Chapter Text
"Don't do anything stupid till I get back."
Bucky feels his heart drop inside his chest, but he finds the words anyway, the same words he's been saying back since 1926, since before either of them knew what they'd become. "How can I? You're taking all the stupid with you."
Steve smiles, and then he's pulling Bucky into a hug. Bucky lets himself hold on for a little longer, one last time. He presses his hand to Steve's back and memorizes the solid weight of him, the way Steve still hugs like he's trying to keep you from floating away. Bucky used to do that for him, back when Steve was small and sick and stubborn. Now Steve does it for everyone else.
They separate. Steve's face is serious, set, bracing for something Bucky can't follow him into.
"Gonna miss you, buddy," Bucky says, and it comes out quieter than he meant it to.
Steve holds his gaze. "It's gonna be okay, Buck."
The corner of Bucky's mouth quirks up. Yeah. I know. You're gonna be happy. That's the point.
He doesn't say it. Doesn't need to. Steve knows that Bucky knows, and that's enough. The last thing Bucky can give him is the permission to go, without guilt, without looking back.
Steve steps onto the platform and clicks on the helmet.
Sam's asking something. Bruce is answering. Words about time, about how it works differently for Steve than for them. Five seconds on this end. As long as he needs on the other. Bucky hears it the way you hear someone talking in another room when you're trying to keep your hands steady. The explanation washes over him. The meaning settles somewhere in the back of his mind, behind the door he's already closing.
Bruce is counting down. The machine hums to life.
He doesn't watch. He can't.
If he watches, he'll see the exact moment Steve disappears, and he'll carry that image forever, and he can't. He can't. So he turns his back and focuses on the trees instead, on the light filtering through the branches, on the birdsongs and the murmuring of the Hudson. But it's all just noise.
Then the quantum tunnel opens with a pop, swallowing Steve in a heartbeat.
Bucky counts the seconds in his head.
One.
Steve's probably already there. Somewhere in the past, holding the stones, starting his mission.
Two.
He'll return them all. Of course he will. He's Steve.
Three.
And then he'll find her. Peggy. He'll knock on her door and she'll open it and she'll see him standing there, finally, finally, and—
Four.
Bucky wonders if Steve will tell her about him. Probably not. Probably easier if he doesn't. A clean slate. A fresh start. That's what Steve deserves.
Five.
It's done. Steve's gone. Steve's living his life somewhere in the 1940s, dancing in a kitchen with Peggy Carter, and Bucky's standing here in the future trying to remember how to breathe, and that's just how it is now. That's the shape of things. He can do this. He's survived worse. He's survived everything. He can survive being left behind.
The machine activates again.
Bucky turns around before he can stop himself. Some reflex or instinct he thought he'd killed. Hope, terrible and clawing its way up his throat—
Steve's standing on the platform. Same suit and same shield. Same Steve, looking straight at him like he never left, like five seconds ago wasn't a goodbye, like Bucky hadn't already laid him to rest in his head.
"Got my dance," Steve says.
Bucky stares.
The world rearranges itself. Every wall he built in those five seconds, the acceptance, the letting go, the it's fine, it's right, it's what he deserves… All of it crumbles, and underneath there's only Bucky, standing in the wreckage, not knowing what his face is doing.
Why are you here. Why did you come back. You were supposed to stay. You were supposed to be happy. What does this mean. What do I do with this. Why are you looking at me like that.
"Any complications?" Bruce asks, running a diagnostic on his tablet. "Stones all returned to their original timelines?"
"All sorted," Steve says. "No branches."
"And you had time? For everything you needed to do?"
Steve looks down, something surfaces and sinks in his expression before Bucky can make it out. Soft and private, a door closing gently. "Yeah. Plenty of time."
Sam's got his arms crossed, eyes flicking between Steve and Bucky. He's not saying anything, which means he's noticing everything, saving it for later. Sam quiet is worse than Sam asking questions. Sam quiet means Bucky's going to have a conversation he doesn't want to have at some unspecified point in the future.
Bucky realizes he hasn't spoken. He's just standing there, staring, like an idiot, like someone who didn't spend seventy years learning to keep his face still and his mouth shut.
"Cutting it close, Rogers," he says. His voice comes out steady. Thank god for small mercies. "Thought you might've gotten lost."
Steve's smile is small and warm and it lands somewhere in Bucky's chest like a bruise.
"Nah," Steve says. "Knew the way back."
The way back. The way back to what.
Bucky doesn't ask. Sam's still watching. Bruce is talking about temporal readings. The moment passes, and Bucky lets it pass, lets it slide by like water, because he doesn't know what he'd do with the answer anyway.
But Steve came back.
Steve came back.
That's going to mean something, eventually, when Bucky figures out how to let it.
