the admission earns the gentlest curve at the corner of steve's mouth, because diana isn't wrong and, truth be told, neither of them has much room to complain about it after everything they've just admitted to one another. he understands what she means about distance, perhaps better than he'd like to, because distance had never really protected him from anything; it had only given memories more room to follow him. he has friends now, people he'd trust with his life without hesitation, and somewhere along the way the avengers had become something close to a family, built out of necessity at first and then maintained because none of them seemed particularly good at letting go of people they cared about. steve loves them for that, loves every stubborn and ridiculous one of them, and without them he suspects he'd be even more of an old fossil than he already feels like, but there are nights when none of that quite reaches the place he's trying to fill. because he still dreams.
sometimes it's nothing more complicated than waking before sunrise to the smell of breakfast drifting through a brooklyn apartment that hasn't existed in decades, hearing his ma moving around in the kitchen while he lies there for another few minutes pretending he's still asleep because getting out of bed means admitting another morning has started. other times it's bucky, not as the man he'd become or the soldier he'd been forced to become, but as the kid who used to sit backward in a chair while shining his shoes before heading out for the evening, or who'd lean over the railing outside steve's window and complain that if steve didn't hurry up they'd miss the picture show, only for the two of them to spend half the night arguing about whether the movie was any good afterward. sometimes, strangely enough, he dreams of the war itself, though he can't decide whether those are memories wearing the shape of dreams or dreams trying to make sense of memories that never really found anywhere else to go.
he has fought plenty of wars since then, against men, machines, armies, aliens, gods, and things that shouldn't have been able to exist in the first place, and somehow the worst part has never been the fighting itself. it is the knowledge that there are names he can still remember which no one else does, faces buried in graves with markers and others left in fields without even that, people who trusted him to get them home and never got the chance. steve has spent years telling himself that survival means something, that all the people who gave their lives bought him the opportunity to keep going, but sometimes it feels as though some part of him never actually left the war, as though it remained scattered across every battlefield he failed to reach in time, every friend he couldn't save, every civilian caught within a regime that never should have been allowed to exist.
and diana understands that in a way very few people ever could. she carries centuries of loss inside herself and somehow still manages to walk into the next morning with enough grace to believe it deserves her attention, whereas steve has never been quite as good at hiding the places where old grief catches on him. maybe that's why he likes talking to her, because there's no need to explain why remembering can hurt even when the memory itself is beautiful.
he glances toward the rain-blurred window, watching water stream down the glass, and an idea comes to him that has very little to do with food and far more to do with needing a reason to step outside.
"i should go get us something real to eat," he says, pushing himself upright from the chair and testing the stitches with a brief movement of his side. the wound protests, but hardly enough to matter after everything he's survived. "don't worry, i'll be quick."
he reaches for his jacket, then pauses with his hand resting against the back of the chair, "i'll go under cover of the rain. anything you're feeling like eating in particular?"
whatever answer comes his way, steve nods, committing it to memory before stepping back into the storm.
the motorcycle makes the trip faster, though the rain turns the country roads into slick ribbons underneath the tires, water streaming from his helmet and down the collar of his jacket whenever he has to slow for a bend or an unexpected patch of mud. for the first few miles, he tells himself he's thinking about the route, the safehouse, the possibility of being followed, anything that resembles the sort of practical problem he can actually solve, but eventually his thoughts drift back toward the past despite every attempt to redirect them.
maybe that's why he doesn't mind the rain quite as much as he normally would.
the storm gives him an excuse to keep his head down, gives him somewhere to look when his eyes begin to sting and something he can blame when his vision blurs for a second under the visor. nobody can tell the difference between rain running down his face and anything else, and steve finds an odd comfort in that as he rides through the countryside, letting the weather hide what he would never willingly explain.
by the time he reaches the little market in the nearest village, he's already decided what he wants to bring back-- fresh bread still warm from the bakery section, fruit that hasn't been sitting around in a tin, coffee that doesn't taste like it was filtered through someone's boot, and a few things he knows will make the safehouse feel marginally better.
he picks up whatever else diana had asked for, pays, stuffs everything carefully into two grocery bags, and heads back into the rain.
twenty minutes later, the door opens again and steve walks through it soaked to the bone, blond hair flattened inside the hood of his sweatshirt, gray hoodie clinging to his shoulders while the matching sweatpants have taken on nearly as much water as the road outside. he carries the grocery bags in both hands, drops them onto the nearest table. behind them, a tremendous crack of thunder rolls across the countryside.
