Work Text:
What I’m thinking is simple:
I’ll sell apples and ice water, at the temple,
And I won’t make trouble.
I’ll pull the devil down with me, one way or another.
-The National, Think You Can Wait
They had hours on the jet before they’d reach Siberia, and it was the longest stretch of downtime Steve had had since the whole mess with the Accords and Zemo had started. It was maybe the longest stretch of time he’d had alone with Bucky since the war. With the silence stretching between him and Bucky, the time felt both too long and not nearly long enough. Because Steve wanted to know what Bucky had spent the last two years doing, and he wanted to know exactly how much Bucky remembered, and he wanted to know if Rumlow had been telling the truth about Bucky remembering him after the fight on the bridge, and he wanted to know why Bucky had never come to Steve or let himself be found. Steve just wanted. But Bucky now was so quiet, and held himself so still. Like he didn’t want to take up space in the world, like he wanted to disappear.
Some desperate thing in his chest clamored at him to fix it, all of it; telling Bucky that the Winter Soldier’s crimes weren’t on him hadn’t been anything close to enough. That had done nothing to ease the resigned pain in Bucky’s eyes, or to lift even some small part of the weight of sorrow and exhaustion that he so clearly carried. Steve didn’t know what could.
“Buck?”
“Hmm?”
“Why did you stay away for so long?”
Bucky looked at him, bit his lip, then frowned out into the sky outside the quinjet window. “I didn’t remember you enough, at first. It was all—everything was mixed up, no context for any of it, and I couldn’t—I was just trying to make some sense of things. By the time I had—” Bucky stopped, swallowed hard. “I thought it was safest if I stayed away.”
“You’d’ve been safe with me.”
“Yeah?” asked Bucky, tilting his head. “With you, maybe. What about the rest of your team? What about when someone told the CIA or the UN about the Avengers harboring the Winter Soldier? Every scenario I could think of, it ended in a fight. And I’m—” He looked down at his hands, shook his head. “I don’t want to fight. Or—I didn’t.”
What Bucky didn’t say, what he didn’t have to say, was that Steve was the fight. Steve Rogers was a battleground of a person, and always had been, and for years Bucky had waded in swinging, no matter what it cost him. God, Bucky deserved better. Steve had always thought so, but he was selfish, when it came to Bucky, had wanted fiercely to keep him from the moment Bucky had grinned and offered him a hand up after a dirty alleyway fight all those decades ago.
Whatever the price was to keep him, Steve would pay it, but the awful truth was that it wasn’t Steve who was paying it, it was Bucky, had always been Bucky. It was Bucky who had held himself back from a better life in Brooklyn to stay with Steve and look out for him, it was Bucky who had stayed in a war that had already injured him profoundly to fight at Steve’s side. And the price for that had ended up being higher than either of them could have ever imagined. No wonder Bucky had stayed away.
The guilt clawed its way up Steve’s throat and killed any words he could think to say. All that survived was a choked out, “I’m sorry,” while a mess of I’ll do better, I’ll be better, I’ll put you first for once, I’ll take us both home, I promise, clamored inside him.
Bucky just smiled at him, a tiny, terribly sad little quirk of the lips. “It’s not really your fault. I’m sorry I tried to make like I didn’t remember you. Last ditch effort to keep both of us out of the shit, I guess.”
“I know.” Because that was Bucky, always trying to keep him safe. It was past time for Steve to do the same for Bucky, no matter what it took. Steve couldn’t think past the next few hours, couldn’t form much of a plan out of the fog of war that was everything about the Accords and Zemo. But keep Bucky safe, keep the team safe were the two solid things in all of the confusion. Everything else would have to be secondary.
Steve busied himself with the quinjet controls, checking readings he didn’t need to, wondering if he could risk another question or if there was something else he should be saying. As if there was some equivalent of the Russian trigger words he could say that would fix everything between them. But it had always been Bucky who could say the exact right thing. I’m with you, to the end of the line. Steve could only parrot the words back to him, a pale echo of the immense feeling that filled up every chamber of Steve’s once faulty heart.
It was Bucky who broke the silence this time, and the low, tender rasp of his voice sent Steve back into countless late nights shared together, when Bucky would toss some truth out into the close dark: in Bucky’s old room at his parents’ house, on muggy fire escapes, in their apartment, in tents on battlefields across Europe.
