It was one op, but Steph figured they might be able to use it for Bucky's trial anyway. She knew a thing or two about public perception, after all. Between Bucky becoming an Avenger, Captain America marrying the Winter Soldier, and the pool of evidence of HYDRA's atrocities, he should be able to walk free, unless the plan all along was to use him as a scapegoat for the government's failures.
"What's mine is yours once we're married, remember?" That wasn't how it worked, but it also wasn't like there was an official membership process or anything. "Look, it's one mission and we're out. I just want us to be together in the history books again," she teased some more.
After a while their conversation shifted to flying a ship and Steph's first trip to space. "Fucking worst. Worse than the Cyclone," she swore. The view of Earth from space was really something though, and she wanted him to see it.
Then the topic moved back to date nights. "Roadtrip," she added to the list. On their bikes would be fun, but they could also just rent a car. "But hey, I'd rather stay in most nights too. We could play board games, or read, or slow dance in the kitchen." Having sex was a given after their dates, so she didn't list it anymore.
"Just say when and where, and I'll be right there with you. You don't have to convince me." And it wasn't just for the sake of getting to live some of his sci-fi dreams, either. But that was definitely a bonus.
Bucky laughed softly as Steph listed various things they could do. "We used to do two of those things all the time," he said, grinning. The board games and reading passed the time when they were hanging out, even though they didn't have many games. Just a couple, but it was better than nothing. The dancing would be... not new, but they didn't do it very often.
One night, when he had danced with her on the Boardwalk on her birthday, while badly singing Cheek to Cheek actually came to mind often.
"You know, I used to wish those nights were actual dates."
"Me too," Steph agreed wistfully. "Especially the one when I turned 17. The dancing, not the Cyclone. Do you remember that at all?" Having made peace with their feelings, her doubt was now because of what HYDRA did to his head, not because she didn't think he'd have considered the moment important. "I wanted so badly to kiss you."
Everything would've changed if she did, she knew now. They'd have made plans to marry the following year.
No use dwelling on what-could-have-beens though. Still, it was nice to think about how much they wanted each other.
"I think about that night a lot," Bucky admitted, smiling softly as he held her. "It was one of the first really clear memories I got back." It might have been because it was also one of the memories Bucky tried to hold onto so tightly when HYDRA was trying to erase who he was in the first place. Most of the memories he tried to hang onto during that time were of Steph.
"But, hey, we got here eventually." Hell, he was just a couple days away from marrying her. "And now we get to have all the date nights we want."
He still couldn't believe what massive idiots they'd been, especially with just how long they'd known each other, but there was genuinely no one else he'd rather spend his nights with, and there never had been.
"Not just nights, though I don't think we're morning persons anymore." Steph still went on runs in the morning, but only after being up for most of the night. She hadn't really been sleeping well since the war; before that she at least had those nights where she wasn't too sick or tired and Bucky was over for her to curl into. Maybe things would be better now that they had that as a permanent arrangement. Hell, she didn't think she remembered sleeping as soundly as she did the past two days.
"I still get nightmares of the train, or of being trapped in the ice, or of you crumbling into dust," she admitted. "Most nights I just stay up to draw, then the next thing I know it's dawn, and I go outside to run."
"I have a lot of nightmares," Bucky said with a sigh. "The train, the things they did to me, the things I did for them..." There had been so damn much.
But he had slept so well beside Steph. No, he didn't sleep for quite as long as she had. And also no, he didn't think she was going to be a magic pill to keep him from ever having nightmares again. But it had been the most peaceful sleep he'd had in more years than he could count.
"They get... bad sometimes," he started, feeling like he should probably warn her if she was going to spend her nights curled up beside him. "I've, uh, woken up swinging a couple times."
Steph hugged him tighter, burying her face into the crook of Bucky's neck. "That's alright. You can't hurt me anymore."
They both knew it was a lie, of course. He'd nearly killed her on that helicarrier. But at least she wasn't weak and sickly anymore. If he did at least accidentally strike her while asleep, she'd just end up sporting a bruise for a while.
