Archive of Our Own

When Steve finally finds Bucky in the snow, perhaps fifteen minutes before Hydra is supposed to get to him and squirrels him away to a nearby safehouse and tells him he’s from the future, Bucky’s first question is, “Can you prove it?”

Steve had prepared for this question: he pulls out a newspaper from 2023 with the headline: Tony Stark, Beloved Hero Iron Man, Dies to Save Earth. He thought it would be helpful not only because of the date, but also because the article, devestatingly, tracks the trajectory of Tony’s life, starting with, of course, Howard Stark as a father. Bucky knows Howard Stark.

But Bucky just looks over at him, somewhat unimpressed, and shakes the paper between his fingers. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says, “I’m sure a newspaper is hard to fake. But I imagine it’s a hell of a lot easier than inventing time travel.”

Steve looks down at the newspaper. On the bottom is a small collection of quotes from people who knew and loved Tony. One of them is his own. “I didn’t invent it,” he says. “Tony did.”

“Right.” Bucky traces the words. “Tony Stark. This is supposed to be Howard’s kid?”

Steve is at a loss. “That is Howard’s kid.”

Bucky nods. “Steve. I think I’m hallucinating. It must be the fall from the train, or the cold, or the fact that I haven’t slept in way too long. Get me some more blankets, will you?”

Steve looks at him helplessly. He does look cold, and younger than he is in the future, although strictly speaking he probably hasn’t aged much more than a few years due to the constant cryofreezing. Maybe it’s just the stress and torture that makes the Bucky in 2023 look older. Bucky has short hair, clean cut but drooping over his forehead, soaked in snow, and he’s shed his wet outer layer and replaced it with the thick knitted blanket that was draped over the sofa when the first entered the house. It’s checkered pink and green.

“Sure,” Steve says, and goes to get more blankets.

The safe house itself is a cabin-like place, running water and a stash of canned foods and cash. It has one bedroom with one bed, but the closets are stacked high with foldable cots and plastic sleeping pads that one can blow up like balloons. There are ottomans that open to reveal neat piles of blankets and spare sheets, and the single couch has enough throw pillows for an army to sleep on, which is maybe the point.

Steve pulls out three and helps wrap Bucky in them until Bucky’s bundled so tight he couldn’t move his arms if he tried, then goes to turn on the heat and the electricity; the sun’s going down and the pale winter sunlight will only last for so long. Once he’s done both, he finds Bucky resting like a scrunched worm on the couch and makes a gesture with his hands that amounts to awkward flapping. “Body heat? Yes or no?”

“Get in here,” Bucky says, tilting his head up to Steve with a smile.

So Steve unwraps Bucky, all four layers of blankets, strips down to his undershirt and boxers, and gathers Bucky in his arms, pulling the cocoon tight around them. “God, you’re cold.” He’s clammy to the touch, though thankfully quite dry by now. It isn’t the first time he’s had Bucky’s body pressed to his own, although it’s never really been with this few clothes, or for this long. He’s carried Bucky’s injured body once or twice, and Bucky has carried him, too. But this is something else; this is skin, skin, so much skin.

“I imagined you were from the future,” Bucky rumbles in Steve’s ear. His breath is warm, despite the rest of his body.

Steve tries to think straight. “That wasn’t your imagination.”

“Hmm.” Bucky doesn’t sound convinced. “So, why did you come back in time, then?” he says, as if entertaining a child.

Steve isn’t sure how much he should say. What’s the use of weighing down Bucky with the trauma he’s never going to experience, now? What’s the use of telling him the things he would have done, but now won’t? “I wanted to save you.”

“Ah.” Bucky’s mouth twists humorlessly. “I died in the snow?”

Steve imagines lying, but even before he speaks, he knows he won’t do it. “No,” he says.

