Steve is on the mend, Bucky's feeling contemplative, and it's time for a big 17th birthday party!

Over the next couple of days, Steve started getting better much faster, and by the end of their first week at home, he'd stopped falling asleep unexpectedly all over the place. Things felt normal again, and it was good to see him get his old energy back. This wasn't the first time Bucky had almost lost him—it was far too frequent an occurrence, really, what with the dangerous lives they led, but it never got any easier.

Now, though, things were good. It was a nice, warm spring, they were home, they were all healthy, and life felt good. Bucky was in the kitchen helping his ma peel potatoes for dinner, and Steve and Becky were in the living room folding laundry. Well, they were supposed to be folding laundry. Bucky suspected what was really happening was that they were folding the odd shirt or two while trying to see how many clothespins they could clip onto the other person before they noticed, like they'd been doing for several days now. So far, Becky was leading the challenge with eight, although to be fair, she did have a much larger area to work with than Steve did.

"Something on your mind, Bucky?" his ma asked from where she was standing over by the stove.

"Huh?" he asked, looking up.

His ma smiled. "You've nearly run out of potato there," she said with a nod at his hands. He looked down and noticed that she was right—he'd peeled all the skin from his potato and just kept going, and he was only a few slivers of potato away from peeling his hand.

"Oh," he said, setting down what remained of the potato. "Sorry." He scooped up the pieces of potato and separated them out from the pile of skins.

"It's alright, they're just going to be mashed up anyway," his ma said. She turned down the burner and sat next to him, placing a glass of iced tea in front of each of them. "What seems to be the trouble?"

Bucky shrugged and took a sip of tea. "No trouble, really," he said. "I was just thinking."

"Penny for your thoughts?"

"I was thinking about what happened with Steve. And just…" He chewed on his lower lip, considering. "It just, well, it scares me when stuff like that happens to him."

His ma nodded. "I know," she agreed. Her small smile told him she understood completely. "It scares me too."

"And not just Steve," he went on. "But, like…I told you what happened with Peggy, right?" She nodded again. He and Steve didn't tell her everything about their missions, but they'd told her about France, and Peggy getting hurt. "And then the thing after that with the…"

"With the tuberculosis," his ma finished for him.

"Yeah," he said quietly. Any mention of that invariably brought his mind back around to Mrs. Rogers, but he pushed on. "And all kinds of other missions too. I don't think anyone on the team's ever not gotten hurt real bad at some point. And I just…" He sighed. "I'm tired of seeing people I care about get hurt. I just worry that one day it'll…"

His ma smiled sadly at him and reached over and squeezed his hand.

"And I'm tired…" He really wasn't sure how to say this next part without sounding like some kind of coward, but… "I'm tired of fighting, Ma," he said. "I know it's good, why we're doing it. And I'm not saying I want to back out while there's work to do or anything, I just…"

His ma nodded, understanding. "I know. And you know how proud I am of you for being so brave and doing all this. But I hope you know that I would not think one little bit less of you if you stopped. You know that, don't you?"

He looked up and met her eyes and smiled softly. "I do, Ma," he said. He really did. And that meant a lot to him, but that wasn't why he couldn't stop. "But I don't think I can. Not with Steve still in the fight. Not with Peggy and Jim and Gabe and the rest of them all in it. I've got people counting on me."

His ma looked a little bit like she was going to cry, but she was smiling at him. "I know that too," she said. She reached over and put a hand around the back of his head, pulling him forward and kissing his forehead. "I'm so sorry this is a choice you have to make at all, baby," she whispered, then kissed him one more time and pulled back.

A sudden knot formed in his throat, and he swallowed hard. He knew he was a legal wizard and an adult now and everything, but right now all he wanted was for his mother to reassure him that everything was going to be okay. "The war has to be over someday, right?" he asked, a very much younger-than-seventeen-years-old waver in his voice.

She got up out of her chair and came over and hugged him, leaning over him and wrapping him up in her arms. "Yes, it will," she said firmly. "You aren't going to have to fight forever, sweetheart. None of you will."

He just sat there for a minute and let her hold him. Calm flowed over him, and he smiled his gratitude up at her when she pulled back and sat down again. "I think I'd like to come home," he said. "If it's over when I'm done with school, I think I'd like to come home to New York." He took a long drink of the tea he'd forgotten was sitting in front of him.

"What would you like to do?" his mother asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I might go to college. Or maybe something, I don't know, Howard Stark has a place in the city, and some of his magic and technology blending is really something. I could work there, or…I don't know." There were a lot of possibilities. "It would be nice to live near you guys for a while, to be some place familiar." He inclined his head thoughtfully. "Steve's talked some about going to art school. Maybe me and him could get an apartment or something. Though one of us would have to learn how to cook," he added. He didn't think campfire cooking would get you very far in the city.

