Chapter Text
(In the end, it happens like this.)
.
It’s the end of summer when Bucky comes home—one of the last warm days before the sweltering New York summer turns into fall—and there is something in Steve that punches right through his chest at the sight of him, leaning against the wall, haggard and unmoving. The stillness looks eerie, unnatural, like he’s waiting for Steve to pass judgment, and he can almost feel his mouth taste like ash at the thought.
“Buck?” he says, keeps his distance, and it kills him slowly with every shaky breath he takes. He wants—needs—to come closer, and he knows he can’t. Not now.
He can almost feel the three bullet wounds in his gut, long healed now, and it’s nothing more than phantom pain, a memory.
“You weren’t home,” Bucky says, his voice hoarse and quiet, like that’s explanation enough.
Like Steve didn’t spend the first four months after D.C. trying to find him before finally understanding that he had to let Bucky come to him on his own terms, that it was the only way or else he wouldn’t be that much different from them.
Like it’s the simplest thing in the world, coming home.
(Sometimes, he knows, it’s the most difficult thing you can do.)
.
There are a lot of things Steve doesn’t ask, things like do you remember, and are you staying, and are you okay.
He settles for are you hurt, and are you hungry, and do you want to take a shower.
Bucky stays silent, but Steve sees the blood on his ruined shirt when he lifts his hand to touch the wound, and the gesture looks automatic, almost subconscious. Bucky’s fingers press down, but he doesn’t flinch.
“Would you like me to take a look at this?” Steve asks. He knows the hospital is out of the question. He’s seen the medical equipment in the abandoned HYDRA outpost where they kept Bucky for some time between the missions, remembers the way just looking at it made him physically sick.
Bucky stares at nothing with unseeing eyes, the line of his shoulders painfully tense, his jaw tight with something that makes Steve’s skin crawl. Like Bucky is waiting for something—something inevitable. Something too horrific to put into words.
“It’ll heal,” he says eventually, like he finally remembers where he is. Who he’s with. Like he doesn’t really care if he bleeds, so long as he doesn’t bleed out. It does something to Steve, deep under his skin, in that ugly, ugly part of him that he usually tries to hide from the world, and he feels like he wants to hit something or maybe like he wants someone to hit him.
“Bucky.” It comes out more pleading than he intended, but he doesn’t care. They’ve done this hundreds of times—patching each other up in their old apartment in Brooklyn, in Steve’s or Bucky’s parents’ apartments before that. They used to trust each other with this, warm hands on their skin, the gentle touch, the whispered words, you idiot or you punk, the unspoken world of affection behind them, and they knew it was going to be okay. That they were going to be okay. “Please.”
When Bucky starts to undress mechanically without a single word, Steve swallows slowly, painfully, his tongue thick in his mouth, and goes to retrieve the first aid kit from the bathroom. He gives himself a moment, splashes cold water on his face, tries to get his breathing under control. This is not about him, he knows. Bucky had always been there for him in the past, and Steve has already failed him once, twice, a thousand times over. He has an impossible debt to repay.
He closes his eyes for the briefest moment and when he opens them, he almost doesn’t recognize himself in the mirror. It’s like he’s looking at a ghost. Maybe he is—after all, there are a lot of ghosts around these days.
The wound is a deep gash going from ribs to navel, bleeding in places where Bucky ripped off the fabric of his shirt. Steve knows from the file Natasha gave him, the one she didn’t upload the day SHIELD fell, that Bucky can now heal faster and endure more pain, but he also knows this must be excruciating. Abdomen injuries always are.
“Please, tell me if I hurt you,” he says, kneeling in front of Bucky.
“Why?” Bucky asks, looking down at him like he’s searching for an explanation, and Steve feels like he’s going to be sick.
“Because it’s not supposed to. Because I will stop if it does.”
There’s something in Bucky’s face that makes Steve want to scream. That makes him wonder why Bucky doesn’t.
Why isn’t he screaming?
He needs stitches, but Steve has little experience with those and no anesthetics, and he knows that if he tried to stitch him up without any painkillers, Bucky wouldn’t even flinch. That’s the thing that scares him the most.
“I can go if you want,” Bucky says once Steve finishes closing the gash with surgical glue. It’s a crude solution, but it’s the best he can do under the circumstances. If Bucky’s body heals the way Steve’s does, this won’t even leave a scar. “You don’t have to— I’m not him.”
