Imagine I-
IMAGINE I-
Artist: lasiliekki
Art Link: here
Author: auhee
Pairing(s): Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes
Rating: T
Universe: MCU
Word Count: 5,033
Summary: He finds him not in an old, abandoned factory turned HYDRA base or safe house as he’d been anticipating, but at the corner of a street carrying a pot plant with an elderly woman and a dog. And isn’t that a sight.
Notes: Beta'd by actuallyyknow. All mistakes are my own though. Any issues with the timelines especially, are issues with me rather than anything else. In any case, I do hope that you enjoy this.
Somewhere in Brooklyn, 1940There’s nothing special about Bucky.
He’s like any other average Joe trying to make a name for himself. The long hours at the docks leave him exhausted.The once soft hands that his mother cherished have become rougher and rougher by the day.
He’s as average as average could ever get, and he doesn’t have a lot going for him - really. The creaking apartment he shares with Steve is testament to that. In every corner of the apartment, despite his and Steve’s attempts at scrubbing it away, there’s mouldy residue staining itself amongst the spidery cracks riddling the walls. Most nights, Bucky falls asleep counting those cracks, losing count each time but still waiting for the day that the apartment just caves in on itself.
Sometimes, he imagines that he’ll return from the docks, sweaty and stinking from a hard day’s work, and their apartment will just be a pile of rubble.
Other times, he imagines while he’s counting the cracks, that some plaster will fall on his forehead and the ceiling will just collapse on him.
Every time, Steve’s somewhere safe. Maybe at the nearby park sketching unknowing people who simply walk by him, or at the grocers, counting the little change that he undoubtedly has in his pocket and budgeting to a T the exact amount of food he’s able to buy and carry.
Bucky’s never sad when he sees the apartment reduced to a pile of rubble. Its contents are scarce at best. Their only furniture consists of two dining chairs, a rickety old table with legs crooked enough that you can see it slant, and two mattresses, each on the floor and pushed together because they couldn’t afford to buy a frame, and have to share the blanket. The only thing of sentimental value would probably be Steve’s sketch book - and Steve carries that around with him everywhere, so there would be no need to worry about it being lost amongst the debris.
Late at night, when Steve is curled against Bucky’s side, his hand curling at Bucky’s sleeve, he whispers all of this. Steve, who had exhausted himself after helping their new neighbours move into their apartment, and had subsequently spent that evening animatedly telling Bucky about said new neighbours. He’s not given a reply, which is no surprise seeing that he’d spent the last couple of hours counting the cracks in the ceiling to the tune of Steve’s even breathing.
Bucky feels rather than hears the muffled coughs that rack Steve’s body, jostling the both of them, and he tries to ease it by rubbing his hand along Steve’s back. The coughing fit manages to stop before Steve can fully regain consciousness, so Bucky doesn’t stop, shuffling that little bit closer to Steve. He can feel the knobs of Steve’s spine as he sweeps his hand up and down. Bucky loses count of the cracks in the wall in favour of counting each bump - one, two, three - until he too falls asleep.
Steve’s never imagined or hoped for their apartment to collapse in on itself. No matter how bare it is, it’s their home - it’s where he and Bucky can find even a moment together, find solace in each other’s arms without any judging eyes. Without this place, Steve doesn’t know where they would be. When they were looking for a place together they went from apartment to apartment until they could convince the land lord to drop the cost to something manageable.
Still, he can’t help but imagine Bucky finding what he’s looking for outside these corners.
Sometimes, Steve’s hand is intertwined with Bucky’s as they run off somewhere, his imagination doesn’t let him go so far as to identifying where somewhere is though.
Other times, Bucky’s at the front door, he’s wearing a suit, hand ready at the door handle to leave - ready to tackle the world. Bucky will say, “I’ll be back in a bit,” but the next time Steve will see him will be in passing, down the street in a sharp suit, briefcase in hand, or maybe on the front page of a newspaper, Bucky’s smile taking all the attention away from whatever the headline says.
Most times, Steve can’t recognise where Bucky is exactly. All he can vividly imagine is Bucky smiling, happy.
Somewhere in Brooklyn, 1942
There’s an odd ache Steve feels when he sees Bucky in uniform, hand at the door handle - looking not quite as ready as he does in Steve’s mind to tackle the world. He doesn’t know how that could feel, being forcibly dragged away by the draft to a war that’s already caused so much death. He doesn’t know because he’s been actively looking for ways to join said war to set things right, to do the right thing.
Bucky’s always telling him to just stay in Brooklyn. “Just stay here, please,” has become a mantra that Bucky’s said time and time again, followed by, “Just, please. Don’t try anything stupid.” And Steve will just push right back. More often than not, he’ll go the very next day and try to enlist again. Steve will get rejected on the spot and he’ll pick a fight with Bucky while they’re eating dinner together. Rinse. Repeat.
The look on Bucky’s face makes him question what exactly the right thing to do is, and for once, he’s almost tempted to throw away the papers he’s already prepared for his attempt to enlist again.
He just hopes that Bucky doesn’t make it to the front page of a newspaper under a headline that martyrs him as one of the many who have been deemed war heroes. More than anything else, Steve hopes upon all hope that the day that Bucky walks through that door comes sooner rather than later.
It’s selfish of him. He knows. But for once, he just wants to wrap himself around Bucky and keep him right here in this old, rickety apartment.
Since he can’t have that, he figures that he’ll just have to find a way to follow Bucky.
Bucky tries not to cry when he says, “I’ll see you in a bit.” It’s a damn near thing though, and he knows that all it’ll take for him to lose it is if he turns around and so much as glances at Steve. They’d tried to prolong getting up this morning in any way they could. Their walls are so paper thin that Bucky would usually wake up to the sound of their neighbour humming to whatever was playing on the radio. This morning he woke up to the pressure of Steve’s weight at his waist, arms bracketing his head, lips against his. They stayed like that for long enough that Steve’s arms started to shake, and Bucky was the one who had to coax them out of bed. Steve had been sullen since then.
