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Steve didn’t need his first month back to make him aware of just how many degrees forgiveness comes in, but some lessons feel new each time. Getting a text from Sam asking him to Delacroix for the weekend feels like one tick closer and Steve’ll take it.
He’s about to text back when Sam adds, Bucky will be there.
And Steve? Steve’ll take that, too.
The dirt path bends through trees that spread in complex arches across what’s left of the road. The pavement gave out a while back. Greenish gray mosses trail down, interrupting the slants of late afternoon light as Steve drives the last quarter mile and parks the rental car in front of a weathered blue house. The trim looks newly painted in a white of almost hallucinatory clarity against the trees and rolling marshy grasses.
Bucky and Sam sit on the front steps with just enough room for a six-pack between them.
“—you have a heart of stone. Do you even have a heart?”
“What? I like it fine, Sam.”
“You like the singular genius of Stevie Wonder fine. I’m almost more offended than if you hated it.”
“Well.” Bucky takes a swallow of his beer. “Now that you mention it…”
“No! No backsliding. We got to fine. We are going to build from fine.”
Bucky glances up. In the shade of the porch, his eyes have turned that dark complicated blue.
“Music was more Steve’s thing.” Without looking away, he reaches to pull a beer from the six-pack, tossing the bottle over in an easy underhand lob that doesn’t shake up the beer too badly. “Me? I just liked to dance. Anything with the right kind of beat.”
“Man, if you end up liking disco, I’m disowning you. You’ll be dead to me.”
Twisting open the bottle, Steve leans his shoulder against the post at the bottom of the stairs. Bucky knocks back the last of his beer, tipping his chin up and showing the pale line of his throat. Steve stares down at the label of the beer in his hand, which has a multi-colored skull with a bullet passing through its bright green forehead.
The beer tastes bitter but also faintly like tropical fruits in a way that’s overwhelmingly modern.
“I can see what you’re typing.” Sam leans over and rests his chin on Bucky’s shoulder. “You’re really going to do this to me. I open my home to you. I feed you—”
“Sarah feeds me. And ‘The Best Disco Songs of All Time.’ Rolling Stone. Steve, that sounds like they oughta know a thing or two about music.”
“—you are not just about to—”
A short wandering guitar lick plays and even Steve knows Stayin’ Alive.
“Now this, Sam,” Bucky says with that magnificent deadpan expression of his, “this is great.”
“You’re lucky you brought great beer,” Sam grumbles. “How’d you even find this?”
Bucky shrugs like it had fallen off of a truck at his feet and he’d thought, eh, might as well. But the trick with Bucky was knowing when to apply an inverse scale.
Huh, Steve thinks and takes another sip that’s strange and bitter.
The taste of the future.
By the time dinner is served, the whole first floor smells of seafood and warm spices.
“You’ve known Sam too long not to have tried some gumbo,” Bucky says, which isn’t true. He and Sam have eaten together half the world over, but not gumbo and never here. Bucky grabs Steve's bowl to pass to Sarah, who exchanges a full one for the empty with barely a glance up. “But you ain’t had gumbo till you’ve tried this.”
Steve ends up with a heaping fragrant bowl in front of him: dark broth and rice, shrimp with the tails left on and thin slices of sausages. Sam passes around a big serving dish of potato salad. Putting a scoop in the gumbo is apparently the done thing.
“Uh uh, no thank you,” Sarah admonishes as AJ nearly knocks his glass of orange juice into his bowl that’s mostly rice and sausages. “Honey, you’ve got to set a good example about being careful.”
Bucky’s phone dings with a text and he sends an apologetic look to Sarah but checks the message, then shrugs, tapping back a quick reply.
“Now,” Sarah says, “I know Sam still has you both listening to that old fogey music.”
“I am so ashamed to be related to you right now—”
“The music our parents listened to. C’mon.” She grins at Bucky, reaching across the table to tug lightly on his phone. He lets go easily, raising his hands, palms out in a playful sort of surrender. “And I know you got Spotify on here, because some magnanimous person put you on the family plan with her own children. Not that there’s anything wrong with forties music—”
“Debatable,” Sam tosses in.
