Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Did you know,” Peggy started quietly, “that he searched for you for five days?”

Bucky raised his head from looking at his shoes and definitely not avoiding looking at his arm. “Who?”

Peggy gave him a withering glare. She turned back to look up at the ceiling. “Five days.” She paused here, and gave a sigh. “And then when he came back to base, he disappeared for a few hours. I found him in an empty bombed bar.”

Bucky stilled, and opened his mouth hesitatingly. “A bar?”

“A bar,” Peggy repeated, her mouth creasing into a thin line. “I think I realized it then.”

“Realized what?”

Her lips curved up and she turned to look at him, giving him a wry smile. “Just how much he loved you.”

Bucky froze, staring at her like a deer in the headlights.

“When you died,” Peggy said, and Bucky flinched slightly. Peggy paused, then started again.

“When you died, something in him died with you. I tried to keep him present, to keep him going. But maybe that was too cruel of me.”

Her eyes slowly filled with tears. “I wasn’t surprised when he followed you.”

Bucky’s face scrunched in confusion. “He didn’t follow me.”

Peggy shook her head slightly. “He did. He followed you. Into the ice.”

“He followed me?” Bucky’s voice broke, and he fell silent.

“He told me that when he crashed into the ice, as he thought he was dying, he was scared. He was terrified. From what Sam Wilson tells me, he’s still affected, that he doesn’t like the cold, that he doesn’t like water, that if he’s alone he feels so cold that he can’t breathe. But you know what he told me? He told me that he could never forgive himself for letting that happen to you.”

Bucky swallowed, staring down at his shoes again, breaking away from Peggy’s gaze that had turned to him with the same intensity it had always had.

“But now here you are, hiding from him, afraid of what he might think. And for that, Sergeant Barnes, I am not going to forgive you.”

Peggy turned away, and she choked out, “How many times are you going to break his heart?”

---

So we can go home-

He doesn’t quite mean to rip the log in two, but it happens anyways.

Steve knows that Tony doesn’t mean to be cruel, but the way the words pierce him, settle low and cold in his gut and the scream he wants to let out instead slides down the back of his throat.

He has no home.

---

He moves from place to place. Right now he has a run down apartment whose owner is currently elsewhere. He has a notebook and a picture in it of the man on the bridge, Captain America. There’s a niggling at the back of his head that, like an itch he wants to scratch but can’t reach.

He ignores it, instead goes about keeping Captain America off his tail. He tries a plum from a bustling marketplace and decides he likes it.

He buys them again, later.

The man’s name is Steve.

---

Steve is vaguely aware of Natasha hesitating in the background; she’s watching his face, waiting for something, Steve doesn’t know what. It’s after a lot has happened; though Bucky is back and recovering, the trigger words gone from his mind, Steve doesn’t see him. Natasha, who can understand Bucky more than anyone else possibly could, is helping him recover the small parts of himself, of his life .

And Bucky, who’s suffered so much, deserves all the time in the world. The press has let up a bit, and living with Sam and Natasha, Steve knows that he’s well protected, that he won’t be bothered. So Steve beats down the part of him that is screaming, and the other parts that are pining and missing Bucky until he’s flat, paper-thin, and there’s little left.

So he smiles that picture perfect, stage smile that no one knows is a fake (besides Bucky, but he’s not, really, he’s not ), and Natasha purses her lips and tells Steve that Bucky wants him to stop visiting for a bit, that he needs to find out who he is rather than what Steve wants him to be. That he can’t be depending on Steve in order to be .

Steve makes sure that she is well and truly gone before burying himself back in bed with all the blankets he owns, and cries.

---

He remembers the other soldiers in the cyro tubes, the clean bullet holes that put them down. Steve seems horrified. He waits for him to do the same.

He’s tired, and Bucky Barnes has been dead for seventy years.

He doesn’t want to respond to a dead man’s name.

---

Sam told him that Bucky wanted to be called James. Steve remembers the last time he had said “Bucky” out loud, he’d been met with angry gray eyes, a scowl, and clenched fists.

---

“Man, I know you two are messed up, but this is crazy,” Sam said. “You come to me, asking me how he is, but you keep avoiding him like the plague. And he lets you. I don’t think I have to tell you how out of character that is.”

Sam picked up the coffee at the end of the counter and walked out of the café, Bucky shuffling along behind him.

