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Sitting outside on the roof of his apartment building, Steve feels like he can see the whole city. If it shines, that’s only because out beyond it is the ocean, with the full lens of the sun glinting from its surface. It’s positively blinding, which is good. Burning through his retinas would be really nice right now. Maybe it could sear back the memories trapped behind them of Bucky perched above him, driving punch after punch down into his face with his metal fist.
Not because he got a beating, and Bucky was the one to deliver it. No, that wasn’t why Steve was so preoccupied over it. Steve wants to forget it because he’d never wanted to see that kind of fear and confusion on Bucky’s face, the realization of who he was and all the horrors that had been done to him dangling out on the precipice of unlocking and crashing home in his vacant mind. He’d wanted to break through to him, sure, but at what
cost?
It was too much. Too much.
Even with the super soldier serum to help him convalesce, Steve still felt like he’d been steamrolled. Most of that was emotional drain, but the physical damage had been something else, too. Stab wounds, gunshot wounds, broken ribs, a ruined face, and he’d inhaled an awful lot of river. He’d been run ragged by Loki’s hordes, exhausted and spent, but it was nothing compared to what it had taken out of him taking on another super soldier and then dropping his own defense completely.
But emotionally? That was where the real harm lay. Steve was wrecked and anxious. He’d gotten through to Bucky: he knew that because he’d been pulled out of the river by him, and by all accounts the paramedics who had received the call had both been made immensely uncomfortable by the man in combat armor glowering at them from under the trees. If he was free of HYDRA’s control, though, where had he gone? Why had he disappeared? HYDRA had to have a protocol in place in the event that the Winter Soldier went off the rails, right? So what if they’d taken him back and Steve had been too beaten up to stop them? What if they made the programming stick this time, or killed Bucky out of malice?
He’d been troubled by his fears for Bucky since the moment he’d opened his eyes in the private hospital room Tony had apparently paid for once he’d heard how everything had gone down. Sam was there to push him back into bed and berate him for trying to move, but Steve couldn’t help that his every waking moment was preoccupied with Bucky, even as the consequences of HYDRA’s fall rippled out in news story after story. The government was in turmoil. Human rights violations. Countries in violent revolution against HYDRA appointed despots. Tony had come by to try and distract him and even that had failed. Nat had come by, recovering slower from her own bullet wound than even Steve was–she’d brought chocolate, grapes, and a game she called ‘Tetris’, which Sam assured him was the only good Russian invention. She and Sam had attempted to get into a playful debate about whether or not that was in fact true, but it was so obviously staged joviality that Steve saw right through it. He only had one question, and none of them could tell him what had happened to Bucky.
As Steve stared out at the horizon, he could almost trick himself that he could see movement. A shift of browns and blacks. His eyes were drifting shut, but
he saw it
, a figure approaching, moving surreptitiously between rooftops, occasionally pausing and freezing, glancing over his shoulder as though he was considering going back. Briefly Bucky stood between him and the Empire State Building, his hair blowing gently in the wind as he looked away, following Steve’s gaze toward the ocean, and as he glanced back Steve could see the telltale shadow of a smile in his features, a
blink and you’ll miss it
familiarity to his surroundings that was there one second and gone again the next.
Bucky was home, and he
remembered
. He remembered New York. He remembered Steve. Hands slid into hands and mouths against mouths, and at last the sick feeling Steve had been having for days finally lifted away. Maybe now they could both start healing.