Chapter Text
He knows it isn’t fair.
The rage burning in his chest, the dull hurt throbbing in his heart — it isn’t fair. Not to Steve, not to anyone. He knows that, beats himself up about it every day, but he can’t seem to stop, feeling the anger surge inside of him at every chance it gets.
He knows it’s what Steve deserves. A lifetime of selflessness, putting everyone before himself, he deserves a break. He deserves peace. He deserves Peggy. Logically, he knows that, because that’s what everyone keeps saying, but he can’t bring himself to truly believe it. That Steve would want to go back. Doesn’t matter the reason. For some reason, he just… can’t wrap his head around it.
“It wasn’t meant to hurt you,” Sam tells him, which he knows too. “Probably didn’t have anything to do with you.”
And it’s supposed to be reassuring, somehow, but it’s not. Probably didn’t have anything to do with you. All it does is make him wonder — those years, when he was in the Soul stone — had Steve forgotten about him? Moved on after losing him for a second time? It’s not fair to expect Steve to always be there with him when he has his own life and his own aspirations, he knows that, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. Regardless, Steve still voluntarily left him. Abandoned him. Permanently.
It’s not fair. None of it is. Not Bucky’s anger or Steve’s desire for happiness or any of it, really, and he dwells on those wasted years of being a brainwashed super soldier too often, wondering if he’d just been stronger Steve wouldn’t have left. If he wasn’t so messed up. If he wasn’t so fucking pathetic.
Maybe the gaping wound in his heart wouldn’t be there.
Sam goes to visit Steve every other week. Says he’s still his friend and still enjoys his company or something like that. Bucky hadn’t really been listening. He tells him Steve misses him and he wishes he would visit and Sam himself says he’s being salty, getting angry over nothing.
Nothing. Oh, how he wishes it were nothing. As if he doesn’t remember tender kisses in the wee hours of the morning and his own strong arms wrapped around Steve’s tiny frame, so warm and comforting and safe. And as much as he wishes, hopes, prays it was nothing, it wasn’t. There’s no way around it. It wasn’t nothing, he’s pretty sure friends don’t make out with each other. If they’d lived in modern times, he hopes they might have been boyfriends. But maybe — maybe Steve would’ve met Peggy anyway. Maybe they would have gotten married and had children like they were supposed to, since they’re a man and a woman and that’s what couples like that do. Maybe Bucky would’ve been shoved to the side anyway.
But those are all “maybe”s, none of them describing the reality he’s currently living in. Here Steve is a ninety-year-old man fresh from a happy — and very heterosexual — marriage, who hasn’t seen Bucky in nearly eighty years and has probably forgotten all about him by now. He wouldn’t be surprised. Eighty years is the entire lifespan of some people, and completely healthy ones at that. After all this time — Bucky can’t even bring himself to ask.
Sam tells him there’s no way Steve’s forgotten about him when he asks to see him all the time, but Bucky knows he knows that’s not what he means. He means he’s forgotten about the birthmark on the side of his thigh and the route they used to walk home from school every day and the address of the apartment they lived in before the war. The little things, the little details, the things that really mattered — Steve’s forgotten all of them. That’s just the way it is. He’s tried to tell Sam this, he really has, but the words come out jumbled and Sam probably thinks he’s going insane again or something. He doesn’t blame him. Most days he wonders the same thing.
He remembers the day Steve left and came back more vividly than he’d like. He’d been expecting it. Steve had told him a few days earlier, and while internally his heart had been shattering, he’d given a thin smile and told him to go for it. Because that’s what he was supposed to do, right? Steve’s his own person, he isn’t Bucky’s property. He can’t control what he does. If Steve wanted to go back in time to be with Peggy then Steve was allowed to go back in time to be with Peggy. It was completely within his right. And like he said — Steve deserved it. Deserves it. He’s done so much for Bucky, for the Avengers, for the world — he deserves rest.
But every time he thinks about it it’s like the temperature has dropped thirty degrees, and it makes him want to claw his hair out and yell at him until his throat is raw and every last word he’s ever wanted to say to Steve has been shouted at the top of his lungs so he’ll never have to look at his stupid fucking face ever again. He wants to scream. Let all his emotions out like a flood. Steve would be angry, of course he would. Bucky’s expected that from the start. But for some reason it feels worth it; like it would finally alleviate some of the heavy, exhausting weight from his chest.
“You’re seriously just going there to yell at him?” Sam deadpans when he explains all this to him. The bus ticket is already paid for and Bucky’s ready, his hair cut and his beard shaved. The anger is strong today, too, and it almost feels like a parasite, eating away at him until there’s nothing left.
Bucky doesn’t miss the sad look on Sam’s face as he lets out an exasperated sigh and nods, slamming the top of the laptop down and swinging his bag over his shoulder. He doesn’t miss it. He just ignores it.
(“Why doesn’t he want to see me?” Steve asked. He didn’t sound angry, not really, just confused. And maybe a little sad.
Sam grimaced. “I mean, in his defense, you did abandon him.”
A heavy silence hung in the air while Steve processed his words. Finally, he said quietly, “No, I didn’t.”
“I’m not going to pick sides here, but yeah. You did.”)