“You know what? You ask me how he is because I have no idea how to read you. But he’s an open book; I just gotta look at him and know that he’s worrying about you. And even then I know him, so I know he’s freaking out all the time because he doesn’t want to suffocate you but he also wants to know whether you’re okay or not. And if looking at him makes me exhausted, how do you think he must feel?”

He unlocked his car.

“But he’s listening to me, so you can stop worrying, too, okay James?”

Once Sam was in the driver’s seat and they started driving, he started talking again.

“You need to focus on you , and you need time and space and he recognizes that. Hell, he probably understands the best out of anyone. He’s just a fucking mother bear about people. He can’t help being nosy and overprotective.”

Sam glanced over to where Bucky was sitting silently, choosing to analyze the foam on top of his coffee instead.

“You haven’t run into him, right?”

Bucky shook his head.

“Good. He knows it’s what’s best for you so he can manage to sit his ass down and wait.”

---

Eventually he leaves. It’s only been a couple of weeks since Natasha came to visit him, but his apartment feels even colder than usual, and he has to stop himself at least several times an hour from going to see Bucky, or at least walk back and home to catch a glimpse of him. He had done it a few days ago, hiding himself in the bustle of cafe, but Natasha had come to him afterwards glaring and saying that he was making progress, and seeing Steve, according to the latest therapist, could make him regress. Needless to say that Steve doesn’t try it again.

But being in New York again, being so close to Bucky, but at the same time so far away, is wearing on him. He lets the lease on his apartment run out, puts his stuff into storage, with Sam as the other name on the account. It’s paid for automatically, a monthly fee taken from his bank account.

He calls Sam, who, though he disagrees with the therapist, admits that some time apart could be good for them, and leaves a message. Sam was visiting Bucky today, so Steve’s not surprised when he lets it go to voicemail. Steve figures it’s better that way.

---

Steve stops coming entirely. He wonders what he did wrong, starts retracing his steps. He’s diving headlong into something, but he can feel himself losing control.

He remembers more. Not the kills; that was  something that would be seared into his brain, the names echoing through his mind for eternity-- Gregory Martin, Francis Albern, John F. Kennedy, Howard Stark --other things.

The way he would buy bright colored ribbons with spare change and use them to tie his sisters’ hair into braids. How his sisters would visit the apartment, not to see him, but rather Steve , and beg for him to draw their picture, or a sketch of a picture they wanted but couldn’t afford, or ask for Steve to help them with their schoolwork.

Bucky would always scowl and act angry that they weren’t there to see him, which would only make them giggle, the little goblins, and run as he chased them around the living room, Steve looking on with a grin on his face.

---

He doesn’t have the shield anymore; Tony hasn’t offered to return it and Steve hasn’t asked for it back, even though they are on speaking terms again. Mostly. So Steve decides to forego the Captain America costume and instead goes for black; it’s more like what the STRIKE team would wear, all functionality and camouflage, holsters for guns and knifes. He has a mask, too. One with night vision and air ventilation.

There’s a lot more HYDRA bases in Europe, after all, and the Sokovia Accords are still in place.

He visits the one’s he knew about before, too, and most of them are the bombed out places that he and the Howling Commandos had left them as. Some aren’t. They soon become that way.

---

Steve still hasn’t shown himself. He doesn’t ask after him because every time he walks into a room and someone has mentioned Steve’s name, they change the subject and look at him as if they expect him to break.

Bucky doesn’t give them the satisfaction, even though he feels like a noose is slowly tightening. He’d needed some space, sure. Just a bit, until seeing Steve’s sad expression didn’t punch a hole in his chest every time, and he knows it’s a bit selfish but he’s angry at everything and everyone. He still misses Steve like a limb, and he already knows what that’s really like and doesn’t want to lose another.

Instead he focuses. The memories, previously a trickle, return in a steady stream, and he suddenly finds himself thinking of Jim, or Dum Dum, or Falsworth. Gabe and Dernier come to mind often, too. All of them with their raucous, sometimes hysterical laughter, the way they would call him “Sarge” with an inordinate amount of fondness.

He thinks of his ma, and her standing next to Sarah at the stove as he sat with Steve at the small kitchen table and talked quietly to each other. How Sarah would say something and his ma would laugh, her voice slightly husky as always, her hair would sometimes escape from the bun and fall, framing her face. Sarah would wipe her sweaty forehead with the back of her hand, her own hair a mess from the heat of the stove.