His ma laughed at that. "Well, at least you know how to do your own laundry, which can't be said of all young men your age. As for cooking…" She stood up, taking his elbow and pulling him up with her. "Why don't we start with mashed potatoes?"

Bucky knew how to peel and chop them, but his ma had always taken over the potatoes from there, so he watched and helped her boil water and add butter and milk and salt. Seemed easy enough. "Well," he said, as they finished that. "So we can at least eat mashed potatoes once we're on our own."

His ma laughed again. "Tomorrow we'll do bread. How's that sound?"

Becky and Steve came in to help then, and Steve seemed to have won that clothespin round, seeing as there was still one clipped to the middle of Becky's braid that she seemed to have failed to notice. It didn't catch her attention until much later when she was getting ready for bed. She then yelped in displeasure, marched into their room and threw her slipper at Steve.

Bucky did help his ma with cooking for the rest of the break, and when Steve heard what they were doing, he wanted to learn too. They'd always helped with pieces of meals when they were home, but always under instruction, and they'd never done a whole meal on their own. Turned out cooking, if you could read a recipe, wasn't that hard. Bucky's ma soon had them preparing entire meals, and declared that she should have done this ages ago.

Of course, the big event of the Easter Break, which Bucky had almost forgotten about after Salzburg, was his coming of age party. That was one meal his ma didn't have him help with—you weren't supposed to make your own birthday meal, she said. She made all his favorites, including a chocolate pie. The Kowalskis came, and Mrs. O'Brien, and it felt like there was almost as much food as when they got together at Christmas. Becky and the Kowalski triplets started the festivities by singing the loudest, most off-key rendition of 'Happy Birthday to You' that Bucky had ever heard in his life.

Everyone laughed and talked happily, and Mrs. Kowalski asked Bucky if he'd been doing any celebratory magic since he was allowed to do it without supervision now. Bucky had actually forgotten about that—again, a lot had been going on since he actually turned seventeen—but he enjoyed listening as all the adults shared stories of the first spells they remembered doing when they'd come of age. Mrs. Kowalski had woken up and levitated her furniture around her room to rearrange it. Mr. Kowalski had apparated all over the house. His ma had tried summoning everything she needed that day instead of actually picking anything up, and his pop had given himself a haircut (and then had to fix it). Mrs. O'Brien surprised them all by saying that her first spell upon turning seventeen had been transfiguring her brother into a rabbit and tossing him out in the garden for the afternoon.

After dinner came the gifts. His parents got him the traditional wizard's gift of a watch. It was beautiful, the bronze casing polished to an almost mirror-like shine, and Bucky felt very solemn upon receiving it, feeling the weight of it in his hand and the soft tick of the mechanism vibrating against his palm. 'E. Barnes' was engraved in an elegant script on the back.

"Edward Barnes," his pop said. "This was my father's watch."

Bucky looked back down at the watch and ran a finger reverently around the smooth rim. "Thanks," he said quietly, a waver of emotion in his voice.

From the Kowalskis, there was a collapsible brass telescope that, when looking at the night sky, labelled the planets and mapped out their movements, as well as those of the major stars—Copernicus and his plotting of the solar system was Polish, after all, as Mr. Kowalski pointed out a couple of times.

From Mrs. O'Brien, there was a leather satchel, very much like the one Bucky took on missions, but this one was magically expanded to be bigger on the inside, and she had sewn in a lining of magically woven cloth that would keep the contents from getting wet if the bag ended up in water.

Steve gave him a combat knife with a protective sheath and a blade that would never dull or break. The handle was solid, wrapped in black leather, and felt good in his hand. The blade shone in the light and reflected his eyes back at him as he examined it. He wondered, given that Steve had still been recovering when he got home, when he had gotten the knife, but Steve just smiled and told him to quit trying to take the mystery out of his present.

The last gift was from Becky. It was a little box, not much bigger than a matchbox, and it appeared to be made of glass, though she assured him it wouldn't break. The box looked empty, but it contained an active Lumos charm—squeezing the box turned the light on, and flicking it turned it off.

"That's really neat," he told her after she explained how it worked. "I've never seen anything like this before."

Her cheeks went red, but she smiled. "That's 'cause I made it myself. I mean, Jim helped me put the spell inside, but…"

He smiled and looped an arm around her neck, tugging her forward and kissing her forehead. "That's awesome, Munchkin," he told her. "Thank you."

After the guests left, there was one more thing—a letter from the S.S.R., of all things. It had arrived a couple of days after his birthday, and his parents had been saving it for him. It declared that since he was now a legal adult wizard, his combat pay would be adjusted to reflect that, and he was officially given the rank of Sergeant. He stared at the three-chevron insignia that had been tucked up inside the folds of the parchment. 'Sarge' had been just a nickname before, did he really… His eyes flicked to the bottom of the official letter where there was a post-script in handwriting he recognized from hundreds of Defense Against The Dark Arts papers and sheets of homework. 'You've more than earned it. C. Phillips, Colonel.' Bucky found himself having to swallow hard several times to force down the lump of emotion that rose up in his throat.