She kissed his jaw. "Hey, if you ever need to... I don't know, sleep in the other room, give yourself some space, that's fine too, alright? We haven't been roommates in years." Technically not even roommates, but he'd been over her place enough he might as well have lived there.
"We'll figure it out as we go, alright?" he told her simply. He didn't want to sleep in the other room if he didn't have to, so hopefully Steph would be at least calming enough to keep him from swinging. Bucky didn't think she'd be able to get rid of the nightmares entirely or anything, but not lashing out would be a good start.
Bucky let out a single, humorless laugh then, followed by a sigh. "You sure you wanna tie yourself to me?" he asked, even though he knew she wouldn't turn him away just for that. "I don't think you could find many people with more baggage than I come with."
"Hey." Steph pushed herself up so she was leaning over Bucky, her expression serious and determined. "I'm sure. Don't even bother trying to change my mind."
She rested her forehead against his, closing her eyes and suddenly grinning. "I'd bet that if you went back in time and told me in... I don't know, in '43, that you love me, past me would take you, baggage and all. But I don't wanna fight her for you, okay? She has her own dumbass to deal with in a few decades."
She knew she would love him, always. Hell, she'd have tied herself to him before the Wakandans intervened, if he'd allowed himself be around her.
Bucky tightened his arms around Steph, hugging her tightly as he closed his eyes. "I'm not gonna go confess to past you. Then I'd just have to explain all my shit, and that wouldn't be good for anyone." It was a joke, but it was a bad one, and Bucky knew it. "You already know about all that, and you're still dumb enough to sign up for a lifetime of it."
And he would be thankful every day that she was dumb enough to sign up for a lifetime of it. Bucky didn't know what he would do without her. Hell, he would probably still be trapped without her.
Either way, thinking about the fact that she was signing up for it made him grin just a little again. "I wish Becca was still around so I could tell her I was bringing you into the family. She would have been excited as hell." And probably would have demanded to be Steph's maid of honor or something.
"And whose problem would this dumbass be now? Yours. So who's really the dumb one, huh?" Look, Bucky was asking for it. Giving each other shit for being stupid was part of their love language, and Steph wasn't going to let the opportunity pass.
Him mentioning Becca gave her an idea. "You know, we could visit her. We just need to pick a point in time where it wouldn't matter if she knows we're alive and from the future." Or if Becca believed it at all. Steph remembered going to Camp Lehigh with Tony to grab the Tesseract, and seeing him get a chance to talk to Howard. It had done him some good. Maybe talking to Becca would help Bucky too.
Bucky and Steph were going to end up giving each other shit until the day they died, he was sure of it. It was just what they'd always done, and part of how they became friends in the first place. Bucky didn't start out treating her any differently from the other kids just because she was smaller, and even on that first day he could see she could stick up for herself, but that was part of what he had liked about her. She didn't let her size stop her.
Sure, over time, he began to treat her a little differently from everyone else, but it still wasn't because of that. It was more because of the feelings he had for her and how he tended to put her before anyone else. Didn't mean he'd stop calling her a dumb punk, though.
Laughing softly, Bucky let his natural hand slide down to give her ass a squeeze. "Hey, at least I picked a dumbass with a great ass," he teased. "I've always liked your ass, though. Even if most of your clothes used to hide it."
But then, Bucky blinked a bit, staring at Steph. "Wait. We could do that?" he asked, the idea sparking a little bit of hope in him. Even if it was just to say goodbye to her, that would be more than he ever thought he would get. "We would... probably have to be pretty careful about when, though, huh? And if she's an option, we could also stop by and see your mom." Like Bucky would ever pass up a great opportunity, like seeing his sister one more time, without considering if they could do the same for Steph.
"Where were all these compliments 90 years ago?" Steph teased just a little more. She wouldn't have believed Bucky if he also didn't tell her how he felt though, thinking he was just saying things because he was her best friend. In any case, she was taking them now. It actually was vindicating to know that he liked her just fine before the serum.
They moved on to planning their little mission side trip. "I mean if we couldn't, I already fucked up the timeline somewhere by telling past me that you were alive." If anyone would cling to such a claim, it would be her. Past Steph was hopefully leveraging the Avengers now to search for her Bucky — unless the Tesseract vanishing posed a bigger problem. She hadn't exactly been privy to how that went.
