Twelve Times It Snowed
AN: Written for the 2018 Chocolate Box Round 3 - for Dreamerfound.
.
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1928.
He meets Bucky because of the snow. He takes a left turn instead of a right, avoiding where the snow is piled deepest on the road and sidewalk, knowing from experience that walking through it will leave him with wet pants, cold ankles, and a scolding from his ma.
Sitting in the snow with no care for any of those things is a boy.
Steve's first thought, and one he'll never share with this much bigger kid with his sharp eyes and neatly brushed hair, is that he'd very much like to draw the boy in front of him. Draw the way his hands are pressed down into the grey-white frost underneath them, draw how the snow is slowly soaking through his trousers, and—most of all—draw the way he looks when Steve looks at him.
"Hi," says Steve and prepares to run in case this boy has cruelty in those snow-covered hands. "I need to get past?"
"Look at this," is the reply he gets, and the boy lifts his hand. "It's just the right kind of wet to be interesting."
'This' is a perfect handprint.
"That's nice." Steve isn't sure it is, but he sure is interested in why this kid thinks so. He inches closer, boots crunching just a little, and crouches by the boy. "Why are you making it?"
"Dunno," the boy says, followed by a grumpy shrug. "Bored. Who clobbered you?"
When Steve touches his hand to his mouth, it stings, reminding him of the cut there. Licking it leaves a coppery taste in his mouth. He scowls.
"No one important," he says and, on impulse, lays his hand in the handprint below.
Despite this other boy being much bigger and broader than Steve is probably ever going to be, his hand fits neatly into the impression in the snow.
"Would you look at that," the boys says, "you've got weird, big hands."
Steve is defensive: "They're the same size as yours!"
"Yeah, but the rest of you sure ain't." But the boy is smiling and offers his hand. "I'm Bucky. You look like you need a friend."
Steve hasn't ever really had a friend, and he isn't sure that he actually needs one.
But he still replies, "I guess that could be nice."
.
1934.
It's snowing out, but in here it's warm, despite the drafty roof and the cold floor below them. They've got the couch cushions shoved up against Steve's bed with Bucky sprawled atop them, Steve hanging off the side of the bed above.
"Give it back," Steve grumbles, trying to reach for the sketchbook Bucky is holding out of reach. "Come on, you know I wasn't gonna show you that. Give it here, Buck!"
"Just a peek," Bucky says. His grin is wide and kind of crooked, and Steve wants to cover that wide mouth so he doesn't have to deal with this kind of attitude anymore. "I know you've been drawing me—I want to see."
"I haven't," Steve protests, and that's a lie. "Why would I want to draw you of all people? I've met horses with more character."
"Oh, then… you won't mind if I just… open this…" And the sketchbook slips open, just a little, Bucky laughing as Steve rolls from the bed to try and wrestle it back. It's a fight he can't win, but he tries anyway—because Steve Rogers is a lot of things, but never a quitter. Bucky pins him easily, book in one hand held over their heads and his other hand holding Steve's wrists still. It's a burning touch, made even more so by the cold snow against the window. And they stop, just for a moment, fifteen and sixteen and looking at each other without really know what the other is seeing.
"Don't laugh," Steve murmurs, looking again at that laughing smile and knowing this is permission.
Bucky replies, in a voice just as raw, "I never would."
Steve is proven a liar. He has drawn Bucky. But Bucky doesn't laugh, just lingers on each page, silent for once and with his free hand still resting atop Steve's.
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1936.
The metal grating of Bucky's fire escape is ice-cold and painful to the touch, a chill creeping up through the cushions Steve is sitting on and the blankets pulled around him. Even as he watches, frost creeps along the gridding, his breath icy-white in front of his mouth. His fingers are cramping around his charcoal, the page turning damp under his blue hand, but he keeps drawing feverishly. Despite the cold, despite the snow beginning to threaten, despite the icy rain that had preceded it.
He coughs. It almost covers the sound of the window opening behind him, and doesn't cover at all Bucky's gentle, "You gotta come inside, it's ten below out here."
"Not yet," Steve replies. Not until he's done; he refuses to stop.
But Bucky doesn't fight him, just tugs Steve's blanket until he can slip under too. He's a warm, all-encompassing weight against Steve's back as he presses so close that Steve can feel his heart beating through his too-thin coat.
"She loved the snow," Steve explains, holding the page for Bucky to see and holding the charcoal so tight in his other hand that he might break it if he's not careful. "I need to see it, to help remember what she looks like. I can't forget, I can't."
"You have photos."
Steve shakes his head. Bucky just doesn't understand.
"It's not the same," he mumbles. It's too late. The vivid image in his mind, of his ma framed against the snowy sky, it's gone. Leaving nothing but the clouds above and his hands too cold to do anything but shake. "I'm her son. I shouldn't need photos to remember her face, and my goddamned hands are too goddamned cold—" He's forced to stop, to breathe in great, shuddering gulps that shake him from deep in his core.
"What would your ma say to hear you swear like that?" Bucky asks, his voice muffled by Steve's shoulder as he hunches closer and brings his hands down to wrap around Steve's. The heat hurts.
