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“Stood on Brooklyn Bridge a bit,” Bucky says. She’s back like she hasn’t been gone all morning, like she hasn’t sent the First Avenger herself into a panic that she’s been caught, that they’ve both been caught, that Bucky will be killed or imprisoned or tortured - same fascists, new flag. Bucky’s back like she never skipped out, same clothes, same on-edge stance, sitting on the rim of the bed, poised to leap at any moment and not looking at Steph. “Three AM.”
Steph is very still, as casual as she is careful. She can’t treat her friend like a spooked horse, like a kicked dog. “Thinking about jumping?” she asks, neutral as she can manage, crossing toward the kitchenette.
They’re in a small short-term rental out by Rockaway Beach, a salt-stained two-room apartment paid for by a burner credit card. Brooklyn is too close to home, so Steph picked a remote part of Queens, a hideaway just off the express train. It’s far enough from the long-shadowed skyscrapers and steel girders of Manhattan that Bucky can pretend the city’s silhouette hasn’t changed.
It’s been almost a year since the Potomac River, months since Bucky decided she wanted to be found and let Steph track her down across Eastern Europe. Steph’s recently been seen in Washington, debriefing cordially and impersonally with the new Secretary of State, so nobody thinks she’s farther out than Virginia. ‘Bucky sightings’ have died down, what with the midterm election coming up; some things about DC never change. Nobody would expect either Bucky to be back in New York so soon after she vanished. Even if they had; well, there’s more than a few “comic conventions” around this month (disconcertingly, Steph’s seen several advertisements she’s featured in). It would be easy to write off their presences as lookalikes. It’s been enough time for certain things to blow over, but not enough time for anything to heal.
Bucky nods, a short, masculine jerk of her angular chin. Barely grown-out hair sways just above her jawline. “Didn’ though.”
“Can see that.” Steph turns, sets down the fresh fruit she bought, and pretends to clear the granite counter to make space for it, even though there’s already plenty of space; she knows that eyelines make Bucky nervous. Her hands are still and deliberate enough not to reveal the resurgence of her worst fear leeching limb-by-limb into her blood, the idea of losing Bucky so soon after finding her, the idea of losing Bucky to her own impartial hand. “Why’d you stop?”
“Dunno,” Bucky returns, still listless. She smacks her metal palm into her flesh one, and Steph knows that has to hurt, Steph knows Bucky’s using the pain to help ground her in what’s real. “Statue of Liberty, I guess.”
Steph’s hand trembles and she opens a cabinet with much more force than she needs to, sending a loud wooden clatter bouncing all across the room.
Bucky doesn’t comment on it. “Fought for this place,” she says instead. “I think.” She huffs out a bitter breath, widening her eyes. “Women in the army. How new-fangled of us.”
“They wanted me as a mascot,” Steph informs her.
“And you wouldn’t go without me.”
“I would’ve,” Steph contradicts gently. “It was – important. Maybe more important than anything the country’d done that century.”
“You didn’t need me.”
“But I wanted you.” Steph waits until she can meet Bucky’s eyes. “I always have. You know that.”
Bucky nods, and Steph hopes it means she’s remembering, that this repetition will be the one that sticks. Her tortured mouth curls up almost into a smirk. “You, a model.”
“Hey!” Steph pretends to bristle, playacting carefully. “I ain’t ugly, Buck. And c’mon, it’s mascot, not model.”
“Nah, you’re gorgeous,” Bucky admits, and for a moment, she really sounds like Bucky. There’s an emotion in that sentence, a real one, something like pride or jealousy, something with heat. She eyes Steph’s nose, her jaw, her blonde hair still tied back in a militant bun. “You got the body you wanted,” she says with a trace of what might even be mirth. “You always wanted to be a boy anyway.”
“Hey, I still got tits!” That almost makes Bucky smile. “C’mon, I wanted to fight,” Steph corrects. “You don’t have to be a boy to do that, these days.”
There’s a lot to learn about the new world, a lot that Bucky has to catch up on. It’s as disappointing as it is unsurprising that people still believe you have to be a man, or at least not a woman, in order to be strong. It’s especially galling since Steph had never believed that — but then again, she’d always had Bucky to look up to, and Bucky'd always been tougher than boys.