---

In Austria, Steve visits an abandoned railway track in a snowy ravine. He knows he shouldn’t do this to himself, should have come back in a season that wasn’t winter , but he goes ahead with it anyway.

The tracks are rusted and falling apart, but they’re still sturdy enough for Steve to get back to the same place that was still tattooed on the back of his eyelids.

This time he doesn’t hesitate to jump.

---

He understands that he’s broken, that he’s not worth saving, that Steve would be better off without him. So he sits in second bedroom in Steve’s floor of Stark Tower  and debates whether a gun or a blade would be cleaner, weighing them in his hands. He calculates the extend of injury he’d have to inflict so that it would stick, and his traitorous body wouldn’t heal him when he didn’t need it.

His therapist had been pleased. He’d been improving in leaps and bounds, he’d said, developing his “own sense of self.”

He didn’t want a sense of self if it meant not having Steve.

The gun would be messy, but he’s familiar with them enough that it feels like an old friend. He’s staring into the barrel, waiting, but doesn’t know what he’s waiting for.

He acknowledges the door opening, of Natalia taking the gun from his trembling hands, the words she muttered to him, of Sam coming in and checking him over before they both sandwiched him on the couch and watched a documentary on carpenter ants.

Though he’s grateful for the company, he still feels lonely. Steve isn’t there.

---

He survives. He sits at the bottom of the ravine, his body broken and bleeding, frost forming on his eyelashes, and just breathes. He remembers the plane, in the Arctic, how he had been knocked back from the impact, how the water had poured in and filled his lungs. How he had coughed only for more water to filter back in. The cold made his lungs seize and it was like having asthma again, but cold. His eyes are open but all he can see is black, so he closes them against the cold.

It’s so quiet. The silence is pressing in on his eardrums. It’s worse than being deaf in one ear or the quiet of a train with one less passenger or the stillness of a bombed out bar. It’s so quiet and he’s so, incredibly alone.  

When he wakes up, it’s with a gasp and total confusion. He was at the bottom of a ravine. No, not a ravine, the ravine. And he’s breathing air instead of water and he already feels himself healing and he cries at the injustice of it all.

---

He learns that Steve went into the ice a week after he fell. That the war ended in Europe a month after that. That there are hundreds of books talking about the war and plenty of them are about Captain America and the Howling Commandos and Steve Rogers, but no one knows that Steve lied about his age on his enlistment form, even though he was legal and didn’t have to.

Maybe he thought it would convince them he’d last longer if he said he was twenty-two rather than nineteen.

Bucky had left in April, captured in November, rescued in December. Steve was 20 and one of the first things he did was wish Bucky a Merry Christmas. It’d been 1942 and Bucky thinks Steve is the best Christmas gift he’d ever gotten.

He still chews him out later, patching up the burns that he’d gotten from literally walking (jumping) through fire. Afterwards, he marvels at how Steve breathes deep and even in his sleep, that Steve is healthy for the first time in his life, and sighs when he realizes that Steve is still going to do stupid shit that it’s harder to keep him safe. He’ll do it anyway.

---

Tony had said once that everything special about Steve came from a bottle.

He’d tracked Steve down a couple months later and was trying to talk him into coming back.

“C’mon, Cap. Robocop is a total sad puppy and it isn’t very Steve Rogers of you to leave him hanging.”

Steve tenses up, something flaring up at the indignity of being told to stay away and then scolded for leaving. But he’s just so tired . He doesn’t snap back like he had wanted to, just speaks with that same quiet assuredness he’d always had. Like what he was saying wasn’t shattering his heart into tiny pieces that would soon be blown away in the wind.

“Steve Rogers died in the Arctic,” he says shortly, coolly. As he turns to face Tony, he shoulders the backpack he has more securely, and notes mildly the look of shock on Tony’s face from his words morph into something more like horror.

The alleyway they are in is deserted, but Tony isn’t in his suit and Steve has scaled up the side and made his way over the rooftops before Tony can find the words to respond.

---

He doesn’t pick up the gun again, not like that. He’s tired of fighting, but of fighting himself , of fighting Steve . He wakes up in the middle of the night, nightmares flickering in the shadows of the darkened bedroom, gasping for breath and reaching next to him for someone who hasn’t been there in months, years . He sits up, blinks the tears from his eyes, and snarls at the nightmares, at Hydra , and decides he’s not gonna let them win.

