Chapter Text
“Flight 727 to LaGuardia has been delayed due to inclement weather in New York. The current estimated departure time is now 12:30pm.”
Bucky glanced around the Louis Armstrong International Airport, which was flooded with sunlight, and wondered what kind of inclement weather awaited him in Queens. It wasn’t the right time of year for snow, but it seemed odd for rain to cause a 3 hour delay.
He flipped through the remaining pages of the book he was reading, trying to decide if it would still last him the whole trip. Probably. Ok, yeah, definitely. He was a fast reader, but it was Anna Karenina, in Russian. He’d bought it at a Russian bookstore in Brooklyn weeks ago on a whim, but hadn’t really dug into it until today. He needed a good mental challenge to distract him from the conversation he hadn’t actually managed to have with Sam earlier that morning.
Bucky pulled Steve’s notebook out of his breast pocket, rubbed the cover gently with his thumb, and stuck it in Anna Karenina for a bookmark.
“I’ve got his book…I figured if it worked for him then it would work for me.”
“I understand that.”
Sam had then proceeded to demonstrate that he did not, in fact, understand what Bucky was trying to work himself up to explaining.
Sam was a smart guy. Bucky knew that Sam understood a lot of things that Bucky likely never would. And the tough-love pep talk that he’d launched into at that point would have been deeply insightful, had the facts of the situation been what Sam thought they were. Bucky sort of appreciated the talk in any case. Having someone care enough to attack him like that was nice, even if they were off-base.
Bucky reflected that he could have interrupted Sam at any point and tried, again, to describe the extra layer of meaning that Steve’s shield and book held for him. But he hadn’t.
Why am I still not telling him? Just because Steve didn’t tell him? Is it going to go on like this forever? Does it matter?
There were a lot of potential reasons why a former assassin who was still kind of on parole might not tell his relatively new friend that their mutual friend/new friend’s mentor/Captain goddamn America had been, well, more than a friend.
Also not a mentor. Also not necessarily a heroic figure, to him, in the traditional sense. Also not, technically speaking, ever a superior officer, although that was probably getting a little bit into the weeds and beyond the scope of what would ever come up in the potential conversation with Sam that Bucky kept workshopping in his head.
Homophobia, to start with the most obvious reason why the aforementioned former assassin might not disclose such information; but Bucky didn’t really think that was an issue with Sam.
There was also the law of inertia: A secret in motion tended to stay in motion.
Then there was the infinite loop of “well at this point there’s really nothing to tell/but the past informs the present and I feel like it keeps sort of coming up/but I don’t know what to lead with because right now in the present there’s nothing to tell.”
There was also the fact that Steve had been both a mentor and a heroic figure to Sam, however tough and casual Sam wanted to try to be about it now. That probably meant that finding out such a large additional fact about the man at this point would be jarring. (Also, as a sub-point to this: Steve had gone to pretty elaborate lengths to visit Bucky in Wakanda without looping Sam in to what was going on, so it wasn’t even like Sam had just cluelessly managed not to notice something going on in front of him. And that had happened during a time when Steve and Sam had been working together pretty closely, as international fugitives no less.)
If Bucky let the question morph from “why haven’t I told Sam?” to “why didn’t Steve tell Sam?” the set of potential answers was similar; but it included the reason, "Because the thing that there is to tell is…complicated. Like, really complicated.”
The story of Steve and Bucky wasn’t all that easy to summarize, let alone categorize.
You could tell it as a story about the Power of Friendship, but you’d have to leave out almost every time they’d been alone in a room together for more than a few minutes since they were teenagers.
You could tell it as an Epic Romance, but you’d have to leave out all the times in the early days when one or the other of them tried to break things off because it felt too dangerous, not to mention pointless. (What were they going to do, get married?) And you would have to ignore the fact that their year together as Howling Commandos had featured a sub-plot of Steve getting genuinely flustered every time he saw Peggy Carter.
You’d also have to leave out the fact that Steve went and left him for motherfucking Peggy in the end, even though “what are we going to do, get married?” had ceased to be a sarcastic throwaway line.
Peggy turned the whole Epic Romance angle into a triangle, and time travel turned the triangle into an infinity loop without any possible conclusion or closure.
It seemed that, unlike Thanos, Peggy Carter really was inevitable.