1.

Sometimes, a year and a half can go by as though nothing's happened.

The mind recognizes the passage of time. The body goes through the motions of sleep-wake-work. The soul plods along in a state of vaguely resentful accomplishment. Days blur, their beginnings and endings conflating like blackboard chalk smudged by a finger, indistinguishable and colorless. Then, before you know it, you glance at the date in the bottom right corner of your laptop screen and think, "Already? Where did the time go?"

You are the same. Your friends are the same. You drive the same car, work with the same people, eat the same foods, listen to the same music. Depending on your age and ideas about the afterlife, you are either resigned, panicked, or depressed. A year and a half, after all, is just a chunk of your life artificially cordoned off by mankind's desire to quantify his state. Time passing is a set of tick-marks measured against the gradient of our existence.

Sometimes, though, a year and a half is a thorny, stinking hedge of pain and regret and anger that you battle to navigate. It chokes and strangles you, tearing at your psyche and spirit. Every swing of the machete springs back; every inch gained feels like conquering Everest; your muscles and heart scream in protest as you fight, fight, fight to get through it, never knowing what's on the other side. Every step burns and tears, beats you back, cuts through flesh and bone down to the very core, exhausting, excruciating, interminable weight dragging you down. Then, when the worst is over, you look back over the year and a half that felt like a decade, brush yourself off, and take your first steps uninhibited by restraint or fear. It is an odd feeling, the loss of claustrophobia and desperation, and sometimes you're not sure what to do with all the freedom.

Either way, a year and a half of existence is a year and a half in your wake, and at some point, you need to turn your back on it and keep pressing forward.

Steve wasn't terribly good at this.

From the age of four, he had been resigned to living a foreshortened life. Chronic illness and poor health forced him to push as hard as he could to make the most of a diminishing fragment of time, and before Erskine's serum, a year and a half spent, even struggling, was a triumph.

During the War, death loomed, imminent and inescapable. After Bucky had slipped through his fingers, the realization of life's tenuousness shook him apart, making the possibility of war's ending and peace's arising insufficient to allow him visualization of his future. And when he'd defrosted and joined SHIELD, the passage of time was irrelevant; his life was measured in mission-debrief-mission-debrief-mission-debrief. He didn't regret his work; it had been necessary, something to get him up and running again. But it had left no margin for the contemplation of retirement, of free time, of discovering what he wanted.

Then the Winter Soldier ventured in from the cold, and Steve's life came to a screeching halt.

The arrest, the trial, the Sokovia Accords, giving up his shield: For four months, he felt like a tennis ball in a clothes dryer, rolled and spun and bounced and turned so that he wasn't even sure in what direction time flowed. Minutes were agonizingly long, yet weeks passed in a breath. Shoving Bucky in the car and fleeing to Florida in the middle of the night was nothing more than a defiant and frightened crossing of another damn Rubicon, forcibly leaving his past behind, desperate to figure out how to let the minutes tick by without shedding any blood.

And so a year and a half passed.

Not all of it was good. Some moments, he had to admit, were pretty bad. Steve was terrible at psychology, too stubborn to allow a mind's illogic to run unopposed. Bucky, his Bucky, who had always stood by his side, a rock-solid and reasonable presence, was a mess that Steve didn't know how to fix, who resisted any efforts to make him normal again. He became angry, or morose, or brittle and sarcastic; he drove too fast and drank too freely and laughed too hard and hid too much. When Steve tried to correct this, and inevitably ran head-first into the stubborn, tangled wall of psychogenic inconsistencies that now made up his best friend, Sam would laugh and call Steve a control freak, and tell him to lighten up and let things be.

So he tried. He didn't always succeed. Sometimes he failed miserably. But he sincerely tried, and he hoped Bucky knew this.

And here he was, a year and a half later, sitting in a cozy living room peppered with family portraits and prints of the Holy Land and books in German and Hebrew, chatting with two septuagenarians about how expensive it was to take grandchildren to Disney World these days, and accepting another glass of sweet red wine from his hostess. Looking up at Sabra Fetterman, her plush face wreathed in smiles under starkly dyed black hair, Steve's mind did a little joyous backflip: A year and a half had passed, and they were on the other side of it, laughing and content.