"Don't start—"
"She'd say," Bucky cuts him off, pulling him tight despite how dangerously exposed they are out here, "you cut that goddamn cussing out, Steven Grant Rogers, or I'll be sorry."
And just like that, the image is back: Sarah Rogers with her hands on her hips and nurse's uniform on, fighting to make her son a man she'd be proud of. And his hands are warmed now, cupped within Bucky's, and he begins to draw.
"There you go," Bucky murmurs from somewhere Steve isn't, Steve's mind far away and long ago. "Now you remember."
They stay in the snowfall until the drawing is done, neither letting go of what they need to hang onto.
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1943.
They're in Strasbourg, France, around forty miles west of the Maginot Line, and everything has changed.
"Am I doing the right thing?" Steve asks Bucky, except they're not Bucky and Steve anymore, they're Sergeant Barnes and Captain America. "This, what we're doing here? How do I know I'm not leading you all to your deaths?"
"Because you're not leading us to shit," Bucky retorts. "We're going together. Side by side, Cap."
Steve smiles, but it hurts. The cold is fierce enough that the muscles of his face aren't cooperating. "Don't call me Cap," he replies softly. "There are no ranks out here, Buck. Not with us. Not like this."
Bucky doesn't answer, just stands by his side and watches the snow. Tomorrow, they could die; today, they're together.
"When we get out of here, I want you to draw me a picture," Bucky says suddenly, stepping closer, and this is different. The rest of the Howling Commandos are bunkered down a half a mile away—Steve isn't worried about being seen, but he is worried that Bucky wants back what they used to be, though they both know that's impossible. Captain America can't love Sergeant Barnes; that's a dream only Steve and Bucky had shared.
"Of what?"
It's the barest touch of fingertip to fingertip, almost imperceptible through Steve's gloves.
But it's there.
"Of you," Bucky answers simply. "How you used to be. How you saw yourself."
Steve stares. "You have photos?" It's a question, not a statement.
"Sure, but they're not the same. I don't want photos to remember us by." Bucky's hand slips around Steve's, gripping tight, and the wind howls between them.
Stupidly, Steve can only repeat, "Everything is different now."
"Not everything," Bucky answers and looks at their hands entwined. "Not always."
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1945.
It's impossible, but Steve's never taken impossible as an answer.
He goes looking for Bucky's body.
The snow is waist deep and getting deeper, hiding dangerous drops and deadly falls and flurrying around his head as it tries to tempt him towards the sheer edges of the cliffs on either side. It's impossible. Wherever Bucky fell, wherever he died, his body is buried under endless snow and ice and rock.
Steve's never going to see him again.
On the side of that lonely mountain, alone in the storm, Steve gives up. He reaches into his pocket and pulls a sheet of paper loose, not even looking twice at it before giving it back to the wind. Then, he turns and walks away.
Away from Bucky and away from the drawing of them together.
Everything is different now.
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1945.
His plane goes down in the snow. Saving the world, one sacrifice at a time. That's what being Captain America is all about, he's sure of it. But he's also glad that it's snowing at the end; he's dying because he's Captain America, but he wants to remember living as Steve.
He wants to die remembering Bucky.
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2012.
His first snowfall in the future isn't lonely, not really, except it is.
He's surrounded by people. Tony, Natasha, Bruce, Clint. No Thor, but he'll likely arrive unexpectedly and loudly sometime soon, Steve is sure. They're in Stark Tower, and the sky is beautiful.
"Hey, Rogers, the party is over here!" Tony calls out, gesturing to himself in his entirety, but Steve shrugs that off and paces along the bank of windows looking out over the grey landscape of winter Manhattan. Soon, it will be white. It would be nice to put charcoal to paper to capture the brief transition between the two, between the old and the new, but he can't find the heart or desire to do so. Something in him aches at the sight of the white flakes catching on the glass.
"Guess you're not a fan of the cold," says Tony, closer this time, standing beside him and looking out at the sky too. "Don't think I blame you, after spending seventy years as a Capsicle."
"Oh, I don't mind it that much," Steve admits, turning away from the window. "It reminds me of home."
"Oh?" Tony's eyebrows are lifted, his mouth in a smile that isn't really forced but isn't real either. "And where's home to you?"
Steve doesn't answer. It's not the right question. Home to him isn't a where, it's a who.
And it's sixty-seven years gone from this world.
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2014.
It's impossible, but Steve's never taken impossible as an answer.
He goes looking for Bucky.
A more pessimistic person, Tony perhaps, would say that the person he finds isn't Bucky at all. That the man sitting in the snow before Steve right now with his wild hair and his metal arm and his blank, endless eyes… that this man isn't even a shadow of the ghost of Bucky Barnes. That he's the Winter Soldier through and through, and about as alive as the snow around them.
Steve would disagree. Bucky's still in there.
He's not looking for a body under a mountain of snow anymore; he's looking for Bucky under a broken mind, and he refuses to fail this time.
"You know me," he tells the man before him, and the man before him says nothing. Just levers himself upright, stares Steve down, and then walks away. Away from his rudimentary camp and all of his belongings, and away from Steve. It's evident that he doesn't plan to return.