“—but a whole lot else is out there. All you gotta do is figure out what you like. Here.” She slides the phone back across the table. “Those four albums. Give ‘em a listen and text me which you like best.”
Bucky taps the side of his phone against the table and smiles in an expression that’s half-shy, half-smirk—and for a moment he looks nineteen, maybe twenty-two all over again.
“Thanks, Sarah.”
“You can thank me by helping with the dishes.”
“Always happy to," and Bucky's voice shades a little softer, "whenever I get the chance to eat your cookin'.”
“Well, there you go.” Sarah grabs a tiny winged action figure painted in red, white and blue that’s swooping towards the shiny meringue surface of the pie waiting for the rest of the meal to wrap up. “You and me, we’re already square.” And she plunks the toy on the table in front of Cass with a warning look that she softens with a kiss to the top of the kid’s head.
Midway through dinner Sam leans over and says, so quiet and real casual, “Don’t fight Bucky on wanting to take the couch.”
And what can Steve do but nod back, just as casual as though to say, Sure. All right.
Sarah shows him up to a room with a gabled ceiling that has a twin bed covered by a faded patchwork quilt. A sewing machine sits on a scratched-up oversized desk and a whole bunch of gray beat-up tool boxes are stacked along one wall.
“Excuse the mess—” Sarah begins, and Steve wishes he could find the words to make her stop, something other than Sam is half of the best family I found in this century, and the other half died so we all could be here together like this, and there’s so much I couldn’t see until it was almost too late.
A man has a lot of time to think when he can go nowhere, see no one and do nothing for months on end.
But there’s no easy way to explain any of that. So Steve pulls out a smile and says, firmly, “It’s great.”
Sarah nods, still embarrassed a little, still unconvinced.
The household has gone to bed, but neither he or Bucky need the full human quantity of sleep. He hasn’t seen Bucky since those first bewildering days back that weren’t anything like the seamless return he’d assumed he could have at any time. But, then, a lot of his decisions haven’t turned out the way he’d expected.
A pile of blankets and a pillow are set on the couch, although Steve finds Bucky outside on the front steps again, listening to the dark that surrounds the dim yellow light spilling out from the porch.
Steve settles on the other end of the same step, folding his arms on his drawn-up knees. The air is damp from the lingering humidity: dense and almost still except for gentle tugs that carry the dank saltwater smell of a marshy sea. The rhythmic drone of crickets overlaps with occasional croaking sounds that Steve can’t identify. Huge pale moths knock against the single bare lightbulb with a noise like a fingertip tapping on a closed window.
“So you and Sarah, huh?” Steve tries, at last.
Bucky huffs out a sound that’s amused but not exactly laughter.
“I should be so lucky.” But Bucky’s smile turns mischievous and he’s so full of light that Steve can barely stand to look. “Bonded over a shared hobby, that’s all.”
Steve runs the evening back through his mind again in a dizzying carnival ride sweep from the front steps to the last slice of pie at the table, searching for what he missed the first time around. And, yeah, of course—
“Giving Sam shit.”
Bucky’s smile is lopsided but real as he leans back on his hands.
“That’s right,” he answers, staring up at the stars that peek unsteadily through the gnarled old branches. “Giving Samuel Thomas Wilson shit.”
![[Image of Steve and Bucky sitting on the porch steps at night]](https://i.postimg.cc/zXH4LrB7/tsrt-scene-1-1680.png)
They sit up half the night, not saying much—but nature this far out is so loud: creaking trees; the swoops and scrabbling of nocturnal animals under the constant buzz and thrum of insects; and, further off, the lapping sound that Steve associates with big tidal rivers or estuary seas.
He stays until Bucky sends him away with a soft “even you gotta sleep, Rogers.”
For a couple hours, he lies awake, alone with his thoughts. The drifting hands of the bedside alarm clock glow in the dark.