“You wanted to kick ass,” Bucky corrects Steph’s correction, and there’s definitely mirth there, and Steph feels like fucking flying. She forces a chuckle, hoping she’s not coming on too strong. “I always wanted to -- be big enough to scare off the bullies.” Like you did. She shrugs her overlarge shoulders, packed with heavy muscle she didn’t earn. “Now I can.”
Bucky looks Steph over again, and like a curtain closing, the dull sadness falls back across her face. There’s a long, anvil-heavy pause. “Can’t remember what’s true about America.”
This is an almost worrying amount of dialogue, for Bucky. She’s using her voice more than she has in weeks, and Steph knows it must be agony for her. Steph’s breath is very measured, boot-camp precise, wanting to engage her further but terrified to misstep and send the Winter Soldier lapsing back into silence or, worse, psychosis. Steph treads extraordinarily carefully around any topic that might trigger Bucky’s Hydra-instilled mechanical rage.
“Remember you,” Bucky goes on. Steph turns to see those hollow blue-tinged eyes boring into hers. Hurt-animal eyes, ringed in shadow. Soulless, they look so soulless. “Always you.”
Steph nods a little brokenly.
“Did we go here,” Bucky asks, pivoting. “Brighton Beach.”
“Rockaway Beach,” Steph says, almost but not quite facing Bucky now. “I didn’t. You might’ve, with a beau sometime. But we did go to Brighton Beach when we were about fourteen.” She swallows. “Good memory. Your memory’s getting better every day.”
Bucky grunts. Hacks some spit in the back of her throat with something that almost seems like energy. She wipes her chapped lips with the back of her metal hand. “Statue reminded me of you.”
Steph selects a banana, watching the Winter Soldier out of the corner of her eye, wondering if that’s why she didn’t jump, hurting, not sure how to properly cradle an admission like that. “The country and what it represents, or what it was supposed to,” she says carefully. “The Statue of Liberty, Buck? 'Mighty woman with a torch,' do you remember how the poem goes?”
“Ideal…” Bucky nods to herself, focused inward. “Idealistic.” Then she’s done, her lips parting and eyes shutting in dull fatigue. She’s pale, worn-out, much wearier than when she — when she was alive, Steph’s brain supplies. “I’m tired, Stevie,” she murmurs.
Stevie. Steph’s heart cracks open all over again. “Go to sleep, Buck,” she instructs, soft as a light hand on a shoulder, as a hand curled on a cheek. “You’re safe here.”
Bucky lies back, locks up, and shuts down with almost mechanical quickness, smooth and formulaic, like a rifle reloading. Steph stays where she is, leaning against the kitchen island, watching her slip into sleep. Arm torn off, bruised body, hair shorn shorter than Bucky ever would’ve worn it in life. Part of it’s been ripped out in a gaping chunk, the pale scalp below barely scabbed over.
Steph can always see the facsimile of who Bucky used to be superimposed atop her. It’s harder when she’s moving in soldier-lockstep, vicious and fast; it’s much easier, albeit more painful, when she’s still. Steph can see young Janie Barnes, a happy, scrappy woman dressed in poorly-pinned victory curls, boyish lapels, red-trimmed dresses that hung slightly too short off her lanky frame. They’ve muscled her, they’ve massacred her. Steph stares at the stoic weapon lodged unmoving in their bed, at the crumpled duvet that frames her. Her gaze returns again and again to the metal arm splayed out against soft pillows. Its fist clenches and unclenches like a heartbeat as Bucky fights her dreams.
It feels safer to rest here, semi-shadowed by the supercity that was once, and might still be, their home. History sticks to the streets of New York; her American grime is old and proud. Steph can still see the 1930s in the way the neat rows of Harlem brownstones meet concrete, in way the midtown art-deco spires stretch metallic and proud into the air. Hot dog vendors and car exhaust and Yankees Games and stalled, overheated subway trains; the city is the city is the city. Steph figured it might do good for Bucky to see something familiar, some undeniable throughline to the past. She woke up in New York, too. They can drag each other through this modern megalopolis together, like they always have.
“Times Square, too,” Bucky begins abruptly, as if reading Steph’s mind, as if the conversation had never dropped off.
Steph stands at attention. “You went to Times Square, too?” Bucky’s eyes slit open like a cat’s, glittering half-snuffed stars in the dim light filtering in through shut curtains. Steph feigns nonconcern. “You weren’t noticed?”