His eyes tracked to Bucky – they always tracked to Bucky, it seemed; even after eighteen months, Steve was afraid of Bucky somehow suddenly disappearing – and he smiled over his wine glass. Bucky was sitting cross-legged on the floor between Ellie Allen and Amelie Hayes, in his dilapidated jeans and holey tee shirt looking like a shaggy and unkempt dog guarding his mistresses. He had a beer in one hand and a birthday card in the other, and was laughing at something Jim Allen had said. Some days, Bucky's grey eyes were haunted and hollow; if he hadn't slept well, if he'd had nightmares, if some boom of thunder or scream of siren triggered him, he would shrink and crouch, pale, baggy, and the light in his eyes would go out. But tonight, after a rich meal of grilled steak and Ellie's potato salad and Amelie's black bean surprise, surrounded by his friends and pumped full of beer and birthday cake, Bucky was about as close to being himself as Steve had seen him since 1944.

"And then," laughed Bill from his seat, his prosthetic leg propped up on a tasseled red foot stool, "we got back on the train, and this woman was still fussing about Jim's cigar smoke – "

"So rude, too," sniffed Sabra, refilling Bill's glass, her glass nazar beads tinkling against the wine bottle. "Say when, Bill!"

"When, when!" exclaimed Bill. "My god, Sabra, you trying to get me drunk again?"

"Wait, what's this now?" demanded Howie, turning away from his slide projector with a suspicious frown creasing his heavy jowls.

"You remember, How," laughed Bill, his round face rosy, "when we were at that winery and she kept pouring her tipple into my glass – "

"Well, it was too dry," said Sabra primly.

"You and your sweet wine, gelibte," grumbled Howie, and started to fiddle with the slide projector again, frowning down his big hooked nose.

"I like sweet wine," said Amelie, blinking angelically up at Sabra with her big brown eyes. "May I have some more, please?"

"You like everything," laughed Sabra indulgently. "You sat there and deliberately inhaled Jim's cigar smoke. Don't look so surprised, I saw you!"

"That unhappy lady was so upset," apologized Amelie, shrugging so that her thin shoulders brushed against her long feather earrings. "I thought if I could show her how good it smelled – "

"She was just rude," declared Sabra, waving one plump and beringed hand dismissively. "Nothing you could have done about it, bubala."

"You would have thought Jim had blown smoke in her face, the way she was complaining," said Ellie indignantly. In sharp contrast to Amelie, whose long sleeveless dress was covered in embroidery and beads, Ellie Allen was trim and bandbox-neat in her uniform of pleated pants and blouse, dyed blonde hair immaculately coiffed. Steve glanced down at her hand; her fingers were tangled with her husband's, and Jim was lightly, absently stroking her thumb. He smiled at them. "You know how careful we are not to smoke in public – "

"More careful'n me," grinned Bucky. "You guys are way too polite."

"You're not impolite, Bucky dear; you just don't have much of a filter," said Ellie, patting Bucky's head. "It's not a bad trait, necessarily. Just one of the things that makes you such an interesting and honest person."

"Well, those are two adjectives I wouldn't've picked for me," grimaced Bucky. "But thanks, El."

"I prefer to call him 'stimulating and authentic,'" offered Amelie brightly, taking a deep draught of her wine.

"Again, thank you, I think," grinned Bucky. "So Ellie, what happened with the rude and snorty lady?"

"Well," said Ellie, eyes twinkling, "just as the woman is winding up to complain self-righteously about cigarette smoking, Amelie says, loud enough for everyone on the train to hear: 'Well, I guess it's a good thing I didn't bring my bong.'"

Steve nearly snorted wine out of his nose. He laughed heartily with the rest. Amelie was smiling, gentle and serene as always, long gray-blond hair pulled back into a braided chignon topped with brightly-painted chopsticks, gifts, she explained, from some of the children at the homeless shelter where she ran the craft table. "It was a valid observation," she said placidly, running her fingers through Bucky's untidy mop. He beamed besottedly up at her. Steve knew Bucky liked his friends and loved his friends' wives. Sabra fed him and fussed at him to be more careful. Ellie encouraged him and fussed at him to settle down. Amelie thought Bucky was perfect just as he was, and Bucky adored her best of all.

"You should've pulled it out," grinned Bucky. "That woulda stopped her dead, yeah, doll?"

"You didn't really bring your bong with you on the trip, did you, Amelie?" asked Steve, a little surprised.

