James Buchanan Barnes was a strong man. He knew war- the war of bloody baby teeth from fights in the schoolyard, the war of listening to his best friend's breath rattling every winter, the war of praying for that sound until spring. He knew the war of kissing and dancing with girls who deserved someone who wasn't thinking of someone else, the war of looking at his best friend with his heart in his throat and keeping his mouth closed because love and war were the same and his words could be a rescue or a bomb. He learned about the war of loving someone too scrappy for their own damn good, the war where holding hands was more offensive than shooting a choice finger, the war of ignoring war and loving instead. Bucky's entire life had been war, and it had left him with a boyfriend he adored more than anything. He'd been a soldier since he was seven years old, so it made perfect sense when he turned eighteen for him to make it official.
James Barnes was too good a soldier. He didn't fight for victory, but for peace- victory meant bombing every town and shooting every person not wearing the same colors as yourself. Peace meant almost getting a dishnorable discharge after kicking the ass of your superior because he tried harassing a female recruit. Peace meant sharing food with the tiny pup that kept following the team around, and peace meant going back to a smoldering town because Bucky heard someone still screaming for help. Peace resulted in James Barnes being declared POW after walking into a trap centered around helping a civilian.
There was a soldier missing from that war. The war went on months longer than anyone expected. James Barnes was considered dead, until someone finally shot the right guy in the head and the prisoners got to go home. There was no more fight for James Barnes to return to, not here at least. So he was sent back home, fighting a battle that existed only in his head but existed over and over again.
At least home had pizza.
At least home had Steve.
At least the dog came home with him.
But Bucky wasn't the same when he came home. He was meant to be a dead man, and he suspected that a touch of death had stayed with him even after the statement was retracted. He dreamt of blood and fire sometimes. His brain could blank out for minutes or sometimes even hours at a time. And some things Bucky was ready to patent as new scientific advances, because they could send him miles and months away in just a few seconds.
Winter, he and Steve learned quickly, was the worst. He'd been doing okay, adjusting back to life at home and getting back on his feet. He'd been free for around six months, gotten a lowkey job at a small packaging and shipping place. Wellie- (Bucky had named the dog after H.G. Wells, using input from the English guy on his team to give her a 'girl version' of the name) had been great at keeping him active and offering company when people were too much, but when the cold weather set in his progress seemed to hit the rewind button. The nightmares got worse and more frequent. The snow and the wind and the biting cold all sent Bucky back to the months spent in Russia, and his periods of blankness or his body running on autopilot became almost more common than not. It was just the season, he'd assured Steve. Once the damn temperatures rose, he'd be fine.
But Bucky was gone before spring came.
He didn't leave a note, or a trace of why he left. He didn't even bring anything, not even his wallet or phone or keys. Just the clothes he must have been wearing. It was as if a timer had been set on how much borrowed time Bucky had after escaping death, and before Christmas came it ran out.
Steven Grant Rogers spent most of his life fighting battles that were meant to be bigger than him, that was just the sort of thing that happened when you were born short and scrawny and with enough ailments to fill up more than half of the check boxes on any given sheet of insurance information. Steve was born a fighter, Bucky had just joined his one man battle against the world a little later, made things a little easier- bruises and cuts always seemed to sting a little bit less when he got them with Bucky at his side.
The step from best friend to boyfriend came about as natural to them as stranger to best friend had; it was just that simple, even if they spent far too long mutually pining over one another while convinced that the other couldn't have feelings. Steve and Bucky were just an inevitability, a sure thing, something they'd both take until the end of the line no matter how far that really was. Steve spent a lot of time thinking about things like that while Bucky was overseas, about how any day he could get a formally addressed letter that told him James Buchanan Barnes had been killed in action. His art at the time had reflected that; pieces about longing, about fear, and those were just the ones that gained some attention.
And then the letter came and the words Missing In Action seemed to plaster themselves over every inch of his being. He stopped painting, for months he couldn't even look at his easel. The day they told him that sergeant Barnes was presumed dead was the day he ripped almost every page out of his sketchbook. The pieces littered their apartment for weeks, every time he convinced himself he had gotten them all he found another hidden behind a chair or under a desk. Not his proudest moment.
