIELD assigns him a new team. It’s not the same. He works better alone now, and they call him the Winter Soldier. Peggy tells him offhandedly as they pack for their move to DC, and he snorts at the stupidity of it. Her lips twitch into a red smile, and he thinks, in their own weird way, they’re coping.
He’s more comfortable in the field than he has any right to be. He takes out target after target—mostly Cold War agents and Hydra sympathizers with delusions of grandeur and world domination—with practiced ease and hardly a second thought to his own lethality. The world is smaller than it was during the war and the weapons are bigger, and Bucky is one man. He hears radio static in the echo of every shot he takes and thinks that he hasn’t done enough—not yet.
Peggy retires a few years later. A man named Nicholas Fury takes over as the director of SHIELD. Bucky remembers him from a mission in Bogotá—the way he defied orders to save the lives of innocent men and women—and remembers Steve recalling his first mission in a smoky bar. He remembers men crying in stunned disbelief as they ran out of their cells, and he remembers being pulled off a metal table in a dark lab, and thinks Fury will be a good leader.
Bucky is in Berlin when the Cold War ends, and helps tear down the wall with his own two hands, and remembers another victory fifty years before.
Later he’s on a mission in Russia with a new recruit, Barton, who’s not even thirty and has a past so bizarre (“Join the club, kid.”) that it almost puts his own to shame. Bucky likes him well enough, and likes him even more when he sees him shoot with such precision the he fondly starts calling him Hawkeye. Their target is a girl, barely out of childhood, with red hair and eyes that speak of pain and fear. Barton makes a different call. A second chance. Bucky lets him.
They bring her back to the States and she’s interrogated. She tells them her name is Natalia, and that she was trained by the KGB in the Red Room. Her English is flawless and unwavering, and Bucky digs out an old SSR file about a woman named Dottie on a tip from Peggy and knows that little Natalia isn’t someone to be trifled with. Bucky is cautiously suspicious but Barton stands by her. One night Bucky sees them playing poker in the interrogation room, and when Natalia successfully plays a bluff and takes the pot, Barton laughs so hard the girl looks startled before she cracks a small smile of her own, and she shines. She’s too much of a liability to set free, but Bucky vouches for her to Fury, and asks her if she’d like to train with him. Her eyes grow wide with unrestrained hope, and Barton ruffles her red curls and thanks him with a smile, and Bucky thinks Natalia will be alright.
Howard is in a car accident. Falsworth has a stroke. They’re the first of the old team to go, and Peggy’s memories follow. Bucky stops going on missions. He mourns his losses, a deep cutting ache tearing at his heart, and throws all his energy into taking care of Peggy. He supposes that in a way, he loved her. She was his family, his home, and they made it work. But when he brushes her hair from her forehead with a cool cloth as another fever steals more of her past away, he closes his eyes and imagines wispy blond locks instead of colorless curls on wrinkled skin.
When Tony is taken hostage, Rhodey calls Bucky personally to retrieve him from Afghanistan. It’s his first mission in almost ten years, and it’s fueled by icy rage and gut-clenching fear, and he hears them whisper about why he’s called Winter. When he gets there and finds that (of course) Tony’s already escaped and is blindly wandering the desert alone, Rhodes yells orders for a medic and Bucky pulls him in close and buries his face in his sweaty brown hair—just like he did when he tugged him in from the fire escape all those years ago—and calls him a goddamn punk. Tony laughs hoarsely and calls him a jerk. It sucks the breath out of Bucky’s lungs and he’s the closest he’s been to losing it in seventy years.
In that seventy years he hadn’t managed to find anyone quite as reckless as Steve, and then Iron Man happens and Bucky swears he finds his first grey hair.
Three more years pass. Tony almost kills himself. There’s something called a Hulk. Gabe Jones’s heart gives out. When Peggy sees his face, she asks after Steve, and he swallows thickly and doesn’t know how to answer. He does some searching and finds a nice home where she’ll be taken care of, and when he leaves her there he’s wracked with guilt. He remembers the winter Steve was so sick his mother took him to the orphanage, unable to afford his medicine. Steve had patted her cheek, sticky with tears, and wheezed, “It’s okay, Mama,” with a toothy smile that had made her cry all the harder. Bucky visited him in the orphanage, thinking that maybe if he had just worked harder, then they might have been able to scrape together enough to keep Steve at home. He knew his guilt was misplaced then, but it feels all the more real now.
Bucky lives alone. His small DC apartment is sparsely furnished but the walls are covered in photographs that show the passage of more time than he thinks one man deserves. Tony calls him at least once a week and offers space in his Malibu mansion, but Bucky always laughs it off and says he couldn’t live with JARVIS always watching over his shoulder (It's half true. Bucky knew the real Jarvis, and Tony's AI dredges up a flood of memories he's tried too hard to keep suppressed). Instead Bucky decides to stay close to SHIELD. He consults with Fury, and every so often Barton and Natalia stop by after a mission with way too much takeout and a deck of cards. He swears they cheat. Barton laughs but Natalia’s face gives away nothing, and some nights, he feels a warm flicker of contentment deep inside his chest.
One quiet Tuesday he gets a phone call in the middle of the night. The caller ID reads Coulson. Good man. Bucky had fun teasing him when he found his trading card collection, but he thinks Steve would’ve liked him anyway. He answers. He’s on a flight to New York within the hour.
Bucky sits on a chair in the recovery room, wearing his old blue jacket and with his hand on Steve’s chest—just like when he was sick, but also like when they were too young and would lay together stealing each other’s breath in the dark—and it’s rising and falling and with it Bucky feels the high of sheer euphoria and the weight of decades of grief all at once. It’s quiet, because he turned off that damn radio as soon as he walked in, and his eyes greedily trace over the prone form in front of him for the hundredth time since he got there. This time when he looks at Steve’s face he’s met with a blue gaze, and his heart all but stops in his chest and he can’t breath and it’s as close as he’s felt to dying since he was strapped to that table in Austria.
Steve smiles a shit eating little grin (Bucky is going to kill him) and says, “Hey, jerk,” and Bucky remembers what it feels like to be whole.
Bucky chokes out half a laugh and says, “Hey, punk.”