// closed starter for @mindfcllofmadness
Steve pulled his bike up at the block of apartments he’d been calling home for the past five years. The street was much more chaotic than usual, but that was to be expected. Having the population suddenly more than doubled. Things were chaotic everywhere. People were showing up in homes they used to own only to find them with new residents. Kids who had lost there parents and had been adopted by new ones, suddenly had their original parents back. It was messy and chaotic and people were having very mixed reactions to whether it should have happened or not.
But Steve had to believe he’d done the right thing. He had to believe that after everything they’d given to undo what Thanos had done, He had to.
And as Bucky pulled up his bike next to Steve’s, there was the biggest sign of them all. After all these years - a whole century - of fighting both physically and with societal expectations of who they were supposed to be, of the loss, and grief, the torture, the trauma of all the things that had happened to them, been done to them, here they were finally together. Finally having admitted that the only place they wanted to be was with each other.
They had earned this. They had given up everything, again and again. They had lost each other, come back together, lost each other again, so many times that Steve had come to believe that that was all there was to define them. But no. Finally whatever it was that Steve had needed to give him himself had been given, and they were here, in the borough they’d grown up, finally getting to stop and be.
Steve approached Bucky as the man got off his bike. “We might need to think about garaging these for a while,” he said. “Looks like there’s still some looting going on.”
He’d do his best to help settle things back down again, but right now, they were home, and they were going to take a moment for themselves. He offered Bucky his hand, still a little nervous about PDA but determined to stop letting what other people expected from him define him anymore. “Come on, let me show you the apartment.”
He took Bucky’s hand and led him upstairs to his apartment. The time heist had kept him away for a while, and the fact he’d left without tidying up or doing the dishes was a little on the mortifying side. It was a modest space. One bedroom, a combined living, dining and kitchen space. There’s an alcove with a desk that’s covered in bills, papers, and half finished sketches. He’s put up some art, sketches of motorcycle parts and a photo of Manhattan taken from Brooklyn in the 1930s.
“Welcome home, Bucky,” he said. “I’ll - uh - try and tidy up. Make yourself at home.”