Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I guess this is goodbye.

Maybe you saw this coming, maybe you didn't, but fact is, I did, I've seen what's on the horizon and it's a whole world of pain. They're not going to let go. They're not going to forget. And eventually, no matter how careful we are, there's going to be a bullet out there with my name on it. Given my track record of getting people hurt, and your track record of putting yourself in harm's way, it's not me that thing's going to hit, and I don't like those odds. A wise lady once told me it's not who you'd die for—it's who you'd live for. So I'm going to live, for both our sakes.

False hope's a poison and I won't give you any. Your agent friends are helping me disappear—don't be too mad at them—but after that, they won't know any more than I do now. I don't know where I'm going. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. I don't know what the future holds. And when I say I don't think we'll ever see each other again, I mean that. I don't mean I'm dubious, or I'm hopeful. I just don't fucking know. This is all too likely a world where it's never going to be safe to use the 'and' in you and me.

You deserve better than what time stole from you, Steve. It took and took and took. I hope to god it gives you something back when I'm gone.

Steve moves to the Tower, of course.

For a multitude of reasons, he can't stay in DC. For a start, no one can safely move into the building while he's still living in it, because the press are all over him like barnacles in the wake of the Winter Soldier's “death.” Locals are suffering and it isn't fair of him to impose on them. New York is his home, and if he's honest with himself, he does miss it. And there's Tony, peer-pressuring him with gorgeous photographs of the view from his rent! free! suite! because Tony is and forever will be a gigantic child with insecurity issues. The last straw is Miss Potts, who shows up with an elegant automated charity plan that allows Steve to donate monthly what he would normally spend on rent. She has PowerPoints. It's very convincing.

Mostly, though, he doesn't want to keep living in the place where James was, and now isn't.

There's a certain sense in which Steve's almost—grateful. That they're apart. It'd sound crazy if he tried to explain it to anybody else; hell, it sounds crazy to him, but it doesn't make it not true. It was manic, like trying to dance to a band playing triple-time. Both of them trapped in the same few rooms, forced proximity, heightened emotions: it was like what he suspects might have happened anyway, if they'd been given time and space to work themselves out, but all crammed into a couple of frantic weeks, both of them desperate for distraction and affection and not knowing how to ask for it. He has a notion that James felt it too, the too-muchness of everything. Steve hadn't been capable of resisting that parting gesture, because what if they never saw each other again? (Always so dramatic, Peggy said once, and she...wasn't wrong.) But Steve had seen—James had been so raw, and—it had hurt him. It's a pretty wild assumption, but Steve can't help wondering whether James, in that moment, had felt the same thing Steve had when the mask came off. Like every nerve being punched at once. Like a body wasn't designed to feel that much of anything.

If—when they get another chance, he'll come at it slower. He'll try to do it right. Not that he knows how, but. He can learn.

And then there's Tony.

Steve's bewildered, over and over, by how the James thing is apparently a complete non-issue when it comes to Tony, in all its iterations. Steve forgets, when he's irritated at Tony, that the guy is really perceptive, oddly delicate about certain things, even if in person he appears to bulldoze over them with the subtlety of a rhinoceros in a shopping mall. It's a cover, Steve's learning, for at least a few of Tony's neuroses, and it makes Steve want to go back in time and give Howard a shake and yell: What happened to you? But he suspects, in his more honest moments, that he really doesn't want to know the answer.

“So your guy came back from the dead, except not,” Tony says, after he pries most of the story out of Steve one late night in the lab, a month in to what Steve's trying and failing to think of as a sabbatical. He's holding DUM-E at a stable angle while Tony fixes some imperceptible problem with its treads, and DUM-E's clinging to Steve's arm like it's a kid at the doctor's office. “Wow, hey, that sucks. Identity, am I right? We think we're pretty solid things, but we're not so much, as it turns out. We're complicated. Brains, though! Brains are easy. You can make a brain. We could grow a brain right here, right now. Right, Banner?”

“Leave me out of this,” Bruce says amiably, bent over his sequencing equipment.

“But identity,” Tony says, like he hasn't heard, “That's trickier, that's the bitchkitty. Because we could absolutely grow somebody a new brain, and I'm willing to bet there's six—no, I'd say eight surgeons capable of doing the transplant successfully, but then you'd have a new person. The old person would be gone, finis, bye bye. We are our neurons, and all that. Hey, did you know a bunch of cultures thought consciousness came from the liver? It was totally a thing. I mean, don't get me wrong, liver's important, you're not getting very far without your liver, but—”

“It's okay, we figured things out,” Steve says, trying to backtrack to the actual conversational content of Tony's ramble. “Yeah, he's technically a different person, but he's also—not. You ever meet someone and think, hey, that person reminds me of this person, but you can't figure out exactly why?”

“I assume you mean in a sense other than 'my best friend's brainwashed twin tried to kill me and now he lives in my house',” Tony says. “Sure, I can see it. So, what, you just...became friends? Buddies? Pals?”

“Whatever lets me say 'I miss him like hell' without getting ragged about it,” Steve says.

“You know I hate to point out the obvious, but there's a solution for that.”

Steve shakes his head. “We—I can't. Even if everything cools down, it's still up to him.”

Tony squints at him over DUM-E's chassis, which becomes an uncomfortably knowing look after about three seconds. “Damn, Rogers, you could've said it was like that.” Before Steve can open his mouth, Tony adds, “No wonder you didn't want to stay in that shitty walk-up. Did I ever tell you about the estate in California I never, ever visit? It's mine, technically, but only by the vaguest possible—” and then DUM-E took exception to something Tony unhooked, flailed with a lot more strength than Steve was expecting, and beaned Tony in the face, bringing an end to that particular line of questioning. At least for a few days.

“So, you and Luke Skywalker,” Tony tries, the next time Steve's in the lab. “Was that a thing before he got forcibly dark-sided, or...”

“You're reference-testing me,” Steve says warningly, and Tony shrugs, unconcerned. “We, uh. Not—exactly, I mean—”

“I think the answer you want is: no, Tony, we weren't shagging in the 30's.”

“Oh, so we had to be fucking for it to count?”

“Captain America.”

“I'm just saying nobody would've been surprised,” Steve says, and, “You know we lived in the queerest neighborhood in Brooklyn, right?” to Tony's climbing eyebrows. “The landladies of our last place were a couple of bulldaggers who owned a bar out Harlem way. Just because we didn't chat about it over lunch with the neighbors didn't mean we didn't, you know. We weren't Victorians, cripes.”

“You know, the Victorians were pretty dirty,” says Tony, which can't really be beat as a distraction tactic, because while Steve's widdershins conversations with Tony are always educational, he doesn't often learn things about, say, the long and sordid history of pornographic magazines.

But the fact that Tony keeps deflecting with humor really starts to bug him.

Steve's—not concerned, exactly; at loose ends might be a better descriptor—with the fact that he knows Tony's apparently skimmed the HYDRA data-pack in its entirety, over one particularly sleepless chlorophyll-soaked fortnight, but he's never brought up That One Mission with Steve, obliquely or otherwise. Steve knows James doesn't remember it; he was pretty clear that the nineties were a no-go zone for memories, at least memories with any context, and even if he did, he wouldn't know the significance of that particular mission anyway, so it's just an itch, is what Steve's saying, and it unnerves him that he doesn't know where to step.

“Oh, I was pissed,” Tony says, when Steve finally dredges up the courage to ask. “I was so mad I couldn't see straight. I'm glad you guys weren't here, tee bee aitch, because I might've done something I'd regret a lot, once the dust settled.” Tony clears his throat. “Anyway, once I found some chill, I read some more, and—well, I mean, this is for posterity so I'll be honest, I was thinking about being tortured in a cave. As you do. And how I was down there for three months. Something like that. JARVIS?”

“Three months, six days, Sir,” JARVIS supplies.

“Yeah, that, thanks.” Tony spins a thin socket wrench like a drumstick. “And then—you still with me, Cap? And then, well, let's be frank, I got distracted, that happens, it's a thing, but then you came along with your...everything, and you filled in some gaps, so to speak, and I started thinking about the other thing. The thing where those assholes took a baby, a literal, actualfacts, brand new human being, and instead of teaching him that the cow goes moo and the uranium slug goes into the graphite channel—”

“I'm pretty sure that was just Howard,” Steve says.

“—instead of doing whatever it is people do with babies,” Tony says, “They taught him how to kill people instead. How to be a murderer, actually, which is different. That's not just, like, point and shoot, that's a complicated thing, right there, it would've been up-close, it would've been personal, it would've been one-on-one, they would've had to look him in the eyes when they were doing it, Steve, that is fucked up, and I maybe destroyed a prototype or two while freaking out about it a little, so no, to answer the question you're crawling out of your skin to ask, I'm not secretly holding a grudge against your whatever-he-is for being pointed at my parents like a goddamned gun,” he finishes, with way more emotion than Steve's really prepared to handle from a Stark at any hour, let alone at 3:17 in the morning.

Luckily, he's not obligated to do anything about it, because Tony says, very quickly, like he's trying to pretend it never happened, “And that arm. That beautiful fucking arm. Listen, I know from non-consensual body modifications, okay, so when I say a thing's beautiful, I mean scientifically beautiful, I mean beautiful like the uncertainty principle is beautiful, like Cherenkov blue is beautiful, like things you shouldn't touch are beautiful, that arm was a thing of beauty and it never should've been installed on a human being.”