Steve swallows, closes his eyes. “I don’t care. So maybe you are, and maybe you aren’t, this doesn’t change anything, Buck, do you understand? You’re still my friend. I still—”
I still love you, he almost says.
“You’re still my friend.”
Steve brings him a change of clothes—a soft, grey henley that smells like laundry detergent and fabric softener, and a comfortable pair of pants, because he remembers what Sam told him the last time they talked about what might happen after— if—
(Soft fabrics. Comfortable clothes. Nice smells. Don’t underestimate the little things, man. He hasn’t been cared for like that in years.)
Bucky strips down with determined efficiency right in the middle of the living room, and Steve turns away from him as soon as he understands what’s happening. He’s still mourning for Bucky’s memories—their memories, the lost history of shared lives—but he knows, he knows that’s not the worst thing they did to him. He knows they made him feel like he wasn’t a person, like his own body didn’t belong to him, like it could be used by anyone for any reason, like he didn’t have the right to think of anything as his own. This—this is a grim reminder of that.
“You can change in the bathroom if you want,” he says, praying his voice doesn’t break. He’s been exposed like a nerve ever since he found Bucky waiting for him outside his apartment, and he’s exhausted, so, so exhausted, and worse than he’s been in a long time now, he can finally admit it, but he can’t let himself think about this now. Certainly not act on it.
When Steve finally turns back to face Bucky, there’s a pile of old, ratty clothes on the floor that Steve has no idea what to do with. He could burn them, throw them away, but they’re Bucky’s clothes and he should be the one to decide how to deal with them. They’re beyond saving, the shirt caked in blood and the black cargo pants torn and frayed at the seams, but Steve understands the importance of the act. When Bucky was alone, in hiding, it was different, there was no handler to tell him what to do and what to think, and who to kill; what to wear and what to eat, and when, but now there’s two of them, and Bucky needs to understand that this time, he can make all those decisions for himself.
“Are you hungry?” Steve asks again, and Bucky shakes his head even though Steve can tell he’s starving. It’s such a small thing—that he can read Bucky, read that small part of him that hasn’t changed and still grinds his teeth a little when he’s trying to lie and failing, making his jaw muscles twitch, and it hits him like a blow to the head. “I could eat,” he adds with a little shrug, like it’s no big deal, an open invitation to join him if he changes his mind.
He makes a stack of pancakes from the mix, adds a handful of blueberries and carefully places two forks on the tabletop.
Bucky joins him while he’s already on his third one. It’s tentative, and Steve hates that, absolutely hates that, because it’s nothing like Bucky and nothing even like the Winter Soldier he fought on the helicarrier, all fury and anger. It makes him want to rip Pierce to pieces.
“There’s a bed in the guest room. Your room, if you want it,” Steve says and starts to get up to put the dishes away when Bucky makes an aborted gesture that makes Steve stop in his tracks. He sits back down, his hands still holding the dirty plate. He has no idea what this means. What Bucky wanted to do before he thought better of it. Before the instinct Steve doesn’t remember from before kicked in.
Sitting less than two feet from him, Bucky looks like he’s starved for touch and like he doesn’t want to be touched at all.
He’s always been extremely tactile, ever since Steve can remember—an arm thrown across Steve’s shoulders, his feet in Steve’s lap after a long day of hard work, his cool hands on Steve’s forehead while he was half out of his mind with fever and hallucinating, small, everyday touches that went almost unnoticed until Bucky suddenly wasn’t there anymore. Now, Steve can see the conflict in him, the need to be touched and the need to get away from any human contact as far as possible, and Steve wants nothing more than to reach out and close the distance between them, but it’s not 1941, and this might be Bucky, but he’s had enough people touching him without his consent to last him a lifetime. Steve’s not going to be another one.
“Do you need anything?” he asks instead, and it’s so inadequate it makes him want to scream.
“No,” Bucky says, and that’s progress, at least. He gets to his feet, clearly convinced he’s being dismissed, and heads straight for the guest bedroom, leaving Steve behind. He doesn’t close the door. The implications behind this gesture make Steve’s blood run cold, but he doesn’t make a move to close the door either, because he doesn’t want Bucky to think he needs to. He has no idea whether he’s made the right call.
“The loft can get a bit cold at night,” he says eventually, trying for neutral and almost, almost succeeding. “Just a heads-up.”
After that, he goes through the motions in an almost dreamlike state, except everything looks black and white, grainy like an old newsreel, and he dreams his nightmares in color.