"I told her to," said Bill. "But she said she'd better not."

"Well, it was an official group trip," shrugged Amelie, taking a sip of wine. "I didn't want to get anyone in trouble."

"Woulda served 'em right bein' so stuffy," declared Bucky, putting his beer down and dragging his next present into his lap.

"I keep telling you, Bucky, that you put the wrong stuff in those hand-rolled cigarettes of yours," said Amelie calmly.

Sabra laughed. "Don't encourage him, Amelie!" she scolded. She waddled into the kitchen and picked up Bucky's birthday cake, half-eaten and dotted with cherries. She paraded it back into the living room as though she were presenting St. John's head to Salome. "Who wants more Tres Leches cake?" she demanded.

"I do!" said Bill. "I need to keep my energy up." He winked at Amelie, who gave him a sly smile over the rim of her wine glass.

"I shouldn't," said Ellie reluctantly, eyeing the fluffy white concoction with less self-control than was her usual wont.

"No, you shouldn't," agreed Sabra, her brown eyes twinkling. "But you will anyway, won't you?" She cut a generous, dripping square and put it on Ellie's plate. "You're too thin anyway, bubala. Not healthy at our age."

"Hear, hear!" said her husband. "You worry too much about your waistline, darlin'. Let Sabra put some meat on those pretty bones of yours." He held out his plate, eyes twinkling. "That goes for me, too," he added.

Ellie blushed, but smiled at her husband. "My pants are already too tight after this trip," sighed Ellie, taking a forkful of cake. "All that delicious food!"

"Elastic is your friend, sweetie," said Amelie, patting Ellie's shoulder. "And yes, Sabra, I will definitely have another piece of cake. It's scrumptious!"

"I got the recipe from Gracie Alvarado," said Sabra, digging out fat white squares of cake. "She's always saying how it's Bucky's favorite."

"It is," Bucky averred. He turned the brightly-wrapped package in his hands. "Can I have another piece?"

"Is that three or four?" grinned Steve. Bucky stuck his tongue out at him. "Hey, I'm not saying you should stop. I've had two, and I'm ready for another one too, Sabra."

"Anything you want, boychick," said Sabra, pleased. "Here you go. Nice fat pieces for both you boys. Howie! Stop futzing with that thing and sit down! Bucky's opening presents!"

"Almost got it," grunted Howie. He finished setting up the slide projector and sat down triumphantly beside it. "There! Now someone get the lights, already!"

"I haven't opened my present from Bill and Amelie yet," complained Bucky.

"Well, hurry it up," urged Howie. "These slides won't watch themselves."

Steve smiled and watched Bucky tear into his present. Sabra and Howie had given him cartoon-character golf club covers, now displayed goggling around his knees, and Jim and Ellie's gift had been a ball-washer, engendering a lot of double-entendre, much to Ellie's dismay. Bucky opened the box and pulled out a tissue-wrapped lump. He unwound it from its colorful cocoon and stared in surprise down at a digital camera.

"Uh," he said, taken aback.

"It's a camera," said Ellie, surprised.

"Yeah," said Bucky slowly, studying it. His metal hand clicked against the casing.

"A digital camera," added Amelie complacently, sipping her wine.

"This'll take much better pictures than your phone," declared Bill.

"Aren't these things kinda expensive?" asked Bucky, looking a little uncomfortable.

"New, they are," said Amelie. "This one is refurbished. So much greener than buying one new. All that packaging."

"Gotta keep our local pawn shop in business, after all," admitted Bill with a wink, taking a big bite of cake.

"And photography is such an underrated art, isn't it, Howie?" said Amelie, blinking big brown eyes at him.

"Well, I wouldn't call my pictures 'art,' necessarily, Amelie," admitted Howie, looking a little embarrassed. "I was just chronicling our adventures, you know?"

"Nonsense, dear, your pictures are art to me," said Sabra, kissing Howie's fuzzy head affectionately. "Now, finish your cake so we can all see your pictures of St. Augustine."

Bucky was turning the camera around in his hands, turning it on, looking through the viewscope. "What do you think, Bucky?" asked Steve.

"I got a camera," said Bucky, still sounding surprised.

"Just like you always wanted," grinned Steve. "What's the first thing you're gonna take a picture of? Wait, let me guess … your beer."