He tries not to get upset when Steve tells him, just as Bucky’s about to step out of their home, “Don’t let the war end until I’m there.” Bucky doesn’t turn around. He knows that within the safety of Steve’s current sketchbook is another enlistment form, knows that Steve will be trying to enlist as soon as tomorrow comes. He knows that anything he says or does won’t change whatever resolve Steve has. Bucky doesn’t take those few steps towards Steve so that he can shake some sense into him. Tell him all over again that this isn’t some back-alley fight. That there are men dying in a war as they stand there in the safety of their apartment.
When Steve has his mind set on something, he’ll find a way to get there. It’s something that Bucky’s both loved and hated.
Instead, he nods his head, chokes out a barely there, “Okay,” and doesn’t look back.
Somewhere in Europe, 2015
Bucky - the Winter Soldier, James, James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant Barnes - he whoever he is, ends up in a town whose name he doesn’t care to know. He’ll only end up leaving in a night or two, finding some place to clean and replenish himself in preparation for the next HYDRA base. He already has a route mapped out. By foot, it’ll take four days. If he can manage to procure a car, he can get there in two days. He doesn’t know what it is he’s hoping to find in that HYDRA base, but if it’s anything like the other remnants that he’s left behind, it’ll probably leave more questions than answers.
That was his intention for this town, at least.
It goes like this:
He tries to steal food from a local grocer. She’s old, only has a small dog not even up to his knee as her companion. The store’s empty when he enters, and the shelves are high enough that from where the elderly woman is sitting, she won’t be able to see him stuff his pockets. He’s done this enough from the other towns he’s passed so he knows exactly how much this jacket can hold before it looks too suspicious.
The elderly woman approaches him as he pockets an apple. He let his guard down too much. He has to run before she pulls something that forces him to do something drastic. She only laughs and pats his shoulder. It takes a lot of effort for him not to break her arm then and there, but he refrains pulls the apple out of his pocket and moves to place it back in its spot. Her hand comes to push it back towards him, and she’s smiling when she says, “I was going to ask you if you needed help, but it looks like you’re fine as you are. What’s your name, young man?”
He clams up, his eyes going wide, his hand itching to hold onto something. Anything. “James.”
“Nice to meet you, James. My name is Maria. Keep what you’ve taken and grab more. That can’t possibly keep you full tonight. Just keep me company until I have to close the shop and we’ll call it even.”
And her kindness reminds him of someone. He can’t precisely make out where this sense of déjà vu has come from, but he remembers a lanky boy, blonde, moving around a kitchen and greeting him good morning.
He doesn’t end up making it to that next HYDRA base.
Steve finds him. Even as far as Steve is standing from him, it’s undoubtedly Bucky.
He finds him not in an old, abandoned factory turned HYDRA base or safe house as he’d been anticipating, but at the corner of a street carrying a pot plant with an elderly woman and a dog. And isn’t that a sight. Somewhere in the recesses of Steve’s mind he remembers Bucky complaining about helping their neighbours move and how their neighbours just had to choose all the heaviest furniture possible. Despite Bucky’s complaints, the thing Steve distinctly remembers is watching Bucky retell the whole experience, laughing between sentences.
Sam is out scouting the locations that were listed as possible HYDRA bases nearby while Steve had been charged with finding a relatively safe place to stay for the night before they jumped to the next place their paper trail sent them.
The evidently fabricated paper trail, if looking at their smiling target was any indicator. The last time he saw Bucky - no it was the Winter Soldier then - Steve had only seen somebody who looked confused, troubled. Bucky, the Winter Soldier, looked like someone who’d only just discovered that they’d lost everything and couldn’t even begin to recall where they should start to pick up all the pieces.
Sam and Steve had spent near three months chasing Bucky, always turning up at an already desecrated HYDRA base or safe house, or finding basically nothing whenever they ended up at a base before Bucky would get there. They’d wait for days in one place, waiting for Bucky, hoping that they’d one up him, only to get a report soon after alerting them of yet another base or safe house that had been destroyed.
The paper trail had gone cold for a few weeks, heating up, and then going cold once again. They’d been led in and out of little towns that would otherwise go ignored. When they’d found nothing within each town, little pieces of information would basically fall right into their laps. Upon reflection, it all seemed too easy.
Now, looking at Bucky listen to the animate elderly woman, it didn’t seem so farfetched that Bucky had meant for he and Sam to figuratively chase their own tails. And Steve couldn’t find it in himself to be annoyed or hate Bucky. Not when he’s allowing the elderly woman fill up the silence with whatever story she’s telling. Not when the dog weaves its way between their legs as Bucky replies with short answers that the elderly woman seems all too happy to hear. Not when Bucky’s smiling like that.
Predictably, Sam comes back from his mini scouting endeavour empty handed. But as always, he doesn’t look nearly as dejected as Steve had been feeling. Instead, he just shrugs himself out of his gear and tells Steve, grinning, “Don’t worry. We’ll find him,” before clasping his shoulder and shaking it. With every passing day that leaves them empty handed, Steve can’t help but feel thankful for Sam’s optimism - albeit cautious, it’s helped Steve keep a level head.
For the most part.
He’d meant to sit Sam down, ease Sam into Steve’s discovery. Possibly over breakfast so Steve could have the night to figure out how he could word everything. Word it in such a way that would prevent the inevitable landslide of questions and frenzy to get to Bucky now before Bucky could jump onto the next town. How he could answer all of Sam’s questions and show the pictures that Steve had taken of Bucky, accompanied by the elderly woman and dog, carrying a pot plant to a hole in the wall apartment, and subsequently retreating to the apartment next door. How, when he was able to get a glimpse of Bucky’s apparent living situation through a window, the apartment looked well lived in. Some books were skewed over the dining table, clothes were draped over chairs, and fresh fruit lay by the kitchen sink. It looked like any other home.