“I missed you,” he said. When Steve turned to look at Bucky, there was nothing hidden on his face: grief and affection and longing in equal measure, and god, he was beautiful. The new lines around his eyes, the curve of his generous lips—every finely wrought line of him. Was this what Steve hadn’t seen in those dark spaces? Bucky laying himself bare, too tired and too full of feeling to bother hiding it? Steve felt like he was flayed open, bleeding out, just seeing it.
“I missed you too, Buck. So goddamn much.” He sucked in a shaky breath, and dragged out another truth of his own for Bucky. “You asked what the plan was with all this, and I don't know. I just want to go home.”
Bucky’s expression went blank and closed before smoothing into a thin and weary smile. Steve’s stomach dropped. Clearly he’d said the wrong thing, but he didn’t know why. “Yeah. That Avengers HQ upstate, right? This Accords stuff will get worked out and you’ll be able to go back, Steve.”
The thought made Steve’s chest go tight. He couldn’t. Not without you, he thought, another echo of Bucky’s own words. It wasn’t home. Steve hadn’t been home in seventy years.
“That’s not—no.”
Bucky’s forehead furrowed in confusion. “Your place in DC? Brooklyn?”
“You.”
There was a beat of total stillness from Bucky. “You can have a better life, Steve. You’ve got a team, you’re doing the kind of work you always wanted to do.” He paused. “There’s, what was her name, Sharon?”
Steve shook his head. That was all what he was supposed to want. Even Sharon, who he did like, who he could maybe like even more, or even love—that all felt distant, faded, compared to Bucky who was here in front of him, real and alive and in desperate need of someone to be entirely in his corner for once.
“I just want to bring you home.”
Steve wanted to keep the team and Bucky, but if it came down to it—he’d choose Bucky.
Of course, he should have considered what Bucky would choose. Because two weeks later, Steve was staring at Bucky in a cryostasis chamber in Wakanda, and Steve had thought of a lot of possible scenarios for the fallout of the whole Accords mess, but Bucky choosing stasis under the protection of King T’Challa hadn’t been one of them. Bucky had been calm and reasonable about it, had laid out his reasoning with a carefully even voice and something too much like resignation in his eyes. Steve had pushed and fought and thrown himself against the solid rock of Bucky’s certainty until Bucky had cracked and said, agonized, “I can't live like this, Steve. I can’t live with these words hanging around in my head, knowing that’s all it takes to turn me into a thing.”
Steve had felt his face crumpling and the hot rush of tears well behind his eyes, and Bucky had relented some, pulling Steve into a hug that finally obliterated the careful distance he’d kept between them since Bucharest in one desperate rush.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Steve had whispered into Bucky’s neck, because he was fucking this up again and he couldn't keep Bucky safe, so instead he’d just clung to him, tight enough to keep from falling apart, tight enough to hold them both together.
Bucky had put his mouth close to Steve’s ear and said, “I want to come home, okay? This is the only way I can think of that will let me come home.”
Later, after Bucky had gone under and Steve had gotten what was left of the Avengers settled in Wakanda, Sam had just taken one long look at Steve and said, “Remember what I told you about putting your own oxygen mask on first?”
It had been one of the first things Sam had said to Steve after they’d started the search for Bucky, a long lecture that had boiled down to, get your shit together Rogers, because your boy is not gonna be okay when he comes home, and you’re not going to be able to help him if you’re still all fucked up.
“Yeah.”
“This is Barnes putting his own oxygen mask on first, Steve. That’s what these entire past two years have been about for him. It’s not about you, man. He’s making the best call for himself, so he can build an actual life.”
Sam had been right, as usual, and Steve tried to remember that now as he stared at Bucky in stasis. He looked peaceful, at least. And T’Challa had assured them that Bucky would feel no pain, that his scientists would work diligently to find a cure for the trigger words. Steve should be grateful, truly, and he was. Bucky was alive, sort of. Bucky was safe. Still, visiting Bucky in stasis, having him so close but so unreachable, was its own kind of torture.
