Someday you are going to stand on a bridge and it won't mean anything except that the water is passing beneath you.
You can feel pain. You can bleed, you can die, you can occasionally shudder under the ache of a serum-heightened migraine.
You cannot get drunk, no matter how much you might want to.
Brooklyn has lost almost everything except the skeleton of its streets, lined like so many ribs. Even most of the trees are younger than you. Those are the details that nobody thinks about, but you have to, because you are not immortal, though you took the brass ring of an extra life anyway.
The merry-go-round hasn't stopped since.
The bridge. You recognize the bridge, and the lonely arm of Liberty, raised in endless burning, that can still be seen beyond it.
So gratitude looks like too much, and then nothing at all, but that is life. At first gratitude seems to be the laughter of people who knew what it meant when the sky opened up, and after that it was for the ones still standing when the knives came from behind.
And then on airport tarmac, there was nothing left to be grateful for.
(Do you blame Tony? Are you allowed to?)
(You decide that you aren't.)
He was wrong, and you betrayed him. Neither was a bargain entered willingly.
Someday you will not search for another shield, and you will fall off of a bridge, maybe, and no one will drag you back to the surface of the water. You imagine that surrender and lay it flat against you like a prayer card in a pocket.
Wakanda offers shelter and a base of operations and there you have it, two years, recovery for some and deadly silence for others, and then the sky begins to open up once again.
It always seems to come from above—death for some, judgment for all, the things that want to kill you but never quite manage it. Death has not yet been for you.
One gauntlet, and half the world thrown down.
Bucky sifts to nothingness before your eyes, and you lose him again because you always do it again, the bridge and the breaking, the last call and the way betrayal always means that somewhere, there was love.
You can't even grieve him; you have to lead.
That is life.
You've had two of them.