"Maybe we could visit Ma just before she passed," she mused thoughtfully. "She would be happy. She never teased me, but she did want to know how I really felt about you."
90 years earlier Bucky had definitely thought and felt every one of the compliments he'd been giving her, but he didn't think she would want them from him. At best he figured she would just brush them off, thinking he was just being nice, even though he would have meant every word.
"So, you went back in time to get those stones, but decided you needed to make a pit stop to tell yourself that I'm alive?" Yep, that sounded like the sort of insanity that Steph would get up to. And the fact that it didn't even really surprise him? He really was a dumbass for not realizing how deep her feelings for him went.
"Anyway, we'd probably need to do the same with Becca. Visit her not long before she went, probably around the time you visited her before." Sighing, he pressed a kiss to the top of Steph's head again. "It might help them when they go, you know? Knowing that it took a while, but we finally got here." Hell, they'd already be married by the time they went on their trip and everything. "I don't think the fact that we'll be married will surprise either of them. Probably just how long it took. And maybe the time travel."
Steph chuckled. "More like, I got into a fight with past me and needed to distract her to land a blow and knock her out." She recounted how, at that time, they were fighting someone who could take on other people's appearance, so seeing double had made her younger self assume she was the enemy. "Fighting yourself is weird. You make the same moves, have the same weaknesses. So yeah, I figured telling her you were alive oughta work. If I'd had more time, I would've given her the coordinates to the facility in Siberia." But she hadn't been prepared for that.
Bucky had a point. She nodded, shifting to snuggle a bit more into him. "My Ma was worried about me being alone after she passed. And Becca, God... she told me how heartbroken she'd been. You had a funeral, at least. My death was just splashed on the front pages of every paper in the country."
"Of course you got into a fight with yourself. Only you, I swear," Bucky said, grinning softly. If anyone was going to end up in a fight with themself, it was definitely Steph Rogers.
However, at the mention of the papers, Bucky's grin disappeared. "Yeah, I... I know about the front pages," he started, frowning as he thought back. "I held out for longer than they expected, so they were still working on breaking me when you crashed. Sometimes they'd bring those papers in to show me. Sometimes they'd read excerpts." HYDRA had known good and well that Bucky was close with Captain America, so they knew they could use those papers against him. At least they didn't realize how close they were, not that it would have changed anything.
"Hey!" Steph laughed and punched Bucky's arm playfully. "I didn't do it on purpose! How was I to know I would run into her?" She knew what it sounded like though, so she couldn't really complain about his teasing.
She pursed her lips into a thin line as he recounted how HYDRA had used her supposed death against him. It was even worse now that she knew how he felt about her. "I'm so sorry, Buck." She buried her face into the crook of his neck. "You know I'd change it if I could, right?"
She'd thought about using the Stones to go back and save him. Stop his fall or stop HYDRA or whatever it took. But how could she leave him now? This Bucky was hers, and while saving another version of him would temper her guilt, this one just wanted her to be here.
"I know you would. But we're here now, so none of that trying to change shit when we go on our trip," he started and held her close, eyes closing instead of staring at the ceiling. "Don't want you accidentally changing too much and us not getting here." Would Bucky rather lose his arm, decades of his life, and be tortured than lose Stephanie Rogers? Absolutely. Was that healthy? Probably not.
"Besides, the papers weren't your fault. They didn't need to show me that shit, but they knew we were close. Even if they didn't realize how important you were to me, they knew it'd be an easy way to twist the knife." How could they not? Even before the two of them teamed up with the rest of the Howlies to take out HYDRA bases across Europe, Schmidt and Zola watched Steph make a special point of saving him from that first base. "Now, the plane crash itself? Apparently, that actually was your fault."
"Do you expect me to want to live in a world without you?" Steph knew it was a joke, but the words were out of her almost immediately. Certainly with a touch of defensiveness and her voice breaking a little. It just hit a bit too close to home, as she still felt as she did in '45; the only reason she didn't try anything after he turned into dust was because she felt killing herself would be the easy way out, and she didn't deserve that for failing.