He couldn’t not visit though. He’d gone close to five years without Bucky now, and he didn’t want to go any longer. Even if Bucky wasn’t awake now. It eased something in him just to have the certainty of Bucky’s presence, to know that he existed in the world beyond Steve’s memory and the ghostly traces of the Winter Soldier. And he was grateful for this much, he was, because he knew what the alternative was, knew how intolerable that long stretch of grey grief had been. It was just—they hadn’t had enough time.
The first couple days in Wakanda had passed in a nearly hallucinatory start and stop rush, Steve and Bucky both recovering from injuries, unconscious for long stretches, and then bombarded with the lush and unfamiliar sensory input of Wakanda when they were awake. It had felt almost like waking from the ice again, Wakandan technology seeming as far removed and advanced from 2016 as 2012 had been from the 40s. And then as soon as he had recovered enough, Steve had insisted on going to the Raft to break Sam and the others out, and had done just that with T’Challa’s and the Dora Milaje’s assistance, Bucky stubbornly coming along even though he was down an arm. And that was good, necessary: concrete actions to take, plans to follow. Steve was good at plans.
It was only when what was left of the Avengers were back in Wakanda that the reality of the situation had truly begun to sink in for Steve. Then Bucky had told Steve about his decision to go back into cryostasis, and Steve had realized he didn’t have any kind of plan to deal with this at all. He’d given up the shield like it was easy, and it had been. Steve would do it again in a heartbeat, without a second thought. But a flutter of panic had taken flight in his chest when he’d realized that for the first time in years, he was just Steve Rogers again, and it had been a long time since he’d had to live in this world as just Steve Rogers. The knowledge had set him to pacing their quarters in the palace, had left him sleepless and staring out the wide windows into the Wakandan night.
Bucky had noticed. He’d taken in Steve’s unrest with quiet, watchful unhappiness.
“I wasn’t worth this, Steve,” he’d said, after a long silence one night. “I remember enough to know that.” His voice had been as soft and even as it usually was now. Steve had reeled as if Bucky had shouted at him.
“Don’t—”
Bucky had clenched his jaw and kept going. “The shield, your teammates, your job, a better life than whatever we’d scraped together in some little shithole in Brooklyn, or on some godforsaken battlefield in Europe—”
Steve had abruptly remembered the quick glimpse he’d gotten into one of Bucky’s notebooks, back in his apartment in Romania. There’d been a few articles about him in it, and yeah, the picture they’d painted of his life in the 21st century must have seemed rosy enough. Miraculously alive and surrounded by fantastic, futuristic technologies, no need to worry about money; a future beyond anything he or Bucky could have ever imagined when they were poor kids in Brooklyn struggling to make rent, or tired soldiers at the front. It was a future bereft of comfort or familiarity though. Bucky ought to have known better, Steve had thought in a burst of miserable fury.
“Oh, so you read some articles about Captain America, and you went to a goddamn museum exhibit and you think—you think it’s a good life I woke up to here? I’ve been walking around half-dead, Buck, without you. Did anything you put together in that notebook of yours tell you that? Because you sure as shit don’t remember enough if you think you’re not worth the shield and the job and all the rest of it.”
It had burst out of him in a ferocious rush, and immediately, he’d felt ashamed and guilty for lashing out at Bucky. But Bucky had just barked out a startled laugh, looking at him with a strange mix of delight and annoyance.
“There you are,” he’d said with a grin. But then his face had gone still and serious again, and he shook his head. “I remember enough. You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen what was in the rest of the notebooks.”
Steve had let it drop then, not wanting to fight when they’d had so little time together. But the words became something of an implicit dare in Steve’s mind, a grimmer sort of challenge than the ones Bucky had issued with a wild grin when they were kids. O’Riley could use a telling off for talkin’ like that to little Joe. Bet you won’t last on the Cyclone. Think you can sneak into Ebbets? So when Natasha showed up in Wakanda with intel on Ross, the red star book with the Winter Soldier activation codes, and Bucky’s own notebooks that had been taken as evidence when they’d been captured, Steve basically immediately decided he was going to read those goddamn notebooks.
“Did you read them?” he asked Natasha, once they’d gotten the hugging and apologizing over with.
“I took a quick look,” she said, which could have meant anything from ‘I exhaustively read and annotated them and now have a complete psychological profile of James Buchanan Barnes,’ to ‘I skimmed to make sure there wasn’t any actionable intelligence in them.’ At Steve’s raised eyebrow communicating as much, she added, “Seriously, I didn’t really read them. They seemed…private.”
