Note: Title taken from the Gabrielle Aplin song 'Home'.
It's Not Just Where You Lay Your Head
You can pick up a phone receiver in the Captain America Smithsonian exhibit and listen to Steve's final conversation with Peggy as he'd crashed Schmidt's plane. It's invasive in a way no one thought it would be when SHIELD released it to the museum in 1995 with Peggy's blessing, because things lose their sting when you're half a century removed from them.
The problem, of course, is Steve isn't, and it's infuriating to know thousands of people listen every day to an intimate exchange he shared with the woman he loves just a few years ago, from his perspective.
But he doesn't tell the museum that. They didn't know when they started sharing the recording that Steve would eventually come back to feel violated.
He'd picked up a receiver, the first time – hadn't really known what it was – and had slammed it down after he'd heard his own voice say just four words:
This is my choice.
Those words have been played on a loop seven days a week for twenty years now, and yet somehow everyone's missed the meaning. It was Steve's choice to crash that plane, Steve's choice to sacrifice his life to save the world.
He hadn't chosen to sacrifice his death.
When he'd first defrosted everyone treated it like a celebration: newspapers declared it a miracle, normally stoic SHIELD agents and practiced politicians alike grew tongue-tied around him, and octogenarians came up to him in the street to shake his hand. It didn't occur to a single person for even a second that there was the slightest possibility Steve hadn't wanted to be woken up.
Dying for the world had been easy. Living in it – seventy years in the future and all but alone – is nearly impossible.
"The important thing to keep in mind," the SHIELD psychiatrist told him over and over those first few weeks, "is that you're safe and you're home again."
Steve had laughed the first time she'd said it.
"I can never go home," he'd said bluntly.
"In a sense, no," she'd non-agreed. "But that's not the way to look at it. You have an opportunity to make a new home."
You're missing the point, Steve had wanted to say. That's not possible. Not when all your friends are dead or demented. Not when your neighborhood was torn down and rebuilt decades ago. Not when you missed so much. It's not possible. I can never go home.
But it wasn't really her fault. She probably felt just as lost as he did. Time-Traveling WWII Supersoldier wasn't exactly a standard case study, after all.
So he'd simply nodded and never refuted her again.
The thing is, after awhile home does become part of his vocabulary again.
"Where are you going after this?" Natasha asks him after a debrief, a few weeks after they move to DC, and Steve answers, "Home," without thinking, a lie in more ways than one.
"If you hurry, you can grab an early-bird special and still be in bed before the sun goes down, grandpa," Natasha teases, completely missing the significance of the word.
"Funny," says Steve.
He heads to his Smithsonian exhibit a few minutes later, like he does most days he gets off before the museum closes.
He surreptitiously strokes his old bike's handle. He reads and rereads even the tiniest blurbs about the Commandos' post-war lives. He spends too much time watching Peggy's interviews.
(Maybe it wasn't a lie at all.)
He's not sure why he goes to find Sam at the VA. He just knows he doesn't want to keep burdening Peggy's fragile mind, and he can't talk to Natasha or Rumlow, but there's something about Sam...
"What makes you happy?" Sam asks, and a thousand little things flash through Steve's mind: helping his mother at the hospital; sharing coffee with Mr. O'Brien, the old man who lived in the apartment across the hall from him and Bucky; the light in Bucky's eyes whenever they scraped together enough money for a movie; saving a kid in a back alley from getting beat up (usually by taking the beating himself); the smell of the bakery on his way home from work; sketching patrons of the diner across the street.
Home.
The word rises to his lips but he bites it back. He can never go home.
"I don't know," he says instead, so much easier than admitting, It doesn't exist anymore.
"Nat told me what happened, you know," says Sam nearly a year later, a few days into training the new team. "With Wanda. The visions you all had."
"Wanda's good," says Steve, barely glancing up from his tablet. "We can trust her."
"I know," says Sam. "That's not what concerns me."
He pauses expectantly, but Steve just keeps scrolling through the tablet and says nothing.
"You gonna tell me what she made you see?" says Sam quietly.
Steve stares harder at the tablet, no longer seeing it.
We can go home. Imagine it.
He has imagined it. Every day since he first woke up, but what's the point? He can't go home. It's gone.I'm home, he told Tony, but that was a lie. He can never go home.
"It doesn't matter," he says. "It wasn't real."
"Nightmares aren't real either," says Sam. "Doesn't mean they don't matter. Talk to me, man. I used to do this for a living, remember?"