“I saw him today,” comes out before Steve even means for it to, and predictably, it brings about a barrage of questions that Steve doesn’t quite have the answers to - yet.
“What do you mean you saw him today?” Sam asks, and it echoes throughout the scarce room that Steve had deemed good enough to house both himself and Sam for the duration of their time in this small town. It’s not so different to a little pocket of an apartment in Brooklyn that Steve remembers from way back when. Sam asks Steve again, and it cuts right into Steve, snapping him out of his journey down that tunnel of cracked plaster and pushed together beds.
“I saw him today helping an old lady carry a pot plant with her dog.” Saying that out loud only makes it seem even more surreal. Sam’s answering incredulous stare does nothing but make Steve feel even more ridiculous.
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. Here,” Steve pulls out his phone and brings up the photos that he was able to take. Given that it had been such a chance sighting, Steve didn’t have any high powered camera that could zoom in and get all the minute details of Bucky’s face. Steve had only been able to rely on his phone’s camera. “This is him. Carrying a pot plant.”
Sam squints at the photo and makes a face. “Wow. You really maxed out your phone’s zoom capabilities, huh?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, we were meant to just stay here the night. This place was completely off our radar.” Steve lets Sam take his phone out of his hand, and sees him scroll through the number of them that he had taken. For the most part, they capture Bucky looking towards the elderly woman, a quirk of a smile on his face, to Bucky’s profile from various angles. Looking at the photos again though, you wouldn’t suspect a thing. The photos are pretty unremarkable. Bucky’s wearing a thick jacket to ward off the cold, and his metal arm can’t be seen. His face is clean of any smears of black, and his hair is tied up into a neat ponytail. He’d go unnoticed in a town like this. Steve supposes that Bucky has been able to find some form of shelter in this little dot of a town given that he and Steve had been following an empty paper trail for a while now.
“This photo,” Sam shoves the phone in his face. To the left of the frame is Bucky opening the door for the elderly woman as he precariously balances the pot plant against his hip. “It looks like he’s familiar with this woman, and you followed them enough to know where she lives.”
“He lives right next door to her.”
“And if we ask her maybe-“ Sam pauses, “Wait. What did you just say?”
“They’re neighbours.” In any other situation this might’ve been funny. Now, since it involves Bucky, who they’ve chased across the globe for the better part of the year, it doesn’t even extract any semblance of laughter from the both of them. While it’s a relief that Steve’s finally found Bucky, there’s an immense form of pressure on he and Sam to make sure that Bucky doesn’t just up and jump towns before they can come up with some form of plan to even just make contact with Bucky. He and Sam had never really planned for when they actually caught up with Bucky. There’d always been the expectation that they’d catch him in the middle of a destroyed HYDRA base and subsequently find the least harmful way of physically subduing Bucky.
Out of the list of potential scenarios that could have played out, this wouldn’t have even been listed. Finding an assassin in an overlooked town, living in his own apartment and apparently helping his neighbour move pot plants was something that they hadn’t prepared for.
“Then what should we do?” Sam asks.
Steve doesn’t know how to answer him.
James is greeted by Steve - Steven Grant Rogers, Captain Rogers, Captain America - at the little corner store grocer where he figuratively hung up his sniper rifle and postponed his journey for answers.
It doesn’t go like this:
He doesn’t freeze up, pull out the knife hidden in his boot and throw it precisely between Steve’s eyes. Nor does he pull all the shelves down as he runs towards the exit. It’s a near thing, but he refrains from doing so if only because beside him is Maria, who’s already made conversation with the person James remembers as Sam - Sam Wilson, Falcon.
Both Steve and Sam don’t do more than greet him and hand him money for the groceries they have piled up on the counter. It’s not what he had calculated would happen. He figured that Steve would have pleaded with his words as much as his blue, blue eyes to remember. To remember that he was Bucky, not the Winter Soldier. That it wasn’t Bucky who had killed countless people whose faces he couldn’t even remember or grieve for, but HYDRA who was responsible for making him the weapon to make it all happen.
Steve does none of that. Merely offers his name to Maria, and nods towards James, then heads off with Sam, groceries in tow.
He’d been expecting the both of them to make an appearance sometime soon. James had become sloppy in diverting their attention away from this town, and it was only a matter of time before they caught on to him. Leaving the town before that could happen was what he should have done. But he’s stopped following what he should do in favour of what he wants to do. And what he wants to do preferably doesn’t involve the use of knives for any other reason than for cooking. The burden of all that blood on his hands doesn’t matter so much here. Nobody knows him. He’s just like any other average person.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembers a person who hated the idea of being average. He can’t help but feel jealous of that person.
It’s not difficult for James to find Steve and Sam’s ‘safe house’. It’s close to his apartment, and he can guess that the window out looking the rest of the town gives a great vantage point to watch him. He sneaks into the safe house through that window. It’s left unlocked, and it all seems too easy. It all seems too planned.
Steve waiting for him to enter the main room is all too telling of how Steve knew James would try. He’s sitting on the dining table, far from all the possible exits that James has already taken note of. Even so, James can’t help but Steve deciding to sit exactly there is calculated too.
Steve greets him with his hands already up, as though he were approaching a wild animal that needed to be calmed. “Hi Buck-“
“Call me James.”
“Ah sorry, James.” Steve makes a move to clasp the back of his neck but then thinks better of it then straightens his arms up again, “I just wanted to ask you one question, and me and my partner will leave and never come back.”
James curtly nods his assent.
“Have you found what you’ve been looking for here?”
James opens his mouth to speak, then closes it. Remembers how empty he felt before settling here. How, with each passing HYDRA base, he’d just feel a heavier weight on his shoulders. How he would wash his hands any number of times each night before he slept because if he didn’t he’d wake up hearing a stranger’s scream resonate within his mind. How, nowadays, he’d remedy that empty, sad feeling of loneliness by sharing dinner with Maria every night, all too happy for the elderly woman to fill in the gaps where his social skills lacked.