Steve flipped through one of the notebooks. Bucky’s handwriting was the same, the neat hand of a top student and clerk. Muscle memory, he supposed.
“That’s not going to stop you, I see,” said Natasha, wry and surprised, as Steve glanced through the whole stack of notebooks and put them in order. Bucky had dated them, of course, and there seemed to be some effort to categorize them by subject. He’d always wrinkled his nose at Steve for his failure to date or otherwise organize his sketchbooks. How will you be able to keep track? Don’t you want to know if you’re getting better?
“Nope,” he said, putting them in order. Some of them were stuffed thick with clippings and post-it notes.
“I’ll be honest, I was kind of expecting a lecture on Barnes’ right to privacy for even skimming through them. I deleted all electronic trace of the codes and these journals too, by the way.”
“Thank you,” he said, and then, defensive, added, “Listen, Bucky used to look through my sketchbooks all the damn time.”
“Okay,” said Natasha, with a deliberate lack of judgment. “I’ll leave you to it then.”
The first notebook was terse nearly to the point of indecipherability, and dispassionate, not unlike the reports Bucky would write up when they were with the Commandos. There was little of their shared history in it, aside from a few references to Brooklyn. Some of it was in Russian that Steve painstakingly translated with the help of Google. He realized quickly enough that it was mostly Bucky’s scattered recollections of his time as the Winter Soldier, plus his research from various recovered HYDRA and SHIELD files to fill in the blanks. Dates, places, targets, and sometimes, brief and vivid sensory impressions. Parts looked not unlike Steve’s own notebook of things to look up, items crossed out as Bucky presumably satisfied his curiosity.
But mostly, there were a lot of targets listed, plus the occasional recounting of collateral damage. Sometimes, the marks left by Bucky’s pen had pressed deep into the page, or his writing went messy and shaky. It was the only indication of anything close to emotion.
It was nothing Steve hadn’t already known in the generalities, if not always the specifics, thanks to the Winter Soldier file and the intel they’d gathered during the long search for Bucky. Did Bucky think this litany of the dead would disturb Steve? Did he think it would make Steve turn away from him? Bucky’s kill count during the war had been fairly high too, and that under Steve and the SSR’s own command. It only grieved Steve that these deaths at Bucky’s hands hadn’t been by his own choice, and that they had been in service of evil rather than good, or even necessity.
Grim as the notebook had been in places, it was more or less what Steve had expected. He expected more of the same in the notebook with the next date on it. But the next notebook took on something closer to the tone of a journal, and it hurt worse than any injury Bucky had inflicted on him on the helicarrier. I think this is one of the first things I remembered every time, Bucky had written on the first page, and what followed was page after page about Bucky’s fall from the train, and what came after, jumbled up with what Steve thought must have been Bucky’s first capture at that HYDRA factory. Bucky wrote of the same moment again and again, dredging up some new detail every time, and it plunged Steve back into the memory with almost physical force: the clattering of the train and the blue light of the HYDRA weapons and the ice and Bucky falling away from him and Bucky screaming—
Someone reached for me, Bucky wrote, and then in another iteration of the memory, Someone shouted a name. Mine, I guess, and then in still another, I didn’t want to leave him.
This proved too much for Steve to bear, to know just what it was that Bucky had been thinking during that long fall while Steve had clung uselessly to the side of the train. It made the wound of his grief, only ever barely scabbed over, tear open again. He bent over the notebook and gasped for air through choked off sobs, and when he’d regained some control over himself, he staggered to the medical suite that held Bucky’s cryochamber.
Bucky looked the same as he had the last time Steve had come to visit of course, and seeing him so soon after reliving his death again and again made the cryochamber look more like a tomb than it ever had. Steve had the brief, wild urge to climb into the cryochamber to join Bucky. I didn’t want to leave him, Bucky had written. Looking at Bucky now, Steve could only think, then why do you keep leaving me? That was probably unfair of him.
One of the Wakandan scientists approached him carefully. Right. It was the middle of the day. Of course the lab wasn’t empty.
“Captain Rogers, are you well?”
No. “I’m fine.” This assurance wasn’t convincing, judging by the look on her face. “I’m just going to—visit, for a while. If that’s okay.”
