Steve had never been religious, no matter how many times his ma dragged him to church. The sermons never really made sense to him, and the sentiment was lost on him. God was an abstract concept, a nice idea, he didn’t hate it – he just had never seen the point.
But now, he was ready to fall to his knees and pray as long and hard as God wanted him to. If there was ever proof of a miracle, it was this moment right here. Not only was Bucky still alive, still safe, but he had finally shown up at his doorstep, like it was seventy years in the past and they were going to catch a train down to the water. Steve didn’t know what he’d done to deserve a miracle like this, something most people couldn’t even dream of – but he knew one thing. He wouldn’t waste it. He wanted to savor every extra moment, stolen away from fate itself.
Maybe Bucky wasn’t the same person he’d been. Maybe he wasn’t that figure in the museums, the face smiling back from old photos in the history books. Steve didn’t care. He wanted him just like this, wanted him real, wanted him sitting on his couch. It’d taken months to get to this point, but after seventy years in the ice, seventy years of thinking he was dead and gone – Steve could be patient. One step at a time. They’d keep walking one step at a time, right up to the end of the line. Just like they always did.
“Never did learn how to play that game,” Steve said, shuffling his feet. “Always needed you over my shoulder, telling me when to play the Ace.” Bucky had done his best all those years ago, but mostly their ‘double dates’ were two girls both interested in Buck, drawing straws to see who’d be stuck with little Steve Rogers for the night. Steve didn’t really mind, except for a couple of very pointed exceptions, girls who caught his eye and made him really wish he was bigger, stronger, that he could breathe without wheezing. Wishing that he was more like Bucky, really. That’s what it came down to. Things were different now. They were so incredibly different, sometimes it still made his head spin.
The tone shifted suddenly, sharply, and Steve’s eyes locked onto Bucky’s, the desperation and sorrow he felt reflected right back at him. Both of them had so much weight on their shoulders, such heavy burdens, mostly made up of their responsibility to one another. He would never set it down, not in another hundred years, but he knew the weight of it. Maybe, if he didn’t, if he didn’t know Bucky so well, even this version of him, he might’ve been confused by the plea. But it clicked instantly in his mind, and he nodded. “I promise,” he said, reaching out and grasping Bucky’s shoulder tight. “I promise you. There’s something, there’s always gonna be something. To the end of line, there’s something.”
Something to hold onto. Something to connect them. Something to keep them going. Something worth fighting for, something worth remembering. Something to laugh about, even when they didn’t want to. Something to apologize for, even if neither of them would accept it. There would always be something between them. Something to help, something that hurt, something to love. Steve could think of a thousand ‘somethings’ he would do for Bucky. Because there was something alive left in those eyes, because Bucky wasn’t nothing, even if he might’ve felt like it. Steve wouldn’t let him go again, wouldn’t lose him. Never again.
Of course, that was a promise the world had made once. And failed spectacularly to keep. His father had died for that promise, the war to end wars. Steve would die for this promise if he had to. He wouldn’t even hesitate, if it meant keeping Bucky safe. If It meant giving him something of a life. After all, it was his fault that Bucky had lost so much, that they’d taken everything but his life in the end. And the life they left him with… it wasn’t much of a life at all. But now Steve had a chance to fix that. To make things right, to give Bucky the second chance he really deserved. Whatever anyone said about the Winter Soldier, whatever they thought, Bucky Barnes was a good man. Bucky Barnes was his best friend. And Bucky Barnes deserved something.
The words cut through him, but Steve forced himself to listen. He owed Bucky that much at the very least. Probably more, if he was honest, but he couldn’t go back in time. He couldn’t stop Hydra’s experiments, couldn’t change what happened on the train. “A book?” he repeated, brows furrowed. He knew Bucky was being facetious, a book that Pierce carried around constantly, wrote in – that had to be important. “Maybe we should look for it,” he suggested quietly. “Might… jog some things. Make them clearer. If that’s what you want.” Remembering their childhood, that was one thing. This was an entirely different part of the past, darker and more twisted, full of forgotten horrors they might not even be able to imagine.
“He does,” he said quietly. “Not as well as you do. But he definitely got his father’s brains.” Among other things – not that Steve would ever say so. It was strange to think that Tony and Bucky had never met, that these two major parts of his life had yet to collide. He couldn’t imagine what would happen if they did. “Howard – he was different than we knew him,” he said softly, biting his lip. “I don’t know it all, Tony doesn’t talk about it much. But it sounds like it changed him. The war, I mean.” He paused, sighing softly. “Guess it changed all of us. The whole world.”
The serum and the war, they’d changed a lot of things for him. Transformed him inside and out. But one that had never, ever changed – Steve Rogers was a stubborn son of a bitch. “I didn’t have you,” he insisted, jaw clenched for a moment. Not out of anger, but because he felt the sharp, jabbing ache in his chest, and it hurt remembering. Thinking about that night, all the ways it’d gone wrong, all the ways it went wrong afterwards. “I didn’t have you there, and I got on that plane knowing I wasn’t coming back.” Maybe not consciously, not at first, but there was an air of finality to the entire mission. “And as I was sinking in the ice, I thought – if it had to be the end, at least you’d be waiting on the other side for me.” He had never told anyone that, the history books only had his last exchange with Peggy on the record, and Steve didn’t talk about it. How it felt to hit the water, to feel the ice surround him. He barely remembered it, it only came back in flashes.