“You know he cut it off, right?” Steve says. “With a circular saw. It was rigged to poison him if he didn't get regular maintenance.”

“What? No! When were you going to share this with the class, Cap? Christ on a bike.” Tony kicks a wheely stool across the lab. DUM-E and U chase after it. “And that, right there, tells me a whole lot about the kind of people who could turn a kid into a science experiment.”

“Your dad turned a kid into a science experiment,” Steve says, giving Tony an out to change the subject if he wants to. If there's anything Tony loves more than building things, Steve's gathered, it's complaining about his father.

“Yeah, but he also helped design the atomic bomb, and I'm pretty sure both of those things drove him off the deep end, so.” Tony rolls his eyes. “Making Weapons and Regretting It: A Biography of the Starks.” Then his eyes light up. “Hey, he wouldn't be in the market for a new arm, would he? Modular, haptic feedback, guaranteed no poison whatsoever, unless I'm allowed to test his alcohol tolerance against yours at some point during the process.”

“I asked him last year. He said no.”

“What a dweeb,” says Tony, not meaning it at all.

☙

Something Steve's ma used to say was: When life knocks you down, you always stand up.

She'd meant it as a general philosophy, but to her—and Bucky's—everlasting despair, Steve had taken it to heart as guidance for fights. He'd get back on his feet until he was out cold and couldn't. His fights are down to the occasional commonplace villain round-up these days, which Tony or Clint and Natasha can often handle on their own, and Steve more than anything wants to make her proud, so it doesn't matter how torn up he is, he'll keep on keeping on, as peacefully as he's able. Not fighting, it turns out, is a lot harder than the other thing.

And Steve isn't—no matter what Tony says—pining away in the Tower like a damsel in distress. He's doing things; he's living. He's in the lab being ordered around by Tony most nights, he's got a regular Tai Chi hour with Bruce in the mornings, and he goes out for lunch at least once a week with whoever's around, usually Miss Potts, but Nat and Maria and Clint sometimes surprise him, and he gets tag-teamed by Jane and Darcy whenever they're in town. Sam's visited a few times, ostensibly for wing tune-ups, but he always hauls Steve out to Jersey to visit Deborah and the twins, and he helped Steve network with the local VFW when Steve asked him to put in a good word. Volunteering on weekends turned into painting a mural in the remodeled gender-neutral bathrooms, which turned into a graphic design position, which turned into running an informal arts-and-crafts session for the senior vets. (He'd thought it would bring the press down on everyone's heads, but New York is too cool to care about famous people who haven't done anything crazy in more than a week.)

So: he's living. He's not dead.

He feels like he's missing an organ, though, sometimes.

When winter hits, it's the worst New York's survived since 2006, the worst Steve's seen since he was nineteen, over two feet of snow in a single day and the city grinding to as much of a halt as it ever does. Steve thinks about a lot of things as he watches the storm from the safety of the ninetieth floor: how a winter like this would have killed a whole lot of people, back in his day, probably him included; how Brooklyn would have looked, whether they'd have been able to put up the Rockefeller tree in Midtown; how Ma would've stood at the window and muttered in Gaelic about how she ever could've thought staying on the east coast was a good idea, lord, whyever did we not just keep going, Steven, your father was sometimes a very stupid man; but mostly, Steve thinks about James, at the end of those first terrible weeks, when he'd finally managed to drag himself out of bed. James would sometimes watch the snow falling until he fell asleep on the window seat in the parlor or the armchair in his room, and Steve always felt terrible about waking him up. Unlike in his bed, James seemed to sleep sounder with one eye on the world. While he'd been ill, and while it had lasted, the snow was the only thing James showed any genuine preference for, the only thing he visibly enjoyed, and Steve had prayed for it to continue past its usual season. Steve wishes James were here now. He'd love this.

It's not the first or the only time Steve thinks that. I wish James was here. Steve had thought the same about Bucky after he woke up—every billboard, every television show, every strange piece of fashion, Steve'd wanted to turn to Bucky and say: Hey! Look at that! It hurts less, thinking it about James; it doesn't scour him out. He doesn't need to reset his brain, tune it into a reality where there's a hole instead of a person. Not I wish he wasn't dead, but I wish he could see this. Steve thinks it when Natasha tries to teach him Hebrew over Hanukkah. He thinks it when Sam takes a video of Hill fast asleep on the common room sofa, New Year's Eve, covered in confetti and spooning Lucky like they're old marrieds. He thinks it when Thor visits and brings toys from Asgard for Tony to dismantle.

In a sense he has to; he has to think in present tense. It's not as though he doesn't know the truth. He's not stupid. James had said never, in the letter he'd written hours before Steve gave him the keys, but—Steve can't bring himself to wholly believe it. It's probably a mistake to keep himself warm by stoking that fire, but he sleeps easier at night, for a while, picturing James in the bungalow, safe. Happy. Surrounded by flowers. Steve doesn't know what the property looks like, or what an English garden consists of, so he Googles until he can rearrange the details in his head, until he can imagine James moving through white halls, his bare feet on age-smoothed wood, his hand in the dirt and hollyhocks against his face. It's a balm to counteract the nightmares of James afraid, alone, bloodied, with a gun in his hand. Steve doesn't know which nightmares are worse—the ones where James is pointing the gun at an enemy, or the ones where he's pointing the gun at his own head. Steve has no illusions at all that James would choose death over capture. So: wisteria. Cottages. Paperbark maples. Anything but the great unknown.

As December rolls into January, though, and as January turns into February, and as the news reverts to its usual five-minute attention span, it gets harder and harder to maintain the fantasy. In June it'll be a year. Twelve months like stones dropping in a well. Gone. And from Sussex, nothing but silence.

“Cheer up, Sad-Cap,” Tony tells him. “He probably jetted off to Tahiti to escape the country winter. I'll bet you the Phantom he shows up with a full-body tan.”

“You just want to see me to drive that boat through Manhattan,” Steve says, but his heart's not in it. He'd give anything for it to be true, for James to stroll into the Tower like he owns it, glowing. It's the moment Steve knows. A bucket of water on the fire. Something in him won't let him cling to the lie.

☙

Steve hadn't thought one way or another about his memory before the serum; it'd been perfectly average, probably, which would explain why it never crossed his mind. Nobody marvels at ordinariness. But waking up sixteen hours after the procedure, alone, in the middle of the night, every clear-distilled movement of the whole day playing in front of his eyes, fever-vivid and very nearly hallucinatory, was more frightening by far than anything else: more than the claustrophobia of the machine, more than the neon scarlet of Erskine's blood on his hands—red, he remembers thinking detachedly, that's red—more than the surreal wide-lensed view of the world 10 inches of height suddenly afforded him. Looking once at a map and being able to replicate it unerringly had been—uncomfortable. Like his body had been hijacked by a parasitic alien from one of those films Bucky'd loved so much.

So, he remembers the war a whole lot better than he ever wanted to. There'd never been a moment when he'd wanted to go home; on the contrary, he'd known he was exactly where he needed to be, and that they were doing good work, counteracting a few pockets of evil in the world. But he'd thought—stupidly, really; should've listened to his dad's friends when they talked around their nightmares, years after their own marginally less brutal war—he'd thought that once it was over he could let it all go. That the horror of it would slide out of him when he wasn't frantically trying to grab every scrap of intel so his brain could pencil it in for later. He'd thought he could leave it behind. His brain, it turned out, was writing it all down in stone.

It's often smell, for whatever reason, that triggers the wide-screen drop into memories he can't erase. Steve had suspected during the war that they could've used him like a bloodhound, but he'd never suggested it, being generally pretty repulsed by the idea, and (as a fallback excuse) uncertain of its realistic application in the field. Sometimes he'll get hit by it when he's out, walking into some inconvenient cloud of scents that send him hurtling right back to the killing floors or the labs. A waft of someone's perfume and somebody else's lunch, and he's deep down in the musk of unwashed bodies and the vinegary-sweet smell of decomposition, failing to gag only because his body'd seemed to have forgotten the knack.

It's weird things like that which really get to him. Nudity does it too, if he's not expecting it. All of the subjects they'd found, alive or dead, strapped to tables and crammed into cages and piled so high they'd broken the bones of the corpses below—there was occasionally a scrap of fabric on them, a jerry-rigged loincloth that seemed to breed lice more than it retained anybody's dignity, but on the whole, they were naked as the day they were born. Except Bucky. It eats at Steve sometimes, what Zola's reason might've been for it. Why Zola might have let Bucky keep his clothes. There had been a horrible articulated machine like an enormous insect, hovering over Bucky when Steve found him: was Zola only working on Bucky's mind, on that particular day? Was it some kind of signifier that Bucky was special? Chosen, in some way? Steve can't make sense of it. When Steve had finally managed to talk Bucky into a clean uniform, they'd had to cut his old things off; they were crusted hard and stuck to his skin. There'd been fibers stuck in all the abrasions on his body. It'd taken Steve over an hour to pick them all out with tweezers, Bucky complaining like a sailor to bluff through what was probably excruciating pain. But Bucky hadn't developed any infection, or even so much as a mild fever. They never talked about it, but Steve should've suspected, really. From that alone.