There’s no sound coming out of Bucky’s room, but when Steve walks out of the shower, the door is now left only slightly ajar. Outside, the loft is dark and silent.
Inside, behind the closed door, Steve slumps slowly to the floor and presses the back of his palm to his mouth to keep the sound in. It’s messy and ugly, his breath hot and wet, and shaky, and he can’t remember the last time he cried like this, apart from that night in a bombed-out shell of a pub in London. Back then, he cried for Bucky, too.
.
“I can’t ask you to do this,” Steve says, looking up from his cup of Americano Beth brought a few minutes earlier. On the house, she said. Looks like you need it.
“I know, man, that’s why you’re not asking. I’m offering.” Sam shrugs, his face open and serious, but not grave, and it makes Steve feel better, because he knows if there’s anything he can trust these days, it’s Sam’s judgment. “You know it’s good, though, right? He came to you. He’s made that choice himself. For him, that’s huge. Just—”
“Be careful, I know.” They’ve had this conversation already. “I’m not compromised, if that’s what you’re worried about. You know I can handle this.”
Sam considers him carefully for a moment. “Would you tell me if you were compromised?”
“Yes.” Steve swallows a large gulp of his coffee, still too hot and burning his throat.
Sam laughs.
“Dude, for someone who worked for the American war propaganda effort and then for SHIELD, you’re a terrible liar. Jesus.” He shakes his head with amusement and Steve can’t help but smile, too. “How is he, though?”
“Still sleeping, hopefully. He looked like he needed a good rest.” Steve rubs his eyes, drags his hands down his face. There’s a pressure deep inside his chest that makes it hard to breathe, a tight knot where his lungs should be. “He was wounded when he turned up, I patched him up with surgical glue, because I don’t think he’d take too kindly to the idea of a hospital right now. He looked like he was starving but didn’t want to eat. He didn’t even think he deserved any privacy while he was changing and then when he went to sleep. I—”
He still remembers the desperate look on Bucky’s face and how badly he wanted to touch him in that moment.
“Listen, there’s no handbook for this, okay?” Sam leans back in his chair, crosses his arms over his chest. “I’m so out of my depth here it’s not even funny, and the closest we have to an expert on recovering from years of brainwashing is in the wind and going after what’s left of the Red Room, so we’re all in the same boat. But the most important thing is this: he needs to do this by himself. You can be there for him when he does, and you can help whenever necessary, but you can’t put him back together. Only he can do that.”
“I understand that,” Steve says, and the thing is, he does. He understands that he can’t be the only reference point for Bucky, the person around which he rebuilds his life from the ground up, from the ruins and ashes left by Zola and the rest of HYDRA. He wouldn’t be that different from Pierce, then. It’s the last thing he wants.
“I know, I know, it’s cool, man.” Sam brings his hands up in a placating gesture. “Just covering the bases.”
Beth brings them their refills and two glazed donuts, and Sam smiles at her in that way that Steve remembers from when Bucky used to take pretty girls out on a night in town but that Steve never quite mastered, and Beth smiles back. They flirt for a moment back and forth while Steve watches, amused and oddly content. They’re sitting outside, taking advantage of the warm, sunny weather that will soon give way to the golden New York fall. The unmistakable smell already lingers in the air in the evenings.
“So how’s the testing with Stark going on?” Steve asks once they’re left alone. “Been airborne yet?”
The smile Sam gives him in return is answer enough. “The guy’s ego is bigger than his building—which is great, for the record, my bathroom is the size of my first apartment—but damn, can he design amazing gear. Stopped him before he could paint it red and gold, though. And Colonel Rhodes came by to visit the first day I went airborne. That guy is amazing. Stark lucked out, I’m telling you. If he weren’t dating Pepper, who is, by the way, totally awesome and wow, you really haven’t been exaggerating about that, he definitely should be dating Rhodes.”
Steve laughs. He’s met James Rhodes a few times, and he certainly respects the man, but he doesn’t know him very well. “So what now, are you staying at the Tower?”
“I don’t know, man. I got a job back in D.C., a good job that I’m good at,” Sam says around a bite of his donut, then wipes the frosting from his upper lip with his thumb. “But you people are all clearly crazy, and you need someone to watch your sorry asses to make sure you don’t get yourselves killed in the process. So just say the word, Cap, and you know I got your six.”