“Wig,” Bucky admits gruffly.
Steph nods.
It’s a surprise Bucky made it that far into the city. Since she’s been here, she's preferred shadows, has shattered every mirror in the house, has surrounded herself with solitude and silence and warm, controlled air. On bad nights, she’s even voluntarily cuffed herself to the radiator, slept slumped against the wall despite Steph’s fervent protests. Steph has been the one getting the groceries, buying new clothes, buying time. “Went there ’n stood there. Cen’r of i’ all.”
“It’s... a lot,” Steph agrees, happy that Bucky is speaking again but unsure how to answer, unsure how to declare that if she understands anything, she understands that.
Bucky nods mutely and rolls over to stare at the wall, not moving, not blinking, as if she can see the mirages of flickering, incomprehensible billboards playing across the blank white surface. As long as Steph watches, her eyes don’t close.
Steph sighs. Bucky isn’t well. Steph doesn’t know what recovery would even look like, in a situation like hers, but she knows that it will take time — maybe even more time than she’s lost, and she’s lost decades. PTSD is a term she’s now intimately familiar with – thanks, Wilson! – but not even that covers Bucky’s bases. No shrink can fix what Bucky’s been through — nor what Steph has, for that matter. She and Bucky are women out of time, and they’ll soon be women out of time. Steph will have to go back to the Avengers in less than a week. The media is restless; she has to show her face like some sacrificial lamb led to the camera. She knows if she doesn’t go to them, they’ll find her. If they find her, they’ll find Bucky and run her through.
God, it hurts. Looking at Bucky, broken and alert and insane. Those familiar eyes fixed on nothing, memories like gangrene, infected limbs.
“I wish I’d died off the train,” Bucky says, dull and somber, after an indeterminate peace. “Thought when I was on the subway.” She makes a sound like metal, twitching her hand.
The rattling of steel wheels over tracks must have been hell. Steph has to know how worried to be. “Did you..." it's a pathetic thing to ask, "freak out?”
“Not really.” Bucky swallows, levies herself partially up, then loses the energy or willpower and falls back again. She’s still not looking at Steph, and Steph, with all her power, with all her history, with all her super-soldier serum and all her heroics and her competence and her confidence, can’t do anything but replay Bucky’s words in her mind, can’t do anything but fight and lose against the fact that Bucky wants to die.
Bucky adds after a while, “But I get to see you again.”
“It’s good you didn’t bite it, Buck,” Steph says fiercely, as if that can convince anyone. “It’s good."
Bucky doesn't react.
"I missed you,” Steph admits. I'm not letting you go.
Bucky’s face crumples and she seizes up. Seizes up. Shudders and clenches and vibrates all over, makes a smothered agonized wail, and then, with herculean effort, lies still.
“Can I hold you?” Steph asks, fists clenched, voice shaking. “Please, Bucky?”
Bucky shakes her head, mutters, “’M a weapon. Take my arm off first.”
“I can’t. I can’t. Don’t say that,” Steph pleads, approaching anyway, arms up as if in surrender. “Don’t say that. It’s not right.”
Shadows and dimness drown Bucky’s face, but Steph can still make out every familiar line, every familiar pain, and can't stand it.
“Hey,” Steph insists, searching for something, trying to spark up the last of Bucky’s receptiveness before she shuts down again. She remembers where it all began, the vibrant crowds, the jubilation of the American universal exhibition, the World’s Fair held in Queens’s largest green space. “They’ve kept Flushin’ Meadows Park, Corona Park, basically the same since they fixed it all up in ’36. Remember? The car prototype that fell apart instantly? The boy you were with? All those lights, the statues, the globe, ’n all the flags of the world, every country in the world? We should – we could go. Remember when we went before?”
“World’s fair,” Bucky grunts. She closes her eyes, exhausted, exhumed. “No, it isn’t.”
Steph crosses the room, stands near the other edge of the bed. Bucky flinches at the movement, because of course she does, but Steph stays. Bucky controls herself and starts breathing evenly behind her. Steph watches but can't tell when, or if, she falls asleep.
Give me your tired, your poor, she thinks, staring out into the shadows. The homeless, tempest-tossed. There's so much left to fight for.
"No, it isn't," Steph agrees. "But I'll have enough hope for both of us, Buck. You know that."
Bucky doesn't answer, doesn't smile. Still, Steph stands guard.