Bucky grinned. "You ain't lyin'," he said, aimed, and snapped.

"Hit the lights," said Howie, turning on the projector. Jim clicked them off.

"Who wants more wine?" called Sabra.

"Not now," laughed Ellie. "Pictures, Howie! Pictures!"

"I have my own bottle," said Amelie happily. "Drink up, girls! That'll get us back in the St. Augustine mood."

"These three," sighed Howie, projecting the first slide, and Jim and Bill laughed.

XXX

Bucky made Steve carry the leftover cake and the rest of his presents home. He was busy trying to figure out how to take nighttime shots, and stopped every ten feet to snap pictures of random plants along the sidewalk. The night was warm and humid, thick with the scents of gardenias and asphalt and the distant tang of the ocean. A third-quarter moon, pale and lovely, shimmered down at them, veiling itself coquettishly in the thin, fast clouds. "I take it the camera's a hit?" said Steve dryly.

"You know it, pal," said Bucky. "Oh, oh! Check out this cactus." Click went the shutter.

"Good thing no one uses film anymore," remarked Steve. "Otherwise you'd find yourself buried in photos of our neighbors' yards."

"Shut up," said Bucky absently. "It's like Amelie said. An unappreciated art."

"Right," nodded Steve, shifting gifts and birthday cake in his hands. "Photography is most definitely Art. Take a picture of that mailbox and show me how artistic you are."

"Quit being pretentious, Mr. Artsy-Fartsy," complained Bucky. He snapped the picture, checked it, and showed the result to Steve on the little display with an unsure smile.

Steve tipped his head to one side contemplatively. The composition was all right, but the flash had illuminated the mailbox so that it showed stark against the dark grass, shadows sharp as razors. He decided he'd seen much worse during his tenure as docent at the Ringling. "Mailbox in the Moonlight, by upcoming new photographer James Buchanan Barnes," he declaimed approvingly. "Art."

"Art," Bucky agreed, looking a little relieved.

Steve pointed with his chin at a small brown lizard, perched on a fence and staring suspiciously at them. "Anole, also in the moonlight. Art, Mr. Barnes?"

"Art, Mr. Rogers," grinned Bucky. Click.

"Art," nodded Steve. "Look, dog shit in the moonlight. Art."

Bucky raised an eyebrow. Click. Steve laughed.

"You told Bill and Amelie I'd always wanted a camera," said Bucky. "Didn't you, Stevie?"

"They asked," admitted Steve. "And I remember you ogling those Kodaks at the Woolworth's."

"I always wanted to get shots of the skyline from the fire escape," said Bucky thoughtfully, looking up at a street light. Click. "Hey, Steve, remember that time we celebrated my birthday at that cabaret, where we heard Thelonious Monk? The one in Manhattan?"

"Minton's," supplied Steve.

"Yeah, that place. That was a gas," said Bucky, aiming his new camera at a palm tree. Click.

"I spent the month's rent getting us into that place," mused Steve. "Could've bought you that Kodak after all."

"Nah," grinned Bucky. "Camera woulda been great, sure, but I can say I saw Monk at Minton's in 1941, and the camera woulda been in a junk shop by now."

"What do you want me to do for your birthday, Buck?" asked Steve worriedly. "Ninety-eight's a nice, big, round number. We didn't do anything for your ninety-seventh."

"Well." Bucky frowned up at a tree frog, clinging wetly to a palm frond. Click. "Wasn't exactly in any kinda shape to do anything."

"No," conceded Steve carefully. Last March had not been good to Bucky, bouncing between doctor's offices and one of SHIELD's hospital annexes in Sarasota, incapacitated by blistering migraines. He had spent his birthday curled into a ball on a hospital bed in a darkened room, hooked up to heart and brain monitors, shaking and sweating and vomiting bile, Steve wracked with worry by his side while doctors and nurses bustled quietly around him. Even his arm had been affected, humming and whirring as though it read its owner's distress, metal fingers twitching against the coarse sheets while flesh fingers clung desperately to Steve's hand. Dr. Cho had assured Steve it was just Bucky's brain finally healing from seventy years' worth of damage, nerves and ganglia rebuilding themselves after decades of cryo and EST by his handlers, but knowing the cause hadn't helped either Bucky or Steve deal with the fallout. "So," he said, "let's think of something special for this year."

