Author's Note: So I make a joke about Steve's driving in this chapter that I can only attribute to a headcanon post I found on Tumblr awhile back. It was actually backed up by a rather interesting history lesson about how careless the army was about assigning people jeeps during WWII. I wish I could find it again, it was pretty damn hilarious.
Thanks, as per usual, to my sister, nighttimelights for the beta!
Also, make sure to check out the 8tracks playlist that goes with the fic! It shares a title with the fic, and my username there is joliemariella.
Remember to drop a review if you enjoy! I feed them to my voracious muse so I can churn out more fanfic XD Don't let her go hungry!
The Times They Are A Changin'
Chapter Two: Reach for the Sky
The pair made their way to the nearest subway station and managed to navigate their way north towards Bucky's old apartment. On the ride, the ex-soldier couldn't help but note the strange dichotomy of the subway system itself. Old and new melded together as they roared through stations that had first been constructed in the early nineteen-hundreds in a train car built in the twenty-first century.
Past and present blurred on that interminable ride, and if he closed his eyes Bucky could pretend it was still 1938 and he was dragging a much smaller Steve Rogers out for a night of dancing.
God, he used to love dancing.
Beside him Steve shifted, and Bucky felt the train lurch and begin to slow as it rolled into the station. Gray eyes opened and looked around warily, as though to check if anyone had noticed his lapse in attention.
Whether Steve had or not, he made no comment, just said "Looks like this is our stop," and made his way to the door.
Bucky followed suit, allowing his taller friend to make a path through the mob of people that thronged on the station platform. It was a stop that hadn't existed back in his day, but as they surfaced at street level, the man found himself wishing it had. It let out only a few blocks from where his apartment had been.
After that initial wistful moment, though, Bucky felt a sense of dread well up within him as he looked around.
"Oh," Steve said aloud as he too took in their surroundings.
'Oh' hardly covered it in Bucky's book. His neighborhood, while not the best, had still been a decent one back in the late thirties. Since then, though, while Steve's apartment in the worst part of the Bronx had skyrocketed in value, his had apparently dropped to the bottom of the barrel.
"You have got to be kidding me," he grumbled and began stalking down the street.
Steve winced, and hurried to catch him up, once again regretting the way all of his suggestions today had thrown his friend into uncomfortable situations.
As they walked, Steve examined the buildings they passed. He remembered many of them, but others had been torn down and replaced in the last seventy years. The dance hall down the street from Bucky's place had been demolished and replaced with a now seedy looking McDonald's, and he was pretty sure that the pub across the way was an adult store of some kind.
Miraculously, the old brown stone Bucky's apartment had been in still stood, but it was run down, with more than one broken window facing the street. A rather unsavory looking group of young men lounged on the stoop, eyeing the pair of them warily where they stood on the opposite side of the street.
Steve's attention was all for Bucky, though, watching the shorter man as he stared at the place he had once called home with an unreadable expression on his face.
Eventually, the ex-soldier said "Let's go," and spun on heel to head back the way they had come.
The blond hurried after once again, following as Bucky, lost in thought, took a detour down a narrow alley, operating on a deeply ingrained habit from decades before when the neighborhood had been a safer place.
"Hey, Buck, I'm sorry about-" Steve began as he matched his friend's pace, an unhappy frown on his face as his words trailed off, unable to quite express just what he was thinking.
Bucky glanced over at him, then shrugged and waved off his concern. "I guess I'm not really surprised. Even back when I lived here the area was on the decline," he admitted reluctantly, hands shoved deep into his coat pockets.
Despite that knowledge, Steve knew it must still have come as a shock to see the change all at once. He knew that he was surprised by it, and it hadn't even been his home.
"Yeah, well," he began, only to be cut off by a young man stepping in front of them from the shadows of a dumpster.
"Give me your wallets and no one gets hurt," the stranger said, waving a pistol menacingly at them both.
Eyes darting sideways, Steve could see Bucky's frown turn into a scowl, prompting him to reach out and place a hand on the other man's shoulder. His friend tensed at the contact and didn't look around at him, but he did stop his advance towards the boy threatening them with a gun he clearly knew little about.
When he was sure Bucky wasn't about to jump the kid, Steve released his hold on him and put both his hands in the air. His friend huffed in annoyance, but followed his lead all the same.
"Now son, how about you just put that down and we all go our own ways, no harm no foul?" Steve suggested in a calm tone, expression solemn but un-threatening as he made eye contact with their mugger, appearing to pay the gun between them no mind.
"Yeah right," the kid scoffed, jerking the pistol a little as he repeated himself. "Wallets, now."
Bucky twitched, but Steve only carefully lowered his hands and reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet as commanded. His friend shot him an incredulous look out of the corner of his eye, but he ignored it as he flipped his billfold open and began pulling out his ID and credit cards.
The mugger noticed this and said "Nuh-uh, leave it all in. You don't get to fuckin' pick and choose."
Steve looked up at the other man, still completely calm "Come on, you know I'll have these cards canceled within five minutes of you being on your way. There's a hundred dollars cash in here, plus whatever he has," he said, nodding towards Bucky.
