A/N: This is a loose companion piece to A Slow Death. It picks up as Steve is about to crash the plane at the end of First Avenger and follows his emotional state through to nearly the end of Winter Soldier. It's not explicitly slashy, but it can be read that way if you squint. As mentioned in the summary, trigger warning for suicidal thoughts.
A Long Life
It's easy to die.
Far easier than he thought it would be. Open the compass. Point the plane down. Listen to Peggy's strong, melodious voice in his ear.
"This is my choice," he says, and it's true. He's choosing to die far more decisively than Bucky did. Bucky did not, after all, choose to fall from the train.
Oh god, Bucky. At least he's not here to watch this. Finding Steve beaten half-to-death in alleys every other afternoon was painful enough for him, however much he tried to hide it. This would destroy him.
But he's not here. He's waiting for Steve at the end of the line. They'll see each other soon.
"I'm gonna need a raincheck on that dance," he says to Peggy, to distract her as much as himself. It will be much longer before he sees her again.
The plane is falling, falling into ice and snow, just like Bucky. There's a nice symmetry there. It's comforting, somehow.
Steve talks to Peggy about dancing, closes his eyes, and waits for the impact.
Mission complete.
It is not, it turns out, easy to die.
Not if you're a super-soldier, anyway. They tell him it's sixty-seven years in the future and he believes them because he has to. The evidence is right there, overwhelming and cold and obvious everywhere he looks.
New York is different. Busier, more crowded, and so, so empty. His old neighborhood in Brooklyn was torn down and rebuilt, and the unfamiliar buildings are decaying because that was decades ago.
He looks up the Commandos. They're all dead – of old age, thankfully – but they left behind plenty of progeny. Steve thinks about calling a few of them up, but what would he say to them?
I fought Hydra with your father three weeks ago, only it turns out it's really been sixty-seven years, and you're a grandparent and I'm still twenty-seven.
Howard is dead too, though he did not die of old age. Steve almost goes to Stark Tower half a dozen times to introduce himself to Howard's son, but he can't do it. Instead he looks Tony up on the internet – it's frightening, really, the amount of personal information that's public knowledge in this world – and doesn't much like what he sees.
(He didn't much like Howard either, when he first met him, but that was different. Howard was part of the war effort.)
(Howard was his friend.)
Peggy is alive, though. Steve tries to call her, and the young woman who answers tells him gently that Ms. Carter is having a bad day and isn't up for phone calls and could he try again tomorrow.
"What do you mean 'having a bad day'?" Steve asks.
"You don't know?" says the woman. "Sorry, I just assumed you were one of her grandsons."
Grandsons. Three weeks ago they were making plans to go dancing and now Peggy has adult grandsons.
"No, I'm… I'm an old friend," says Steve.
The woman says she is so sorry to be the one to tell him but Ms. Carter has dementia and it would be better if he could visit in person first if he hasn't seen her for a while. Steve takes down an address in a DC suburb and thanks the woman and promises to call before he visits.
He goes to a gym with punching bags because the future is a horrific nightmare and he's afraid to fall asleep again and wake up in a worse one.
Then Nick Fury shows up and tells him a god-like alien is attacking the world.
It turns out to be a nice distraction.
After that things get easier.
He moves to DC, which doesn't remind him of his childhood or Bucky or the world he lost. He visits Peggy several times a week, and it's a relief to have someone connected to his old life, even if she's heartbreakingly surprised to see him alive most visits. He works for SHIELD full-time, because the New York invasion taught him that keeping busy keeps things bearable.
Natasha seems to think dating will solve his problems, and Steve wants to laugh every time she suggests another possible girl for him because what she's suggesting is ludicrous. He has no idea what he'd say on a date. Which might be okay, actually. No one really wants to hear what Steve Rogers has to say.
Steve went to a bar the first weekend he was in DC and was immediately surrounded by people wanting to talk to the heroic Captain America. Two girls came right up to him and kissed him without so much as introducing themselves. He left pretty quickly.
Sam is the first friend he makes in DC. Steve's been there a year and a half when he runs into him (runs past him) on the Mall. Sam doesn't talk to Captain America: He talks to Steve, and it's nice, talking to someone soldier-to-soldier again. Different wars, different centuries, but same experience, almost. Closer than anything else he's found, anyway.
He thinks he might leave SHIELD and ask Sam to help him figure out civilian life. SHIELD isn't the only thing that could keep him busy.
Then Nick Fury (why is everything related to Nick Fury?) is shot to death in Steve's apartment and everything goes to hell.
Bucky?
Who the hell is Bucky?
It's the cruelest thing. The very cruelest. It's everything he lost staring right at him without a trace of recognition.
He lets the Hydra agents take him without a fight. There's nothing left for him in the future.
It will be easy to die.
Sam and Natasha won't let it go that easily though. Think he made a mistake.
As if Steve could ever mistake anyone else for Bucky.
"How's that even possible? It was like seventy years ago," asks Sam, and the horrible thing is Steve knows the answer.
"Bucky's whole unit was captured in '43. Zola experimented on him."
And I never asked what they did to him. I never asked him to talk about it. I never asked.
"Whatever he did helped Bucky survive the fall."
And we never looked. Howard spent years looking for my body but no one ever looked for Bucky's.
It made sense at the time. Resources were precious and no one could have survived that fall.
Natasha tells him it's not his fault, and Steve just shakes his head.
"Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky."
That's a lie, though. He has nothing now. Has had nothing since he woke up in this future, and he hasn't had Bucky this whole time.
He thinks he knows why he's in the future now.
The mission was never complete.
"People are gonna die," he says.
Funny, he thinks he said the same thing to Peggy before he crashed a Hydra aircraft the first time. The choice was easier then.
"Please don't make me do this," he says, but he knows even as he says it that it's no use. Bucky's eyes are dead.
Defeat Hydra. That was always the mission. That was the thing he died for the first time.
(The thing he tried to die for.)
I'm gonna need a raincheck on that dance.
He is not, he thinks as Bucky's bullets rip through him, going to die for it this time.
"Fire now," he tells Maria.
"But, Steve," she protests.
But what? he thinks. Sam is safely on the ground. Everyone else is Hydra.
Maria fires, and just like that it's over. Mission complete. Responsibility lifted.
Time for the real mission now.
"Finish it," he says, and means, Do it right this time. No ice, no miracles, no mistakes. Finish it. Let it be over. "Because I'm with you to the end of the line."
Oh, they were both supposed to reach the end of the line so long ago.
The Helicarrier explodes. Steve falls, and he thinks Bucky must fall with him.
They have been falling for seventy years, alone and terrified and waiting for an impact that never comes, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Their time has finally come. Together, as it always should have been. They'll see each other soon.
Mission complete.
It is easy to die.