She never really did grieve him, just cycled through anger and denial and back again.
She didn't cry, but she didn't say anything for a while, just kept her face buried into the crook of his neck. If she lost him again, after everything, after finding out that he loved her, she wouldn't know what to do with herself. She hoped they would never have to find out.
"Sorry," Bucky said quietly. "That was a stupid thing to joke about."
After that, Bucky also went silent for a few minutes. He just held her, almost convinced he could feel her heart beat where their chests were pressed together as he stared at the ceiling.
"I would have probably done the same thing," he said eventually. "If I had to live in a world knowing you were gone? I don't know what would keep me going." Bucky didn't put her on a pedestal, exactly. He knew she had flaws -- lots of them, that he would let her know about whenever he needed to -- but she was also the most important person in the world to him, and always had been. Ever since they were kids, no one had come before Steph in his mind.
"Sorry," Steph said after a while. "I just... I don't know, I guess I just never imagined a world where I outlived you, so I... didn't know what to do with it." She sighed. "You know the first thing I did after I woke up in the future? I visited your grave." Well, after she punched her way out of a SHIELD facility and ran barefoot into Times Square like a crazy person anyway. Fury had had no choice but to drive her to Brooklyn.
"Then Fury showed me the Wall of Valor, and it had your name, and the boys', and Howard's, and I... I never felt so alone." Visiting Becca, and later on Peggy, had helped with the displacement and the loneliness, but not with the grief. Especially after Becca had said that her family kept some of Steph's stuff, though the rest they'd placed in Bucky's empty casket alongside most of his books and photos.
"He would've wanted you next to him," Becca had told her.
"So did I," Steph had agreed.
Hugging him tightly, she said, "Sorry. You're here now. Probably should focus on that, yeah?" She just never really talked about any of that, not even with Natasha, who she'd gotten pretty close with after the Snap. She'd mentioned a few things to Sam back when they hung out in D.C., but it hadn't been anything specific; she knew he ran a support group and didn't want to be psychoanalyzed.
The fact that they had both lost each other without ever letting go wasn't lost on Bucky. If he had let go of her, she probably wouldn't have been able to get through to him. Though, the loss did help those assholes break him.
After all, without Steph what reason did he have to keep going?
Bucky hugged her back just as tightly and pressed a kiss to her hair. "Hey, you've got nothing to be sorry about, you hear me? It's probably good for us to talk about these things or something." Distracting himself slightly, Bucky moved his good hand so he could play with the ends of her hair.
"I don't think I ever told you that when I got my draft letter, I seriously thought about grabbing you and running. Taking you to the west coast, or Canada, or somewhere far from New York so I couldn't get shipped out," he admitted. Until those newspapers with Steph splashed across them, that draft letter was the worst piece of paper he had ever seen. "Even wondered how many people I could convince my name was Buck Rogers, like the comic strip, cause I knew it'd be easiest if I tried to go by names that were kinda different, but that I was used to."
"We used to talk about everything," Steph agreed, then after a moment amended with a soft laugh, "except our feelings."
Case in point: how Bucky really felt about being drafted. "And here I thought you were raring to go, just like every other young man in Brooklyn." She didn't know anyone who didn't want to be part of the war effort, and they would have been shamed otherwise. In hindsight, though? "We should have run." Maybe she would have died after a few years. Maybe the Allies wouldn't have won. But maybe they would have been spared from... all this.
She shifted to rest her cheek against his shoulder. "Maybe we should tell them to run," she said quietly.
"You just nailed why I didn't mention not wanting to go," Bucky said with a soft laugh. "The other guys were all for it, but I just wanted to stay home with you. So I waited to get drafted instead of enlisting, then faked it after that." At least after all those years of pretending to be interested in other girls, Bucky had plenty of practice faking things. Maybe he shoulda gone into acting.
"If he got caught, he'd get thrown in jail, though. They'd still end up separated." And then Steph, small and sickly and wonderful, would be stranded somewhere unfamiliar on her own during exceptionally hard times, with no family of her own back home to return to. It was better to at least leave her where his family could try to keep an eye on her for him, wasn't it? Those were the sorts of things that Bucky thought about back then.