The look of kind pity he received didn’t help his whole wanting to climb into the cryochamber with Bucky situation. “Of course,” was all she said, and went back to her workstation.
He sat there for a while, one hand on the chilled glass of the chamber. His other was still clutching the notebook he’d been reading, and he thumbed it back open with a shaking hand. The rest of the notebook was devoted to Bucky finding himself, more or less literally. He’d gone to the Smithsonian exhibit apparently, and then done some reading. Bucky’s earlier dispassion returned some here in the spare recording of the facts of James Buchanan Barnes’ existence, a procession of events and milestones gleaned from books and wikipedia articles. It made for a short list. Bucky had been so young, before he’d gone to war. He’d been so young when he died.
Scrawled at the end of the list, Bucky had written, Visited my own grave. I’m not in it, obviously. Maybe I should be. And then, a new list: 1944-???? Zola. Cryo.
After that, Bucky’s handwriting grew alarmingly shaky and nearly illegible, and what semblance of order there had been disappeared. Steve flipped back to check the date on the notebook: a few months after the Triskelion fell, and the first time he and Sam had entirely lost Bucky’s trail. Bucky had gone to ground, and now Steve knew why.
He could scarcely make sense of the wild rush of words, and what he could make sense of jumped from memory to memory like a cryptic game of word association. Some of it wasn’t even in English. Some things Steve recognized as memories he shared with Bucky: muddy trenches and pine trees, smell of cigars would have been the war; incense singing Our Father who art in heaven white robes would have been their church in Brooklyn, where he and Bucky had briefly been altar boys before they’d made too much mischief; turpentine smoke sweat, Steve painting for his art class, or for a job, while Bucky smoked on the fire escape to catch any breath of cool air in the sticky summer night. But there were other strings of words that hinted at horrors, and here it seemed that eventually language had abandoned Bucky, because he’d stop mid-word, and move on to the next stream of words. There was one page that Steve couldn’t decipher at all, save the single sentence, Remembering hurts as much as forgetting did.
Steve had to stop then, as the words blurred on the page and his eyes burned. He leaned his head against the cool glass of the cryochamber, let the notebook drop from his hand before he could crumple or tear it. He understood a little better now why Bucky had wanted to bear this alone. But he still didn’t understand why Bucky thought the notebooks would change Steve’s mind about choosing Bucky over the shield.
He didn’t really sleep that night, the better part of his mind and heart still with Bucky, the Bucky who had written in those notebooks like he was bleeding himself dry. He didn’t know how Bucky had endured any of it, but he had, and he’d done it twice: living through it the first time, and then reliving it again as his memory returned. No wonder he’d looked so tired.
The next day, Steve marshaled his strength and read the next notebook. This one was more calm and ordered than the last one, to Steve’s relief. There was some research and memories about HYDRA bases, a rundown of the handlers Bucky had managed to remember and their current whereabouts as best Bucky could tell. Bucky hadn’t gone after any of them. Vengeance, it seemed, hadn’t been high on his list of priorities. Steve didn’t know if that was only pragmatic necessity to avoid unwelcome attention, or if Bucky just genuinely hadn’t wanted to pursue it. Steve, meanwhile, had blown up a really lot of HYDRA bases. He’d probably been raiding a HYDRA base while Bucky had been writing in this notebook.
Steve skimmed through a lot of it, finding little of interest in Bucky’s meticulous accounting of old HYDRA operations and operatives, all of it ten or twenty years out of date. He nearly missed the first bit of Bucky in all of it, one harshly scrawled out paragraph wedged in between notes about Pierce and Karpov.
Every time I remember one of the Winter Soldier’s victims, it’s like a nightmare where there’s no relief of waking up. I don’t get to wake up and think, oh thank god, it was just a dream, that wasn’t me, I didn’t do it. I did. My hands. Maybe not all my mind, but my fucking hands. I keep thinking I should have done something differently, but I tried saying no and I tried dying and I tried running and none of it mattered. I still ended up in that chair, erased, and I still ended up behind the rifle’s scope.
A couple pages and a few inconsequential memories of high school later, Bucky wrote, for a change, this latest memory of shooting someone in the head is from before I got turned into a medical experiment. Great. I remember my hands didn’t stop shaking for a couple hours after. Eventually I got used to it I guess. Eventually other things seemed more important, like protecting my men and keeping Steve safe. But take all that away and my hands still didn’t shake, after. So what does that say about me, I wonder.