"Wow," Steve said when Bucky handed him the letter. Pride was swimming in the soft blue of his eyes when he looked back up at him. "Congratulations, Buck."

Bucky took the letter back and smiled. Tired of fighting or not, that Phillips actually did that was…wow. "Thanks," he replied.

The rest of the break passed quietly. Bucky did enjoy doing some magic around the house, just because he could, and his pop even took him down to the garage and showed him some spells that worked for fixing up the car. A couple of times, Bucky would apparate into whatever room Steve was in to try to make him jump—it only worked twice, but they were both pretty good. And he had finally, finally made it to six feet tall. Still not as tall as Steve, because the little punk kept growing, but six feet was pretty good. He even had an inch on his pop now.

It hardly seemed like any time at all before they were heading back to school. Easter was the shortest of their three breaks anyway, and they'd lost a week of it coming in. It was an uneventful train ride in—long, as usual, and Bucky found himself wondering why, if they could apparate all over the continent for missions, now that he was seventeen why he couldn't just apparate to school and save the nine hours on the train. He knew long distances like that were harder, but not impossible. Erskine had brought them all the way to New York from the school gates three years ago. Nobody on the train seemed to know the answer to that. Steve and Gabe were the only ones who had no comment—they were the only Howling Commandos still underage at this point.

On the first day of classes, Bucky hurried off after breakfast when he spotted a familiar head of red hair leaving the Dining Hall. He had his first period free, and he knew Vicki did too. And in the thinking about the future he'd been doing over Break, he'd done a lot of thinking about her. He wanted to talk to her.

"Hey, Vicki!" he called.

She turned, saw him and smiled. "Hello, Bucky. How was your holiday?"

"Short," he replied, not really wanting to get into the rest of it right now. "Listen, do you have a minute? I wanted to talk to you about something."

"Sure," she replied. "First period on the first day—I've not got any homework yet." She smiled at him, and that really was a great smile.

"I was thinking a lot over Break," he started. "And even last term, really." He thought that the realization that Vicki would be graduating and leaving soon had gotten his thoughts turning this way, but he knew too that watching Steve and Peggy together when he'd been laid up in the infirmary had stirred up that familiar ache in his chest. "Vicki, I miss you," he told her.

She arched a mischievous eyebrow. "Is that so? And Rose McTavish was, what…?"

"Same thing Colin Fraser was," he said with a grin, and she blushed a little and laughed.

"Touché," she replied with a smile.

"She was sweet and funny and I liked her, but she wasn't you," Bucky finished. "I miss you," he repeated, and she smiled softly. "I think we should give it another shot."

"Oh," she said, shaking her head. "No, Bucky, don't do this to me."

"Why not?" he asked, taking her hand. "You know how great we are together."

"Oh, I know, but…Stop looking at me like that, you know how hard you are to say no to when you do that."

He smiled, but then he nodded, moving to sit down on one of the benches along the wall. She followed. "Alright," he said, serious again. "If you don't want to, okay. Say no and I'll take it. But can I ask why?"

Vicki sighed. "It's not that I don't want to," she said. "You're right, we are great together, and, oh, you know I love you so much," she said, leaning back against the wall and rolling her head to look at him. It never got old, hearing that, and he smiled back at her. "It's just…" she went on. "We keep doing this on and off and on and off thing, and I'm leaving at the end of term, and I don't…It's going to be hard enough to go without breaking it off with you too."

Bucky nodded. "Who says we have to break it off, though?"

"How d'you mean?"

"I mean there's letters and telephones and things like that. You not being here doesn't mean we have to stop going out."

She sat up straighter and looked at him curiously. "You're serious?"

"I am," he replied. "Like I said, I was thinking a lot over the Break, and I think the reason we keep coming back to each other like this is because I can't let you go. Not all the way." He smiled at her softly. "I love you too, you know."

She smiled back. "I know." She tilted her head to the side, considering him thoughtfully. "You really think we can do this? It's a big step, especially for us."

He laughed a little at that, but he nodded. "I mean, I'm not saying I think we should get married or anything." That kind of thing was a long way off. Sure, he'd been thinking about life after school and stuff, and he could see Steve and Peggy doing that before too long, maybe, but he didn't think that's where he and Vicki were. But, who knew, maybe one day they would be. "But I'd like to see where we can go with this. I know it won't be easy, but if you're up for it, then I'm willing to put in the work."

She looked at him and didn't say anything for a couple of minutes, and he didn't say anything either, not wanting to rush her. A smile started creeping across her face, and she bit her lip like she was trying to keep it from stretching too far. "Alright," she agreed. "Let's do it."