Unless it had worked, of course. But there was no way for them to know if it would have or not.
"You really are a dumbass," Steph sighed in exasperation, but there was a lot more affection in her tone than the words implied. She propped herself back up so she could kiss Bucky and murmur into his mouth, "But my dumbass."
He would choose to fall off a train and get tortured and his mind screwed than lose her, which was incredibly stupid, but who was she to call him out? She would choose to be experimented on and jump off planes without a parachute and get buried in the ice than lose him. So yeah, that shut down whatever ideas she might have had about interfering with their past. But going on that mission together, definitely. Just in case. If anything happened, they at least had each other.
Resting her forehead against his for a moment, she closed her eyes, then said quietly, "It might take me a while longer to forgive myself, so please bear with me, but I promise I won't run off and do anything that might separate us." She'd been trying to save everyone for so long, she hadn't realized she needed saving.
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"What's mine is yours once we're married, remember?" That wasn't how it worked, but it also wasn't like there was an official membership process or anything. "Look, it's one mission and we're out. I just want us to be together in the history books again," she teased some more.
After a while their conversation shifted to flying a ship and Steph's first trip to space. "Fucking worst. Worse than the Cyclone," she swore. The view of Earth from space was really something though, and she wanted him to see it.
Then the topic moved back to date nights. "Roadtrip," she added to the list. On their bikes would be fun, but they could also just rent a car. "But hey, I'd rather stay in most nights too. We could play board games, or read, or slow dance in the kitchen." Having sex was a given after their dates, so she didn't list it anymore.
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Bucky laughed softly as Steph listed various things they could do. "We used to do two of those things all the time," he said, grinning. The board games and reading passed the time when they were hanging out, even though they didn't have many games. Just a couple, but it was better than nothing. The dancing would be... not new, but they didn't do it very often.
One night, when he had danced with her on the Boardwalk on her birthday, while badly singing Cheek to Cheek actually came to mind often.
"You know, I used to wish those nights were actual dates."
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Everything would've changed if she did, she knew now. They'd have made plans to marry the following year.
No use dwelling on what-could-have-beens though. Still, it was nice to think about how much they wanted each other.
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"But, hey, we got here eventually." Hell, he was just a couple days away from marrying her. "And now we get to have all the date nights we want."
He still couldn't believe what massive idiots they'd been, especially with just how long they'd known each other, but there was genuinely no one else he'd rather spend his nights with, and there never had been.
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"I still get nightmares of the train, or of being trapped in the ice, or of you crumbling into dust," she admitted. "Most nights I just stay up to draw, then the next thing I know it's dawn, and I go outside to run."
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But he had slept so well beside Steph. No, he didn't sleep for quite as long as she had. And also no, he didn't think she was going to be a magic pill to keep him from ever having nightmares again. But it had been the most peaceful sleep he'd had in more years than he could count.
"They get... bad sometimes," he started, feeling like he should probably warn her if she was going to spend her nights curled up beside him. "I've, uh, woken up swinging a couple times."
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They both knew it was a lie, of course. He'd nearly killed her on that helicarrier. But at least she wasn't weak and sickly anymore. If he did at least accidentally strike her while asleep, she'd just end up sporting a bruise for a while.
She kissed his jaw. "Hey, if you ever need to... I don't know, sleep in the other room, give yourself some space, that's fine too, alright? We haven't been roommates in years." Technically not even roommates, but he'd been over her place enough he might as well have lived there.
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Bucky let out a single, humorless laugh then, followed by a sigh. "You sure you wanna tie yourself to me?" he asked, even though he knew she wouldn't turn him away just for that. "I don't think you could find many people with more baggage than I come with."
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She rested her forehead against his, closing her eyes and suddenly grinning. "I'd bet that if you went back in time and told me in... I don't know, in '43, that you love me, past me would take you, baggage and all. But I don't wanna fight her for you, okay? She has her own dumbass to deal with in a few decades."
