Chapter Text
SHIELD had told the story of Steve’s defrosting countless times. They said that he woke peacefully, that he quickly realized that something was wrong, and busted out of the facility and ended up running through the streets of Manhattan. The truth was much simpler. Steve woke up screaming. For hours Bucky’s name was the only word that fell from his lips. It was supposed to be over. Bucky had fallen and Steve had crashed. It was supposed to be the end of the line.
For Steve, it had only been nine days since Bucky fell, but to the rest of the world it had been almost seventy years. SHIELD had set him up with an apartment in Manhattan and expected him to move on with his life, to become battle ready again and to be there for them when they needed him. People loved to think that Steve was simple, naive, and didn’t know anything about the future or the way that technology worked. What people didn’t realize was that very little has truly changed over the past seventy years. Steve had spent years fighting in some of the most highly classified ops of the war, he understood the intelligence community better than anyone would give him credit for.
The apartment SHIELD set up for him was crawling with bugs. It was honestly hard for Steve to decide if SHIELD thought that he was an idiot or if they genuinely didn’t care if he noticed the bugs. It was obvious that Fury wanted to keep an eye on him and disabling the bugs would raise far too many eyebrows. If SHIELD wanted to listen to him cook his dinner and listen to ‘old’ music, they could go right ahead. He did take the ones from his bedroom and move them into the spare room. Steve needed at least one place where he could be alone.
Steve, obviously, had no idea how to adjust to the future. After finding the bugs he figured he should probably get a new laptop. He wasn’t sure what SHIELD could have done to the one they gave to him.
Some agent, whose name Steve had immediately forgotten, had given him a crash course on different kinds of cards and how money worked in the future. Steve wondered if this man thought he was stupid. The cards were a bit weird, but not unlike the way that ration tokens worked, it wasn’t money but he could use it to pay for things. And money was the same, things were just more expensive, seriously this did not need to take two full hours.
“So basically, instead of paying with cash all you have to do is insert your card and enter in a PIN, which is like a four number password. Here, you can choose it now. Yeah, just type it in here.” Steve had zoned out for like the past five minutes, but this seemed kind of important. The only number Steve could think of was 1917, which was probably a safe bet considering Steve was born in 1918 and few people seemed to actually realize how important Bucky was to Steve.
“Okay, I got it. Anything else I should know?”
The agent answered quickly, “Nope, you should be all ready to go Captain.” Did no one bother to teach these kids how to lie? There was obviously something he wasn’t allowed to tell Steve. Considering all the bugs that SHIELD had placed in his apartment it really wasn’t that hard to figure out the card could be traced.
Without the card he didn’t have that much money. It would probably be enough to buy some books but probably not a new laptop.
There was a small bookstore about a block from the apartment. People thought that he was old fashioned, so he might as well make the most of that assumption. He was mostly interested in military history, he wanted to know what made SHIELD the way it was. Steve also found a book on himself, which although weird, would probably be useful. If he was going to be expected to play Captain America, he might as well read up on how the world saw Captain America.
The book was interesting to say the least. It was confusing and frustrating and so incredibly far from the truth. Steve read the book and recognized that it was about him but the more he read the more he felt like he was reading about somebody else’s life. It made him seem like the perfect American man: patriotic, strong, masculine. Everything they knew about his personality seemed to come from the USO tour or those god awful comics. It was honestly kind of funny to think that there were people who actually believed that bullshit.
Everyone seemed to know about project Rebirth but no one seemed to care about the man Steve was before the experiment. There wasn’t any mention of Steve’s Irish Catholic heritage, or his single immigrant mother. People didn’t want Captain America to be anything other than red-blooded American. So many of the important milestones and fights that Steve had experienced were erased. Steve had spent the majority of his life small, sickly, and disabled, but no one wanted to talk about it. Everyone wanted to ignore the fact that Steve had lived through the eugenics movement. They talk about the way he was before the serum as if they’re trying to make him more relatable. Like he was just a bit skinny and not disabled in a time when people thought that he should be killed for that.
Reading all these things about himself was probably a bad idea and reading things about Bucky was an even worse idea. Steve must lack any sense of self-preservation because here he was; alone, unable to sleep, and reading a book about Bucky. It was called ‘America’s Sargent’, which Bucky would have loved. Him and the Howlies used to joke about the whole Captain America persona. They each had their own impressions and versions of what Bucky liked to call his ‘Captain America mode’.
The author painted Bucky as some sort of sidekick, which is honestly laughable. He must have gotten the idea from the Captain America comics, but anyone who had actually known Steve and Bucky knew just how far that was from the truth. They had always said that they had more of a partnership than anything. The Howlies used to joke that they acted like an old married couple. Considering that their 70th wedding anniversary would be in September, Steve guessed that they really were an old married couple now.
He could picture the day of their wedding as clear as a movie.
September 28, 1942. Bucky had gotten his draft card earlier that morning. Neither of them talked about it but they both understood that there was a chance that Bucky would never come home. Bucky had proposed about four years earlier. They had always wanted to get married but were never able to justify the risk. When Bucky got drafted they decided that they didn’t want to wait any longer, or at least that’s how Steve remembered it.
“Stevie, baby, I love you, but there’s no goddamn way I’m gunna turn you into a widow.”
“Losing you would hurt the same whether or not we got married. But, Buck, marrying you would be the greatest honor of my life and it would make all the pain worth it. God, it sounds so stupid, but you’re going to be so far away and I just want to have that with you.”
“Okay, let’s imagine for a second that I were to say yes . . . where would we even go? It’s not like we can just waltz on down to Church.”
“You know that dance hall we go to sometimes? They do queer weddings there all the time and I already talked to Thomas, the bartender, and he said he’d have everything ready for us by 8:00 so you should really go get ready.”
“Okay . . . Wait? You did what?”
“I already planned everything. Now, hurry up we can’t be late to our own wedding.”
The ceremony was rushed and somewhat chaotic, but Steve couldn’t imagine it being any more perfect. Bucky was letting his hair grow out, so he had these beautiful curls forming a crown on his head. Bucky stood there with the face of a Greek god and all of the confidence and stature of a king. Even given a thousand lifetimes, Steve didn’t think he would ever be fully worthy of the man standing in front of him.
Thomas had claimed that being a pastor’s son gave him the authority to officiate weddings, which was logical enough for everyone involved. As Thomas started his speech, Steve couldn’t help but be drawn into Bucky’s eyes.
He thought of all the memories they shared; their first kiss, the time they took pictures together in a photobooth on Coney Island, when Bucky had first told Steve that he loved him. All of these small moments had led them to where they were now, and although many of them were painful, Steve wouldn’t change any of them for the world.
Steve woke up with tears in his eyes, but at least he wasn’t screaming.