"You really want to?" he asked hopefully.

"I really want to," she answered. "Oh, I could never let you go all the way either." She flung her arms around his neck and kissed him long and good, and, oh, man! Nobody could kiss like Vicki Marlowe. "And I've missed these lips."

"They've missed you too," he told her and kissed her again.

Steve was smirking at him as he slipped into his seat in Transfiguration right before the bell rang. "What?" Bucky asked.

"Getting back together with Vicki?" Steve asked.

He'd mentioned to Steve over Break that he'd missed her, but that was oddly perceptive as far as Steve and girls went. Bucky arched an eyebrow in surprise. "How'd you know that?"

Steve chuckled. "Because that's your Vicki Marlowe smile."

"I don't have a Vicki Marlowe smile," he protested, a little embarrassed. He hadn't realized he was that transparent.

"Yeah, you do," Steve said, pointing at his face. "It's that one right there. It hasn't changed since you were twelve."

Bucky grumbled a little at that, but didn't really have anything to say. Steve sure was one to talk! He'd only had a Peggy Carter smile since the day they got here.

Between his missions and the weird schedule the informal teams kept, it was rare that he actually got a chance to see one of his sister's Quidditch games. It worked out this first week, though, so on a sunny Friday afternoon, he and Vicki and Steve and Peggy and Jim headed down to the flat area by the lake to watch Becky and Esther's team play against one of the other Second-Year teams.

The game started with little fanfare—there wasn't an announcer, so they had to pay fairly close attention to keep up with what was going on. Since the make-shift goals were closer to the ground than the ones on the regular field, though, it was easier to see the action from where they sat. One of the Sixth-Years was refereeing.

"Oh, I miss Quidditch," Peggy sighed, watching as Eleanor, one of the Beaters on Becky's team, whacked a Bludger at the other team. Peggy had been a Beater when she played.

"You should come down and help coach them some time," Bucky suggested. He'd come down once or twice and was pleased to see that they had remembered most of the moves he had taught them.

"Oh, I don't know," she mused.

"No, they'd love it," Bucky said. "Based on what Becky tells me, you're pretty popular with the lower grades."

"I am?"

"Well, sure," Vicki said, surprising them until they remembered she had a little brother in Third Year. "The girls all think you're just fantastic, what with playing Quidditch and all your secret spy work and fighting in the war and everything."

"And the going out with Steve Rogers, too," Jim added with a grin. Esther's crush on Steve had lessened, but not abated entirely.

"Yes, that too," Vicki agreed with a smile. "Something the boys are quite jealous of, by the way, seeing as it means you're taken."

Bucky grinned. Peggy was blushing, but she was nowhere near as red as Steve.

"Seriously, Pegs," Bucky said, reaching over and bumping her arm. "You want to come down and coach them some afternoon, it would make their day."

She was still a little bit red, but she was smiling. "It does sound rather fun," she said. "Maybe I will."

They all cheered when the Quaffle came flying down towards their end of the field and Becky pulled off a pretty impressive diving save.

The game went on, and Vicki leaned over onto Bucky's shoulder. "I was never much of one for Quidditch, to be honest. I did enjoy watching you play, though."

"Oh, yeah?" Bucky asked, rolling his head to look at her with a smile.

"Mm-hmm. You move beautifully." She kissed him quickly on the cheek. "And you look very dashing with wind-swept hair."

He smiled and kissed her and pulled her a little closer to watch the rest of the game.

The game went on until the sun started to go down. It was hard to see the Snitch out here, and there had been a couple of games where it had actually gotten confused by the lack of walls and wandered off and gotten lost. The sunset helped, though, and Esther finally caught the glint of gold and managed to catch it for a victory.

They all jumped to their feet cheering and clapping. "Hey, great job, Munchkin!" Bucky said, looping an arm around Becky's shoulders when she came over and kissing the side of her head.

"Some very nice saves," Vicki agreed. She had to run off after that—the game had run late and with N.E.W.T.'s coming up, she had a lot of studying to do—but she patted Becky's shoulder and kissed Bucky on the cheek before she left.

"Congratulations," Steve told her, giving her a hug. "Nice flying."

Jim and Peggy congratulated her as well, and then Esther came over and they all praised her for a job well done too. Becky was beaming, and Bucky looped an arm over her shoulders, glad to see her so happy. "You did really good today," he told her proudly.

"I know," she said smugly, before bouncing up on her toes to kiss his cheek. "I had a good teacher."

They walked back up to the castle, Becky and Esther excitedly breaking down every play as they went. Peggy chimed in with some advice, and Bucky grinned. She was going to be down there coaching for sure.

So we finally got to see Becky play Quidditch, and everyone's had some nice, soft, restful time after Austria. Back to work on Monday!