By the time Steve comes down in the morning, the blankets and pillow on the couch have vanished. Bucky is in the sunny blue kitchen helping Cass and AJ cut circles from rolled, floured dough.
“You heard your mom, you gotta work fast. What does she say?”
AJ sighs with impressive world-weariness. “If the butter melts, you get bricks.”
“And—”
Bucky nudges Cass, who replies in a sing-song voice, “Who wants to eat bricks.”
“We’re all still on cutting duty,” Bucky says as he shifts a crimped-edge round of dough on the tray, quietly tugging an overlap apart. “But we keep our heads on straight and stay sharp, we may work up to dough-makers, in time.”
At breakfast, Sarah examines one of the biscuits theatrically before pulling it open into flaky halves. Cass stares at her, rapt. AJ digs into his grits, no shrimp, with an appearance of total focus that’s spoiled at the last moment by a glance up.
“Huh.” Sarah drops the halves of the biscuit on her plate. “Whoever made these, they did all right.”
AJ smiles down into his grits. Cass wriggles in his seat with delight.
He finds Sam at the back of the house, where most of the nearby trees have blue gym mats taped the first four or five feet up. By way of hello, Sam tosses the shield at an angle that sends it in a lazy rebound right on over. Lobbing the shield back off a more distant tree is simply a matter of letting his hands and his body react.
Sam picks a trickier angle in response. They work up to rolling catches and soon Steve forgets to hold back. Working with Sam was always like that.
I walked away from this, Steve makes himself think as Sam spots the perfect angle to swing around for a rebound that lays the shield right into Steve’s grip like a gift. But Sam’s hands are fully human. He’s got to be so much better than Steve to do the same damn thing.
On the next pass, Steve catches the shield through the worn leather straps and pauses, tilting his arm up to stare at the painted surface.
Steve feels small and humble and clumsy when he stretches his arm out to pass the shield into Sam’s hold once again. Sam considers the shield, too, testing its weight with a slight flex of his arm.
“You okay with some tough love?”
Steve shrugs then tips his head side to side in a sort of nod, bracing himself.
“Bucky took your leaving hard. That’s between him and you. But he’s got his own thing going on and turns out he’s an okay guy, though if you ever tell him I said that I will—”
He watches Sam struggle for a threat of appropriate scale.
“My suffering will be legendary.”
“—your suffering will be Homeric. I will Gilgamesh your ass.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Monsters. Weeping. Tragedy.”
Steve throws up his hands.
“So think really hard about what you want this time, Steve. Bucky’d pick himself up again if he had to. That’s the kind of guy he is. But I don’t want to see him do it.” Sam’s pause is brutal. “Twice.”
The afternoon unspools under a hot July sun as the brackish air goes thick and heavy. Insects hum and sea birds call one to another. Sarah sets out iced tea with big sprigs of mint on a tray by the front door before driving off down the winding dirt road in her beat-up old tank of a truck. Bucky appears from inside the house, pausing to catch the slam of the screen door. He tosses a worn paperback at Steve that has an S. Wilson inscribed on the inner cover in a childish exaggerated cursive that Steve can’t place, maybe Sam’s as a kid, though the S could as easily be Sarah.
With the old rocking chairs right here, Steve is willing to take the book as an invitation though when he nods his thanks, Bucky just shrugs, glancing away again. But the relief in his chest glows like coals when Bucky settles on the top step of the stairs, twisted sideways to lean against the post. Bucky shakes out sheets of newspaper to protect the floor before he begins to disassemble a complicated part, laying the pieces out in a methodical order.
The tea is too sweet but makes sense, somehow, under all this damp relentless heat and is all right taken in small sips. Bucky cleans the gummed-black mechanical parts, switching between a combination of shop cloths and small brushes with stiff, precise bristles, and his focus narrows down enough to forget all about his tea. The glass sweats even in the shade and occasionally the ice shifts, clinking.
“You know a princess!”
AJ’s voice from the bottom of the stairs is sudden and almost accusatory in the drowsy afternoon sunshine.