The moment Steve remembers most clearly, the one that tends to loop, is Bucky looking up at him in the factory. For what felt like a year and was probably only three or four seconds, Bucky'd looked at him like—looked through him, really. Before Steve's ma died, before he moved in with Arnie and Skip across the hall from Bucky and his folks, they'd lived one floor up from a pair of middle-aged siblings, Flo and Dean. Steve had visited when Ma did, because he liked Flo—she sold little watercolor paintings to make ends meet when typing wouldn't cover the rent—but Dean always frightened him a little. Dean had been a construction worker, and a damned good one, if you believed the stories: a real monkey, made for climbing the girders, and strong as three men.

It'd been one of those freak accidents. A bolt fumbled from somebody's belt, half a dozen floors up, and although Dean had lived, he'd never recovered. He'd get up on command, even walk in a straight line; would use the facilities and mechanically put food in his mouth. But he never spoke, and his gaze never focused, and it seemed to Steve then that there'd been nobody inside, just a shell, a body going through the motions after the soul had gone somewhere else. The way Bucky'd looked at Steve, in that endless moment, was just like Dean and his glassy eyes. Reflective, like a dead animal's. The next second, Bucky'd tuned in like somebody upstairs had flicked the antenna, and Steve had felt a relief so powerful he'd almost gone to his knees.

For weeks, all Steve could see when he looked at James was that moment, over and over like a record left too long on a turntable. The moment when Bucky clicked on. He kept expecting it to happen again, a miraculous awakening, the endless stretch of static before you find the station, and at the end of it, recognition. It'd light up Bucky's face from the eyes, just like before, and Steve would see his best friend crawl back into his own skin like putting on a suit, and they'd walk out into the sunlight, in the future, and everything would be okay.

In other words: he was an idiot.

He'd apologized, and James had forgiven him, but he still wants to take James's hand and say, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't see it for so long. I'm sorry I was blind. I'm sorry I expected you to remember. I'm sorry I wanted you to be him. It was for me, that wanting. I told myself it was for your benefit but it wasn't: it was for me. It was selfish. I'm so sorry.

It'd be too little, too late. The way he wants it is superstitious, a prophylactic measure: if he apologizes enough, in the right way, it'll somehow have prevented James from being hurt, from suffering in silence, from leaving. Steve hasn't thought this way since he was a kid, bargaining with God for his ma's life. He's outgrown the idea of a God who can be cajoled into producing wishes like a genie, maybe outgrown the idea of God as a being. Instead of an almighty person with agency, he likes the idea of God as a force, like gravity, like magnetism. A subatomic field that's present when people are kind in difficult circumstances, when people are heroes, when they're conductors of light. Tony would tell him he's abusing quantum mechanics, probably. But for all that, he still has the impulse to plead. He wants it to have been a thing that he said, when it mattered. He wants that apology to have lived in his mouth.

Now, he's not sure if he'll ever get the chance.

☙

On March 9th, a package arrives.

It's a little cardboard box, maybe big enough for a paperback. It's stamped and marked with all sorts of designations Steve hasn't seen since the war, shipped Royal Mail from some out-of-the-way post office. Maybe the kind that doesn't even have a debit machine; Steve sometimes likes to imagine there's still places like that in the world. The tissue paper inside is, for some reason, mint green. Steve stares at it for longer than he really should, trying to puzzle out whether there's some deeper meaning to it that he's not picking up.

Under the tissue paper is a set of keys.

The keys Steve gave to James. All of them, present and accounted for on their metal ring: two for the front door, one for the back, and one for the shed. Instead of the keychain that was on the ring before, an enamel bee that must've had some significance for Susan, there's a round metal charm, the kind of cheap thing you'd buy in an airport for your kids to perk them up, the kind with names on them. This one, in black on a blue background, just says: J.

Steve hopes he was right about the white halls and the hollyhocks. That's all he has, now: hope. He hopes James was happy, until he had to leave. Decided to leave; that's a nicer thought, isn't it, than assuming he had to run? Steve wonders how much work James did on the bungalow, in the garden. Whether the flowers are blooming stronger this year because of his care. Whether the neighbors will miss him, or if they'll even notice that he's gone. For all that James had Bucky's talent of making friends by walking into a room, he also had what Bucky hadn't: the trick of becoming invisible. An empty space. A ghost story.

Well, that's that, Steve thinks, and carefully eases himself to the floor.

He curls up as small as he can and clasps his hands behind his head so he won't lash out and damage anything. Waiting out a storm. Covering a grenade, but the grenade is him. Rage so frantic it feels like combustion. Years of it, held under his skin: HYDRA cells and bloody knuckles, the Potomac, a man on a bridge—and then before: the ice, the room, aliens pouring from the sky to destroy a city he hardly recognized, Peggy in her silver hair. A life moving from loss to loss. He feels nonsensically as though crashing the plane was some sort of—of singularity, that he's passed into a place he shouldn't be, shouldn't have been. As though he'd punched through the universe and made a hole. Tore through his own life, backwards and forwards, responsible for his two stillborn siblings and his illnesses and his parents' deaths and the war itself, as if it wasn't normal, as if everyone he knew hadn't been struck by the same calamities, in some form or another. Responsible for Bucky and James and everything that happened to them. He knows it's not true, he knows time passed normally when he was under the ice, people were born and lived and died while he slept, and nothing was effected by his passing out of the world for seventy years, not really, but the sense of wrongness remains. Bucky'd have called him a martyr. James would've called him an idiot.

Now you listen close, Steven, his ma would've said: You always stand up.

He's going to. He will.

Just not yet.

☙

In the end, he doesn't tell anybody. He thinks Natasha might have figured it out, because it's her, but she doesn't chase him to ground about it, which he doesn't know how to interpret. Does she think he's better off? Probably not; she liked James. Is she waiting him out? Maybe, but it's not like her to be tactful. She likes making him uncomfortable. Maybe this is just too close to the bone. Sometimes he feels like they're not squared up, like they never fully re-learned to trust each other after she took James away. He wants to make things right and doesn't know how.

It's Tony, actually, who ferrets it out, who edges around it for weeks until he finally says, “Okay, come on, lay it on me, did somebody die?”

Steve—well, he doesn't know what his face does, exactly, when he pulls the keys out of his pocket and puts them on the bench between them, but it must be pretty awful, because Tony looks appalled.

“Holy shit, that is the worst way to break up with somebody,” Tony says, and Steve has to say, “It's not a break-up, he's running for his life,” and Tony says, “Yeah, but that's pretty fucking final either way, isn't it?” and Steve—

Can't really argue with that one.

He can and does argue in the last week of August, when Tony natters for half an hour about this conference, you know, it's pretty much mandatory for anybody even tangentially related to the field of artificial intelligence, it'd be an actual crime not to show up and sample the hors d'oeuvres, if you know what I mean, everybody who's everybody is going to be rubbing elbows and oh, by the way, it's in London, so...

“What?” Steve says, because he'd mostly been tuning Tony out.

“London,” Tony says. “As in the capital of England, the heart of the nation, the Big Smoke, where the charter'd Thames doth flow—”

“Yeah, no, I got that—”

“—and coincidentally happens to be a nice scenic train ride away from Sussex.”

Steve rubs his eyes with his fingertips for nearly a full minute before he feels like he can respond like a reasonable adult.

“Tony,” he says slowly, “You know he's not going to be there, right?”

“I know,” Tony says. “I know, I gathered, I followed the the whole thwarted-goodbye-via-keychain thing you guys are rocking, but—hey.” Steve looks up. “Look, the brain is kind of revoltingly ill-designed, like seriously, if I'd been in charge I'd have made a lot of changes, like who thought having two visual systems and two auditory systems was a good idea, that is mental, literally, and the holding capacity of the prefrontal cortex is just—”

“Point, Tony,” Steve says.

“Sorry. Where was I? Right, what I'm saying, Cap, is that sometimes our stupid lizard parts need, you know, physical reinforcement.” Tony gestures irrelevantly with his hands; Steve idly wonders if Tony would be able to verbalize if someone held them down. “We need to look under the bed, we need to open the closet, whatever. And I'm not exactly talking out of my ass when I say: closure? Is maybe a thing that might help. Especially given your overdeveloped thinky parts, I'm so upset you won't let Bruce put you in the scanner, your cortical layers are probably—anyway. It's cool, I'm going to London, you've never been on one of my private jets, I could use an excuse to drag you around to a bunch of touristy shit you haven't seen since it was mostly rubble in '44, and you probably need to see that empty cottage so you can get on with your life. So. Wanna come?”

Steve stares. Tony gives him a thumbs-up.

“No,” Steve says.

☙

Saying no to a Stark, Steve will reflect later, as he watches the English countryside roll past, is sort of like saying no to a praise-motivated Labrador: it'll grovel and mope until you thoroughly convince it that it's not a failure to dog-kind, preferably by allowing it to do the thing it was trying to do in the first place.

Or maybe that's just Lucky.