I could do this all day , he says into the stillness, and turns over, tries again. He thinks that maybe happiness isn’t something found in a day and maybe it’s something he and Steve could search for together.

---

He’s at the Grand Canyon, three weeks later before they find him again. He supposes the burning Hydra sites are a pretty big indicator of where he’s been and he hasn’t been trying very hard to hide.

It was dark out, and he’d gotten himself a small campsite and was burning a red, leather-bound book with a black star embossed on the cover. All of them.

The books were ashes, and he’d been sketching in a notebook when they’d approached.

They were trying to be sneaky, Steve would give them that. But he could also hear the slithering of a snake a couple yards again, so he figured he had an advantage.

He’d put his tactical uniform away, but there was still a knife in his boot, a gun strapped to his thigh. He paused in his drawing to set aside the notepad and rummaged around for a bag of marshmallows and tossed it carelessly over his shoulder.

There was a muffled curse and a shuffle, and Steve knew that he had hit his mark.

“Jesus, marshmallows, really?”

Clint settled himself on the ground beside Steve, ripping the bag open as he went and digging an arrow out of his quiver.

“Arrows, really?” Steve responded wryly. Only Clint would have an arrow for marshmallow roasting.

Clint shrugged, and settled about toasting. Wanda made an appearance on Steve’s side, and gave Steve a smile and a kiss on the cheek before adhering herself to his side, looking on in interest when Steve continued the drawing.

Clint passed the first finished s’more to Wanda. She took it, inspecting it like it was a suspicious creature she had never seen before, but her eyes lit up after she’d taken a bite. She devoured it, then grinned. “It’s good,” she said.

They sat in silence for an hour, eating s’mores, watching as Clint seemed to have more fun setting the marshmallows on fire than eating the finished product. He leaned back on his elbows and stared up into the sky.

“It’s peaceful here,” Clint said, “the kids would like it.”

Wanda hums her agreement, still watching as Steve carefully sketched out facial features. She’d been staying with Clint recently, regaining her own peace of mind, reading the kids bedtime stories and learning how to knit baby clothes.

“He’s beautiful,” Wanda says quietly.

“Yeah,” Steve says, swallowing the lump in his throat, his voice hoarse. “Yeah, he was.”

---

When Bucky has his head sorted out better and he knows that he won’t attack anyone for looking at him funny, and the whisper at the back of his head when he sees Steve’s picture - mission - is dead, he finds out that Steve isn’t just not visiting, he’s gone .

They didn’t tell him, muttering excuses like avoiding relapses, that Steve had been missing for months .

It’s only the amount of time he’d spent getting a hold of his emotions that prevent him from breaking the glass he’s holding, and allows himself to snarl at people around him before holing himself in an empty apartment.

He thinks back to the time when they were laying on the floor of their cramped apartment in the middle of summer. It’d been a Sunday, but Steve hadn’t gone to church since his ma died and Bucky hasn’t either, but he figures it’s the day of rest and they sure are doing their best at resting.

Bucky has stripped down to his underwear, hair tousled from sleep even though it’s way past noon by now, but Steve’s hair is infinitely worse.

Steve is next to him, far enough away so that they didn’t share body heat, but close enough so that Bucky could reach him if he wanted to. He’s wearing a shirt, still oddly self-conscious in the burning heat. Bucky turns his head so that he can watch the rise and fall of Steve’s chest from the corner of his eye.

He remembers what happiness felt like.

He isn’t the Bucky Barnes from before, but nothing stays the same. Brooklyn is carved into his heart and soul, but there are streets and places he’s relearning. The noise in his mind has quieted to a murmur, except for the way his heart seems to ache to the point of a scream.

Bucky Barnes was a ghost for seventy years, but he’s coming back to life.

---

When Steve is in Yellowstone, drawing pictures of the landscape he is still mourning Bucky Barnes. He turned on his old phone again, only to be called by Sam and yelled at for all of twenty minutes. After, Sam asks him how he’s doing. Steve doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing.

Wanda finds him again, somehow. She’s been traveling, too, she explains, visiting places, seeing the sights. It’s what Pietro would have wanted, she says. The smile on her face is sad and bittersweet, and when Steve takes a step in her direction, hesitating, she meets him halfway and returns the hug.

“Don’t mourn the living,” she says quietly, next to his ear. He stills at her words, bitterness sharp on his tongue, but says nothing. “No one understands him,” she says, drawing back and forcing Steve to meet her gaze, “they don’t know how; but you are different, always defying and exceeding expectations. You knew what he needed all along. And so did he.”