“Yeah,” Bucky says simply, “I do.” Putting down the gear he was cleaning, he holds out his intricate metal arm. His hand crosses the threshold of the shade cast by the house to gleam in the battering sunshine. “She made this arm for me.”
From behind a nearby palm tree, Cass goes, “Whoaaa.”
Climbing the steps, AJ picks up Bucky’s wrist, unselfconscious about bending the joint and rotating his hand palm up. Cass’s face peeks into view, but he ducks back when he catches Steve noticing.
“Why would a princess do that?”
“Because she’s a good person.” Bucky slowly flexes his fingers inward to let the boy see the shifting joints and how more or less of the gold shows through. “I needed help and she could help me. So she did. For some people, it’s just that simple.”
AJ presses Bucky’s pinky and fourth finger in, curled toward the dark palm, before releasing the pressure and watching the small human motion of uncurling express through these mechanical parts.
Steve feels savage and tender and there’s never been anywhere to pour these feelings but in watching Bucky—like this, like anything—in whatever ways he’ll let Steve see.
By the time Bucky has all the parts clean and reassembled again, Steve is almost halfway through The Day of the Triffids, which is a perverse book for a child to read growing up in all this wild tangled-up mass of plants. The hanging mosses look incrementally more sinister. Hell, even on the run, he and Sam had stuck to cities.
He waits for Bucky to finish wiping the grease from all the fine joints of his hand before lobbing the book back at him for an easy catch.
“You jerk.”
Bucky snickers and for a brilliant flash he’s nine and Bucky is ten and the humidity is the heat of a different summer in a city that no longer exists; and never existed at all, not exactly the way he remembers it.
Of course, thinks Steve. Of course, there’s no going back. And he lets the ache in his chest be what it is: grief.
Sarah comes back with an ice chest of pale golden fish with white bellies and dark spots on their tails like false eyes that she leaves beside an old wooden table at the side of the house.
Sam brings out a white plastic bucket, a huge metal cooking pot and two soup spoons, crouching on the other side of the ice chest.
“C’mon, Cap,” he says, tossing Steve one of the spoons. “Earn your keep a little.”
“I should start calling you ‘Cap.’”
Sam grins and shrugs like well, if the shoe fits.
The fish bodies are cold and smooth. The scales fall in translucent discs the size of nickels into the bucket as he runs the spoon’s edge along the fish’s iridescent sides.
“You gonna punk out at some fish guts?” Sarah asks, cutting a glance at him that’s not unfriendly but skeptical about the volume of fish guts he has encountered in his daily life.
Next to him, Sam just shakes his head, laughing, and he can hear Sam’s unvoiced not if you ask like that.
The heads and bones get dropped in the stockpot. The throats and long filets, which are all the same irregular shape from where Sarah cut the bones out, go back onto the ice. The guts go in the bucket.
“You gonna do Mama’s blackened redfish tonight?”
Sarah hums and the sound is non-committal.
“You know, I’m still not over figuring out that Mama’s version was just the same blackened fish everybody across America was making throughout the whole of the eighties. Don’t know why I was so sure it was one of ‘lita’s old recipes.”
“Yeah, well.” Sam hands over another fish to be gutted. “Still tastes good. And you do it just the way she did.”
A little silence hangs that’s made up of Sarah not saying something and Sam hearing whatever goes unsaid before the tension slips away again.
The last of the cool, gleaming fish are scaled and gutted until the ice chest is nothing but a row of pale pink filets next to the wing-shaped pieces that are all the cut-out throats.
Bucky is quiet at dinner, not letting Sam or Sarah rope him into taking a side in their debate on variable versus fixed-rate mortgages, which devolves into detailed competing analyses of the 2008 American housing crisis. The question seems not was racism a factor but which parts were good old American racism and which were good old American exploitation of the hopeful, badly educated poor.
Steve doesn’t want to think about where either he or Bucky was in 2008, but in his heart he hopes that they were both in the ice since that’s the best thing he can hope for.
Bucky helps Sam clear the table while Sarah waves him to sit back down with a simple “they got it.” But he does find out that the old copy of The Day of the Triffids was definitely hers.