Tony means well, Steve's sure of that much, and—okay, he's not wrong, because on the train Steve feels a swell of purposefulness for the first time in ages, as though he finally has a mission with a solid set of parameters. First: don't get recognized. Darcy'd helped him dye his hair dark brown before he left, and she'd offered him tips on how to disguise his gait (“walk like your balls are too big for your shorts” had been a particularly memorable one) and some of her bodybuilder brother's clothes; he'd taken the clothes, if not the advice. They hang grievously, and make him look smaller and softer than he is. Second, and more important: go to Sussex, find the bungalow, walk through the garden in James's footsteps, and then go back to London so Tony can show him the delights of the Science Museum, the London Eye, and pub food that isn't rationed. He has to do this so he can let James go. Steve feels almost as though he's holding onto an unfathomably long leash, so long he can't see the end of it, but at the end is James, tugging, trying to get loose so he can dive safely underground. Sometimes loving something means letting it go. Didn't somebody famous say that?

That's Britney Spears, Steve, Tony says when Steve texts him. Which—close enough.

It ends up not being quite so simple as Steve plans. A late start, missing his first train, and a serious accident on the tracks means that it's getting on evening by the time Steve arrives in Sussex proper, and another hour before he grabs something to eat and finds the road. On foot, it's farther than it looks on the map. When he texts Tony to tell him he'll camp out overnight in the bungalow and catch the first train in the morning, he receives the nagging he expected for not upgrading his phone to Stark 4G before he left. Coulda had Google Maps, Tony says, Coulda been back in this excellent pub by now, and Steve puts his phone in his pocket as he turns down the twilit driveway.

The bungalow looks nothing like he imagined, and yet weirdly familiar: he's been over so many variations in his imagination, it's not unreasonable that some elements would be real. The lane's overtaken with rhododendron and craggy trees he can't identify, all of them leaning in close, like the wind blows around the property instead of through it. The house itself is a little rectangular box, whitewashed, with a skylight catching the last of the sunset on its edge, and few windows otherwise. A jaunty chimney sticks out of the top like a feather. The proportions make him squint until he realizes that there must be a tiny second story, a postage-stamp-sized room or two hunkering under the shingles. He hadn't known bungalows could have more than one floor. Two wooden benches stare each other down across the yard.

Steve's key—James's key—turns easily in the lock, and silently at that; someone's treated it with graphite dust. The hinges are quiet too. Everything is quiet out here, especially after New York and the insanity of London, the clatter of the train. An owl had hooted on the road a half mile back and scared the life out of him. The last time Steve's been this far out in nature was during the war, and they were generally making enough of their own noise to scare off (or scare quiet) any nearby fauna.

Inside, it's pitch-black and silent, dashing Steve's last lingering hope that James might still be here, somewhere, that there might be a just-boiled kettle or a pair of muddy shoes, still wet, or a breath in a corridor: evidence of human life. There's plenty of evidence of human passage—the cottage must be a hundred years old if it's a day, and he doesn't think anyone's changed the furnishings in all that time. The carpets under his shoes are worn down the middle and at the intersections by uncountable steps. Whoever owned the place before Peggy loved books like a religion; Steve can't see a single wall that isn't lined in shelves. They're mostly empty, but Steve finds a few haphazardly organized rows in what he assumes is the parlor, although all it holds is a single squashy armchair and an enormous fireplace. There's some paperbacks over by the chair and the fender, and near the window are stacks and stacks of larger volumes, all of them with cracked spines and curling covers. James was working on emptying the local used bookshop, clearly, before he left. Steve crouches to see the titles. With his amped-up night vision it's just bright enough to see them without pulling out his phone and blinding himself for five minutes: Permanent Present Tense; The Blank Slate; An Anthropologist on Mars, The Neuropsychology of Memory—he was researching amnesia, Steve realizes with a jolt. The structure of the brain, the ways it can fail.

Whoever built the house not only loved books, but baths: the washroom is just about as big as the kitchen, which isn't saying much for the size of either, but it's easily a quarter of the downstairs real estate, half of the room taken up by the most enormous clawfoot tub Steve's seen in all his life. The toilet is crammed in the corner like an afterthought. Across the hall is the bedroom: a mattress on a wooden platform, and a smaller fireplace, and more bookshelves lining the walls, a surprising number of them full. Steve makes a mental note to check them later, maybe in the morning. In the hall outside the kitchen, there's a folded-up easel leaning against the wall, and a bag full of paint tubes hanging from a coat-hook above it. Something twists painfully in Steve's chest when he sees them there, and then when he sees them as if for a second time, abandoned.

The kitchen leads out into the garden.

Steve closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, and then another, and then—he just breathes, for a while. It's too beautiful to look at, right away, even in the dark. James had loved it, Steve knows, without having seen it in daylight, without having asked: it's beautiful. The things he knows about flowers can be summed up in a few Google Image searches, but the chaos sprawling out from the back door is exactly—exactly what he imagined. He breathes. It's a warm night, but not sultry, and there's just enough of a breeze to make the hairs on his arms raise. He can hear some night-bird or bat squeaking above the trees. The murmur of speech from a nearby house, maybe the elderly couple who waved at him from their front yard when he passed by. Someone's dog barks, far away.

Steve's about to go inside when he sees the light: fireflies, further out, down over the little bridge in the lower part of the garden, where the ground slopes gently towards the shed. What the hell, he thinks: I don't have to go inside yet. He wanted to walk in James's footsteps, didn't he? And what better time than now, when it's dark and no one can see him, when the fireflies are out dancing? He does a little dance himself, over the bridge, feeling halfway between laughter and tears, the kind of hysteria that doesn't feel too wild, just a tingle under his skin like he's trying to move in two directions at once. His footsteps silent on the wood, on soft ground. He spins with his arms out like a kid, feeling ridiculous and not caring: once, twice, three times, before he's stopped by a leaning rosebush that scratches his elbow and snags the sleeve of his tee-shirt. He looks around as he's tugging himself free, at the gentle oval of the lower garden, at the shed with its roof all sway-backed, at the fireflies in the center, huddled as if against the breeze.

It takes Steve four more steps to realize that what he's seeing isn't fireflies.

There's two people, down there, laying on a blanket with a camping lantern between them. As Steve watches, one of them points up at the sky. The murmuring he's been hearing comes into context: it's not the neighbors, it's them, speaking quietly with their heads angled together. Steve must make some noise in his throat, because one of them rolls half over onto their side, craning their neck to see.

It's James.

James down there on the blanket, James in the garden, James—here, alive, pointing at the stars with a lantern reflecting eerily off the planes of his face, which are moving in a way Steve's never seen before, or hasn't for years, whichever's right to say, god, he doesn't know, but James is grinning hugely, his eyes wide and surprised as he calls “Steve!” up the path in his big rough voice, and Steve can't move a fucking muscle for the shock of it all.

Not until James shouts, exasperated, “C'mon, sweetheart, show some hustle,” and then Steve's jerking like a whip's cracked over his back, half-running down the slope to where James and his companion are sitting up on the blanket. The other person is an older woman, Steve sees now; she stands up as he approaches, brushing off her trousers. She's tiny, maybe less than five feet, gray-haired and thin as a plank of wood, the lines in her face scored deep, but Steve's having trouble placing an age on her: she could be forty, or she could be sixty. She leans close to James, murmuring something in his ear before she kisses his cheek. James doesn't seem to notice. His gaze is fixed on Steve. Steve sympathizes. He's having trouble taking his eyes off James.

“You must be Captain Rogers,” the woman says, offering her hand. Her grip is startlingly strong. “A pleasure to finally meet you,” she adds. She doesn't sound British, or—anything else Steve can identify, actually; her cadence is flat, no ups or downs, almost synthesized.

“Pleasure's mine, ma'am,” he says, rote, and she gives him the oddest smile, just a sharp flicker of upward movement he almost thinks he's imagined, it's there and gone so fast. She walks away with her hands deep in her pockets, big swaggering steps for such a delicate-looking woman.

Steve only realizes he's still watching her go when James says, “Took you long enough. What the hell did you do to your hair?”

“It's a disguise,” Steve says, turning. “And, hey, you didn't exactly send a detailed telegram, pal, you had me thinkin' the worst.”

“Yeah, well, next time I covertly invite you to a Sussex bungalow, I'll make sure to be less subtle.” James squints, leaning back on his hand. “Get down here, you're killing my neck.”

Steve sits carefully on the other side of the lantern, on the half of the blanket the woman vacated. He looks at James and feels a surge of joy too big for his body, stretching him at the seams. James looks viciously alive, like he's been living; hunting life with open hands. He's gained weight: his cavernous cheeks filled out. His hair is a few inches long, flopping in his eyes, and his earlobes are stretched a little under two more sets of piercings, and his grown-out beard is neatly trimmed. There's a faint dusting of silver on either side of his mouth. Steve's scared to reach out for him and break the spun-sugar moment between them, not touching each other with anything but their eyes, Steve reading contentment in the set of James's shoulders and James reading—whatever Steve's projecting, he doesn't know. He hopes it's that oceanic gladness, seeping through his skin.

“Your neighbor?” Steve asks, nodding towards the path, when he can't bear the silence any longer. It feels like a stupid question; he can't imagine a woman like that owning a cottage in the countryside.

“Old friend,” James says. Fighting a smile.

“How old?”

“She was born in '26, so. You tell me.”