She knew she would love him, always. Hell, she'd have tied herself to him before the Wakandans intervened, if he'd allowed himself be around her.
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And he would be thankful every day that she was dumb enough to sign up for a lifetime of it. Bucky didn't know what he would do without her. Hell, he would probably still be trapped without her.
Either way, thinking about the fact that she was signing up for it made him grin just a little again. "I wish Becca was still around so I could tell her I was bringing you into the family. She would have been excited as hell." And probably would have demanded to be Steph's maid of honor or something.
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Him mentioning Becca gave her an idea. "You know, we could visit her. We just need to pick a point in time where it wouldn't matter if she knows we're alive and from the future." Or if Becca believed it at all. Steph remembered going to Camp Lehigh with Tony to grab the Tesseract, and seeing him get a chance to talk to Howard. It had done him some good. Maybe talking to Becca would help Bucky too.
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Sure, over time, he began to treat her a little differently from everyone else, but it still wasn't because of that. It was more because of the feelings he had for her and how he tended to put her before anyone else. Didn't mean he'd stop calling her a dumb punk, though.
Laughing softly, Bucky let his natural hand slide down to give her ass a squeeze. "Hey, at least I picked a dumbass with a great ass," he teased. "I've always liked your ass, though. Even if most of your clothes used to hide it."
But then, Bucky blinked a bit, staring at Steph. "Wait. We could do that?" he asked, the idea sparking a little bit of hope in him. Even if it was just to say goodbye to her, that would be more than he ever thought he would get. "We would... probably have to be pretty careful about when, though, huh? And if she's an option, we could also stop by and see your mom." Like Bucky would ever pass up a great opportunity, like seeing his sister one more time, without considering if they could do the same for Steph.
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They moved on to planning their little mission side trip. "I mean if we couldn't, I already fucked up the timeline somewhere by telling past me that you were alive." If anyone would cling to such a claim, it would be her. Past Steph was hopefully leveraging the Avengers now to search for her Bucky — unless the Tesseract vanishing posed a bigger problem. She hadn't exactly been privy to how that went.
"Maybe we could visit Ma just before she passed," she mused thoughtfully. "She would be happy. She never teased me, but she did want to know how I really felt about you."
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"So, you went back in time to get those stones, but decided you needed to make a pit stop to tell yourself that I'm alive?" Yep, that sounded like the sort of insanity that Steph would get up to. And the fact that it didn't even really surprise him? He really was a dumbass for not realizing how deep her feelings for him went.
"Anyway, we'd probably need to do the same with Becca. Visit her not long before she went, probably around the time you visited her before." Sighing, he pressed a kiss to the top of Steph's head again. "It might help them when they go, you know? Knowing that it took a while, but we finally got here." Hell, they'd already be married by the time they went on their trip and everything. "I don't think the fact that we'll be married will surprise either of them. Probably just how long it took. And maybe the time travel."
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Bucky had a point. She nodded, shifting to snuggle a bit more into him. "My Ma was worried about me being alone after she passed. And Becca, God... she told me how heartbroken she'd been. You had a funeral, at least. My death was just splashed on the front pages of every paper in the country."
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However, at the mention of the papers, Bucky's grin disappeared. "Yeah, I... I know about the front pages," he started, frowning as he thought back. "I held out for longer than they expected, so they were still working on breaking me when you crashed. Sometimes they'd bring those papers in to show me. Sometimes they'd read excerpts." HYDRA had known good and well that Bucky was close with Captain America, so they knew they could use those papers against him. At least they didn't realize how close they were, not that it would have changed anything.
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She pursed her lips into a thin line as he recounted how HYDRA had used her supposed death against him. It was even worse now that she knew how he felt about her. "I'm so sorry, Buck." She buried her face into the crook of his neck. "You know I'd change it if I could, right?"
She'd thought about using the Stones to go back and save him. Stop his fall or stop HYDRA or whatever it took. But how could she leave him now? This Bucky was hers, and while saving another version of him would temper her guilt, this one just wanted her to be here.