The next page was a tidy sketched-out map of their old stomping grounds in Brooklyn, and that must have triggered some more memories, because it was annotated with cryptically brief notes that Steve couldn’t make sense of, but that had apparently been descriptive enough for Bucky’s purposes. On the page after that, Bucky wrote, I used to box. And I used to get in a lot of fights. Blood on my hands long before I ever stepped foot on a battlefield, even if it was just from punching assholes in the face. I can’t remember what that felt like, why I did it. Have I just always been fighting? There must have been a time I wasn’t, I just can’t quite remember it. It doesn’t feel real. There’s just Steve and one long war.
I’m so fucking tired of it. I don’t want to fight anymore. But I’m scared that’s all I am. I’m scared there’s nothing else left.
Steve stared at the words until his vision blurred, and then he went to visit Bucky. It was late by now. Steve hadn’t realized how late. The halls of the palace were dim, and the medical suite with Bucky’s cryochamber was empty of everyone but the two night shift technicians. But that was fine, Steve had 24/7 access, and it wasn’t like he’d be able to sleep. Not after reading that. He gave an “I’m fine” wave to the technicians as he passed them, and sat down on the bare floor by Bucky, slumping against the cold glass and metal of the cryochamber.
Bucky’s words had cut so close to the bone they’d scraped along it.
“You think you’re the only one who’s scared there’s nothing left of you but the fight?” he asked Bucky’s unmoving form.
He wanted to wake Bucky up right now and tell him, it’s not just you, I know what it’s like to live with that fear, I know you. I may not be fast on the uptake with this kind of thing, but I know you, and I’m not leaving. Just don’t leave me.
But he couldn’t, of course. It wasn’t like Bucky was a coma victim or something, someone who was maybe reachable across the barrier of unconsciousness. No, if Steve talked now, no part of Bucky would hear. He was too far away. So he was left here staring at Bucky’s eerily still body, glowing nearly white in the dim lighting. He had to very carefully avoid thinking about how Bucky’s chest wasn’t rising and falling with his breath. Steve got up and paced the room instead.
Bucky’s anger during that fight in his apartment made more sense now. He’d gone from wary and tired to furious, and Steve hadn’t paid it much attention at the time, too caught up in worry and making and discarding rapid contingency plans in his head, and then there’d been the rush and thrill of fighting at Bucky’s side again. Their bodies, at least, had been in automatic sync, easy as breathing. It had been in everything else that they’d fallen out of step. Reading these notebooks now though, Steve could feel them matching up again, and it was both a joy and a sorrow.
Now Steve knew what Bucky had meant, when he’d said Steve wouldn’t think Bucky was worth it if he read the notebooks. Bucky was wrong, obviously, but Steve could see why Bucky would think it. Because what Bucky saw as a grindingly long parade of bloody memories, too few of them innocent or good enough to redeem him, Steve saw as Bucky gathering up every scattered piece of himself, and holding on to each one, no matter how jagged it was, or how blood-stained, or how heavy.
And of course, Bucky himself was entirely unaware of how remarkable that was. That, at least, was bittersweetly familiar. For all that Bucky had been overconfident and vain as hell about silly stuff like his hair or his dancing, he’d never paid much mind to the things that made him a hero in Steve’s eyes. All the sacrifices he’d made for his family and Steve, his steadfast loyalty, his generous heart, his quiet bravery—Bucky’d never seemed to notice any of that as worthy of attention in himself. Steve had always thought it was because that was all so automatic to Bucky: of course he’d work extra shifts to pay for Steve’s medicine, and of course small and sickly Steve Rogers was the best person in all of Brooklyn, and of course he’d stay on the front even though he could go home. The alternatives were just unacceptable, in Bucky’s mind.
There was one notebook left now, and it was the one Steve had seen in Bucky’s apartment. Late as it was, he didn’t want to go to sleep without having read it.