The two friends walked in silence for a few moments, turning from Bermuda Court onto Ponte Vedra, the row of neat duplexes paralleling the single-family homes across the street. They passed the Sandovals' place, brightly lit and cheerful, and the Goudelocks across the street, Harry Connick Jr. piping tinnily through open windows. Every now and again Bucky would see something he thought was interesting, and snap a picture.

Steve loved Palacios Del Mar, not because it was necessarily the best retirement community in Sarasota, but because it had been a safe haven for two super soldiers looking for sanctuary. No one questioned their appearance; no one objected too greatly to their presence – except maybe the McTavishes across the street, but they complained about everything – and they were comfortable there. It had given Bucky and Steve a place to figure out how they fit into the 21st Century, post-Sokovia Accords, and Steve was grateful.

But … he was getting a little restless. A year and a half in Sarasota. Eighteen months. In one city.

He hadn't stayed this long in one place since 1940.

Bucky wouldn't be allowed to leave the state until the two-year mark, but Florida was pretty big, and except for trips up to St. Petersburg to cheer on the Rays at Tropicana Field, and a hectic, nine-day tour of Orlando with the Bartons, they hadn't seen much of it. Steve mulled over Howie Fetterman's slide show, thought about the third-party organized Seniors Trip the three couples had taken to the other coast. Steve hadn't seen the Atlantic Ocean since they had bid good-bye to Foggy Nelson in Queens. Organized tours and preset schedules aside, it certainly looked like an interesting place. "We could go to St. Augustine," he suggested casually.

Bucky paused. He was crouched close to the ground in front of the Goudelocks' house, focusing on a hibiscus blossom. He took the shot, then looked up at Steve through his messy hair. "I'm old," he said acerbically. "I'm not that old."

"I didn't mean, take a seniors tour," hastened Steve. "But the buildings, monuments, food, history – "

"You and your history," muttered Bucky, rising.

"The winery, the distillery," added Steve ingenuously. Bucky leveled a look at him that said he knew exactly what Steve was doing. "Hey, you said you liked the rum Bill brought back. And you drank nearly a whole bottle of that key lime wine tonight."

Bucky grunted. "Well," he conceded, "it's probably the only place in the whole damn state that's older than us."

"Food's supposed to be good, too," said Steve. "Those six seemed to like it."

Bucky was quiet a moment, fiddling with his camera. When he looked up at Steve, he was unnaturally serious.

"You know I like Bill, Howie, and Jim," he said.

"Well, yeah," said Steve, mystified. "I like them too, Bucky."

"And I love Amelie and Sabra and Ellie."

"Yeah," said Steve expectantly.

"But the wives, they haven't always got along. You know?" Bucky played absently with the F-stop on the camera. "You know. Ellie's religious. Sabra's loud. Amelie's … " He waved one hand around absently.

"Amelie's Amelie," smiled Steve. "She's unique."

"Yeah," said Bucky. "But tonight? After this trip they took with that seniors group? It's like the girls, they bonded. They got tight." He took an absent-minded picture of a leaf. "I liked it," he admitted.

"I did notice," said Steve. "Maybe having to band together against the rest of the tour group was good for them."

"Yeah, maybe," said Bucky. He ran his metal hand through his overlong hair and stared up at their duplex. "Funny thing, those three. I mean, Bill, Howie, and Jim? Lots in common. Golf, shuffleboard, fishing. But their wives?" He shrugged. "Maybe they needed that extra push, you know?"

"I know," said Steve, wondering where Bucky was going with this, or if he was going anywhere with it at all. It was hard to tell, sometimes, with Bucky's colloquies. On occasion, topics led to some great concession or understanding. Other times, he was just musing about how no one made Jell-O molds anymore.

"So," said Bucky, starting to walk up their driveway.

"So," said Steve.

"St. Augustine," said Bucky. "Okay. Sure. You wanna take me someplace for my birthday? Let's go there." He found something interesting on his front stoop and took a quick picture of it. Steve squinted down. It was a garden snail, its glutinous trail silver in the moonlight. "Get us outa town," he said absently. "See something new. Go someplace."

"All right, then," said Steve, relieved. "I'll start looking into it tomorrow morning."

Bucky glared. "No old people," he threatened.

"Buddy," said Steve, unlocking his door, "I guarantee you, you'll be the oldest person there."