Bucky was spouting excuses now, Steve had heard it all before. Back when Steve would start a fight, need bailing out, and Bucky would get hurt in the process. He’d always say it was his own fault, that he hadn’t ducked or swung fast enough, something. Steve never believed him, but Bucky Barnes was his own brand of stubborn when it came down to it. “Peggy came to me that night. After it happened. No one else would get close, I think they didn’t know what to say,” he whispered, staring down at his hands. “She told me to ‘respect the dignity’ of your choice. And I tried, Buck, I did, but –” He clenched his jaw again, fighting off a wave of emotion, welling up in his throat, choking him slowly. “But it was still my fault. At least some of it, I can’t – I can’t let you carry it all alone,” he said firmly, looking up at him. “You could’ve been a leader,” he said simply. “They would’ve followed you. I followed you. That whole time, I was always following you.”
The serum had made him stronger, faster, more durable. It had amplified him, but he still had limitations. He knew he could be impulsive, that he thought with his heart more than his head, so whenever there was a decision to make, he talked it over with Bucky. He listened to him, even if they were just joking around. Did Bucky never realize how much Steve needed him, serum or no?
Steve laughed as they both spoke at the same time, saying essentially the same thing. “Probably,” he said, smirking at his best friend. Despite all the pain, all the messiness in their past, there was one simple fact. Bucky was here. Steve could put a hand on his shoulder and feel how real he was. “Good thing I’ve got you here, to watch my six.” Just like they always had. Just like they always would.
“Both,” he replied easily. He wasn’t ashamed of being a sap – they’d called him ‘sensitive’ back then, as Bucky knew. His mother fretted about it, but Steve didn’t much care what anyone thought. He was going to be a soldier no matter how ‘sensitive’ he was, and in the end, it was that quality that made him what he was. “I need you, Buck,” he said. “Pretty sure I’ve made that much clear. And I don’t care what you’ve done, what happened to you. I want to know everything you want to tell me. Whatever it is, I’m with you. To the end of the line, that’s how it always is. No matter where that line goes,” he said firmly, squeezing his shoulder tight once more before letting his hand fall. He laughed under his breath and clasped his hands together. “I can’t do this with anyone else, you know,” he said softly, looking over at Bucky. “Peggy’s gone. Howard’s been gone, the other Howlies – we’re the last ones left. The only ones who remember what it was like back then. How it felt to buy ice cream for a nickel. What it’s like dodging bombs in the trenches. All these memories…” He tapped his finger against his temple. “And no one in the entire world gets it like you, Buck.” He smiled and let his gaze drift away again. “She was pretty,” he said. “And she was happy you asked her out. Her brothers weren’t as thrilled,” he said, smirking lightly. Even then, Bucky had a reputation.
Bucky had tried, in the beginning. He had tried to listen to the words in his ma’s letters, telling him to keep faith, that Hashem would guide him to greater and better things. He had kept the Star of David tucked under his shirt, had flipped off those that commented on it, had pretended that the feeling of it pressing against the back of his dogtags and into his chest wasn’t suffocating him. The things that he did, the things he saw, they ruined it all for him. He had walked through fields that stunk of poppies, and he had seen the red of blood seeping through the ground, had seen the faces of men whose lives had been cut dramatically short. He had walked through the valleys of death a thousand times over with a gun slung over his shoulder, and he had known, then, that if Hashem was there, he had forsaken them long ago. Given up hope while he still could. Bucky wasn’t sure he could blame him.
After all, Bucky knew more than enough himself. He was an angel of death, the ones that were forbidden from the kingdom. During the day he fought with honour, followed the Howlies’ code, never shot a man in the back. During the night, though, that was something different. During the night he got a telegraph from Colonel Philips, or even from Carter - something he wasn’t much in the mind for revealing to Steve then, and definitely not now - and he would get a knife and go into enemy territory, put it across the throat of their leader.
He had done it, so he said, for the reason that anybody did anything in that war - to stop someone doing the same thing to their countrymen, to their blood, to their family. Truth be told, though, Bucky had always found his home in war. He hated it, but it suited him, sat well on his shoulders in a way it never had with even Steve. “You were too trusting, that was all,” Bucky said. “Probably heard your Ma in the back of your head telling you gambling was the Devil’s pastime, too.” Bucky had heard it as well, his own ma’s voice, but he was well adept at ignoring it even before he shipped out.
Perhaps it was pathetic, racing for scraps, trying to get anything that fell off the table, but that was all Bucky had to receive now. It was all that would make him a person again, all that would make him capable of existing in a world where he didn’t have continuous orders, where his path wasn’t laid out right in front of him, and his focus could be entirely on a target. He needed something to live for, and right now, Steve was promising that. It wasn’t fair, asking him to do that when Bucky knew he would still take a bullet in an instant, and for a ghost at that. It wasn’t fair, it was selfish, and if Bucky was a better person he would’ve never come back to New York.