"Analyzing my situation isn't going to change it," says Steve, inexplicably angry. "Trust me, the shrinks at SHIELD already tried."
"Then SHIELD tried to do something right," says Sam. "You keep all this inside, it makes you reckless. I've seen that firsthand. I'm guessing you've been that way since you woke up."
"You know, I didn't ask to be woken up!" Steve snaps, throwing down the tablet so hard it cracks. He's aware of how petulant he sounds but just now he doesn't particularly care. "I didn't ask to be found! I knew what I was doing when I crashed that plane. I knew that was it, and I was fine with that. I didn't beg anyone for a miracle."
"The way you didn't beg for a miracle on the helicarrier? Or in Novi Grad?" says Sam softly, and Steve gives a broken bark of laughter, shaking his head.
"Would you choose to live like this?" he mutters. "I can never go home. I was flying right for it when I went down, that plane was taking me straight to New York, but I crashed it and now I–" his voice breaks. "They should have left me in the ice."
Sam rubs a hand across his face.
"Steve," he says gently, "they just wanted you back."
"No," says Steve bitterly, "they wanted Captain America back."
"SHIELD, maybe," says Sam. "But your friends–"
"My friends are dead," says Steve harshly. "The people who found me didn't want me. Why would they? They didn't know me. They just wanted someone who fit in that uniform. And I don't. Not anymore."
"You still fit in the uniform," says Sam. "But the uniform might not fit in the world the same now."
"Yeah," says Steve with a short laugh. "That either."
Sam gives him a small, sympathetic smile, and Steve slumps slightly and admits, "I'm glad they woke me up. Knowing what happened to Bucky… I'm glad I'm here to save him. I just wish…" He trails off, unsure what exactly he wishes. That neither of them had been robbed of their deaths, maybe.
"I don't regret getting the serum," he says finally. "And I don't regret fighting Hydra. I just… I wish we'd known what we were signing up for."
"Would it have made a difference?" Sam asks.
Steve shrugs slightly.
"I don't know," he says, but it's only half true. For his own sake, probably not. But for Bucky's? "Maybe."
Steve foolishly allows himself to hope that getting Bucky back will be a little like getting home again – closer than anything else, at least, closer even than the precious moments of lucidity he gets with Peggy.
He almost instantly finds, however, that in most ways, being with Bucky in this new world is even harder than being with Peggy. As shocking and heartbreaking as it is for Steve to see the powerful, vibrant young woman he knew so recently now trapped in a failing body with a more rapidly failing mind, there is the comfort of knowing she's had a full life, a good life, that she'd lived on her terms: whatever scars Peggy has, she'd known they were a possibility.
Bucky's scars are different: each one damage that someone else decided was acceptable collateral. There is no life well lived for Bucky to assuage Steve's guilt. He is damaged nearly beyond repair, though nowhere close to beyond recognition.
And he doesn't remember. Not the good things. The assassinations, the massacres, those he remembers well enough. But he barely remembers his life with Steve at all.
"I don't remember," he says flatly, whenever Steve shares some childhood anecdote or pre-War story (he tries to avoid talking about the war itself, if he can help it).
"That's okay," says Steve each time, even though it's anything but. "I can remember for both of us."
It's hardly the first time he's lied to Bucky.
"What happened to the other Commandos?" Bucky asks him about a month in, over breakfast.
Steve chokes on his oatmeal.
"What?"
"You've told me what happened to everyone else. My parents, all our Brooklyn friends," says Bucky. He waits until Steve meets his gaze and says levelly, "Have you not brought up the war because you're afraid I don't remember? Or because you're afraid that I do?"
Steve lowers his spoon.
"Do you remember it?" he asks. He hopes the answer is no. He hopes Bucky learned about the Commandos from Wikipedia. He hopes–
"Every damn minute," Bucky whispers.
"So you remember what happened on the train," says Steve. He can't look Bucky in the eye.
"They tortured me for weeks," says Bucky tonelessly, and Steve's eyes snap to him in horrified fascination. "At first I tried to employ all the anti-interrogation techniques I'd been taught, recited my name, rank, and serial number until I couldn't think of anything else. And then I noticed they never asked me any questions. It wasn't until later I realized they weren't torturing me for information – they were experimenting on me."
Anger spikes through Steve, punctuating the flood of guilt.