James isn’t all too sure if he’s found what he’s been looking for. The problem that lies here, though, is that he isn’t too sure if he knows what it is exactly he’s been searching for all this time. Has he been looking for the Bucky that this Steve once knew? Or has he been looking for revenge on the people who’ve made him into this person that he is now? He’s still unsure.
“I haven’t. But,” James contemplates this for a moment, tries to find the words to describe what it is that he’s found. There’s no words that James knows that can express how he feels in such a way that’ll make Steve understand. “I can show you what I’ve found instead,” is what he settles on.
Steve makes the short walk with Bucky - no, it’s James now - to James’ apartment block. They go right past the door Steve saw James go into all those days ago when he first found him, and straight to the door where Steve watched as James had somehow balanced the large pot plant and open the door for the elderly lady. James knocks three times. Steve’s on edge. Doesn’t know what exactly he’s doing anymore, trusting a person who was more than his best friend, but is only similar to that person in appearance now. Following James into a place that he’s basically unfamiliar with is something that Sam would have scolded him for. It’s probably on the long list of things not to do that Sam had made before Steve had convinced him to take the next flight home.
“For all you know, that old woman, Maria was her name? Could be an assassin too. She might have a secret connection with that dog that’ll just get that dog to suddenly go rabid on you and rip out your throat,” is something that Sam had said while they were doing a background check on said elderly woman. The background check on Maria had come out with nothing out of the ordinary, but it never stopped Sam from speculating. “I saw what happened in New York. A person controlling a dog like that isn’t out of the realm of possibility, come on.” Sam had said when Steve gave him a blank stare in reply.
But what Sam thought he should do, and what Steve was going to do were two separate things. And Sam was on a plane this minute now, so there was little else that Sam could really do for Steve now.
Maria opens the door, and at the sight of James, almost immediately lights up and beckons the both of them inside. “I remember you,” she says, as she pulls him into a chaste cheek-to-cheek greeting, “you were at my store the other day. Steve, wasn’t it? I didn’t know that you were friends with James. Come, come in.” Steve only has enough time to respond by nodding.
At his and James’ feet, the little dog that he had seen the other day weaves itself around them. James just continues to walk towards the dining area as though the place were his own. It looks a lot more well lived in than the glimpse that Steve had seen of James’ apartment. Little knick-knacks are skewed across the home in an organised, albeit cluttered manner. The smell of tea brewing fills the air, as does the smell of something sweet baking that Steve doesn’t know the name of, but knows he’ll soon be informed by Maria about the nuances of making it just so, in addition to its name.
“Just sit wherever, I’ll go help Maria.”
“I can help too.”
“She won’t let you. Really. Just sit.” James gives a gentle shove to Steve’s arm, and Steve numbly falls into the closest stool. It reminds him of a time when he was still young, settled into a seat that was too big for him, waiting for Bucky to come back from the kitchen with his mom after Bucky insisted that he’d try and cook for Steve and that Steve shouldn’t move a finger to help out because this was Bucky’s birthday gift for him.
James and Maria return with a plate of pastry and a set of tea. Maria’s filling up the room with some story that Steve only catches fragments of, if only because he can’t focus on anything other than James, who doesn’t look as torn or troubled or broken anymore. Who looks like that twenty year old, wet behind the ears kind of guy who was ready to challenge the world and give back just as much as it gave. He doesn’t look like While his smile isn’t quite like Bucky’s was - the kind that could capture a whole room’s attention, make all the girls swoon and all the guys seethe with something akin to jealousy - it had its own lopsided charm.
“So what were you doing in our little, little town?” Maria says after she’s finished the story she had been telling Bucky. “Will you be here for long?”
“James told me that he loved it here, so I had to come see it.” Steve chances a glance at James, who’s occupied himself with eating a pastry with his gloved hand, and running his other hand through the dog’s fur. “I’ll be leaving tonight though.”
“Such a shame, if I had known that you were friends I would have invited you to have dinner with us too.” Maria smiles and gestures for the dog to come to her side, “James is quite the cook, did you know? I say that we have turns cooking, but really, I’m so old and I get tired quite easily so having him volunteer to cook for us is a real help.”
Steve doesn’t try to reminisce about how he did know that James - Bucky, was quite the cook. Doesn’t know whether James remembers how despite being scarce on money, Bucky had insisted on celebrating their first year of having moved in with one another and somehow managed to make a home cooked five course meal that could have been featured in any restaurant menu. He bites his tongue to stop himself, chokes a bit on the sadness of knowing that the memory might never come back to James. “I never knew. Maybe one day I’ll get him to cook for me though.”
“Maybe.” James says, softly. “I’ll-I need some more time before that happens though. If that’s okay with you?”
Unwavering, Steve locks his gaze with James’, and as steadily as he can despite the lump in his throat, he answers, “Of course I can wait.”
Somewhere in Brooklyn, 2016
James leaves that small dot of a town with only a note saying, “I’ll be back in a bit,” slipped under the door of Maria’s home. Then he heads back to where Bucky called home.
Brooklyn, and the spidery cracked walls that Bucky used to count and James only vaguely remembers and wishes he could touch. To the apartment that Bucky wished would collapse in on itself, and James wishes he could sit in and just remember.
Steve finds him. He finds him not on the front page of a newspaper, or as the headline for a ‘Breaking News’ update. He finds him in Brooklyn, at the corner where their apartment stood, and now stands a renovated Starbucks. Steve hasn’t been since he’s been back from the ice, if only because the most recent memory he has of that apartment when both he and Bucky were still there, was Bucky’s back turned away from.
He doesn’t take blurry pictures on his phone of James. Instead, he stands right next to him, shoulder to shoulder. “I have some photos that museums don’t have.” Steve lightly nudges James, “I also have a kitchen. And I know that you’re a good cook.”