But then Bucky wasn't dead, then he was home, then he was safe and for a while all Steve wanted to do was draw him. He relearned the shapes of Bucky's face, the way shadows fell differently across his cheekbones, and how his eyes would unfocus when his he remembered something long ago and far away. His art turned angry after that- never at Bucky, it'd always been him and Bucky against everything, but at the politicians and the war profiteers and those who felt national pride and imperialism were one and the same. That art got a /lot/ of attention, everybody loved to hate a political statement after all. This was the stuff that really threw him fully into the light, and it made sense, Rogers had spent his life fighting battles, now he'd just figured out how to do it with a paintbrush instead of a scrawny little fist.
Steve may have loved the recognition, but he loved Bucky more. Bucky who spoke in nightmares and lived with a little more of a shadow in him than he'd had before he shipped out. It was as if the air in the room weighed down heavier on him than it did anyone else, and maybe Steve wasn't an expert by any means but he'd survived enough asthma attacks to know how much a single breath could weigh. So he did everything he could, he was a shoulder when Bucky needed that, made himself scarce when Wellie was all the interaction he could handle that day. Bucky Barnes was still his best friend and nothing would ever change that fact.
When winter came, the holiday that used to fill him with so much joy was suddenly an insurmountable challenge to be fought every single day. The cold weather had never been good for his health but this was something on a different scale entirely. Bucky hated the snow and the cold and it was all Steve could do to chase away one set of nightmares before another was taking its place. Bucky promised that it was just the weather, that this would melt with the chill and that it was all temporary.
And then one cold day in December James Buchanan Barnes walked out of Steve's life and he didn't come back.
Steve plastered every street pole and window with Bucky's picture. He called friends, neighbors, and strangers and asked them to keep their eyes out, to let him come home safe. He got desperate, went to church for the first time since his mother died and prayed and prayed and prayed for him to come home, then for him to be safe, and finally just for him to be alive somewhere. He walked to the police station a thousand times, he handed out flyers to anyone that would take them, he drank too much coffee and visited dangerous neighborhoods and he stopped caring because Bucky was /out there/ somewhere.
The trouble with pushing that hard was that something was bound to break eventually, and Steve might have kept pushing through that too if that break hadn't come in the form of a meningitis induced seizure.
Everything had passed in a blur for a while after that. They fitted him with brand new hearing aids to improve what the sickness had taken, told him that he was lucky he hadn't gone completely deaf, and told him to go home and get some rest. That was when Sam stepped in- Officer Wilson had been the man in charge of Bucky's missing persons case, safe to say they'd seen a lot of each other in the past few months. Sam was the first to visit him in the hospital, first to tell him that getting himself killed looking for Bucky wasn't going to be good for anyone, first one to tell him six months later that he didn't have to hate himself for putting Bucky's things into boxes and hiding them in the back of the closet where he didn't have to spend every day looking at them anymore.
Steve started painting again after that. He had to buy a new easel but he still started painting again. He went out with Sam, he made new friends, and the pretend smiles he plastered on became more and more convincing until they were all but second nature. He adjusted, and Sam had been there to see the best and worst parts of that change. He'd never been afraid to tell that to Steve, either.
-
Over two years later, the pain had eased. Steve missed Bucky almost every day instead of every day, and the pain was no longer overwhelming. He could swallow the sudden lumps in his throat and continue shopping or laughing at a joke, and with another mouthful of water or alcohol the pain could be ignored again. Wellie stopped waiting at the door and crying when it was time to go to sleep and Bucky still wasn't home. Sam no longer had to look inside his case file and wonder how someone could leave his best friend, especially if Bucky was as great as Steve said. The hole wasn't gone, not by any means. Steve still couldn't play tug of war with Wellie and win like Bucky could, he couldn't take her on such long walks. He couldn't look too long at a man in a military uniform, or go to Coney Island. He couldn't date. He could smile and laugh again, he could say that as a person he no longer felt like he was drowning every day and was probably reasonably close to being happy, but the hole that Bucky Barnes had left in his life was never really going to disappear.
-
The homeless man wedged behind a dumpster in an alley on forty-second street with less than two year's worth of memories in him didn't know anything about that. Nobody wanted him, he knew that as well as he knew the cold was awful, losing an arm hurt like a bitch and that he'd been strapped down and electrocuted before and would rather die out in the cold than risk having it happen again.