“She wasn't,” Steve says. “How—she'd have to be—”

“When I said they all died,” James says, “I might not've been entirely honest.” He flops back on the blanket and sighs when Steve stares, mouth open. James puts his hand on his belly. “They called her the Nurse. I didn't know she was like me until—I guess it was 1990. Early serum experiment. A failure, technically, no regeneration, just—well, you saw her. Zola must've started on her when she was a teenager.”

“God.”

“She's his daughter,” James says.

Steve puts his hands over his face and sort of snarls into them. He doesn't know how to categorize the noise he makes; he's never made one like it before. It's angry and tired and sad all at once.

He feels as though he became jaded to evil people, at some juncture. The war, certainly, but. On a smaller scale, too many supervillains, and too many regular villains. Steve remembers being called to assemble for a rescue mission in a collapsed building, a catastrophe that could have been avoided if the contractor hadn't complied with the owner's cost-cutting wizardry. Twenty-one people dead, and over two hundred injured. Steve finds it hard sometimes to shake loose from the memory of himself—almost detached, as if he was watching it from a security camera—carrying the body of an adolescent girl out of the rubble. As much of her as he could find, anyway. The world is full of terrible people, taking advantage, hurting the vulnerable. He has to deafen himself to it to keep moving, some days. They become things. Forces of nature, like hurricanes. Terrible and largely unavoidable.

But Zola always seems to find a way to take the fucking cake.

“She's been here for three months. Little over three months,” James says, gathering Steve back to ground like he's winding up a thread. “She tracked me down—uh, literally. There's an ancient transmitter in my left heel, apparently, and she remembered the frequency. Had the old equipment and everything.” Cheerfully: “We've been catching up. Haven't seen her since Pierce, when she went to ground.”

“She left you there?”

James shakes his head at Steve's critical tone. “I was happy. Wouldn't have done any good if she'd stayed, they'd have eliminated her eventually. And besides, her job was over.” Steve makes a querying noise when he doesn't elaborate. James bares his teeth, almost a smile. “Continuing Zola's work,” he says evenly. Steve twitches. “Maintaining the miracle. She was Zola's insurance policy, someone who'd know how to take care of me after they put him in the machine. But Pierce thought I was, you know. Obsolete machinery. No point in taking care of something you intend on running until it breaks.”

“You're orphans,” Steve realizes, and only notices he's said it aloud when James shoots him a baffled look. “Sorry, just—it's like you two were foster kids with awful parents. You went through the same stuff and you understand each other.”

“Yeah,” James says. “Sure, that works. Although I'm still not sure I understand her. I don't know if anybody can. Her head's—she doesn't think like other people. She's...”

“Like a robot?”

“No,” James says, very certain. Then he grimaces. “Maybe. It just seems too—she has feelings. I just don't think they happen in a straightforward way. I think she can choose how she feels, maybe. Like we can pull the lever on the slot machine but she has to move the wheels manually.” He exhales through his nose, pressing his lips together. “It must be really, really lonely. Is what I keep thinking.”

Steve hasn't thought about the Chitauri in a long time, but he used to a lot, mostly because Tony and Bruce were at the subject like dogs on a bone for a few months before Steve moved to DC. He's never gotten the story straight, but logically something must have been controlling them from the other side of the rift, its influence cut off when the rift closed. Tony thought they were a hive mind, theorizing about a vast intelligence, something like a queen bee. After Steve'd had a little distance from the battle, he'd started wondering whether it'd been strange, for them, bursting into a new world. If they'd felt anything at all in the moment the rift closed, before they collapsed: if they'd all been cut off from each other. If they'd felt abandoned. Steve glances up towards the bungalow and feels a complicated pang.

“She has you, at least,” Steve says. “That's not nothing.”

“I guess.”

“Where's she staying? I only saw the one bedroom.”

“There's a weird closet with a bunk in it, in the attic. Did you see the porthole under the eave?” Steve didn't. “Whoever built this place was kind of a nutjob, it was all asbestos lining with foil wallpaper up there. The clean-up guys said people used to homebrew insulation that way, if they didn't want to install heating.”

“I grew up in a windowless building where people dumped their garbage in the air shafts,” Steve says. “Honestly, nothing would surprise me.”

“There wasn't a toilet, either,” James says, so grimly offended that Steve has to laugh. “I tell you what, I didn't survive two autoamputations and seven decades of torture to live in a house with no plumbing, that's just fucking unreasonable.”

Steve scoots his butt over and lays down on his back next to James, the lantern and a good few inches of blanket between them. Even with the light, the stars are still clear, brighter by several degrees than DC or the outskirts of New York. All Steve recognizes is the Big Dipper, point-down like it's diving towards the horizon.

“Do you know the constellations?” Steve asks. “I saw one of you pointing.”

“Mm,” says James, which isn't an answer. “After I dragged your sorry ass out of the river—”

“You put it there, pal, it's only fair.”

“After,” James says over him, “I crawled out of DC, couldn't tell you how. Wound up in this big field, and I only had one boot, I was totally fixated on that, for some reason, but—anyway, I looked up and realized they'd made me forget celestial navigation. I couldn't remember the names of the stars, how to find north, how to determine my latitude, nothing, and it scared me worse than I thought anything could scare me, back then.” James moves his hand from his stomach to the back of his head. His elbow brushes Steve's hair. “I think that was the moment I figured out what deep shit I was in. I mean, before, I didn't really—there wasn't enough of a me in there. I just reacted, I didn't think for myself. But when I realized they'd taken something out of me, that there'd been a me who was more...”

“Did you get angry?”

“I tried to kill myself,” James says. Steve jerks, hurting with the effort of not turning his head, his whole body. “Didn't work, obviously. After that, I ended up in Philly, and you mostly know the rest, but. I did remember the stars. Eventually.”

“I'm glad,” Steve says.

“I've been remembering a lot of things,” James says quietly.

“You don't have to—”

“I know.” James laughs. “I know, believe me. But—it's okay. I...”

He trails off. Steve waits.

“I hated him,” James says at last. “Maybe that's not a surprise or anything—”

“Bucky?”

“Yeah,” James says. “See, thing is, from my point of view, he left. He left me. He went somewhere else and left me down in that ravine. He got to die. And I had to live through the surgeries and the training and the c-chair,” and Steve hears James's teeth click together hard, like he's trying to stop them from chattering. Steve lets his head tilt against James's elbow. “And,” James continues shakily, “They hurt me for knowing who you were.”

Steve can't help it: he turns over onto his side, hitting the lantern with his knee. It wobbles but doesn't fall over. “You—on the bridge—”

James nods. “I rec—no, I don't know if recognized is the right word. I don't know if there is a word. I didn't know your face, but I knew I'd seen it before. Not—” He huffs, frustrated. “Not the time before, when you threw your shield at me. It would've been fine, if that's all it was, because they didn't wipe me between that and the bridge. That kind of before wasn't dangerous. But I was coming around to the idea of—you know how they say that animals can only understand the present? They don't regret the past or worry about the future?”

“Squirrels bury nuts,” Steve says.

“I meant besides instinctual behaviors, smartass,” James says, almost fondly. Steve sticks his tongue out. It works; James looks less tense. “That was me. Sort of. It's hard to look back with 20/20 recall and—conceptualize what I was thinking, it's all just this. Blur. But I remember that, coming around to the idea that there was more than the present, that I'd done things I didn't remember, and I was really upset when they tried to take that away.”

“So when you fought me on the helicarrier,” Steve says, letting the end dangle.

“You kept saying I knew you after they'd just finished punishing me for it,” James agrees. Steve feels sick. “And then—and don't you beat yourself up over this, we've laid it to rest, okay?—and then, all the help I was getting from you was because of Barnes. So, I hated him. How could I not? There was so much I could blame him for, shit, basically my whole life and everything bad that ever happened to me, I could pin it on him if I tried. And then, uh. I went to his grave. That time I was in Virginia.”

“I...” Steve bites his lip. James glances at him. “I wondered.”

“I'd been thinking he was the lucky one,” James says. The sweep of his eyelashes on his cheek as he turns back to the sky. “He got to move on, he didn't have to go through all of that shit. But standing over that poor kid's grave, which didn't even have a fucking body in it—I realized I was the lucky one. I was alive. And the last little bits of him were hanging on for dear life inside my head while I walked free.”

Steve's assaulted with the memory of Bucky clinging to the railing of the train, dangling out over nothing but air, and sucks in a breath. He's helpless to imagine Bucky in James's head like that, screaming. Wanting to live. It hurts like a kick in the chest, and then: it must have been agony, he thinks, for James. Existing with that inside him.

“I'm not saying I was just suddenly serene about it,” James says. “It took a while to—I don't know, accept, acclimatize, whatever. I feel okay about it these days. I'm never going to be him again, but I was him, once. There's no disputing that. I think for a little while we might've even been the same.”

“Down in the ravine,” Steve ventures.

“Yeah. And later. I was still drawing portraits and things, in—I don't know when. For a while after they brought us to the States.” James pauses, his face slowly distorting; and then it relaxes all at once. “It's just, I was so wrapped up in hating him, and trying to not be him, I was blowing it out of proportion. I was convinced it was all or nothing—if I remembered anything of his, then I was going to become him, or maybe I was obligated to become him. Or something. Like if I let myself accept anything of his at all it would just—open the floodgates and I'd disappear.”