Steve considers this for a moment. “There’s a VA department here in New York, too,” he says eventually. “I’d never ask you to give up your job, but it would be great to have you here. And Sam? That wouldn’t be Captain America asking. Just Steve Rogers.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m saying yes.”
.
It’s Pepper who finds the apartment, two weeks after Steve comes back to New York.
“I know you don’t want to live at the Tower permanently,” she says one evening around a glass of red wine, while Tony tinkers away with Bruce in his lab, “so I asked around, and turns out, a friend is selling a loft in Williamsburg. I have some pictures, if you want to take a look.” She passes him the tablet, and Steve starts to look through the photos. “You draw, right? Well, in that case, I think I should mention that my friend is a painter, and he swears the light is to die for.”
The place is all high ceilings and huge windows, bare red brick, and steel, and old wood, and it’s so unlike all the other apartments Steve used to live in, he falls in love immediately.
He buys an old turntable at the flea market, not out of nostalgia, but simply because he enjoys the soothing, grainy quality of sound. He decorates the walls with old sketches done in pencil and a few original pieces from young local artists. He fills the shelves with books he wants to read. It feels like moving on.
.
The loft is quiet when Steve returns, and his first frantic thought is that Bucky is gone, but then he hears the quiet hum of water in the bathroom, and he feels like he can breathe again.
Bucky comes out a few minutes later, dressed in yesterday’s clothes, but his hair is wet and his eyes are red-rimmed from the water. He pauses when he sees Steve, though he must have heard him come in, and almost desperately avoids any eye contact as he moves through the open space of the apartment. There’s tension in his shoulders that must be painful to carry, and Steve can’t help but wonder what would have happened if he’d found Bucky right after D.C. If it would have been better. If it would have been worse.
Steve doesn’t think of those months they spent apart, after Bucky pulled him out of the Potomac, as lost, because he, of all people, knows there’s no loss in trying to find yourself, being on your own to figure out how much of you is still left after everything else has turned to dust.
(The waitress in Louisiana tells him Bucky had been coming to the diner for a while before he left town, and that he looked closed-off but not threatening, not the way Steve remembers from the helicarrier, when for a moment all he could see was a feral snarl. This is good, Sam tells him then, over the phone. It means he’s adjusting to being among other people again. Just gotta give him a little more time.
Two days after that, Steve comes back to New York. This time, it’s for good.)
“There was a cat,” Bucky says quietly, and his voice still sounds hoarse from disuse. Steve stops putting the groceries away and turns to face him.
“The one with the missing ear, that Becca really wanted to keep but your parents wouldn’t let her, so we fed him scraps from the table when they couldn’t see?” he asks. Steve remembers the cat—an old, ugly thing that Rebecca Barnes, for some unknowable reason, loved more than anything in the world. He remembers how Bucky held her when she found it dead one morning and cried until she almost couldn’t breathe. They buried it in the backyard, by the fence, behind the bushes so that the adults wouldn’t take notice.
Bucky shakes his head and looks down. “I only remember the cat,” he says.
Steve feels like someone poured a bucket of water over him.
“She’s dead, isn’t she,” Bucky continues, uninterrupted, in a monotone voice. “My— my sister. I had more than one, that’s what the exhibit said. And they’re dead now.”
Steve swallows painfully around the tightness in his throat. “Yeah, Buck. They’re dead.”
A moment of silence, then, “Good. At least they didn’t have to see— this.”
“Bucky, come on.” Steve shakes his head and takes a step closer, stops himself at the last moment before he can put a hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “They thought the world of you. I don’t think this would’ve changed anything.”
“No. It’s good,” Bucky repeats, more forcefully this time, but his face remains blank. He doesn’t look at Steve as he turns back and walks away. When the door closes behind him, Steve doesn’t follow.
.
He finds Rebecca Barnes three weeks after the attack on New York. It’s not difficult to track down her address once he gets comfortable using the internet, though it’s still a strange feeling, to know that these days, you can find virtually anything about anyone if only you know how to look, all in less than ten minutes. The world got bigger while he was under the ice, but also, in a way, it got a lot smaller.
Rebecca Barnes-Proctor owns a brownstone in Greenpoint, a nice, two-story building across from a Polish delicatessen that must have been here even back in Steve’s time, even though Steve could never afford to shop here back then. The sign says: Established 1925.