“Though dystopian literature has lost a lot of its charm these days,” Sarah adds in an offhand voice, staring at Sam as he pats Bucky’s side and leans around him to set a stack of dirty dishes in the sink.
Steve keeps waiting for the memory to hurt less: kneeling in all that ash.
The house is dark and mostly silent except for the occasional creak of old boards settling. He expects to find Bucky out on the porch again, but he’s sitting at the big empty dining table with a beer. The colors on the label go flat and wrong with so little light but the bullet is still crashing through the side of the skull’s grinning head. Steve gets a glass of the filtered water in the fridge to have something to do with his hands, trying to feel out from the lines of Bucky's body and the weight of his silence if Bucky wants company—or at least wants his company.
But he’s sitting alone in the dark. Steve can’t just turn around and leave.
The sick irony trailing after the thought makes him take in a slow breath like he’s trying not to jostle a bunch of broken ribs.
He can stay now, though. That’s all he can do.
The ticking of the kitchen clock is the loudest sound in the room as he sits across from Bucky and waits. He’s got all night.
Eventually, the refrigerator kicks on. The floorboards creak in a soft sequence and, upstairs, the bedroom ceiling fans layer into a faint mechanical hum.
“You were all set.” Bucky stares down at his metal hand, flexing the fingers. “Peace. A whole life. So why’d you come back?”
Because Peggy was a person and not the story I’d carried around in my head for a lonely decade.
Because she was already half in love with the man who could still make her eyes look that warm and mischievous twenty years after she’d buried him when I finally caught back up the first time.
Because I couldn’t sleep at night for thinking of Nat and what she fell off that ledge and broke herself on rocks for, and how it wasn’t this.
Sam.
You.
There are too many true ways to answer that and above all what he owes Bucky now is the truth.
“I was trusted with great power and I messed up. I needed to try and make things right.”
“That what all this is?”
Bucky’s eyes are hard, prying Steve open but giving nothing of his own thoughts up.
“That’s what I hope it is. If you let me.” And that’s true but Steve can do better. “And I’m still being selfish. This is where I want to be.”
Bucky smirks, but he doesn’t look mean, just tired.
“You got a funny way of showing it.”
You ran, too. Steve doesn’t say. I ran for nine months. You ran for years.
He stares at his personal walking-around miracle that, like the wish made on some cursed monkey’s paw in a fable, came at such a terrible price and one that he didn’t even get to pay.
“We keep on ending up in the same place.” How is too great a weight for words, but this much neither of them can argue with: “You and me, Buck, we’re still right here the whole long stretch of bad road later.”
Bucky nods, slowly turning the mostly empty bottle.
“I want you happy, Steve. I want you to be so goddamn happy that your teeth ache with it and you wake up wanting to punch yourself in the face for being the jerk with just so much that’s good in your life.”
Bucky drains the last swallows of beer, tipping his head back and Steve just lets himself stare, jawline to throat.
Catch me looking, Steve thinks even as the old familiar panic sweeps right through him. But Bucky pushes away from the table, rinsing out the beer bottle and slipping it into the paper bag of bottles under the sink. And that's for the best—Steve knows that's for the best.
Steve should head up to the guest room, let Bucky sack out on the couch, even though the ways the world has worn them both threadbare aren’t the sort that sleep can touch.
Bucky’s warm palm lands heavy on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry you never got that life, Steve. You deserved all that peace.”
Bucky gives his shoulder a shake, then lets go with the little edge of a shove that’s echoed across decades.
As he heads up the creaking stairs, Steve thinks down to Bucky, You deserve all this.
Whatever you’ve found here and made yours.
No one deserves a little happiness more.
Steve doesn’t have much to pack in the morning, stowing his Dopp kit in his leather duffle with yesterday’s clothing already rolled into tight cylinders. He remakes the bed with hospital corners, taking care with the old patchwork quilt.
Sarah is in the sunny blue kitchen, slicing a big pile of mushrooms. Two cartons of eggs sit on the counter.