“Can't really say that's an unreasonable fear,” Steve points out. James snorts. “Well, c'mon. It's not like you were given a manual or anything.”

“Anyway,” James says pointedly, “Like I said. I've been remembering. And it's—okay.”

“It's fine if you don't want to talk about it,” Steve says. “Or if you do. I just mean. I'm here, either way.”

James smiles at the stars. “I know, sweetheart,” he says. Steve feels warm. “I don't have much from the war, or what I guess was the war, but—the closer something is to a head trauma, the less likely somebody's going to remember it, apparently, so that's normal.” He laughs. “Normal. What a dumb word. It feels so weird, there's no context to any of them, so it's just...”

“Like watching a movie?”

“I guess,” James says. “Except not quite. Maybe like—people take videos of their babies and put them online, a lot. Share 'em with friends. But I was thinking, I wonder what those kids think when they watch them later, knowing it's them but not being able to remember crawling around or learning to walk or whatever. Maybe like that.”

“So.”

“So. Well—shit, I mean, they're nothing important, the rest of them.” James shakes his head. “I'll be doing something or thinking something, and I guess the brain makes associations, and all of a sudden I've got some new—clip. Laying on a roof in the summer. Sorting books in a library, I think. Dancing. Hiding behind a blue rocking horse. That one's really clear, for whatever fucking reason. Somebody was trying to give me a bath and I really didn't want to. Of all the things!” he says suddenly, and shoots a great big wry grin at Steve. “Of all the fucking things. I can't remember what my mom looked like or what my favorite food was, but I can sure as hell remember that I didn't want to take a goddamn bath!”

“A shame you didn't have that bathtub in the house,” Steve says. “I can't imagine any kid saying no to that bathtub. It's like a pool.”

“Think how much of a mess you could make,” James says earnestly, and Steve, trying to keep a straight face, feels his laugh go through his nose. “I do remember your mom, though,” James adds, and Steve goes very, very still. He feels all of sixteen, like his bones have let out all their air and he's little again, like the soft night breeze is going right through him.

He says, small: “Oh?”

“Sure. Maybe because I drew her so often, like you said. I don't know. But I remember her face,” James says, and takes his hand out from under his head, moving it in the air like he's sculpting invisible clay. “Green eyes and dimples, neither of which you inherited, you poor sucker, I guess you took after your dad—but she had a smile that'd light up the room. Just like you. You smile like her. That's what I remember.”

Ten inches to his right, close enough to feel Steve's breath on his neck and still somehow miles away, there's the unmistakable sound of a grown man trying his level-headed best not to burst into tears. It breaks his fucking heart.

“C'mere,” Jay says, and throws the lantern off the blanket so he can pull Steve half on top of him. Steve clings immediately instead of fighting, which means he's been restraining himself this whole time. Jay should've grabbed him the second he sat down. “C'mere. God's sake. You're a mess, you know that? There you go. Come on, let it out. A little salt water never killed anybody.”

Steve tries to say something and fails. Jay strokes his hand up and down Steve's spine, trying to be soothing. Following an instinct, like draining a wound: “And I remember he loved you.” Steve jerks like he's been stabbed. He's totally silent when he cries. The only way Jay can tell is the dampness on his neck, the trembling under his hand. “God, how he loved you. I think sometimes he thought he'd die of it. We were worried about you, in the ravine, after we woke up. We couldn't remember who you were but we were worried. We knew we'd left someone behind.”

Steve shakes and shakes and shakes. Jay tries to be a rock, a place for him to come to ground once he's done purging this storm of grief, or anger, or whatever it is. He's glad to have had the practice. Eva and her kids from down the lane were over a few weeks back, and Eva'd been somewhere in the house when her youngest took a spill on the bridge, skinning up both her knees. The boys, horsing around in the bushes behind the shed, hadn't noticed, and when Lily'd rushed at him Jay had dropped his trowel in a panic and picked her up, giving her something to hang on to until her mom came out and kissed it better. He'd asked Eva later: is that what you do? When a kid's crying? Not always, she said; it depends on why. But if they're hurt and they come to you, always.

“Ssh,” Jay says, once he thinks Steve's starting to wind down. “S'all right.”

“Sorry,” Steve mumbles.

“You apologize for the stupidest things,” Jay says. Steve laughs wetly. “I always meant to ask. Did you love him?”

“What the hell kinda question is that?” Steve asks, sniffing hard. He wipes his face and nose on Jay's sweater, which...should probably be disgusting and isn't. What's become of you, Jay thinks at himself. “I can't—that's like asking if I loved my lungs, it's not—”

“Wa Nahnu aqarbu ilaihi min hablil wareed,” Jay says. Steve lifts his head. “It's, uh, from the Qur'an. It means: we are nearer to him than his jugular vein. It's supposed to be about God, I think, or angels, probably sacrilegious to—”

“No,” Steve says. He sounds startled. “No, I mean—that's. When were you reading the Qur'an?”

“Last month. After I remembered a bunch of awful shit from the nineties. I was in—Qatar, I think, for—never mind, it doesn't matter. I thought it'd help with context, and then it was a good excuse to practice my Arabic, and it was kinda beautiful, so I kept going.”

“It's huge!”

“So I got a lot of fucking time on my hands!” Jay says, which makes Steve really laugh, finally, and scrapes the last of the anguish off his face.

“But that's it, though,” Steve says, when he gets himself together. He puts one hand on top of the other on Jay's sternum, and props his chin on his knuckles, looking at Jay's face. “That's how it feels.”

Jay taps Steve's ribs with two fingers, as close to his heart as he can get from this angle. “That's where he is, Steve. That's where he'll always be.” Steve's face crumples up and he presses his forehead to the back of his hands instead, hiding it. “I get it, you know,” Jay says, putting his arm back around Steve's waist. “I miss him too. Sort of. In a different way. I think—I get the impression he was an easy person to love.”

“Yeah,” Steve whispers. “Yeah, he—he was.” He rolls his forehead on the backs of his hands before propping his chin up on them again, looking sad, but less raw. “I guess it's like how I miss my dad. He died when I was just three, I don't really remember him very well. Maybe—would it be easier, if you thought of Bucky as, I don't know. Your long-lost brother?”

“Nah,” Jay says. “If anything, he's my father. Obviously. C'mon, Rogers, he can't be my brother, I never had a chance to punch him.”

Steve laughs so loud he startles something lurking nearby. There's a great rattle and crash in the rhododendrons. The adolescent fox that's been coming around, probably; it might not recover from the indignity. They lay together and listen, but it doesn't come back.

“You know,” Steve says, “You punched me.”

Jay grins, certain that Steve can see it in the dark. Pretending not to understand: “And you dislocated my arm, what's your fuckin' point?”

“No, I mean—”

But Jay can't keep it together. Steve makes an aggravated noise and smacks him on the chest, so he smacks back, and when Steve tries to sit up Jay hauls him back down. It turns quickly into wrestling, Jay cackling louder than he should as Steve grunts and manages to knee him in the hip; his neighbors will have to be placated. He manages to roll them to the edge of the blanket, and pins Steve's shoulder on the wet grass. Steve yelps and curses. Jay lets him up, helps him back onto the blanket, but the damage has been done. Steve makes a futile attempt to flap-dry the back of his shirt while Jay idly digs the heel of his hand into his spine.

“Hurts?” Steve asks, noticing.

“It's fine,” Jay lies. He's going to feel it tomorrow, but. It was worth it. To move his body like it's a body and not a bag full of broken glass. He wasn't sure if he could, but the painting, the weeding, turning the compost pile—it must be helping, because he couldn't have done this in the winter. Not when he was still adjusting to regular physical activity and his bones were telling him all sorts of things he didn't need to know about the weather.

“Oh!” Steve says suddenly, reaching out and then stopping himself. Jay grabs his wrist and pulls it closer, encouraging, and Steve pulls up Jay's shirt high enough to see the port. “What happened to Joe?”

“Still not acknowledging that,” Jay says darkly. Steve grins. “It's retired, I'm on bolus feeds now. Five times a day, kind of annoying, but it beats carrying a machine around everywhere.”

“Hey, that's swell! I was kinda worried about how you'd hack it out here, but. You look good.”

“Thanks.”

“Really good,” Steve says, and then presumably flushes, because he quickly covers his eyes with his hands. Jay reaches into the grass for the lantern and holds it up. Oh yeah. Red as a tomato.

“I see a year hasn't improved your flirting skills any,” Jay says.

“No thanks to you,” Steve mumbles, but he lets Jay pry his hands off his face. He looks sweetly embarrassed, his shoulders up around his ears. “I was never any good at this kind of thing.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Whatever this is. Whatever you want to call it,” Steve says, and then looks panicked. “I don't mean to pressure—I mean, it was so fast, before, if you're not ready for—”

“Rogers.”

Steve smiles crookedly. “Am I being an idiot?”

“Come here,” Jay says. He hooks his arm around Steve's neck. It's awkward, at first, both of them twisted, and then Steve tries to turn and get both arms around him. It hurts Jay's spine, so he pushes himself up and over Steve's thigh, sitting between his legs. Steve makes a soft, surprised noise.