The mugger seemed to think it over for a moment before saying "Fine, whatever, hurry it up."
Bucky himself gave Steve a look that said he was mad, but after a moment, he sighed hugely and pulled out his own wallet, grumbling "This is a new level of stupid, Steve."
The ex-soldier produced thirty-six dollars from his beat-up wallet and passed it to his friend with a fierce glower. Steve added the bills to his own, then closed the billfold and offered it to the boy holding them at gunpoint.
Bucky nearly scoffed aloud when the kid actually stepped forward to take the wallet instead of insisting Steve put it on the ground and back up, making him think that this was probably his first time trying armed robbery. Granted, against a normal civilian, it probably wouldn't have mattered, but the boy could hardly have anticipated Steve's superhuman reflexes. Even Bucky had a hard time tracking what the super-soldier did next.
As their mugger pulled the wallet from Steve's right hand, pistol still held at arms-length (at least, Bucky thought, the idiot wasn't holding it sideways as seemed to be a trend these days), his friend used his left to twist the gun out of his grip and tossed it to Bucky in one fluid movement.
The shorter man caught it deftly with his left hand and ejected the clip, which he then pocketed. Bucky stared their mugger down with dark eyes and a grim expression as he then crushed the pistol into an unusable hunk of twisted metal that he tossed into the nearby dumpster.
The utter look of horror on the boy's face nearly made the whole exchange worth it as he turned tail and fled down the alley without a word. It wasn't until a moment later than he realized the kid had still managed to make off with Steve's wallet and all their cash.
"I cannot believe you just let that kid mug us," Bucky complained as he glared up at Steve.
His friend just shrugged, smile pulling at his lips as he said "Eh, he's just a kid, and that's one more gun off the streets. Leave him be. Don't you remember some of the stuff we got up to at that age?"
Bucky scoffed "You've never mugged anyone in your life."
"Well, no," Steve admitted. "No one who wasn't a Nazi, anyways," he amended after a moment's consideration.
And there it was again, that divisive feeling of wanting to hit Steve, or something else entirely that Bucky could never bring himself to put much thought into.
As usual, he shook it off, then snorted and said, "Come on, let's go. I think I've had enough of New York for the day."
"Sure," Steve said, smiling at him as they started walking again, avoiding taking any further alley shortcuts once they made it out of the first.
The pair lapsed into a comfortable silence on their trip back that wasn't broken until they made it to the car.
As they both got in and buckled up, Steve said "I was thinking we could pick up dinner for everyone on the way back. I think Scott and Hope will be stopping by tonight."
Bucky quirked a brow at his friend as he started the car. It was a habit now, for Steve to ride shotgun when they went out together, because if he didn't ride shot gun, the ex-soldier refused to go anywhere with him. He still had no idea how Steve had managed to land himself a driver's license since waking up in the twenty-first century, but Bucky was utterly convinced he'd never had any sort of driving lessons. He'd been terrible at driving anything bigger than a motorcycle back in their army days; but then, the Army had had so many jeeps on deployment that they'd been willing to throw one at literally anyone. Even kids fresh out of Brooklyn that had never been behind the wheel of anything bigger than a bicycle their entire life.
The running joke in the platoons had been that Americans blew up more jeeps than Nazis did.
Natasha seemed to be the only person that understood Bucky's reluctance to be in a car with Steve behind the wheel. They would share looks behind Steve's back when he suggested going anywhere, deciding in unspoken code which one of them would go with him to keep the man out of trouble.
"That Chinese place on the way back is pretty good," Steve continued.
"You gave away all our money," Bucky pointed out with a roll of his eyes as he backed the car out and pulled into the street, merging smoothly with city traffic. Unlike his friend, he had learned to drive long before he'd ever joined the army or become the Winter Soldier. Even with the newer, faster cars, he had adapted quickly, Hydra conditioning or no.
"I kept my credit card!" His friend objected, frowning at him as he fished in his pocket and dragged out the cards he had pulled out of his wallet before handing it over to their mugger. "I did like that wallet, though," he added ruefully, speaking mostly to himself as he sorted through the little plastic rectangles, organizing them in order of importance, with his ID on top.
Glancing over at the man as they sat at a stop light, Bucky reached into his pocket and pulled out his own wallet, which was now completely empty without his cash. He'd yet to commit to a credit card (considering he wasn't even supposed to exist, there was going to have to be an entire fake identity made before he could acquire any number of things), so the cash was all he had kept in it.
Bucky tossed the beat up, black leather rectangle into Steve's lap as the light changed and he turned his eyes back to the road.
"It's alright, Buck, I can get another one," Steve said, trying to offer the wallet back. His friend had so few things to his name, that even taking something so small as his wallet felt distinctly wrong.
"Just use it and give it back later," the dark haired man said as he shifted gears and merged onto the highway. "Not like I need it anyways," he added, ignoring his friend's hand as he tried to give it back.
Steve hesitated, then withdrew his hand, fingers brushing over the age-worn leather as he proceeded to slot his various cards into its pockets.
Before he could say thank you, Bucky said, "No where's this Chinese place you wanted to go to?"
Cap looked up from his task and smiled "I'll tell you when to turn."
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