There’s a pause. “No,” Bucky repeats curiously, turning in the circle of Steve’s arms to look at him. His shoulder presses into Steve’s bicep; his pec presses against Steve’s pec. There are two very thin shirts between them. “Now, here’s what confuses me, Rogers. You’re looking pretty good for a hundred years old. Is that part of the supersoldier thing, too? Did you come back because your immortal ass missed me when I died?”

“Oh. No. You’re also….” Steve looks down at himself a second, but all he sees is the dark, slim crevice between their chests. Jesus. “It’s a long story.”

Bucky tilts his head. “Maybe you should tell the story.”

Steve had thought he would not tell the story, or that maybe he would only tell parts of it. But this is his best friend, and there’s no hiding that kind of thing. He tells the story of how Steve had thought Bucky was dead and how soon after, he’d put the plane down, with the understanding that it would kill him, too.

“God, you’re so…” Bucky says, and doesn’t finish the sentence. “Why would you do that?”

“I just told you why I did it.”

“Yes, but.” Bucky shakes his head and looks at him. “You’re somethin’ real special.”

Steve feels his face flush hot. “I’m just the same kid you’ve always known.”

He tells Bucky of waking up and finding out he’d been asleep for decades. He talks of the lights of Times Square, of the formation of the Avengers, of cell phones and the internet.

“Musta missed Carter,” Bucky muses.

“Yeah, her and you. The two people who ever liked me.”

Bucky laughs. “Plenty of people liked you.”

Steve flexes his biceps. Bucky’s face is right next to his biceps. “People like these. I don’t think they care who they’re on.”

Running his eyes up Steve’s arms to Steve’s face, Bucky smirks. “I care who they’re on.”

Steve feels very, very hot all over. His blood runs down towards his cock and he pushes his mind away from where they are, how they are, and what Bucky’s eyes feel like on his body. He clears his throat. “Anyway. Then I found you.”

“You found me?”

“Maybe you found me.” Steve explains that they later learned Bucky had been frozen too. He explains about the Winter Soldier, about Bucky forgetting him, nearly killing New York City, saving him, going on the run, being framed, the whole nine yards. “How much of this do you want to know?” he asks, and when Bucky says gravely, “all of it,” Steve tells him about what has since come to light about Bucky: torture, brainwiping, programming, missions, kills across history. He tells Bucky haltingly about the Starks, and then about Steve leaving the Avengers and becoming a fugitive in part to protect Bucky, waiting for Bucky to tell him to stop, but Bucky just listens with patient interest.

“You’re a good friend, pal,” Bucky says quietly after a while. He runs his hand up Steve’s arm, the hand Steve knows to be metal one day, but which right now is as organic as the rest of their bodies.

“You took care of me all my life,” Steve says. “You started it.”

Steve almost puts his hand around Bucky’s ribs and runs his thumb up and down it, but he stops himself. They’re not lovers. They have never been lovers. They are friends, one of whom nearly had hypothermia. Instead, he just asks, “Warm yet?”

Bucky blinks, looks away, and says, “Yeah.”

Steve leaves Bucky in the blankets and heats them three cans of beans on the stove, which fills the room with the sticky, cheap smell of syrup and salty bacon. They eat it a good two feet apart as Steve runs quickly and vaguely through the deal with Thanos, the death of half the population, the stones, the resurrection, and now his task: to return everything back to where it was.

“So, you did that,” Bucky surmises, “and then you came here. To me. So I wouldn’t become the Winter Soldier.”

Steve shrugs. “I didn’t want you to have to go through all that.”

Bucky stirs his spoon through the can, making the awful scraping sound of metal against metal. He lifts it, watches the syrup drip, then puts it back down. “And what about future me, the one you know? You left him there?”

“You—Bucky, you’re the same guy.”

“Hm.” Bucky nods and doesn’t say anything else.

A storm starts up outside, a storm Steve is pretty sure will last several days, if he remembers correctly the weather history he ran through before he stepped back in time. Bucky comes away from the whole ordeal entirely unharmed and joins Steve at the stove, because apparently Steve can’t cook worth a damn. They play cards, but neither of them know very many two person card games. They take walks around the room and pretend they’re in the city.