But it was the one notebook Steve felt perversely more guilty reading than the others, because it was the one that was full of information about Steve himself. Even though it was the one notebook that natural, I-saw-my-name-and-I-was-curious impulse could easily excuse reading, Steve still felt some strange mixture of guilt and dread. If this notebook was only full of bare facts, if this notebook was carefully void of strong emotion, he didn’t think he could bear it. He didn’t need Bucky to remember everything about his life and about Steve, but he did need to know that Bucky knew there was something real there. He needed to know that Bucky didn’t think of him as just some guy Bucky had known a lifetime ago.
The notebook did start with a spare listing of facts, the kind of thing you could find in the Smithsonian exhibit and on Steve’s wikipedia page, plus the kind of intel they must have given the Winter Soldier about Steve’s role in SHIELD and with the Avengers. There were a couple news clippings from after the Triskelion fell, and a bunch of articles from around the time his return made the news after the Chitauri attack. Bucky’s only commentary on all this was ALIENS. WHAT THE FUCK, which made Steve laugh. He’d been looking forward to Bucky’s reaction to that.
Soon enough, Bucky had finished catching up on the basics of Steve, and let his more diary-like impulses bleed through. He said he’s my friend. I know it’s the truth, because it’s there in every history book, and only love could make someone pull such a dumb fucking move as he did on the helicarrier. I could have killed him.
A few pages on the war and Howling Commandos followed, and a picture of Steve before the Serum. The only comment on it was, I remember him better like this. Before Steve could get too sad about that, Bucky spent the next pages on assorted horribly embarrassing (for Steve) discoveries like the Star Spangled Man with a Plan song (I know my memory’s not much to talk about but this is the best thing I have ever heard), the handful of Captain America propaganda movies (wow, Steve is a terrible actor), some of the particularly unflattering paparazzi shots of him (this stupid face is definitely extremely familiar to me), the silly comics (WHY AM I A CHILD IN THESE. WHY AM I WEARING TINY SHORTS.) and assorted improbable tabloid stories that Steve just knew Bucky had held onto because he thought they were hilarious. He couldn’t exactly begrudge Bucky the laughs at his expense; these pages were the most light-hearted of all the notebooks.
“Glad I could make you laugh, pal,” he muttered to the cryochamber. There was no answer but its steady thrum of power.
Time or all this research seemed to have unlocked something in Bucky’s mind, because the memories flowed fast from his pen in the rest of the notebook, all of them of Steve and Bucky together. Their lives had been so closely tied together for nearly twenty years that the more Bucky remembered of Steve, the more he remembered of himself. A lot of it was the small stuff that people took for granted, all the little everyday memories that formed the whole of a life and a relationship: shared meals, arguments about the rent, the daily routines of life in the 30s, double dates they’d gone on together, drunken outings, Sunday dinners with the Barnes family. Seeing it all made Steve desperately homesick for the life they’d shared together. It had done the same for Bucky, apparently.
I was washing dishes and all of a sudden I remembered that Steve never used to wash the goddamn dishes. He’d just leave them in the sink, the asshole. Why does that make me miss him so much?
Probably for the same reason Steve had spent a full two minutes once staring teary-eyed at the laundry he was folding when he’d realized the reason the pile seemed so small was that none of Bucky’s clothes were in it.
He scrubbed at his eyes and turned the next page. He blinked in surprise at the next clipping pasted into the journal: a movie poster for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Snow White. I don't remember a goddamn thing about the movie, some animated fairy tale thing apparently, but I remember him in the flickering light of the theater. I remember wanting. I remember it had been a bad winter, and I remember being afraid that I wouldn’t get to keep him for much longer, one way or another. I remember he’s the one who got the tickets, as a surprise for me, even though I’d told him he should save his money for something more important. I remember it had felt like a date. I remember loving that stupid crooked bump in his nose, proof of all the stupid fights he got into. I remember loving him.
You’re my friend, Rogers? Yeah, right. This mess of feelings that fills up all the room in me says it was more than that. Living together for five years like we were some kind of married couple says it was more than that. You saying my name and breaking seventy years of HYDRA brainwashing says it was more than that. On my part, anyway. Don’t know if that was the case for you. I’m not sure if I want to know. Not when I have to stay away, for both our sakes.