“I know you,” Jay says, and feels Steve suck in a breath next to his ear. “And I trust you. How does that poem go? i like my body when it is with your body, it is so quite new a thing...”

“Muscles better and nerves more; i like your body,” Steve says. “You turned into a regular college man without me. I haven't thought about Cummings in years—Bucky and I used to giggle over the racy stuff like idiots where we thought the librarians couldn't see us.”

“Eva down the lane's a lit professor,” Jay says. Steve's burrowing down into his neck like he means to live there. “I looked after her kids one time when the nanny got appendicitis and she had to proctor final exams, and now she brings me all sorts of stuff that's getting thrown out. She's—shit, you okay? When's the last time you had a hug?”

“You. The day you left.”

Jay knees him in the ribs. “You fuckin' martyr.”

“Ow,” Steve says mildly. “Nobody wants to hug me, I'm too intimidating.”

“What kind of idiots think that? Little you, maybe. I'd've poked my eye out on those cheekbones.”

Steve pulls back just enough to look at him. “Doing what?” he says, feigning innocence.

Jay swallows. He wants to—he wants. But there'd been rules in place, before; walls he could see. He wants so badly not to fuck this up.

“I, look,” he says, “In terms of expectations—”

“I don't expect anything.”

“I need you to know,” Jay says firmly, and Steve settles, attentive. “I was on a lot of drugs for a lot of years, I don't remember a time when I ever had a libido, and it doesn't seem like it's ever coming back.” He laughs: “Not like I would even know what it'd feel like if it did, so. There's things I like. But if you've been entertaining fantasies of me nailing you to a mattress...”

He expects Steve to turn purple, but Steve just clears his throat and says, “There's, um, there's alternatives. Out there. If you ever wanted to. And I—wouldn't say no. But, for the record, that isn't any kinda dealbreaker.” Now he looks shy. Jay feels his eyebrows lift. “I liked what we had. What we did before.”

“Spooning in closets?” Jay says dryly.

But Steve nods without any irony at all. “I mean, I wouldn't mind an actual bed being involved, at some point, if that's not too freaky.”

“Then you're in luck.” Jay gets awkwardly to his feet, trying not to step on any part of Steve in the process. He uses Steve's shoulder for leverage and then offers him a hand up. “Because I happen to have a bed, an extra pillow, and a pretty desperate need for some shut-eye.”

“Past your bedtime, old man?” Steve teases. Jay mock-shoves him once he's on his feet. Steve offers an elbow, and then says, “Oops,” and offers the other with a goofy, embarrassed grin. It's such a bright and boyish expression; it reminds him of the young men in their rowing uniforms who sometimes amble down the lane, teasing each other and shouting, their simple animal bodies, their wet hair. Jay doesn't think he's ever seen Steve this uncomplicatedly happy. It can't entirely be him, can it? He's only a single person, a messy conglomeration of cells and selves. He can't possibly be the source of that much light.

“What's that look for?” he asks, against his better judgment.

“You,” Steve says, as they start up the path, “Here, in the garden. It's just—was it everything you wanted? When you used to think about it?”

Yes, Jay thinks, startled, even as he struggles to remember. What was it he'd dreamed of? Flowers he couldn't name, then. The villages in the Mediterranean that had inspired him, honeysuckle on the eves, lavender spilling out between fence rails, a riot of honeybees. Kindly neighbors and children playing in the long grass. He'd wanted the old chair, and something he could fill with ice, he remembers now: it seems frightening and unpleasant in hindsight, after so long without cryostasis, after a year of hot baths in the clawfoot tub. He'd wanted flowers, and to never be alone. He'd been so frightened when he first arrived here, and then so busy keeping everything alive, he hasn't had an opportunity to reflect. To count his blessings. “Yeah,” he says aloud, his throat feeling gritty and strange.

“It's incredible,” Steve says. Hushed; he isn't looking at Jay, but out into the dark, between the climbing roses. “I—I'd imagined—I thought about it a lot. You, happy. Wherever you were.”

“I was,” Jay says. Steve turns. His radiant face. “I was. I am.”

☙

“What do you think?” Jay says, turning on the kitchen light. Steve doesn't seem to know where to look, his eyes still glued to Jay's, so he points at the hall, where three of the paintings make an uncoordinated triptych. Steve looks, and then double-takes, and walks over to them, his knuckles rising to his mouth. Jay watches him looking at them, feeling exposed, a little scared, but also warm, deep down. No one who really knows him has seen them, really seen them for what they are; even the Nurse didn't have the context. But Steve—

“This is the ravine,” Steve says breathlessly, pointing at the leftmost painting. At the rightmost: “And this is—DC, right? The stars? This one, I don't know, though.”

“It was in the fifties. Probably,” Jay says. Steve turns, holding his stomach almost like it hurts. “I might've escaped if the base hadn't been on an island. I wasn't really retaining memories around then, so I thought I'd never seen an ocean before. It, uh, made an impression.”

“Don't get me wrong, they're—they're amazing,” Steve says, turning to look at them again. “They're even really soothing, if you don't know what they're about. I'm so glad you—but. You hung them in your hall.”

“They were rattling around in my head anyway. I'd rather see them on the wall.” Jay kicks off his shoes on the mat. Steve follows his example. “Besides. It's culturally appropriate, right? Go on any of the house tours around here, you'll see what I mean. Game hunters used to hang their trophies everywhere. It's a statement, I guess: look at all this shit that tried to kill me and failed.”

“I like them,” Steve says, in case it was ever in doubt.

“I know,” Jay says, and turns him towards the bedroom.

At the threshold Steve suddenly lowers his voice: “Should we...”

“The Nurse?” Jay shakes his head. “She sleeps like the literal dead, don't worry.”

“Does she have—I don't know how to ask this without sounding like an enormous jerk.”

“You and names,” Jay says, nudging him. “You're as bad as Wilson, he tried to get me to pick something last year. Yeah, she knows what hers is. She just doesn't like it, on account of Zola giving it to her.”

Steve raises his eyebrows expectantly. Not looking where he's going; he trips on the carpet. “But you picked one, though.”

“Would've been pretty strange introducing myself to the neighbours otherwise, yeah. Jay. J-A-Y,” he clarifies, when Steve startles. “Why'd you start calling me J, anyway? You didn't like James?”

“I thought of you as James,” Steve says. “I don't know, it just seemed like—less pressure. It wasn't quite a name, but it wasn't not, either. You didn't pick it because of me, did you? There's a million variations. Jim, Jaime, Jack, Jem...”

“Believe me, I know. My phone thought I was expecting, after all the baby name websites I subjected it to on the way here. Six months of diaper ads. Hey,” when Steve glances at the bed and starts looking a little peaky, “You want to make yourself useful, boy scout? Start the fire in here while I do perimeter check.”

“Yessir,” Steve says.

When Jay comes back, firelight is playing off Steve's face where he's sat cross-legged on the foot of the bed, a book in his lap. Jay recognizes it as the collected Cummings; it's a hefty paperback some bored student attacked with a sharpie, coloring the tops of all the pages blue. “These aren't as funny as they were when I was twelve,” Steve says, but doesn't look up. “Wanna guess my favorite?”

“Humanity i love you,” Jay says, as he takes off his sweater and shirt, “Because you would rather black the boots of success than inquire,” his trousers, “Whose soul dangles from his watch-chain,” everything else; and he offers his hand to Steve over the page as Steve says with him: “Which would be embarrassing for both parties—” and Steve looks up.

He drops the book, and then he does the oddest thing.

He breathes in so hard it's almost a gasp, and his eyes shut hard even as he's standing, reaching out, fumbling blindly for Jay's arms, patting his elbow and the end of his stump before squeezing his biceps. Steve leans forward tentatively, almost as if he's moving in for a kiss, but his chin is tucked. Grasping at straws, Jay presses his forehead against Steve's, and a little of the steel goes out of Steve's hands. Right guess, then. But—

“Sorry,” Steve says. He sounds reedy, like he isn't getting quite enough air. “I can't—sorry. Give me a minute.”

“You've seen me naked before,” Jay says, a little incredulous. “When I was sick, which I'd argue is more naked than this, frankly. What's going on in there, huh?”

“You're right, I know,” Steve says. He makes a little huffing noise that's almost a laugh. “It's just, it's the dumbest thing, it's this stupid...”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“The bodies in the labs,” Steve says, and Jay feels like the room's dropped a few degrees. “In the war, they—they never had clothes, when we found them. I should've—I never got used to it. I don't know why that and not any of the other things. They were shaved, usually, and I don't fly into goddamn tizzy every time I see a bald person. Just. Just nudity. When I'm not expecting it. Fuck, sorry.”

“Stop apologizing, my god.” Jay cups Steve's elbow and shoves him a little with his forehead, following when Steve sways back, skin-to-skin.

“I want to sleep with you,” Steve says miserably.

“I know,” Jay says. “I wouldn't be standing here starkers if I didn't think you were a sure thing, Rogers, come on, it's fucking freezing in here,” and Steve laughs, startled. “Hey, you can't say we're not made for each other, with my broken dick and your inability to look at naked people.”