Artist: lasiliekki
Art Link: here
Author: auhee
Pairing(s): Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes
Rating: T
Universe: MCU
Word Count: 5,033
Summary: He finds him not in an old, abandoned factory turned HYDRA base or safe house as he’d been anticipating, but at the corner of a street carrying a pot plant with an elderly woman and a dog. And isn’t that a sight.
Notes: Beta'd by actuallyyknow. All mistakes are my own though. Any issues with the timelines especially, are issues with me rather than anything else. In any case, I do hope that you enjoy this.
Somewhere in Brooklyn, 1940There’s nothing special about Bucky.
He’s like any other average Joe trying to make a name for himself. The long hours at the docks leave him exhausted.The once soft hands that his mother cherished have become rougher and rougher by the day.
He’s as average as average could ever get, and he doesn’t have a lot going for him - really. The creaking apartment he shares with Steve is testament to that. In every corner of the apartment, despite his and Steve’s attempts at scrubbing it away, there’s mouldy residue staining itself amongst the spidery cracks riddling the walls. Most nights, Bucky falls asleep counting those cracks, losing count each time but still waiting for the day that the apartment just caves in on itself.
Sometimes, he imagines that he’ll return from the docks, sweaty and stinking from a hard day’s work, and their apartment will just be a pile of rubble.
Other times, he imagines while he’s counting the cracks, that some plaster will fall on his forehead and the ceiling will just collapse on him.
Every time, Steve’s somewhere safe. Maybe at the nearby park sketching unknowing people who simply walk by him, or at the grocers, counting the little change that he undoubtedly has in his pocket and budgeting to a T the exact amount of food he’s able to buy and carry.
Bucky’s never sad when he sees the apartment reduced to a pile of rubble. Its contents are scarce at best. Their only furniture consists of two dining chairs, a rickety old table with legs crooked enough that you can see it slant, and two mattresses, each on the floor and pushed together because they couldn’t afford to buy a frame, and have to share the blanket. The only thing of sentimental value would probably be Steve’s sketch book - and Steve carries that around with him everywhere, so there would be no need to worry about it being lost amongst the debris.
Late at night, when Steve is curled against Bucky’s side, his hand curling at Bucky’s sleeve, he whispers all of this. Steve, who had exhausted himself after helping their new neighbours move into their apartment, and had subsequently spent that evening animatedly telling Bucky about said new neighbours. He’s not given a reply, which is no surprise seeing that he’d spent the last couple of hours counting the cracks in the ceiling to the tune of Steve’s even breathing.
Bucky feels rather than hears the muffled coughs that rack Steve’s body, jostling the both of them, and he tries to ease it by rubbing his hand along Steve’s back. The coughing fit manages to stop before Steve can fully regain consciousness, so Bucky doesn’t stop, shuffling that little bit closer to Steve. He can feel the knobs of Steve’s spine as he sweeps his hand up and down. Bucky loses count of the cracks in the wall in favour of counting each bump - one, two, three - until he too falls asleep.
Steve’s never imagined or hoped for their apartment to collapse in on itself. No matter how bare it is, it’s their home - it’s where he and Bucky can find even a moment together, find solace in each other’s arms without any judging eyes. Without this place, Steve doesn’t know where they would be. When they were looking for a place together they went from apartment to apartment until they could convince the land lord to drop the cost to something manageable.
Still, he can’t help but imagine Bucky finding what he’s looking for outside these corners.
Sometimes, Steve’s hand is intertwined with Bucky’s as they run off somewhere, his imagination doesn’t let him go so far as to identifying where somewhere is though.
Other times, Bucky’s at the front door, he’s wearing a suit, hand ready at the door handle to leave - ready to tackle the world. Bucky will say, “I’ll be back in a bit,” but the next time Steve will see him will be in passing, down the street in a sharp suit, briefcase in hand, or maybe on the front page of a newspaper, Bucky’s smile taking all the attention away from whatever the headline says.
Most times, Steve can’t recognise where Bucky is exactly. All he can vividly imagine is Bucky smiling, happy.
Somewhere in Brooklyn, 1942
There’s an odd ache Steve feels when he sees Bucky in uniform, hand at the door handle - looking not quite as ready as he does in Steve’s mind to tackle the world. He doesn’t know how that could feel, being forcibly dragged away by the draft to a war that’s already caused so much death. He doesn’t know because he’s been actively looking for ways to join said war to set things right, to do the right thing.
Bucky’s always telling him to just stay in Brooklyn. “Just stay here, please,” has become a mantra that Bucky’s said time and time again, followed by, “Just, please. Don’t try anything stupid.” And Steve will just push right back. More often than not, he’ll go the very next day and try to enlist again. Steve will get rejected on the spot and he’ll pick a fight with Bucky while they’re eating dinner together. Rinse. Repeat.
The look on Bucky’s face makes him question what exactly the right thing to do is, and for once, he’s almost tempted to throw away the papers he’s already prepared for his attempt to enlist again.
He just hopes that Bucky doesn’t make it to the front page of a newspaper under a headline that martyrs him as one of the many who have been deemed war heroes. More than anything else, Steve hopes upon all hope that the day that Bucky walks through that door comes sooner rather than later.
It’s selfish of him. He knows. But for once, he just wants to wrap himself around Bucky and keep him right here in this old, rickety apartment.
Since he can’t have that, he figures that he’ll just have to find a way to follow Bucky.
Bucky tries not to cry when he says, “I’ll see you in a bit.” It’s a damn near thing though, and he knows that all it’ll take for him to lose it is if he turns around and so much as glances at Steve. They’d tried to prolong getting up this morning in any way they could. Their walls are so paper thin that Bucky would usually wake up to the sound of their neighbour humming to whatever was playing on the radio. This morning he woke up to the pressure of Steve’s weight at his waist, arms bracketing his head, lips against his. They stayed like that for long enough that Steve’s arms started to shake, and Bucky was the one who had to coax them out of bed. Steve had been sullen since then.