“There’s a hot dog stand,” Steve says, pointing at the bookshelf. “You can pay by tapping your card.”

Bucky pulls out an ace of spades. “This one?”

Steve points out the people, too, people in electric cars, people wearing Avengers T-shirts.

“There’s a grandma crossing the street with her chihuaha,” Bucky adds, playing along.

“There’s a couple of guys kissing in front of the MoMA,” Steve chimes in.

“There’s a—” Bucky stumbles over his words. “A—what did you say?”

Of all the things Steve has told Bucky about the world in seventy years, this is the first time he seems genuinely flabbergasted. Not by cell phones or Stark’s crazy space tech, or infinity stones or aliens.

“Yeah, the MoMA’s still there,” Steve says. “Those are the things left from our time—you, me, and the MoMA.”

“There’s a couple of guys kissing who?” Bucky asks.

Oh. Steve’s mind screeches to a halt. He’d forgotten this. How could he have forgotten this? It was so formative to his childhood years, how he would look at Bucky and know in his bones it wasn’t written in the stars. How even if they loved each other they could never build a future, not a proud, open one the way he could with a woman. How they would have to pretend to be friends. He would look at Bucky and feel doomed, truly doomed, to a life of tragedy. In some ways, it had mattered so little, because Bucky was such a ladies’ man that the very idea that he and Steve would have anything worth hiding was laughable.

“Each other,” Steve says now, slowing his steps as they come around the back of the sofa in their imagined walk through Manhattan.

“Some sorta protest going on?” Bucky asks, eyes burning into Steve. “Ain’t they gonna get arrested?”

Steve studies Bucky, but he knows his friend well; Bucky has never looked down on gay people. He has only ever looked at them with a kind of sadness. Once, when they had seen a tussle in the street over two men holding hands, Bucky had turned away from the window and said softly, what are they doing it for? They’re throwing away their lives for nothing, but Steve had always felt that Bucky had not meant their love was not worth having, but that they would never win their fight.

“No,” Steve answers gently. “It’s legal now. I mean, it will be legal. It’s normal, mostly.”

Bucky comes to a full stop. His fingers curl absently around the edge of the kitchen counter. “There are kids who…”

It can’t be, Steve thinks. It can’t be; he would know. All this time he spent in love with his straight best friend, you think he would have noticed. “There are kids who aren’t even afraid,” Steve says carefully, still watching. “There are kids who don’t even say they’re gay, not because they’re afraid, but because no one assumes they’re straight.”

“Gay?” says Bucky.

“Homosexual,” says Steve. “That’s what they call them.” He hesitates. “That’s what they call—me.”

Bucky’s eyes go huge. Truly huge, the way they go when he spots a grenade soaring through the air, like he’s bracing for the ground underneath him to shake and crumble. “You,” he breathes.

“Actually, I’m bisexual,” Steve says, “that’s both.” But it’s always been you. In every time, under every name, it’s always been you.

“Bisexual,” Bucky scrapes out. He laughs to himself, a kind of breathy, disbelieving laugh. “I thought gay meant happy. I thought homosexuals were miserable.”

“I’m sure there were some who were happy,” Steve says. “I imagine there are more who are happy now. In 2023, I mean.”

Bucky’s eyes flick up to Steve’s, his mouth solemn. “I was miserable. If I had chosen the name, I probably would not have chosen gay.”

“Oh,” says Steve.

“Oh,” Bucky repeats flatly, as if this is not a satisfactory response for him. As if he expects Steve to manage even another syllable after comprehensively turning his world upsidedown.

“I didn’t know,” Steve says after a long pause.

“I didn’t know about you,” Bucky returns.

“Well—now we know.”

“Now we do.”

Finally, Bucky seems seriously interested in the future, the way Steve thought he would be about alien armies and nano tech and space ships that can travel galaxies.