“There’s coffee.” Sarah nods toward the maker. “Milk’s in the fridge. Sleep all right?”
“Thanks.” The coffee is scorching hot and brewed strong. “And, yeah, I did.” Or, at least, he slept. Steve swallows back the ma’am that wants to slip out and the even worse misstep of you have a lovely home.
The mushrooms are replaced with shiny red and green bell peppers she cuts into thin strips.
“Anything I can help with?”
Sarah gives him an evaluative glance, measuring either the sincerity of the offer or his observable potential as kitchen help.
“Cheese needs grating. Here.” She pulls down a bowl from a cupboard and taps the side of the box grater with the largest holes.
It’s nice to have something to do with his hands.
The silence stretches out until Sarah says, “You've known Sam a long time.”
“Since 2014” is the only answer that doesn’t involve heartbreaking subtractions. “We met when I lived in D.C.”
Sarah smiles.
“On your left.”
“...and that’s how.”
“It’s a funny story the way Sam tells it.”
Steve breathes through remembering Nat rolling up in her conspicuous car and the way she always drawled out hey fellas each time she found him and Sam in dozens of countries the world over.
“Means he probably left out the part where he ran out the side of a burning building.”
“The burning buildings,” Sarah says as her voice goes complicated, “I saw on the news. Got used to seeing Sam showing up on TV for a while there.”
Seven years of not seeing her brother and that’s on him.
“I’m sorry.”
Sarah gives him another of those evaluative glances.
“Well, I’m about to start cutting up onions. If we need to get teary-eyed, now’s the time. But Sam left here without looking back to go risk his life doing dangerous stunts long before he met you.” Sarah’s gaze has the same unmoveable calm. “Might wanna be careful which of his choices you try to carry for him. He won’t thank you for it.”
Steve looks down, observing the work of his hands and letting the sting settle a little before he nods.
Message received, loud and clear.
But the huge fluffy omelets stuffed full of vegetables are delicious.
His flight leaves at noon, back to New York and the Airbnb that’s his stopgap measure until he figures out where to live now.
Saying goodbye to Sam is short and simple with Sam taking the hug and waving off any attempt at a thanks. For all that he can talk to Sam for hours, they’ve never needed to say much to each other. He’ll text Sam when he lands because he wants to and because there are a lot of ways to do the work.
Bucky is sitting on the front steps, listening to music through Sam’s ridiculously large over-the-ear headset with his eyes closed, sunning himself like a cat. Bucky could always pick up the loveliest golden brown tans and the first flush of color is already curling over his cheekbones, the bridge of his nose and his temples where Steve wants to press his mouth and let gratitude crash through him.
Steve sits beside him and Bucky lets the song play through before pulling the headset down to rest on his collarbones.
“Heading out?”
Steve hums, meaning yeah. His rental is the only car here. “Need a ride to the airport?”
Bucky shakes his head.
“My flight’s not till later.”
But he doesn’t offer up when.
Tossing his arm around Bucky’s shoulders and knocking his forehead gently against the side of his head is an impulse Steve doesn’t let himself second guess—he can’t afford to. This has to work.
“Come by sometime.” He keeps the words a whisper since his mouth is so close to Bucky’s ear. “When you’re back.”
![[Image of Steve hugging Bucky on the porch steps in brilliant daylight]](https://i.postimg.cc/859cHGV4/tsrt-scene-2-1680.png)
Bucky elbows him.
“You gonna be in New York for a bit?”
“Yeah,” Steve says. “There’s this jerk I know who lives there. Haven’t seen much of him in a long, long time.”
Bucky makes an acknowledging sound and taps his closed fist on the top of Steve’s knee before shoving Steve off with the same calculated roughness as always—the complex consideration for Steve’s old body and prickly pride too ingrained in him to be changed now, needed or not.
“Yeah, Steve, okay. Now you’d better get going.”
Leaving, Steve looks back. His last glimpse is Bucky in all that sunshine—safe and warm and comfortable—with the headset slipped back on as the next song plays.