He tries not to get upset when Steve tells him, just as Bucky’s about to step out of their home, “Don’t let the war end until I’m there.” Bucky doesn’t turn around. He knows that within the safety of Steve’s current sketchbook is another enlistment form, knows that Steve will be trying to enlist as soon as tomorrow comes. He knows that anything he says or does won’t change whatever resolve Steve has. Bucky doesn’t take those few steps towards Steve so that he can shake some sense into him. Tell him all over again that this isn’t some back-alley fight. That there are men dying in a war as they stand there in the safety of their apartment.
When Steve has his mind set on something, he’ll find a way to get there. It’s something that Bucky’s both loved and hated.
Instead, he nods his head, chokes out a barely there, “Okay,” and doesn’t look back.
Somewhere in Europe, 2015
Bucky - the Winter Soldier, James, James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant Barnes - he whoever he is, ends up in a town whose name he doesn’t care to know. He’ll only end up leaving in a night or two, finding some place to clean and replenish himself in preparation for the next HYDRA base. He already has a route mapped out. By foot, it’ll take four days. If he can manage to procure a car, he can get there in two days. He doesn’t know what it is he’s hoping to find in that HYDRA base, but if it’s anything like the other remnants that he’s left behind, it’ll probably leave more questions than answers.
That was his intention for this town, at least.
It goes like this:
He tries to steal food from a local grocer. She’s old, only has a small dog not even up to his knee as her companion. The store’s empty when he enters, and the shelves are high enough that from where the elderly woman is sitting, she won’t be able to see him stuff his pockets. He’s done this enough from the other towns he’s passed so he knows exactly how much this jacket can hold before it looks too suspicious.
The elderly woman approaches him as he pockets an apple. He let his guard down too much. He has to run before she pulls something that forces him to do something drastic. She only laughs and pats his shoulder. It takes a lot of effort for him not to break her arm then and there, but he refrains pulls the apple out of his pocket and moves to place it back in its spot. Her hand comes to push it back towards him, and she’s smiling when she says, “I was going to ask you if you needed help, but it looks like you’re fine as you are. What’s your name, young man?”
He clams up, his eyes going wide, his hand itching to hold onto something. Anything. “James.”
“Nice to meet you, James. My name is Maria. Keep what you’ve taken and grab more. That can’t possibly keep you full tonight. Just keep me company until I have to close the shop and we’ll call it even.”
And her kindness reminds him of someone. He can’t precisely make out where this sense of déjà vu has come from, but he remembers a lanky boy, blonde, moving around a kitchen and greeting him good morning.
He doesn’t end up making it to that next HYDRA base.
Steve finds him. Even as far as Steve is standing from him, it’s undoubtedly Bucky.
He finds him not in an old, abandoned factory turned HYDRA base or safe house as he’d been anticipating, but at the corner of a street carrying a pot plant with an elderly woman and a dog. And isn’t that a sight. Somewhere in the recesses of Steve’s mind he remembers Bucky complaining about helping their neighbours move and how their neighbours just had to choose all the heaviest furniture possible. Despite Bucky’s complaints, the thing Steve distinctly remembers is watching Bucky retell the whole experience, laughing between sentences.
Sam is out scouting the locations that were listed as possible HYDRA bases nearby while Steve had been charged with finding a relatively safe place to stay for the night before they jumped to the next place their paper trail sent them.
The evidently fabricated paper trail, if looking at their smiling target was any indicator. The last time he saw Bucky - no it was the Winter Soldier then - Steve had only seen somebody who looked confused, troubled. Bucky, the Winter Soldier, looked like someone who’d only just discovered that they’d lost everything and couldn’t even begin to recall where they should start to pick up all the pieces.
Sam and Steve had spent near three months chasing Bucky, always turning up at an already desecrated HYDRA base or safe house, or finding basically nothing whenever they ended up at a base before Bucky would get there. They’d wait for days in one place, waiting for Bucky, hoping that they’d one up him, only to get a report soon after alerting them of yet another base or safe house that had been destroyed.
The paper trail had gone cold for a few weeks, heating up, and then going cold once again. They’d been led in and out of little towns that would otherwise go ignored. When they’d found nothing within each town, little pieces of information would basically fall right into their laps. Upon reflection, it all seemed too easy.
Now, looking at Bucky listen to the animate elderly woman, it didn’t seem so farfetched that Bucky had meant for he and Sam to figuratively chase their own tails. And Steve couldn’t find it in himself to be annoyed or hate Bucky. Not when he’s allowing the elderly woman fill up the silence with whatever story she’s telling. Not when the dog weaves its way between their legs as Bucky replies with short answers that the elderly woman seems all too happy to hear. Not when Bucky’s smiling like that.
Predictably, Sam comes back from his mini scouting endeavour empty handed. But as always, he doesn’t look nearly as dejected as Steve had been feeling. Instead, he just shrugs himself out of his gear and tells Steve, grinning, “Don’t worry. We’ll find him,” before clasping his shoulder and shaking it. With every passing day that leaves them empty handed, Steve can’t help but feel thankful for Sam’s optimism - albeit cautious, it’s helped Steve keep a level head.
For the most part.
He’d meant to sit Sam down, ease Sam into Steve’s discovery. Possibly over breakfast so Steve could have the night to figure out how he could word everything. Word it in such a way that would prevent the inevitable landslide of questions and frenzy to get to Bucky now before Bucky could jump onto the next town. How he could answer all of Sam’s questions and show the pictures that Steve had taken of Bucky, accompanied by the elderly woman and dog, carrying a pot plant to a hole in the wall apartment, and subsequently retreating to the apartment next door. How, when he was able to get a glimpse of Bucky’s apparent living situation through a window, the apartment looked well lived in. Some books were skewed over the dining table, clothes were draped over chairs, and fresh fruit lay by the kitchen sink. It looked like any other home.