"But then you were there," Bucky continues, and Steve belatedly understands that Bucky isn't talking about what happened after he fell. "Bigger than I remembered. You were always larger than life."
"I don't–" Steve starts.
"They showed me the news reports," Bucky interrupts, as if he doesn't hear him. "The second time. For the longest time I didn't believe it. I kept waiting for you. But you didn't come, and they kept showing me those reports about how you were missing, how you'd crashed in the Arctic, and I knew since you hadn't come for me that they must be right, that you really must be–" his voice breaks.
A wave of nausea washes over Steve as realizes what must have happened – what Zola had used to finally break Bucky.
I kept waiting for you.
It hadn't even occurred to him to look for Bucky's body.
"Bucky," he breathes, reaching across the table, but Bucky pulls his hand out of reach.
"Have you read The Hunger Games?" he says.
"What?" says Steve, thrown by the sudden change of subject.
"The Hunger Games," Bucky repeats. "It's this book series about a girl who–"
"I've read it," says Steve. "Sam gave them to me."
"Me too," says Bucky. "Said I might like Peeta. I guess he thought I'd know a little something about being brainwashed by the enemy."
He gives a bleak little laugh. Steve winces.
"Anyway, Peeta says something in the third book, after he gets back to Katniss," Bucky continues. "After he starts to remember."
Steve thinks he knows where this is going and he wants to scream at Bucky to stop, wants to beg him not to do this, but then again, Steve deserves this, doesn't he? After everything he's done, everything he failed to do, he deserves to have to face this.
"'I must have loved you a lot,'" Bucky quotes softly, and Steve's breath catches.
I don't know. You never said, he wants to say, because he has faced down gods and devils without blinking an eye, but in this he has always been a coward.
But there are promises – promises made earnestly on front porches, promises screamed angrily in the face of death, promises whispered in the dark, promises never spoken allowed, promises promises promises, and for nearly a century Steve didn't acknowledge a single one.
But Bucky – brainwashed, amnesic, shell-of-himself Bucky – still always honored them all.
"Yeah," Steve whispers thickly, looking at the ceiling so he doesn't have to meet Bucky's eyes, "you must have."
After that, good memories start to return.
"The butcher's name was Tom," Bucky says when they're making sandwiches one afternoon. "He always tried to give you a discount on sausage and you always insisted on paying full-price."
"That's right," says Steve, fighting to keep the elation out of his voice. "He needed the money more than me. He had–"
"– kids to feed," Bucky finishes, snorting. "Yeah, so you told me a million times."
"Because he did!" says Steve, a little defensively, and Bucky lets out the first honest-to-god laugh Steve's heard from him since before the war.
"So typical," says Bucky, shaking his head, and Steve can't stop smiling the rest of the day.
About a week later they pass a dog-walker on a run and Bucky says, "You lost your front teeth protecting a stray dog from some older kids."
"They were loose anyway," says Steve.
"And they grew back even straighter. Shame the same couldn't be said for Billy Connolly's nose," says Bucky, smirking.
"That was all your doing," says Steve.
"Yes it was," says Bucky with great satisfaction.
"I guess you got over your allergy to cinnamon," he says the next morning when he wanders into the kitchen to find Steve pulling cinnamon rolls out of the oven. "You got the worst hives when that old woman across the hall gave us cinnamon sticks to suck on. Scared me to death! What was her name? Mrs. Murry?"
"Muirhead," Steve corrects. "Yeah, don't worry, I'll stay hive-free this time."
He manages to give a Bucky a tight smile before turning back to the rolls.
It's just occurred to him that all of Bucky's memories revolve around Steve.
"You've seen the Smithsonian exhibit, right?" Bucky asks several weeks later, out of nowhere.
"Yeah," says Steve, looking up from the sketch he's working on. "It's really –"
"So I guess you know I didn't enlist," says Bucky flatly.
Steve sets the sketch aside and stares at Bucky, feeling the same twist in his heart he felt the first time he saw Bucky's draft card, sitting six inches behind glass next to all of Steve's rejected enlistment forms.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he says quietly, just as he'd whispered it then.
Bucky gives a short, humorless laugh.
"Why didn't I tell the guy who was so desperate to fight for his country he falsified half a dozen enlistment forms just so he'd get another shot? I don't know, I guess maybe I didn't want to die knowing my best friend had lost every ounce of respect for me."
"I wouldn't have– is that really what you thought? That I'd hold it against you?" says Steve. He thinks every day his heart can't break any more, and yet…
Bucky just shrugs his non-metal shoulder, an aborted and irritated movement like he's shaking off a fly.