Steve looks through the stuff left behind and finds nothing of the man he's looking for, but he doesn't give up.
He keeps looking for the man he's loved since he was ten years old.
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2015.
He's been trailing Bucky for two weeks now. They're both aware of the other, with neither being willing to stand down. Every day, Bucky moves his camp in the hope that he'll shake Steve from his tail; every night, they bunk down barely a mile from each other. Sometimes, Steve wonders why Bucky isn't trying harder to get away.
It's freezing cold, but the cold has long ago stopped bothering Steve. He still finds the time to sit in the snow and draw, flashlight held between his teeth and his mind in a different time, remembering warm hands around his and a smile that was too cocky and too loved. He draws. He draws their hands and he draws their bodies—the bodies of before because he hasn't learned the after—and he puts everything in his heart down on the page under his pencil.
Then, in the middle of the night with snow crunching under his boots, he walks to Bucky.
Bucky doesn't react to his approach, sitting moodily by a campfire he doesn't really need and picking through a can with no label. Steve looks at him and wonders what pain is hidden behind those eyes that don't smile at all anymore. He misses the attitude, and he misses that cocky mouth.
"Here," says Steve, and puts the drawings next to him. "To help you remember."
And he leaves, only barely hearing the whispered, "I have photos," that floats after him.
Heart in his throat and hammering away, he pauses without looking back. He can't look back. This is a fragile, cautious moment. Instead, just as quietly, he says, "It's not my face you need to remember," and keeps on walking.
In the nights following that, their camps grow closer. Neither speaks to the other, but they're both watching.
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2015.
Two weeks later, there's a blizzard. It's a white-out. The world around them disappears.
Steve sits alone with nothing but the snow around him, huddled in a tent that's quickly going to be buried. He doesn't think the cold can kill him, is almost sure it can't, but this night is going to try nonetheless. He senses the man approaching before he hears him, reaching his hand up and unzipping the tent to find Bucky hovering right on the cusp of visibility. He's not going to approach further, no matter what's driving him, so, in the wind and the snow, Steve stands and walks fearlessly towards the Winter Soldier.
But it's not the Winter Soldier looking back at him when he gets there.
"Hi, Bucky," Steve says simply, seeing his drawings in Bucky's ungloved hands and something familiar in his wide eyes. Watching Bucky swallow, over and over again, as he fights to speak without his words being whipped away by the squalling winds.
Steve steps closer again. Reaches.
He wraps his hands, even with their thick gloves, around both of Bucky's, the drawings between them. The metal and the man, it doesn't matter to him. They're both as cold as the other, and both a part of the person he needs so desperately to reach.
And Bucky follows where Steve leads, back towards the tent and into the light, crawling in beside him and laying the drawings down. With the flap zipped and the world sealed without, ice and snow dripping from their bodies, he asks, "Can I try something?" in a voice that's changed so much since they'd begun. "I want to remember something."
Steve can't say anything but, "Yes."
The kiss is cold and awkward, seventy years between this and the last. It lingers too long without lasting long enough and, when they break apart, it breaks Steve's heart with it.
But Bucky says, "I do know you."
So Steve replies, "Come home."
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2016.
Their first winter home is fraught with complications. Bucky is Bucky with harsher edges, all new and sharp to Steve's understanding. He doesn't recognise everything about him anymore but, then again, Steve's not the person he was in 1945 anymore either. They're both different.
That's the winter they find each other.
It's a single night that brings them the last step back to Bucky and Steve and how they'd used to be. It's snowing. Bucky doesn't like the snow anymore, refusing to leave the apartment Steve is financing for him in order to come out and see Steve at the Tower. Steve goes looking, finding him closed in with the curtains drawn and pacing restlessly.
"It makes me feel lost," he admits when Steve asks why. "I feel… like I'm standing in that blizzard again, desperate to reach a man I barely remember. I can't handle feeling like that anymore—like there's this gulf between who we were and who we are that I can't cross."
"Well, alright," says Steve, because that makes sense and because there's a solution. "We can fix that."
"Can we?"
They can.
The couch cushions are shoved up against Bucky's bed, Steve sprawled on them with Bucky lying above. The curtains are open, and they're watching the snow fall, together. They don't speak. They don't have to. Steve has his drawings on his knees, and he's sketching a boy kneeling in the snow, his hand making the perfect print beside him. When he pauses, putting the charcoal aside, Bucky reaches for his hand.
And, outside, the snow can't touch this moment.
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2020.
He finds Bucky sitting in the snow, with no care for the white flakes in his long hair or for the way his clothes are getting soaked. With little care for those things either, Steve goes and sits beside him, looking at where Bucky's hand is spread in the snow. His human hand, not the metal one curled in his lap.
"Lift," Steve says, and smiles when Bucky obeys and reveals the handprint he's left there. "Look at this."
'This' is his hand fitting neatly into the print Bucky left behind.
"Still the same size," Steve finishes, "even after all this time." After everything they've been through, all the times they've been lost and alone, they still have this. They still have each other.
They still have the snow.
Everything is different now, except the things that are the same.