With Your Shield or Upon It
"And: still it is not enough to have memories, they must turn to blood inside you."-Jane Cooper
I.
The shield seems heavier than he remembers.
Perhaps his muscles are weaker from the years in the ice, or, as he suspects, its just another thing that feels wrong and altered.
"I feel like a puzzle piece put in the wrong box." He thinks inwardly, but he doesn't voice it, as the therapist they assigned him writes down his progress with a cheerful smile.
They give him time to adjust, to catch up. He reads, watches, absorbs decades that should be the future and now are suddenly the past. Man has reached the stars by now, and he watches the flickering footage with awe as a figure steps onto the moon, secured by a fragile tether. He thinks the past once held him that way, only to snap and send him adrift, spiraling into a space that threatens to swallow him whole.
Everything is strange, as if entering some other version of the world, a parallel earth where the familiar and mundane has become unknown. Everyday objects he saw just weeks ago are rusted and faded on the shelves of antique stores, and a thought flashes through his mind that he should be one of them. The grocery store clerk blinks blankly when he asks for a brand that he learns hasn't existed in thirty years, longer than the clerk has been alive. Even the foods that shouldn't have changed, like bananas, don't taste the same.
"Oh!" Tony says excitedly and with a distinctly smug twinkle in his eyes, as if Steve has asked the secret of the universe and he's about to reveal it. "There's a reason for that actually." He launches into a fifteen minute diatribe about some sort of blight, but Steve's mind wonders, caught by the familiar gestures in an unfamiliar body.
Howard Stark had a son. He can see the resemblance of course, from the set of the jaw to the sharpness of his mind, but there's a haunted look in Tony's eyes instead of the optimistic sparkle in Howard's that, if nothing else, speaks volumes about the contrast of the time period Steve left behind, and the one he's found himself in. He lives with ghosts - glimpses of men he knew in sons nearly as old as or older than their fathers were then, familiar places changed nearly beyond recognition. It must be what immortality feels like, a displacement and weariness, and a longing for things that can never come back.
He dreams, often, of Peggy's voice in those last moments, of the war, of his childhood, of the train car and a hand slipping before he can grasp it. He tries to find closure - visiting Peggy in the nursing home, paying his respects to Howard Stark's and the Howling Commando's graves, trying to locate any surviving relatives of Bucky. He finds a sister still living, and calls her, the conversation awkward and frequently paused, his mind unable to reconcile the elderly and frail voice on the other end with the pigtailed tomboy who ran after Bucky and him trying to extort dimes to go see a movie.
He wants to ask if Bucky's body was ever found, if there's a grave for him to visit, or if, and his mind wanders morbidly, he's still at the bottom of that ravine, cold bones and an empty marker in some local cemetery. But he can't make himself ask. He can't find closure to this thing, a rotting limb he can't cut off for fear of severing some last, final link to the past. He should have gone himself to find his body, and at least the not knowing can somehow make him think he still can, that decades haven't passed and the snow hasn't fallen hundreds of times by now since that day.
He sees the end of the war that night, Howard and Peggy. It's only when Bucky appears, cocky and smiling, celebrating with him, that he realizes its a dream.
II.
The world stops when he sees his face.
At first, there's nothing but numb shock, like coming up for air from under ice, cold freezing his bones, mouth open in a wordless gasp. He doesn't try to protect himself, and later he thinks it's blind luck that Bucky didn't take advantage of that moment and put a knife in his heart. He can't move, can't stop him, can't even dodge danger, the world frozen in a black and white photograph suddenly brought to life in vivid color.
Bucky. Alive, changed and yet unchanged, when everything else has changed so much.
And later still when his hands start to shake, and his mind replays the fight, that he realizes, caught up in the moment, how close he came to killing Bucky before that mask came off, how close he came to never knowing until it was much too late.
They're more than evenly matched in a fight, but Steve has more to fight for, and he has Bucky pinned to the floor of the carrier, arm clenched in his hands - there's a crack, and Bucky yells and he's hurt him, caused him pain - before his arm is around Bucky's neck, cutting off his air. Bucky struggles against him - desire to complete his mission, desire to live, Steve has to hope its the latter - and then Steve's hearing it: the acceleration of his heart, the desperate gasps as his movements slow. He lets go the instant he passes out, but his hands twitch, still feeling that life ebbing away.
He doesn't think as the water closes over his head, but he dimly feels that metal hand grasp him, drag him to the shore, and there's a rightness to it, like a wanderer finding home after years of endless drifting, a hope in his heart he'd thought long buried with everyone and everything in the past.
After, when he's recovered and alone, he reads the file cover to cover, every horrible emotionally detached word, apathetically detailed account of every single torture and experiment they did. He throws up twice, at the beginning, and at the very end, heaving his lunch into the toilet, before wrapping his arms around himself to stop the shaking. No one should have survived it, he thinks. He didn't know anyone could.
But Bucky's strong, the strongest person he's ever known, and Steve has to believe that if he can survive all that in body, that something, anything of Bucky, the old Bucky, could have clung to the inside of his mind, stubbornly refusing to let go.
His purpose shifts abruptly, from whatever he's been slowly building with the Avengers to a single laser sharp focus, circling back the way he did as a boy, as a soldier, as Captain America running in, saving so many men for which he'll be called a hero when he only went to save one. He can do it again.
Later, when he's sleeping in Wakanda, he thinks, yes, that was the moment he made his choice. Everything after that was already decided.
III.
The air reeks of burnt metal, sweat, and blood, some sickening modern echo of the worst days of the war.
He doesn't consciously make a choice, even if the Accords don't sit well with him, even if Tony and he, long fighting on the same side, always were a bit like oil and water, designed to separate eventually. No, this decision in subconscious, something deep in his soul tugging like a last strand of a tether, the astronaut clinging to the spaceship that will take him home. Home is gone, but the tether, frayed and damaged, remains, and he grasps it with both hands and all his strength.
Tony yells at him, his words are raw, bitter, filled with anger, and, not for the first time, he hears Howard Stark in his voice. But there's a challenge lurking beneath, and Steve knows what Tony expects: that he'll come to his senses, come back.
Bucky is heavy against his side, smelling of blood and burnt metal, dragging in harsh breaths and staggering on his feet. The shield is unbearably light in comparison, leaving him unbalanced, as if teetering on a cliff. There's no choice, no thought, no question. He had nothing but Bucky before, he can have nothing but him again.
The shield falls from his fingers without a backward glance.
"I don't know if I'm worth all this, Steve." Bucky had said wearily, and he wonders how much of him Hydra cut away to leave him raw and open. Bucky, the old one, would never have said something like that, would have masked every fear, every doubt, behind a smile and a square of his shoulders. Steve's answer is heavy on his tongue, too little, not enough.
IV.
Later, much later, when he's on his knees on the ground, with ash staining his fingertips, Steve realizes he should have said he was worth it all and more.