"Wouldn't you?" he says. "There you were, absolutely fearless, determined to get to the front lines even though you were fifteen seconds away from keeling over and dying in the street from an asthma attack. And there I was, able-bodied and unwilling and scared shitless."
"You should have told me," says Steve.
"Yeah?" says Bucky. "It never once crossed your mind that I didn't enlist, did it? You couldn't even begin to imagine not wanting to go."
I couldn't imagine you not telling me the truth, Steve wants to say, but he knows that's not fair. He's not angry at Bucky for lying – he's angry at himself for making Bucky feel like he had to.
"You didn't even think it was strange that I'd choose to leave you," Bucky adds, not looking at him.
"You didn't leave me," says Steve at once. "I never thought that, Buck. You did what anyone would have done, what I would have–"
Oh.
For the first time, Steve thinks about Bucky's last night in Brooklyn from Bucky's perspective. Thinks about how he'd ditched Bucky to go enlistagain, because Bucky was having a good time, he'd had the girls, he'd wanted to dance, he'd –
– he'd followed Steve. He'd wanted to spend that last night with Steve.
And Steve had chosen to leave him.
"I never thought of it like that," he admits softly, and thinks, I wasn't thinking about you at all, and feels sick with himself.
"No," says Bucky tonelessly, finally meeting Steve's gaze. "You wouldn't."
Steve looks away after just a few seconds, guilt and shame clawing at his insides as he remembers another night he'd spent thinking of his duty and not thinking about Bucky at all.
"You called them idiots," he says. "The Commandos. That night I put the team together." He swallows. "You were gonna get out, weren't you?"
Bucky just shrugs again.
"Not without you," he whispers, the softest echo of a furious promise made so long ago. Steve hadn't examined the implications of it then. He'd been high on adrenaline, flushed with success, euphoric at finally being useful, and he hadn't goddamned wanted to.
But he'd still cashed in on it, when the time came (and never examined the implications of that either).
"I always said I wasn't meant to be a soldier," Bucky mutters.
Steve's head jerks up.
"You never said that," he says, more sharply than he intends, but Bucky just laughs again, brief and hollow.
"Not to you," he says, and for the first time Steve hears the never to you Bucky leaves unspoken.
"The scary thing," Bucky continues softly, "is that I'm starting to think I might not have been meant to be anything else."
There's no bitterness in his voice, no edge. He sounds resigned and so, so tired.
Steve wants to cry.
We can never go home, he thinks, but it occurs to him for the first time that that might have been true even if they'd been ordinary soldiers fighting an ordinary war.
He can almost picture it: him still small and sickly and probably the one missing a limb or two (because he would have found a way to the front lines one way or another); Bucky mute and shellshocked; the two of them trying to piece their world back together in a Brooklyn that had left them behind; maybe buying a piece-of-shit car and heading west to escape the memories.
We can never go home.
Time marches on, whether or not you're encased in ice. Peggy and Howard are proof enough of that.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I was so focused on what I had to do. I never even considered you might need something different."
"I only needed you," Bucky whispers.
For the sake of his own conscience, Steve hopes to God that isn't true.
They don't buy a piece-of-shit car, but they do head west.
"I guess the world just can't handle both of us on the same coast at the same time," says Tony, who hasn't been back to California since the Mandarin incident. "Too much awesome. Word to the wise: don't give out your home address on the international news."
"I'll bear that in mind," says Steve, smiling slightly. "Probably won't put my name on the side of my house, either."
"Now that's just being paranoid," Tony scoffs.
"You know, it doesn't snow in L.A.," says Sam a little too casually, when Steve tells him where they're moving. "No real winter to speak of."
"That's the idea," says Steve.
"Of course," Sam adds, "who knows what climate change'll do to the place."
"I'd rather not worry about it," says Steve.
"Kind of how we got climate change in the first place," points out Sam.
California turns out to be as warm as advertised. Unusually warm, according to locals. They try the beach – Steve wants to give surfing a shot, much to Bucky's annoyance – but Bucky's metal arm gets uncomfortably hot and sand gets in the gears, so it's out as a regular activity. Tony promises to work on a beach-friendly prototype, and in the meantime gets them premium Disneyland passes for something to do. (Natasha suggests they go to a Dodgers game, but Steve suspects this is purely to see the twin looks of outrage on his and Bucky's faces.)