When Steve rings the bell, there’s only silence for a long moment, but then he hears someone running down the stairs, and a few seconds later he comes face to face with a young woman. She’s tiny, wears a floral dress with combat boots, her hair is a dark shade of teal and she has a sleeve tattoo on her left arm, and yet she looks so much like Bucky that Steve feels like someone’s just punched him in the solar plexus.
“I’m looking for Rebecca Barnes?” he says after a short moment when all he can do is stare. “I’m— a family friend.”
The girl raises an eyebrow. “So it really is you,” she says. “Grandma said you would come.”
Steve smiles, and it’s so hard and so, so easy at the same time.
“Steve Rogers.”
He extends his hand instinctually, even though his ma always taught him it’s the lady who should reach out first, but Peggy never much liked the spectacle of it. A good handshake is a good handshake, she used to say.
“Ruth Scanlin,” the girl says, taking his hand. She has a firm, sure grip. “And yeah, I figured, after they plastered you all over the news during the attack. Grandma took it, well—”
He can only imagine.
“Is she home? I’d love to talk to her.”
Ruth steps to the side and opens the door wider to let him in. Inside, the smell is so familiar, it almost makes him reel. It’s the way the Barnes aparment always smelled, the way Bucky’s mother always smelled, lavender and honey.
“Steve.” Becca Barnes stands in the living room doorway, and she looks every inch the girl Steve remembers. There are deep wrinkles on her face, and her hair is milk-white, but her eyes are still the same, and she smiles the same smile. “You came back.” Her voice doesn’t waver, but her eyes are a little watery.
“Yeah, Becca, I did.” He hugs her then, and he’s huge now, towering over her so much that she almost disappears in his arms, but she clings to him with such force he can’t doubt there’s still a lot of fire inside her frail body.
“Is— is Bucky with you?” she asks once they part, and suddenly Steve can’t breathe. “I know we got the telegram, and then the letter, but they said the same thing about you, so if you came back, then I thought that maybe— maybe Bucky did, too?”
He’s silent for a moment, and when he looks at Ruth over Becca’s head, he can see she already knows the answer.
Steve shakes his head. “I’m so, so sorry, Becca, but Bucky— Bucky’s dead. He’s dead, Becca, and he’s not coming back.”
He swallows thickly and closes his eyes for a moment to get his bearings, make sure his voice doesn’t betray him when he speaks again.
It’s still fresh in his mind, like a wound deep inside of him that won’t close, won’t turn into a thin, white scar that only hurts with the coming change of weather. He still wakes up with the image of Bucky falling, screaming his name, burned into the inside of his eyelids. It’s been almost seventy years for everyone else, but for him, it hasn’t even been two months.
Becca nods without a word, but Steve can see there are tears in her eyes, and her hands are shaking just a little bit. She regains her composure in a matter of seconds—she’s always been strong, and there’s steel under her skin, even after all this time.
“Make us a cup of tea, would you, darling,” she says to Ruth, guiding Steve to the living room. There’s a fireplace, a series of framed photographs in sepia on the mantle, and the walls are painted the kind of green that makes Steve think about the old grandma Barnes’ apartment. He used to go there with Bucky from time to time before grandma Barnes died, and Steve always got an extra slice of apple pie, because she thought he wasn’t eating enough.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.” Steve looks at her, his hands clasped tightly in his lap. He feels too big for the room—the way he still does sometimes—and tries to take up as little space as possible. “I had— a few things to figure out. After, you know. After I got back into the world.”
“And in such a spectacular manner, too,” Becca says with a wry smile, and Steve can’t help but laugh. “They were telling me my age had finally caught up to me, you know, that obviously you weren’t real, but I’d recognize that mug anywhere. They have no business tellin’ me I can’t see what’s true and what’s not anymore.”
“People trying to tell Rebecca Barnes what to think. What has the world come to.” Steve shakes his head with mock outrage, remembering how stubborn Becca has always been, how she would never take no for an answer. Mrs. Barnes always lamented that she had raised such a headstrong child—out of the four of them, it was Becca who was the biggest troublemaker. Maybe that’s why she and Steve always got along so well despite the age difference—trouble always attracted trouble.