She leaves before Steve falls apart. When he’s lying on his back later that day, staring up at the sky as it turns colors like it was set aflame and grass tickling his bare feet, his eyes are dry, but they’re red and sore and each breath feels like a battle.

He stretches out his hand on instinct, reaching for the place Bucky should be and flinches. That space is empty and Bucky isn’t here, he’s gone , and withdraws his hand like it’s been burnt.

Only for someone else’s to snatch it.

Steve is up immediately, bearing down on the person next to him, pinning him to the ground, until he makes out the face in the darkness and goes completely still.

---

Steve opens his mouth, starts to call his name,  and closes his mouth quickly. He says nothing. He’s just staring at Bucky, face confused, and though Bucky thinks it’s stupidly cute, the tear tracks down Steve’s face are less so.

Bucky remembers talking about not liking other people calling him Bucky, because that was something reserved only for Steve, but apparently he hadn’t explained himself very well, because Steve’s mouth is twisting like he’s going to start crying again.

Bucky’s only seen him cry twice in his lifetime: once when he was the sickest he’d ever been, talking about angels and missing Bucky once he’d died and Bucky had shaken him and sworn that, so help him, if Steve went he’d be following. The other time when Steve lost his other best friend. He didn’t cry at the funeral, but he’d cried back at the apartment that was now empty, after Bucky had gotten in through the open window and he’d sat, holding Steve while crying himself. He almost could hear Sarah humming pleasantly in the background before he drifted off to sleep, and, though he hadn’t been particularly religious before, felt deep in his gut that she was there in angel form, watching over Steve still.

He swallowed the lump in his throat, and tugged Steve back down when he moved to get up.

“Let me go,” Steve whispered, refusing to look him in the eyes, “please, James.”

Bucky felt like he’d been drenched in ice water. “Since when d’you call me James?”

Steve accidentally met his eyes for a second before ducking his head. “Sam said--”

“My close friends call me Bucky, the people who knew me before all this shit call me Bucky,” he retorted, frowning, “They’re great an’ all, but they ain’t gotta right to call me that.” He swallowed. “That’s why I only wanna be called that by you.”

Steve blinked a couple times, eyes meeting and holding Bucky’s gaze. “Bucky,” he said quietly.

“Stevie.”

Steve let out a noise that sounded something like a laugh and a sob all mixed together and buried his face into Bucky’s shoulder, and Bucky let a hand reach up and brush at the hairs at the back of Steve’s neck, and, for the first time in decades, they both breathed easy.

---

At their apartment in Brooklyn, they sleep side by side. If sometimes Steve snuggles up against Bucky’s side and tucks his head under Bucky’s chin, and sometimes Bucky traces patterns in the freckles on Steve’s cheeks, on his shoulders, or that sometimes when Steve cooks breakfast early, before Bucky wakes up, Bucky will stumble in, muttering darkly about the time, and hug Steve from behind, tucking his chin on Steve’s shoulder, or Bucky comes back from a therapy session he makes sure to get one of those ridiculously sweet frappachino lattes from the tiny coffee shop around the corner, or that they sit on the couch huddled together despite the fact that the AC broke and they’re both boiling, watching Disney movies and eating banana flavored candy because no one understands their pain, well.

That’s no one’s business but their own.

Too bad no one told the others that.

One time, Natasha had broken into their apartment and let Sam in after her. Bucky almost decked Sam with a frying pan before he recognized the intruders and went about making pancakes cursing under his breath at them.

Steve stumbles in from brushing his teeth in the bathroom, eyes foggy from sleep and nuzzles Bucky’s neck and a kiss on the cheek before he realizes they have company, and flushes magenta. Bucky only barks a laugh, when Natasha points out the hickey on Steve’s neck and he blushes an even darker shade. Natasha smirks, Sam lets out a long suffering sigh, and Steve quickly moves to hid his face behind the refrigerator door.

When Wanda and Clint show up ten minutes later, and Clint starts complaining about being cramped in their tiny apartment, Bucky turns to him with spatula raised and he falls silent immediately. Satisfied with Clint’s silence, and ushering Steve to stop being distracted by the millions of chores he came up with in order to hide until the bruise faded and get plates, Bucky continues flipping pancakes.

The dog tags around his neck aren’t his own, and Steve isn’t wearing his own either.

This is what happiness feels like.