“I saw him today,” comes out before Steve even means for it to, and predictably, it brings about a barrage of questions that Steve doesn’t quite have the answers to - yet.
“What do you mean you saw him today?” Sam asks, and it echoes throughout the scarce room that Steve had deemed good enough to house both himself and Sam for the duration of their time in this small town. It’s not so different to a little pocket of an apartment in Brooklyn that Steve remembers from way back when. Sam asks Steve again, and it cuts right into Steve, snapping him out of his journey down that tunnel of cracked plaster and pushed together beds.
“I saw him today helping an old lady carry a pot plant with her dog.” Saying that out loud only makes it seem even more surreal. Sam’s answering incredulous stare does nothing but make Steve feel even more ridiculous.
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. Here,” Steve pulls out his phone and brings up the photos that he was able to take. Given that it had been such a chance sighting, Steve didn’t have any high powered camera that could zoom in and get all the minute details of Bucky’s face. Steve had only been able to rely on his phone’s camera. “This is him. Carrying a pot plant.”
Sam squints at the photo and makes a face. “Wow. You really maxed out your phone’s zoom capabilities, huh?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, we were meant to just stay here the night. This place was completely off our radar.” Steve lets Sam take his phone out of his hand, and sees him scroll through the number of them that he had taken. For the most part, they capture Bucky looking towards the elderly woman, a quirk of a smile on his face, to Bucky’s profile from various angles. Looking at the photos again though, you wouldn’t suspect a thing. The photos are pretty unremarkable. Bucky’s wearing a thick jacket to ward off the cold, and his metal arm can’t be seen. His face is clean of any smears of black, and his hair is tied up into a neat ponytail. He’d go unnoticed in a town like this. Steve supposes that Bucky has been able to find some form of shelter in this little dot of a town given that he and Steve had been following an empty paper trail for a while now.
“This photo,” Sam shoves the phone in his face. To the left of the frame is Bucky opening the door for the elderly woman as he precariously balances the pot plant against his hip. “It looks like he’s familiar with this woman, and you followed them enough to know where she lives.”
“He lives right next door to her.”
“And if we ask her maybe-“ Sam pauses, “Wait. What did you just say?”
“They’re neighbours.” In any other situation this might’ve been funny. Now, since it involves Bucky, who they’ve chased across the globe for the better part of the year, it doesn’t even extract any semblance of laughter from the both of them. While it’s a relief that Steve’s finally found Bucky, there’s an immense form of pressure on he and Sam to make sure that Bucky doesn’t just up and jump towns before they can come up with some form of plan to even just make contact with Bucky. He and Sam had never really planned for when they actually caught up with Bucky. There’d always been the expectation that they’d catch him in the middle of a destroyed HYDRA base and subsequently find the least harmful way of physically subduing Bucky.
Out of the list of potential scenarios that could have played out, this wouldn’t have even been listed. Finding an assassin in an overlooked town, living in his own apartment and apparently helping his neighbour move pot plants was something that they hadn’t prepared for.
“Then what should we do?” Sam asks.
Steve doesn’t know how to answer him.
James is greeted by Steve - Steven Grant Rogers, Captain Rogers, Captain America - at the little corner store grocer where he figuratively hung up his sniper rifle and postponed his journey for answers.
It doesn’t go like this:
He doesn’t freeze up, pull out the knife hidden in his boot and throw it precisely between Steve’s eyes. Nor does he pull all the shelves down as he runs towards the exit. It’s a near thing, but he refrains from doing so if only because beside him is Maria, who’s already made conversation with the person James remembers as Sam - Sam Wilson, Falcon.
Both Steve and Sam don’t do more than greet him and hand him money for the groceries they have piled up on the counter. It’s not what he had calculated would happen. He figured that Steve would have pleaded with his words as much as his blue, blue eyes to remember. To remember that he was Bucky, not the Winter Soldier. That it wasn’t Bucky who had killed countless people whose faces he couldn’t even remember or grieve for, but HYDRA who was responsible for making him the weapon to make it all happen.
Steve does none of that. Merely offers his name to Maria, and nods towards James, then heads off with Sam, groceries in tow.
He’d been expecting the both of them to make an appearance sometime soon. James had become sloppy in diverting their attention away from this town, and it was only a matter of time before they caught on to him. Leaving the town before that could happen was what he should have done. But he’s stopped following what he should do in favour of what he wants to do. And what he wants to do preferably doesn’t involve the use of knives for any other reason than for cooking. The burden of all that blood on his hands doesn’t matter so much here. Nobody knows him. He’s just like any other average person.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembers a person who hated the idea of being average. He can’t help but feel jealous of that person.
It’s not difficult for James to find Steve and Sam’s ‘safe house’. It’s close to his apartment, and he can guess that the window out looking the rest of the town gives a great vantage point to watch him. He sneaks into the safe house through that window. It’s left unlocked, and it all seems too easy. It all seems too planned.
Steve waiting for him to enter the main room is all too telling of how Steve knew James would try. He’s sitting on the dining table, far from all the possible exits that James has already taken note of. Even so, James can’t help but Steve deciding to sit exactly there is calculated too.
Steve greets him with his hands already up, as though he were approaching a wild animal that needed to be calmed. “Hi Buck-“
“Call me James.”
“Ah sorry, James.” Steve makes a move to clasp the back of his neck but then thinks better of it then straightens his arms up again, “I just wanted to ask you one question, and me and my partner will leave and never come back.”
James curtly nods his assent.
“Have you found what you’ve been looking for here?”
James opens his mouth to speak, then closes it. Remembers how empty he felt before settling here. How, with each passing HYDRA base, he’d just feel a heavier weight on his shoulders. How he would wash his hands any number of times each night before he slept because if he didn’t he’d wake up hearing a stranger’s scream resonate within his mind. How, nowadays, he’d remedy that empty, sad feeling of loneliness by sharing dinner with Maria every night, all too happy for the elderly woman to fill in the gaps where his social skills lacked.
