A/N: Just watched The First Avenger again. So here we are.
Happiness is never all at once. There was a time when he had his parents, but that was before he could serve; there was a time when he could not serve, but he had Peggy; there was a time when he could not have Peggy, or Bucky, or anything he knew or loved, but he saved the world.
Happiness is never all at once; it dwindles all the same.
.
Bucky never stops falling, and Steve never stops running, and worst of all is that both of them keep living, on and on, as though the train that ran that mountain pass still has them by the hands, metal and metal.
When Bucky goes under ice again, Steve is the one who is cold. Steve is always cold. It's why he finds he can bear the South better than Brooklyn, because Steve, the golden solider, somehow needs sunshine more than any other man.
(And then again, he can bear anything better than Brooklyn, some days.)
Theirs is not the sort of story where people want to see tragedy. Even now, even in the twenty-first century, people like the Captain America who punches Nazis in whatever new form they take.
It's so much simpler, when the blood stays behind museum glass.
It's so much simpler, when the war stays in photographs.
.
"You know, I loved you more than I could understand," Steve says. "It didn't hit me until you fired off a few rounds at the shield. Still has the marks, you know." He, of course, knows. He's run his fingers over them a thousand times, thought about her lipstick and her snapping eyes and the way her voice broke, when—
"You were so much more than I was, before or after," he whispers. And then he pinches the bridge of his nose, and then he stands up. "It doesn't matter now."
He leaves the roses leaning at a perfect angle against Peggy's headstone.
.
Are they free from Wakanda? Someday, of course. And does Tony forgive him? Maybe, but forgiveness is always in the future, never in the past.
And Steve is in the present, and that is all he knows, his shoes against new sidewalk and his back against old ghosts.
Is the end near? Always, and there will come a time when he cannot stop it, and maybe he will not wish to.
Maybe it will be selfish. Maybe it is selfish to pray that his end is one of sacrifice, when sacrifice has never done much to persuade the world. (Only to save it.)
.
Forgive me, he has said, a thousand times. But Tony is behind glass and metal, and Bucky is behind ice and memory, and Peggy is behind granite and hope.
If this is bravery, it comes far too late, and never all at once.
Steve dwindles. He is slipping through his own fingers, so much sand, so much heroism. So much for heroism.
Steve lives in the present, and it takes so much time.