Something like vertigo jolted Steve. He remembered that day too. It had been sometime in March after Bucky’s birthday, winter still holding on stubbornly. It had been the first winter since his mom had died, and he and Bucky had muddled and staggered through it together, patching holes over the empty spaces where Sarah Rogers had been. Through Steve’s frequent illnesses that kept him out of work nearly half the winter, through the lean times they skipped meals to make rent, through shivering together in the cold. Steve didn’t think he’d have survived it without Bucky. Bucky had told him he didn’t have to get by on his own, and then he’d proceeded to show it, without fuss and without complaint, even as he took extra shifts to cover Steve’s share of the rent and tended to Steve when he was sick.
Steve had been more grateful than he could bear, and in some attempt to show it, he’d been a little more extravagant than usual for Bucky’s birthday that year. The movie had been a wonder, though it seemed quaint by today’s standards, and Steve had splurged on a nice, proper meal out for them, and spent dinner rambling on about the animation and the art, while Bucky had listened, indulgently. In retrospect, yeah, it had been an awful lot like a date. In retrospect, friend wasn’t a big enough word for what they were. Wanting and love enough to fill up all the room in him. Steve understood, now. This was what Steve meant, when he called Bucky his home.
And jesus, Snow White. Steve hadn’t thought of that movie in years, and thinking about it now, he had the hilarious and horrifying realization that his life had become more like Snow White then he’d ever have expected. Because here he was, sitting in front of Bucky lying in a glass tomb, Bucky who was in a sort of sleeping death. It hadn’t been a poison apple that had cursed him, just poisoned words. What had cured Snow White again? Prince Charming had come and—true love’s kiss.
Steve wondered, more than a little hysterically, if true love’s kiss could cure Bucky. Their lives were crazy enough, already, right? Might as well try. He could just see himself explaining to the serious-faced Wakandan doctors and scientists: I’d like to try an unconventional treatment. True love’s kiss. Because you see, I think I finally get it. I love him, and he loves me, and it’s the truest thing I know. That’s true love, right?
He burst into laughter just imagining it, and the laughter mixed with tears of relief and pain and joy, and that was how the scientist who checked the cryochamber’s readings in the morning found him.
“Captain Rogers, are you okay?”
“Not really. But that’s okay.”
A couple months later, the scientists took Bucky out of cryo. They had a promising treatment option to try, and Bucky would have to be conscious for it. Steve asked if he could be there when they woke Bucky up.
“Of course,” said Dr. Mbele, smiling at him warmly. “We’re going to warm him up slowly, and he should wake as if from sleep. We’re hopeful that will keep him from growing agitated or becoming aggressive.”
Steve’s habit of hanging around the lab with what he was assured was a tragic and earnest expression of devotion had apparently endeared him to the scientists. Sam said he was being a creeper because it wasn’t like Bucky was aware in any way, but Dr. Mbele and her team seemed to think it was romantic. He wondered if Bucky would think so too. Probably not. You’re such an overdramatic asshole, Rogers, he’d probably say.
He fidgeted and paced in the recovery room, and eventually they brought Bucky in, piled with warming blankets and already looking less pallid. His chest was rising and falling with his breath. He fixated on the welcome sight of that for long minutes, and then talked to Bucky some, hoping it would ease Bucky’s return to consciousness to hear a familiar voice. When the heart rate monitor began ticking steadily upwards, Steve braced himself to do possibly the most stupid and ridiculous thing he’d ever done.
He leaned towards Bucky and pressed a close-mouthed kiss to his still cool lips, pulled back as Bucky’s eyes fluttered open.
“Steve?”
“Yeah, it’s me. We’re in Wakanda, and we’re safe. It’s been about four months. Everything’s fine. The doctors have something they want to try to fix the trigger words.” He brought Bucky some water and gave him a couple minutes to get his bearings.
Bucky drank the water and scrutinized Steve.
“Did you just—fuck, I think I’m hallucinating.”
“No, I definitely just woke you up with a kiss. True love’s kiss. Figured it was worth a shot.”
“What.”
“You know, Snow White. Break the curse and all. Also, you were right. You’re more than just my friend.”
Bucky levered himself up on the bed with his one arm and squinted at Steve suspiciously. “You read my notebooks? You asshole,” he said, with exasperated affection. Then he laughed, a little breathlessly. “You call that true love’s kiss? I know I’m freshly defrosted and all, but get over here, we can do better than that.”
They definitely could do better than that, and did. It wasn’t happily ever after, not even close, not with the words still looming over them. But it was a start.