The only restaurant within fifteen minutes of the compound, or what used to be the compound is a pizza place called Paulina's.
"I'm starving," Sam announces, and that's how the decision gets made.
Nobody argues. Bruce looks relieved to have a task, somewhere to direct his nervous energy other than run diagnostics on equipment they might never use again. Steve just nods, shrugging on his jacket over the underlayer of the quantum suit, and Bucky watches him do it without meaning to watch.
The momentum of it. The way Steve just moves to the next thing, always the next thing, like he didn't just return from—
Bucky stops that thought. Pushes it away. Later.
They load up the equipment in one of the Stark Industries SUVs that survived the destruction, one of the black ones with tinted windows that security used to ferry personnel around.
Sam drives. Bruce takes shotgun by necessity. He tries to fold himself into the back seat first and everyone silently agrees that's not going to work. Which leaves Steve and Bucky in the back, a middle seat's worth of space between them, both looking out their respective windows.
The leather seat is still warm from the afternoon sun, the faint vibration of the engine traveling up through Bucky’s thighs like a low, steady pulse.
It's a five minute drive. Maybe less. Nobody talks.
The road is cracked in places. Aftershocks from the battle, or maybe just bad upstate infrastructure, it's hard to tell. Bucky counts mailboxes to keep his brain occupied. He gets to eleven before they're pulling into a parking lot.
Paulina's looks like it's been here since 1985 and hasn't changed a single thing since. The sign is sun-faded. The parking lot has three other cars in it. Locals, probably. The dinner rush hasn't started yet. The Stark Industries SUV is parked between a Honda Civic and a pickup truck with a faded bumper sticker. In the back, under a black tarp, is the device that just sent Steve Rogers through time. A family of four walks past it on their way inside without a second glance.
Bucky notes the exits out of habit: front door, probable kitchen entrance in the back, windows on two sides. Then he makes himself stop, because he's not here to secure a perimeter. He's here to eat pizza like a normal person.
He doesn't know how to be a normal person. But he can fake it for an hour.
Inside, the decor hits him like a visual assault. Burgundy walls, the color of old wine stains, pressing in from all sides. Wood wainscoting that's trying to class the place up but it just makes the place feel smaller. And the carpet, Christ, the carpet is a pattern of tan and green leaves, busy enough to hide decades of spilled drinks and dropped food, aggressive enough to give him a headache if he looks too long.
The ceiling is low. Bruce notices immediately. Bucky sees him register it, sees the way he adjusts his posture, hunching in a way that makes him look almost apologetic for taking up space. In any other context it might be funny. Right now, nothing's funny. Everything's just there, too bright and too close and too normal.
There are sunburst mirrors on the wall. Gold-toned, tacky, the kind of thing someone's Italian grandmother picked out in 1978 and nobody's had the heart to replace. One of them catches the light wrong and Bucky accidentally makes eye contact with Steve's reflection.
He looks away at the hostess instead. Middle-aged, tired, wearing an apron that says Paulina's: A Taste of Italy in the Hudson Valley. She looks at the four of them with the weariness of a woman who's been doing this job for twenty years and has seen weirder, and without fuss, she grabs a few menus and leads them to a table by the window.
The vertical blinds are yellowed, slightly uneven, one slat bent at an angle that's going to bother Bucky for the entire meal.
They sit. Bruce takes one whole side of the table, chair creaking ominously under him. Sam slides in next to Bucky, which puts Steve directly across from him. Eye contact distance. Unavoidable.
Bucky studies the menu.
"The portions here are huge," Sam observes, flipping through laminated pages. "Look at this pizza. That's like, a medium for normal humans and an appetizer for you two."
"I could eat," Steve says, and it's the first full sentence Bucky's heard from him since knew the way back. His voice sounds normal. Bucky doesn't know why he expected it wouldn't.
Bruce is already flagging down a server. "Can we get a couple pizzas? And—" He looks at the table. "Calamari? Chicken piccata?"
"Get two chicken piccatas," Sam says. "I've seen these two eat."
The server, a young woman with several pens clipped to her apron, doesn't even blink at the green guy taking up an entire side of the table. Paulina's is the closest restaurant to what used to be a major Stark Industries facility; she's probably been serving Avengers since before the Snap.
"What can I get for you boys today?" she asks, like this is any other Tuesday, like half the world didn't just come back from the dead, like the compound down the road isn't a smoking crater. Bucky appreciates the professionalism.
Five days ago, Bucky was in Wakanda. Five years ago. Yesterday. The timeline doesn't make sense and he's stopped trying to make it make sense. He was feeding goats and then he was standing in the middle of a battlefield with a machine gun in his hand fighting beside a talking raccoon and then he was dust, and now he's sitting in a pizza restaurant with burgundy walls while someone asks if they want garlic knots.