“So they call themselves gay,” Bucky says the next day, coming around to sit by Steve with a bowl of oatmeal. He has to let it rest for three minutes, so at the moment, it looks like oats under a kind of dust-murky layer of water. “Should I start saying we? We call ourselves gay? Do you call yourself gay?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes bisexual.” Steve hadn’t imagined Bucky finding queer politics relevant at all, but if he had expected anything, it would not have been a fixation on labels. He feels tenderly towards this side of Bucky, the way it seemed Natasha felt tenderly towards him when he first found out. “When people say gay, they sometimes mean homosexuals, and they sometimes mean anyone… uh—queer.”

Steve expects that Bucky will flinch at this word, maybe because the people in his day are so viciously up in arms about the term queer, but Bucky just looks at Steve consideringly and says, “Alright. So, homosexuals and bisexuals are both gay.”

“Yes….” Steve hesitates. “Some bisexual people don’t like to be called gay, though.”

“Why?”

“Because it mostly means homosexual.”

“Okay….”

“So they feel like it means people are ignoring the fact that they like both.”

Bucky stirs the oatmeal, sniffs it, and adds some salt. “And you?”

Steve shrugs. “I don’t care much either which way. People also say ‘bi,’ instead of ‘bisexual’ sometimes.”

“Bi,” Bucky echoes with a laugh in his voice. “The word for two? You guys claimed the word for two?”

“Prefix,” says Steve, grinning. “But yeah.”

They eat their oatmeal. Steve wonders if he should have added salt, like Bucky, but surely that would only make things worse. He would rather have paste that tastes like grainy whiteness than paste that tastes like salty grainy whiteness. He feels like he’s living in a whole new world of possibility suddenly, a world where Bucky might hypothetically be in his dating pool. Maybe. Only on a technical level.

“I always thought,” he starts, “you and those girls.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says.

“I can't believe we never talked about this.”

Bucky eyes his bowl and then spoons jam into Steve’s bowl, the whole rest of the jar—about two spoonfuls. “Eat up, punk.”

Steve fights a fond smile. “I’m not eighty pounds anymore, jerk.”

Bucky looks up at him, his eyes clear and affectionate. “Don't get ridiculous now. It’s still my job to take care of you, you know, since you’re the one out of time.” He licks the spoon, making his tongue firm and flat, flicking the tip around the edges, the pink of it reflected in the curve of the metal. “So, what’s the deal with queer? We call ourselves that?”

“Some,” Steve says.

“Sounds like there’s a lot of that going around.”

Steve blinks. “Queerness?”

“No, I mean, all this ‘it depends’ stuff. We haven’t figured it out yet, or what’s the deal?” Bucky doesn’t seem judgmental, just curious and a little unsure.

So Steve tells Bucky about the Lavender Scare, about how after the war clears up, the communists get associated with homosexuals. He talks about the people who will fight for civil rights—the homophile organizations full of people who couldn’t even tell each other their real names for fear of getting fired.

“They thought communism made you homosexual?” Bucky asks, grinning a little over his bowl.

Steve shrugs. “Honestly? I didn’t look into it too much. Seems to me that they thought homosexuals were an attack on the family power structure and communists were an attack on the government power structure, so homosexuals were the communists’ greatest weapon.”

“Oh, not much research, huh?” Bucky laughs. “Sounds like you’ve been reading books.”

“Just one.” And Steve goes on. About the younger generation, who thought the homophile movement was too conservative, and started calling themselves gay.

“Oh, the men kissing other men and testifying before Congress that homophiles shouldn’t be fired were too conservative,” Bucky says in mock understanding. “What a world.”

“The world changes fast, much faster than you’d think. I’d never have expected the world seventy years in the future to look anything like it does.” Steve stands and gathers their now-empty oatmeal bowls. His fingertips touch Bucky’s on the handoff, and a jolt runs through him, like the simple knowledge that Bucky is gay has turned every once-innocuous interaction into a possibility. The possibility that Steve might, maybe, if he gets very, very lucky, hold the thing he’s dreamed of for his whole hundred-year life.