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"Besides, the papers weren't your fault. They didn't need to show me that shit, but they knew we were close. Even if they didn't realize how important you were to me, they knew it'd be an easy way to twist the knife." How could they not? Even before the two of them teamed up with the rest of the Howlies to take out HYDRA bases across Europe, Schmidt and Zola watched Steph make a special point of saving him from that first base. "Now, the plane crash itself? Apparently, that actually was your fault."
Bad joke, Bucky.
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She never really did grieve him, just cycled through anger and denial and back again.
She didn't cry, but she didn't say anything for a while, just kept her face buried into the crook of his neck. If she lost him again, after everything, after finding out that he loved her, she wouldn't know what to do with herself. She hoped they would never have to find out.
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After that, Bucky also went silent for a few minutes. He just held her, almost convinced he could feel her heart beat where their chests were pressed together as he stared at the ceiling.
"I would have probably done the same thing," he said eventually. "If I had to live in a world knowing you were gone? I don't know what would keep me going." Bucky didn't put her on a pedestal, exactly. He knew she had flaws -- lots of them, that he would let her know about whenever he needed to -- but she was also the most important person in the world to him, and always had been. Ever since they were kids, no one had come before Steph in his mind.
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"Then Fury showed me the Wall of Valor, and it had your name, and the boys', and Howard's, and I... I never felt so alone." Visiting Becca, and later on Peggy, had helped with the displacement and the loneliness, but not with the grief. Especially after Becca had said that her family kept some of Steph's stuff, though the rest they'd placed in Bucky's empty casket alongside most of his books and photos.
"He would've wanted you next to him," Becca had told her.
"So did I," Steph had agreed.
Hugging him tightly, she said, "Sorry. You're here now. Probably should focus on that, yeah?" She just never really talked about any of that, not even with Natasha, who she'd gotten pretty close with after the Snap. She'd mentioned a few things to Sam back when they hung out in D.C., but it hadn't been anything specific; she knew he ran a support group and didn't want to be psychoanalyzed.
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After all, without Steph what reason did he have to keep going?
Bucky hugged her back just as tightly and pressed a kiss to her hair. "Hey, you've got nothing to be sorry about, you hear me? It's probably good for us to talk about these things or something." Distracting himself slightly, Bucky moved his good hand so he could play with the ends of her hair.
"I don't think I ever told you that when I got my draft letter, I seriously thought about grabbing you and running. Taking you to the west coast, or Canada, or somewhere far from New York so I couldn't get shipped out," he admitted. Until those newspapers with Steph splashed across them, that draft letter was the worst piece of paper he had ever seen. "Even wondered how many people I could convince my name was Buck Rogers, like the comic strip, cause I knew it'd be easiest if I tried to go by names that were kinda different, but that I was used to."
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Case in point: how Bucky really felt about being drafted. "And here I thought you were raring to go, just like every other young man in Brooklyn." She didn't know anyone who didn't want to be part of the war effort, and they would have been shamed otherwise. In hindsight, though? "We should have run." Maybe she would have died after a few years. Maybe the Allies wouldn't have won. But maybe they would have been spared from... all this.
She shifted to rest her cheek against his shoulder. "Maybe we should tell them to run," she said quietly.
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"If he got caught, he'd get thrown in jail, though. They'd still end up separated." And then Steph, small and sickly and wonderful, would be stranded somewhere unfamiliar on her own during exceptionally hard times, with no family of her own back home to return to. It was better to at least leave her where his family could try to keep an eye on her for him, wasn't it? Those were the sorts of things that Bucky thought about back then.
Unless it had worked, of course. But there was no way for them to know if it would have or not.
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He would choose to fall off a train and get tortured and his mind screwed than lose her, which was incredibly stupid, but who was she to call him out? She would choose to be experimented on and jump off planes without a parachute and get buried in the ice than lose him. So yeah, that shut down whatever ideas she might have had about interfering with their past. But going on that mission together, definitely. Just in case. If anything happened, they at least had each other.
Resting her forehead against his for a moment, she closed her eyes, then said quietly, "It might take me a while longer to forgive myself, so please bear with me, but I promise I won't run off and do anything that might separate us." She'd been trying to save everyone for so long, she hadn't realized she needed saving.
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