Ruth brings them their tea and a plate of pumpkin cookies.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t save him.” He can’t look Becca in the eye, but it still needs to be said, and once he starts, the words seem to spill out all at once. “I should’ve— I should’ve grabbed him sooner, I should’ve been more careful, I should’ve told him to take his medal and get back home. They would’ve let him, he was a prisoner of war, he was tortured, he had every right to go home. But he stayed. Because of me. It was me who got him killed. It was all my fault, Becca, and now he’s dead, and I’m not, and it’s—”
“You loved him, didn’t you,” Becca says, and it’s not a question. Steve can feel his heart lodged in his throat, beating frantically. “And I don’t mean like a brother. Was that what this was, the plane crash? You trying to go after him?”
(No. Yes. Maybe. He hasn’t figured that out for himself yet. There’s no way he can verbalize that for other people, what it felt like, before he fell. What it felt like after Bucky did.)
“Yeah. Yeah, I loved him,” he admits finally, after the silence has stretched for too long. It’s the first time that he’s said it out loud. That he could say it out loud without fear. It does not feel like a triumph.
“Oh, Steve,” Becca says, covering Steve’s hands with hers. “I am so, so sorry. I can’t imagine what that must feel like. But you have to know it wasn’t your fault. None of it was your fault, and we never blamed you. And you know Bucky wouldn’t have left your side even if you’d asked. It was always the two of you, Barnes and Rogers, joined at the hip. For as long as I can remember. There was nothing in the world that could change that.”
They sit in silence after that, before Steve finally asks, “When did you figure it out?”
“Back then, when you still looked like a stronger breeze would make you keel over. You always looked at him the same way he looked at you, when you weren’t watching. At first I was too young to understand what this meant, but then I grew up and got to know things that would make our ma blush so hard she’d explode. Bucky never said anything, because he wouldn’t have, now, would he, with how the world worked back then, so he made a show of skirt-chasing and looked at you when he was sure he wouldn’t get caught. And you were the same way. Well, apart from the skirt-chasing.”
Steve huffs out a laugh, but he knows the smile doesn’t reach his eyes.
“So, your granddaughter,” he says instead. “Is the name a coincidence, or was she named after Ruth?”
“Named after Ruth. You should’ve seen Nora, she was so jealous that Alice would name her firstborn after Ruth and not her, even though she was her godmother.”
“Sibling rivalry to the end, huh?” Some things, Steve supposes, really never change.
Becca chuckles. “You know how they always were, trying to one-up one another. And they said I was the trouble child, can you believe that?”
“Hey, you know what they said about me.” Steve shrugs with one shoulder, a smile tugging one corner of his mouth up.
“Anyway, poor Nora died a few months after Ruthie was born, and then Ruth a year after that, and yet, somehow, I’m still here. But you know what, Steve? It’s not a good feeling to outlive all of your siblings.” Becca’s gaze turns distant for a moment, like she’s not even there anymore. “She made professor, you know that? Ruth. Got a tenure, taught at Cornell.”
“And Nora?”
“Got married, stayed at home, same as me. The only difference is, she actually stayed married. I did a few courses, went into publishing after my husband died—editing, proofreading and such. Never remarried, eventually went back to my maiden name.” She takes a deep breath, then reaches over to squeeze Steve’s hand. “I’ve lived a good life, Steve, surrounded by wonderful people, but there hasn’t been a day that I wouldn’t think about Bucky, and about you. You were family, too, I hope you know that.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” Steve looks down at his hands.
Ruth comes by a few minutes later to ask them if they need anything else before she has to head out for a while. Becca looks thoughtful for a short moment, then says, “If you could bring me the box from my bedroom, you know which, my dear. I’d go fetch it myself, but the hip’s been bothering me again, I think it’s going to rain. And thank you, darling.”
It’s a small, black wooden jewelry box encrusted with ivory that Becca holds in her lap for a moment before she opens it and extends her hand to Steve, her fingers closed tightly around something. When she drops it into his open palm, Steve gasps almost inaudibly, just a sharp intake of breath. In his hand, he’s holding Bucky’s old dog tags.
“You should take them,” Becca says, and before Steve can get so much as a word of protest out, she shakes her head vehemently and continues, unperturbed, “Steve, they’re yours if you want them. Please, take them. He sent them back home when he got issued new ones, as some soldiers did, to give their families something to hold onto. He sent them to you. Only you weren’t in Brooklyn anymore, but the postman knew us, and he brought the package back to us. We only opened it when we heard about you—”
James Buchanan Barnes. 32557038. Steve stares at the letters engraved in the metal, slightly bent out of shape.
“Thank you,” he says, then slips them on, covers them with his shirt.
He doesn’t take them off.