“I’ll say it does,” Bucky says, seemingly unaffected by the split second in which their skin came into contact. “I still remember when the boys by the docks would call you a fairy, and I would think how close they were to the real fairy. I would look at you and think to myself, ‘Steve has honest to God wanted a woman before.’”

It’s true, strictly speaking. Steve is not a stranger to lust. He’s wanted a woman before, he’s had sex dreams about women once or twice, in the most torturously horny years of his youth. But he’s never loved one the way he loves Bucky, and the discrepancy is so glaring, it feels almost a lie to say Bucky’s right. He says, “I thought the same about you.”

“‘Course you did. I made sure of that.” Bucky leans against the kitchen counter, watching Steve do the washing up. His gaze is light, unstudied, and yet the awareness of Bucky’s eyes on Steve prickles at his skin, makes him feel like he’s burning up inside. “I didn’t want you to think less of me.”

“I wouldn’t have.”

“I know.” Bucky doesn’t look at him. “I knew it then, too. But I thought you might be worried, you know, I thought you might take a second look at why I never left your side, all those years. I didn’t want you wondering.”

Are you? Steve wants to ask, but of course, he can’t. That’s the whole point Bucky’s making: to assume Bucky’s in love with him just because he’s gay would be insane and insulting. Bucky is Steve’s best friend, and he’s damn good at it. He says, “I won’t, I promise.”

Bucky gives him a smile that looks somewhat like a grimace. Steve tries his very best not to read into it.

As the morning passes into noon, and the whiteness outside doesn’t let up, Steve and Bucky find themselves sitting by the window, watching the snowflakes whirl by. They’re silent for a long time, as they spend so much of their time. It’s a quiet Steve appreciates, seeing as most people in the modern day move incredibly fast, like they’re scared the world will leave them behind. As a slow, considered person himself, Steve isn’t entirely sure they’re wrong.

“So, the kids called themselves gay,” Bucky prompts out of the blue. His breath fogs across the cold glass.

“They thought the homophiles were too respectable,” Steve says, picking up where he left off. He talks about how careful the original movement was, how well-dressed, how they stressed conformity. “The gay generation saw them as pushovers, I guess, too focused on legal rights.”

“They did get legal rights.”

“Yeah, some. But the gays wanted social recognition.”

“You know, all those idiots who say, ‘give an inch and they’ll take a mile,’ might actually be onto something,” Bucky says, but there’s a brightness in his voice that Steve has never heard before. “These youth just keep gobbling up those miles.”

Steve is quiet for a moment. “This really—this is really important to you,” he realizes.

Bucky’s eyebrows shoot up. “Uh, yes, you idiot. I’m a homosexual. This is the kind of thing I dreamed of.”

“When I was a kid, I dreamed of a happy ending with someone I loved,” Steve confesses, “not a massive legal and cultural shift.”

“Guess I just dream bigger than you, pal.” Bucky looks like he wants to ask something, his eyes flicking over Steve’s face like he’s searching out an answer, but in the end, he stays silent, so Steve continues.

“You can probably guess that the queer movement thought the gay generation was too—”

“Conservative?” Bucky fills in.

“Yep.” Steve tells Bucky about the other struggles that got collected up in queerness. The gays were the homosexuals and bisexuals. The queers were homosexuals and bisexuals and people who called themselves puppy-owning boy-dykes and woman-in-the-body-of-a-gay-man transsexuals and polyamorous seperatists, and they were people of politics who thought that the struggle against the straight agenda was inseparable from the struggle against capitalism, racism, sexism, and all other structures of power. To be queer was not only to be gay, but to be gay and radical.

“So… they were kind of right, in the beginning,” Bucky interjects, still watching the snow fall.

“What?”

“The threat of homosexuality was the threat of communism.”