✰
He’s wearing the leather jacket that Sam had gotten him for his birthday — it’s somehow already wrinkled, but Sam’s never commented on it. He hasn’t worn it too much recently, since it’s been way too hot to be wearing anything but your bare ass, but it’s chillier today and on top of that, he wants Steve to think he’s got his shit together. As much as he’s angry at the guy, he’s still his boyfriend childhood best friend. And the last thing he wants is for him to know he’s as royally fucked up as he is.
When he enters Steve’s apartment complex, his stomach starts to churn uncomfortably. This is a mistake, he thinks, a mistake, a fucking mistake —
“You going in the elevator?” Bucky whips his head up to see a teenage boy standing next to him, with one earbud in and a bubble of gum sticking out of his mouth. Wordlessly, he nods and follows him in, unfolding the note Sam had given him with Steve’s address and unit number and pushing the button for the seventh floor. Unit 732 is scrawled almost illegibly next to it.
When the boy gets out at the fourth floor, Bucky allows himself to mutter a few curses under his breath and tries to stop himself from crumpling the note up and digging his heel into it. He manages to restrain himself long enough that he makes it to the seventh floor, although he feels the anger building inside of him again. It seems to have returned with a vengeance, and in all honesty Bucky’s scared that if he steps into Steve’s apartment he’s going to burst into tears. And Steve will try and comfort him because he’s Steve, always has been and always will be no matter what Bucky does, and all that will do is make him cry harder because he doesn’t deserve Steve. He didn’t back in the war and he doesn’t now.
A minute later, he finds himself standing in front of a freshly painted white door with three gold letters reading 732 nailed into the front, and he wishes he just went home. But it’s too late now, and he wasted enough money on the bus ticket that he doesn’t want the trip to be for nothing. So he pushes aside any last ounce of pride he has left and knocks on the door — three times, like he did before the war — trying desperately to ignore his breath hitching in his throat.
Sam was right. This was a stupid idea. Is a stupid idea. Why is he even —
The door creaks open and Steve stands there, with his greying hair and wrinkled face and Bucky almost wants to throw up. Considers it, even. The former’s eyes are wide as he surveys the latter, as if he doesn’t believe it’s really him, but he remains silent. He supposes he looks more like the Bucky Steve remembers now that his hair is short and he isn’t going around murdering people anymore, but he sees Steve’s eyes flicker towards his arm and instantly any memory of what Bucky has dubbed “Steve’s Bucky” seems to disappear. He steps aside and Bucky awkwardly enters the apartment, his hands clasped behind his back to stop them from shaking, and Steve motions for him to follow him further into the room.
“I wasn’t expecting you.”
The voice sounds so old and parched and unlike any version of Steve Bucky’s ever known, so much so that he seems almost unrecognizable, but he swallows thickly and tries to sound as indifferent as possible. “Me neither.”
“What are you doing here, Buck?” Buck. The nickname rolls off Steve’s tongue as easily as it always has and he almost wants to laugh, tell him he’s not Buck, not anymore, not to him, wants to scream at him that he lost that privilege eighty years ago when he jumped into Peggy’s arms, but he doesn’t. He works his jaw and stares right into Steve’s eyes, such a clear, shimmering blue like they’ve always been.
“I’m here to say goodbye.”
The words come out dryer and shakier than he intended but Steve hears them all the same, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise. “Listen, Steve, you had an entire life without me in it. Voluntarily. You chose to uproot everything you’d worked for and go back to a time when people like us were tortured and killed for being different all because of a girl you knew for a year and kissed once, and you didn’t even fucking hesitate.” He can feel the anger, the parasite growing again. “We don’t know each other anymore. That’s not something you can change. So, goodbye, Steve. Formally.” Steve opens his mouth to respond but Bucky doesn’t let him. “‘Til the end of the line my ass.”
He steps around Steve and storms out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him and heading back towards the elevator. No one else is there.
It almost feels like Steve’s eyes are burning holes in the back of his head, like he’s there with him, but he’s not. And he doesn’t know if he wishes he came back for him or not, but regardless, he didn’t, so he figures he just needs to suck it up and accept it.
Steve’s gone. Maybe not dead — not yet, anyway — but definitely gone. Whoever Bucky knew before the war, during the war, while he was the Winter Soldier — he’s gone. And he’s never coming back.
He wonders if this is how Steve felt when he found out Bucky was still alive. When he found out Bucky had been mercilessly tortured for fifty goddamn years before he woke up from the ice. That his best friend, his soulmate, maybe even his lover, was never going to be the person he fell in love with. But the difference, he supposes, is that Steve saved him. He never gave up on him. He didn’t stop until Bucky was safe, until Bucky was back, safely in his arms.
And Bucky — he just said goodbye.
The image of Steve leaving flashes in his mind and he wants to rip it out of his brain completely so he’ll never have to think about it ever again, but he can’t. He can’t bring himself to do it. Steve’s still his best friend. No matter what he said, what he did — he still cherishes the memories he has of him.
He misses Steve, he thinks. Not the wrinkly old man sitting in unit 732 in that bitchass apartment building or the perfect super soldier with the goddamn shield and the fucking spandex, but Steve. Steve, in all his 5’4” glory, the dumbass from Brooklyn who was “too dumb to run away from a fight.” The kid who would do anything to fight for what he thought was right, even if it became the last thing he ever did.
And he wonders, as he listens to the roar of the Brooklyn streets in front of him with Steve’s fucking apartment building behind him and the image of him yelling at him replaying in his head, if maybe that was the stupidest thing he’s ever done.