"What's Disneyland?" Steve and Bucky say at the same time, when Tony tells them over FaceTime with the air of Santa producing a particularly large toy.
Tony rolls his eyes.
"Just the happiest place on Earth for the past half-century," he says. "Of course, I haven't been there in years. Let me know if it sucks: I'll start designing Avergersland. Actually, I might do that anyway," he adds, visibly brightening as he signs off.
It doesn't suck. It's simultaneously impressive and bewildering, but Steve doesn't throw up on any of the rides – though he comes close on the Teacups (Bucky actually does throw up on that one, and Steve laughs for a full minute before finally managing to gasp out that this is payback for the Cyclone) – so he considers it a success.
It's vapid, though, and after a week or so, even the momentary exhilaration of beating Bucky's score on the Buzz Lightyear ride has lost its appeal.
There are plenty of places in the world where Captain America could be useful, but Steve can't leave Bucky, and he definitely can't take him into a combat zone.
"You could always be a diplomat," says Natasha, but even she can't keep a straight face when she says it.
The essence of the idea isn't without merit, though, and prompts Steve to start volunteering at a local homeless shelter. It's rewarding, and he more than appreciates the opportunity to do some good without leaving a trail of dead in his wake.
Unfortunately, his body misses the exertion of combat. So when Tony's beach-friendly arm arrives and has a successful test-run, Steve signs them up for surfing lessons, eager for a challenge.
But this too is a disappointment. His genetic enhancements enable him to pick it up easily, and while it's an enjoyable hobby, it's hardly fulfilling.
He thinks this must have been how Peggy felt after the war. But she, at least, had the SSR and SHIELD to keep her occupied.
That would have been his life, too, if he'd survived Schmidt. Their life. The two of them running SHIELD, leading missions – her the covert, him the overt. He never would have hesitated taking Peggy into combat. She, like he, had chosen that life after all. Had thrived in it.
He wonders how much blood was spilled because he didn't get that life.
(He wonders how much more was spared.)
"I can feel you itching for a fight," says Bucky finally, after several months. "You weren't built for this. Peace."
"I want to be," says Steve.
"Do you?" says Bucky softly.
Once, so long ago and yet so recently, Steve pointed the nose of a plane toward the earth and told himself it was courage. He thinks now it may have been his ultimate act of cowardice.
"I'm done dragging you into wars," he says. "That's what you weren't built for."
"You never dragged me anywhere," says Bucky. "I chose to follow you. And now that I've got a choice again, I still do. I always will. Hydra screwed my head to hell, but that's the one thing I've been sure of since I saw you again."
"But that's the point," says Steve. "I don't want you to follow me somewhere you don't want to go."
"If you're there, it's where I want to go," says Bucky with the same sincerity that lost him an arm and very nearly his soul – the same sincerity Steve always took for granted all those years ago.
"Bucky, I–" Steve breaks off, searching for words able to bear the sheer weight of his regret. "I don't deserve it. This. You," he finally chokes out.
"Yeah, well," says Bucky, "that's the thing about love, isn't it? You don't have to deserve it."
Steve gapes at him.
"I spent years thinking I didn't deserve you. That I wasn't good enough," says Bucky. "But I didn't deserve what Hydra did to me either. After everything that's happened, everything we've been through, I don't think being deserving matters very much, do you?"
"You're the only thing that matters," says Steve honestly.
Bucky kisses him.
Kissing Peggy had been like preparing for battle: fortifying and exhilarating at once – a kiss to both live and die for. Kissing Natasha had been terrifying (for many reasons).
Kissing Bucky is like coming home after the most exhausting day and collapsing, relieved, into its familiarity and safety and warmth. For the first time, Steve understands why the protagonists of romance novels are described as melting at their lover's touch. He can physically feel decades of pain and weariness draining out of him.
It all comes rushing back, though, when Bucky reluctantly pulls away to allow them to catch their breath. Keeping his eyes shut, Steve tips his forehead against Bucky's.
"I don't know how to do this," he admits in a whisper.
"We'll figure it out," says Bucky. "We did before."
"We never figured it out," says Steve.
"Then," Bucky murmurs against Steve's lips, "I guess it's a good thing we got a second chance."
None of us can go back, Peggy told Steve once, the prescient answer to Sam's question, What makes you happy?
Yet when Steve and Bucky are wrapped in each other's arms the scars of time fade away, and in those nebulous moments it exists.
Home.