“Oh,” said Steve. He had never thought of it like this. “Well, honestly, nowadays half the kids who call themselves queer have no idea it was originally a sort-of political identity.”

“Shame,” Bucky says, and falls quiet again.

The snow has gathered up on little piles against the window, tiny snowdrifts. Bucky traces the path of the snowflakes with his eyes as they swirl up against the glass and settle neatly atop these miniature mountains, their edges rising and rising, until at last a large gust blows the highest layer off of them and the slow build begins anew. Steve just sits there, content to watch Bucky’s gaze flicker, his fingers rest on the sill, his posture lie relaxed and loose on his chair. A shadow Steve has always known in Bucky’s eyes, in his smile, seems to be fading away, leaving behind a man unburdened.

I love you, Steve wants to say, looking at him like this.

They talk a little about winters in New York, about the time Steve wore a hole in the bottom of his shoe and the snow started seeping in through it, and the newspapers would only last so long until they became a kind of papery mush. They talk about their favorite sandwich place, how they could only afford to go there on the specialest days. They talk about which asshole beat Steve’s ass in which alley, and which girl Bucky took out on which night.

Finally, Bucky pauses, runs his thumb through the fog his breath has left behind on the window, and turns to look at Steve. “What are we like, in your future?”

“We?” Steve echoes stupidly. We is a simple pronoun, used in all sorts of contexts. But he keeps thinking—as if we isn’t the perfect word for two best friends.

“We’re alive. We beat this purple giant, and you’re free to love whoever you want. Is there something else wrong?”

Steve frowns. “No.”

Bucky keeps on thumbing away the spot of steam. “So, why’d you come back?”

Steve falters. “For you, Buck, I told you.”

“Your future sounds pretty cool.” Bucky hesitates. “I don’t know if I’m worth all this to you.”

The words take Steve so off guard that his brain stalls out for several seconds, two timelines colliding in his head.

“What?” Bucky asks.

Steve swallows. “You’ve said that before. I mean, in the future.”

Bucky blinks, and then leans forward. “Do you miss him?” he says, his voice quieter, his face closer. It takes Steve a second to realize Bucky is now wiping off the fog from Steve’s breath, now.

“You, from the future?” Steve doesn’t know what to say to that. Yes, of course he misses Bucky from the future, who makes jokes he’s heard on the internet as easily as if they’ve always been part of his vocabulary, while Steve still feels fifty years behind everyone else. He misses Bucky who, when he feels like isn’t focusing well, will swivel his metal arm the full three hundred and sixty degrees, as if this will snap him back to the task at hand. He misses Bucky who makes a little smile-wince whenever he and Tony find themselves in the same room, and sometimes offers an awkward little nod. “You’re the same Bucky.”

“That can’t be true,” Bucky says, because of course it isn’t true, and Bucky’s smart enough to know that. “We’ve been through different things.”

Steve looks up at Bucky now. Bucky has lovely eyelashes that curl up, framing his eyes. “I love every version of you.” At least this isn’t a lie.

He watches Bucky’s jaw flex, and—and Bucky’s hand comes up to cup Steve’s face, to tip it up further, his thumb running along Steve’s cheek, like—like— “Put me back in the snow,” Bucky murmurs.

Steve jerks back. “What?”

“I want to live during your time,” Bucky says, letting his hand fall. In the future, that hand is made of metal, and it’s made that way because Bucky has had his arm amputated from near-death in the snow. “I want you to have your new friends, and I want to meet them, and I want to be…” He turns the word over in his mouth. “Queer.”

“Did you not hear everything I told you?” Steve demands. “The torture, the mind-wiping, everything?”

Bucky looks down at his own hands, watches his fingers trace his cuticles. “Based on what you’ve told me about time travel, if I don’t become the Winter Soldier, all the people I hurt and killed will still get hurt and killed, right?”

“…Yes.”

“So why does it matter if I’m the one doing it or not? History will compensate for it.”