“I can!” Steve protests, with his eyes still squinched shut. “I can—look, I'll—” He pats his way up from shoulders to neck, and moves his big hands over Jay's face, feeling his features. “There, see? I'm looking at you.”

“Okay, then: here.” Jay moves Steve's fingers to the scar under his right ear, the smear of chalk from the wildcat days. “What's that from, genius?”

Steve tilts his head like he's listening to something. “I don't know if I should tell you,” he says. “I'm kinda attached to the idea of using it for blackmail purposes.”

“Oh, it's like that, is it?” Jay says. “Eye for an eye? Fine, how about this. I'm pretty sure you were born in September. Internet says I'm wrong, but.”

“September 4th,” Steve says, aggrieved. “They changed it in the records after Kreischberg. Fine, if you're gonna be all sincere about it. We were fourteen-ish, running papers together, and we used to pick up our bundles in an alleyway two kids really shouldn't've been messing around in, and that day there were a couple of shady characters hanging around, throwing darts and knives and things at the crates. You bent over to pick up your bundle, and the one wise guy thought it'd be awful funny if he threw his knife between your face and the papers, scare the bejeezus out of you. I figure you can guess the rest.”

“I moved suddenly, like kids do,” Jay guesses, “And he beaned me in the face.”

“Yup,” says Steve. “On the plus side, they high-tailed it and you got to keep the knife. It was a nice knife.”

“I bet my mother thought that was a great consolation prize for me coming home covered in blood.”

“My ma gave your shirt a Viking funeral and your ma never found out,” Steve says, grinning blindly. His questing fingertips have found the eyelets in Jay's ears. “I like these, by the way. I didn't think I would, but I do.”

“Not quite big enough for handles,” Jay says, “But you can haul me around if you want to.”

“Uh,” Steve says. Flustered Steve is Jay's favorite Steve. “So when you said there were things you...liked—”

“I like kissing,” Jay says. He tries not to laugh and mostly fails, pretty sure that Steve can feel the vibration of it in his throat, his jaw. His mouth twitches. “It's been a while since my first lesson, admittedly. You might have to show me how.”

Steve opens one eye experimentally, squinting. He looks completely ridiculous. Like the little owl that lives in the rafters of the shed at the bottom of the garden. Whenever Jay goes inside to get something during the day, he always manages to provoke its waking-up routine: glaring lopsidedly, puffing all its feathers, shuffling its wicked feet. Uncanny. If Jay ever paints the owl, he'll put a little Captain America helmet on it.

“Natasha says I'm bad at it,” says Steve. “So I'm probably not the best tutor.”

“Good thing I won't be able to tell,” Jay says, and pulls him down.

☙

Jay startles awake in the middle of the night with a feeling that something's wrong. At first he thinks a log's just tilted and made a noise in the grate, but when he rolls onto his back, he realizes Steve isn't beside him. He spots him when he sits up: Steve's hunched over in front of the dwindling fire, his arms on the fender and his head down. It's a posture of abject misery. It feels like a boot to the chest, and has Jay scrambling out of bed about as fast as he can manage.

“Shit, sweetheart,” he says, sitting down hard on Steve's right side. He squeezes Steve's bent knee. “Hey, what's wrong?”

Steve shakes his head and then lifts it. He's not crying, like Jay expected, but he looks confused. Overwhelmed.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says. “I just—” He turns unfocused eyes on Jay. “Do you ever get—as if there's too much in you, like—” Shakes his head again. “I can't explain it.”

“Try,” Jay says gently.

“Like everything's dialed up to eleven,” Steve grits out. “I was laying there thinking how lucky—how happy I was, and it got bigger and bigger, and then it—I couldn't stop thinking about the alternatives, if things had happened any other way, how—stupidly small our chances were. And I thought if I kept touching you I'd burn up. Like that woman who caught fire and all that was left was her legs.”

“Did anyone ever tell you you're a morbid little shit?” Jay asks, trying to stick a pin in the tension. Steve doesn't react. “Has this happened before?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “It just usually goes away without making me—” He balls up a fist. Jay puts his hand over it and feels Steve force it to relax. “Do something I didn't want to,” he finishes. “I thought this time would be different.”

“Stay put,” Jay says, “For just a second, okay?” and scurries off to the kitchen, thinking quickly. He's certain he's figured it out by the time he comes back with two wine glasses, stems slotted carefully between his wide-splayed fingers.

“Alcohol doesn't work on me,” Steve says, even as he's taking one.

“Bully for you, this is sparkling grape juice,” Jay says, and Steve laughs a little. “Kettle's slow as molasses and I can't drink with all the medications I'm on, so. Next best thing.”

“I've never been able to tell the difference anyway,” Steve admits. He taps their glasses together, the bright ring of crystal. “Cheers.”

“It's not a cure for anything, you know,” Jay says, once Steve's done throwing his back like it's whiskey. “Loving somebody. It's not going to turn your world upside down and fix all your problems.” Steve's grimace says as how he'd been thinking that, at least a little. “But I can see how it'd be frustrating that it might make them worse.”

“It just—hurts,” Steve says. “Thinking, you know. Even when I'm happy, something's there, making me think about all the ways I could lose somebody.”

“That's life,” Jay says, “Kicking you when you're down,” and Steve sighs. “You know what I think, though? It'll get better. Most things do, in one way or another.”

“You think I'm making a big deal out of nothing?”

“I didn't say that. Maybe it's—maybe you've got to walk before you can run. Maybe you've got to practice being happy before you can go all the way to cloud nine.”

“Goddamn demoralizing,” Steve mutters.

“I don't know,” Jay says. “I think it's kind of beautiful. That you can be paralyzed by joy.”

Steve gives him another of those owl-expressions, wide-eyed and startled, unblinking, before he tilts over and puts his head on Jay's shoulder. Jay steadies his glass on his knee and hooks his stump over Steve's neck like he's trying to keep him from floating away.

“Stop doing that,” Steve says. “Being...” He flaps his hands.

“Sorry,” Jay says. “I'll work on being a shithead.”

“Shouldn't be too hard. Ow!” Steve aborts a swat and pokes him in the ribs instead. “No fair using that arm, I can't fight back. I feel like I'm gonna hurt you.”

“Go for it, my adhesions need breaking up.”

Steve ignores him. “By the way, you were wrong. That wasn't actually my favorite Cummings poem.”

“Oh? Why'd you have it memorized, then?”

“Because,” Steve says. “It was Bucky's.”

Jay turns his face, pressing his mouth against Steve's hair. “Well, he had good taste.”

“Are you just saying that because it's your favorite?”

“Plausible deniability,” Jay says, and Steve huffs a little laugh. “How long can you stay for?”

“I don't know,” Steve says sleepily. “Tony's waiting for me in London, and I'm an art coordinator at the VFW back home—my vets'll mount an international manhunt if I'm AWOL longer than a week. We'll figure something out.”

“He's the engineer, right?” Jay asks. Steve hums a yes. “Invite him here, he can help me fix the auger.”

“He'll strap rockets to it.”

“As long as it works.”

“He'll probably try to sweet-talk you into a prosthetic.”

Jay shrugs, jostling Steve's head. “If it means I can fuck around with a vegetable plot next year, maybe I'll let him.”

A log pops deep in the grate. Sparks come up spinning like little fiery insects. He read, somewhere, that things like this are good for the brain—fish tanks, too. Stochastic patterns, soothing tired cells. He'd noticed the effect long before he read about it, an observation made from those first sleepless weeks where every bat and badger going about its nightly business had startled him out of bed; he'd fallen asleep on the hearth-rug more times than not. On the bad nights, convinced that he deserved it, he'd tried to count and catalog the people he'd killed, a shallow penance he'd quit once he'd realized his self-absorbed wallowing wasn't helping anyone. He still feels deeply about wanting to do something substantial, to bring some good into the world for all the pain his hands stirred up. Something more than gardening, more than making the kids laugh. Maybe Steve can help him think of something.

When he turns his head to ask, Steve is out cold, breathing through his mouth, still a little congested from his breakdown in the garden. It won't be the last, he thinks: all of Steve's walls are down, now, after—Jay's certain of it—he's spent the last year trying to build them up. Gertie next door said Jakob did the same thing after the war, a sense of distance he'd worn like a coat, a layer of padding so it'd hurt less the next time he lost somebody. My guy's a mess, Jay'd said, sitting beside her on the bench, watching Jakob and his pals stump their way through the world's slowest game of croquet. How can I help him get better? he'd asked her.

You? she'd said. Bugger-all. That's on him; you can't change another person. But you can be a lighthouse, when he's lost in the dark.

Troubles, he's come to think, can't be helped by one thing alone. Grief, hurt, trauma—not anything that wants fixing. People say it's time, or distance, or love, but you can have all of those in their purest form and not affect any change at all, if it isn't the right moment. If the flesh isn't ready. And they're none of them cures, not individually, not as a collective. If there's any cure at all, he thinks, it's living. Day to day. The monotony and the fumbling and the moments of light—the laundry, the bills, the weeding; children in the long grass. Pruning the goddamn rhododendrons. You put dead things in the compost pile and they come back to life, in another form. Nothing is ever truly destroyed.

He raises his glass to the fire. Steve, asleep on his shoulder, doesn't stir.

“Goodnight,” he says, “And thank you. Sergeant Barnes.”