"Yeah," Sam says. "Extra garlic knots."
The server leaves. Silence settles over the table like a physical weight.
Steve is looking at the window, at the bent slat in the vertical blinds, at some point past the parking lot that Bucky can't see. His hands are folded on the table in front of him, still and patient. A tiredness in him that has nothing to do with sleep. Soft around the edges, like some tension in him has finally released.
Bucky wants to ask. He wants to grab Steve by the shoulders and demand answers. What happened, what did she say, why did you come back, why are you looking at me like I'm something worth returning to. But he can't. Not here. Not with Sam's careful observance and Bruce's well-meaning presence and a server who's going to come back any minute with drinks.
So he doesn't ask. He sits with his hands in his lap and waits for the food to arrive.
"So," Bruce says, and his voice is gentle, careful, the voice of someone trying to navigate emotional landmines without a map. "Pepper called while we were packing up the equipment. The funeral's Friday."
The word lands on the table, heavy and unignorable.
"Upstate," Bruce continues. "Private property, just the team and family. She said—" He pauses, clears his throat. "She said Tony would've wanted it small. No press, no spectacle."
"That makes sense," Sam says. "He had enough spectacle for a lifetime."
Steve nods. He's still looking at the window. "Friday," he repeats, and his voice is distant, like he's calculating something. How many days, how many hours, how to fit this grief into the shape of everything else.
Bucky says nothing.
He focuses on the carpet instead, on the ugly pattern of leaves repeating and repeating, and tries to find where the seams are. There have to be seams somewhere. Nothing goes on forever without a break.
Sam shifts next to him. Bucky can feel the attention, the careful sideways assessment. Sam's good at that. Looking without looking, noticing without announcing. It's a therapist thing, probably. Or a soldier thing. Maybe both.
"You good?" Sam asks, low enough that it's just for Bucky.
"Fine," Bucky says. The word comes out flat and automatic.
Sam doesn't push. But he doesn't look away either, not for a long moment, and Bucky knows this isn't over. Sam's going to circle back. Sam always circles back.
The food arrives in waves. Calamari first, golden and glistening, then the pizzas, massive and covered in garlic knots around the crust, then the chicken piccata, two enormous plates of pasta swimming in lemon and butter. The server sets it all down with practiced ease and asks if they need anything else.
"We're good," Steve says, and he smiles at her, that polite Captain America smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes.
She leaves. They eat.
Or rather, Bruce and Steve and Sam eat. Bucky goes through the motions, putting food in his mouth, chewing and swallowing, but he couldn't tell you what any of it tastes like. His body does what it's supposed to do. His mind is somewhere else, stuck on the funeral he's not going to attend, on the question he's not going to ask, on the way Steve's eyes crinkle when he reaches for another slice of pizza.
He looks... peaceful. That's the thing Bucky can't get over. Steve looks peaceful in a way Bucky hasn't seen since before the war, since Brooklyn, since they were kids who didn't know what was coming. Whatever happened when he went back, whoever he saw, whatever he said… it settled something in him.
Bucky should be happy about that. He is happy about that.
He's also—
He doesn't know what he is. The feeling doesn't have a name. It's mixed up with relief and confusion and something that might be grief, mourning a version of events that didn't happen, a future where Steve stayed in the past and Bucky learned to live without him.
He'd been ready to live without him. He'd made his peace.
And now Steve's sitting across from him in a pizza restaurant in Esopus, eating garlic knots, and Bucky has to rebuild everything from scratch.
"You're quiet," Steve says.
Bucky looks up. Steve's watching him now, finally, that soft focused attention that always made Bucky feel like the only person in the room.
"Tired," Bucky says. It's not a lie. It's not the truth either.
Steve nods like he understands. Maybe he does. Maybe he's too wrapped up in his own head to notice that Bucky's drowning three feet away.
"It's been a long—" Steve stops, laughs a little, the kind of laugh that's more exhaustion than humor. "I don't even know. Week? Century?"
"Time's fake," Sam says through a mouthful of pizza. "I've decided. None of it's real."
"Quantum mechanics would actually support that interpretation," Bruce offers, and then he's off again, explaining the nature of temporal perception and how the human brain processes nonlinear experiences, and Bucky lets the words wash over him without really listening.
Steve's still looking at him.
Bucky drops his gaze to his plate, to the chicken piccata he's barely touched, to the capers scattered across the pasta like tiny green accusations.
Why did you come back?
He doesn't ask.
The meal continues. The vertical blinds rattle every time someone opens the front door. The sunburst mirrors catch the fading afternoon light. The lemon butter on his untouched plate cools slowly, the scent sharp and bright in the too-warm air.