“It doesn’t have to be you that suffers, Buck,” Steve says, feeling as helpless as he had in their very first conversation. “It’ll probably be one of those other Winter Soldiers they tried to develop.”

“That doesn’t sound like the Steve Rogers I know,” Bucky says, his voice rumbling and fond. He stands and claps Steve on the shoulder, like they’re done talking. “Come on, pal. You read a whole book on the history of homosexuals. You want all that studying to go to waste?”

This isn’t how it was supposed to go. That’s all Steve can think. “You don’t know what they did—” He starts, standing as well.

Bucky moves off to the cabinet, inspecting the lines of canned foods. “I thought you told me what they did.”

“You didn’t see those files,” Steve says, following.

“What, you think I can’t consent to something if I don’t know what’s going to happen? You think I can’t consent to risk?” Bucky turns, eyes flashing. “You did. That science experiment could’ve killed you, for all we knew. Let me make my own damn decisions.”

“It was your decision,” Steve says weakly. “I asked you if you’d let me come back and save you, and you said yes.”

“That was probably my selfish idea of a future with you,” Bucky says. He turns a can of beans around in his hands.

The world seems to grind to a halt. “What—what do you mean?” Steve gets out.

“Do I know you were bisexual, in the future?” Bucky still won’t look up from the beans.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Do I?”

“I—What—No. No, I don’t think I really mention it,” Steve says impatiently. He pulls the beans out of Bucky’s hands and turns him around by the shoulders. “Bucky, they make you forget your own name.”

“But not you,” Bucky says, lifting his eyes.

“What?”

“Not you. That’s what you said, right? That I’ll recognize you enough to save you from the river?” Bucky lays his hand over Steve’s where Steve is gripping his shoulder, and gently tugs his fingers loose.

Bucky’s hand is warm and familiar, his callouses just as Steve remembers them. Despite the panic, despite the confusion, the feeling of their fingers interlocked this way sets Steve’s mind spinning, and he can’t find any words as Bucky brings both of Steve’s hands together between his own and squeezes them.

“I’m going back back in the snow,” he says again, and leans in, folding Steve into a hug. He brushes a kiss across Steve’s cheek so light, Steve is half-sure he’s imagining it. And then he taps the can of beans once, like he’s saying goodbye. “Don’t do anything stupid until I come back.”

“Bucky,” Steve says.

“You’ll see me soon,” Bucky says, and Steve knows he’s talking about his future self, and then he opens the door into the blizzard and trudges out into the snow.

Steve spends a whole day sitting there in the house, wavering between chasing after Bucky and knowing that Bucky, like Peggy once told him, as the right to make his own choice. He knows this much: time and history are elastic. Whatever they’ve changed is so small, the world should snap neatly back into place.

He knows also that when he returns to the present day, his present day, his Bucky will be there, waiting by the side of their time travel machine with Bruce and Sam.

Steve has a million questions for Bucky. As he punches in his time coordinates and sends himself back home, they swirl about his head: why did it matter that Steve is bi, why did it matter that Bucky remembered him, why was it worth it?

When he steps out and his suit seems to dissolve off of him—this freaky Stark tech is still beyond him—the exact moment he was in three days ago sets in: the rustling green leaves above, the shining time travel apparatus under his boots, Bruce-as-Hulk standing by the control panel with his gaze running all over the scene, as if terrified something has gone wrong.

“I’m good,” Steve says for Bruce’s benefit, wiggling his fingers a little to make his point. “Am I good to go?”

Bruce shrugs affably. “If you put the stones back, then yes.”

So Steve turns around, and there he is.

Bucky, the Bucky he’s come to know, with his gleaming titanium metal hand, the arm disappearing into that well-worn leather jacket, his hair soft around his shoulders. He does that little nod he loves to do, and holds his arm out as if to help Steve off the platform.

Steve steps off and stares at him. Bucky stares back.

“I just unlocked some interesting memories,” Bucky says as they walk towards the car.