“Guess we weren’t joking when we said that,” Bucky said, remembering how the words had come through him easily. At Steve’s ma’s funeral, the pastor had said something that Bucky had turned over in his head for an hour or more. Sarah had fought well, had helped so many people, but she had reached the end of the line, and now she would ascend. Bucky hadn’t known even then about ascending, but he had known that he was gonna be there for his best friend until the time came when they were separated by the big guy himself. “Never really pictured it extending to 2018, but I guess we were thoroughbreds. Might’ve lived this long even if we hadn’t died.”
Bucky had aimed for the joker during the war. He knew that often, the guy that was cracking jokes and laughing the loudest was the guy that was shitting himself the most, and it was clear as day. That wasn’t the case with him. He did it because for a long time, especially after Zola put whatever he did into him, war came natural. The bitterness didn’t resurface. Violence felt almost like a release. Steve had said that good became better, bad became worse, and that was true. Of course, at the time, Steve hadn’t known that Bucky was the same thing, or a bastardisation of it. He thought he was telling a story that affected nobody else, a story that he could be self-deprecating in as always.
Bad definitely became worse for Bucky. It kept getting worse, too. He wasn’t sure how much was him, how much was the serum running through his veins. “Yeah, like a red book. Maybe black, I don’t know. Had a star on it like this one. The star - it was silver. I think.” The colours blurred in his mind, but he remembered something about Vasily Karpov, as well. That name, though, wasn’t uttered out loud. He would take the risk of forgetting it again if it meant Steve never had to hear it. “I’ve already been hunting down Hydra,” he admitted. “Being a bartender only got me so far. Always find myself called back to it, you know? Every dickhead I’ve taken out had nothing. Just money and connections. Can’t take either of those to the grave.” You could, though, take secrets. Books. Who knew where the hell it was now? “Yeah. Yeah, what’s the worst that could happen?”
Father. It still seemed strange, somehow, to picture it. Strange to think that Howard had grown and aged. Bucky still remembered him in a vintage car, sunglasses on, models in the backseat. “What way different?” Bucky asked, raising an eyebrow. Then Steve kept talking, and Bucky’s gaze darkened. “Yeah,” he said. “Howard always had that kinda thing in him, you know? Something that wasn’t quite wired right. Used to think it was his eccentricities, you know how rich folks are.” War changed people, Hashem knew it had changed Bucky, but a part of him wondered whether it just brought out your true self, or a paradox of it.
“There’s going out in a blaze of glory, and then there’s what you did.” Bucky had listened to the tapes. Of course he had. He had frequented every Captain America exhibit this side of Manhattan, and the ones over the water in Europe, where they worshipped him with less of a reverence, even before the Civil War. He’d heard Peggy’s desperation, her heartbreak. “The cold must’ve got to your head,” Bucky said, voice laden, “‘cause no deity would ever put you and me in the same place. You saw the things I did. You didn’t see the others.” That had been the whole point, after all. The Howlies needed someone who was willing to do the dirty jobs. Philips had always trusted that Bucky would never refuse.
That was why he was reluctant to say that everything he had done with the Winter Soldier had been entirely Hydra’s doing. Bucky had always been good at following orders, at doing the things no one else wanted to know, no one else’s soul could bare having on it. “I would’ve been happy going out that day,” Bucky said, looking at him seriously. “I made a stupid mistake, let them get the best of me, but I still would’ve been good to go. Think we both knew there was no going home for me.”
The idea that the conversations they had at night over a smouldering campfire, or in a tent that definitely stunk out the entire forest, had some kind of impact on Steve almost made Bucky burst out laughing. He had progressed well in the army, he knew his opinion was worth something, but the idea of Steve following him rather than the other way about seemed impossible. “You know, before I knew Captain America was you, I used to hate the guy.” It seemed like a confession that didn’t need to be made, but it was a memory. A vivid one. “Used to stand out in front of the stage watching these newsreels, wondering whether the poor son of a bitch they put in that getup had any clue what it was like to be out here. You proved me wrong, Steve. You proved the whole damn world wrong.”
Steve had to know that trusting Bucky, that putting this much weight in him, was a dangerous thing to do. “They’re still looking for me,” Bucky said finally. “I got some friends, people I can trust, but the government still wants to see me in cuffs, wants to see me pay for what I’ve done - and I did do it, Steve, no two ways about it.” Bringing up everything that he had been through, everything that he had put other people through, and everything that he couldn’t remember while people stood and judged him, that was nothing other than a nightmare, but maybe that needed to happen. Maybe he needed to spend the rest of however long his life was in a cell. “I know. I -- I saw in the news. I wanted to see her before, you know, but it didn’t work out that way.” Probably for the best. Peggy would’ve shot him, all likelihood. He had been instrumental in destroying her life’s work, even if it was corrupted. “That’s why I came back,” he admitted. “To get those memories back. To -- reaffirm them, I guess. Make sure I wasn’t creating them in my head. They took a lot of things out of there, Steve. A lot of whoever you knew before.”
