I was going to make a joke like, “Steve and Bucky starring in The Notebook” but wound up actually thinking about it and oh no. Steve and Bucky have this amazing relationship, however you choose to interpret it. They’re separated. They mutually go through hell. They find each other again. Bucky’s filled up notebooks upon notebooks with memories, stuff that’s come back to him. He’s even sorted it, tried his best to organize everything in some semblance of a timeline, chronological order. He separates the Before‘s; There’s a notebook for post-capture but pre-fall, but there’s also a notebook of before, and it goes all the way back to Brooklyn. And then something happens, and he starts to lose himself. Again. Maybe it’s an after-effect from all the times HYDRA wiped his mind, maybe it’s something else, but it happens, and despite everyone’s best efforts, it can’t be stopped. So Steve reads from the Before notebooks, and again and again it brings Bucky back.
Until it doesn’t.