“Ah,” says Steve. “Yes. I can’t believe I went back to save you just for us to come out to each other and part ways again.”

Now Bucky knows all the history Steve has told him, and plenty more. Now Bucky has seen gay couples holding hands on the street with his own eyes, and knows what the term coming out means, and Steve can admit to himself that it feels good, really good, to share 2023 with Bucky. He leans over and opens the passenger door for Bucky.

“Funny how life works,” Bucky says, looking at him with those piercing eyes as he climbs in.

Steve walks around to the other side, gets in the driver’s seat. “Home?”

“Sure.”

It’s only when they’re in the apartment they share, with the scratch on the door and the old Captain America costume Steve stole from the museum way back when piled in a box in the corner, that Steve really feels the whole thing is real. He’s back here, with his Bucky, in their shared apartment, with all the baggage and history of the last seventy years, the seventy years he didn’t think Bucky would have to live through.

He snags Bucky’s hand just inside the apartment, as soon as the door falls shut behind them. Bucky throws all three of the bolts, as he always does, then looks at Steve as if to say, yes?

“Now that you’ve been through it,” Steve asks, “was it worth it?”

Bucky runs his tongue along his bottom lip, and Steve’s brain sparks out. “Steve,” he says.

Bucky turns his wrist in Steve’s hold again, curling his metal fingers through Steve’s, and Steve is pretty sure he’s about to die. After everything he’s been through, everything he’s survived, this will be what finally kills him. Bucky’s watching him closely. He seems to catch something like the truth in Steve’s gaze, because he lets out a tiny laugh.

“Steve,” Bucky begins again, “you didn’t figure it out?”

Steve’s mouth is dry. He’s up against the door. “Figure what out?”

Bucky laughs softly again and takes Steve’s chin in his hand, just like he did seventy years ago, yesterday. “I’m in love with you, you punk,” he whispers against Steve’s lips.

Steve makes a sound. He’s not sure what sound it is—a kind of gasp, a plea. Bucky is in love with him. God, oh God. And Bucky isn’t even kissing him. Steve wants to ask why, when there’s only the one inch between their mouths, but all he can get out is, “Yeah?”

Bucky’s thumb brushes Steve’s bottom lip. “When you told me about the future, you didn’t mention that you decided to fight the whole world just to protect me,” Bucky whispers.

Steve swallows hard. It doesn’t help anything. “Oh.”

“I thought you were being obtuse to be kind,” Bucky goes on. “Those days in the safehouse, pretending not to know what I meant. I know that now. I realize.” Bucky’s fingers on Steve’s pulse at his wrist. “Now that I know about what you’ve done for me, I’m starting to feel like you might be able to say it back.”

I’m in love with you, Steve mind fills in, racing to keep up. Oh, he thinks, that’s why it mattered that Steve was bi. That’s why Bucky walked into the snow. So he could hear Steve say it back.

“Think you can say it back?”

“Yeah,” Steve manages again. “Yeah.”

And he kisses Bucky, turning them around and pressing Bucky back up against the door. He doesn’t know how to talk, but his hands know what to do, his mouth knows what to do. His body has imagined Bucky against it so many times that touching him feels like breathing. This is what he was made for. He curls his hand around the back of Bucky’s head, another around Bucky’s hip, and kisses him so open mouthed and thorough that he feels they are swallowing each other’s souls.

Bucky gasps softly against him, the sound of someone discovering something wonderful, and gives as good as he gets. He gives it furious and insistent, like he’s trying to get the message through Steve’s thick skull.

Steve can’t blame him.

“Okay, then yes,” Bucky says against Steve’s jaw, sounding short of breath.

“What,” Steve says.

Bucky pulls back at looks him in the eye. “If you’re in love with me too, then yes. Now that I’ve been through it, I can say that it’s worth it.”

Steve runs his fingers through Bucky’s hair in wonder. “All this just to kiss on the street.”

“All this to kiss you on the street,” Bucky says, grinning, and kisses Steve again.