James isn’t all too sure if he’s found what he’s been looking for. The problem that lies here, though, is that he isn’t too sure if he knows what it is exactly he’s been searching for all this time. Has he been looking for the Bucky that this Steve once knew? Or has he been looking for revenge on the people who’ve made him into this person that he is now? He’s still unsure.
“I haven’t. But,” James contemplates this for a moment, tries to find the words to describe what it is that he’s found. There’s no words that James knows that can express how he feels in such a way that’ll make Steve understand. “I can show you what I’ve found instead,” is what he settles on.
Steve makes the short walk with Bucky - no, it’s James now - to James’ apartment block. They go right past the door Steve saw James go into all those days ago when he first found him, and straight to the door where Steve watched as James had somehow balanced the large pot plant and open the door for the elderly lady. James knocks three times. Steve’s on edge. Doesn’t know what exactly he’s doing anymore, trusting a person who was more than his best friend, but is only similar to that person in appearance now. Following James into a place that he’s basically unfamiliar with is something that Sam would have scolded him for. It’s probably on the long list of things not to do that Sam had made before Steve had convinced him to take the next flight home.
“For all you know, that old woman, Maria was her name? Could be an assassin too. She might have a secret connection with that dog that’ll just get that dog to suddenly go rabid on you and rip out your throat,” is something that Sam had said while they were doing a background check on said elderly woman. The background check on Maria had come out with nothing out of the ordinary, but it never stopped Sam from speculating. “I saw what happened in New York. A person controlling a dog like that isn’t out of the realm of possibility, come on.” Sam had said when Steve gave him a blank stare in reply.
But what Sam thought he should do, and what Steve was going to do were two separate things. And Sam was on a plane this minute now, so there was little else that Sam could really do for Steve now.
Maria opens the door, and at the sight of James, almost immediately lights up and beckons the both of them inside. “I remember you,” she says, as she pulls him into a chaste cheek-to-cheek greeting, “you were at my store the other day. Steve, wasn’t it? I didn’t know that you were friends with James. Come, come in.” Steve only has enough time to respond by nodding.
At his and James’ feet, the little dog that he had seen the other day weaves itself around them. James just continues to walk towards the dining area as though the place were his own. It looks a lot more well lived in than the glimpse that Steve had seen of James’ apartment. Little knick-knacks are skewed across the home in an organised, albeit cluttered manner. The smell of tea brewing fills the air, as does the smell of something sweet baking that Steve doesn’t know the name of, but knows he’ll soon be informed by Maria about the nuances of making it just so, in addition to its name.
“Just sit wherever, I’ll go help Maria.”
“I can help too.”
“She won’t let you. Really. Just sit.” James gives a gentle shove to Steve’s arm, and Steve numbly falls into the closest stool. It reminds him of a time when he was still young, settled into a seat that was too big for him, waiting for Bucky to come back from the kitchen with his mom after Bucky insisted that he’d try and cook for Steve and that Steve shouldn’t move a finger to help out because this was Bucky’s birthday gift for him.
James and Maria return with a plate of pastry and a set of tea. Maria’s filling up the room with some story that Steve only catches fragments of, if only because he can’t focus on anything other than James, who doesn’t look as torn or troubled or broken anymore. Who looks like that twenty year old, wet behind the ears kind of guy who was ready to challenge the world and give back just as much as it gave. He doesn’t look like While his smile isn’t quite like Bucky’s was - the kind that could capture a whole room’s attention, make all the girls swoon and all the guys seethe with something akin to jealousy - it had its own lopsided charm.
“So what were you doing in our little, little town?” Maria says after she’s finished the story she had been telling Bucky. “Will you be here for long?”
“James told me that he loved it here, so I had to come see it.” Steve chances a glance at James, who’s occupied himself with eating a pastry with his gloved hand, and running his other hand through the dog’s fur. “I’ll be leaving tonight though.”
“Such a shame, if I had known that you were friends I would have invited you to have dinner with us too.” Maria smiles and gestures for the dog to come to her side, “James is quite the cook, did you know? I say that we have turns cooking, but really, I’m so old and I get tired quite easily so having him volunteer to cook for us is a real help.”
Steve doesn’t try to reminisce about how he did know that James - Bucky, was quite the cook. Doesn’t know whether James remembers how despite being scarce on money, Bucky had insisted on celebrating their first year of having moved in with one another and somehow managed to make a home cooked five course meal that could have been featured in any restaurant menu. He bites his tongue to stop himself, chokes a bit on the sadness of knowing that the memory might never come back to James. “I never knew. Maybe one day I’ll get him to cook for me though.”
“Maybe.” James says, softly. “I’ll-I need some more time before that happens though. If that’s okay with you?”
Unwavering, Steve locks his gaze with James’, and as steadily as he can despite the lump in his throat, he answers, “Of course I can wait.”
Somewhere in Brooklyn, 2016
James leaves that small dot of a town with only a note saying, “I’ll be back in a bit,” slipped under the door of Maria’s home. Then he heads back to where Bucky called home.
Brooklyn, and the spidery cracked walls that Bucky used to count and James only vaguely remembers and wishes he could touch. To the apartment that Bucky wished would collapse in on itself, and James wishes he could sit in and just remember.
Steve finds him. He finds him not on the front page of a newspaper, or as the headline for a ‘Breaking News’ update. He finds him in Brooklyn, at the corner where their apartment stood, and now stands a renovated Starbucks. Steve hasn’t been since he’s been back from the ice, if only because the most recent memory he has of that apartment when both he and Bucky were still there, was Bucky’s back turned away from.
He doesn’t take blurry pictures on his phone of James. Instead, he stands right next to him, shoulder to shoulder. “I have some photos that museums don’t have.” Steve lightly nudges James, “I also have a kitchen. And I know that you’re a good cook.”